Sixties travel
Michael Barber
In April 1966, desperate to get as far away from Britain as cheaply as possible, I boarded a flight to Sydney as a ‘£10 Pom’. Three years later, having exorcised most of my demons, I flew out of Sydney to Singapore, the first leg of a long road home that led through Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. Astonishing as it must seem to the selfie generation I didn’t take a camera. But then, as I once heard Eric Ambler proclaim, ‘If you go looking, you don’t really see.’ What I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye – an Indian feeding rats in Calcutta, an Afghan spitting at a young European beggar – persisted long after spectacles like the Taj Mahal had faded.
The same is true, in spades, of what I smelt. The moment I left the plane at Singapore I was confronted by a stench that lingered, with regional variations, all the way to Istanbul. It couldn’t be ignored and it wouldn’t go away. Outdoor cooking, exhaust fumes, exotic vegetation and dust all contributed to this, as did human waste. Which reminds me that one of the items I’d been told I must pack was loo paper. Some people dispensed with this refinement, opting to use fingers and water instead, which could explain why you met so many people on the road with chronic diarrhoea – which I managed to avoid. However, hygiene was always going to be a problem when, as was often the case, all you had to wash with was a large bowl of cold water.
Another problem was finding a bed for the night. Fortunately in Penang I met a meticulous Canadian couple who provided me with the cost and location of every hotel, lodging house and crash-pad they’d stayed at between Istanbul and Calcutta. I came to think of these places as caravanserai, which was certainly true of the Thai Song Greet in Bangkok, a cosmopolitan staging post that doubled as a brothel. There
I got to know Gerry, an Irish plumber heading for California after working in Australia. Ten years later, drinking in a bar on the San Francisco waterfront, I spotted a figure at a table. Could it be? Surely not. But it was indeed Gerry, now on the staff of a posh establishment called The Bohemian Club.
Sadly, since my father had fought there during the war, Burma was off limits to travellers. But Afghanistan had yet to become a war zone and I was lucky enough to take a bus through the Khyber Pass, where you could still see British regimental insignia carved on the walls of the hill forts that overlooked the Pass. Some of my fellow passengers carried rifles and bandoliers, and in addition to my fare I had to pay protection money which went, I was told, to local tribesmen.
My arrival in Kabul coincided with that of the then Soviet premier
Kosygin, in whose honour a display of Buzkashi, the national game, was arranged. This took place on a large field outside Kabul called Bagram, later notorious as a rendition site. Buzkashi means ‘goat-snatch’, the goat in question having been decapitated, disembowelled and stuffed with sand. About 70 weatherbeaten horsemen, clad in padded gowns and thigh-high boots, and brandishing thick, plated whips, did their best to make off with the carcase, resulting in a series of savage mêlées that must, I thought, have been what an old-fashioned cavalry skirmish was like. Ten years later Kosygin, by then overshadowed by Brezhnev, opposed the Soviet invasion. Perhaps the ferocity he witnessed at Bagram accounted for this.
Time could hang heavy on the road and there was a great deal of book-swapping. One book I retained was a proof copy of Kim Philby’s apologia, My Secret Life, which I bought in a Tehran bookshop. Some years later I showed this to the novelist Alan Williams, then writing a thriller about Philby called Gentleman Traitor. Alan, who met Philby in Beirut shortly before he defected, was intrigued. ‘A proof copy. In Tehran. Highly suspicious!’ So of course I gave it to him. A little later he returned the compliment by inscribing a first edition of Gentleman Traitor as follows: ‘Don’t be seen with this by Sir Anthony Blunt!’ It was dated January 1975, almost five years before Blunt was exposed.
The adventurous part of my journey ended when I caught the ferry across the Bosphorus from the new city of Istanbul to the old, with its domes and minarets and tribes of ginger cats. Had you told me then that when I finally returned there, in May 2010, it would be prior to swimming the Hellespont exactly 200 years after the poet Byron, I would have been gobsmacked. But that’s another story.
‘Some of my fellow passengers carried rifles and bandoliers, and in addition to my fare I had to pay protection money’