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.
‘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.
It was the year I was commissioned to write a history of exploration* for what seemed at that time a gigantic fee of £12,000, with the condition that the book had to be delivered in six months and that no royalties would be paid until 125,000 copies had been sold. A prodigious number for a book with a selling price at that time of £10.50. Sales actually came close to this figure, but then, mysteriously, stopped.
At the same time I was asked to become the principal figure in a BBC film, one of a series entitled One Pair of Eyes, the intention of which, I was told, was to find out what made me tick.
As if all this was not enough to contend with, Wanda decided that this was an appropriate moment to sell our house in Wimbledon, which meant that until we bought another one, so far as Britain was concerned, we would be homeless.
The house, a pretty, early-Victorian one, was hidden away in a cul-de-sac called Sunnyside on the slopes of Wimbledon Hill, and she had surprisingly little difficulty in selling it. There were two contenders, but only one of them was seriously interested. The eventual buyer was at that time a professional circus clown. It was Wimbledon Week when he came to see it and the spiraea was in full flower. The garden looked wonderful.
Suddenly, for the first time in our joint lives, we enjoyed the sensation of being quite well off. We extinguished our overdraft and, bubbling with euphoria, left the Midland Bank which had made our life a misery for so many years, to carry on without us.
The house was crammed from top to bottom with all the loot and junk accumulated in more than twenty years of travel: primitive paintings, among them some from Haiti, Ethiopia, Bali, the shores of the Mediterranean and the Côte d’lvoire. One of them, a spirited impression of the Turkish city of Bursa, in the manner of Osbert Lancaster, was painted in 1902 on a piece of linoleum. There was also a fine Aboriginal painting on bark, from Van Diemen’s Land, of an emu.
And there were kilims, flat weave rugs made by the Yürük nomads during their wanderings on and off the high Anatolian plateau, with which they used to cover the floors of their tents.
And there was the entire Ordnance Survey of Great Britain at one inch to the mile, all 189 sheets of it mounted on canvas. And about 2,000 books, including dozens of Murray and Baedeker guides; and the entire Observer Colour Magazine from its inception in 1963; and all the manuscripts of my books that I should have thrown away but hadn’t; and a complete set of the 1879 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in a demountable bookcase (useful if one needed to consult it in the wilderness while on yak’s back, all thirty-five volumes of it).
And there were bellows cameras with shutters that made a noise like the Traitor’s Gate being slammed shut when they were fired off; and there were models of the sort of ships and boats I had sailed or rowed in – a curragh from the Arran Islands, oolaks and panswais from the Ganges, a four-masted Cape Horn sailing ship, a caïque from Ruad, the Syrian island in the Eastern Mediterranean on which they are still built to this day.
There was a large, empty tin of what had contained a kilo of Malossol caviar – the two halves of the tin held together by what looked like the inner tube of a car tyre – which I had brought from Leningrad to Moscow on New Year’s Day 1965, and from Moscow to the Hook of Holland stuck on the front of a succession of steam engines in order to stop it going off in what were tropically heated carriages.
And there was a black felt suit with matching double-breasted waistcoat, so thick that it could stand up without anyone in it. It had been made for me by a Bulgarian tailor who had his premises in one of the sinister, labyrinthine lanes between what was then the Old Fishmarket by the Galata Bridge in Istanbul – a suit I never wore.
And there were cricket bats steeped in linseed oil which I hadn’t used for so many years that I had forgotten how to play the game; and a pair of sculls belonging to my father that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of; and a couple of pairs of cross-country running shoes fitted with spikes which I didn’t think I was going to need while writing a history of discovery,