Letter 2

Oh dear, chapter two has arrived. Chapter one ended a bit abruptly I thought but I just couldn’t think of what else to write about. I’m sure that by the end of this chapter I will be such an experienced writer that the transition to chapter three will be much smoother. I did think about including the scenes of incest and sodomy we witnessed one day when we were trekking along a jungle trail in the middle of the island. Unfortunately though, I just couldn’t bring myself to write about such depravity so you’ll just have to imagine it. Suffice it to say that it was overt in the extreme and it had us fascinated. It fascinated another onlooker too! I nudged Alicja,

“look over there” he’s having a wank”

“Where, where, where?”

“To the left of the big tree with the creepers”

“He’s not is he, d’you think that’s his dick?”

“What else would it be, a tumor? It’d have to be a bloody itchy one too if he’s got to scratch it like that”

We watched the monkeys for another five minutes or so until a much bigger one came along and chased the others off. Very entertaining it was though and I went back the next day at the same time with the video camera but there was no repeat performance. The jungle was still. I remember when my father caught me masturbating. He told me what every boy’s Dad of that era told his son, that I’d go blind. I looked at Tugger Wilson at school, the next day and he had glasses. That’ll do me, I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. Poor old Dad. He’s been gone a long time…he should be there by now. I’ll always remember his last words “Fuck, a Bus, AAAAARGH!!!” He taught me to swim did Dad – getting out of the sack was the hard part.

Two days after the monkey peep show our stay on the island came to an end and although I wanted to get on with our trip I was sorry to leave. It was such a good place that I’d have liked to have stayed until I got fed up with it. We boarded a tiny plane on a grass runway in what was no more than a clearing in the jungle. The captain announced that it was the shortest runway in Asia and I believed him because I remember landing on it. It had frightened the hell out of me as the angle of descent was so steep that I realized why the word kamikaze in Japanese translates to “divine wind”. I was heading for the next stage past wind although there would have been nothing too divine about it.

But now we were taking off and I was confident that the pilot knew what he was about. Even so we rushed towards the thick green wall of jungle at an alarming rate and didn’t clear the trees by much as we headed skywards pressed back in the seats. In no time we were up aloft and heading for Kaula Lumpur where we would catch our plane to Heathrow.The view from the plane window was stunning. The waters of the South China Sea were so clear that we could see that Tioman and its accompanying islands were just the tops of mountains rising up from the ocean floor. In Tioman's case the whole mountain from its base on the seabed could be seen, the island being just the green summit encircled by a ring of sandy beach where it joined the water.

We landed at Kuala Lumpur Airport with 10 hours to spare before catching our connecting flight so we caught a taxi to the city for a look around. We were hoping to find a traditional Asian bazaar in Kuala Lumpur but its modernity surprised us. Like Singapore the city is full of up to the minute clothes, perfume and jewelry shops. None of that interested us so we found a large supermarket to walk around in.

I loved it. Much more fun than perfume shops and the smells were better. We cruised the shelves and counters looking at all the different spices on sale, picked up things we’d never seen before and felt them and smelled them and then we came to a wall of fish tanks. The whole wall was taken up by some twenty or so of these tanks, all full of brightly colored tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and so we stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium, which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been in too much of a hurry to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and really did have a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.

Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of our nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last throes.

I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is the plural fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? Like…if you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were still attached and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you. I’d never thought about it before but I will in future – every time I sprinkle the salt and vinegar on one.

Oh yes, where was I? Kuala Lumpur wasn’t it? Well, that’s all about Kuala Lumpur because I lost my notes. Our flight from K.L to England was with Royal Jordanian Airlines and I must say that we weren't looking forward to it after hearing various stories about Arab airlines in the past from friends. Royal Jordanian however, offered the cheapest fares because, according to the travel agent, many Westerners are scared to use them. By this we presumed he meant the sort of people with missile allergies and so forth but he told us that it was because Arab airlines "tend to be noisy" - so we booked at once.

At the airport as we started to queue up for boarding we began to see what the travel agent was getting at. There were men with entourages of six or seven accompanying ladies loaded down with transistor radios, portable televisions and one with a huge, white plastic hippopotamus measuring about a meter in height. There was arguing, laughing, joking, smiling, yelling, screaming and loud discordant Arabic, almost musical, sounds coming from the transistor radios. I smiled at the ladies, the men scowled at me and I looked away. We had to spend 45 minutes in the queue with me trying not to look at any of the Arab ladies while two very serious looking security guards went through all the hand luggage in microscopic detail. The lady directly in front of me looked like a cross between a Dalek and a post box. She was completely covered in a bright red gown and headscarf and there was a horizontal slot in the front of her matching red veil.

When it was our turn to front up to the security guards things began to look decidedly nasty as I refused to let my films go through the X-ray machine. They kept pointing to the "film safe" sticker on the front of the machine and I tried to explain that the effect of one x-ray machine was OK but the films had already been through two previous machines and the effect was cumulative. I stood my ground and won the day but they did seem intimidating and they removed the batteries from my camera. I didn’t mind about the camera batteries as the last thing I wanted to do was point the camera at one of the Daleks and end up buried under a whole load of Royal Jordanians. Once we took off things improved considerably. We didn't hear a peep out of the Jordanians and we both agreed that it was the best airline we'd ever used. The cabin crew were magnificent, nothing was too much trouble and the food was really cool. The coffee was hot though.

Part of the cheap air fare deal was that we would have to stop over in Aman (the capital of Royal Jordania) for six hours and we envisaged having to lay around on airport seats. But when we arrived we were issued with transit visas and whisked off to a palatial hotel some five kilometers from the airport, given a free breakfast and a double room with a shower. A wake up call was all part of the service and we left on the last leg feeling completely refreshed. This time we had some English hostesses on board and the difference was all too evident. Pained expressions, a feeling that everything was too much trouble and they were cold, terribly cold. I thought they should all have had second vaginas fitted to go with their holier than though attitudes. We couldn't help but notice the contrast between them and the Jordanian girls, who quickly got to know their passengers, had a laugh and a joke with them and exuded personality.

Upon disembarking at Heathrow, a smiling young Royal Jordanian girl was waiting at the door with a tray containing the radios and camera batteries taken from the passengers at Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately somebody in front of us had already taken mine. Losing a couple of camera batteries was no big deal so we went down to the luggage retrieval roundabout to pick up our suitcases and waited until all the luggage and passengers had gone. There was only one suitcase left - it was identical to mine - and it didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened. But where was he, the silly sod who'd taken mine? So there we were in the airport lounge at Heathrow with only the tracksuit I stood up in, no spare underpants and storm raging outside the doors - welcome to England.

We were picked up by my sister Pauline and her husband Jack and taken to their farm near Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds in a draughty Land Rover in freezing temperatures. I’d never met Jack and on the way I eyed him up and down to see if any of his clothes would fit me. Only the socks, I thought. It was a Sunday. The shops were shut. I couldn’t go out and buy clothes and by the time we arrived at the farm two small lumps had appeared behind my ears. I was delighted - the disappearance of my testicles had been giving me cause for concern.

We'd only been in the house for a few minutes when we had a telephone call from a man at Luton airport. He had my suitcase and was organizing a courier to send it over to us. I was thankful that Alicja had gone to so much trouble with the labeling of our luggage. She’d thought to include Pauline's telephone number. I hadn’t seen my sister since she moved to the Cotswolds. The whole area was like one great big model village, the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Quaint little stone houses with little stone walls dividing the fields, little old ladies in little quilted polyester jackets and little old Agatha Christie tea shops serving little scones with strawberry jam in little dollops from little spoons.

Chipping Norton, I’m sure, is the little old lady center of Great Britain. The little old ladies all have the same white permed hair and blue framed glasses and it's impossible to tell one from another, just as if they all came out of a mould in a Terry Gilliam cartoon. There's an inordinate number of them and they all seem to congregate in Chipping Norton which, but for the blue and white colors, from the air resembles a penguin rookery. It also seemed to be the quilted polyester clothing center of the world. It’s just as if Chairman Mao had decreed that everyone over the age of forty must wear quilted polyester jackets. And on warmer days, quilted polyester sleeveless waistcoats.

I was asked to bring along the video camera to film a fiftieth wedding anniversary which Pauline had been seconded to organize in the village hall. There were sausage rolls and sandwiches, cups of tea and fairy cakes and hordes of little old ladies engaged in a sort of little old ladies feeding frenzy. The highlight of the evening was the Freddie Dix dance band, fresh out of retirement just for the occasion. The Freddie Dix dance band was fresh out of everything, wind, music, tune, you name it. Apparently they used to play at all the local dances when all these septuagenarians were young and, as if that wasn't enough, they had the original vocalist with them.

She was seventy-five if she was a day and I'd put her at around fourteen stone (if indeed a fourteen stone old time music hall vocalist is putable anywhere). Anyway, we'd never heard anything remotely approaching the vocal gymnastics of this musical matriarch, who, it seemed, had a set of bagpipes built into her vocal chords. She was out of tune and, most of the time, was singing a different tune to the band who were also out of tune. Meanwhile, I was supposed to video the whole proceedings without laughing - a task I just wasn't up to. At the interlude the Chipping Norton Male Voice Choir entertained us (or at least that was presumably their intention) with some interminable funeral dirge and I think that, all in all, it was probably the most comprehensive assault on our ear drums to date.

So how does one go about filming an event like this? I filmed Freddie Dix and his septuagenarian syncopaters. I filmed each table of little old ladies and little old men gumming the crusts off little triangular sandwiches. I filmed the people preparing the sandwiches, Freddie Dix again then all the people at the tables again and I still hadn't taken up 15 minutes of video film. Only the occasional foot tapping loosely under a table served to remind us that we were not at the Chipping Norton annual taxidermy exhibition.

Then, suddenly, it was all over well before I thought it had started and they all left the hall in one great seething mass of brown and blue polyester like a Barry Manilow audience at a working mans club upon being told that the meat and potato pies were now being served at the bar. We stood at the door and watched them as they moved in a wave up the street like a tsunami full of surfing lemmings or, perhaps, an outback Australian mice plague. And suddenly, silently they were gone. We had intended to present the happy couple with the video tape at the end of the party but decided to watch it ourselves first and edit out the unkind remarks made by one of the lady sandwich makers concerning the musical dexterity, or lack thereof, of Freddie Dix's vocalist. "When Fred 'an me wus first wed we'm used to live on a pig farm down Rollright way 'an we 'eard a racket like that'n evry time they filled the bluddy troff."

For the past fifteen years my sister Pauline has worked with mentally handicapped adults and really enjoyed it. Like many people who adopt similar professions she finds it totally fulfilling rather than frustrating and enjoys the company of her patients. She sometimes takes them home to the farm at weekends and she organizes all sorts of outings for them. She tells the most hilarious stories about some of the things which go wrong on these excursions and I have asked her to write a book on the subject but she's totally involved in the work and never has the time.

She told me how last year she took a group of fifteen to London’s Hyde Park where they were all intrigued by a man who was feeding the birds and was covered from head to foot in sparrows. Upon seeing Pauline's charges so intently watching him, he lined them all up alongside each other and gave them each a piece of stale bread so that they could attract the birds too. When he got to the end of the line handing out the bread he turned around with a smile on his face. The smile quickly faded. The bread had all gone - they'd eaten it.

On another occasion, she took them all to the Barbican Centre and they had to go up to the first floor. It wasn't until she stepped off of the escalator at the other end that she realized that none of them had ever been on an escalator before in their lives. The first two reached the top and fell over and the next two fell on top of them. The next two fell on top of them again and still they kept coming in waves, all bolt upright like shop dummies, until they were all piled up in a great screaming heap blocking the escalator.

Of course, when it came to going down again there was no way they'd get back on the escalator and there were no stairs. In the end, they had to open up the fire escape and let them walk down. This was something which the authorities were reluctant to do because there was an IRA bomb threat on the place and they had to arrange security from the police department first. Meanwhile Pauline's charges wanted to use the toilet, which they couldn't do because the toilets were on the ground floor.

One of Pauline’s patients, Andrew, a man in his early thirties, was a kleptomaniac and even though she always kept an eye on him she would still find all sorts of things hidden in his room after each outing. She'd long since given up on trying to modify what was most obviously an incurable condition in Andrew. Before taking her clients on outings in the village Pauline would telephone building societies and banks and explain that this man had a need to steal things and that she'd be taking them all on a walk around town the next day. Could they perhaps drop in and say hello to the staff behind the counters? The managers of these establishments were, without exception, most understanding and would place out of date free brochures on the counters for Andrew to steal. The manager of one bank used to stand at the door as they all left and he’d hand out brochures to them all. Andrew would be most upset when this happened as he’d gone to the trouble of stealing his share when they first walked in.

Andrew was well aware of his condition but just couldn't help himself and after each outing would present himself to Pauline to be searched. Pauline and Jack had moved house shortly before we arrived and there was a truck load of unwanted odds and ends at their old house which Pauline thought would come in useful at work and so took the works minibus and four of her patients, including Andrew, to collect them. As they left the house and prepared to board the minibus Pauline began her routine search of Andrew but upon putting her hand in his right hand trouser pocket she came into contact with something warm and clammy. She recoiled with a start and told him off - he smiled weakly and produced a sausage which he'd stolen from the fridge.

It was good to be in England again after such a long absence. There were so many things about the place which I'd forgotten - the pubs, the humor, the lush green of the countryside. Even so, I couldn't help thinking that a large, daily dose of sunshine would do the place the World of good. England is so well looked after, everything is so neat and cared for, but without that Germanic sort of sterility and thoroughness. The hedges in the Cotswolds are all neatly cut, the grass at the sides of the roads is kept down and people look after their gardens and do things purely for decorations sake. A nation of analy retentive manicurists on a grand scale.

In accordance with our plan it was soon time to start looking for a left hand drive minibus and we spent two weeks scanning the papers and making phone calls but there was nothing suitable to be had so we decided to head for Belgium where, the guide books said, they were easy to find and cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. Before leaving England I rang the Belgian consulate and they mailed me the addresses of four large car parks where pre abused minibuses and vans were bought and sold privately on Sundays. At last we knew where to go. Not being able to find a van in England had been something of a disappointment mainly because we had so much luggage with us. We’d sent two suitcases ahead of us from Australia and a heavy box of tools which were much cheaper to send than to buy again in England.

We booked tickets on a bus and hovercraft service and were puzzled to find that it cost less to go to Belgium from Chipping Norton than to go by train up to London and back in the rush hour. The trip across the channel was uneventful and the landing was unexpectedly smooth. The hovercraft travels at quite a lick and doesn’t slow down much as it approaches the land. From my position in the front of the craft it was disconcerting to see the land looming up so fast and the hovercraft still going at full speed. I braced for the bump but nothing happened as it glided smoothly up the beach. We eventually got off the bus in Brussels with four suitcases, a tool box and two big bags. In all it weighed in excess of 100 kilos - practically all we thought we'd need for a trip of approximately a year's duration. I had already pre booked into a youth hostel, which, as it turned out, was less than a hundred meters away but at the time, we didn't know it.

We couldn't possibly carry all the luggage any distance so we looked around for a taxi. The driver and I had a difficult job fitting everything into the car and when we eventually sat inside and gave him the address, he was far from happy at putting in so much effort for such a short trip. He threw his arms up in the air and uttered what I took to be a few run of the mill Belgian curses and we drove just up the road and stopped outside the Jacques Brell Youth Hostel. We unloaded, paid him and he spat on the ground at Alicja's feet and left blaming us for his having lost his place in the taxi rank for nothing.

We registered at the hostel and received a room on the fifth floor which normally would have been nothing to bother about but in this case the lift had broken down and we had to carry over a hundred kilo's of baggage up the stairs. Nothing daunted we got up early the next day, bought a newspaper and went off to look for a van - and had the camera stolen while we were reading the newspaper on a railway station bench. It all happened in a few seconds and we were doubly annoyed because we'd only had it for six weeks and it had been bought especially for the trip. Needless to say, it wasn't insured and the police couldn't have given a damn.

We wandered the streets of Brussels in the rain for 4 days looking for a van, both catching extremely heavy colds or the flu, or something equally nasty, in the process but found nothing remotely suitable. We'd been told that Brussels was the cheapest place in Europe to buy a car and it's true that the prices were incredibly low but the availability of vans was just about zilch. As for the Belgian Consulate's four addresses - they were all two years out of date. Brussels was not a happy experience for us and everything was very expensive, especially eating, but it certainly is a beautiful city with a large square in the center called The Grand Place. The architecture and atmosphere have to be seen and felt, you can't describe it. The buildings around the square, the town hall, the cathedral etc. were all built in the 1600's and are so well preserved and maintained that it was hard to believe that they were anywhere near that old. Ornate Gargoyles were everywhere and lots of Turkish people - don't know why I thought of Turkish people after typing gargoyles? Some of my best friends are gargoyles - honestly.

Anyway, according to our guide book, Victor Hugo is supposed to have said that Brussels had the best city square in all of Europe, but then again, I don't suppose he had his camera nicked, caught the flu and had a taxi driver spit at his feet while he was there. Brussels has one area of narrow cobbled streets with fish restaurants on either side where the rich people and those on EEC expense accounts sit and eat dinner in the evenings. The displays of seafood outside the restaurants were nothing short of spectacular and should be classified as an art form in their own right. None of your Kuala Lumpur style whack its head off with an axe and shove it in a bag here. No, these fish had all been dispatched by slow suffocation.

We wandered up and down looking in restaurant windows at overweight, balding, middle aged Euro civil servants accompanied by tall, beautiful, long haired, blond women eating their beautiful food and drinking their expensive wines and it made us hungry. So we found a Lebanese take away food stall run by a short, fat, greasy haired, unshaven, Lebanese gentleman with a wart on his nose and a scar cheek, ordered a sharwarma (the cheapest thing on his menu) and went to bed back at the youth hostel with a packet of flu' tablets.

Unable to find the minibus of our dreams after ten rainy, influenza packed days in Brussels, we caught the train to Germany where a friendly, English speaking chemist told us that we hadn't been taking flu' tablets at all but something for allergies. We got off at Frankfurt (on Main) after a very pleasant ride and everything, for some reason, immediately felt better than Brussels. For one thing all the road signs were in one language we didn’t understand. This, in stark contrast to Belgium where they were in both Flemish and French (two languages we didn’t understand) and quite frequently one’s map is in one language whilst the name of the street you are looking for is in the other.

The first thing we did was to put the luggage into the railway station safety lockup so that we had a reasonable degree of mobility. Then, with "Lets Go Europe" in hand (a great publication) we chose a cheap hotel and telephoned them. “Yah vee godda room vor vive niyts” he said and so ve godda taxi unt vent zere. It was called The Pension Lohman and was a spotlessly clean no frills guest house in Stuttgartner Strasse just 3 minutes from the station and the prices were ridiculously low. Herr Lohman, the proprietor, helped us a lot, reading the classified ad's in the paper for us and telephoning people who had vans for sale, advising us on prices and telling us what trains to catch to get to places. All told he probably saved us a week's van hunting time.

In the evenings he regaled us with stories about when he was a young man in Hitler's army on the Russian front. He was most careful to point out that he was in a green uniform not a brown one. I didn't know what he meant but I pretended I did. Maybe the extra nasty SS Nazi types were dressed in brown? He told me at breakfast one morning that he had only just met his wife when “I levt her behind to go to ze front” - at least I think that was how it was meant. However, as I didn't get a glimpse of her behind I couldn't assess how big a loss this would have been to him at the time. Time had, however, taken its toll on her front.

When we told him that we would be going through East Germany he told us how he happened to end up on the Western side of the Berlin Wall. He lived with his family in East Berlin and managed to get himself a job interview in Frankfurt. He attended the interview and stayed the night with relatives, returning home on the evening of the following day. It was too late. The wall was already in place and he was cut off from his family. It took him almost a year of writing letters before he finally received a reply from his brother but he eventually established regular contact and has been sending them a monthly remittance ever since. "Only forty marks you understand. It's nothing to me but a fortune to them and if they knew how well I was doing they probably think I was stingy."

We enjoyed Frankfurt, it was clean and tidy, there were some good walks to be had down by the river and it had a palmengarten - an enormous building containing all kinds of palm trees and tropical plants. What was in some respects dismaying, was that it made most British cities look decidedly shabby by comparison, especially London, and the Metro was far better looked after than the tardy looking London underground. The food was inexpensive and first class and we ate most of the time at the railway station restaurants where the variety was outstanding and the service fast. Frankfurt Central station has at least 50 shops in it, restaurants and take-aways, a supermarket, fruit stalls, newsagents, shoe menders, perfumeries, photo shops and a whole lot more as well as a tourist information centre with a permanent staff of four around the clock. A very different concept in railway stations to what we were used to.

We eventually found the second hand van we had been looking for. Finding a van in Frankfurt was no trouble at all, there were lots to choose from and we became the proud owners of a 1980 Mercedes 207D diesel engined van. It was high enough to stand up in and we could walk through from the cabin - something we considered essential, especially on rainy days. There was already a sink, a cooker and a bed in it but it all needed re arranging before it would be suitable for the trip we had in mind and this task was reserved for Poland, where labor was cheap. We spent two days running around Frankfurt buying everything we thought would be difficult to buy in the communist countries before heading east at 4am on a grey, drizzly Wednesday morning with the van piled so high that we couldn't see out of the back windows.

We drove for a couple of hours before stopping at a petrol station for a few last minute Western supplies but when we went to move off, the starter wouldn't work. The petrol station had no mechanic and my tools were buried under mountains of supplies so we ended up getting a push from a couple of truck drivers and resolved not to stop the engine, unless parked on a slope, until we arrived in Warsaw.