Departures and Arrivals

There, with the words of the wagons-lits conducteur ringing in their ears, ‘En voiture, s’il vous plaît, Madame, M’sieur!’, we set our feet on the portable mounting block which he had placed there for the convenience of his passengers and hoisted ourselves up the two tall steps to the interior.

Once inside the wagon, having distributed largesse to the porters who had unceremoniously shoved our heavy leather luggage through an open window, and to the conducteur in anticipation of further rewards, we were able to take a brief look at the compartment that was to be our home for at least the next 48 hours and 3,041 kilometres.

We admired the wealth of inlaid mahogany, the shining brass-work, the glittering mirrors, the water carafes, heavy enough to lay out the most thick-skulled train robber, the white linen drugget on the floor, the spotless bed linen and towels which would become progressively less so as the journey unfolded, the little hook on the bulkhead beside one’s bunk to hold a man’s pocket watch in a world in which almost everyone now possessed a wrist watch. We were also pleased at the thought, although we did not actually inspect it, of the chamber pot hidden away like a bomb in its special receptacle which when sufficiently filled enabled it to be up-ended and its contents deposited on the permanent way below, which was less hazardous than attempting to throw it out of the window in the Simplon Tunnel.

Then after whoever was driving the thing had caused it to give its habitual, shattering premonitory lurch in anticipation of the actual departure, we were off.

Because we were hungry we set off immediately for the dining car, in anticipation of the announcement of the premier service, as the train clonked out through the 12ème arrondissement, past the Entrepôts de Bercy, the great warehouses on the left bank of the Seine – now no more, as no more as the Simplon-Orient Express. The cutlery and the glasses tinkled on the snowy tablecloths, which even before the train left the station had begun to be speckled with tiny flecks of soot from the coal-burning engine.

And while we drank our aperitifs we studied the interesting menu which had the name of the chef de brigade and his team inscribed on it, while the train, gathering speed now, passed through Maisons Alfort and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where Balzac’s widow once resided, places we would be unlikely to visit then or ever.

Then to bed with a little violet light burning high up in the roof of the coupé, as the train roared down the line towards Dijon, only to be woken at some ghastly hour to find it at a standstill, 462 kilometres from Paris, at Vallorbe, a station on the edge of the strange no man’s land between France and Switzerland, with a man plodding past groaning ‘Vallorbe! … Vallorbe!’ Here the train erupted with Swiss guards and customs men, all full of fight, who were content to look at the passports which the conducteurs held for their inspection in neat piles without harassing the wagons-lits passengers, saving their energies for those they would harass in the lower-class carriages.

Breakfast was coffee and fresh croissants – put aboard the train at Lausanne and eaten as it snaked along the shores of Lake Geneva in the grey early morning. Then up the valley of the Rhône, still in dark shadow, to Brig, where the Finsteraarhorn and the Jungfrau loomed over us, and then into the Simplon Tunnel to run 12½ miles under the Lepontine Alps, with the little violet light burning in the coupé. Then, out into the golden winter sunshine of Italy.

On Lake Maggiore the cork and cedar trees and the oleanders rose above the early mist that enshrouded the Borromean Islands.

At Milan there was plenty of time to buy a Corriere and stock up with Chianti, prosciutto di Parma, salame di Felino, black olives and the white bread called pane di pasta dura, for whatever periods of enforced abstinence awaited us in the Balkans.

Here, too, at Milan, a restaurant car was attached, in which you could eat delicious pasta al forno and drink Barbera, while the train drove on through the pianura, the great plain of Northern Italy. Then, some four hours outward-bound from Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, dying city in the Lagoon, which there was no time to visit.

After Venice we crossed rivers that in the First World War had literally run with blood – the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo.

After Trieste there was the Yugoslav Customs with rather smelly officials rooting in our luggage before the train climbed into the great limestone wilderness of the Carso, 1,200 feet above the sea; and from there it ran down through the Javornik Range, the densely wooded Slovenian mountains in which wolves and bears still lived. No more restaurant cars on the Direct-Orient after Trieste until we reached Turkey – we were glad of the food and drink we had bought at Milan Station. The conducteur brewed us tea and coffee. Things were better ordered on the Simplon-Orient – at least there was a Yugoslav dining car as far as Belgrade.

After Ljubljana, the train ran down the valley of the Sava to Belgrade behind a big steam engine that howled as it went, as if to express its feelings about the human condition. From now on it was steam all the way and it was difficult to sleep and everything became grubbier and grubbier. We spent hours talking with the conducteur of our wagon, who was from La Villette, behind the Gare de l’Est, and could by now have done with a shave.

He told us stories about such eminences grises as Gulbenkian père and Zaharoff, the armaments king, both of whom commuted on these trains; tales of the express being snowed up and attacked by bandits in Thrace; and girls being put on, and later taken off, the train. It was very cold now and he spent much time stoking the coal-burning stove in what was now, after Belgrade, the sole remaining wagon-lit on the train. Whenever the train stopped at a station, it was besieged by country people carrying huge, crumbling paper parcels in lieu of luggage. In the fields we saw men and women clustered around fires, wearing thick waistcoats and tall fur hats.

At Nis, 2,216 kilometres from Paris, the guide book said that there was a tower constructed with Serbian skulls by a Serbian despot in 1808, but it was invisible from the railway, and when we finally contrived to visit it years later, rather disappointing. At Dimitograd Bulgarian Customs officials were more friendly, less prying than the Yugoslavs. Perhaps they were too cold to care. Here, a huge steam locomotive was attached to the train which panted up with it through a rocky defile and in thick snow to the Dragoman Pass.

We were beginning to be hungry now. Our Italian food was finished and we had no Bulgarian leva to buy anything with: huge queues at the stations made money-changing impossible.

After Sofia lay the wildest country of the entire route, on the borders of Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. Then, from Edirne (in Turkey further great difficulties with money) with a Turkish dining car attached at last, across the windswept, snowy plains of Eastern Thrace, past Çorlu, where the train was snowed up in 1929, and down to the Sea of Marmara. Then round the seaward walls of Istanbul and out to Seraglio Point, where the Sultan used to have his unwanted odalisques drowned in weighted sacks, and into the Sirkeci Station 3,041 kilometres from the Gare de Lyon.

Under the Crust of Coober Pedy (#ulink_68da1d02-6b8a-5102-9ab2-d75f95136013)

In 1971 Wanda and I flew to Coober Pedy in the Stuart Range, in South Australia, the location of the world’s biggest opal field.

As we came in to land, Coober Pedy and its environs looked like Verdun after five months under artillery fire; what appeared to be shell holes were shafts of workings which went down 20 feet or so beneath the surface, into the desert sandstone in which the opals lurk and are found, or not, according to the skill and luck of the miners. Other holes in the earth’s crust, not distinguishable at this height, were the chimney and air inlets of the underground houses in which the majority of the permanent inhabitants lived troglodytic lives, having dug their multi-roomed residences out of the sandstone and equipped them with every imaginable and unimaginable convenience (one of the more unimaginable being a revolving bed surrounded by mirrors, whose owner, a half-French, half-Hungarian gentleman, proudly demonstrated it to me).

The remaining unfortunates, who included the majority of the Aborigines, lived on the surface in the unimaginable horror of corrugated-iron huts or else in caravans, some of which were equipped with air-conditioning. Unimaginably horrible because in summer here the temperature rises to a shattering 140°F, shade temperatures reach the high 120s, and life is only tolerable underground, where the temperature never rises much above 80°F – less with air-conditioning. In winter the temperature outside sinks to the low 40s – the lowest ever recorded was 26°. Coober Pedy is a rugged place.

There was no surface water in the town. What water there was, which was very salty, was pumped from 350 feet underground into a solar still. The inhabitants were rationed to 25 gallons a week, not that many of them actually drank water. Until 1966 it was carted all the way from Mathesson’s Bore, 80 miles to the north.

There was not a lot to see on the surface of Coober Pedy (even the pretty little Roman Catholic church, which was like a catacomb, was underground) once we had seen the excellent hospital, the motels, the two or three eating places, played cricket on the cricket pitch, and had drinks in the Italian club to which we had been lucky enough to get an introduction. Even the buildings on either side of the dirt road which was the main street only had a skyline at dawn and at dusk. In the evening the great clouds of dust thrown up by the trucks and cars whirling into town against the sunset were a marvellous sight. By that time many of the Aborigines who spent their days scratching for opals among the spoil of abandoned diggings, the half-castes and the completely decayed white men, were all lying semi-comatose against a fence surrounded by empty port bottles.

There were few Australians born and bred among the miners. Almost all of them were Europeans who emigrated to this distant land because they found life intolerable in their own – Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, Greeks, East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, all dreaming of the day when they would make a strike and take the next plane out.

Anyone could become an opal miner. No experience was necessary. All you needed were lots of guts, a partner you could trust when he was down the mine alone with the opals, and a Miner’s Right which you could buy for 50 cents at the Post Office. It entitled you to prospect a claim 50 yards by 50 for a month, after which, if you wanted to continue working it, you had to register your claim at a cost of under Aus$10 a year. You also needed a pick, shovel, hand auger, carbide light, windlass and ladders.

Professional opal buyers came here from all over the world. The miners would accept nothing for their opals but cash; not even traveller’s cheques would do. And they gave no receipts for fear of being identified by the Inland Revenue. All buyers were forced to have large quantities of cash about their person. Most buyers were therefore armed, but in spite of this some buyers still disappeared.

Digging started at dawn and soon after noon most miners had had enough. Then the long bar in the Opal Motel (men only) filled up and stayed full until about 10 p.m., by which time Slovenes, Poles, Irishmen, Czechs and even an occasional Englishman were either slithering to the floor or else collapsing as if pole-axed, according to their powers of resistance. During this time, ten hours or so, nothing had been discussed except opals, not even women.

This was a tough town which all through the hot months was almost entirely without women. The girls came to Coober Pedy at the beginning of autumn, around the first of June, as regularly as migrant swallows. They came in air-conditioned coaches and the first arrivals were met at the bus stop and straight away carried bodily underground. They cleaned up a packet. One wonders what would happen if an outing of lady school teachers arrived at the same time.

We quitted this amazing place with real regret and flew on eastwards over Lake Torrens, a ghastly, ghostly, dazzlingly white saline expanse, to Hawker, a pleasant little nineteenth-century town, in the middle of what used to be vast wheat fields, now sheep country, in the Flinders Ranges. Here I met Jeff Findley, who had been asked to take me into Outback country.

‘The Nips have got the six-cylinder Land Rovers licked with their Toyotas,’ he said gloomily. ‘If I was Lord Stokes I’d be real worried.’ I wrote to Lord Stokes pointing this out, but he was so unworried that he didn’t bother to reply.

We drove up through the Ranges by way of the Hills of Arkaba, where there was a sheep station but scarcely any sheep, which was not surprising considering that in this sort of country at this time of year there were probably only 10,000 sheep to 10,000 acres.

Finally, we arrived at the Parachilna Hotel, 57 miles from Hawker, but longer by the route we took, just at the moment when the sky fell in and this particular part of the Outback and a good 500 miles north of it were deluged with water.

It is almost as difficult in retrospect to remember this night at the Parachilna Hotel as it is to forget it. Difficult either way with the malt whisky flowing like beer and the beer like spring water, and Angus Donald McKenzie, the proprietor of this old and extensive hotel, playing a lament on the bagpipes, with the rain falling so thick outside that it was difficult to breathe and while all that was going on trying to listen to old Bert Rickaby, who was eighty or ninety, I forget which, but looked sixty, who the previous week had opened up his stomach with a pen knife and got out 26 ounces of fluid, presumably pure Glen Grant.

‘… so I got some salt,’ Rickaby was speaking about some more ancient affliction now, ‘cut the poisoned part three times on top and twice underneath, rubbed in salt from the lake, and then went into Maree and got piss drunk.’

The rain ended any serious attempt to reach the real uninhabited Outback. Having charged through Beltana, a ghost town deep in mud, population six families – three Aboriginal, three white – and water-courses which engulfed the transfer box on our Range Rover, all the next day we sat on the bank of Emu Creek waiting for it to subside while the mile-long trains of freight cars on the Central Australian Railway, from Alice Springs, hummed down the line triumphantly above us.

The magnificent Victorian hotels we came across might have been in the West Country. They had hitching rails outside which were not for horses any more, but had been reinforced to prevent the owners of Nissans and Toyota Land Cruisers, all fitted with winches, lifting hooks and kangaroo bars, from driving them through the retaining wall of the hotel and into the bar inside.

So far as I could make out most of the fighting in Outback pubs was on account of somebody refusing to have a beer with someone else.

‘Eric, meet Ron, John, Les, Stan, Alan, Willie, Jimmy. This is Eric from England. How about a beer, Eric?’

I stood in the wide main street outside the Birdsville Hotel in south-west Queensland, which was the epitome of all the Outback pubs I had seen, watching the sun race up behind the trees out of the Diamantina River, which was often nothing but a series of dry furrows.

The rain had accomplished what seemed almost impossible in country where the last drops of the stuff worth measuring fell four years before, a whole foot of it coming down in a single night early in March the previous year, and that was only the beginning. Since then Birdsville and its eighty-odd inhabitants had been cut off by flooding from the outside world except by air.

I had seen many interesting things during my travels round Australia. I had been to the East Alligator River on the edge of Arnhem Land, which had large and horrid estuarine crocodiles at its mouth and freshwater ones with red eyes further up. I had seen swarms of magpie geese, spoonbills, ibis and variously coloured cockatoos and lotus birds with giant feet which helped them to skid over the surface of the water lily pads, red wallaroos and wild horses up to their flanks in water, and wild Indian buffaloes with 10- and 11-foot spreads of horn.

I had been to Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges on a road that was like an old-fashioned, dark red blancmange and seen the uranium mountains that were so difficult to reach that they had to use camels to get the stuff out for the Manhattan Project in 1943 and 1944, and had stayed in their shadow in a brand new motel.

I had flown hundreds and hundreds of miles, over the coal mines at Leigh Creek and the dingo fence which stretches right across South Australia from New South Wales to the west, and I had just missed being bitten by a deadly spider in the meat house of an abandoned homestead at Tea Creek, and now I just wanted to sit down quietly and think about the Outback without seeing any more of it because, quite suddenly, it had become a little too much for me.

Walking the Plank (#ulink_b4e0ce72-fc3b-5efb-b360-f9cb2439710a)

‘You have rather walked the plank, haven’t you, Eric?’ Donald Trelford, then Deputy Editor of the Observer, said when he heard that I had decided to leave the paper and become a freelance writer. For almost ten years, from 1963 to 1973, I had been its Travel Editor, one of the few jobs in my life from which I had not been sacked and had really enjoyed.

But I was not as worried about the prospect of walking the plank as I probably should have been. I knew all about walking planks and what happened to the good guys who did so. I still remembered, back in the twenties, seeing Douglas Fairbanks Senior, suffering this fate in a film, The Black Pirate. He had been shoved off the end of one swathed in chains to the accompaniment of some frenetic work on the piano by a pianist who was located where the orchestra would have been if it had been a theatre (sometimes he would be accompanied by a drummer to simulate the sounds of gunfire). At that time all films were silent ones.

But in spite of this, now fathoms deep in the Caribbean Sea, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves of oxygen in his lungs, Fairbanks had been able to rid himself of his chains; and then, having swum under the keel, had clambered aboard the enemy vessel, found to hand a swivel gun loaded with grape shot, with which he swept the decks of the murderous scum who had tried to do him in. (At least this is how I remember it years later.)

He was a corker, Douglas Fairbanks Senior was, and he could fill a cinema such as the Broadway in Hammersmith, or the Blue Halls, over the river from where I lived in Barnes – both of which smelt strongly of disinfectant – with just the suspicion of a twirl of one of his elegant moustaches. I think he had moustaches. All this happened long before Donald Trelford was even thought of.

That year of my departure from the Observer, 1973, the year I walked the plank, was one in which, all of a sudden, everything started happening that was needed – to continue the gangplank metaphor – to keep me and the rest of our family afloat.