Contact! (10 page)

By the very next day he would be one of the most famous men on earth.

‘Mamma mia!'

A veteran fisherman took me out into the Venetian lagoon to find an island house I had read about, but when we reached the spot we found that nothing remained of it but a pile of rubble. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. ‘Now why should a thing like that happen?' he asked me indignantly. ‘
Mamma mia!
That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone–and now it's gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!'

He was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble, and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the
stern of the boat. ‘
Mamma mia!
' the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards. ‘Like a couple of crabs,' he said, unabashed, ‘though even the crabs go sideways.'

An apartheid queue

In the evening all the poor black workers of Johannesburg, forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, rush for the buses that will take them to their slums and sprawling estates. You can hardly watch such a scene without the stirring of some crusading instinct, some Byronic impulse, or at least a stab of pity. As dusk falls, and as the bitter winter night begins to whistle through the buildings, a vast tattered queue moves in raggety parade towards the bus depot, and thousands of Africans shuffle their slow way in double file towards their shabby buses. There is an air of unutterable degradation to the scene, so heartless and machine-like is the progress of the queue, as the white folk hasten off in their cars to the rich city districts, and the lights glitter in the windows of the department stores, and those poor lost souls are crammed into their buses and packed off to their distant ill-lit townships. Many of them are half starving. Most of them live in fear of robbery or violence when they step off the buses into the dark streets of the locations; half of them spend almost all their leisure hours travelling between the city and the far-flung patches of high veld in which they are
obliged to live; they reach their homes long after dark at night, and they start work again when the morning is still only a suggestion.

Old-school flying

In earlier days of transatlantic flying it was generally necessary for passenger aircraft to refuel en route, at Gander in Newfoundland, Shannon in Ireland, or somewhere or other on the way to San Francisco. I was travelling to America on a British Overseas Airways Corporation aircraft when we were told that because of favourable winds we would not for once have to make an intermediate stop. About halfway across, the aircraft's captain came chattily around the passenger cabins, as was the BOAC custom, in the full glory of his regalia–they ran their planes like ships then, and he was very much the Master.

‘Everything all right?' he asked courteously, in a clipped public-school accent, when he came to me. ‘Having a comfortable flight?'

‘Everything's fine,' I told him, ‘but there is one thing: are you quite sure you've got enough fuel to get us over without a stop?'

‘Never fear,' he replied in the best old-school British style. ‘We're terrible cowards up front.'

Festivities!

On Princes Street that day, when the Edinburgh Festival was
in full fling, half a dozen sideshows were performing. An old-fashioned socialist demagogue was haranguing the crowd from his soapbox. A man in full evening dress was singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street' from the steps of the National Gallery. Two comedians dressed as ancient Egyptians were doing a comic act, and a tipsy old fellow in a kilt was dancing a reel to the music of a wind-up gramophone. All of a sudden amidst the hubbub two young toughs in shirtsleeves struck up a bit of a fight, punching each other in a tentative way and exchanging high-pitched Scottish insults. Instantly all attention turned to them. The orator found his audience dwindling before his eyes, the ancient Egyptians were soon playing to an empty pavement, and swirling here and there across the pavement went all the audiences, wavering and staggering with each exchange of blows. Through the melee, as it disappeared behind the Scott Memorial, I could see the fierce squabbling heads of the contestants, mouthing festive curses.

Aloofly towards the dawn

I once heard a pair of Venetian inebriates passing my window at four o'clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices; but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.

Mother Russia

In Soviet Russia during the Cold War the foreign writer was generally at the mercy of Intourist, the government tourist organization. It was efficient and courteous enough, though speckled no doubt with agents of counter-intelligence, and its younger employees were often refreshingly undogmatic. Now and then, though, Intourist would send you an interpreter of the old school, a woman of severe bearing and inflexible party loyalty. Polite but unmistakably chill such a lady was likely to be, as though you were an emissary of capitalist encirclement, and a day with such an ideologue could be exhausting. I found there was a solution, though, an exorcism. When my companion was particularly severe about my bourgeois deviations, I would turn to her with an expression of deeply wounded sensibility, allow the warm tears to well into my eyes, sniff a little, blow my nose shakily, and tell her I thought she had been
unkind
.

This was a magic word. Instantly there would be released from her bosom a flood of immemorial Russian emotion, dimly lit with ikons and scented with incense. In a trice all thought of norms and Seven-Year Plans would be driven from her kindly mind, and she was likely to be on the telephone half the night, making sure I was warm enough.

‘Nobody's used this cup'

One of the notorieties of the Cape of Good Hope is the ‘tot' system, which legally allows a wine farmer to pay his coloured labourers partly in cheap sweet wine. ‘You're just in
time,' a Huguenot farmer told me when I asked to watch the process. ‘We give them six tots a day, you see–one when they start, one at breakfast, one at eleven, one at two, one at four and one when they finish work.'

There stood the labourers in a quavering crew, seven or eight tattered coloured men, and on the steps of a barn a white overseer was doling out the tots. He had a big bucket of thick red wine before him, and as the workers came shambling up with their old baked-bean tins he scooped them their ration in silence. It was an eerie spectacle, for it was plain to me that those dazed and ragged half-castes were in a state of perpetual dissipation. Quaffing their tots in one experienced and joyless gulp they shuffled away again. It was as though eight elderly machines were being greased or refuelled.

‘Yes, we give them six tots a day,' said the farmer chattily, ‘that's the law. It comes to a bottle and a quarter a day. They sweat it out very quickly–it gives them kick, you see. It's a good wine–here, taste it.' And with fastidious courtesy the foreman, producing a tin cup from inside the barn, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and drew me a ration. ‘It's quite all right,' he said kindly, ‘nobody's used this cup.'

Expatriatism

Almost anywhere in the world of the 1950s I met expatriate Britons of the upper bourgeoisie, and almost always they liked to tell me their memories, personal or inherited, factual or fictionalized, of an England long extinct: a garden party England it seemed to have been, where nobody talked too loud, and there were parasols on the lawn, and we so
often used to visit Sir Henry…Sir Henry…what was his name now?–Never mind, I shall remember it later–Anyway, he had this lovely old house. Oh, the smell of the honeysuckle and such gay tennis parties we used to have. ‘Of course I know it's all changed now and I could never go back, it would break my heart to see it all so different, socialism, and strikes, and white girls with black men in the streets, they tell me, and all these death duties and so on. But it will always be home to me, Mr Morris–you may be a
little
too young to understand just how I feel–that's Lindley Hall there, by the way, above the mantelpiece, painted by Robert…Robert…you know, very famous–but I'll remember later, I always do…'

On second thoughts

When I was writing a book about Oxford I read that a special duty of the High Steward of Oxford University was ‘to hear and determine criminal cases of the gravest kind, like treason or felony', if the accused was a resident member of the university. In legal theory it meant that until capital punishment was finally abolished in England, this purely academic official was authorized to hang you.

I once told a proctor, one of the intendants of university discipline, that I proposed to follow him and his officers (popularly called Bulldogs) on their patrol through the streets one night, to see how the undergraduates responded to his authority. He advised me not to follow too closely, in case the Bulldogs took offence at my attentions, and summoned me into the proctorial presence. I bristled a bit at
this. They'd better not, I said, I was a free citizen, I knew my rights, I could walk where I liked when I liked, nobody could pull antique usage over my eyes, he and his minions certainly had no authority over me. The proctor smiled darkly. ‘Are you quite sure?' he inquired; and by heavens, remembering the bit about the High Steward and the felonies, on second thoughts I wasn't.

Alas, proved right

I was never a very astute political observer, and I really did not know what to make of Jack Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, when I went to one of his Washington press conferences soon after his inauguration. I was charmed by the look, sound and presence of him, as everyone was. I was impressed by his professionalism and his fluency, but some vague instinct told me that although he was only in his mid-forties he was already in his prime. In a report I wrote for the
Guardian
I tried to express my feeling that the Kennedy we were seeing then was the definitive Kennedy, that we would never know him greatly changed by time or experience, and, as it sadly happened, for once I was proved right.

A Mikado

Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave was officially Adviser to the Ruler of Bahrain, but in effect he was prime minister as well, while Lady Belgrave enjoyed the beguiling title of Directoress of Female Education. For thirty years Belgrave
had guided the destinies of the island, and his influence was all pervasive. A mere mention of the name Belgrave would instantly bring a price down. There was a street called Belgrave Road, and not a soul in the place, not a sheikh or a tailor or a man picking his teeth on the high curved prow of a dhow, who could not direct you to the house where the Belgraves lived.

This Mikado viewed his own eminence with a trace of dry amusement, and his home (above his office) was a gay and racy place. Belgrave had a splendid and eclectic library, and he was a man of esoteric tastes, addicted to (for example) roulette, cigars, watercolour painting, swords and pantomimes. Each year he presented a panto of his own in the dining room, with bold backcloths painted by himself and dialogue verging upon the risqué. It was curious that his effect upon his bailiwick was almost sanctimonious. ‘How good are roads are,' the island seemed to say, ‘and how sensible our schools are, and how thriftily we use our oil royalties. Mohammed, stop picking your nose in front of Lady Belgrave.'

Beggars and buskers

The indigenous beggars and buskers of Venice are treated with indulgence. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evening at the foot of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano and who is often to be seen pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of
Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafes and, planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are often a few innocents to be seen following the melodic line with knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven's 9th, held upside-down and close to the stomach.

Among the Delhi Spearmen

Among the officers of the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers there was a powerful sense of family. It was hardly like being in an army at all. Age was disregarded and rank was tacit. Nobody called anybody ‘sir'. The Colonel was Colonel Jack, or Colonel Tony. Everyone else was known by his Christian name. Courtesy towards each other was not a deliberate form, it was merely a matter of habit, or convenience. This was a very professional regiment. A sense of heritage accordingly bound us one to another, and made us conscious of lance and plume, saddle-carbine and cuirass. These were the Delhi Spearmen; and though the details of the regimental history were less than vivid to most of us, still there hung always around our mess a general suggestion of glory (not that anyone would have been so insensitive as to mention it,
for if there was one attribute the 9th Lancers were not anxious to display, it was
keenness
).