What the Traveller Saw

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Now many of the young men of these Apennine families were away at the war, many of them with the Giulia division of the Alpini which was now on the Russian front. The only able-bodied men were deserters who had left their units after the armistice, like my friend with the mule at Fontanellato. Like me, they too were on the run, not only from the Germans but also the Fascists, who, after their initial reverse, were making an altogether too rapid recovery.

Up there in the mountains no one except prisoners of war and the deserters, who had to keep an ear open for what was going on, was really interested in the war. For them it was an inexplicable calamity that had deprived many of them of their sons. Few of them were even nominally Fascists, those few that were still practising were, unfortunately, hyperactive.

The villages were collections of grey stone farmhouses huddled together for mutual protection from the elements above a labyrinth of narrow passages which led to the stalle, the cowsheds, and barns. These houses were roofed with stone slabs split from the same limestone with which the houses were built.

Apart from the few principal routes, which wound their way up through the Apennines and across the main ridge at one or other of the few passes that could be crossed by motor vehicles, there were few proper roads. Communication between villages was by rough tracks which had probably existed since the beginning of recorded time. Those who used them computed distances by the number of hours it took to reach one’s destination, rather than the number of kilometres that had to be covered.

Whenever a road or a track crossed a ridge or reached some other high point there would invariably be a little wayside shrine, usually with the Virgin depicted on a small, Carrara marble slab, of a sort that often dated back to the mid-eighteenth century.

Up there in the mountains, no woman whatever her age thought anything of making a three-hour journey downhill on foot to deliver a consignment of cheese to a weekly market, often carrying it in a first-war Alpini rucksack, and then climbing, loaded with purchases, all the way up again. Pack mules were used to carry heavier loads. Hay and firewood were brought down from the upper meadows and the forests on wooden sledges drawn by cows or bullocks. The only wheeled vehicles were handcarts.

Families lived by growing crops, mostly grain, potatoes and other vegetables, and by milking their cows. They also gathered chestnuts – the flour was a staple food but more so on the warmer, south-facing flanks of the mountains – and also edible mushrooms, such as boletus edulis, otherwise porcini, a delicacy which commanded high prices and sometimes grew in very large quantities. There were no vines. Vines couldn’t exist on this side of the range much above 220 metres, and there were no olives. So olive oil had to be bought. When the snow came in November/December many of the higher farms were often cut off from the outside world for quite long periods, except for those with skis. In this pre-plastic age which endured up here until many years after the war, ploughs were of wood and iron, harrows were made from the trunks of trees, digging was done with a long-handled spade called a vanga, nothing like an English spade, which had a triangular blade and a metal projection at right angles to it so that the user could exert more pressure and dig deeper.

Clods were broken up with a two-pronged mattock, called a zappa. In a field of any size the work of zappatura was hard for a lone operator because up in the mountains the earth was mostly adhesive clay that used to stick on the prongs of the zappa. Crops were cut with scythes and sickles.

When working, most of the men wore battered felt hats and what had once been their best Sunday suits. Sometimes they were of corduroy which their wives had repaired so many times, using whatever materials came to hand, that they often resembled patchwork quilts. And under their shirts they wore thick vests, with the natural oil still in the wool, which the women had knitted using wool they had spun themselves.

It was commonplace to see women spinning in the fields while looking after the animals, carrying a wooden spindle tapered at either end and with a perforated stone at the middle of it, to the top of which the woollen yarn was attached, and with the rest of it rolled round a distaff, a piece of wood which they carried tucked under one arm. Until they became old, or widowed, or both, when they dressed in deepest black from head to toe, women and girls for everyday wore dark skirts about the length of a kilt and aprons to protect them when working, blouses, hand-knitted vests, except in hot weather, thick, hand-knitted socks to match, heavy, nailed mountain boots and coloured head scarves. In this society men didn’t go to church much. Religion was for women. Among their men it was reserved usually for feast days and for death.

For them, and for me, life in those days when not working outside revolved around the kitchen, the largest, most important room in the house. There was no equivalent to a British front parlour. The fireplace was a blackened cave in which heavy copper cooking pots hung suspended in the chimney by long chains. And there was a cast-iron wood-burning stove with a long silver stove pipe rising from it then executing a right-angled bend before disappearing into one of the walls.

At that time the staple food was homemade bread, baked in an outside oven, using flour which was kept in a piece of furniture known as a madia. This had a detachable board on top which was used to make pasta – a great standby was a thick vegetable soup made with beans and pasta – and there was polenta, made with chestnut flour or maize. There was cheese and very rough wine, and for breakfast bread and milk and acorn coffee. Sugar was a black-market commodity; worst of all was the shortage of salt.

After the evening meal they all enjoyed sitting round the fire telling and listening to stories. At that time there were still storytellers whose stories dated back to medieval times, when the Saracens infested the coasts of Italy, stories which had been passed down by word of mouth.

Parma in the winter of 1944, when I was recaptured, was a city of the dead, like the rest of Italy, gelid, without heat, or hope, the Allies bogged down hundreds of miles to the south. It was also a city of terror, under the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the last of the Fascists, all of whom I had seen fleetingly on the way to be imprisoned in the Cittadella, the huge, star-shaped fortress on what were then the outskirts of the city, and when the gates finally closed on me I knew that, for the foreseeable future at least, it was the end of my new-found friendship with Italy.

Across the Oxus KABUL-MOSCOW-VIENNA, 1956 (#ulink_4a621310-2e0b-5752-b124-a1bb49275b50)

THE CHEAPEST WAY to get back to Western Europe from Afghanistan in 1956, as I discovered after my unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Hindu Kush, was to fly Aeroflot. I therefore paid a visit to their Kabul offices, which at that time were located in a large, non-committal-looking private house fitted with several doors, none of which opened when I either rang bells or banged on them. After a long interval in which I could distinguish the voices of a man and a woman in what sounded like intimate conversation somewhere inside the building, one of the doors did open and I was led into the office of the manager, a Mr Scholkonogov, an assertive monoglot Russian in a bright blue suit, for whom one of his aides, a crop-haired gentleman, all smiles, interpreted.

I told Mr Scholkonogov that I wanted to fly to Venice.

‘Why?’ he asked.

It seemed a strange question for the manager of an airline to ask a potential passenger, but at this time I was unused to Russians.

‘Because my wife and children are in Venice,’ I said. It was no good complicating matters by telling him that they were, in fact, in a village between Trieste and Monfalcone.

‘Better you fly to Tirana,’ he said, with the air of someone who had already made up his mind that that was where I was going whether I wanted to or not.

‘But Tirana’s in Albania, it’s miles from Venice,’ I said. With a man like this unless I watched my step I would probably end up in Siberia. Happily this was not his intention. He was a nice man, trying to look after my interests. ‘Better you go to Tirana because Tirana is much cheaper fare; but if Tirana no good, go to Vienna. Vienna for you still very cheap.’

‘How cheap?’

‘Very cheap. You buy Afghanis [the Afghan currency] on the black market with English pounds at 150 Afghanis to the pound. Then you buy a ticket from me in roubles at a very good rate of exchange’ – I forget what it was – ‘and the entire journey Kabul – Vienna by Moscow will cost you …’ – at this point there was a halt in the conversation during which he got out an abacus and went to work on it, eventually coming up with a figure – ‘8650 Afghanis, £51. Good for 6000 kilometres. Why not go to England?’ – more work on the abacus – ‘That will cost you only 10,000 Afghanis, £8 more, and we will both come with you. We have always wished to see England.’

‘I can’t do that, I’ve got a wife and children waiting for me in Venice.’

‘Mr Scholkonogov asks me to tell you that wives and children are nothing but trouble,’ the interpreter said as I prepared to set off for the Bazaar right away, apprehensive that the black market in sterling might suddenly collapse. ‘He will telephone our Embassy and tell Mr Oleynik there that it is all right as far as we are concerned for a visa to be issued for you. You should have no difficulty, but go there at once before what Mr Scholkonogov says to Mr Oleynik is forgotten.’

The plane was an Ilyushin 12, a Russian version of a Dakota. The windows were fitted with lace curtains and the headrests with antimacassars, the only concessions to luxury in this otherwise austere machine. The effect was curious. All that was lacking was an aspidistra. It remained less than half full all the way to Moscow, in spite of people getting on and off, which would scarcely be the case today.

The stewardesses were monolithic. They gave us sweets with the air of schoolmistresses providing the most disagreeable of their pupils with some undreamed-of treat, but no sooner had we put them in our mouths and begun sucking them than we were told to put on our oxygen masks – there was no such thing as one of those mindless, preliminary demonstrations which all too often send the recipients of this vital information to sleep – so we had either to swallow them or spit them out.

Now we were off, on the crossing of the Hindu Kush. Sadly I looked down on snow-covered summits that I now knew, in my heart of hearts, I would never conquer. And then we had to put on our masks in earnest.

With the mountains behind us we were over the Oxus, seeing dense jungle, momentarily, and coming in to land at Termez, on its right bank, in Russian Uzbekistan, where we were out of sight of the river, which I longed to see, a magic one to all explorers.

From Termez we flew northwards to Tashkent, over the Zeravshan and Turkestan Ranges, and over Samarkand, all of which I identified using the Oxford University Economic Atlas of the USSR, which I had bought in the Bazaar at Kabul.

There, in a fearfully gloomy small hotel – who was I to complain where bed and board was part of the £51 ticket? – we dined interminably in the restaurant of the hotel. It took more than an hour for the first course to arrive from the time we sat down at our various tables. The other guests were mostly emancipated male Uzbeks – no Uzbek women were present – all of whom were dressed in Western clothes, although some of them still wore their characteristic, embroidered skull caps. They were more at ease in their suits than they were with the Western cutlery with which they had been provided. More happy, as I would have been, given gristly lumps of mutton to deal with, to have picked them up and tackled them by hand, instead they stuck their forks vertically into them with one hand, while they sawed away with their knives at an angle of forty-five degrees to the meat with the other, so that the effect of numbers of them doing this at once was like the string section of a large orchestra playing away out of tune, on miniature versions of the double bass or cello.

What was by now only relatively modern Tashkent had been built soon after the Trans-Caspian railway reached what was then the Tashkent Oasis in 1898. It was already in the process of being knocked down and replaced by even more gimcrack structures. Later it was to be flattened by an earthquake. Most of the old Uzbek houses in the parts I was able to visit had either been razed to the ground or were in the process of being demolished. Any Uzbeks who retained anything of their native garb, apart from the skull cap, were very old indeed. Walking about the city in this fashion, gazing more or less open-mouthed at everything, I was very soon taken into custody by two plain-clothed policemen, who demanded from me the piece of paper giving the name of my hotel and my room number and on receiving it speedily returned me to it.

Early the following morning we flew northwestwards, following the line of the Syr Darya river and the railway from Tashkent to Moscow, a line on which I had always longed to travel. To the east the milk-chocolate-coloured expanses of the Betpak-Dala Steppe, stamping ground of nomad hordes, stretched away in the direction of Lake Balkhash, four hundred miles or so to the east, while immediately below the river wriggled through what appeared to be desert like an endless, greyish green snake.

Then we landed at Dzhusaly, about a hundred miles east of the Aral Sea, on a military airfield out of sight of the river, out of sight of everything except an endless nothingness of steppe. A searing wind was blowing and the air was filled with the high-pitched screamings of Soviet jet fighters warming up for a practice sweep over those parts of Kazakhstan which today are some of the most secret and difficult-to-get-at areas of the USSR. Then we took off again, seeing the Aral Sea shimmering in the sun, on a short trip to Aralsk at its northern end, where we took on more fuel, after which we crossed the southern outliers of the Urals and were in Europe. At Uralsk we ran into a big electric storm and there the pilot altered course to fly north of what was the normal route, which would have taken us straight across the Volga to Penza, but still flying parallel to it. From now on, we flew very low over endless forest.

Twenty-five minutes after passing over Uralsk, on our new course, I looked down on what, if it was not the first missile site I had ever seen, was a very complex sewage farm, a series of dome-shaped concrete constructions, sprouting up in what looked like newly-made clearings in the forest, like freshly-emergent mushrooms, with what looked like railway lines running out from them.

It was only for an instant; then they were out of sight and the forest closed in again, with occasionally a ride or firebreak running through it to interrupt its endless monotony. Thirty minutes later we crossed the Volga and I asked the least taciturn of the two standing stones which acted as stewardesses to ask the pilot, who up to now had not exactly been a mine of information so far as his passengers were concerned, at what speed we were travelling, information which he rather surprisingly provided. It was now possible to work out, longitudinally, the approximate position of my missile site/sewage farm, whatever it was. The military attaché at Kabul should be proud of his pupil, I thought. After all, it was he who when I was about to depart had gruffly told me to ‘keep my eyes skinned’ in case I saw anything interesting, and had provided me with a telephone number in London to ring if I did.

At Moscow I was put up at the Embassy and was invited by the Ambassador (Sir William Hayter) to travel with him the following day to the monastery at Zagorsk to which he was taking Isaiah Berlin who was also staying on the premises. Foolishly, perhaps, I turned down this invitation. I wanted to see Moscow and the Muscovites. An Orthodox monastery, however splendid, I felt, could wait. In the event it awaited me for more than twenty years, until 1977.

The Embassy at this time had a particularly beleaguered air about it and the Ambassador said that until recently the only place where he could be reasonably sure of having a conversation without being overheard by the Russians was in the Embassy garden; but even this was now no good with the recent improvement in listening devices. Now the only really satisfactory thing to do was to wait until winter if one had something confidential to communicate when it could be done while skating with one’s confidant on some frozen lake – summer was no good, boats could too easily be bugged. What about bugged skates? I wondered.

At Sacher’s Hotel in Vienna, where I had booked a room while still in Kabul, in spite of my outlandish appearance I was given a splendid double room with a sunken bath, approached by steps, that looked as if it might have been used by Rudolph when it was too damp to make love at Mayerling, and from it I sent Wanda a telegram. ‘Hotel Wonderful, come at once,’ I said, not realizing that she had not received my first cable from Moscow telling her which wonderful hotel she was to come to. After telephoning the tourist office in Vienna (whose staff might have displayed a little more initiative than they did by telephoning round one or two of the more wonderful Viennese hotels on her behalf) to ask the whereabouts of the Hotel Wonderful, she gave up and waited for me to appear at Trieste.

At this time (the autumn of 1956) Vienna had only recently ceased to be an occupied city, the Treaty restoring Austrian independence having only been signed in May the previous year, and its walls were still covered with allied military graffiti. Otherwise there was little outward sign, except for a certain threadbareness, that it had been occupied for ten years.

The Habsburgs still dominated the city. What they had made and what they stood for was everywhere, above and below ground, embalmed and in the spirit. In the Imperial Vaults, the Kaisergruft, there were 138 of them sealed up in giant catafalques and sarcophagi, one of which weighed eight tons, row upon row of them, as if in some funereal bedding department; dead from suicide, murder, assassination, the firing squad and natural causes, presided over by Franz Josef II, the penultimate Habsburg, who died in bed. The hearts of forty-nine of them were in the Augustiner-kirche. Their intestines, which in life they cosseted at the sulphur springs at Baden, were in St Stephen’s. Their dull, nineteenth-century furniture was in enfilades of rooms in the Hofburg. Their jewels and regalia and those of the Holy Roman Empire in its Secular Treasury: the Imperial Crown made for the coronation of Otto the Great in 962, the Orb, the Holy Lance and the Inalienable Heirlooms, the Agate Bowl and the Unicorn, representing the mystical element in medieval kingship which the splendid objects in the Ecclesiastical Treasury next door were somehow less successful in doing. And their uniforms could be picked up for a song, ankle-length coats and sledges to go with them, in the Dorotheum, a huge, rambling pawnbroker’s and auction rooms in the Dorotheergasse while sour-faced descendants of their female domestic servants, all dressed in black, dispensed delicious pastries at Demel, an extraordinary Kaffee-Konditorei near the Hofburg in the Kohlmarkt.

Everywhere I went I was confronted by noble, baroque Habsburg façades behind which the present inhabitants, many of them professional people, lived in conditions of gross overcrowding, lacking almost every amenity, although those Viennese in what had been the Russian sector were far worse off. Without industry, without an empire, out on a limb on the furthest frontiers of the West, the city gave the impression that it was dying. Even the young, who spoke of London as if it were Sodom, rather enviously I thought, seemed strangely old when I met them in the wine cellars, which were fun but rather conventional.

After a couple of days of this, replete with Habsburgs and Sachertorte, fed up with the bossy waitresses at Demel and with the very gemütlich chambermaid who every morning used to ask me why I was still ‘allein’ in such a large, fine, double-bedded room, and awash with coffee over which I sat interminably in a café – the Hawelka, in Dorotheergasse, hung with paintings by Cocteau, Chirico, Dali and Rops – I gave up what was to have been the holiday of a lifetime and took the train to Trieste.

Back in London I was invited to present myself at an office of the Secret Service off Whitehall, staffed by men some of whom I had regarded as being distinctly unstable when I had known them during the war. They were quite thrilled with my sewage farm and I spent a couple of days ‘helping them with their enquiries’. On both days I was taken to a dreary pub on the corner of Trafalgar Square, where I was forced to pay for my own sandwiches as apparently they had no appropriation for expenses of this kind. In future, I decided, they could jolly well find their own Russian sewage farms, and I have never again engaged in any remotely clandestine activity for Britain, or for any other country.

The Edge of the Western World IRELAND, 1960 (#ulink_9ed2de30-aeae-53f7-8ce4-c2e26e5b1d77)

‘YOU MUST ASK the Captain but he’s not here,’ the old man said when we asked him if we could visit the house, but not brusquely as he would have done in England, and with no suggestion that he ought to be given something for being rooted out of his habitation late on a winter’s afternoon. He had emerged from a Gothick lodge so narrow that one wondered if he had to go to sleep standing up in it.

He unpadlocked and opened an iron gate, which sounded as if it had not been moved on its hinges since the discovery of oil, and admitted us to the ‘demesne’. Dusk was coming on. A long, seemingly endless ride between huge, shattered trees eventually led to a rather severe, late-eighteenth-century mansion with its façade intact, but which proved when we reached it to be nothing more than a shell. It had either been burnt, if so probably during the Troubles in the 1920s, or someone had taken the roof off to avoid paying taxes. It was at the time of the Troubles, we found out from the old man later, but alone with it in the gloaming there was no way of knowing. The Captain was away, somewhere across the water. And when in residence he lived in a bungalow.

Over the house rooks circled ceaselessly, below there was a lake full of reeds. To one side there was an artificial mound overgrown with impenetrable thorn, and an obelisk choked with ivy rose from it, like a huge tree trunk.

The whole place had an air of indescribable melancholy about it, but exercised an irresistible fascination for people such as myself, lovers of the abandoned and the decayed. In Ireland local authorities and developers have a habit of dynamiting these kinds of remains. But there still are hundreds, and perhaps, in spite of such uncontrolled demolitions, thousands of similar places; many of them with lodges from which old men emerge to unlock gates; and sometimes with invisible captains, Foulenoughs and Grimeses some of them, in the offing, for this was a country, as Waugh’s Captain Grimes said, where you couldn’t get into the soup however hard you tried.

It was the thought of all the people, many of them still alive, who had lived in Ireland but no longer did so, that gave the country its unique feeling of loneliness. Roads led from no place that was or could be signposted, to another, equally nameless, because there was nothing there to signpost. Here, out in the boondocks, women, many of them old, and children, walked long distances; the children to school, the women to weekly markets, there and back. Wherever we went we travelled with a Land Rover full of them, and heard some fine talk of a sort that had simply ceased to exist in modern Britain.

But in spite of this the past was too much for Ireland and its maddening, enchanting people, and sometimes for us, too. In it the ghosts of its past occupants cried out or whispered from empty castles, abandoned islands, hidden loughs, huge, precipitous cliffs (Croaghaun on Achill Island looms 2192 feet above the sea), burial mounds, caverns, towers, abbeys, churches, follies, waterfalls, holy wells, pasturing places, deserted villages; and from nineteenth-century barracks, middens on the edge of enormous sand beaches, from mountain tops and offshore rocks on which innumerable saints once lived in solitary contemplation.

Round Island SCILLY ISLES, 1963 (#ulink_d88502d9-9045-5dfd-a882-b2707267ab1b)

IN THE SUMMER of 1963 while I was trying to get enough money out of various publishers to go to India, and Wanda was endeavouring to let our house in Wimbledon, I succeeded in getting permission to visit an offshore lighthouse at Anvil Point.

It was not easy to obtain, this permission. The Elder Brethren of the Corporation of Trinity House, the general lighthouse authority for England and Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, consisted of nine active brethren, the remainder being made up of royalty, eminent politicians and so on. Probably perfectly amiable individually, these nine when acting in their collective capacity, through their Secretary, were pretty stuffy.

‘I am directed to acquaint you that the Elder Brethren have granted permission to Mr Newby to spend two nights at Eddystone Lighthouse,’ the Secretary wrote from their eyrie on Tower Hill, and that I must supply the Brethren with copies of any photographs I took in triplicate – ‘It would be convenient so that two copies of each may be retained at this House for record purposes.’ What did they do, play Snap with them? I was also told that I was to supply my own food and bedding and that I wasn’t to ‘interfere’ with the keepers, which conjured up visions of bearded giants calling one another Alice and Mildred. Any further arrangements, I was told, should be made with the Superintendent at Penzance 2259.

At Penzance 2259 a voice in which it would have been difficult to detect willingness to arrange anything, except perhaps a burial at sea – ‘Ullo,’ it said, unhelpfully – indicated that if I wanted to get to the Eddystone, in the sea some 14

miles south-south-east of Plymouth, it was nothing to do with them, as the relief boat had already gone and there wouldn’t be another for two months.

In the end I went to Round Island in the Scilly Isles, having received another letter from the Brethren, a facsimile of the first one but with Round Island substituted for Eddystone.

Round Island is a rock, 130 feet high, the last rock in the north Scillies. To the west there is nothing but water until you reach New York, a peculiarity that it shares with a lot of the Cornish coast but because it isn’t part of the mainland it has a very much end-of-the-world feeling.

On the way out to it from St Mary’s, one of the inhabited islands, the boatman told me hair-raising stories about wind velocities on Round Island: ‘The wind gauge registered a hundred and twenty miles an hour, then it bust and nobody knew how hard it blew,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I’ve never been up there myself.’

The only other passenger was a Trinity House mechanic who was going out to overhaul the engines and repair the crane at the landing. ‘You should see the engines,’ he said. ‘I call them diabolical juggernauts.’ His name was Don. At that time mechanics and masons employed by the Brethren spent most of their working lives ‘on’ at lightships or lighthouses, often moving from one to another for a spell of a month or so with no time ashore in between.

‘Hope you’ve got your bed,’ he went on. I told him that I had been told to bring bedding, nobody had said anything about bringing a bed. ‘Ah, I expect they’ll fix you up with something,’ he said, which raised visions of sleeping on a granite slab.

Close to, Round Island was like a great dome from which the top had been sawn off. The landing was on the south side in a narrow gut between the rock and two parallel reefs called the Camber. If it comes on to blow hard from the north-northeast, it is impossible to land because the surge in the gut lifts the boat high up the side of the cliff at one moment and dashes it down towards the bottom of the sea at the next.

As we came into the gut, the lighthouse disappeared from view, 130 feet overhead. From it I could see one of the keepers descending an interminable staircase to the landing, where an iron ladder with its rungs set in the granite of the rock led straight down into the water.

We made fast to the strops which hung off from two bow and stern ropes stretched across the gut to the reef from a massive post, the bole of a tree, cemented into the rock above the landing. High overhead the wire cable of a compressed air hoist ran from a steel gallows on the top of the rock to a shackle on the other side of the gut.

As soon as we were moored fore and aft, another keeper in the winch house up on top sent a big red box down the wire until it was directly overhead where it swung in the wind like a crib for some monstrous baby. We piled our gear into it, which included a hamper from Fortnum and Mason, filled with luxurious food and drinks, provided by the rather frivolous, now extinct magazine which had sent me there, and which it was intended that I should share with the keepers in the course of my sojourn there. Then the boatman shouted up the cliff between cupped hands and the box was whisked upwards and disappeared from view over the top. It was only thirty feet or so from the boat to the ladder and the boatman took us across in his dinghy. ‘I’ll come back on Thursday afternoon, unless it’s blowing,’ he said. ‘Watch for the flag on Trinity Cottages,’ which was where the off-duty keepers lived.

On the way up, Ken, the young Assistant Keeper who had come down to meet us, took me along the cliffside to show me his garden, three tomato plants behind a low wall, growing in the peat of the mesembryanthemum, the only plant beside the sea pink which had got a real footing on the rock.

‘No good,’ he said, gloomily, contemplating a solitary, minute, very green tomato. ‘How can you expect the bloody things to grow with all this spray. Still, I’ll keep on trying.’

I asked him whether the other keepers were interested in gardening. ‘Not very,’ he said. ‘Ray, the Keeper in charge now that the PK [Principal Keeper] is on relief, he’s mad on dreadnoughts and cats. He makes models of dreadnoughts all the time. Tony, the other AK [Assistant Keeper], he’s potty about bird-watching and meteorology. He thinks the reason there’re hardly any birds here is because of old Ray’s cats. And now that Don’s come back – he’s mad on photography – it means we’ve all got cameras, cinés and still. When we’re all out stalking one another on top of the rock because there’s nothing else to photograph we look like a lot of loonies. But that’s only in fine weather. You can’t take pictures at all when it’s really blowing, on account of the spray coming right over the top.’

It was bleak on the top of Round Island. The tower was only 63 feet high but it was the highest of all the rock lights between the Scillies and the mainland. It was built in 1887 by Sir William Douglass who also built the light tower on the Eddystone, the Bishop and completed the Wolf Rock. The walls of the Bishop were more than 7½ feet thick at the level of the entrance door; but all three of these towers were lapped by water and in a storm they vibrated. Round Island was on a much more firm base, but even so its walls at the level of the lower windows were over 5 feet thick, as if its builder expected some cataclysmic wave to surge over the top of the rock, which in fact sometimes happened.

The keepers’ quarters were at the base of the tower, not inside it, which made it the most comfortable rock lighthouse off the coasts of southern England. In the others you slept in a bunk with your body following the contour of the tower; here you could sleep in a bed. There were four keepers’ rooms, an office where the radio-telephone was kept, a room for the radio beacon coders, a kitchen and a larder. And there was a separate fog signal house, with two enormous black mouthpieces, giant versions of the sort used at one time on hand-made gramophones, the sort that T. E. Lawrence had at Clouds Hill, an ‘engine room’ with a couple of fantastic old engines in it which provided compressed air for the hoist and the fog signal and three others, two of which were modern, producing power for the radio beacon and electric light.

There were four keepers but only three were on duty at any one time. In the absence of the Principal Keeper the next senior Assistant Keeper became Keeper in Charge. They all did two months ‘off’ on the rock and one month ‘on’ on the world. Round Island was a ‘happy light’. When asked, singly in the dark watches of the night, they all agreed that they got on well together – all liked the Principal Keeper. They told me hair-raising stories of unhappy lighthouses, of being immured with keepers who were religious maniacs or drug fiends or smelly keepers, but these seemed mercifully rare – all agreed, however, that most of the new entrants were not up to previous standards. They all liked being lighthouse keepers, whether they were married or not, and had no crazy ideas about living in Sunningdale or having a second car for shopping.

Two of them had quitted the service temporarily. One, for what he regarded as a ghastly period, worked for Sun Life Assurance in Holborn, the other, more congenially, had worked in a pub; both had returned to it.

All were remarkably free from germs, as proud of the healthiness of their environment, and with presumably more reason, as the London sewermen whose subterranean empire I had visited previously. ‘You can come out here with a nasty sore throat after a turn ashore,’ Ray said. ‘After a day or so on the rock it’s gone.’ None of them was bearded. A mysterious regulation of Trinity House stated that ‘… all keepers after 18.11.52 to be either clean-shaven or wear beard and whiskers or moustache’ – what strange mutations were in existence before this date were not clear. The regulations were of an almost obsessive thoroughness and covered everything from chimney sweeping (‘keepers shall sweep the kitchen chimneys at their stations at least twice a year’); the number of teeth a keeper had to have – ‘a keeper must have sufficient teeth’ – the regulation said; to the wearing of uniform – compulsory if the keeper was to be photographed. None of the keepers on Round Island liked wearing their uniforms; but they had to during the annual visit of the Elder Brethren (all en grande tenue in their vessel, the Patricia, which bore a suspicious resemblance, at least from the outside, to a millionaire’s yacht).

They all possessed the enviable quality of being able to create an atmosphere of high fantasy and maintain it for long periods, rather in the same way as the more resilient prisoners-of-war of my acquaintance had succeeded in doing in Italy and Germany. This, with the fact that they each kept their own food supplies separate from one another’s (at meal times in the kitchen we peered at one another through a forest of sauce bottles), gave Round Island an uncanny resemblance to a prisoner-of-war camp of the better sort. From the moment I landed I never saw my hamper from Fortnum’s. It was whisked away, ‘We’ll keep this for a rainy day,’ they said, roguishly, like the worst sort of hosts, to whom you bring a couple of bottles of champagne hoping to enliven the evening. It never rained while I was there and I lived as they did. They seemed to have a morbid passion for Bird’s Custard.

They also had a little trolley on which, when they were not trying to photograph one another, with their keeper’s hats reversed like early racing motorists at Brooklands, they used to zoom down a concrete path from the high south end of the rock through the open gate in the protecting wall of their living quarters, round the base of the light and back again.

Their life was one of constant activity. If such a comparison were possible it could only be with that of a pre-1914 housewife whose cook and housemaid had left her, armed with nothing but a bottle of meths, paraffin, soap, lubricating oil and metal polish who finds herself saddled with a number of machines, the majority of them outmoded, all in need of constant attention, which are housed either in an embryonic skyscraper without a lift or else dotted about a rocky plateau exposed to the full force of North Atlantic weather.

On Round Island watches were from midnight to four, four until noon, then noon until eight and from eight until midnight. At 9.15a.m. day-workers were called to breakfast by the man who had the four to noon watch. Each keeper worked as a dayman two days out of three. Jobs included removing the seventy-two steel rollers which supported the sixteen-ton edifice of lenses – in some lighthouses it floated in mercury – cleaning them with meths, then oiling and reassembling them; oiling the clockwork mechanisms with which the rock was abundantly provided; cleaning some 350 square feet of lenses inside and out with a mixture of meths and water, cleaning an infinity of brass (some older Elder Brother must have had shares in a brass foundry); wiping over the exposed steelwork with oily rags, a job that had to be done with great care to be successful; maintaining the engines, scrubbing the floors and the spiral staircase; filling the stoves; riddling the ashes from the cooking range – on Saturdays the man who was cook cleaned the telescope, the kitchen window and the mirror, Monday’s cook washed the previous week’s dishcloths (changed on Sundays and Wednesdays); took the Elsan chemical closet from its exposed situation on the west side of the rock and emptied it over the cliff on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Better by far, they all said, than the lugubrious pilgrimages with a wheelbarrow that keepers used to go on from the old lighthouse at Dungeness, and better than hanging over the void in the lavatory on the outside gallery of the Longships Light off Land’s End – 110 feet up, and, if you were on duty in thick weather, rising every five minutes to change the guncotton charges on the manually operated fog signal, raise them high in the air on the counterbalanced jib, a facsimile of the one I had seen twenty-five years previously at Anvil Point in Dorset, and push down the plunger on the exploder, ‘Just like Lawrence and the Arabs,’ as one of them who had done it said.

At sunset the lamp was lit, a 75 mm Hood Petroleum Vapour Burner, visible twenty-one miles away, like the one at Anvil Point, but now very old-fashioned and soon to be supplanted by electricity, the product of one of the finest makers in the world, Chance Brothers of Birmingham. At last I realised a long-cherished ambition, to see the lamp of a lighthouse lit, and only just in time. The Keeper on Watch poured meths into a spirit cup under the upper and lower vaporizers. They were really nothing more than over-size Primus stoves. While he was waiting for them to heat up, he removed the curtains that shielded the lenses from the sun. The magnification was so great that if they were not shielded the sun would splinter the red Venetian shades on the mantles. Then he lit the mantles, which erupted like great crimson fungi. The light was economical. It only burned two and a quarter pints of paraffin in seven hours.

He then wound up the weight from the base of the tower to the level of the lantern. It weighed about 7 cwt and it took 400 turns of the handle to raise it. When the bell rang it meant that there were fifty more turns to be made. If he went over the fifty, the handle would begin to unwind and either remove his front teeth or else hit him in the pit of the stomach, according to whether he was a large or small light-house-keeper. He had to do this once every hour. At the end of the hour, the bell rang to tell him that the weight was almost down; but he would know, even if he did not hear the bell. ‘When it’s nearly down you feel it in your bones,’ one of them said.

Once the light was burning the only sounds were the hiss of the vaporiser, the whirr of the governor and the clacking of the ratchet when he began winding again. If fog came down he had to go over to the engine house and start the engine, a 22 h.p. Hornsby Fog Signal Engine, installed aout 1905, but looking like a copy of something much older. In order to start it he heated a metal dome at the end of the cylinder with a blow lamp. When it was nice and hot, he set the flywheel to top dead centre, opened the valve to the compressed air tank, switched on the paraffin and oil drips, and operated the starting lever in short jerks at every other revolution of the flywheel. The first time he did it while I was there he caught the piston on the wrong stroke, the engine went backwards, there was an explosion and the room was filled with dense smoke and a voice fucking the engine and the Brethren for not providing a replacement.

Once the thing was firing correctly he locked the starting lever and closed down the relief valve to allow the compressor to pump air back to the main tank. While he was doing this, being a good lighthousekeeper, he was wondering if the weight bell had sounded, whether the Radio Beacon was functioning (actually, he could see the monitor in the engine house); or whether he ought to be listening to Land’s End on the RT.

Now he had steam up and he could begin to operate the siren, which was miles away on the other side of the rock. Like everything else on Round Island that wasn’t operated by paraffin, the opening and closing of the valves was controlled by clockwork, a gigantic weighted mechanism in the basement which had to be wound up every two hours.

Just before the siren went off the two black horns emitted a sighing noise, like a whale surfacing, there was a pause and an enormous, indescribable sound came blasting out of them. Out on the platform, close to them, it was as if one’s ears were full of giant bluebottles; not surprising as the thing could be heard ten miles away. Inside the keepers’ house it was worse. The ones off duty lay rigid in their bunks waiting for it. There was not long to wait. It gave four three-second blasts every two minutes. After seventy-two hours of the siren, everyone was ready to transfer to British Railways.

The power of the sea at Round Island was enormous. At three in the morning on 7 January, the previous year, the wind was WSW Force Ten. In the official jargon this produces ‘very high waves with long overhanging crests … the tumbling of the seas becomes very heavy …’. At three-thirty the radio aerial carried away, the window of the pantry on the inside of the protecting wall was smashed in by seas surging 130 ft up the rock. This was the weather in which a giant wave roared up the West Gulley and stove in the oak doors of the engine room which were more than three inches thick.

At six o’clock it was blowing Force Eleven – more than sixty knots. This was a storm in which ‘small and medium ships might be lost to view’. In such weather seas will be breaking over the top of the Bishop, 180 ft, and the Wolf and their towers will be shaking violently. In addition, according to keepers who have served there, on the Bishop at the height of the storm they hear strange metallic clankings that seem to come from the base of the tower. On the Longships there is an awe-inspiring sound that is generally agreed to be made by a boulder rumbling about in an underwater cave.

At a quarter to six in mid-September the sun is rising behind a line of jagged cloud over a grey, heaving sea. In a half-circle around you the lights begin to go out. From Round Island you can see them going: to the east the triple-flashing light on the Seven Stones light vessel towards Cape Cornwall; beyond it to the east the occulting white light with red sectors on the Longships; the alternating red and white light on the Wolf to the south-east and the double-flashing white of the Bishop. There is not a ship to be seen. It is lonely here. Occasionally a Dutch liner comes in close to give them a toot on the siren. The Keeper on Watch closes the micrometer valve, changes over the bottom lens vaporizer. He changes bottom and top vaporizers alternately (later he will put it on the kitchen-stove to dry out) and hangs the curtains over the lenses for another day.

Mother Ganges INDIA, 1963 (#ulink_f984d09f-2778-5d86-833e-edd30ba6f2ba)

AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon of 6 December 1963, my forty-fourth birthday, Wanda and I set off to travel down the Ganges by boat from Hardwar, one of the most venerated Hindu bathing places, which lies at the feet of the Siwalik Hills. Our destination was the Bay of Bengal, 1200 miles away. The vessel was a five-oared rowing boat and it looked very much like an oversize Thames skiff – it had probably been built by some British official in a moment of nostalgia for the Thames at Henley. Now it was the property of the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works on the Ganges Canal, who was an Indian. He had only lent it to us, and then with extreme reluctance, because we had shown him a letter, signed by Mr Nehru, ordering all and sundry to help us on our way down the river.

The boat was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam, was made of mild steel put together with rivets and needed thirty-two people to carry it. This was the number of barefooted men I had paid to carry it across a mile of almost red-hot shingle to the Ganges from the Ganges Canal.

With us was a rather too-high-caste companion for such a journey, procured for us by the personal intervention of Indira Gandhi, acting on behalf of her father, who warned us that he wouldn’t stay the course – he didn’t – and, for this first part of the journey, three boatmen.

Among the things we had with us was a canvas bag full of books, a Janata oil stove, hurricane lamps, 8 kilos of rice, a small sack of chilli powder, flour, vegetables, a teapot, a kettle, a number of lathis (weighted bamboo poles) for hitting dacoits – robbers – on the nut, and military maps with which we had been supplied by the Director General of Ordnance of the Indian Army, who had also obligingly allowed us to acquire some bottles of Indian Army rum.

Two hundred yards below the bridge at Chandi Ghat from which we set off, the boat went aground on great, slimy stones the size and shape of cannon balls, which we had to lift to make a passage for it. Difficult to describe the emotions we felt aground on a 1200-mile boat journey within sight of our point of departure.

What makes the Ganges a great river, and in this sense the greatest of all rivers, is that for more than 450 million Hindus, and for countless others dispersed throughout the world, it is the most holy and most venerated river on earth. To each one of them it is Ganga Mai