On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Read Free

and her husband had published from their small, now very leaky dwelling in our small Essex village. Her dark-gabled home, with its twin towers like witches’ hats, was falling apart at that time and would have taken a fortune to repair. Mary Sweetlove the anarchist, with whom I had many wonderful conversations over endless cups of tea, died in the early part of the new millennium. I’m sure she’s now with her beloved birds, foxes and badgers that used to mill around her garden, safe from harm.
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    At the end of the war dad left the RAF to return to his old job as a greyhound trainer at a greyhound farm in Essex. Either the money was bad, or dad couldn’t stand his bosses, because he rejoined the RAF after a year in civvy street. In 1947 he was posted to Felixstowe, where they had seaplanes such as the Sunderland Flying Boats. I don’t know what he did there, but he was always in general administration, so I guess it was counting things and writing the figures in books somewhere.
    We lived in married quarters – dad was a corporal by that time – and I went to Langer Road Primary School to begin what was to become a very nomadic education. The headmistress at Langer Road was a gruesome woman with a tongue like a rasp file. We had assembly every morning in a hall that smelled of dinner-time cabbage and there we used infant lungs to bawl out hymns. I still know the words of many of the ‘Ancient and Modern’ hymns. My favourite was ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’ with the refrain ‘for those in peril on the sea ’. It meant something in Felixstowe. We had the cold grey North Sea on our doorstep and one day it would come for us in the dead of night and overwhelm and envelop many of us. I get misty-eyed even now when I hear that hymn: it has a very emotional tune and deeply moving words.
    We seemed to learn everything by rote in those days, especially our ‘times tables’. Day in, day out, we chanted those tables, until they were so lodged in my brain they’ll be with me into senility and beyond. Some nursing-home carer will ask a delivery man, ‘What’s seven times eight?’ and I – who by that time will not even know my own name – will interrupt with, ‘Fifty-six,’ without even pausing to dribble.
    Classrooms in the ’50s had coal fires, whose warmth failed even to reach the front row of desks. They heated the backs of teachers until they steamed, leaving the pupils to freeze. Those same teachers were already inflamed by our uselessness and ignorance. They threw chalk, blackboard dusters and other handy missiles at us in the vain hope that such barrages would instil knowledge into our heads. If we lifted our desk lids as shields, the teacher would spring forward and whack our fingers with a ruler. I was never caned at Langer Road, as I was at my several senior schools, but I still collected a few scars there.
    Felixstowe took care of my early formative years. I played cowboys and Indians on the ‘plains’ between the married quarters and the seashore. There was a boy called Colin Colenso, and his sister, and the three of us used to light fires in the old Languard Point fort and roast potatoes. In the summer months the Territorial Army used that area behind the beach for camping their soldiers and we would earn money cleaning boots and belt buckles. The tents had duckboard floors. When the summer was over and the army had gone, we would run our fingers through the grass where the tents had stood for coins that had dropped through the duckboards. We became surprisingly rich.
    When we weren’t playing games on the dunes, my middle brother Ray and I (Derek was born at Felixstowe and was still a baby) would go fishing off the dockside pontoon where the ferry to and from Harwich used to moor up. Using just a line, wine cork and hook we caught smelt, dozens of them, and took them home for tea. Felixstowe docks is now a massive commercial enterprise, the third largest container port in Europe so I’m