Pretty girl in crimson rose (8)

Pretty girl in crimson rose (8), a memoir of love, exile and crosswords, by Sandy Balfour, Atlantic Books, 2004.

A lovely phone call which made my day yesterday from a client who was especially pleased with a book he had ordered (Twelve Sonnets, by George Faludy, translated by Robin Skelton, Pharos Press, Victoria, British Columbia, 1983, one of 175 numbered copies, signed by the author and the translator). Hungarian poet, writer and translator Faludy is very much worth looking up. It had great emotional resonance for him, one of the sonnets having been read at a recent funeral for a friend. He also found it an object of great beauty. Certainly the book is very elegant typographically and in every other way. We got chatting and quickly discovered a mutual addiction to crosswords. I mentioned the book Two Girls, one on Each Knee (7), The Puzzling, Playful World of the Crossword, by Alan Connor, which he knew, and he mentioned this book, which I didn’t but immediately ordered.

From the first few chapters it seems a lyrical account of travels with fine attention to evocative detail and a playful love of the cruciverbalist’s pastime. At one point he starts filling in, in his mind, the grid formed by a tower block with only some of its lights on.

Already it has brought back memories which have not recurred for a while.

My brother and I used to love being taken to Harrods as children as a treat. I don’t think we or our mother ever actually bought anything, looking around was enough, especially on the top floor where the huge toy department was located. I remember ‘inventing’ for a school science project a self-propelling boat. I hadn’t discovered perpetual motion (it took me a while to work out why not) which consisted of a hollowed out polystyrene cube with a hole in the bottom at one end. All you had to do was fill it with water, gravity would push it through the hole and, hey presto, the boat would move forward. It was a little galling to see a stack of expensive plastic versions on sale at Harrods. Perhaps I should have patented it.

For the duration of one Christmas holiday from university I worked at Harrods in the food department. They took on a lot of temporary staff to cope with the seasonal rush. My and various others’ jobs consisted for the most part of delivering Christmas puddings to the food hall. One of Harrods secrets is that it is as large underground as above, as deep as it is tall – there are at least six floors below ground, maybe seven. We would descend in large, insalubrious lifts and load up unwieldy, heavy trolleys with Christmas puddings. Then back up to the surface to push through the crowds to the relevant counter. All day. I didn’t mind it but the hours were long. Ten hours a day I think on minimum wage, which included two hours ‘compulsory overtime’ at the normal rate. I am not sure how they got away with that. If you were off sick, you simply didn’t get paid. After a couple of weeks I realised that I was never seeing daylight except on Sundays. Harrods’ windows are not to be seen from inside and I arrived before sunrise and left after sunset.

What made it tolerable was the colourful cast of characters doing the same work, as at Sandy Balfour’s pizza place. Three of them I can picture very clearly. There was Jack (I think), friendly, a smiley, cheeky, salt of the earth type. He had to scrape around every morning to find his bus fare and yet was, mysteriously, eating caviar, truffles and other fine foods for dinner every evening. Security was pretty tight but luckily for him he was never searched. Then there was a softly-spoken African guy whose name or country of birth I cannot remember. He had an easy, quiet charm. I asked him what he was doing aside from this menial job. “I am studying for my degree in immunology”. Then there was Jonathan, who became a close and long-term friend. He was I suppose my first openly gay friend, a subject on which he was always supremely witty (“Oh I’ve been terrible, it was twins last week.”) We used to go to the cinema together for years afterwards. He bought me a pastel blue jacket for my 21st birthday. Suddenly and sadly I stopped hearing from him.

Another man was a rumbunctious, highly affable character. We were allowed to eat produce stored down below as long as it was broken. “Anyone hungry?” he would ask at break times, before picking up a tin of shortbread and hurling it to the floor. “That looks pretty broken to me.” We had fun. Some of the food, such as the Christmas cakes, were stored uncovered, prey to the droppings of the ever present pigeons who had somehow found their way in and down. I trust they have improved their hygiene since. One other character stands out – our supervisor, a sort of camp version of Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served? He pretended to be strict, arch and forbidding but he was far too nice to keep up the charade and was a softy at heart.

I once worked for a temp agency which sent me out to be a washer-up at various canteens in financial institutions in the City of London. Again I met some wonderful people but the work was pretty grim. As the temp for the day I tended to end up with the worst jobs (scouring out huge vats of custard for example remains vivid in my mind). I worked as hard and efficiently as possible which was not popular with the permanent staff and when I had pointlessly polished hundreds of glasses in record time the manager just told me to do it again. Portions had to be identical he told me. If one of them gets more peas than anyone else they’ll make a terrible fuss. Next time I was at the agency I was told someone had complained that I was “a bit slow”.

Balfour’s tales of hitchhiking also prompted memories. I have never hitchhiked although I used to be happy to pick people up. I like staying in all-inclusive resorts as much as I would like to go on a cruise, which is not at all. We have stayed in one in Cape Verde which was an exception, but in Fiji, where it is pretty much the only real option, we felt we could have been anywhere. The only interactions with the people who actually live there are with those who are waiting on you, save for a contrived visit to a contrived village where the tribal chief was too busy watching football to bother with us (and why should he?) I did rather like the soporific drink, kava, the consumption of which is taken quite seriously.

Even once we had children we would book somewhere to stay for the first night or two only and then wing it. Before the children we would go away in the winter months for three weeks at a time to somewhere hot. Then the rigidity of the school holidays kicked in. The flights might have cost more to travel further but everything else was cheap. I always think what if you end up somewhere you don’t like if you are fully booked in? You are trapped, you can’t move on. Things did go awry occasionally. I once jumped off a train in India as it was moving out of the station (it was the wrong train) and my head and the platform made memorable contact, and my wife and I once got off a boat in Indonesia (I am not sure now which island it was) and in the absence of any other possibilities started walking in the only available direction. There was nothing for miles, as far as we could see. We were very lucky (or perhaps the grapevine did its work) to be picked up by a hotel owner who took us to his lovely place on a lake. It was the nearest building to where we had landed but it was many miles from it. We would really have struggled with our rucksacks, in the heat, with no idea of where we were going. But without taking some risks, there is no serendipity.

In a small coastal village in Turkey we could find absolutely no one who understood English (and we had no Turkish apart from the prerequisites please, thank you, sorry and so on which are so little trouble to learn but get you so far). We were introduced to the local ‘fixer’ who did speak English and we explained that we wanted to hire a car to drive up to Cappadocia. He took us outside his restaurant and pointed to his taxi. “There you are.” “But we can’t take that, it’s a taxi,” I protested. “Not any more,” he said, unscrewing the taxi light from the top of the vehicle. It broke down almost immediately but he sent someone out to fix it and all was well. We came very, very close to being mown down by a juggernaut whilst trying to overtake one of an endless procession of lorries – the car was seriously underpowered. At one point we found ourselves entirely alone on a motorway, wondering why there was no traffic in either direction, when we realised that it was still under construction and not actually yet open. We had promised our fixer not to tell anyone that we had hired the car from him or that it was usually a taxi, but when stopped by armed soldiers, to our apprehension, we were quickly waved on once they realised we were English. I loved Turkey then, much has changed now. The food is arguably the best in the world and the people perhaps the most hospitable and kind. Istanbul is a city like no other and Kaş and Kalkan were little fishing villages rather than the tourist traps they are now with new apartments everywhere, built so close together that, as my father used to say, you can barely get a cigarette paper between them. Back then, it was often assumed that we were German which many visitors were. Attitudes softened immediately when they realised we were not, a consequence of Germany’s poor treatment of their Gastarbeiter.

Turkey was also the scene of my first encounter with a dolphin, purely by chance, on a boat trip. It had not been a great day in spite of the captain’s best efforts – the small boat kept breaking down and the diesel fumes were impossible to ignore. But then as the sun began to set, the moon already bright in the sky, a fin appeared. I thought it was a shark. The dolphin followed us most of the way back, breaching often, enjoying the bow wave, and everything became magical. Also, by the time we got back to the harbour, everyone, including the captain, was completely drunk on raki.

Kaş and Kalkan do still have their charms, these being from 2019.

These are the poor cows I made a fuss about in Animal Trust:

I could not help myself on holiday in Turkey, visiting the ruins at Patara, which have, to my mind, been rather spoilt by the addition of modern reproductions to the existing architecture. A brand new, sandstone coloured Ionic capital on an original dark grey column jars the senses and deprives the imagination. My daughter noticed a number of cows in nearby fields who seemed to have no access to water in the blistering (thirty-six degrees and rising) heat. I could see metal water troughs in the distance, but even if they were regularly topped up, the cows had chains and ropes around their necks. I approached the ticket lady whose manner had already been pretty brusque, who passed me over to the lady who ran the shop. I expressed my concerns. She was instantly aggressive, so I knew I was about to be lied to. “Of course they have access to water. They are well looked after.” “Really? But they have ropes and chains around them, are they not tethered to the ground?” “They are fine. They have access to water.” I walked across the field to check. They were indeed all anchored to the same spot. I returned and pointed this out, asking who owned them. She waved her hand in the direction of a run-down neighbouring farm. “What is the address of that farm please?” “I don’t know.” “But it’s next door … Well, I will be reporting it, that’s for sure.” She laughed in my face. I did go as far as to research relevant organisations in Turkey and find out that PETA unfortunately has no one on the ground there, but ultimately there was very little I or anyone else could do. In contrast, there were few cafés or shops which did not put out bowls of food and water for the presumably feral or stray cat and dog populations. An Alsatian, belonging to no one as far as I could tell, jumped into the sea by a watersports centre as I watched and swam out to an inflatable raft where he was welcomed and helped on board. Happening to be at the same place at the same time a few days later, I saw him do exactly the same again. A daily pleasure then. Animals do seem to like their routines. There always seems to be something – I have tried but no doubt failed to shame those people who have tried to sell ivory to me, and an invitation to a cockfight in Bali incensed me of course.

A beautiful Striped Hawk-moth.

Lovely sunsets.

The children had a wonderful time but we mostly regretted how things had developed over fifteen years. We didn’t recognise the place when we arrived. This is also from Animal Trust:

Some of the best snorkelling of my life was in Kaş. I can remember as though it were yesterday being in the middle of a massive ball of tiny, sparkling silver fish. When I reached out a hand, a hand-shaped hole appeared in the shoal, then, when I withdrew it, the sphere re-formed, like a murmuration of starlings. The colours of the coral and fish were dazzling in their variety, the coastal waters were teeming with life. It was in Turkey too that I had magical encounters with two huge sea turtles, quite by chance and good fortune, one of whom I was able to swim with for quite a distance before he went off into the vastness.

On the more recent visit, having promised some of the finest snorkelling the world had to offer, my children were as dismayed as I was to discover that the sea is now lifeless, apart from some jellyfish with a very painful sting. The sea bed was grey and barren, resembling a moonscape. We do, in our numbers, seem to wreak environmental havoc and destruction wherever we go.

It’s “rebelled”, by the way.