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He was waiting at the top for me.
I tried not to look out of breath.
‘Mr Cairns?’
He gave me a crushing handshake.
‘So pleased to see you. Do come in.’
The flat was crammed with books. Books filled the shelves, were stacked on chairs and tables, stood in piles on the floor. And on the wall hung a painting of himself—himself as a much younger man. And although much had changed in the intervening sixty years, the deterioration that comes to us all, in time, it was still the same man looking out—still the same strong jaw, the same distinctive, misshapen nose, broken twice in the days when he boxed for Oxford, and the eyes—the same, same eyes.
He turned.
‘Did you go to Eton?’
‘No, sir, I didn’t.’
I didn’t, as it happens. And I didn’t think he would have been too familiar with the various comprehensive establishments of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, where I did go to school, so I didn’t elucidate further.
‘Do take a seat. You can move those books onto the table there.’
I did.
‘Now, can I get you a drink? A glass of sherry, perhaps?’
‘Yes, sir, a sherry would be perfect.’
He left the room, and came back into it holding a heavy brown bottle and a glass—a single, large glass—and he placed them on the small table between us, and sat down in his chair. He still had on his jacket, brown herringbone tweed with worn leather buttons, although it was warm indoors; he reached into his breastpocket and pulled out a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, with which he wiped the dust from the sherry bottle before uncorking it. Then with a steady hand—surprisingly steady, given his age—he poured out the sherry, and kept on pouring, until the glass was more or less full to the brim. It was, as I say, a large glass, and it held about half a pint, or thereabouts, and he slid it across the table towards me.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’
He nodded.
‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you,’ he said. ‘You see, I can’t bear the stuff.’
Nor could he ever.
Once, out hunting in the English countryside as a young man, he was handed a flask, from which he had his first taste of beer.
‘It was revolting,’ he said, ‘I spat it into a hedge.’
And that, pretty much, was that, as far as his relationship with drink went.
I remember little of the detail now of what followed, except for disjointed snatches of conversation and images of long ago and far away. A young man’s journey into a forbidden kingdom, on a quest to find the unknown destination of a distant river. A midnight meeting in a forest clearing with a savage potentate and his armed warriors, and the glint of curved daggers in the moon’s pale light. The burning heat of desert sands. Wave upon wave of armed and bloodied hosts screaming out their victorious deeds before an emperor’s throne. A great feast celebrating the killing of four unknown men—shot in the back and from a distance, for all anyone knew—and the young killer all shy and manful, he said, as praise was heaped upon him, like an athlete at Oxford being awarded his Blue for cricket.
Oh, and Salman Rushdie, and what an infernal bloody nuisance the man was, and the sooner the Iranians finished him off, the better it would be for all concerned.
I came out onto the street an hour later, leaving behind an empty glass, and with an invitation to call again. Whatever I had said, it must, I think, have found favour. This time the invitation was not to Tite Street but to his other home, where he spent the majority of his year. This home, the other home, was a mud hut, and it was in Africa.
From Tite Street I followed the crowds on the King’s Road, past the plate-glass shop-fronts, past the restaurants, past the antique dealers, the interior designers, the clothes designers, the cavalry barracks and the crocodiles of uniformed schoolchildren in their corduroy knickerbockers, and thence to Sloane Square underground station, where, down on the platform, a river flows above your head. I say a river, but it’s more of a stream, a brook or burn that flows in from the west, and which is called the Westbourne. You can’t actually see the water in it, or touch it, but you can hear it as it crosses above you, suspended, as it is, from the girders in a big old riveted cast-iron pipe, on its way out under the concrete and tarmac of the streets, on beneath the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital and then out from a Victorian outlet-pipe known as the Ranelagh Sewer into the Thames, the great brown river whose ancient name, like that of the Tame, the Teme and the Tamar, meaning, perhaps, ‘the dark one’, goes back far beyond recorded history.
But as for the Westbourne, there was a time, once, when it was a real stream, a stream with grassy banks and trees leaning over it, and when it crossed open land—fields and forests—as it flowed from its springs in the Bagshot sand in Hampstead down to the big river. The Saxons called it the Cy Bourne, or King’s Burn: over the years that became ‘Kilburn’; in other times it became the Serpentine, which it still is, briefly, in the short space where it comes to the surface as an ornamental lake in Regent’s Park. Mostly, though, it has been lost and forgotten, along with all the other lost and forgotten rivers with which London once teemed—the Tyburn, the Fleet, the Walbrook, the Effra, the Wandle, the Peck, the Ravensbourne … It lives on today only in the street-names and place-names of the areas through which it once passed.
Does drinking too much sherry when you’re unaccustomed to it make you think about things like this? ‘Maudlin’ is the word that comes to mind here, as I write these words: yes, maudlin—that’s it. I can’t say that I’m a great expert in these matters, but I thought, the world moves on and by and large we’re all the better for it. And yet …
I didn’t know what, precisely, but ‘and yet something’ was definitely a part of it, if you get my drift. There was a definite ‘and yet’ in there—still is, in fact.
Where I come from we have cars and things, and shopping, and we have computers and televisions and bars of chocolate—we have all sorts. No one starves here—which is good. And that was not always the case.
But sometimes you catch a glimpse of what things were once like, and you have intimations of what went before, and of the other lives and times of the ground beneath your feet. And it makes you think, and it makes you wonder what the cost has been, what the price paid, in getting to where we now are.
The economist Milton Friedman once said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. With civilisation, with the way we live now, with all of the things we have, what we have is not so much a lunch—free or otherwise—as a massive multi-course banquet of extraordinary proportions, a spread wholly unimaginable to previous generations.
Imagine what your great-grandfather would have thought, to be here now; imagine what he might have said, to see what you have and where you live, and what you do. Or imagine your great-great-grandfather, more to the point, or all the generations before, all the way back to the woad-painted wattle-and-daub-hut-dwellers we came from. Imagine if they could be lifted out of their time, just for the day, and set down in the middle of your life now.
There is a story that back in the 1940s the Soviet Union bought the film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to use as propaganda, to show how bad things were in the ‘free world’. Steinbeck’s story is, as stories go, a pretty miserable one, with the Joad family, including the daughter burdened with the ridiculous name of Rose of Sharon, like many others in that place at that time, losing everything when the rains fail and the rivers run dry and their lands turn to dust, and being forced to load up onto their battered old car what few worldly possessions they have and set off to try—spectacularly unsuccessfully—to find a better life elsewhere. Everywhere they turn they are shunned and insulted, and doors are slammed in their faces. And people die. It doesn’t get much worse than that, you might think. But when Soviet audiences saw the film, they didn’t see the same things that you or I might see, and they came out shaking their heads in wonder. They came out shaking their heads in wonder not so much at how bad things were in the USA, but at the fact that over there even the poor, even the lowest of the low, even peasants driven from their farms, that these people had their own motor-cars. Their own. The film was subsequently banned.
That’s what civilisation is like, these days. Even the poor people have motor-cars, now, and computer-game consoles, and new clothes, and more food than they need. Even the poor people are getting fat. A bit of starvation would probably do some of us quite a lot of good, you might think—and not just the poor, either, to look at our expanding waistlines.
But as you surfeit on the sumptuousness of it all, this life that civilisation has served up, and the feast that’s spread out for you, you might find your mind wandering, from time to time, to the issue of the bill, and to what extent you, personally, will be expected to pay.
You might begin to wonder what the damage is here, exactly. Or is there none? Do we genuinely have, this time, if not a completely free lunch, then at least a damn cheap and filling and tasty one? And Wilfred Thesiger, explorer, nomad, ex-Eton and Oxford and His Majesty’s Colonial Service, distinguished SAS officer and sometime military adviser to Haile Selassie, wanderer through the lost worlds of vanished tribes, current resident of Tite Street, Chelsea, and also of a mud hut in the middle of nowhere, was probably as good a person to ask as any.
I booked my ticket the next day.
Cheques and Balances (#ulink_1ab1fb6e-4fdd-5efd-9656-e29ece909091)
Go back a couple of years, and you will find me behind the counter in a provincial high-street bank, lending money to people. Go back further still and you’ll find me upstairs in that same bank, in what was known as the ‘machine room’, taking the elastic bands off bundles of cheques and then counting those cheques, sorting them into account-number order and walking up and down the great long tables that dominated the room and stacking the cheques onto the appropriate numbered sections, for some eight hours a day.
There were machines there, also: quite big ones, I seem to think, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was that they did. Perhaps I never knew.
You get faster at it, after a while, machine-room work. And you could go up to people who’d been there a long time, give them a block of cheques and say, ‘count those’, and they’d tap the block against the table once or twice to square the edges off, set it down, flex their fingers and then there’d be a blur of fingers and a whirring of paper, and half a second later, or whatever it was, it would be ‘a hundred and twenty-seven’. I am convinced that some of the tapping and the finger-flexing wasn’t strictly necessary, but was a vanity, an affectation, to impress, a little stylistic flourish to say, ‘Behold! Here is a master of the art.’
These skills, such as they were, and to the extent that I mastered them, did not transfer well to lending money to people. Lending money to people was something that I did worse than I did counting cheques.
People would come in with the most outrageous stories of why they needed money and, most times, so long as they managed to keep a straight look on their face and a credible tone to their voice, I would believe them.
‘I need,’ said one woman, ‘a completely new wardrobe.’
‘But you have no money. You have, in fact, less than no money. And this has been going on for … well, it looks like several years now, as far as I can see from your file. We need to talk about how you intend to pay some of it back, rather than how much more of it you need to borrow.’
‘Well, that’s why I need this money, you see. You see, what it is, is that I’ve just been offered a job. And it’s a good job, a proper job in an office—but the thing is, I don’t actually have any office clothes to wear, other than what I’ve got on, which is what I wore for the interview. So I need the clothes for the job, to earn the money to pay back what I owe.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, that sort of makes sense, I think. How much is it that you say you need, for these clothes …? I’m sorry, how much? Really? Well, that does seem a bit steep … No, I do know how important it is to create the right impression. And as you say, it will give you the ability to pay back what you owe. I’ll just get the paperwork sorted out. You’ll need to sign here … and here, too.’
She was glad that I understood these things, she said, as she signed. Not like her mother, who’d advised her to make do with what she had. Not, of course, that she actually had anything to make do with, as she’d already explained.
I never saw her again, or the money, either.
And all the while and all the day in my peripheral vision and hearing—and sometimes more directly—I could see, and hear, and feel the under-manager, who ran the day-to-day business of the bank, and the rising sense of stress and panic with which he started and finished every day of his working life. That deadlines should be met, that queues should not be too long, that people should not take much time over their tea-breaks, that people should arrive in the mornings precisely when they were meant to arrive (and on the dot of nine, the signing-in book was whisked away to the manager’s office, whence anyone whom arrived after should go to explain themselves), that procedures should be followed, that shoes should be shined and trousers pressed, that the books should balance. All these things concerned him greatly, and visibly and audibly. As each day wore on, the note of tension in his voice would grow more strangulated, the temper sharper and more hair-triggered, and for every fault or omission he spotted and corrected, others would arise, hydra-like, to take their place. Too many humans in the machine room of his bank; too much slackness, too much imperfection. Fraud and deception.
You would get the ones who planned it all in advance. People who’d open an account—sometimes in their own name, or sometimes, on some pretext, with a friend or colleague, with whom they’d sign the mandatory declaration of ‘joint and several liability’ making them both personally liable for all debts on the account, whoever caused them.
They’d keep the account ticking over, quietly and in credit, for a year or more, putting in requests for a new cheque-book every now and then, until they were good and ready, when, all of a sudden, there’d be twenty cheques issued in a single day, and more the next, and the next, and they’d be drawn out to off-licences and clothes shops and casinos, and the account would go tens, hundreds and thousands of pounds overdrawn in the space of a single week. You’d phone the account holder, send letters, but there would be no reply. And so you’d bounce the cheques, and brace yourself for the wave of angry phone calls from outraged creditors and even-more-outraged co-account holders.
There was a correct response to these calls, which was, ‘I’m very sorry sir/madam, but I am not at liberty to discuss this person’s account. Or their whereabouts, I’m afraid’, to which I’d add sometimes that the address I really, really wasn’t allowed to tell them was number 11, Ferndene; or that the phone number that I was not, unfortunately, at liberty to divulge, might have been 673562, if I’d been allowed to say so, but since I wasn’t, they’d have to look elsewhere to find it out. That tended to stir things up a bit, I found. Particularly if the voice at the end of the line sounded like someone who intended to take the matter somewhat further to recover their money.
‘Golf,’ said the under-manager.
‘I’m sorry?’
I think I must have drifted off somewhere, off into my thoughts. I had a tendency to do that. I have a tendency to do it still. I was, I think, sitting at the foreign exchange till at the time. It was a quiet afternoon, on a hot summer’s day, and there were no customers in that section, had been none for a while.
‘Golf,’ he said. ‘Do you play it?’
‘Er … no. Not exactly. It’s not something I’ve got round to doing yet.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind. There are plenty of people who’ve managed to go quite a long way in banking without ever playing golf. Now, your suit …’
‘My suit?’
‘Ye-es. Your suit. What’s it made of?’
‘I’ll have to have a look.’
The label said 75 per cent cotton, 25 per cent linen. I’d bought it for the weather, for the summer.
‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Disco suit. Don’t wear it again.’
In the backrooms there were fans on the desks, beige oscillating fans that swayed from side to side and caught the stray unweighted papers of the unsuspecting, lifting them up and sending them seesawing gently down to the worn brown carpet.
In the restroom where we took our morning and afternoon tea-breaks there were no fans, but there we were allowed to remove our jackets and to roll up our sleeves.
Brian, a middle-aged clerk with a close-cropped sandy beard, never rolled up his sleeves, no matter how hot or still the air in the restroom. He was a middle-ranking clerk, quite old for his position, and he had been at the same level for many years now, far longer than most. I was never quite sure whether it was for golf reasons or for the quality or fabric of his suitage or for some other cause that he had never progressed, but he had not done so, nor did it seem to bother him, particularly.
One day we were sitting together in the restroom sipping vending-machine coffee from plastic cups when I asked him about his sleeves and why he never rolled them up.
‘Do you really want to know?’ he said.
I said that I did; and with this he put down his cup and beckoned me to follow him outside, into the corridor. There, after checking in both directions, he undid both cuff-buttons; then, looking me in the eye, he pulled back first one sleeve and then the other.
‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
His arms, both of them, right down to the wrist, were covered, with barely a patch of flesh to spare, in blue-green tattoos. Mostly they were of skulls and motorcycles, and skulls in Second World War-German-Army-style motorcycle helmets, and motorcyclists with fleshless skulls for heads. There were also the logos of the old British motorcycle manufacturers surmounted by skulls, or just in the general vicinity of skulls. And, on one arm, a naked lady wreathed in a large snake.
‘Gosh!’ I said, or words to that effect.
‘I’m a Hell’s Angel,’ he said.
And thereafter he would tell me, when we were alone together, about his weekends with the Chapter, and about motorcycles and how to customise them to make them just so, and why, when a big petrol tank meant that you could ride for longer and make fewer stops, it was a good thing to replace it with a smaller one, from the point of view of just looking hardcore.
All of which made sense to me then and seemed only right and natural.
I was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts. I saw the world of work, then, as what people had to go through, to pay for what they wanted to do in their ‘real’ time, the time that mattered. And all the business reports on the television talking about the FT-100 Share Index and whatnot, and the copies of the Financial Times in the newsagents, and in the bookshops the shelves upon shelves of books with titles like Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, The Ten Habits of Successful Business Leaders and The Corporate Warrior: Your Road Map to Success, I thought, then, that they were what people had to read because of their jobs, and what they had to put themselves through to earn their living. But that beyond these, I thought there were other things that meant more to them: I don’t know—golf, say, even, or motorcycles, or tennis or something. Now, I don’t know so much. Now, I’m not so sure. There are people, I have seen, who every day when lunchtime comes, stay at their desks. There are people who, every day when home-time comes, don’t go home, but instead stay on at work for hours. There are people who, though they have holiday allocation, don’t take it all, or even much more than a fraction of it; and who, when they do leave the office, take with them the concerns of their company, take them on as their own and carry their work around in their heads with them, and when they talk, they talk about work, or else they constantly check mobile electronic devices for messages to do with work. There are people who earn the most extraordinary sums of money working in offices, but who do not know what their own children like to eat. There are television programmes about work, too, game-shows in which the contestants vie to be the best shopkeeper or salesman or distributor or wholesaler, and for whom the prize, should they win, is a job in an office in a provincial retail park.
I shared a taxi, years later, with a businesswoman I had been working with, a senior executive with a multinational company who had lived, for a year or two at a time, in more countries than she could remember, who regularly attended breakfast meetings before work and evening functions with business colleagues and contacts after work, and who said goodnight to her children, most nights, by telephone as the nanny tucked them in; and as we drove, by way of conversation, I asked about her husband and what he did.
‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ she said.
And indeed he seemed to be a successful one, for between them they had an expensive house in a sought-after part of London and a second home elsewhere, and several expensive cars. They both had their clothes made for them by tailors, and had all of the things and did all of the things that successful people have and do.
‘And what are his hobbies?’ I asked.
It took her a moment or two to make sense of what I had said. It seemed to be not the sort of question that she was used to being asked by the kinds of people she habitually mixed with.
‘Business is his hobby,’ she replied, at length.
‘But outside business? I mean, does he have a sport he likes, or an interest or something?’
She thought again.
‘I asked him once. I said, what would you do if you couldn’t work? If you’d earned so much money you didn’t need to. And he said, “I’d start a new company”.’
For some people, work is the thing, the main thing in life. Work is what they choose to do and where they want to be. Work is life.
But then I did not believe this to be so.
Sultan of Aussa (#ulink_f133628c-9fe5-59b7-ba33-cc72ad7dc851)
To the east of Abyssinia there lies a desolate volcanic plain, strewn with ash and tumbled black rocks, almost entirely empty of life and swept constantly by a burning salt wind. What vegetation there is grows close to the banks of the slow-flowing, mud-red Awash River, which winds its way down from the mountains, down through deep gorges and into the barren desert, where live the people known as the Danakil, who were, at one time, a murderous tribe split into two great bands, the Adoimara, or White Men, and the Asaimara, or Red Men. Among these Danakil, both Adoimara and Asaimara, a man’s status was judged, entirely, by the number of men, women and children he had killed. This he might do by any means he pleased, no matter how treacherous. When they were not killing outsiders, or engaging in feuds with surrounding tribes, the two bands of the Danakil expended their time and their energies on killing each other.
The river flows on and on through the Danakil lands for mile after mile until there rises, in the distance, a line of purple hills known as the Magenta Mountains. There is a steep and narrow pass in these mountains, and the river flows through it, pouring down into an extraordinary oasis, shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. Some thirty miles square, it is a place of thick forest, deep swamp and huge lakes.
This is the land of Aussa, and it was, in the 1930s, the home of a great Danakil army who owed their absolute loyalty to the Sultan of that place, whose palace lay deep within the forest.
The Sultan, in those days, was a small, intense-eyed man called Muhammad Yuya. His father, the Sultan before him, had on his deathbed called for two slaves to be brought before him, one male and one female; and he had had them both slaughtered there, in the hope of seeing, in their death-agonies, some clue or portent that might help him escape his predicament. He could not. But no doubt it passed the time.
The river flows around Aussa on three sides, looking for a way out into the desert land beyond, where at some further point, before reaching the coast at Djibouti, it disappears. No one outside Aussa ever knew where it went.
There had been attempts to discover the river’s destination, over the years; and over the years there had been a number of expeditions to Aussa, but none had ever returned alive.
An expedition, in 1875, led by the Swiss explorer and mercenary Werner Munzinger, accompanied by his wife and children, were all murdered before reaching the borders of Aussa. In 1881, two Italians, Giuseppe Giulietti and Ettore Biglieri, had mounted an expedition to cross the country to the north of Aussa to establish a new trade route. Their bodies were found lying in the desert, horribly mutilated. Three years later, fourteen armed Italian sailors had tried to cross the same land from the opposite direction. They, likewise, were all killed. And in the 1920s, a party led by two Greek animal-collectors was hacked to death, although a third Greek managed to escape, crawling away on his hands and knees in the brief space between being left for dead and the corpse-mutilators getting down to their work.
In 1933, at the age of twenty-three and not long down from Oxford, Wilfred Thesiger made a decision.
‘I will bloody well go and do it myself,’ he said.
Harlow New Town (#ulink_c88a2c3e-088f-5a2a-b093-fd8ce90afe23)
