As I have said, the villagers are a great mixture. Colin and Sue Waters live in a cottage near the church and they invited us to a party where we were able to meet many neighbours. Colin, now in his fifties, is an eminent physicist, the inventor in 1981of the ‘supertwisted nematic liquid crystal display’ (STN – LCD), used in the first generation of mobile phones and computers. A brilliant man, though he’s as down to earth as any science fiction author. Sue is among other things a school teacher. We’ve since been sailing with the pair of them in the Aegean on their yacht the Hilda May and intend going again and again. Just down the road from the Waters are Tamzin and Dean. Dean is an American, an engineer, who has worked in Saudi Arabia. A super guy. Tamzin taught ballet and has the poise of Audrey Hepburn playing a princess.
The Ennifers, Derek Page, the Pearces, the Browns. Unlike us ‘incomers’ these are friendly born and bred Suffolk men and women. They and others like them form the foundation stone of our village community, having lived in this great county all their lives.
All these people, and more, helped us settle into our new home.
Annette and I joined the carpet bowls club, helped to form a cinema club, joined the tennis club, are volunteers at the Anglo-Saxon visitors’ centre at Sutton Hoo. Annette also assists the Suffolk Wildlife volunteers and is a member of Woodbridge Art Club. We both play badminton with Lloyd and Elaine Butlerand and attend pilates with Steve and Jane Kirk. It’s a great village and we wonder why we took so long to find it. Everything centres around the village hall, which pulsates with activities every week. All right, it’s not Monte Carlo or New York, but hell, I’m not twenty-five any more and I like the pace of life to be a little more measured now. We still get away to the Far East, or Europe, whenever we wish. All we need to do is lock up and leave the house in safe hands.
~
We left Wychwater in February of 2001 and went to live in the one-bedroom Rochford flat while our house in Tattingstone was renovated. The hospital had been derelict since the late ’70s and only the show house was so far fit for habitation at that time. Our house would be ready in the Spring. Dylan was now eighteen years of age and showing it. He slept most of the day where he used to hunt and had to summon up the enthusiasm and energy to bite people. In fact he grew more affectionate with age. I was very fond of that old cat. When I used to write in my office in the attic of Wychwater, he would go to sleep in the open top drawer of my desk. In the mid-afternoon I would often take a nap, just twenty minutes on the floor by the desk with a cushion as a pillow – a trick learned on shift work in the RAF, when I would sleep on marble if I had to – and on waking in the foetus position I would find Dylan curled up in the hollow of my tummy. He was a character, that cat.
Dylan died in 2002, a year after losing his Wychwater hunting grounds, where he had spent so many happy hours stalking the wildlife and triumphantly dragging the carcasses through the cat door. I missed my gnarled old friend once he had gone, but I didn’t miss finding gall bladders on the kitchen floor of a morning. They were the only part of the creatures he caught that he refused to eat.
In the Spring, three months after the sale, we went and took our last look at Wychwater, probably the most loved of our many homes. The new owner, a roofer and builder, had ripped up all the hedges that had once surrounded the house. In their place were chain link fences. The house itself had been razed and rebuilt. Our beloved trees were gone too. The wild wood, where we had had so many great bonfire parties and had told spooky stories into the night, was now gone. In its place was more lawn. It was still called Wychwater, but it was now a sterilised version of what it had once been. Every bit of wildness had been clinically removed. Every crooked corner had been straightened. Yet – yet even a builder had not been able to conquer the septic tank. We noted with great satisfaction that every so often a waft of stink came drifting out on the air as a bubble rose through the sewage and burst in the fermenting tank that was buried in London clay.
~
Shaney and Mark moved to Canada with the three boys at the end of the ’90s. We visited them twice in Toronto and spent the last day of the 20th Century with them. It was a great evening, watching the fireworks and seeing the old 100 years out. The family spent two years there then Mark was moved to Singapore. Naturally we visited them there too, several times. My old dictator pal Lee Kwan Yu was still in power after all these years. He was there when I arrived in 1959, still there on going back in 1990, and still there again in 2003. He is one hell of a stayer that man and I don’t think he’s gone even now. He is a dictator but a relatively benevolent one. Certainly Singapore has gone from a banana republic in my youth to a thriving and rich island whose people seem to have grown into a high standard of living. There are no kampongs of stilted huts any more, no wasteland with bamboo stalls, only modern buildings, parks and a flourishing port.
Shaney, Mark and the boys first lived in 6th Avenue, a suburb, but eventually moved to Bukit Timah, on the edge of a wild park full of beautiful trees, monkeys and snakes. They had a cobra in the back yard for quite a time and though they called in the snake catcher he told them it was best to leave it there and avoid that part of the garden. However, the dog, Toffee, a street mongrel from Thailand, was spat at in the eyes and had to have treatment. Their Filipino maid Catalina also got attacked by a snake that had wrapped itself around the gate post, but she was a no-nonsense woman and took its head off with a carving knife.
In Singapore we hooked up again with Robin Moseley, Annette’s boss from Hong Kong days, and Glynis his wife. They had relocated there, still working with schools. Now that Shaney and Mark are back in England, Robin and Glynis let us stay at their house whenever we are in Singapore. I still get a great kick out of going back to the stamping grounds of my youth. There’s always plenty to see and do, though the island has been somewhat sterilised by rules and regulations. The rain still falls in torrents at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon during the monsoon season and the wet smell of the jungle still wafts from the parks. There are still stalls that sell curry mee and noodles on street corners and Changi village has hardly changed since the days when my billet stood on the hill above it. That billet is now a rest home for civil servants and old soldiers.
~
In 2004 the publisher of my series of six Welkin Weasel books, Random House, decided to send me on a two-week book tour of New Zealand schools and libraries. My editor there, Philippa Dickinson, seemed rather amused by the idea, since New Zealand had no indigenous mammals – only birds – and those weasels and stoats which had crossed the seas to get there were seen as a menace by the local wildlife societies. Still the Kiwi kids seemed to like these jokey novels, in which the weasels are the good guys and the stoats the baddies, because they were selling well in New Zealand at the time. New Zealand had then a population of around four million people. Trust me to get a bestseller in a country with a population the size of greater Birmingham. Maggie, my agent, said it was a pity that sheep couldn’t read, since there were sixty million of those.
As ever I wanted Annette with me. We had a wonderful time, even getting time off from book talk to go whale watching. One of the towns we visited was Dunedin. On the way from the airport to the town we passed the impressive statue of ‘Speight’s Southern Man’, a lifesize pioneer figure mounted on a horse and wearing a long raincoat with a high collar and many capes, a broadbrimmed hat, riding boots and an expression that told you he was a man who had tamed one vast wilderness and was looking for another one to have a go at.
In the library at Dunedin on South Island an elderly couple approached me after I had given a talk to some schoolkids.
‘Hi, remember me?’ said the man. ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha?’
It was Fred Haslam, the man who had been responsible for turning my first published short story into a stage play in the mid-1970s.
Fred and his wife then took over and showed us all the sights of Dunedin then took us to dinner. Another circle completed.
T
hat was our last visit to New Zealand and it was mostly on the house. Random House. New Zealand is a very beautiful land and I could certainly have lived there very happily, given different circumstances. I almost bought a holiday home there. Almost. However, Spain is just a little closer to England.
~
In 2005 my friend and accountant for thirty-five years, Stuart Holliday, died of lung cancer after a brave fight. He had never smoked a cigarette in his life. Stuart was a strong Christian and believed to the last that he was bound for Heaven. If there is such a place, then Stuart is most definitely there, for a more devout man you could not meet on this side of the altar. He loved Jesus and his God and was convinced he was going into the arms of both. A cruel pathway to Paradise though.
~
Shaney and Mark’s family spent four years in Singapore before moving again to Melbourne, Australia. We decided it was time for a long stay in a new country and Annette and I set out in 2006 to spend six months in Oz, staying alternately with Shaney and Mark, and Pete and Carolyn. In between we intended to roam the country. We flew first with Andrew and Cheryl to Hong Kong. They were on their way to Bali for a holiday and when we lived in Hong Kong they had always intended to visit but never managed it. Now we wanted to show them where we had lived and some of our favourite places. We stayed in a hotel on Kowloon-side and the first morning in Hong Kong I left the others at breakfast to look for a cyber café to check my emails.
I found a large place full of Chinese youngsters playing computer games and settled down at one of the forty machines. The third email I opened was from Jill Hughes, my foreign rights agent at the Maggie Noach Literary Agency. Jill was and still is a whizz at selling my books to foreign publishers and I thought she was telling me of another coup. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The email began:
I’m sorry to tell you Maggie died yesterday . . .
Maggie Noach? Dead? Just like that?
I was shocked to the core with this sudden, unexpected tragedy and immediately burst into tears. This attracted the attention of the boys on the other computers. Some of them came to me and patted me on the head, not knowing what was wrong, but seeing I was distressed they tried to comfort me. I ran back to the hotel, still weeping heavily, and found the other three in the foyer where I blubbed the terrible news.
I believe Maggie died of cancer of the spine. I knew she had been complaining of back pains, but like her and everyone else I thought it was simply something like a sprain. Apparently she had expired in the ambulance on the way to hospital. As with Stuart, Maggie had been my friend and agent for over thirty years. She and her daughter had been to stay with us many times and we with her at her two homes, one in London and the other in Gloucestershire. She was irreplaceable as an agent and she was irreplaceable as a dear friend. Maggie was an amazing character who was known throughout the literary world. She could be soft and vulnerable, and she could be a virago. Once, I had hugged her in my arms when she had dissolved in tears over a battle with a taxi driver and many times I had seen her spitting fire. Small, dark-haired, absolutely jam-packed with energy, Maggie blitzed through the book world scoring victory after victory. She was unique. A wonderful friend, a terrific agent, and a huge loss to many authors and friends.
Like my accountant, Stuart, Maggie was only in her fifties.
We caught the plane to Australia a few days later, bereft of Maggie Noach, and spent Christmas with Shaney, Mark and the three boys on Phillip Island south of Melbourne, where we saw the mutton birds flying in of an evening. We played cricket on the beach and went to see the small fairy penguins march up the sands to their homes as the mid-summer sun went down. It was a strange Christmas with the heat and the flies, but then Aussies do live in this upside-down world.
Then Annette and I went off with Pete and Carolyn to Tasmania, to the Bay of Fires, where we stayed at a fabulous house we had exchanged with two KLM stewards for two weeks in our Spanish apartment. There’s not much to say about our stay on Tasmania, except that it is one of most beautiful islands on this Earth. The wildlife was prolific and mostly visible around twilight. We saw wild wombats, pademelons (small kangaroos), echidnas, blue-tongued lizards and a huge variety of birds including brilliant blue fairy wrens. There were dolphins that roamed the surf below our beach house, the water of which was absolutely freezing, as it stretches out into the South Polar Ocean. Tasmania is the Botanic garden of southern Australia.
Much later we did another house exchange with a family who owned a deconsecrated wooden church in a ghost town near Ballarat. The wooden buildings had sprung up during the 19th century golf rush and many were now empty and derelict. It would be a great setting for a vampire movie. Our editor friend Lesley Levene was with us for a couple of weeks. She refused to sleep upstairs, which was the darkest part of the house and I didn’t blame her. Here the scenery was the opposite to Tasmania, being mostly dry and sandy with sparse vegetation. One day I said to the girls, ‘I’ll drive you somewhere for a cup of tea and a cake.’ Foolish man. We drove, and we drove, and we drove, and all we found was empty wilderness.
The car was almost out of petrol when we came across a small settlement of about a dozen shacks. One of the shacks had a sign outside which read: TRADING POST. We went in and found a combination general store, cafe and post office, though all those titles were a little bit highbrow for the rickety wooden building we had entered. We ordered tea and sat on tattered camping chairs at a table whose fourth leg was about three centimetres shorter than its brothers. The tea came in mugs and with a good deal of chat from the hostess.
After a few minutes an Aborigine man entered, sat down with us and began, without ceremony, to talk. ‘Anyway, I’ve just been out in the bush and Willy lit a fire. I told him there’s a drought on and the fire might spread but he took no notice. You’ve got be careful of fires in this weather . . . etc etc etc.’ He was a nice old man who seemed keen on company and I asked him where the nearest petrol station might be. He said, ‘Joe’s got one in his back yard, three doors up.’ So I drove to Joe’s and knocked on the door of his shack. Eventually Joe answered and I asked, ‘Can I fill my tank? I’m almost out.’ Joe pointed to a rusty old hand-pump in the back garden and said, ‘Help yourself, mate.’ I filled up and paid him no more than I would a petrol station.
By that time Lesley had asked the woman in the trading post if there was anything of interest in the region. The woman directed us to the ‘sculptures’ out on a dust road a few miles away. On our way back to Ballarat we found these carved tree trunks which lined the highway and told the history of Australia, from prisoners and settlers, to the First and Second World Wars. They were beautifully crafted, standing out in the middle of nowhere, and had probably only been seen by a handful of visitors at the most. All around us was the Australian bush, a landscape of dust and scrub, and here were these wonderful sculptures. No name of the artist could be found anywhere, I would have guessed they had been carved with a chain saw by a local man. I would definitely replace the bricks in Tate Britain with one of these works of art.
There wasn’t a great deal to do in Ballarat. Their lake had dried up, since there was an eleven-year drought in Victoria state and thus the vegetation in the park was not in any great shape. We were taken around a local graveyard by one of the residents of the town. In that graveyard was the tomb of young man in his late teens. The woman explained that he was a relative of hers who had died in a car crash.
‘He was going too fast,’ she said.
Since arriving in Australia and especially around St Kilda where Shaney lived, we had experienced young men driving like maniacs, yelling out of their car windows at passers-by, and had been told they were ‘hoons’, the equivalent of Britain’s yobs.
‘Was he a hoon?’ I asked her.
She looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t say as bad as a hoon – more of a larrikin.’
I liked that. It seemed there were three levels of bad behaviour in young men. Starting
with the worst: hoons, revheads, larrikins.
Lesley stayed with us at the Worths’ for a few more days before going on to New Zealand. We oscillated between Pete and Carolyn’s house and Shaney and Mark’s place. The two were not more than six miles apart. We also went to Melbourne Quakers’ Meeting House while we were there, which was well attended. When we had first arrived in Melbourne we had purchased second hand bikes and did most of our town roaming on those. Where it was too far to ride we used the tram system which connects almost every area of Melbourne. It’s a city with art galleries, an opera house, a huge cricket ground, several golf courses, a Formula One race track, museums, open air markets, a seaside, a port, an Olympic swimming pool – just about anything you could want – all within a few square miles. I could live there very easily. The Aussies may make fun of Poms, but Captain Cook and Captain Flinders are great heroes of the Aussies. They name railway stations and towns after them, so you’ve got to think that deep down, they’re just kidding.
Sport of course, is massively big in Oz. The boys, Conrad, Christian and Jordan, were easily accepted being good at cricket, rugby and five-a-side footy. However, the Ashes of 2006/7 were on during our stay and any Barmy Army fan will tell you it was a disaster from the English point of view. The ‘England and Wales Cricket Team’ were slaughtered at all five venues. I went to the Melbourne games with my three grandsons and my son-in-law, all decked out in George Cross Flags, only to witness the complete destruction of Vaughan’s miserable team. Even the great Freddy Flintoff couldn’t save them. The only cause for a smile were the songs of the Barmy Army, who sang, ‘God save YOUR gracious queen, long live YOUR noble queen . . . long may she reign over YOU . . .’ all the while pointing at the stands where the Aussie fans were staring with seething eyes at the Pom contingent. They also sang a parody of Waltzing Matilda – something about taking her behind the bike sheds for a shag – which brought a smile to my face and a glower to those who love the Banjo Patterson folk song.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 38