Gweilo Read online

  'What's a pole-fisher?' I enquired.

  'Pole-fisher's a thief,' he explained in his cockney accent. ''e 'as a long flex'ble pole with an 'ook on it. 'e shoves it through the por'hole an' sees what 'e can catch. But,' he added sternly, 'if you see the pole wigglin' about in the cabin, don't make a grab for it, even,' he glanced at my bunk, 'if 'e's 'ooked yer teddy bear. See, 'e'll've set razor blades in the pole. You grab it an' – zip! – 'e pulls the pole an' you ain't got no fingers.'

  I immediately put the bear in the wardrobe, hid it behind my mother's frocks and closed the door.

  My mother was eager to go ashore. This was the first time she had set foot outside Britain. I was just as eager to follow. My father, conversely, was not at all enthusiastic. A friend of his had been stabbed to death in Algiers during the war and he considered the place unsafe. That this friend had been in military intelligence, that Algiers had been under the influence of Vichy France and that the war against Hitler had been in full flood at the time did not seem to occur to him. However, my mother prevailed and we set off to see the sights in a small, decrepit bus with some other passengers from the ship. Our ride culminated in the Casbah, the sixteenth-century fortified part of the old Ottoman city. Here, we got out of the bus and, after my father had exhorted us to stay close together and be alert, wandered through the narrow thoroughfares of the suq.

  Every street and alley was an animated illustration from my grandfather's morocco-bound copy of The Thousand and One Nights. Men wearing turbans and baggy trousers passed by, leading donkeys. Some of the women wore burkas, their eyes bright in the darkness of the slits. Dogs scratched themselves indifferently or lay asleep in the shade. Stalls erected under arcaded buildings sold vegetables I had never seen before, quaintly shaped copper jugs, vicious-looking daggers (the better for stabbing British spies with), leather ware and sand-coloured pottery. In coffee shops, men sat around tables drinking from small cups or smoking hookahs, the scent of their tobacco alien when compared to my father's Sobranie Black Russian or my mother's State Express 555 cigarettes. Away from the smokers, I found the air heavy with smells reminiscent of my grandmothers' spice cabinets, of minced pies and apple tart – and the odour of donkeys, camels and human sweat. My mother purchased some fresh dates from a stall and set about eating them, much to my father's alarm.

  'How can you tell where they've been?' he remonstrated with her.

  'They've been up a date palm,' my mother replied.

  'And they picked themselves, I suppose?'

  'No,' she responded, in the same tone of voice as she might have used to a dog sniffing at the Sunday dinner table. 'I expect they were plucked by a scrofulous urchin and thrown down to his tubercular aunt who wrapped them in her phlegm-stiffened handkerchief.'

  'Well, if you want to poison yourself, at least don't give one to Martin. The last thing he'll want is dysentery.'

  'But I want one,' I butted in.

  I had no idea what I was being forbidden, but I was determined not to miss out on it or the promise of dysentery. Surreptitiously my mother slipped me a date. Its taste and texture reminded me of solidified honey.

  Once through the suq, we climbed up to a battlement where I sat on a large cannon. From this vantage point, I could see camels down below, their wooden-framed cargo saddles being laden with sacks. My mother asked me what I thought of the city and was later to write to relatives that I compared Algiers favourably to the outer-London suburb of Woking.

  As we retraced our steps through the suq to catch the bus, we were beset by a horde of children, many of them about my age, dressed in flowing rags and the fragrances of warm humanity. They called vociferously for baksheesh, their hands out-stretched, their eyes devious and pleading. One or two of the more courageous plucked at my father's tropical-weight linen jacket. He raised his hand as if to strike them and they adroitly retreated.

  'What do they want?' I asked my mother, somewhat shocked that my father had thought to hit someone else's child. Smacking me was one thing, but clipping the ear of a stranger was an altogether different matter.

  'They want money,' my mother answered. 'They're beggars. Ignore them.'

  This seemed callous but I did as I was told.

  My mother's first encounter with a camel was more costly. She had an inbuilt attraction to anything of fur or feather. Only a month before sailing, she had narrowly missed having her neck broken by a peeved circus elephant which, bored with being offered currant buns, swung its trunk full force at her. She had just dropped one of the currant buns and, with the timing of Laurel and Hardy, had bent down to retrieve it. The wind of the passing trunk had ruffled her perm.

  The camel was sitting on the ground, fully laden, chewing the cud. I wondered if it was dreaming of a wide desert of rolling dunes and a far-off oasis of palms, for its eyes were shut. My mother approached, hand outstretched, to stroke its muzzle, much as she might have caressed the velvet nose of a placid horse. In an instant, the beast was wide awake and getting to its feet with the alacrity of a sprinter leaving the starting blocks. Its neck arched forward, it sneezed and then it spat. A shower of bactrian spittle lodged in my mother's hair. In the sharp north African sunlight, she looked as if she had been sprinkled with glutinous tinsel. She stepped back sharply, discretion the better part of affection. The camel, thinking it had her on the run, lunged after her but its front feet were hobbled. The camel herder hurried over and struck the beast on its rump with a stout stick, shouting a spate of invective at it in Arabic, for the camel's benefit, and then in pidgin French for ours. The camel lay down again. The camel's owner looked balefully expectant so my father parted with all his loose change, no doubt hoping this would be sufficient for us not to be knifed in revenge on our way back through the suq.

  When we stepped into the square where we had left the bus, it had gone. Panic entered my father's eyes. He had been to the movies. He knew the cash value of a blond white woman of shapely form and a matching potential catamite. His friend had bled to death in a gutter hereabouts. At this point, my mother disappeared down an alley of tightly packed stalls selling lengths of multicoloured cloth.

  'Joyce!' my father called after her. 'Joyce!' His voice rose half an octave with anger, frustration and fear. 'Joyce! You don't know what you're doing. This isn't Piccadilly . . .'

  Yet, in less than a minute, my mother returned, unscathed by blade or bullet. Following her was an elderly bearded Arab in a flowing blue-and-gold striped robe leading a morose-looking donkey in the shafts of an ancient trap. My mother was ever a resourceful woman.

  My parents, Joyce and Ken, were in many ways an incompatible pair from the very start. My mother was a very pretty strawberry blonde, petite and lithe; my father slim and handsomely dark in an almost Latin-American way. They looked the ideal couple, yet they were not. My mother was full of fun, with a quick wit, an abounding sense of humour, an easy ability to make friends from all walks of life and an intense intellectual curiosity. She was also as determined and tenacious as a bull terrier.

  By contrast, my father was a stick-in-the-mud with little real sense of humour and an all-abiding pedantry. Furthermore, he had a chip on his shoulder which insidiously grew throughout his life. He came to hold all relationships at arm's length, considering himself a cut above most of his contemporaries.

  My parents' coming together was perhaps unavoidable: born within five weeks of each other, they lived out their childhoods virtually next door to each other in Portsmouth. The marriage, however, greatly discommoded my paternal grandmother who thought my mother and her parents to be socially inferior. Her husband, Grampy, had been a commissioned officer, but his son had married the daughter of a non-commissioned officer from the lower deck. What was worse, my mother was a Modern Woman, had a job as a General Post Office telephonist and smoked cigarettes. In my grandmother's eyes, she was an upstart and could not be more common unless she worked behind the counter in Woolworths.

  During the Second World War, my father spent a g
ood deal of his time overseas in south and west Africa and the Middle East. When the hostilities ended, he was employed at the Admiralty in London, his office overlooking Horse Guards' Parade. Although he made himself out to be an important man, he was in fact little more than a superior clerk. Indeed, my mother had had an almost equivalent wartime job provisioning submarines for the Battle of the Atlantic.

  After the war, our lives had seemed settled enough. We lived in a semi-detached house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Brentwood, Essex. My mother was a housewife in the outer suburbs of London, my father a daily commuter into London.

  Then, one day, my father came home to announce that he had been posted to Hong Kong, to serve upon a Royal Fleet Auxiliary naval supply ship plying between the British crown colony and the Japanese military dockyard of Sasebo. The Korean War was in full flood and he was, he claimed, to be a part of it.

  A debate followed as to what was to be done with me. My father was all for sending me to boarding school in England: I could spend my holidays with his parents. He and my mother, he pointed out, would only be gone three years. The quality of schooling in Hong Kong was an unknown and he would not have me educated in a school for children of military personnel.

  'In with Army children?' he declared. 'Out of the question! A rabble of East End brats with snot-besmirched faces and grimy fingernails, the spawn of bloody corporals and squaddies—'

  'I'm sure there are local schools,' my mother said, with no foundation whatsoever for her optimism.

  'Full of Chinese,' my father announced from an equally strong foundation of ignorance.

  'Well, I'm not leaving him here,' my mother pronounced obdurately. 'He'll wind up like some poor child in a Kipling story. Parents in the Orient, boy in—'

  'Don't be ridiculous, Joyce! If he's in England, he'll be safe. The Far East isn't Farnham. There are tropical diseases, civil unrest, an inclement climate, native—'

  'It's a British colony, Ken. I'm sure they have hospitals and a police force.'

  'All the same, we leave him here. In the long run, it's for the best.' My father's mind was made up. He had clearly worked it all out.

  'No, we bloody don't,' my mother exploded. 'I didn't go through nine months of pregnancy and twelve hours of labour – while you were swanning around in the Mediterranean – to leave the product behind. I had a child – a son – to raise him, foster him, shape him, not foist him off on a gaggle of minor public school masters, half of them as interested in the contents of his underpants as his mind.'

  'Don't be so bloody stupid, Joyce. The masters at Hilsea . . .'

  Hilsea College, an insignificant private boys' school in Portsmouth, was my father's Alma Mater, from which he had attained little but a basic matriculation and a few certificates for proficiency in Music.

  'Hilsea!' my mother echoed in a voice verging on the falsetto. 'You can have another think coming! Martin's going to be with us. It's a family posting. We're a family. Fix it!'

  I overheard this conversation through a closed door and missed bits of it but the gist was clear and the outcome decided. I was going too.

  Life aboard ship quickly settled into a routine. It seemed to me that, for many passengers, the voyage was an extended and free holiday, away from the austerity of Britain. Mornings were spent reading in deckchairs, writing letters in the lounge or smoking room, both of which were forbidden to unaccompanied children, or walking briskly in circles round the promenade deck. Some joined in physical exercise classes on the boat deck. At mid-morning, a steward served beef tea in small china cups. According to my mother, it was supposed to give the white man salt and strength. After luncheon, most passengers either took to their cabins or lay supine in deckchairs. A few participated in deck sports, most of which seemed to involve quoits of tough rope that one threw over a net, shuttled across the deck or tossed from hand to hand frisbee-style. One passenger spent much of his time driving golf balls over the side, from what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply.

  As far as I was concerned, the voyage was also a prolonged vacation although, early on, a blot appeared on this landscape of bliss.

  Passengers under the age of twelve were expected to attend school lessons every morning in the ship's nursery, a room decorated with poorly executed versions of Disney and nursery tale characters, furnished with chairs and desks of Lilliputian dimensions and overseen by a crabby-faced woman in a nanny's uniform. The content of the instruction offered bore no relation to any syllabus and my mother, after visiting me shoe-horned into a desk, excused me from all future attendance. Thereafter, she taught me geography and history herself for an hour a day at a table in the lounge, her lessons anticipating the next port of call. My father attempted twice to teach me the basics of geometry but his patience expired before half time and he gave up in exasperation.

  The days at sea were euphoric, reading Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome in a deckchair, playing with the children of similarly educationally enlightened parents and painting watercolours of imaginary volcanic desert islands. A sub-tropical sun beat down from a cloudless sky, its heat deceptively cooled by a stiff sea breeze. I quickly acquired a tan with the aid of a noxious-smelling liquid my mother basted me with at every opportunity.

  To amuse the younger passengers, 'diversions' were arranged. The chief engineer conducted a trip to the engine room, a cathedral-sized cavern filled with mechanical noise, spinning fly-wheels and governors, polished copper and brass pipes and brackets, heaving piston rods, levers, taps and the vast propeller shafts which incessantly turned whilst being lubricated by a muscular man with a towelling rag tied round his neck, stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat. The air stank with the all-pervading odour of diesel and lubricating oil, which convinced me that whilst a life at sea might have suited my grandfathers, it was definitely not for me.

  Another excursion took us to the bridge, where we feigned interest in engine room telegraphs, radar screens, compasses and assorted nautical navigational aids. We were shown a blip on a green radar screen, then given binoculars, identifying it as another P&O vessel heading west. On passing it at a mile, I was chosen to greet it with a blast on the ship's horn, to which it responded. We were also permitted to steer the ship, keeping her on her bearing with the aid of a large gimbal-mounted compass and the officer of the watch whose hand did not once leave the wheel. This feat accomplished, we were each presented with a certificate to say we had taken the helm of the P&O liner Corfu off the north African coast on such-and-such a date.

  One morning I awoke to find the ship still and alongside a quay seething with activity. A quaint-looking railway engine passed by, its flat trucks laden with baggage. Men in white turbans mingled round the entrance to a warehouse, chivvied into order by a portly man in a bedraggled suit and red fez. Shouting stevedores pushing hand carts steered around each other with considerable alacrity.

  'Port Said,' my mother announced, entering the cabin. 'Egypt,' she added, standing under the ceiling blower and towelling her hair. 'This is where the pharaohs lived. Remember our history lesson?' I nodded. 'Well,' she said finally, 'this is where it all happened.'

  After breakfast, four or five elderly Arabs appeared squatting on the promenade deck, each with a lidded basket before him. None of them, it occurred to me, looked as if he might be even distantly related to monarchy. Their loose-fitting robes and turbans were grimy. They were barefoot, the underneath of their feet soiled, cracked and as thick as the soles of military boots. Their toenails were horny and ridged like a tortoise's shell. As I walked past the first, he reached out, his fingers ruffling the hair behind my ear from which he produced a day-old yellow chick, showing it to me with a grin framed by yellow-stained teeth. The little bird cheeped dejectedly and the man dropped it into his basket. As he performed this magic, he muttered, 'Gully-gully-gully,' in a cracked, guttural voice.

  'They're called gully-gully men,' my mother explained unnecessarily and she put a coin into the man's open hand. His fingers were calloused,
his long, curved fingernails striated like an ancient nag's hoof. He touched his forehead, secreted the coin in the folds of his clothing and produced a hen's egg from inside my other ear. I felt his talon of a fingernail scrape against my ear hole.

  My father decreed we could quite safely go ashore. He had been here during the war, had lost no friends to enemy agents or native collaborators and purportedly knew his way around. A decaying landau with faded cream leather seats, pulled by a gaunt pony with a hangdog look, took us into the centre of town. Once there, we entered a museum of ancient Egyptian antiquities filled with glass display cases containing faded turquoise faience ushabtis, scarab beetle amulets, wooden and sandstone carved figurines, framed strips of linen and parchment upon which had been written dynastic poetry in hieroglyphs, bead necklaces, pottery oil lamps and bronze jewellery. The difference between this museum and those I had visited in England, however, was that everything here was for sale. Captivated by the ushabtis, I attempted to persuade my mother to buy me one, even desperately arguing that it might help me with my history lessons, but the price was too high and this was not, she told me in hushed tones, an emporium in which one haggled the price down.

  'What does haggled mean?' I asked. My mother's reply was a severe keep-your-mouth-shut look. I complied.

  Further along the same street we came upon a low, colonnaded building which seemed to be attracting passengers from the Corfu as a picnic did ants. The interior was dark and cool, large wooden and rattan-bladed ceiling fans spinning overhead, blue sparks dancing in their electric motors. This was the Simon Artz department store, almost as famous in Egypt as the Sphinx or the pyramids, alabaster replicas of both of which it sold in a variety of sizes. In addition, one could buy copies of ancient Greek amphorae; grotesque leather poufs decorated with hieroglyphs, high priests and heavy brass studs; camel saddles (labelled as being genooine Bedooine); beaten copper water jugs; wooden boxes inlaid with brass, lapis lazuli or ivory; carved camels, red felt fezes; brass salvers, alabaster ash trays and a working model of a water-raising system called a shadouf which I coveted but was forbidden to purchase by my father in case it harboured woodworm. That said, he purchased an alabaster ash tray. Without his knowing, my mother bought me a small wooden camel supposedly devoid of insect infestation.