Contact!: A Book of Encounters Read online

  Snow in Holland

  I was once in Amsterdam when the first snow of the winter fell. The men in the central junk market, among their stuffed birds and rusty curios from Surinam, broke up the most hopelessly lopsided of their kitchen chairs and made bon-fires of them. A cold wind whistled in from the North Sea, huddling the more mature housewives in their mutation minks and driving the portly burghers to the felt-covered newspaper tables of the cafes, where they meditated ponderously over their coffees like so many East India merchants considering the price of apes.

  Joburgers

  I found the poor black inhabitants of the Johannesburg locations, in the cruel days of apartheid, hard to understand. Sometimes they were grave and courteous, and I was reminded of Ethiopian chieftains; sometimes they treated me with such bubbling flippancy that I thought they might be teasing me; sometimes a flash of malice entered their eyes, or something gave them such inexplicable amusement that they burst into a tumult of infectious laughter, or danced little jazzy jigs upon the pavement. When they spoke, they did so with explosive animation, but when they listened the whole of their being supplemented their hearing, they became one great ear, and their white eyes, their tense bodies, their eager fingers and their yellow striped socks all waited upon my words. And once in my hotel I heard tinny twangs of music from the street outside; and there beneath the arcades of President Street a solitary black man was lounging by, in a crumpled brown hat and blue dungarees, plucking away at a guitar as he walked, humming a high-toned melody, and expressing in his every gesture, in the very swing of his shoulders, the spirit of blithe indolence.

  ‘The same again’

  Kabul in the 1960s is a tense, nervous, shifty capital, and edgiest of all at night, when the streetlights are dimmed, the brilliant Asian stars come up above the hills and only a few shrouded watchmen are left brooding on the doorsteps. Then the whole place feels sleepless and dry-eyed, like some insomniac conspirator. Sometimes a shot rings dead on the night, and sometimes a distant shout, and when a donkey pads softly by you can hear the two men upon its back, nebulous in white robes, murmuring to each other in low sporadic undertones. I once asked an old man of Kabul what would happen if another enemy attacked this capital as the British had catastrophically attacked it in 1845. Would they be exterminated too? He gave an angry tug at his beard and threw me a look of piercing and bloodshot intensity. ‘The same,’ he hissed through the last of his teeth. ‘The same again!’

  Home are the hunters!

  I first went to Kuwait in the company of a sheikhly hawking party, returning home from a desert sporting expedition. Splendid were the caparisons of those haughty Arabian sportsmen, and their eyes were cold and heavy-lidded. They wore magnificent flowered gowns, and crossed bandoliers, and daggers, and spotless headdresses, and golden swords; and big black lackeys carried their peregrine falcons, hooded upon their pedestals; and a brass band puffed away on the airfield at Kuwait when this gorgeous crew, looking slightly airsick, staggered on to the ancestral soil.

  The quarry clerk

  I was only just in time to meet Bob Owen of Croesor, in northern Wales, before he died in 1962, and I am glad I didn’t miss him. He had worked as a clerk for a local quarry company for more than thirty years, a small man with a high wrinkled brow, a white moustache and bushy eyebrows, respectably dressed when I met him in jacket, waistcoat and unassertive tie. He was a tremendous talker, a chain smoker and a chapel goer of strong views, and when his quarry work ended he had become a writer and lecturer well known throughout Wales. He took me to the small square house where he and his wife lived and, merciful heavens, the moment he opened the front door for me I found myself hemmed in, towered over, squashed in, squeezed down by an almighty multitude of books. They filled every room of the house–he had amassed more than 40,000 books and pamphlets, many of them rare and valuable. He was born, he told me, in a very small nearby cottage, nicknamed Twll Wenci, and people used to call him Bob Twll Wenci–Bob Weasel’s Hole.

  Pretty children

  In the mountain resort of Flims I saw three small Swiss girls on their way home from school. They looked like modernistic elves, with bright-coloured rucksacks on their backs, and they were burbling brightly to each other as they climbed the hill to their homes above the town. They paused for a bit of gossip and leg-swinging at a bench beside the road, and when they got up to go one of them, meandering off by herself, chanced to leave her sunglasses on the bench. In a trice the other two, laughing and giggling, threw them on the ground and stamped them into pieces before my eyes, alternating kicks in the prettiest way.

  Lese-majesty

  ‘Yeah,’ said a woman loudly and complacently, stepping back from a china cabinet during our guided tour of the White House. ‘Just what I thought–chipped!’

  A hated man

  Soon after World War II a friend was driving me one day along an Oxfordshire lane when we saw a picturesque sight in front of us. A fine four-in-hand was running along at a spanking pace, driven by an elderly gentlemanly looking coachman on his high box. ‘D’you see the man driving it?’ said my host. ‘That’s Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the most hated Englishman alive.’

  ‘Bomber’ Harris! The man who had unleashed his vast fleets of thudding black aircraft, manned by crews from every corner of the old British Empire, to devastate half Germany and kill scores of thousands of German civilians! I stared rudely at him through our rear window, as we left those trotting horses behind, but he looked a jolly enough old fellow, up there behind the reins.

  America, America!

  I once came into Pier 86 on the liner United States, the fastest ever built, and I watched the faces of the passengers around me, waiting for the gangplank to open as the ship’s band subsided into a last medley of patriotism–‘America, America’, ‘Dixie’, ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and one or two stirring marches I failed to recognize. Trilly secretarial voices rang, as those grand old tunes reverberated, jewelled spectacles vibrated, stiletto heels tapped the deck; but the expressions on the passengers’ faces struck me as sad, as though the hum of the liner’s mechanisms, the blaring of those anthems as the vessel docked, were holding the voyagers for a moment in a lost American world–a world encapsulated there still between the decks of the great ship, that would dissipate the moment the gangplank doors were opened, and they returned to 46th Street.

  Responses on the road

  Driving through Vienna in a rented car, I slowed down uncertainly to decide upon my route. Instantly the driver in the car behind blasted his horn most rudely. I gave him a vulgar two-fingered sign which I would never have dreamed of using had I not recently learnt that it was a gesture devised by Welsh archers to demonstrate to opponents that their shooting fingers were intact. When the other car overtook me, its occupants both looked eagerly in my direction. The stout tight-buttoned horn-rimmed burgher at the wheel shook his jowls at me in affronted astonishment. His wife blew me a kiss.

  Widowhood

  For the jollier kind of American widow Los Angeles offers a cheerful refuge, and provides a bedrock, so to speak, upon which they can reconstruct their lives. There is a certain sameness to their appearance, in their bright blouses, leather jerkins, rather too tight slacks and rather too rakish sailor caps. They are bowed often with arthritis but resolutely jaunty of step, and to their attitudes there is a sprightly element of freedom. ‘Did you know,’ one such lady asked me, supposing me, I imagine, to be a bit lost for social satisfactions, ‘did you know that the telephone company offers a free tour every day of the week? My, that’s a rewarding way of spending an afternoon!’

  Moon men

  In the last years of Rhodesia, before it mutated into Zimbabwe, I sometimes had the feeling that its Europeans were being mutated by history, becoming some sort of new subspecies as they fruitlessly resisted the rise of black power. In Salisbury I sometimes took my lunch beside the hotel pool, and there was generally a group of young officers, on leave from their battle stations in the b
ush, having a swim or a beer on the terrace. Stripped to their trunks and sun-bleached hair, they seemed to lose all ethnic identity. Some were probably mercenaries: Portuguese, German, Afrikaner; most were doubtless expatriate Britons, subtly changed in posture and physique; all seemed to me specific not simply to the place, but to the time, to the circumstances, the historical prospect. They might have been moon men.

  Ethel in Egypt

  One evening I went to a salon presided over by one of the younger, richer and more cosmopolitan of the Cairo society ladies. The purpose was to present to the Cairo grand monde a celebrated clairvoyant of indeterminate Levantine origin, named–well, let us say Ethel. Ethel would judge character, tell fortunes, give semi-occult advice and accept confidences. The attendance was soignée: a couple of ambassadors’ wives, an Indian, a German, a few bangled Egyptian patricians. We were served coffee in very fragile cups, by a Berber in a tarboosh, and we sat on squashy sofas at spindly tables in a room above the Nile.

  Ethel was closeted on a balcony, and one by one the guests disappeared for consultations, taking their coffee cups with them. In the meantime the rest of us chatted. Did we know that G was almost certainly going to St Tropez with A? Was it really true that B was getting Omani money for his new hotel? Had we tried the chopped liver at the Hilton? What about F selling that awful house of his for a quarter of a million?

  From time to time another woman left for the confessional, but the returning devotees, I noticed, never seemed dismayed by Ethel’s predictions, and returned instantly, without so much as a mention of their brush with the occult, to our distinctly worldly exchange–‘Half a million, I heard–and surely it’s chopped kidneys?…’ But then Ethel, my hostess told me, seldom had unhappy premonitions. ‘Well, one would hardly expect her to, would one, actually in one’s own drawing room?’

  Birth of a taste

  I had disliked whisky all my life, but stopping to eat my corned beef sandwich in one of the most famous Scottish distillery areas, I felt it my duty to try once more. I went to a nearby pub and asked for a dram of the local water of life, to drink with my victuals on a bench in the square outside. The barmaid looked at me quizzically. ‘I’m not sure the law allows it, but seeing as you’re a visitor…’ Looking cautiously around her, she poured into my plastic mug a full measure of single malt whisky–one of the very best, she said, from a distillery just down the road. I concealed it in my bag as I left the inn, and turning at the door I saw her winking at me conspiratorially, as if I had poached a salmon. No constable intervened, though. No revenue man expostulated. Unwrapping my sandwich, there on the bench in the square I took a cautious swig of the whisky, and, dear God, I have never looked back.

  Hospitable cop

  I was a guest once at a Buckingham Palace reception for publishers and writers, and at the end of the evening, wishing to leave, I looked around for somebody to thank. Queen, princes, dukes and all seemed to have gone elsewhere, so I left anyway, and at the palace gates I found a policeman. ‘I was brought up,’ I told him, ‘to say thank you for having me when I’d been to a party, so as I can’t find the Queen or anybody to say it to, I’ll say it to you instead. Thank you very much for having me.’

  ‘Not at all, madam,’ he replied. ‘Come again.’

  A glimpse of power, 1950s

  For a glimpse of power, try the Bolshoi at Moscow, when some gigantic Russian epic is being furiously enacted, with rolls of kettle drums and clashes of armour, a mammoth chorus open-mouthed, a clutch of heroes swelling in the foreground, with a passage and repassage of knights, horses, serfs, a frenzy of conical helmets and chain mail, banners dramatically waving, flames issuing from a backcloth, smoke, flashing beacons, the orchestra in a quivering fortissimo, the conductor wiping his sweating bald head, the enormous audience gripping its seats or craning from the high gilded balconies above the chandelier–then, in the middle of it all, you will glance across your neighbour’s shoulder to the great state box in the centre: and there will be sitting the most powerful man on earth, looking bored and rather glazed, a slight sad smile playing around the corners of his mouth, his wife, in a bun and brown sagging dress, demure and attentive at his elbow. You need not wait for the last act. Go home and sleep it off.

  Another time, perhaps

  In the Faroe Islands I repeatedly ran into groups of traditionally dressed folk persons, buckled and aproned, on their way to or from festivals of one kind or another. ‘We have been telling rhymes in Klaksvik,’ one practitioner told me as we sat together on the deck of a ferry, a celestial scene of mountain and fjord streaming by. ‘Long rhymes?’ I ventured to ask, thinking I might be fortunate to have missed them. ‘Extremely long,’ he said with pride.

  At a Patagonian airfield

  When I was once hanging about an airfield in Patagonia, hoping to arrange a lift to the north, I noticed a small group of people, dressed apparently for après-ski, who seemed to dominate the waiting room with a kind of steely radiance. They looked very rich and very brassy and very thrusting. Their children were ill mannered but intensely vivacious, their women were gimlet eyed but seductive, their men had a feline Italian elegance to them; and unexpectedly, when I offered a smile in their direction, one and all suddenly, brilliantly, delightfully smiled back. I asked where these magical creatures were making for, and was answered in one short tingling word: ‘Rio!’

  Makings of a microcosm

  I did not want to be rude, but I could not help eyeing my neighbour with interest, for she seemed to me to have the makings of a microcosm. More than most cities, Stockholm projects two images–the one you have been led to expect and the one you discover for yourself–and this plump but not unalluring citizen, wearing a pink linen dress and a white straw hat, her eyes bluish but somehow glazed, her mastication rhythmic and her bosom calmly heaving to the flow of the salad–this lady of Stockholm, evocative partly of Chanel and partly of disinfectant, slipped into my preconceptions like a plug into a socket. She was eating alone, with a half bottle of Niersteiner and what appeared to be the financial page of Svenska Dagbladet. Her lunch was large but looked obscurely colourless, as though it had been bleached in some anti-fattening lotion. Her gaze now and then wandered from her victuals and paraded slowly, resting at last without excitement on somebody else’s pudding. Her expression was content without being joyous, and beneath her loose blonde curls, I told myself, all kinds of Swedish neuroses surely festered: anxieties of opulence, spinsterhood or free love, occupational frustrations and suicidal impulses. She seemed to express all that I expected of Stockholm, and when at last I engaged her in conversation, and boldly asked her what she did for a living, I could almost have hugged her in gratitude. ‘I am a juvenile social welfare worker,’ she replied with a sweet smile, taking a delicate last sip of the hock.

  The only place for him

  When the US Supreme Court ended racial segregation in American schools, all the simmering discontent of the white Southerners boiled over, and I spent the day in Atlanta listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrasebook of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me he was a senior police officer. They spend some time reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of niggers bashed and beaten in the streets; and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. ‘The only place for a nigger,’ said the manager with finality, ‘is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.’

  Flowers and the tribesmen

  Clumps of a rhododendron-like bush brightened the fresh meadows as we drove through the Qara tribal country of south-east Arabia, and I asked the Arab driver to stop while I jumped out of the truck to pick some blossoms.

  ‘What do you want them for?’ he asked when I returned with the flowers. ‘Are t
hey good for diseases?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I just thought they looked nice.’

  ‘So they do, so they do. But the Qara people eat them, for the stomach.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. The Qara people know everything about flowers and things. They are very strange people, like the animals. By Allah! They are very like the animals.’

  As if to bear him out we saw at that moment three strange fuzzy tribesmen standing on a bank beside the road, leather thongs around their foreheads, dark robes slung over their shoulders, daggers at their belts. My driver shouted them a ribald greeting. Two of them, with long, beautiful faces, did not respond, but simply stood there stiffly, like childish elocutionists waiting to perform; the third, a younger man, ventured to wave his short stick at us, and then, seeing that his companions remained impassive, lowered it shamefacedly as though guilty of some desperate solecism.

  When we had passed I leant out of the window to look back at them. There they were still, three straight, shy figures, holding their sticks, watching our progress fixedly.

  Uncle Henry and the planter

  The planter, fresh from a tussle with his tractor, had greasy hands and wore a toupee and an open-necked shirt. But like most Southern gentlemen he had a talent for hospitality, and soon we were sitting on the balustrade of his porch, sipping long cool drinks and looking out through the pines. The plantation had once extended to some 10,000 acres of cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes and corn, but was now whittled down to about 150 acres. He told me that he ran it with only one full-time employee. His children went to the local state school, his wife did the housework, and ‘The Street’, the double row of uniform cottages where the slaves used to live, was empty and tumbledown.