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

told, but in the ’40s and ’50s it was a small open square surrounded by granaries and warehouses, big enough for one or two medium sized ships, but nothing like the monster it is now.
    Around the docks were yards full of giant buoys of the sort used by ocean-going liners for mooring. They were as big as small houses, some hollow metal balls, others square blocks of wood wrapped in iron bands. There were mountains of them and on a certain night in 1953 they became lethal battering rams that smashed into houses, and crushed prefabs and caravans. Whether they were actually responsible for any of the deaths of my schoolfriends I do not know, since I never went back after that murderous night to find out why so many of them failed to survive.
    ~
    When I was about six years of age I had whooping cough and heard my mother and father debating about calling the doctor. It was 1947. Years later I realised that the National Health Service had not then come into being. So my parents would have had to pay for any medical help. In those days families like ours were paid weekly. The money often ran out. There was barely enough for food. Indeed, there was certainly none left for holidays. In my whole childhood I do not remember my parents taking us away for a single holiday which did not involve staying with relations. Us kids were sent to grandparents for the summer, or took a train to my mother’s younger brother, Douglas, in Ilkeston. Also in the late ’40s and early ’50s we still had food rationing. I used to cadge sweet rations from elderly neighbours who liked my curls.
    My mother had four siblings. Like my father, she was the eldest of the family. Next came Aunt Barbara, who lived in Catford, South London and whose only daughter was Christine, my favourite cousin. Then Aunt Daphne, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, whose daughter Molly was born with a hole in her heart and died at the age of ten and also Harvey, who had diabetes and died in his late thirties. There was a much younger half-sister, Aunt Margaret, but before her in age came my Uncle Doug, whom I adored as a kid. Though my mum’s family had been mostly born and raised in Dorset, they had all gravitated towards the capital, probably to find work.
    Doug was a lorry driver working for the British Coal Board at the opencast mines in Derbyshire. I used to ride passenger in his lorry during the holidays and search for fossils among the coal he carried. I found several fern and tree impressions, which I treasured and took back to show my class at school. Uncle Doug was the spitting image of the actor Nigel Patrick and any film in which the actor starred, such as the Pickwick Papers or Raintree County, had me riveted. I found it fascinating to see my uncle up there on the screen, even though I knew it wasn’t he. The likeness, the gestures, the speech were all Uncle Doug. He and Aunt Jessie were good, kind, honest folk and I was extremely fond of them. Doug had moved to Ilkeston at the age of seventeen, yet until the day he died at the age of eighty the Ilkeston men called him ‘the Londoner’. He was held in great affection by them though, especially at the working men’s club, where he was elected chairman several times during his life.
    ~
    Christmases at that age were magical. I can remember looking out of the window and seeing a lone star fading in the early morning sky. My favourite Christmas present – the one that thrilled me with its colours and textures – was a chemistry set. I was never good at school chemistry, but this was different. You could make all sorts of wonderful concoctions with a home chemistry set. Stink bombs, salt petre fuses for bombs, copper crystals. You could do litmus tests, change the state of liquids and gases, play with a Bunsen burner without getting told off, make explosive mixtures, kill wasps by creating a vacuum in test tube, make electricity and magnets. Wow. I loved that gift.
    I never became a famous chemist of course, which