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It was, as houses on the outskirts of Harlow New Town go, a fairly normal one.
It was semi-detached, and vaguely modern in style; or what would have been considered modern sometime in the mid-1960s, when it was built. It had large double-glazed picture windows with brown frames, and a bit of dark vertical wood-cladding in some parts and off-white render in others, and it sat in a row of houses that were identical—or that would have been identical at one time, before the replacement-window and flat-roof-extension salesmen came around. Also the stone-cladding salesmen, for one of the houses nearby had pinkish and yellowish crazy-paving up its walls, for reasons best known to its owner, and also to the owners of other similar houses I had passed on the way. It was in a cul-de-sac, the house, a cul-de-sac with only half a name. I say half a name, but it was a whole name—‘Winchester’ or ‘Gatefield’ or something—but it was a name without a description—it wasn’t Winchester Road or Gatefield Close or whatever—it was just what it was without the attachment. Things were like that, round that way, when they built Harlow New Town. It was a time when people knew better, you see.
The end of the Second World War—the cities bombed to smithereens, the population subsisting on powdered egg and dripping, the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever known vanishing—poof!—just like that, gone in a puff of smoke, like a magician’s party-trick. It was plain that the old ways of doing things were worn out, and that they no longer applied in the modern age.
Road-names were part of it. For centuries, as long as roads had been around, they’d always been called Something Road, and Streets called Something Street, and so on and so forth; but no one, apparently, had ever thought to ask why. This, it was felt, would no longer do. There had been too much unnecessary adornment and frippery for far too long, the thinking went, and it was about time people started behaving rationally.
And so, in 1947, when the planners got down to work on Harlow New Town, roads called roads and streets called streets were to become things of the past. Henceforth, they would just have the functional part of the name, without the redundant descriptor (‘Yes, I can see that it’s a bloody road—you don’t have to tell me that!’).
And then there was the Town Centre itself, which was to be truly a Town Centre for the coming age. Because old-style town centres, in the pre-war world, had just happened—they’d grown up higgledy-piggledy over God knows how long, around lanes and alleyways, and were messy and crowded at the best of times; and when there were cars and delivery vans to add to the equation, they really just didn’t work any more.
It was now time to go back to the drawing-board and plan the whole thing properly, from scratch.
So Harlow New Town got an urban ring-road, for the traffic to go around, and it got the country’s first-ever pedestrian shopping precinct, all planned out by modern planners and designed by modern architects and built—well, probably still built by blokes in flat caps and donkey-jackets with packets of Woodbines in their pockets, but at least they did it using the latest reinforced concrete this time, and put raised walkways all over the place and flat roofs throughout. Which leaked, the roofs—but this was considered a small price to pay for what was manifestly a work of progress. In the words of the great American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.’ Or, as he put it, rather more bluntly, to clients who had the temerity to complain about their leaks, ‘That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.’
In 1951 Harlow got the country’s first-ever residential tower-block, The Lawn, as a taster of what was to come in the planned communities of the future. And as if all of that weren’t enough, to top it off they had sculptures in the parks and squares, so that Art would be for the many, not the few. Not just any sculptures, either—not long-dead generals in classic poses or things like that—but actual Henry Moores. Henry Moores are sort of roundy-shaped things, often with holes in them, and they were considered just the thing at that time—just the business for edifying the population. And the population, no doubt, after being thoroughly edified by the Henry Moores, would all go back up the stairwells of their modern high-rise flats stroking their chins thoughtfully, in order then to listen to a bit of atonal music on their Bakelite wirelesses while getting on with their basket-weaving and smoking their pipes.
It was to be a brave new world of communal solidarity and free dentures and spectacles on the National Health, a world that would see the gradual withering-away of class distinctions, private property, private schools, dirty drains and outdated traditions.
People believed in all that, then. There are still people who believe in it now.
It all depends, I think, on your view of the malleability and perfectibility of human nature: on the one hand, the degree to which we are as we are because, until now, we’d not had enough Progress and hadn’t learnt any better; and on the other hand the degree to which we are as we are because that’s just the way we are. Back then the balance of opinion among the people who knew best was definitely coming down on the malleability and perfectibility side.
Not just in Harlow, either, but all over the place.
In 1948—a year after Harlow got going—a professor by the name of B. F. Skinner, the most influential psychologist of his generation, published a book called Walden Two, a utopian volume which described the wonderful life lived by the inhabitants of the ultimate ‘planned community’, a perfect town of a thousand happy, productive and creative people governed by a handful of properly qualified managers and planners, acting on the impartial advice of a small number of scientists. It was a place in which people no longer ate meals at home with their families but dined, instead, in communal canteens, not least because the ratio of volume to surface area of a large cooking-pot is more energy-efficient than that of a smaller one. Clothes no longer denoted status, since status, like poverty and violence, no longer existed—although the people did dress attractively in items carefully and strategically chosen to be beyond the fast-changing vagaries of fashion, which is a bad thing because it ‘makes perfectly good clothes worthless’ long before they are worn out. And women in this ideal community most certainly did not fill up their wardrobes with party-dresses, since these things were quite clearly impractical. The world, Skinner suggested, could be this way, and people could be this way, with just a little effort from all of us and just a little expert guidance from the likes of him. We could all be this way.
To return to the house, though. I’d had a bit of trouble finding it.
This was because Winchester, or Gatefield, or whatever it was called, wasn’t an old-style linear road such as you’d find in an old-style town. It was more of an area, a zone, and it contained a tree-shaped collection of cul-de-sacs, in which all the branches had the same name. So you’d be in it, looking for the house-number, and there’d be other roads branching off to the right and the left, and they’d all have road-signs, and those road-signs would all say exactly the same thing. They were all the same place.
This was modern; confusing, but modern nevertheless.
I found it in the end. In the end, we all found it. There were, I’d say, about twenty of us who turned up there, all crammed into the living-room, sitting four or five to the three-seater sofa, plus one perched on either arm, and three to each armchair, and attempting to drink our tea and eat our Rich Tea biscuits and make conversation with our elbows comprehensively pinned into our sides in the crush, like the arms of Irish dancers.
It was to be a talk arranged by the local organiser of a charity that sent young men and women to far-flung places around the world, to do community work with the local people, and also to have adventures. The leaflet had said that they would be having a famous explorer there to give the talk, although I had not heard of the man before, and neither had the people on either side of me. But we were all up for a bit of adventure in exotic lands, though.
And in he came, tall and upright and dressed in his thick tweed suit and his stout brown shoes, and when he spoke, with his pre-war Etonian drawl, it silenced the room.
‘In the past fifty years,’ he said, ‘we have wiped out the inheritance of the previous 500.’
This was an odd way to start, but then again he had spent the day in Harlow New Town, so perhaps it was to be expected.
‘When I was about your age,’ he said, looking at us all sitting there before him, looking at the shelves of china and crystal knick-knacks by the faux-mahogany television cabinet, looking at the red plastic Trimphone on the round-edged laminated-teak sideboard, ‘when I was about your age, what I wanted, above everything else, was to be an explorer.’
The Emperor’s Gift (#ulink_30fd78c5-a07c-5cd0-84fa-e9e7f3fce370)
The top-hatted doorman stood to one side, allowing the young man in the tweed suit to pass through the double revolving doors of the new hotel into the hush of the marble hall, leaving behind all of the sounds of Park Lane, the motor-cars, the taxis, the electric trams, the midday crowds on the pavements.
At the far side of the hall was a great burr-mahogany desk, bound at the corners with beaten copper bands fastened with brass studs, and topped with polished slate, and behind it sat a tall bald man in a tailcoat and gold-braided waistcoat, dipping his pen-nib into a square cut-crystal inkwell as he wrote on the heavy cream-coloured pages of a green leather-covered ledger.
The young man glanced briefly back towards where he had come, and saw the taxi passing back out into the traffic. The square-faced clock between the doors said twenty to three. He was twenty minutes early; but then, everything was riding on this meeting. He crossed the hall, hearing the sound of his own footsteps on the polished floor.
The man at the desk looked up.
‘Mr Thesiger?’ he said. ‘You are expected. One moment.’
He picked up a small bell and shook it.
Instantly, a second man appeared by his side, as if from nowhere.
‘If you would be so kind as to follow me, sir,’ said the man.
He led the young man through the hotel, past the open doors through which could be seen the vast pillarless ballroom, and to a secluded table in the restaurant beyond, where two places had been laid and where two waiters stood, each with a starched napkin over his forearm.
They brought the young man tea, and a silver tiered stand of cucumber sandwiches and small pastries.
He took some tea, but did not touch the food. He took the fob-watch from his waistcoat pocket, and turned it over in his fingers, and then put it back again. The walls and coffered ceilings were white and gold, as were the fish-scale-patterned Egyptian pillars. The pale carpet was intricately woven in a chinoiserie style.
He consulted his watch again. Still almost twenty minutes left to wait.
He had, by now, made the decision to go.
He would, he had decided, cross the desert to Aussa, and he would enter the Sultan’s kingdom and pass through, and he would follow the river along all the length of its unmarked, unknown course until he came to the end and solved the mystery. On this he was determined.
He had made arrangements and plans, and had obtained the blessing and sponsorship of the Royal Geographical Society, and gained further funds for food and equipment, medicines and wages for his party from Magdalen College and from the Linnean Society.
But at this time the Sultanate of Aussa lay, nominally, within the borders of Abyssinia, and obtaining the permission of the Abyssinian Government was proving considerably more difficult than he had bargained for.
His initial requests had been met with a flat refusal; and although he was not without connections there, although his late father had been British Minister at the court of the former Emperor Menelik, although he himself had received a personal invitation to attend the coronation of Haile Selassie, these things seemed to have got him nowhere.
And then came the message from the Embassy.
The waiter came, to see if fresh tea was required. It was not.
The young man felt his watch-chain again, and half-pulled his watch from its pocket, but then pushed it back, and instead studied the scalloped pattern on the back of his teaspoon.
Time. How we measure it out. How it feels, the passing of it. How what was is transformed utterly into what is, and which even in the moment of perceiving has vanished into what is to come, and so on for ever and always. How the wood that made the table at which he sat had grown, for however many years, in some far-flung forest, and the ragged trailing creepers overhanging, and the piercing call of brightly plumed birds. This same thing.
His father. The presence of him, the fact of him, as solid and real as anything in this life, and now gone, long, long gone: dead and buried these what—thirteen years? One wonders how this can be so.
He became aware of low voices across the room, and of a cluster of men, and one stepped out from among them and gestured to the others to stay, and turned to look over to where Thesiger sat. He was a young man—little more than a boy, in fact—maybe sixteen or seventeen at a guess—and slight, light-boned, narrow-shouldered and black as your hat. He had prominent ears, big, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wore a formal black suit, tightly buttoned-up, with a high white collar, and highly-polished black shoes on his feet; and he carried a battered leather satchel, brass-buckled like a doctor’s bag.
Thesiger shot to his feet, recognising the boy at once.
The boy smiled, revealing white teeth, and crossed to where he stood.
‘Do sit down,’ he said, in perfect, educated English, ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’
‘You are more than welcome, sir,’ said Thesiger.
A waiter appeared and pulled out a chair so that His Highness Asfa Wossen Tafari, Crown Prince of Abyssinia, eldest son of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings and Elect of God, and direct lineal descendant, it was said, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, could sit down.
‘Jolly good sandwiches,’ said the boy, taking a bite, ‘Not so sure about the tea, though. A bit cool for my liking.’
He snapped his fingers and fresh tea was brought.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘down to business. The place you desire to go to: they are very bad people there, you know. Absolute savages. And you are determined to go among them?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They will kill you, of course.’
‘I’m prepared to take my chances.’
‘I am sure that you are. Everything I have heard about you convinces me that this is, indeed, the case. But it is not as simple as that. Not by a long way, because if they kill you, it puts my father in a very difficult position.’
‘How so, sir?’
‘Aussa is part of Abyssinia. This is agreed. It is not in dispute. And in all of Abyssinia my father’s word is law. But the Sultan does not always see things in this way. And there have been … incidents in the past. Very unfortunate ones. We tend to keep our officials away from Aussa, to avoid too many of these … misunderstandings. Now, if you travel there, with my father’s authority and under his protection, and if anything were to happen to you, then he would be obliged to take the matter up with the Sultan, and it would all be rather awkward.’
‘I understand that, sir—which is why I am prepared to go there at my own risk, and without involving your father in any way, other than asking for his permission to proceed.’
‘Hmm …’ he said. ‘Just what we expected you to say. So you are absolutely determined to do this thing?’
‘I am, sir.’
‘And nothing we could say would make you think otherwise?’
‘No. Nothing.’
The young prince looked serious for a while, and then, quite suddenly, he smiled.
‘Well, in that case, my father has, after careful consideration, authorised me to offer you two things.’
He took a sip of his tea, savouring the flavour of it before continuing.
‘The first,’ he said, ‘is his permission.’
Thesiger moved as if to speak, but the prince raised a hand to silence him. ‘And the second,’ he continued, ‘is this.’
He pulled out his satchel from beneath the table and unfastened the buckles. From inside a faint, slightly sour odour arose, as of stale sweat.
Reaching in, the prince pulled out a bundle of yellowed cloth, which looked very much like someone’s used shirt, rolled up and knotted around something weighty; he passed it across the table.
‘You may open it.’
It was, indeed, an old shirt. But when Thesiger untied the knotted sleeves and unwrapped the bundle, he saw inside a heavy, ancient-looking gold chain upon which were strung rows of thick gold rings.
‘For your expenses,’ said the prince.
Don’t Tell Others (#ulink_ae2f068f-cddc-52fd-8c4e-14c72095504e)
Sometimes there can be whole days, weeks, months and years that pass you by and it seems just like the blink of an eye.
Then there are other times where the actions of an instant seem to last for ever.
People who have been in car crashes or other near-fatal disasters often talk about time ‘slowing down’. It is said that they are able to recall all sorts of peripheral detail with astonishing accuracy, as if they had the time, in the half-second of their almost-death, to roam the scene with the camera of their mind’s eye, and to record for posterity not just the look of drunken horror on the other driver’s face but the missing second button on his shirt-front; the colour and style of the lead on the dog being walked by the man in the flat cap on the pavement; the words and the patterns on the half-torn circus poster on the wall behind him.
Scientists call this time dilation, and it signifies the feeling of the opening-out of a moment far beyond its normal or expected limits.
There is a reason that it feels like this.
At moments of intense significance and at moments of great physical risk, the brain pulls in all of its resources and processing-power, and crams more observations and more reactions into a fraction of a second than it would normally make use of in a duration many, many times longer. It does this the better to react quickly and effectively, and so to cope with whatever challenges or opportunities it faces.
The result of all of this is that we experience moments that, for good or ill, are more intensely lived, and in which time appears to slow down, or even, on occasion, to stop.
And just as this time dilation exists, so also, I believe, there exists its opposite, which you might, I suppose, call time diminution, if you were to use the same rules of construction. Time diminution, or what you will, is an experience in which large tracts and expanses of time just pass you by, just vanish away unmarked and unnoticed, except when you look back later and think, was that it?, or, where did it all go?
From the end of the talk in the house in the cul-de-sac in Harlow New Town to my next contact with the man, and the visit to his flat in Tite Street, was two years, more or less.
They were two years in which, in one sense, much happened, but in which, in another, the main thing that happened was the passing away of time.
When the meeting had ended, the people there gathered up their coats, and those who drove got out their car-keys, while for those who did not, minicabs and the cars of parents arrived outside. But when he had finished his talk, and when the evening had begun to break up, I went up to him and asked him more questions about his life and times, and we carried on talking even as others were leaving around us, until, at last, there were no other guests left, and the owner of the house was standing there, as if to say, well, haven’t you got a home to go to? The man took a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote his address on it and handed it to me.
‘If you go on this trip,’ he said, ‘do write and let me know how you get on.’
And then it was outside into the night air.
I applied, but did not get a place.
I also applied for academic scholarships overseas, but did not get them, either.
In the meantime, there was banking to be done, and banking examinations, which I was required to study for.
Months passed in which I undertook two correspondence courses with something called the Rapid Results College. One was in Law Relating to Banking and the other in Economics. In Economics I learnt—the only thing I remember from it now—that if a bank lends money that doesn’t exist, and which hasn’t been minted or printed, or made or planned, it can actually cause that money to come into being, and so increase the money supply.
This is something of a paradox, on a number of levels, in the way that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is in physics. One of the main levels upon which it is a paradox is that it is, according to the experts, clearly and demonstrably true; and yet, at the exact same time, it has the ability to seem to me to be the most complete and utter nonsense.
At some point during that time I reapplied for the overseas scheme and this time was offered a place. It was to be a trip to America, involving trail-building in the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, and also drilling wells for water on a Sioux Indian reservation on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota.
I still had the scrap of paper Wilfred Thesiger had given me.
I wrote and told him about it.
About a week later a cream-coloured envelope arrived on my doormat.
Inside was a cheque for £300, drawn on a London private bank; and with the cheque was a three-word letter, written in blue-black fountain-pen on embossed headed notepaper.
