Travels with Myself and Another E-Book

Martha Gellhorn

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Out of a lifetime of travelling, Martha Gellhorn has selected her "best horror journeys". She bumps through rain-sodden, war-torn China to meet Chiang Kai-Shek, floats listlessly in search of u-boats in the wartime Caribbean and visits a dissident writer in the Soviet Union against her better judgment. Written with the eye of a novelist and an ironic black humour, what makes these tales irresistible are Gellhorn's explosive and often surprising reactions. Indignant, but never righteous and not always right, through the crucible of hell on earth emerges a woman who makes you laugh with her at life, while thanking God that you are not with her.

Leseprobe

Travels with Myself and Another

MARTHA GELLHORN

For Diana Cooper with long-lasting love

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1 Credentials

2 Mr Ma’s Tigers

3 Messing About in Boats

4 Into Africa

5 One Look at Mother Russia

6 What Bores Whom?

7 Non-Conclusion

About the Author

Copyright

The good traveller doesn’t know where he’s going.

The great traveller doesn’t know where he’s been.

CHUANG TZ

Leap before you look

OLD SLAVONIC MAXIM

‘Oh S the sights are worse than the journeys.’

SYBILLE BEDFORD A Visit to Don Otavio

Introduction

WE CAN’T ALL BE Marco Polo or Freya Stark but millions of us are travellers nevertheless. The great travellers, living and dead, are in a class by themselves, unequalled professionals. We are amateurs and though we too have our moments of glory we also tire, our spirits sag, we have our moments of rancour. Who has not heard, felt, thought or said, in the course of a journey, words like: ‘They’ve lost the luggage again, for God’s sake?’ ‘You mean we came all this way just to see this?’ ‘Why do they have to make so damn much noise?’ ‘Call that a room with a view?’ ‘I’d rather kick his teeth in than give him a tip.’

But we persevere and do our best to see the world and we get around; we go everywhere. Upon our return, no one willingly listens to our travellers’ tales. ‘How was the trip?’ they say. ‘Marvellous,’ we say. ‘In Tbilisi, I saw …’ Eyes glaze. As soon as politeness permits or before, conversation is switched back to local news such as gossip, the current political outrage, who’s read what, last night’s telly; people will talk about the weather rather than hear our glowing reports on Copenhagen, the Grand Canyon, Katmandu.

The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster. ‘The camel threw you at the Great Pyramid and you broke your leg?’ ‘Chased the pickpocket through the Galeria and across Naples and lost all your travellers’ cheques and your passport?’ ‘Locked and forgotten in a sauna in Viipuri?’ ‘Ptomaine from eating sheep’s eyes at a Druze feast?’ That’s what they like. They can hardly wait for us to finish before they launch into stories of their own suffering in foreign lands. The fact is, we cherish our disasters and here we are one up on the great travellers who have every impressive qualification for the job but lack jokes.

I rarely read travel books myself, I prefer to travel. This is not a proper travel book. After presenting my credentials so you will believe that I know whereof I speak, it is an account of my best horror journeys, chosen from a wide range, recollected with tenderness now that they are past. All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

It takes real stamina to travel and it’s getting worse. Remember the old days when we had porters not hijackers; remember when hotels were built and finished before you got there; remember when key unions weren’t on strike at your point of departure or arrival; remember when we were given generous helpings of butter and jam for breakfast, not those little cellophane and cardboard containers; remember when the weather was reliable; remember when you didn’t have to plan your trip like a military operation and book in advance with deposit enclosed; remember when the Mediterranean was clean; remember when you were a person not a sheep, herded in airports, railway stations, ski-lifts, movies, museums, restaurants, among your fellow sheep; remember when you knew what your money would bring in other currencies; remember when you confidently expected everything to go well instead of thinking it a miracle if everything doesn’t go wrong?

We’re not heroic like the great travellers but all the same we amateurs are a pretty tough breed. No matter how horrendous the last journey we never give up hope for the next one, God knows why.

1

Credentials

I WAS SEIZED by the idea of this book while sitting on a rotten little beach at the western tip of Crete, flanked by a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty. Around me, the litter of our species. I had the depressed feeling that I spent my life doing this sort of thing and might well end my days here. This is the traveller’s deep dark night of the soul and can happen anywhere at any hour.

No one suggested or recommended this sewer. I found it unaided, studying a map on the cheap night flight to Heraklion. Very pleased with myself too because I’d become so practical; before leaping into the unknown I actually telephoned the Greek Tourist Office in London and received a map of Crete, a list of hotels and the usual travel bumf written in the usual purple prose. Reading matter for the plane.

Way off there, alone on a bay, was a place named Kastelli with one C Class hotel. Just the ticket; far from the beaten track, the C Class hotel was sure to be a sweet little taverna, clean, no running water, grape arbour. I pictured Kastelli as an unspoiled fishing village, sugar cube houses clustered behind a golden beach. All day I would swim in lovely water, the purpose of the journey; at night I would drink ouzo in the grape arbour and watch the fishermen lollop about like Zorba under the moon.

It took as long to get from Heraklion to Kastelli, by three buses, as from London to New York by Jumbo Jet. All buses sang Arab-type Musak. Kastelli had two streets of squat cement dwellings and shops; the Aegean was not in sight. The C Class hotel was a three-storey cement box; my room was a cubbyhole with a full complement of dead flies, mashed mosquitoes on the walls and hairy dust balls drifting around the floor. The population of Kastelli, not surprisingly, appeared sunk in speechless gloom, none more so than the proprietor of the C Class hotel where I was, also not surprisingly, the only guest. On the side of the Post Office, across from my room, a political enthusiast had painted a large black slogan. Amepikanoi was the first word, and I needed no Greek to know that it meant Yank Go Home. You bet your boots, gladly, cannot wait to oblige; but there was no way out until the afternoon bus the next day.

I had made prodigious efforts to reach this death trap for the purpose of swimming and swim I would. In the morning, a twenty-minute walk past a disused factory and some hideous small unoccupied villas brought me to a café by the sea, which provided unspeakable food and a closet half filled with mouldy potatoes for undressing. And so to the beach, like a minor garbage pit, the sea having cast up rubbish to join the crushed cigarette packs, tin cans, dirty papers, bottles left by previous swimmers. Anyhow nobody else was here and the water looked fine, transparent and calm over sand but too shallow for swimming. Beyond the little promontory, the waves were choppy with whitecaps, no obstacle to a dedicated swimmer. Once out into the deep water the current grabbed me and began to move me at speed westwards. Next stop Malta.

We are supposed to learn by experience; fat lot of good that does if you only remember experience too late. Flailing for shore, I remembered the circular current of Mauritius where I was caught and borne for a time on a fast scary round trip of that island. Such currents might be a disagreeable feature of large isolated islands; the kind of information it would be helpful to know. A few minutes earlier I had been warning myself not to get dashed against the promontory on the return trip; a few minutes later I did my best to get dashed and clung with fingers and fingernails, washed away, clinging again, until I could pull back into the still protected water. And now sat on the sand, bleeding gently from scratches, somewhat winded, and in despair.

Où sont les plages d’antan? I remember when beaches had no debris on them except seaweed and were safe and often so deserted that I was the sole naked tenant. The coves around the small Caribbean islands, the water turquoise and Nile green; bays in Cuba surrounded by jungle; Mexico on the Gulf and on the Pacific; beaches backed by umbrella pines along the Var coast, the Mediterranean side of Italy all the way down to Calabria, the Costa Brava and the great beach at Zarauz; marvellous beaches in the state of Washington; miles of white sand by the Indian Ocean in Kenya. The natural world is my true love; therein my particular love, the beautiful junction of sea and land, was lost forever, defiled and overrun. I was reduced to a contemptible muck heap outside Kastelli. The future loomed coal black; nowhere to go that was worth going to. I might as well stop travelling.

Stop travelling? Come, come. That was carrying despair to preposterous lengths. I’d been in much worse places than Kastelli. Furthermore millions of other travellers set forth with high hopes and land symbolically between a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty. I was not unique, singled out for special misfortune. Besides, I was in the same position towards travel as a leopard is towards his spots. I had been a traveller all my life, beginning in childhood on the streetcars of my native city which transported me to Samarkand, Peking, Tahiti, Constantinople. Place names were the most powerful magic I knew. Still are. And I had been hard at the real thing since my twenty-first year, when I decided that it would be a good plan to see everywhere and everything and everyone and write about it.

A pep talk was called for and delivered. If you can’t learn from experience at least you can use it. What have you done with your long rich experience of horror journeys and fetching up in dumps like this? Moaning is unseemly; get to work. Work is the best remedy for despair. Okay. All right. Agreed. But first, let’s get out of Kastelli.

The trouble is that experience is useless without memory. Serious travel writers not only see and understand everything around them but command erudite cross-references to history, literature and related travels. I couldn’t even remember where I’d been. I think I was born with a weak memory as one can be born with a weak heart or weak ankles. I forget places, people, events, and books as fast as I read them. All the magnificent scenery, the greatest joy of travel, blurs. As to dates – what year? what month? – the situation is hopeless. I am still waiting for the promised time, said to arrive with advancing age, when you forget what you ate for breakfast but the past becomes brilliantly clear, like a personal son et lumière. I know exactly what I ate for breakfast, can reconstruct the main events of the last month if I try, otherwise the past is veiled in cloud with gleams of light.

The lowest points of some horror journeys were unforgettable but I needed details. For the first time ever, I began to search through old papers, archaeology in the sitting room. Like the moss-free rolling stone, a roving writer gathers few papers. There were letters to my mother who wisely saved perhaps ten per cent of the avalanche total, and nine diaries scribbled only to remind me where I’d been that year and not looked at since, and some confused notes and published and unpublished bits and pieces. Rummaging in that stuff made me unhappy. Even when glimpses of the past were funny they were sad because the years were gone and the people with them. And my memory was growing more not less muddled. A different approach seemed indicated.

Before selecting the best of the worst journeys, I ought to remember the countries I’d been in. By been in, I mean stayed long enough to learn something of the local life and customs. Not like India (India then) where I landed at Karachi and took a quick look at the cows and the poor scabrous children and made a beeline back to the airport to get away. Or French Guiana where I spent a mere three repelled hours. Or Venezuela or the Philippines, absolute amnesia. It was slow work. I kept remembering a country in the middle of the night. Finally my list was complete: fifty-three countries, which includes every state in the Union except Alaska.

When I tried to think of islands, memory fainted and failed. The Caribbean is pockmarked by islands; it was easier to remember the names of the four where I had not been, Barbuda, Barbados, Isla de Margharita, Jamaica. And the Greek islands from Corfu to Rhodes with plenty of little ones between, and Capri and Ischia and Sicily and Mallorca and Elba and Corsica and Gozo and Comino and Bermuda and Bali and Honolulu and Hawaii and Guam and Midway and Wake and Macao and Gran Canaria and Sao Miguel and probably others.

This is the countries list, willy-nilly as I remembered them. France, Great Britain (four parts), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Spain, Andorra, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Greece, Surinam, Haiti, Dominican Republic, China, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, Portugal, Finland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Cameroun, Chad, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt (including the Gaza Strip when Egyptian, and later when Israeli), Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Thailand, South Vietnam, Turkey, San Marino, Republic of Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Costa Rica, Malta, the United States of America up, down and across.

Once launched on this memory exercise, statistics went to my head. I calculate that I made repeated trips to twenty-four of those countries, ranging from two sojourns in the Netherlands East Indies to countless travels in Europe, the Caribbean and East Africa. As a base, from which to move, I lived in seven countries where I established eleven permanent residences. A residence is a flat or house that you rent or buy or, if insane, build. I built one and a half houses in two countries and in my opinion house-building is far worse than any horror journey. The point is that you start from scratch with the notion that you are going to live there quite a while, maybe for the rest of your life. You then use the residence for several years and abandon it, usually with all its contents.

Residences are different from temporary furnished quarters of which I remembered seventeen before I stopped trying to remember. Some temporary furnished quarters preceded permanent residences, some were linked to jobs, but mostly they were and continue to be bolt-holes for writing. At home, wherever home is, there are interruptions. I settle in temporary furnished quarters in foreign places where I know nobody and enter into a symbiotic relationship with a typewriter. This is stationary travel in contrast to travelling travel and I love it. No matter how unsatisfactory the work or how drab the furn. bdstr., I have the scenery, chosen with care, sea or mountains, and the joys thereof.

How very odd that one bends one’s own twig and it stays bent. Who could have foreseen the permanent effect of childhood journeys on streetcars? No other manner of living would have interested me so much and so long and I will surely go on until I drop trying to see more of the world and what’s happening in it.

Despite the amount of ground covered, I never thought of writing about travel. Here goes.

2

Mr Ma’s Tigers

BY THE BEGINNING of 1941, the Sino-Japanese war had been going on so long and was so far away that it ranked more as an historic fact than a war. Compared to the survival of Britain, the Far East was stale and trifling. But something new had been added to the old China story; Japan was now joined to the Axis as the third partner in what they named ‘the New Order’. My boss, the editor of Collier’s and one of the nicest men I ever knew, concluded that the Japanese, having already invaded Indo-China, did not intend to sit upon their hands and would soon start destroying the East as their partners were destroying the West. He agreed that I should report on the Chinese army in action, and defences against future Japanese attack around the South China Sea.

The Germans had done fearsomely well, Europe was lost and silenced but, like countless millions of others, I didn’t believe at any time that Britain would be defeated, that America would stay neutral and that Hitlerian Germany would conquer and rule and poison life on this planet. After long years we were going to win but it would be the end of the world. End of the world? I felt a driving sense of haste: hurry, hurry, before it’s too late; but don’t remember what I meant. I was determined to see the Orient before I died or the world ended or whatever came next. The Orient: pictures in my mind since childhood, not reality. Reality was in the other direction, across the Atlantic.

All I had to do was get to China. On this super horror journey I wheedled an Unwilling Companion, hereinafter referred to as UC, into going where he had no wish to go. He had not spent his formative years mooning on streetcar travels and stuffing his imagination with Fu Manchu and Somerset Maugham. He claimed to have had an uncle who was a medical missionary in China and took out his own appendix on horseback. He was also forced to contribute dimes from his allowance to convert the heathen Chinese. These facts seemed to have turned him against the Orient. I went on wheedling until he sighed gloomily and gave in. That was scandalous selfishness on my part, never repeated. Future horror journeys were made on my own. It was all right to plunge oneself neck deep in the soup but not to drag anyone else in too.

Early in February 1941, we set out from San Francisco for Honolulu by boat. We imagined this trip would be like the already distant good old days when one crossed from New York to France, on a French ship, wallowing in delicious food and drink and luxury. UC always had the right idea about pleasure which is: grab it while you can. Instead of the hoped-for delights, we were batted about the decks like ping-pong balls, hurled into nailed-down furniture unless unnailed-down furniture hurled itself into us until finally, incapable of standing upright, we retired to our berths where we lay eating and drinking and trying not to be flung from berth to floor.

Trays crashed off our laps, bottles spilled; the ship proceeded with the motion of a dolphin, lovely in a dolphin and vile in a ship. UC muttered a lot: why had nobody warned us, if he had known the Pacific was this kind of ocean he would never have set foot on it, a man should stick with the waters he knew, as a matter of fact he knew and respected many lakes and rivers too, and look at it any way you want, M, this is a bad sign. The sea voyage lasted roughly forever. Somewhere, over those detestable grey waves, Honolulu would be a haven of sun, swimming, peace and stationary land. Nobody warned us about the traditional aloha-welcome either.

I made a full airmail report to my mother:

‘There were finally eighteen leis on each of our necks. UC had a face of black hate. He said to me, “I never had no filthy Christed flowers around my neck before and the next son of a bitch who touches me I am going to cool him and what a dung heap we came to and by Christ if anybody else says aloha to me I am going to spit back in his mouth.” You get the feeling?

‘Leis were not the end of it. Among the hordes of greeters who swarm aboard, ready to sling leis on their friends, were photographers. A fat man we never saw before came up to us. He was Irish and drunk. He said to UC, “I’m as big a man as you are and I can drink as much.” Then he staggered and UC caught him. “Here,” he said to a nearby photographer. “Take a picture of me too. I’m a fine man where I come from.” So I said quickly, to forestall worse, “You bet you are,” and this is the picture. Us three. He stumbled away and we never saw him again.’

That photograph is one of the few, the sadly few, which has survived my multiple changes of residence. UC is grinning like a wolf with bared fangs above necklaces of flowers; in profile, flower-draped too, I seem to be falling over backwards and look dazed; between us the fat man, flowerless but glass in hand, managed to lean affectionately against us both. Seeing the way people carry cameras, everyone else has always known the value of recording one’s travels on film. I have only now understood what I’ve missed: instead of massive albums I have a single thin folder of photos to make me laugh in my declining years.

The report continues: ‘Also arrived on board an aunt of UC’s, an actual full-blooded aunt, UC said; she was the leechiest of all with a fine disregard of anyone’s feelings or fatigue (UC’s face was now white and wet with sweat and horror, the ground was coming up to hit me and I couldn’t see from headache, it was like a lecture tour with all the gushing cannot-be-shaken-off people). We got rid of her at the dock and there was Bill looking very nice, clean, solid, reasonable, unexcited and dull; he took us to this hotel where we fell upon liquor to carry us through and had a good talk with him, about the defence stuff, shop talk which interests us and which I at least must know. Then he left but not before he had extracted a promise (Louise sent him to get it) that we would dine with the local American King and Queen of the island that night. This is a place where hospitality is a curse and no one can be alone. We lunched with the aunt and a dreary gathering of people who should have been missionaries but were not even kind, just stupid people with nothing to drink and I was afraid I was going to faint from boredom and you can imagine UC. At last we got an hour to ourselves on the beach and then people began to call at our hotel; then we went to dinner. Some life, what?

‘The dinner was for about fifty people in a vast torch-lit patio with a fountain playing, the most spectacular house outside a movie set I have ever seen, and to me not beautiful, but rich, rich, rich. There is a strike of streetcar workers going on and they all said with vicious hard voices: let them strike till they starve but don’t give in, it will spoil these beautiful islands … The stockholders are now getting eighty per cent on their investment: they cannot possibly compromise and only get sixty per cent. Let them starve, the guests kept saying, over the creamy food and the champagne: let them starve. So that was very delightful and instructive.’

Finding this letter was a lucky surprise, authentic hot news of the day, especially as I remembered nothing about Honolulu except being there, disliking it and touring Pearl Harbor with Bill. The planes stood wing tip to wing tip, the warships nudged each other (‘like the Sargasso Sea’, from notes), the Japanese fishing boats were anchored alongside, ideal for Japanese Intelligence. Bill, a soldier, was appalled by the setup but not a five-star general, thus unable to scare sense into anyone. UC said it was the system so popular in the First World War: get everything and everyone packed in one place and get the whole lot wiped out. When Pearl Harbor was indeed wiped out ten months later, with three thousand three hundred American officers and men killed, my countrymen were whipped into fury against ‘the stab in the back’, but my fury was directed against the UC General Staff who provided the world’s richest target for the Japanese.

We retreated to Hawaii, undiscovered by tourists, peaceful and simple. My notes are bright with descriptions of beauty, cane fields and cattle range country, tea gardens, fishing villages, enchanting Japanese children, but all I remember is climbing and scrabbling over volcanic lava in a vain search for the Hawaiian chamois or some such animal. UC enjoyed Hawaii more than I did; he was by no means on fire with impatience for the Orient. Then I hear the unchanging voice of my soul (in another letter to my mother): ‘In half an hour we go to the Clipper. I am very very excited and pleased and glad to be off. To think that all the names of all the places are real; and I will be there … I don’t care where we go; it is all new, I want to see it all.’

Air travel was not always disgusting. Those big PanAm flying boats were marvellous. We flew all day in roomy comfort, eating and drinking like pigs, visiting the Captain, listening to our fellow travellers, dozing, reading, and in the late afternoon the plane landed on the water at an island. The passengers had time for a swim, a shower, dinner, and slept in beds. Since that was air travel at its best, it has naturally disappeared.

On the way to Hongkong, at Guam, we were introduced to spearfishing by a passenger whom I described to my mother as ‘a character like Lawrence of Arabia, a marine aviator en route to Egypt’, and that’s all I now know about him, sinful bad memory. I never speared any fish nor tried to. I thought it unwise and improper to dive into depths where I didn’t belong and interfere with activity I didn’t understand. Keeping a respectful distance on the surface, I have watched underwater scenery and fish with joy all these years. Fish must perceive me as a rowboat. It is not that easy in life to find an unfailing source of joy.

UC took to Hongkong at once. Hongkong bore no resemblance to the present city as seen on TV, a forest of skyscrapers, a mini New York set against the great triangular mountain. Travellers of the next century, always supposing there are any, will scarcely know whether they are in Buenos Aires or Chicago, skyscrapers all the way, skyscrapers to break the heart. When we saw it, the working city of Hongkong at the base of the Peak looked as if nailed together hurriedly from odd lots of old wood and sounded like a chronic Chinese New Year. It was brilliant with colour in signs and pennants; the narrow streets were jammed by rickshaws, bicycles, people, but not cars; the highest building was an imposing square bank and it wasn’t very high. The gentry lived in gracious homes up the sides of the Peak, social position established by height.

We stayed in an old hotel downtown, perhaps the only hotel there was: big rooms with paddle fans on the ceilings, antique bathrooms, a large public lounge with large beat-up leather chairs; very Maugham to me. UC, in the twinkling of an eye, collected a mixed jovial entourage, ranging from local cops with whom he went pheasant-shooting to fat wealthy crook-type Chinese businessmen who invited him to Chinese feasts. A bald middle-aged Caucasian of obscure nationality and occupation, self-styled ‘General’, was a special favourite, and a huge polite thug from Chicago named Cohen whom UC believed to be a hit man for some Chinese warlord.

UC could not bear party chatter, or discussions of politics or the arts, but never tired of true life stories, the more unlikely the better. He was able to sit with a bunch of men for most of a day or most of a night, or most of both day and night though perhaps with different men, wherever he happened to have started sitting, all of them fortified by a continuous supply of drink, the while he roared with laughter at reminiscences and anecdotes. It was a valid system for him. Aside from being his form of amusement, he learned about a place and people through the eyes and experiences of those who lived there.

Though a hearty talker in my own right and given to laughing loudly at my own jokes, I was a novice drinker and had a separate approach to learning. I wanted to see for myself, not hear. UC did not mind what I did as long as he didn’t have to do it too. Much as I like conversation, I like it only in bursts for a few hours, not marathons, and seldom in group formation. I slipped away from the large leather chairs. UC used to say, kindly, ‘M is going off to take the pulse of the nation.’

Four days after arrival, I left Hongkong alone to fly via Chungking and Kunming to Lashio, the Burma end of the Burma Road, and returned immediately the same way, material for a Collier’s article. The airline, called China National Aviation Company (CNAC), consisted of two DC3s and two DC2s, elderly machines and no nonsense about comfort. Compared to passenger planes now, these were flying beetles. The floor sloped steeply, the chairs were canvas on metal frames, the toilet, behind a green curtain, gave a small circular view of the ground below.

DC3s could carry twenty-one passengers, DC2s fourteen passengers, but seats were removed to make space for the freight load. Five thousand kilos of mail and $55 million in banknotes (very heavy) were average monthly freight; the same planes also hauled wolfram and tin out of China. Except for the Burma Road, CNAC was the only contact between the outside world and ‘Free’ China, in effect the one third of China not occupied by the Japanese and ruled by the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. Trucks took fourteen days to reach Chungking from Rangoon on the spectacular corkscrew of the Burma Road, and broke down and rolled off precipices in alarming numbers. The five small tatty planes of CNAC kept ‘Free’ China in business.

There were seven surviving American CNAC pilots, ten Chinese and Chinese-American co-pilots, same for twelve radio operators, and two stewardesses. The pilot on my round trip jaunt was Roy Leonard who looked and sounded like a nice ordinary Midwesterner. He became my hero within an hour of being airborne. He was thirty-three or four, medium height, brown hair, thin, matter-of-fact, invariably good tempered, and as much at home and at ease in China as if China were Indiana. I never learned why he came to China but he had been flying here for years, for a time as Chiang’s private pilot. I felt I was watching a genius at work, and I watched closely, settling at once into the pilot’s cabin.

The Japanese encircled Hongkong and had shown themselves hostile by fatally attacking two CNAC planes. CNAC simply changed its methods. Now CNAC planes climbed high above Hongkong, at night, in bad weather, before crossing the Japanese lines. Flights were postponed or cancelled if the weather was too good. Passengers were informed of the departure time a few hours in advance. By daylight, the Hongkong airfield looked discouragingly short, with the sea at one end and the cliffside of the Peak at the other. It was less worrying at night when you couldn’t see what was happening.

We left Hongkong at half past four in a high wind in a DC2; freight, seven Chinese passengers, me and Roy Leonard. I cannot remember a radio operator nor find mention of him in my muddled old pencil notes; there was certainly no co-pilot or stewardess. In principle every plane did carry a radio operator whose job was to pick up weather reports and, before landing, make sure the landing field was not being bombed or under water. The passengers were given a rough brown blanket and a brown paper bag for throwing up. The plane was not heated or pressurised.

We climbed, as if climbing a spiral staircase, in tight jolting circles over Hongkong until we reached fourteen thousand feet. All lights went off except the dim light in the pilot’s cabin and we crossed the Japanese lines, brightly lit far below. In half an hour, the storm hit us. I had been watching the flickering exhaust flame on a wing, but the wing vanished into cloud that looked grainy and hard as granite. Hail sounded like a threshing machine. Everything froze including the air speed indicator. Roy explained that if the speed dropped below sixty-three miles per hour the plane stalled and went into a spin, but there was no cause for anxiety; he opened his window a crack and judged air speed that way; he’d done it often. The windscreen was a sheet of frost. Inside this cloud mass, elevator draughts lifted and dropped the plane, one’s stomach making the same vertical movements. I had untroubled confidence in Roy so the behaviour of the plane didn’t disturb me but I was perishing of cold. Behind in the cabin, the passengers vomited or hid beneath their blankets from the sound and the fury. This lasted for an hour and a half, after which Roy remarked that the rest of the trip would be easy. We were still flying blind in cloud but I thought it would be bad manners to mention that.

We landed at ten o’clock at Chungking. The air strip was a narrow island in the Yangtze, beneath the cliffs. For two months a year, this island lay under sixty feet of water and was subject to weird nightly rises in the river level. When we circled to land, I saw Chungking on the cliff top, looking like a greyish brown expanse of rubble. The passengers departed gratefully. While the plane was refuelled, Roy and I sat on the damp ground and ate a sumptuous breakfast of one bowl of dry rice and tea. That was the only nourishment until we got the same repast in the late afternoon at Kunming. I said there was no nonsense about comfort.

More passengers arrived and we took off for Kunming. The country was visible all afternoon, mountains, changing in colour and marked with a jigsaw pattern of small cultivated fields. A few grey villages, a few isolated farmhouses appeared in this vastness, and paths like animal tracks. Roy flew the plane as if riding a horse, meandering along valleys, ‘I go where I’m looking,’ he said. He was trying out a new route, the idea being to baffle the Japs.

At one point I observed that this was a remarkable plane as it seemed able to stand still in the air. We were low in a valley between massive mountains. Roy said we weren’t exactly standing still but headwinds were sixty miles per hour so it kind of slowed us. Then he started to play an odd game of peek-a-boo, flying up to peer over mountains, dropping back; he was trying to see how things were at Kunming. ‘Yep,’ he said, and we flew straight in to land. The sky above Kunming was smoky and yellow with dust but clear of Jap planes; the day’s bombing had finished. Every day, ground crews scurried around shifting the runway markers, white-painted oil drums, and filling in new bomb craters to get ready for the arrival of the CNAC plane.

Again passengers left with relief and another lot arrived and we were off, flying at thirteen thousand feet above the gorges of the Burma Road. The high altitude was necessary because here the appalling downdraughts plunged the plane thousands of feet in seconds towards the valley floor. We were always cold to frozen but I began to feel ashamed (soft, nothing worse than being soft) because I was also flushed and my legs and arms twitched and my mind seemed peevishly dislocated and I thought with horror that I might burst into tears for no reason. Confessing some of these symptoms to Roy, with a forced laugh, he said it was only lack of oxygen and I’d be all right when we got to Lashio after ten that night. Flare pots lit the runway at Lashio; it was much easier on the nerves to land in the dark when you couldn’t see what a mess you were landing on. Sixteen hours and 1,494 miles, if flying like a crow, seemed to me a fairly mammoth trip, but this was a regular weekly run for Roy and the other pilots.

The CNAC rest house, near the Lashio field, was a wooden shack with iron cots and a shower, heaven itself, a chance to wash and sleep in spite of suffocating heat. Roy went off in the early morning with a .22 rifle to bag game; I wandered in the village bazaar, Burma rubies and eggs in banana-leaf baskets and pretty little Burmese women bathing under a tap. The Japs usually bombed Kunming between ten and eleven o’clock but it was unsafe to count on their schedule. Today they were late. We hung about sweating, which made a nice change, until the radio reported that twenty-seven Jap planes had bombed Kunming at one o’clock for half an hour but were now gone, so we could take off. Back as we’d come, over the Burma Road by daylight, beautiful hopeless country, jagged mountain after mountain and a brown ribbon of road. Those hot green mountains were breeding grounds for the malarial mosquito; malignant malaria, which is fatal, was another hazard of the road journey. We landed at Kunming at half-past five in the afternoon dark, a city shrouded in smoke and lit by fires.

I had been in Finnish cities during bombing attacks and Madrid was swept almost daily by artillery fire but Kunming was in a class by itself. It was a big walled city, entered by a great carved painted gate. The houses were made of timber or mud brick, with curving eaves. The Japs claimed to have destroyed it but, as they destroyed, the Chinese residents repaired. Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.

First, we smelled smoke and the stink of burst drains. Electric light lines were down like snakes over heaps of rubble. On the sides of a fresh crater, twenty-five feet wide, a little house half tottered, half held, and the family was eating inside by candle light. There was no sound except hammering. Enormous crowds of silent people were putting their houses together as best they could, by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. Something had gone wrong with the fire hose, water could not be pumped from the river. Two tall fires blazed while a mile-long chain of Chinese passed buckets of water from hand to hand. No one was wailing or crying; everyone, even small children, worked in silence.

Part of the city was still lit by electric light. Noisy eaters were bowed over rice bowls in an eating house. A long queue stood outside a movie theatre waiting to see a film called ‘Kentucky’. We took rickshaws to the hotel since we couldn’t find our way on foot over the rubble and around the new craters. The hotel was a small dirty café downstairs and a few dirty little rooms upstairs. The Greek owner welcomed Roy as a friend, and was in splendid form. Every day that his hotel escaped intact was like a special favour from God. He said, ‘L’alerte est très correcte ici.’ The people had two to three hours’ warning so they could run from the city. Pre-alarm was one balloon, floating over the town; then two balloons were floated and the siren wailed, really time to get moving. For the final urgent alert the balloons were hauled down and the siren wailed steadily. The only casualties were people who got sick and tired of running off into the fields every day, and stayed and took their chances.

The penalty for looting was death. ‘They shot about four hundred and since then there has been no problem.’ Today had been unusual, only forty minutes’ warning and the Japs, whom the Greek called ‘ces bandits’, were late. Kunming was defenceless and the Burma Road traffic did not pile up there. Roy thought the Japs used Kunming as safe practice in bombing and cross-country navigation for their trainee pilots. We dined on fried eggs and warm beer, very jolly, and went early to bed as we had to be off before dawn and well lost, flying low between the mountains, before the Japs came back on their usual morning raid.

Landing at Hongkong the third night was as impressive as the rest of the trip. We had been flying in what looked like bechamel sauce for hours; Hongkong was invisible but the Peak is always there as a threat for straying planes. Roy wheeled and turned, wheeled and turned, saw the field for an instant through a rift in the clouds, dropped lower, still on that circular flight pattern, saw more, and finally we skimmed the housetops, ceiling two hundred metres, and landed neatly. The Chinese passengers had a tendency to clap, with tears in their eyes, at every safe arrival.

There can have been nothing else like CNAC in the history of civil aviation. I doubt if there were ever any other pilots like those. They flew by compass, eyesight and experience; help from the ground was limited to contact when nearing cities, the all-clear signal for takeoff, and whatever weather reports they could pick from the air. I remember one weather report: ‘The moon is beaming’, not really much help. The pilots earned $1,000 a month for eighty-five flying hours and $10 for each extra hour. Men do not risk their lives every week for such money. They were immensely proud of their fantastic little airline. And I think they were in love with their kind of flying, the man and the machine off on their own against the Japs and the weather and the mountains and the landing fields.

That was not a horror journey, never a dull moment. Glowing with adrenalin and high spirits, I would gladly have started again on the next flight.

UC had finished a long piece of work before we left the US and if I hadn’t coaxed him to China, he would have been loafing somewhere probably with a fishing rod. Since he was done out of that, he loafed around Hongkong with an ever-growing band of buddies. He had learned to speak coolie English, a language related to West African pidgin and Caribbean English, and was seen laughing with waiters and rickshaw coolies and street vendors, all parties evidently enjoying each other. He loved Chinese food and would return from feasts with his Chinese crook-type friends swearing they’d been served by geisha girls, and describe the menu until I begged him to stop, due to queasiness. He was ready to try anything, including snake wine, the snakes presumably coiled and pickled in the bottom of the jug.

Local customs charmed him, for instance ear-cleaning. Salesmen with trays of thin sticks, topped by tiny coloured pompoms, roamed the streets: these sticks were ear cleaners. Customers would pause, in the middle of those bustling crowds, to prod away at their ears with the detached expression, UC said, of people peeing in a swimming pool. The Chinese passion for firecrackers also delighted him. UC bought them every day and was very disappointed when I insisted that he stop lighting them in our rooms, where they raced like exploding worms over the floor. He found someone to box with and went to the races, saying that dye sweated off the horses and cunning Oriental fraud prevailed. From the first he was much better at the glamorous East than I was, flexible and undismayed.

UC wrote to my mother of the Hongkong pleasures so far, adding that ‘M is very happy, treating the men like brothers and the women like dogs.’ UC was not the most accurate fellow on earth (neither am I) and I cannot think of any women whom I could have treated like dogs. I remember only Emily Hahn with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient and I was never foolish enough to be disdainful of her, and Madame Sun Yat Sen, tiny and adorable and admirable unlike her sisters Madame Chiang and Madame Kung who were the limit. The CNAC men and their wives were my chosen companions.

I wasn’t entirely happy either as I was taking the pulse of the nation and growing more despondent by the day. Opium dens, brothels, dance halls, mahjong parlours, markets, factories, the Criminal Courts; it was my usual way of looking at a society from the bottom rather than from the top. An opium den, to an old student of Fu Manchu, should have been velvet and gilt and voluptuous sin; these sad little rooms, more like a corridor than a room, with three tiers of bare board shelf-size bunks, were where the coolies smoked opium at ten cents for three tiny pills, because opium was cheaper than food, took away the appetite and rested the strained and tired muscles. In one such room, behind a basket factory, a girl of fourteen fixed the pipes and when not so occupied played gently with a pet tortoise. Another such den (what a word) was an airless hole behind a carpenter’s shop; the carpenters worked from eight o’clock to five, then ate their one daily meal and worked again from seven o’clock to ten. A girl of fifteen earned 70 cents a day there; the poor skinny smokers could fondle her as part of the services. Next door, two families lived in a space about the size of a double Pullman berth.

The Chinese, great gamblers, paid one cent an hour to play in a mah-jongg parlour and bet ten cents a game; they played in concentrated silence. The streets were full of pavement sleepers at night. The brothels were small square wood cubicles, lining a narrow passage; $2 a night per man per girl. The crimes were street vending without a licence, and a fine no one could pay. These people were the real Hongkong and this was the most cruel poverty, worse than any I had seen before. Worse still because of an air of eternity; life had always been like this, always would be. The sheer numbers, the density of bodies, horrified me. There was no space to breathe, these crushed millions were stifling each other.

When finally I visited a dank ill-lit basement factory where small children carved ivory balls within balls, a favourite tourist trinket, I could not bear to see any more. I had a mild fit of hysterics.

‘They look about ten years old,’ I shouted at UC. ‘It takes three months to make one of those damned things, I think it’s eight balls within balls. They’ll be blind before they’re twenty. And that little girl with her tortoise. We’re all living on slave labour! The people are half starved! I want to get out, I can’t stand this place!’

UC considered me thoughtfully. ‘The trouble with you, M, is that you think everybody is exactly like you. What you can’t stand, they can’t stand. What’s hell for you has to be hell for them. How do you know what they feel about their lives? If it was as bad as you think they’d kill themselves instead of having more kids and setting off firecrackers.’

From agonising over the lot of my Chinese fellow men, I fell into a state of hysterical disgust with hardly a pause. ‘WHY do they all have to spit so much?’ I cried. ‘You can’t put your foot down without stepping on a big slimy glob! And everything stinks of sweat and good old night-soil!’ The answer of course could be that spitting was due to endemic tuberculosis, and as for the stink, I had seen where and how the people lived. I knew I was being contemptible. To avoid more hysterics, UC moved us to a country hotel at Repulse Bay. We couldn’t go farther because we hadn’t yet received our papers and permissions for the journey to the interior. The hotel at Repulse Bay was as near English as possible, set in lovely gardens and done up in chintz. Soft-footed servitors bore pink gins around the place. No spitting and no smells, no visible poverty. UC teased me about my contentment in this clean non-Oriental enclave but was quite happy himself; he’d had enough company and was satisfied to read and walk over the hills.

We decided to walk to a sampan city for lunch, balmy weather, nice walk, and the prospect of rare fish dishes. The sampan city entranced me, from a distance, because it looked like picturesque China in the movies. A Chinese woman staggered along the dirt road towards us, pleasing UC who was partial to Chinese drunks. I think he felt that the Hongkong Chinese, given to gambling, rice wine and firecrackers, had great savoir vivre. The woman then began to vomit blood and collapsed. UC said, ‘She’s had it, poor old lady,’ and hurried me off.

We had just seen the cholera epidemic in close-up. The cholera epidemic was due to practice air-raid alerts, lately discontinued. The night-soil coolies, terrified by the sound of the siren, dumped their baskets of excrement and fled; and cholera followed. I believe UC was more impressed by the sight of that woman dying than he ever said; he became the Medical Officer on our China travels. In China water is like justice in that it has to be boiled and seen to be boiled; UC supervised this. UC also checked the quinine intake, which I’d have forgotten or muddled. He arranged extra shots against all the available diseases. By myself, I’d have wrung my hands and groaned and caught every germ and ended up dead.

Reporting on the Chinese army in action seemed a rational project in New York but absurd in China due to distances, lack of roads and transport and any form of communication and the quiescence of the war. The Japanese held the best three quarters of China and had no need to push farther; they bombed without opposition when they felt like it. No front was anywhere near remote Chungking so UC decided we would do a short aerial jump over the neighbouring mountains and the Japs, and make our way back towards the Canton front which was next door to Hongkong. I now think it astounding that this trip ever got arranged; at the time, not knowing the practical obstacles, I fumed and fretted and complained of the delay. What more natural, I asked, than for war correspondents to look at war?

My glimpse of conditions inland had given me ideas: I stocked up on Keating’s Flea and Lice Powder, Flit, thermos bottles for boiled water, disinfectant for unboiled water, towels, mosquito nets and bedrolls and fancied we were comfortably equipped. UC did the tedious staff work and bought not enough whisky but how could he guess that Chinese generals would down this new tasty drink like water. As it worked out, we flew for an hour and a half from Hongkong to Namyung, where the true horror journey began, and took seven days on the ground to travel half of that distance.

On 24 March 1941, we presented ourselves with our gear in the middle of the night at the Hongkong airfield and stood around in a gale-force wind until the flight was scrubbed. Visibility at Namyung zero. The next day we left at eleven o’clock for Namyung in blanketing cloud. From notes: ‘lovely landing (blind)’. Showing off to myself, as an old China aviation hand. It was raining at Namyung. Here we met the first batch of our Chinese escorts. I described them to my mother as ‘two Chinese officers, both officers by courtesy, since one was in the Political and one in the Transport Department. Mr Ma, the politico, our interpreter, early showed himself to be a dope … Mr Ho, the transport king, was as efficient as humanly possible in this repellent country and we liked him very much. He spoke a language that resembled French and had a vocabulary of some thirty words.’ Yet Mr Ho, whom we approved, is sunk without trace while Mr Ma lives on tenderly preserved in my memory.

Mr Ma was all round; round specs, round nose, round cheeks, round, permanently smiling or open (waiting to smile) mouth. He said he had been educated at the University of Michigan which we didn’t believe for a minute and as time went on we doubted that he understood either English or Chinese. The smile was infuriating; poor Mr Ma, so hardworking and good-natured, he couldn’t help being a fool.

In China, vehicles were manned by the driver and the mechanic, who leaped out to start the car, tinker with the engine, change tyres, and put rocks behind wheels to keep the vehicle from rolling away. We set out in a small old Chevrolet, seven of us and both UC and I bigger than any Chinese. Wedged in, we got our first taste of the infrequent roads. Not roads; rivers of mud, rutted, gouged, strewn with boulders. You caught your breath after each backbreaking crash. The tyres, not unnaturally, exploded like firecrackers. This drive lasted until dark when we arrived at our hotel, The Light of Shaokwan, in the city of that name.

Mr Ma had assured us of the elegance of the hotel so we were a bit daunted to begin with. We had a room with two sets of planks for beds, a trembling bamboo table, a brass washbowl full of dubious water and a spittoon to empty it into, a hard bamboo chair and a bamboo stool, two toy kerosene lamps, malarial mosquitoes and a stand-up hole-in-the-floor toilet down the corridor. The toilet must have been unique, in that I do not mention it with hatred, possibly a jar of water was provided for flushing. It was still raining, it was always raining, and cold, but cold did not discourage the mosquitoes.

I wondered aloud about the washing arrangements: how exactly were two people to manage with one bowl of water? Did we both wash our teeth in the same water, then our faces? UC told me earnestly not to wash at all and if I dreamed of brushing my teeth I was a nut case. I had better control my mania for keeping clean. ‘Cheer up,’ UC said, battling with a mosquito net. ‘Who wanted to come to China?’