by Jan Morris
Merciless fish
At sea in the Caribbean an elderly sailor pointed out to me the dark shadow of a shark, loitering beside the hull of our ship, and this is what he told me: ‘It’s got no marcy, no marcy at all. Big blue fish, so you can’t see ’um in de water, he’s sly! No marcy, see, not a drop of marcy!’
Nanny talk
The nannies of the London park were there in their battalions, elderly complacent nannies and perky young ones and hard old professionals with starched faces. ‘So I said to her, I said, “No, madam, it is not and never has been my job to make the tea…”’ ‘It’s never been the same since Lady Sarah passed over but, there, times have changed, haven’t they, dear?’ ‘No, Jeremy darling, keep away from the doggy, dear…’ ‘“Give him his tea?” I said, “I haven’t been looking after children for thirty years without knowing when it’s teatime,” I said, and with that I walked out…’ ‘Try rubbing his back, Mabel, that usually brings it up, doesn’t it, dear?’
Chief of the Egyptians
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, lived blamelessly with his buxom wife and five children in a modest Cairo house that was plain to the point of ugliness. No rude or ranting orator greeted me there, behind some big officious desk. On the contrary, the Chief of the Egyptians was relaxed and friendly, in shirtsleeves, his vest showing between the buttons, and he gave me coffee and talked pleasantly and intelligently for as long as I liked. Nasser like to call himself the first indigenous ruler of Egypt since the Pharaohs, and he was indeed a genuine through-and-through Egyptian, born of peasant stock on the banks of the Nile. ‘What a reasonable sort of man,’ I said to myself as we talked across the plain deal table, sipping thick chamomile coffee from cups edged with blue roses and gilt.
I was not deceived, though. For many long years Nasser led an underground revolutionary movement, and I knew he had talents of deception and conspiracy of a very high order. His horizons were limitless, and he liked to talk about circles of power, national destinies, the interventions of fate and that sort of thing. The hours slipped smoothly by as he expounded his theories, the coffee cups came and went, until at last the President rose from the table, his sandals flip-flopping across the linoleum, to see me to the door in his shirtsleeves and wave me goodbye into the night. The sentries saluted obsequiously.
Anglo-Sudanese
Good living is a Sudanese tradition, but it came as a disagreeable surprise to me in a Khartoum bar one evening to meet a young Sudanese, just down from the university, drunk not in the Sudanese but in the British manner; facetious with the sweaty banter of his British companions, not with any African drollery, with his tie loosened precisely as theirs was and a cigarette sticking to his lower lip. His grandfather had charged across the plain at Omdurman, brandishing a spear and screaming, but when this modern Sudanese slurred into the maudlin it was the maudlin of smoky pubs and potato crisps. I was shocked. But the British administrators of the Sudan have a wonderful knack of making you feel slightly ashamed of yourself, and I thought of that unlovely young man when I later read in a pamphlet of theirs: ‘A new nation is being born, and in the difficult world of today the new arrival needs all the sincere sympathy and disinterested help you can give or get it.’
I blushed: but it did not matter, for all the electric lights had gone out.
An exotic
Sen Tenzing was a Sherpa who had become well known as a porter with British mountaineering expeditions in the 1930s. He had always been a man of lively tastes, and by the time I met him in Kathmandu, when he was elderly, much respected and semi-retired, his appearance was wonderfully distinctive. On his head he wore a brown balaclava helmet with a peak, like the hats the Red Army used to wear. His grey sports shirt had polished major’s crowns upon its epaulettes. Over woollen long johns he wore a voluminous pair of blue shorts, and on his feet were elderly trainers. A confused variety of beads, tokens and Tibetan charms dangled around his neck and a bracelet hung upon his wrist. In one hand he flourished an ice axe, in the other a fly whisk. It was not for nothing that Sen Tenzing, in the old days of gentlemanly climbing, had been affectionately christened by his British employers ‘The Foreign Sportsman’.
Mr Beebe
Virginia City, the most famous old mining town of Nevada, has been kept boisterously alive by gambling, and by the presence there of Mr Lucius Beebe. Mr Beebe owns and edits a revived newspaper of the Gold Rush days, the Territorial Enterprise, and he lives grandly in a small Victorian mansion, keeping Rolls-Royces and St Bernards. Almost before we had settled in at our hotel he was aware of our presence by bush telegraph, and before long he was showing us the town, wearing a hat with a flat crown and very broad brim, a shirt with a wide and handsome check, an elegant pinstriped suit and a waistcoat embellished with a gold watch-chain. Mr Beebe is a fine sight at any time, but is at his best when he strides into a gambling house with his St Bernard at his heels, pausing for a moment beside a roulette wheel to throw a handful of silver dollars on the table with a satisfying clang, shrugging his shoulders with cheerful nonchalance when he loses the whole lot, bending an ear to a tattered prospector from the hills who has some slight financial worry, raising a negligent hand of greeting to an acquaintance here and there, listening patiently to the report of activities of a man who plans to get even with him for something he published in the paper last week, ushering his guest into the dimness of the bar with a truly Bostonian courtesy before hitching his ample frame on to a bar stool and ordering an enormously large whisky. During our stay in the town Mr Beebe lent us one of his Rolls-Royces, for our convenience.
Battle hardened
‘Lucky you got me,’ Chicago taxi drivers nearly always seemed to say, if you wanted to visit the tough black neighbourhoods. ‘Not many guys would take you. I tell you, I was a Marine for four years, I fought in eight major battles, eight major battles, and believe me if any of these blacks get in my way I’ll just run ’em down, just like that. Lock your door now. Like I say, it’s lucky you found me. Not many guys would come out this way.’
Celebrating with Breughel
If ever you attend a rustic wedding in the Orange Free State you will realize how close the Afrikaner can be to the world of the old Dutch masters. The reception is held in the church hall, and the room is packed, and hot with robust gaiety. At the top table sit the bride and groom, flushed and rotund, she in an ornate white headdress, he intolerably corseted in black. Here are the bride’s parents, wrinkled and sharp of face, and here also the two small bridesmaids, their plump country figures wrapped in pink and blue, posed self-consciously beside a potted palm. Big black servants scurry about with cold drinks and sweetmeats. ‘It’s all done to plan,’ says your host complacently. ‘All the tables are numbered, you see, so that everyone knows just where to sit–no confusion, you see, no pushing or shoving, everyone can have a good time.’ And everyone does. Now and then somebody makes a speech, generally disregarded, and the bride and bridegroom sometimes simper at each other at the demand of amateur photographers, and a hubbub of enjoyment and mastication fills the hall. Each trestle table makes a party of its own and eats its pastries with gusto, and shouts cheerfully for the Africans with the drinks; and the whole scene is warm and homely and animated, with the sheen of red velvet dresses, the fizz of bottled pop, smiling weathered faces, white satin, excited little girls and a smell of flowers and scent and sandwiches.
Shoeshine
The waiter at Colombo put down my breakfast and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law, a planter who had died in Ceylon during the war.
‘By God,’ he said at once, ‘that’s good, that’s very good–parents is a bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,’ and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.
We did not linger
With an American colleague I once went to a ceremony at Alexandria at which some new Czech weapons were to be h
anded over to the Egyptian forces. In those days many German specialists and advisers were working for the Egyptian army, and as we waited for the ceremony to begin we noticed a crowd of Egyptian officers milling around a tall figure in a black beret at the corner of the grandstand. We elbowed our way across and found ourselves face to face with as obvious and disagreeable a Nazi officer as ever I saw. His face was congealed with hauteur; his movements were stiff and mechanical, like a robot’s; and icy cold were the eyes with which, flicking his cane against his long legs, he turned to look at us. The jostling Egyptians crowded admiringly all around him, but my colleague was a Jew, and we did not linger.
A family outing
It was a festival day of some kind, and in the evening I asked a taxi driver in Beirut to take me for a run around the neighbouring hills, to observe the village goings-on. He brought along his family for the ride–a plump smiling wife in black, a little boy in jeans and a very small baby girl with enormous brown eyes. The driver had spent some years in America, and his English was sprinkled with rather dated Americanisms–‘Say, what you say we stop for a sundae?’ or ‘How d’ya feel like a Coke, baby?’–as we progressed through the balmy evening. We frequently stopped in villages for some quick refreshment among the celebrations. Candles were burning in many windows, and there was a constant crackling of fire-works and whizzing of rockets. Gangs of young men strolled about the hilly streets, singing and shouting. Innumerable friends and relatives of the taxi driver emerged from houses to impede our progress, and we had so many bottles of pop that the baby was visited by a staccato series of burps. ‘What feast day is this?’ I asked the driver. ‘Christmas, friend,’ he replied (it was the middle of July).
When we started our journey back the family was fast asleep in the back seat, in a tangle of ungainly abandon, and the driver and I smiled at each other. ‘Dig those crazy guys,’ said he, as another festive party rollicked by.
Tactful parent
During my stay in Darjeeling I often saw a young American dressed in the habit of a Buddhist monk. He was studying at a nearby seminary, I was told, and wore the brown cloak, the sandals and the hair bun as to the manner born. Nobody appeared in the least surprised by this anomalous figure, and his father, who was paying him a visit from the States, seemed entirely at home with the turn of family events. ‘I’m going to drink, Jimmy,’ I heard him saying to his son one day, puffing at his cigar and raising his glass, ‘I’m going to drink to all these wonderful, wonderful people of Darjeeling!’ (And ‘Say,’ he tactfully added as he put his glass down, rather hastily I thought, ‘is this Indian wine? Delicious!’)
A small magnifico
I was strolling through the souk in Qatar when there emerged from a doorway beside me the smallest man I had ever seen. He was about four feet high, stout and prosperous looking, dressed in the resplendent regalia of an Arab gentleman–splendid brown aba, milk-white keffiyeh, black head-band, dagger and beads. With a flourish and a toss of his head this marvellous figure strode down the steps of his house and swaggered away through the souk, as bold and assured as any gigantic African chieftain or Renaissance aristocrat. His proud head bobbed away among the packing cases, and a breath of the incense that perfumed his beard hung in the bazaar behind him.
A large magnifico
‘Back again,’ said the magnifico at the cafe on the last ridge before Cetinje and the heart of Montenegro. We had met before, you see. He is always there, it seems, summer or winter, like a major-domo of these uplands, or a Chief of Protocol. He wears black breeches, and a wide belt like a cummerbund, and he stands about seven feet tall, and speaks in a basso profundo, and tosses slivovic back like lime juice, and is in all respects the very model of a modern Montenegran.
A snatch of sound in Morocco
‘Go to sleep now,’ they said, ‘the operation will be later.’
But when they had gone I got out of bed rather shakily,
for the drug was beginning to work,
and went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror.
As I did so a street vendor outside played a delicate
arpeggio upon his flute,
a very gentle merry sound
which he repeated, over and over again,
in sweet diminuendo down the street.
Flights of angels, I said to myself, and so
staggered to my bed, and oblivion.
‘Ain’t that right?’
In Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep. Some were moving very slowly, some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down and one or two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. The men were very weatherbeaten, dirty and bearded, with their tangled hair escaping from their hats and their fingernails black and broken. They had been rounding up the sheep in the surrounding mountains, to bring them down for shearing and to escape the coming winter storms. ‘We been fourteen days in the hills,’ said one, ‘and seven days on the move. Sheep ain’t very fast movers. Boy, will I be glad of a bed!
‘As for this horse,’ he added affectionately, ‘all he wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up. Ain’t that right, boy?’
In a trance?
When I was alone in the Himalaya one day I saw a man. I saw him first in the extreme distance, across an absolutely blank snowfield at about 19,000 feet, to which I had climbed from the glacier below for the sake of the view. At first I could not make out what he was–only a black swaying speck, indescribably alone in the desolation. As he came closer I could see that he could only be human, so I plunged through the loose snow to meet him, and presently, there near the top of the world, thousands of feet and many miles above the trees, we met face to face. It was the strangest encounter of my life.
He was a holy man, wandering in the mountains, I suppose, for wandering’s sake. His brown, crinkled, squashed-up face looked back at me expressionless from beneath a yellow hood, and seemed to find nothing strange in my presence there. He wore a long yellow cloak and hide boots, and from his waist there hung a spoon and a cloth satchel. He carried nothing else, and he wore no gloves. I greeted him as best I could, but he did not answer, only smiling at me distantly and without surprise. Perhaps he was in a trance.
I offered him a piece of chocolate but he did not take it, simply standing there before me, slightly smiling. Presently we parted, and without a word he continued on his unfaltering journey, making, it seemed, for Tibet without visible means of survival and moving with a proud, gliding and effortless motion that seemed inexorable. He did not appear to move fast, but when I looked round he had almost disappeared, and was no more than that small black speck again, inexplicably moving over the snows.
The truth of it
In a churchyard in County Monaghan I stood beside the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments until he had been killed by British soldiers in a neighbouring meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears came into my eye as I stood there (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working nearby asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was simply crying for them all, whatever side they were on. ‘That’s the truth of it,’ he said, ‘that’s the truth.’
Urgent inquiries
Wide eyed and open handed the Fijians greet me, in their tidy thatched settlements off the highway, or among the mangrove swamps where the women, hitching their skirts up to their waists, scoop about indelicately for shellfish. ‘Where are you going? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Have you any children? Would you like a banana? How many people live in London? Do you sleep alone?’ Their inquiries are directed urgently at me: the Fijian for curiosity is via kila–knowledge want
. I told the maids in my Suva hotel that I was scared of them, because they stared at me so hard, and in the evening I found a little bowl of flowers placed beneath my window in appeasement. ‘Aaah,’ they said, shaking their big kind heads in remorse, ‘we no wish to frighten you.’
Their forebears used to be cannibals, but I would not mind being eaten in Fiji. The pot would be spiced, the cooking gentle, and the occasion in most ways merry.
On the waterfront
After a day around the docks with the notorious Manhattan longshoremen, still among the more obstreperous of the city’s workers, I thought of them with more sympathy. That evening I took a coffee and doughnut in a diner down there, and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a poor Irish immigrant half a century ago, looking for work on that hard and dirty shore. When the man on the next stool scowled across the napkin stand and said nastily, ‘You want all the sugar?’ I told myself he was the victim of historical circumstance, and said I was most awfully sorry.
Empire builders?