Part 44
Continuing my journey to Africa, at Marseilles my parents and I boarded a Greek liner called the Corinthian. We set off across the Mediterranean on a ship with the euphemistic title of “luxury Liner,” which may have been very grand before the war but, in 1946, it had recently been decommissioned as a troop ship. It was a shambles. I’ve written about it in an earlier blog, so I’ll just briefly repeat that it had insufficient lifeboats, none of the bulkheads would close, there was a distinct list to port and the decor was horribly mutilated. Nonetheless, it was an adventure for all of us which included my falling in love with an incredibly beautiful young girl, who at fourteen was far too old for me, but I adored her without ever verbalising as much. Just as well, I would hate to have interfered with her marriage at eighteen to the Shah of Persia! Her name was Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari. Sigh!
Other moments included all passengers being ordered by the Captain to move to the stern of the ship as the ship crawled through a minefield left behind by the war, and as it passed the Volcano Stromboli which was busy with a minor eruption on the coast some miles away. We safely made it to Athens, where Mop, Pop and I visited the Parthenon and other glorious relics of a past great civilization.
Thereafter, it was an uneventful trip to Alexandria in Egypt, where I drank my first-ever Coca-Cola at a harbor cafe. To hell with history and antiquity; after the first sip, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!
A couple of weeks later, we took a train to Cairo where we stayed in the second-ranked of the five-grandest hotels in the world at that time, Shepheard’s Hotel. Cairo was extraordinary for me as a 10-year-old. The noise, the crowded streets and the constant harassment from young boys who proudly proclaimed that they were Boy Scouts with special permission to take us on a tour of the Grand Mosque in the center of the city, which was open to visitors only one day a year, and this was the day!
After about the fourth such approach on different days, with exactly the same spiel, Pop finally said “Ah, so you’re a Boy Scout. My name is Baden Powell. The “scout” in question looked completely confused, clearly never having heard of the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, and he disappeared into the crowd. We did eventually visit the mosque. It was magnificent.
Somehow, Pop had a knack for meeting interesting people. One day, he announced that the Curator of the Egyptian Museum had invited the three of us to join him on a visit to the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Even at my tender age, I was fascinated by his details of how he believed the Pyramids were built. He even took us inside one of them, long before it was eventually opened to the public. It consisted of long stone corridors and a couple of empty chambers. Before moving on to the Sphinx, he arranged for me to ride on a camel. I don’t recommend it for anyone like me, who gets seasick. It was like moving up and down in a rough sea.
The kindly Curator also took us to the Egyptian Museum which had not yet re-opened after the war, where, amongst many other amazing artefacts, we were shown the tomb of Tutankhamen. Frankly, I was bored by that stage of the tour, little knowing that the tomb of the young king and I were to cross paths again ten years later in London.
Pop tried to get us onto a Nile Steamer, but they were booked for months ahead; so his rather elaborate and quite unrealistic plans to travel up the Nile and somehow make our way to Kenya were thwarted. Instead, he organized a flight in a small airliner (a Lockheed Lodestar) to Nairobi. It was the first flight for all of us, and we boarded the plane with a mixture of fear and excitement. Things like turbulence were not explained to the passengers. Halfway to Khartoum, where we were to stay the night, two elderly Greek women literally tried to get out and walk, causing a bit of a panic all around. It certainly put me off flying for some years.
Khartoum was the hottest place I’ve ever experienced, and I could hardly breathe all night. The following day, we flew on to Juba, a British Royal Air Force base in Sudan. Finally, we arrived tired and bedraggled at Nairobi Airport, to be met by my grandfather, who sternly admonished me to call him “Uncle Dick.” As his name was neither Dick and he was my grandfather, I was somewhat puzzled. We spent a couple of months at the Torr’s Hotel, where “Uncle Dick” had lived for about 25 years.
Elsewhere in these blogs, I tell the story of how we were finally taken into the African bush to catch our first sight of the wildlife we had been hoping to see since our arrival. “Uncle Dick” had a guest accompany us. He was an Egyptian Prince, a nephew of King Farouk and at first we could not understand what he had in common with my grandfather. Arriving at a place where elephants, giraffe and many species of buck could be seen, we stopped. To our horror, “Uncle Dick” instructed his team of African porters to become beaters and chase all the wildlife away. Whereupon, “Uncle Dick” and the Prince pulled out butterfly nets and proceeded to chase these glorious innocent creatures. It turned out that these two old men were the leading butterfly collectors in Africa.
Apart from the fact that “Uncle Dick” was a former racing driver at the Brooklands Race Track in Weybridge Surrey where I was born, he was also now blind in one eye and nearly deaf. Having him as our chauffeur left a lot to be desired. Eventually, he drove us down to the coast to Mombasa. On the way, our car was chased by a rhino. Pop and “Uncle Dick” departed the car to try to shoot a buck, giving instructions to Mop and me, who were left in the car, that should we see any large and threatening animals, we should blow the horn. Mop decided that an approaching group of wildebeests were enough to sound the alarm, so I blew the horn until Pop and “Uncle Dick” arrived at a run and at the point of collapse from their exertions. After one look at the wildebeests, Mop and I suffered the wrath of two generations of male Dressers who had run over a mile only to shoo away one of the most docile and timid of Africa’s wildlife.
Apart from Pop and I nearly getting chomped on by a crocodile when we stood on the banks of the Tsavo River, as rookie palefaces, unaware of the speed and power of those fearsome beasts, we reached Mombasa without further incident. We stayed at a resort called Shanzu Beach in Mombasa for a couple weeks until we boarded another liner, the Winchester Castle, that had also been a troopship. This was her first voyage back in service with the Union Castle Line; from Southampton to Cape Town, stopping at Mombasa and Durban.
Sadly, it was still more of a troopship than a liner, but it was overall in far better condition than the Corinthian, and we landed a week or so later at the port of Durban.
This was the first sight of South Africa for Pop and me. Mop had relatives in Durban and she had been at school at St. Anne’s about 50 miles from the city.
Durban has a sub-tropical climate and we experienced the somewhat bizarre ritual of a summer Christmas, where the day usually consisted of a swim in the sea and then a Christmas lunch with turkey and the full works. Hardly ideal for a hot summer’s day but old traditions die hard!
After a couple of weeks of mainly going to the beach and eating masses of indigenous fruit like pawpaw, pineapples, bananas and mangoes, Pop bought a motor car for our trip to Cape Town where we planned to settle. He selected a 1928 Plymouth coupe. I doubt it was because a nearly 20-year-old car was cheap. Pop had little sense of economy. I think it was because it was an attractive-looking vehicle. The fact that I was to sit in the “dickie” seat for over 1,200 miles on dirt roads at that time, did not seem concern father. A dickie seat was in place of the usual trunk (or boot) of a car. It opened outwards from the top to reveal a tiny seat, where I was now exposed to the elements for the entire trip!
Despite the relatively poor quality of all our modes of transport from England to Africa, the sheer excitement of entering a new world and a new way of life was a far greater motivation for me as a child, than anything I could have expected from a normal childhood.
The trip and our arrival in Africa instilled in me a lifelong curiosity about new places, new things and new ideas. This is why the exploration of a completely new concept in computing, such as ExoTech, excites even a technophobe like me. I see it as ushering in a new way of life where we mere humans can actually remain at cause over the digital monster that is modern computing and be able to regulate it to our real needs instead of succumbing to a morass of obscure technology that specializes in keeping us at the effect of an elite priesthood of IT specialists who pretend they know what they are doing!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.