Travel

Travel

T

ravel broadens the mind – provided one has a mind and not just a random collection of opinions and prejudices. Otherwise it may simply reinforce what is already there. Travel is then called ‘tourism’, the uneducable gawking at the unintelligible.

            I first saw Europe just after the war, when rebuilding had scarcely begun, for the Marshall Plan dollars, generously provided by the United States, had only just begun to trickle in. Without this aid, Stalin would probably have succeeded in his plan to incorporate the Western democracies into his empire. Germany was the worst – her cities still a vast sea of ruins, stretching to the horizon, with hollow-cheeked scarecrows, most of whom were head-scarfed women, gaunt children or tremulous old men, creeping out from caves under the rubble to star at us or beg. Cigarettes were the ubiquitous currency, along with chocolate, among people who were sometimes on the verge of starvation. Morality had collapsed so completely that an attractive young woman would sell herself for a couple of bars of chocolate or a packet of cigarettes. As one hard-eyed, blond teenager remarked to me, when I remonstrated with her for ‘fraternizing’ with a couple of soldiers in the British zone, “What’s it to you, anyway? I’ve got to make a living. And your soldiers pay well, not like the Russkis who paid me nothing when they raped me.”

Rape had been endemic in the territory seized by the Russians. Towards the end of the war there was a saying current among German women, ‘Better a Russki on your belly than an Ami on your head,’ meaning it was better to be raped than blown to bits by American bombs. It seemed inconceivable at the time that anything could be done to resurrect this shattered culture. Yet when I next returned, nearly forty years later, not a trace of the devastation remained in any of the prosperous cities I visited, all swarming with self-confident, overweight people. Only in the eyes of some of the older generation could I fancy I glimpsed traces of past defeats and arrogant triumphs. In the past, when civilizations fell, they did not recover. Now, such is the power of technology, they can be rebuilt in a generation. The exception is the former USSR, where the devastation was so tremendous, the loss of life so great (27 million killed) and the technology so rudimentary compared with the West that even today the physical and psychic scars are still dreadfully evident. The collapse of Soviet Communism in 1990-91 was in part due to the face that Marxist economics had singularly failed to make good the gargantuan damage inflicted on the USSR by WWII.

After devastated Germany, France was a delight. Though many bridges were still down and the fields were still littered with the debris of war, especially burnt-out tanks and trucks, her cities were largely untouched and her people alert, confident and happy. Only the sombre plaques that adorned every city, country town and village, recording the long lists of hostages shot by the Germans (Fusillés par les Allemands), bore bitter testimony to what the French had endured. French food, in particular, was a revelation to one coming from an England where tasteless stodge, tough meat and tired vegetables boiled in bicarbonate soda masquerading as cooking, was ubiquitous. I vividly recall the first meal I had in a French family restaurant in Paris; I had never tasted such ambrosia in my life. Elizabeth David had experienced the same exhilaration some years before, memories of which drove her to write her first cookery book when suffering the turgid horrors of English hotel food in 1947. The only thing in short supply was good coffee. Paradoxically, this was readily available in England, among Sir Stafford Cripps’s austerities and rationing, because my countrymen preferred tea. I took kilos of fresh coffee beans into France in my haversack and sold them when I ran short of money or else gave them to my French friends.

How was it that France, defeated and under Nazi occupation for over four years, was able to recover so quickly from the war while England continued to endure fourteen years of rationing and drabness? I suspect the answer has something to do with the fact that France was still an agricultural country and therefore able to produce food in abundance, while England was still importing food. But it was also due to England’s being fundamentally a Puritan country, where enjoyment of any sort – even of the pleasures of the table – was seen as obscurely sinful, whereas the French had never succumbed to this spiritual blight and were quick to start enjoying themselves again. The French expulsion of the Calvinistic Huguenots had ensured that the country kept its capacity for joie-de vivre. The dour-faced Sir Stafford Cripps, incidentally, was the very personification of Puritanism. It was said that he rose at four every morning, even during the Arctic winter of 1947, and took a bracing ice-cold bath before settling down to his usual fifteen hour day. With such a hair-shirted example of asceticism ever before us, how dared we even think of having fun?

Along with food, the greatest delight in France was the southern sun of the Midi. I have never forgotten my first glimpse of the Mediterranean, when after hitchhiking from Paris to Marseilles, I first saw the golden-red sun rise triumphantly over its blue and glittering expanse. It had been a difficult journey, since the roads were in bad repair after the war and traffic still relatively scarce. The longest leg of the trip, from Auxerre to Marseilles was spent in the company of a haggard truck-driver with a strong Parisian accent who picked me up on condition that I talked to him throughout the night to keep him awake. I felt I was undergoing a nightmarishly unending French oral examination, with a remorseless examiner who would exclaim “Parle! Parle!” if I stopped talking even for a moment. On the rare occasions when I paused for breath, he would promptly fall asleep and swerve wildly across the road, while I grabbed the wheel of his ancient camion, which looked as though it had seen service in WWI, and shouted “Attention, mon pote!” in a stentorian bellow. I had therefore the strongest incentive to carry on talking – sudden death if I didn’t.

In the long hours of darkness that followed a blindingly hot afternoon, I narrated in excruciating detail my life history and then the biographies of my entire family and friends; I discussed philosophy, especially the then fashionable existentialism; French, English, Welsh and European history; education, current politics, geography, physics, cosmology, zoology, horticulture, women; Latin, French and English literature; Dante, the Russian novel, and, of course, the recent war. The latter was the only subject to which he actually responded, for he had been a prisoner of war before escaping and joining the Maquis and had undergone some horrendous experiences. (The first question he had asked me when he stopped to pick me up was if I was German. I had the feeling that if I had told him I was, he would have run me over immediately and the reversed to do it again). Every hour or so, we would stop at an estaminet where he topped himself up with a bon coup de rouge, while I drank black coffee to keep awake. To my consternation, he refused to drink coffee, explaining that it put him to sleep. Only red wine, vin ordinaire, he assured me, swilled down in copious draughts, enabled him to drive. What his blood alcohol reading must have been I am afraid to guess. As we sped on through the night, along twisting potholed roads, I kept thinking of a doleful English billboard seen beside every major highway in the UK at that time, featuring a mournful widow veiled in Gothic black, adorned with the lugubrious message, ‘Keep death off the road!’ At times, indeed, I fancied I saw this ominous, sable lady perched on the bonnet, staring at the sand running through her hour-glass and muttering ‘Courage, mon vieux! We’ll be together soon.’

Finally, as dawn was breaking, my drunken companion stopped the truck on a level crossing, muttered, ‘Putain! J’en ai marre’ and immediately fell asleep with his head slumped on the wheel. I broke off the French infantry marching songs which I had been hoarsely and obscenely singing, for I had run out of narrative somewhere around Avignon, rubbed my eyes and then nearly leapt through the windscreen in fright at what I saw in the grey light of dawn, expecting the Paris-Marseilles express to hurtle out of a nearby tunnel at any moment and demolish us. Sweating with fear, I tried unavailingly to wake him, dragged him from the wheel, frantically started the engine and somehow – for I could not drive – managed to send the truck jumping along until we were well off the crossing – mistake, presumably, for a lay-by for trucks – where he had sleepily decided to await his Maker. He was still snoring away when I grabbed my haversack and clambered down shakily from the truck. Ten minutes later, while I was waiting for a bus to take me to nearby Marseilles, a train did rush out of the tunnel, making the earth tremble with the speed of its passing. I was left with the feeling that Providence sometimes looks after drunks and English hitchhikers and that I had definitely earned my passage to Marseilles.

A couple of hours later, watching the blazing sun soar into a sky of unbelievable crystalline blue while I lay on a deserted beach and dried out after my swim in the warmest water I had ever encountered, I had never felt so glad to be alive. I felt profoundly sorry for my benefactor and hoped he was still sleeping soundly. I did not see how he could possibly survive many more trips of that nature, undertaken, so he assured me, only because he had a wife and five children and the more of those nightmarish trips he made, the more he earned. This was not just my first encounter with the southern sun; it was also my first encounter with the world of a brutalized, exploited working-class, whose whole life was one long struggle for survival in often desperate circumstances. Little wonder that the French Communist party was so powerful, even under the doubtful leadership of Maurice Thorez.

It was the quality of the light that so enchanted me in Provence. Until then, I had never realized that in England, even in what passed for summer, I had been seeing the sky through a misty haze. No wonder so many artists had made Provence their home. “In England,” I muttered to myself, “winter slowly mellows into winter. But here…” I made up my mind that at the first opportunity I would leave England for a country where I could bask in this marvellous, crystalline radiance for the rest of my life. It was this desire to escape from the grey skies, rain, yellow fogs, mist and Stygian gloom that eventually led me to Australia, via the Middle East, as soon as I had come down from Cambridge. After seven years spend in the Fens enduring the coldest, dankest weather in a cold, dank island, I was yearning for the sun. Although I did not realize it at the time, I was suffering from mild depression, which we now know can be remedied by exposure to intense light. The euphoria I experienced for the first time in the Midi was due, not only to the excellent food and wine, but also to the brilliant sunlight which flooded my whole being from dawn till dusk. I drank it in voraciously, as a man on the verge of dying of thirst will drink draught after draught of life-giving water, watching my slug-white English skin slowly turn a healthy brown as the days went by.

Ironically, towards the end of my life, I now find that the sun has become too dangerous for me to submit myself to its full rays. The thinning of the ozone layer and the consequent sharp increase in ultra-violet ionising radiation has meant that I can only enjoy the sun in the morning and late evening. I have seen too much of the ravages of skin cancer, especially melanoma, for me to soak myself in sunshine as I did then. Fifty years on, I find myself living in a strange and often sinister world - one which I could not possible had foreseen in those far-off days.

From the French Riviera, still scarred by the battles fought there after the Allied landing in 1944, I made my way to North Africa, where I took a job as Assistant in a French lycee in Oran. When the summer term ended, I stayed on to work in a colonie de vacances run by the headmaster, whose Communist sympathies drove him to devote his summer vacations to the welfare of some of the poorest children of the colony, most of them Arabs. A few years later, the Algerians rose in revolt against their French colonisers in a bitter, bloody struggle that lasted for eight years. Many of my colleagues and – almost certainly – a high percentage of the children I was caring for, especially the boys, must have died or been wounded in that long and cruel war. I know for certain that two of them were killed early on in the struggle. Yet during my stay I never heard anyone express the slightest misgivings about the future, even though I myself, from the vantage point of an outsider, could see clearly that the regime was in its death-throes. Such wilful blindness affects us all at times, especially when we are most threatened. When we most need to see clearly, we cannot.

I arrived in Baghdad in October 1956, to take up a post as Lecturer in English Literature in the newly founded University of Baghdad. I had chosen an inopportune time, for in November the British and the French invaded the Suez, provoking a violent reaction in Iraq which led to the evacuation of most British and French nationals. I had not bothered to register with the British embassy, so remained behind, largely unaware of what was going on. My first real intimation of the seriousness of the situation came when the bus on which I was riding stopped suddenly in Al Rashid Street, the main thoroughfare, while everybody fled from it, including the conductor and driver, leaving me sitting there wondering what was going on. Puzzled, I left the bus and took refuge in a near-by bookshop, only to be bundled out unceremoniously as the owner began to pull down the steel riot shutters. As I stood on the pavement, wondering how I was going to get home again, I heard a loud chanting, turned and saw a mob some two hundred metres away, advancing rapidly towards me. An exultant cry arose when they saw me, a solitary Englishman, provocatively loitering in a deserted street. Enlightenment dawned. I turned and ran towards Bab El Sherji, with the mob in hot pursuit, like a fox pursued by a pack of hounds, reaching the Sindbad Hotel just in time to slide under the riot shutters which the management had thoughtfully raised for me.

“That was a close one,” said the manager, cheerfully, as I recovered my breath. “We were having bets on whether you’d make it or not.”

“And if I hadn’t?” I asked.

“Oh, then you’d have ended up like the Frenchman they killed yesterday. They cut his head off and carried it round on a pole.”

This was my first lesson in Middle Eastern politics, a game that is played for keeps by both sides.

            Less than two years later, during the revolution, the mob stopped an army truck in the same street. It was carrying a couple of dozen Swiss and German businessmen to the Ministry of Defense for their protection. They had been abroad a flight that had landed just before the airport was seized by revolutionaries and had not been allowed to leave. The mob, ignorant of bloodthirsty as always, mistook them for hated Jordanians, who they had heard were being evacuated from the Jordanian Embassy, hauled them out and beheaded the lot of them there and then. Such are the hazards of Middle Eastern travel. One moment you are sipping champagne in business class; the next you are watching your screaming companions being decapitated in a welter of blood in a filthy Baghdad street, knowing you will follow them in a few minutes time.

            Since the university was closed, to forestall riots, I spent most of the next three months closeted in my house, with an armed guard at the gate for some of the time, learning Arabic while I waited for things to quieten down. It was disconcerting to be told by shopkeepers, on the rare occasions when I went out, that I would have to hide myself in a dark place, should the pro-British government be overthrown. In May 1957, as I was preparing to leave Iraq for Australia, my students gave me a farewell party. “We are quite fond of you, sir” said their spokesman politely, as he handed me a going-away present, “But we are glad you are leaving, because if you stayed we should have to cut your throat.” My other students, neatly clad in dark suits, white shirts and highly polished shoes, all smiled in agreement. Nothing personal, of course, for they were well aware that my sympathies lay with them. It was all routine kill-or-be-killed politics.

            My students had warned me, repeatedly, for several months that I should leave Baghdad as soon as possible, for my own safety, since there was going to be a revolution which would sweep away the detested regime of Nuri-el-Sa’id. Even my neighbour’s houseboy, whose brother was in an armoured regiment, had told me that there was to be a military coup that summer. Yet when I attended dinner parties or Embassy receptions, nobody wanted to know the truth, dismissing my warnings as ‘bazaar rumours’. The fact was that I knew what was going one because I mixed with students, who, in Arab countries are always among the chief instigators of such uprisings, along with their relatives in the military, whereas the business community, like the diplomatic set, were cocooned in their own cosy world, cut off from the people.

            In July 1958, only three weeks after I had quitted Baghdad for Canberra, a military coup took place. The entire royal family and their courtiers were machine gunned, the bodies hastily wrapped in rugs and interred in the grounds of the palace. The Prime Minister and all his cabinet except one [1] were brutally murdered and dismembered, their bodies being dragged through the streets behind cars until they disintegrated, along with those of many other politicians opposed to the Ba’ath party, which had planned the coup. The British Embassy, where I had attended decorous garden parties and sipped luke-warm sherry, was burnt to the ground and three of the staff murdered. The Ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, along with Lady Wrights and other members of the corps diplomatique, narrowly escaped death by hiding in the cellars until they were rescued. Insularity and smugness often come at a price, as in Algeria four years earlier.

            Among the university students who rampaged murderously through the streets in the slaughter that followed was a certain budding lawyer named Saddam Hussein, who later became a hit man for the faction that eventually overthrew the new regime, replacing it with one even more extreme. Iraq had begun its slide down the long, blood-drenched slope that led through further revolution, the war with Iran and the Gulf War, to the starvation, destruction and misery that grip the country today. These events reinforced the lesson which I had learnt when shattered my childish world forever in September 1939. I realized afresh that no society – not even Australia – is either as safe or as stable as we delude ourselves into believing it is. To me at least, later events, such as those of September 11, 2001, came as no great surprise. We all wander, blindly, along the brink of a bottomless abyss.

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[1] Dr Fadhil Jamali, the Foreign Minister, with whom I was personally acquainted, survived his imprisonment and was subsequently released into exile.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM