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

would have made a nice round ending to the story. You know the sort of thing, Albert is given a tin whistle for his birthday and eventually grows up to become an international flugel horn player. No indeed. Nor did I become any kind of chemist whatsoever, not even a gifted teacher of the science like my friends Chris and Fe Evans. I became a writer. Just as Arabic newspapers would come to thrill me with their strange writing patterns, so did those test tubes with their coloured powders and crystals stir the latent apothecary and alchemist in me. Not that I wanted to cure or poison people, or turn base metals into gold. I just loved the idea of doing those things with magical ingredients. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . The Gold Bug . Words in Arabic, tubes of coloured chemicals, these were full of mystery and awakened strange imaginings. Imaginings that became tales of the fantastic kind, which I later burned on to blank white paper.
    Also I have come to realise that the writer must have been in me from a very early age. It was not so much the chemistry that excited me, but the names of things. Words. Labels with saltpetre and ferrous sulfate printed on them. But the one gift that really brought home this revelation was the ubiquitous water colour paint box. I don’t think a Christmas passed without a paint box in my stocking. But it was not the colours themselves, or the thought of using them that excited me. It was the names of the paints: burnt sienna, yellow ochre, crimson lake, cobalt blue, burnt umber . These names hovered on the edge of my imagination, like keys ready to open doors to strange and wonderful story-worlds.
    ~
    Early in the morning on 1 February 1953 my brothers and I were abruptly woken. My parents were dashing down then up the stairs with perishable things like photo albums. When I stood on the landing and looked down the stairwell I could see about a foot of water swilling around the hallway. Bleary-eyed and confused I went back into the bedroom and looked out of the window to see a wall of water combing the fields behind the house with white surf. A moment later a tidal wave struck the side of the house, breaking one or two panes of glass, and thundered round the corners of the building. Soon seawater was gushing in below and my parents stopped their evacuation of the lower part of the house and gathered us all in the main bedroom.
    ‘It’s a flood,’ said dad. ‘The sea wall’s collapsed. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. These houses are very solid.’
    However, kids can see concern in adults who might be the greatest actors in the world. My brothers and I knew we were in trouble. We could hear the wind screaming around the eaves, see the water swirling halfway up the walls of the house, and were aware of distant cries of those in the houses a little lower than ours. Hell had opened its sluice gates and not fire but water was surging through the gaps. Then a short time later there was a loud bang on the side of the house and the whole place juddered. Looking out we saw one of those massive ocean liner buoys swirl past after hitting our brickwork. It went on to strike another house in the next row and we could see bits of brick fly up on impact.
    ‘We’ll be fine,’ said mum. ‘We’ll be fine.’
    Staring out of the window again I could see a meteorologist’s mast on the top of which was an anemometer. There were rungs going up the mast, each about a foot apart. I watched the water level climbing those rungs one by one. We were probably going to drown. I was scared but not terrified. I thought we might die, but I also thought we might be rescued. It was a strange, ambivalent feeling, looking out at the ocean that had swallowed my garden. There were animals floating by now, cats and dogs, being swept along with the force of the tide. Thankfully I saw no people, though there were plenty who died that night, some of them horribly. I learned later that water rose six metres above mean sea level. In