Flying Free Read Free

of everyday human magnificence and picking up relics. Even in childhood, I never hankered after hoards of gold. I just wanted to feel the connection between me and the land and the people who had come before me.
    Weird child.
    Only two things drew me back home: food and cricket.
    At the end of 1968, I remember thinking, ‘This has been the most important year EVER, and there will never be another like it.’ As it happens, I was not so far wrong, but I blush to admit that the Tet offensive and the student unrest in France and Chicago had quite passed me by.
    I was aware of the deaths of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy and (an instant hero by merit of his charm, his fiery delivery and his quickness on his feet. I had never witnessed a top-class lawyer in action before, and brain and tongue working so in synch struck me as no less a marvel than a leisurely cover-drive in response to a John Snow thunderbolt). I was aware of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Every child was. We understood about bullies.
    Above all, however, this was the year when I became self-aware and England failed to recover the Ashes, even though John Edrich, Geoff Boycott, Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney, John Snow, Alan Knott, Derek Underwood et al., plainly the greatest cricketers EVER, all performed prodigies.
    1968 was also the year in which I discovered Europe.
    We went to Portugal, which was obviously the best country EVER.
    My father had decided that what we really needed to make everything better again was a couple of weeks on the Algarve.
    I had not flown before – nor even visited Heathrow before, nor knowingly visited London – so even the airport was an exotic foreign country. There were girls with architecturally unstable cairns of hair and black eyes that looked like Dennis the Menace’s dog Gnasher. They wobbled about the terminal on smoked-glass egg-timer legs.
    â€˜Lady Madonna’ and Gary Puckett’s ‘Young Girl’ were bouncing out of the PA system, Viscounts and Stratocasters whining on the tarmac outside. It was all so… modern . I ate my first Wimpy hamburger and chips washed down with Coke. I vomited for the first time in – well, really quite near – a public convenience.
    This was living.
    In Portugal, there were old women dressed all in black, stray dogs on the streets, goats on the hillsides and young women dressed in almost nothing on the beaches.
    I was four. Food still had precedence over young women. There was lots of garlic – still then a culture shock inspiring jokes about bad breath and kissing and displays of gastronomic machismo. A steak proved to be fish – fresh tuna, which was alarming but good – and they had vicious trick sausages which pretended to be the bland, soft things provided by Messrs Walls but turned out to be chewy and to bite back.
    There were also ingenious sardines which had somehow escaped their tins. The correct masculine thing here was to crunch them, bones, burned skins and all, whilst females and infants grimaced and said ooh.
    I already knew my role. Because my dad, my glamorous, beautifully dressed, funny, generous, adventurous dad – well, what else could all those prolonged absences mean save adventure? – was my model, I crunched theskin and bones and said that it was good, and was rewarded for being like him with some strange lemony biscuits which seemed to be called lavatories.
    I said that they were good too. In the shiny black-and-white picture, my mother is vaguely smiling amidst all the laughter as she sees another potential ally going over to the other side.
    *
    I was not only talking by now, I was talking volubly. In fact, I considered a moment not filled with piping Farageisms wasted – unless Brian Johnston or John Arlott were doing the soundtrack, in which case a respectful silence was required.
    The retired Indian Army neighbours, therefore, the gardeners at Down House, the village idiot (yes, every