Over thirty years later, they were still convinced that the Georgian people would rise any day, throw off the Soviet yoke, and restore them to their palaces and oil wells. The jewels had lasted about five years—they had no taste for economizing—so after that, they took in paying guests. They had a contract with the Royal Navy, who sent them midshipmen and sub-lieutenants, whom they much favored because the Navy paid promptly and had manners.
Their flat was frequented by counts, dukes, and the occasional prince, who either drove taxis or appeared as artists or singers at the opera. They always appeared to be clearing up after a party or preparing for the next one.
At Easter they took me to High Mass at the extremely impressive Russian Orthodox cathedral, which was then followed by the father and mother of all parties. I was plied with incredibly sweet Russian Easter delicacies and a vodka that felt like an explosion in the pit of the stomach.
It had nothing to do with the stuff in a modern bottle shop. It was thick and viscous, and each slug had to be downed in a single gulp, accompanied by Christos voskressiya, or “Christ is risen.”
I never recall any formal lessons in Russian. I and the other three young Navy men simply had to pick it up by listening and asking questions. But I recall the princesses with affection. Those three weeks helped me to get O-Level Russian in the summer exams and, years later, to listen to Russians talking in East Berlin while pretending to understand not a word.
And the following year, in the summer of 1955, which was a very busy time, I would have need of their sofa.
A STEP NEARER TO THE STARS
It must have been a small advertisement in one of the flying magazines that I spent much time devouring, but I do not now recall which one. It introduced me to a new scheme being offered by the Royal Air Force—the concept of the RAF Flying Scholarship. The idea was that if you could pass all the tests, the RAF would pay for a young enthusiast to go to his local flying club and learn to fly to private pilot’s license level. Of course, I applied at once. That was in spring 1955.
The RAF had no intention of wasting its money subsidizing young men with defective eyesight or other flaws that meant they would never fly anyway. The point was to help eager youngsters develop the flying bug and later join up. The first thing that arrived at my parental home in Ashford was a small buff envelope requiring me to attend a thorough medical examination at RAF Hornchurch, a base in Essex. There was also a rail pass.
If I thought the tests would involve just a few minutes with a stethoscope on the chest or some taps to the kneecap, I was much mistaken. Hornchurch was a five-day residential course designed to pull you to pieces and see if the tiniest flaw could be detected. I arrived with a small suitcase, changed into boxer shorts and overalls, presuming myself to be impeccably fit, and then they got started.
For two days, it was just the physical. One after another, young applicants who were not there for the scholarship but, older than I was, were trying to get accepted for flying training, were sent home, disappointed. The medics and the opticians discovered color-blindness, lack of night vision, farsightedness, myopia, or some other eye defect that the applicant had lived with and never suspected.
Others had a shadow on the lungs, fallen arches in the feet, something wrong somewhere, something less than a hundred percent. Day three was dedicated to reflexes, reaction speed to emergencies, dexterity, hand-eye coordination. Day four was for initiative exercises. Two white lines on the parade ground to represent a chasm. Some poles, ropes, and an oil drum. Get the team safely over the gulf.
The last day was interviews in the morning, with time left over to go home in the afternoon. I kept quiet about the languages, for fear they would accept me but for the education branch or even intelligence. Three officers, two with wings on the chest. Bored stiff. All right, lad. Why do you want to fly?
For heaven’s sake. Why did I want to lose my virginity? Because it sounded fun and I was sixteen and life was racing by. But no humor, please. Not in front of a board of officers. So serious answers and an assurance that I had been mad about flying since being plonked into a Spitfire cockpit at the age of five. Several raised eyebrows and one amused grin. Several trick questions about modern fighter planes, which I could answer easily, because I had been studying them for years.
Yes, sir, I had been at Farnborough that day when John Derry, at the controls of the prototype de Havilland 110, had plunged into the hillside. No more grins; some serious sideways glances, but approving. Then dismissed. Cannot salute; no flat hat. But I would have one someday.
Five days later, another buff envelope. Report to RAF Kenley to be kitted out with a flying suit, boots, a leather helmet. Then start at Blue Bell Hill Flying Club, Rochester, in June. One technical problem: school started in May. I could do it, but I needed transport.
Dad came to the rescue again. He bought me a secondhand Douglas Vespa scooter. It was British-built, licensed from the Italian Vespa company, and it was a load of rubbish. It had a kick-start pedal and would cough for fifty kicks before sparking into life. Still, it was my first motorized transport. With a learner’s license and a red L-plate front and back, it was legal on the road. Dad ran me to Blue Bell Hill to get introduced and see what I would be learning on.
It was a silver Tiger Moth, a biplane like something out of the First World War, and the standard workhorse of flying schools back then. Open cockpit, a speaking tube to communicate with the instructor, wind-in-the-hair sort of stuff. Marvelous, intoxicating. The only problem was Tonbridge School. The authorities there had already made plain my passion for flying was juvenile madness. I would never get permission. So I got a shed instead.
Of course it was not on school grounds. It was down in Tonbridge town, on one of those small gardens called allotments, leased for a peppercorn rent by the municipality to those with no garden but who wished to raise their own vegetables. The kindly gardener allowed me to keep the Vespa in it, out of sight and out of the rain.
Back at Parkside for what I hoped would be my last term, I had no more exams to pass, so I was put down for GCE S Levels. The S stood for state scholarship, but it was a forlorn hope. State scholarships were means-tested, and my father could now afford university fees without state help, so it would never be awarded. But no one wanted me hanging idly around. Actually I had another exam in mind—my private pilot’s license. But I would not take that until August 26, the day after my seventeenth birthday. Still, I had thirty hours of prepaid flying tuition waiting for me up at Rochester and could certainly not wait for school to break up. So I amazed Parkside by becoming a cross-country runner.
Until then I had loathed cross-country running, usually awarded as a punishment for some misdemeanor, or practiced by those stringy youths who resembled stick insects. I was still short and stocky and would not start to shoot up until the next year. I regarded cross-country as pure misery. Yet I suddenly started volunteering for it, and not just the five-mile junior run but the eight-mile senior cross. My one condition: I would run alone.
So, twice a week I would don white shorts and a spotless T-shirt and jog out the gates to the street. It took fifteen minutes to get to the allotment shed, where I would put on the canvas flying suit, boots, and leather helmet. Thus disguised, I could putter past the school gates and out on the highway to Blue Bell Hill and its flying club.
After six hours’ dual instruction, I went solo and experienced the intoxication of flying free, high over the winding Medway, looking down on Rochester and its towering medieval cathedral. Up there I could roll and twist among the clouds, turning, climbing, diving, ripping off the helmet, keeping only the goggles to protect the eyes.
In my boyish imagination, I was over the fields of Flanders, circa 1916, in formation with Bishop, Ball, Mannock, and McCudden, with a cheery wave for the French aces Guynemer and Garros, hunting for the Germans Von Richthofen, Boelcke, and Immelmann. I had read all about them, researched
their stories, their victories, and, one by one, their deaths. By the end of school term, I had logged twenty-seven of my permitted thirty hours, saving three for the final tests at the end of August.
Parkside never solved the riddle of the cross-country running schoolboy. The bullying ebbed away, as there were now other new boys to persecute. The caning continued. I think I managed to collect seventy-four strokes from the rattan cane over my three and a half years, always administered to me in the bending position, my head under a table, protected only by thin pajamas.
I never contrived to develop those strange deviances so often attributed to the English, but only two things in their place: the ability to take pain in silence and a contempt for harsh and arbitrary authority.
Summer term ended in July 1955. Blue Bell Hill promised to welcome me back for the flying tests in late August. Meanwhile, one of my few mates at Parkside, John Gordon, and I decided to hitchhike from Newhaven on the Sussex coast across France to Ventimiglia on the Italian border, via the length of the Côte d’Azur. John was fifteen to my sixteen. We thought it might be an adventure. It was.
A LONG HIKE
Hitchhiking is rare nowadays, but back in 1955, for a youngster with no money, it was common. Middle-aged men, mindful of their own impecunious teenage years, would take pity on the figure by the roadside with right fist extended, thumb erect, slow down, pull over, and ask the face appearing in the passenger window where he was heading.
National Servicemen in their uniforms, heading home to Mum and Dad with a weekend pass or struggling back to camp, could usually expect some help. Most middle-aged men had once done it themselves. John Gordon and I, though we did not know it, had an even bigger advantage than a uniform.
John had an aunt who lived in Cooden, close to the Sussex coast and not far from Newhaven. There was a ferry across to Dieppe. I ran down to Cooden on the Vespa and the aunt took us to Newhaven the following morning for the first ferry. We had two return tickets and a very tiny budget.
We firmly expected to sleep rough in sheds, outbuildings, and even ditches, and eat the cheapest of foods, probably bread and cheese. We were in tough hiking boots, short khaki drill pants, knee-high socks, and canvas shirts. Those, plus a haversack. I had taken the precaution of tacking a Union Jack onto the back of my rucksack. We would march in single file, with me at the rear so that motorists coming up behind could see it clearly. It turned out to be the game changer.
By midmorning, we were out of the Dieppe ferry terminal and heading for the highway to Paris when a car swerved up behind, tooted, and a voice asked—in French, of course—where we were heading. I replied in French, and within seconds the haversacks were in the boot. John telescoped into the rear seat and I was beside the driver, answering his question as to how I spoke such fluent French. Then we learned the reason for the rapid pickup.
In 1944, only eleven years before our hiking jaunt, the Allied armies curved out of Normandy and proceeded to liberate France. The British and Canadians turned north for Holland and Belgium, passing through all of northern France. Anyone over twenty-five would clearly have remembered the German occupation and the liberation. It was the British flag that did it.
There were no motorways back then, just the usual Route Nationale, narrow and winding, with one traffic lane on each side and occasionally a central and pretty lethal overtaking lane, disputed by cars approaching each other at a hundred miles an hour. It was encouraging if the driver would stop looking sideways and keep his eyes on the road ahead. In three rapid lifts, I believe we made it to Paris ahead of the boat train.
Once in the city, we took the Metro and arrived unannounced at the flat of the Princesses Dadiani. Completely unfazed, as if teenage hitchhikers were always turning up at their door, the lovely ladies welcomed us in and gave us supper. At ten, I parked John on the sofa and went back into the night.
I had worked out that there was a very long haul from Paris south to Marseille and there was one way that, if it worked, would be a terrific way of covering the distance in a single day. Every day, thousands of trucks—big snorting rigs with trailers we would now call juggernauts—brought fruit and vegetables from the subtropical south, the Midi, to replenish the stomach of Paris. And then they went back empty.
The gigantic fresh-produce market they made for was in the district called Les Halles, long since moved to the outer suburbs. But then it was right at the heart of Paris, a square kilometer of sheds and warehouses, blazing with light and activity through the night, its bars, restaurants, and bistros the haunt of the workers and the social night owls. I began to inquire and had no luck.
I went from café to café, asking perfectly politely if anyone was a truck driver heading south in the morning. The answer was always no, until the proprietors chased me out for not spending anything. Then I got a tap on the shoulder from someone who had followed me out to the pavement.
It was a small and scruffy market worker, an Algerian, who said he had a friend who was exactly what I sought and who was sleeping at his small flat a few hundred yards away. I should follow him and he would lead me there. Like a fool, I fell for it.
The streets became narrower and dirtier, mere alleys between blocks of slum. Finally he led me through a door and up one flight of stairs. He unlocked his own bed-sitter and gestured me inside. The filthy little room was empty. I turned. He had closed the door and locked it. He gave me a snaggle-toothed smile and gestured at the grubby bed.
I reckoned there was not much point in calling for help. This was obviously not that kind of community. I shook my head. He gestured again, adding in French, “Pants down, over the bed.” I just said, “Non.” He ceased smiling, fumbled at his flies, and produced his penis. It was semi-tumescent. He repeated his instruction.
I am not homophobic but just have a personal aversion to sodomy. I repeated “Non” and then added, “I’m leaving.” Then he produced a knife. It was a lock knife that needed two hands to open it. The blade was curved; I assumed it was used mainly for cutting fruit. But it would do just as well on a human body.
By great good fortune, my father, several years before, when I used to camp out in the fields of Kent, had given me a hunting knife, horn-handled, with seven inches of Toledo-steel blade. It was for paunching and skinning rabbits brought down with my air rifle, for cutting twigs for the campfire, or trimming branches for a hide.
I was carrying it horizontally across the small of my back. I fumbled under my shirt. The Algerian thought I was loosening my belt. When the hunting knife came out, his eyes widened and he came forward.
There was a scuffle—quite short, really. A few seconds and it was over. I found myself in the doorway, the door open, my hand on the handle. The market porter’s knife was on the floor. He had sustained a long gash to the right bicep, about which he was making rather a fuss. In Arabic. I saw little point in waiting around in case he had friends elsewhere in the flophouse, so legged it down the stairs and out into the alley.
The incident was not entirely without benefit, because on my way back to the streetlights, I came across what I needed, a sort of elephants’ graveyard; row after row of parked juggernauts, waiting for the dawn. The drivers were saving their overnight allowances by bedding down in their cabs. I found one relieving himself against the rear wheel of his truck, and when he had finished, approached him with my problem. He thought it over.
“It’s not allowed,” he said. “Company policy, no hitchhikers. It’s more than my job’s worth.”
But again, luck cut in. He was from Marseille, which had never been occupied by the Germans. But his wife was from the north and her father had been in the Resistance in Amiens. He was in jail, destined for execution, when Group Captain Pickard led his Mosquitoes on the Amiens jail raid. They had ripped open the cell block with precision bombing and destroyed the outer wall. His father-in-law had escaped and was still alive.
“I’ll have to lock you in
for the whole trip,” he said. “If we are caught, you say you stowed away during the night while I slept. Agreed? OK, be back here at six.”
It was still dark at six, but the graveyard was slowly stirring. Our new friend cleared a space at the rear of the trailer, near the door, piling the empty crates further to the front to create a cubbyhole about eight feet by eight. Once John and I were curled up inside, he locked the doors and went to his cab. By six thirty, we were rolling.
There was a distinctive odor to the crates that had once contained his cargo. Melons. At seven, in the southern suburbs, the sun rose. By eight, we were out on the Route Nationale Eight, heading for Marseille, eleven hours away. By nine, it was getting hot; by ten, it was a small furnace. By eleven, the melon smell had become an overpowering stench. John was as white as a sheet and complaining of advancing nausea. By midday, he was on his knees by the door trying to deposit what remained of his Russian supper through the crack where the doors joined the floor. The stench of the melons joined that of human puke in a heady cocktail.
There was no way to contact the driver, way up front in his cabin. At one, he pulled into a roadside halt for fuel and lunch, but with other drivers milling around, he did not approach the trailer or let us out. After half an hour, he resumed the run south, but we had not a clue where we were and John was very sick indeed. He had ceased bringing up and was just moaning.
At first he thought he was going to die, and then feared he wouldn’t. I was lucky in having a fairly strong stomach, whether for open boats on an angry sea or journeys by road. And I had just spent June throwing a Tiger Moth all over the sky above Rochester. Our misery ended around six p.m., when the truck pulled onto a wayside lay-by and we were let out.
John retired to the verge to put his head in his hands. I produced a map of France from my haversack, and the driver pointed out where we were. South of Avignon, but north of Marseille. I thanked him profusely, we shook hands, and he left, presumably to head for his melon farm and a large bucket of disinfectant.