12 Home by Worms

My memory is ungrateful as well as unreliable. I sometimes remember people who have hurt or annoyed me better than people who have been good for me. On my way home from Lebanon I was invited by two of my fellow volunteers, one Egyptian, the other Italian, to stop off on the way home and visit their families in Cairo and Rome.

That was easy because the ferry stopped off in Alexandria on the way to Naples or Genoa, but I have no picture of these kind people and cant remember their names. The memories I have of Cairo and Rome have more to do with later visits and film images than with those first encounters. For Egypt I cherry-pick from TV documentaries, and my time in Rome is patched up with clips from Roman Holiday, the film with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, and possibly Ben Hur as well.

Alexandria was first stop on the Turkish ferry back from Beirut, with just a short run south to Cairo. This 1956 visit seems more significant in retrospect because Britain and Egypt would soon be at war. Perhaps some Egyptians were more aware of what was brewing than I was. I had hardly got off the gangway before a uniformed official greeted me courteously in English, asked where I was going and if I needed help.

Any reserves on my part stemmed from memories of unctuous acolytes and grasping taxi drivers in Jerusalem, This man said he was from the tourist ministry and radiated goodwill. He asked nothing from me, except where I was going so I showed him the slip of paper with my Cairo hosts' address. He led me to a taxi rank and stopped by a big car already two thirds full. After a few words in Arabic with the driver, the passengers inside made room for me. My guide  said I would be dropped off near the address I'd given him, and one of the other passengers would show me the way. He told me what fare I should pay, shook my hand and wished me a happy stay in Egypt.

Some of the road from Alexandria to Cairo was through green irrigated land, some across desert. It was not just a sea of sand, but rough and stony in places. We got glimpses of the Nile and palms before darkness fell. Suddenly what the headlights picked out ahead was no longer road, as though a tide of sand had covered it.  The driver kept going unflustered and the car seemed amphibious. Then the road reappeared and I may have drifted off. As we approached Cairo, my fellow-passengers gave me a nudge and pointed out through the window on our right. By now the moon was up ;and what I saw was not just palms but PYRAMIDS: ultimate cliché, pure geometry in triangles of black and white moonlight. I dont know how we came to pass by Giza on the way to Cairo from the North? Am I inventing that first sight, or did our road swing right almost bypassing the city before turning in from the west?

I'm ashamed to have no image of the people I stayed with, their home, what we ate, how we got around the city. Not even their names. Another case of Image-overlay? I was back in Cairo four years later, with a rented a flat in an unfinished apartment block (I'd bumped my head in Oxford and been told to take a break from intellectual work, found a teaching job instead, at the nationalised Victory (ex-Victoria) College in Cairo.)  After years ducking out of God Save the Queen at home, I stood to attention each morning for Gamal Abdel Nasser's national anthem, and read Wuthering Heights as a set book with a class of Egyptian and Gulf-state Arab boys. Loved it, first time for all of us. From my room at the school,  I moved into town. From my bare flat, I looked out on a busy little street and a stall that sold old nuts and bolts. I bought myself an old green bike. One day, after a bus-ride out of town, I found myself on a policeman's bike. I had been trying to photograph a donkey, against a backdrop of bougainvillea, when the policeman pulled up beside me. 'No pictures,' he said, his free hand making sure I understood. The wall behind the creeper concealed an army base. He put my camera in his tunic pocket, took my arm and told me to come with him. We set off on foot, him holding me with one hand and his bike with the other. It was a couple of miles to the police station and when the mid-day sun got too hot for us - the natives feel it too! - we agreed to double up on his bike. At first he sat in the saddle and pedalled while I sat on the crossbar, then we swapped around. It wouldn't have done to arrive at the station with my arresting officer caged between my arms, so we got off before we came in sight and resumed our custodial walk. By then we wished each other well, and his report must have tallied with mine: weren't tourists more interested in donkeys and pretty flowers than humdrum national defence?

At the Cairo Museum, I had another set-piece dream-come-true, the shock of the expected. Here was the golden mask of Tutenkamun and his gold-flake chariot, spare as a racing bike or Italian trotting cart - eat your heart out Boedica. Did the Romans pick that up their chariot-racing from Egypt, or were some horsemen always happier in carts? 

One received image leads to another, I was about to add the long-necked Nefertite to my trophy-list, only to find that her head was in Germany, not Cairo at all...  How did I get from chariots and bikes to trotting carts? At my prep-school - Frilsham House, now buried under the  M4 - there was an Italian boy in my dormitory. When others reached for the Beano or Comic Cuts, Jeger pulled out a wad of trotting-papers sent to him by his father in Italy.

I fondly remember this boy Jeger - our headmaster called him Georgie J - because he was the only other boy in the school who voted Labour in the school mock-elections held to mark the post-war national poll of 1945. Maybe Jeger sided with me because being a foreigner made him feel different. He may also have been a Jew though that never came up at school and it's only now that I realise his parents may have sent him to England for safety. None of that crossed our minds as we celebrated our proxy victory with a Labour landslide nationwide. For some reason I'd been nicknamed Labour Hard-boiled Egg, though I wasn't hard and my christian-name, Greg, was hardly ever used at school. 

When I went to Rome in 1956, I never thought of asking after Georgie J. My Italian work-camp friend had stayed on in Lebanon, so it fell to his elder sister to show me round. She had a job and her own red Fiat 500, and took time off to drive me round. The picture I have of her might as well be a fashion shot.  Skirt swinging, she runs up a flight of stone steps, turns and looks back in a swirl of dark hair. 'Guarda...', she says when I join her at the parapet above, as if opening a window on the cityscape below.

Another close-up sticks with me. Not the sunlit bella sorella but a male back-view in the shadows of a church. My hosts' apartment was on an upper floor overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. One day, with my guide at work, I went out on my own. I noted the name of the square so I could ask the way back if I got lost but didn't get far. Across the square was a church, less imposing than some others we'd seen. The door was unlocked so I went in. What struck me was an ill-lit painting on a side wall.

I had not heard of Caravaggio, the figure I took to be Jesus was hanging head-down on a topsy-turvy cross that some workmen struggled to lift. This victim's expression was not holy but distraught. Up-staging him and outshining his face was a workman's bum, as he strained to lift the weight. 

  

Now that I conjure the picture from cyber-space, I discover that the man on the cross is St Peter, not Jesus, his dismay focussed on the long nail through his hand. This crucifixion has no conventional wooden + but a contorted human x.

Legend has it that Peter had moved from Antioch (up the coast from Lebanon) to take charge of the new Christian community in Rome. When Nero came after him, Peter tried, as once before in Jerusalem, to escape. On his way out of the city, he met Jesus (in a vision) heading the other way. 'Quo vadis?'  Peter asked (that the Hollywood epic might be fulfilled). Jesus replied that he was going to be crucified again. Peter too turned back to face his punishment. Unworthy to stand in the image of his master, he had himself nailed upside-down.

From Cairo to Rome, then back to Germany. Two more work-camps would see me through the winter and into the last lap of my two years 'alternative service.' The first camp was another self-build housing project near Worms, the second, over Christmas, in a smaller Rhineland town called Bruhl.

Our Diet of Worms – unless it was our diet of Bruhl – came out of seven-pound US food-aid cans of orange processed cheese and homogeneous red jam. We took this gunk in various combinations, cooked or raw with greyish bread. Like most English schoolboys of my age and class, I'd grown up with jokes about the Diet of Worms, farting Vaterland and Martin Luther's indulgences. When I got to Worms, I never found out where the excommunicating Diet was held, nor even the whereabouts of Wittenburg and the church where he posted his demands. I'd passed my History A Level, but any knowledge acquired lay dead or asleep in my head. I was pinned firmly to present routines and possibilities, work and play, the prettiest girl in sight, red jam and orange cheese.

So why don't I have a clearer memory of the people and what went on from day to day? The Worms project was with a community housing co-op or 'seidlung' (settlement). Some of the co-builders must have been 'displaced persons', a familiar word at the time. Poles, East Germans? The Iron Curtain was already in place, and our school history had never got much further east than Germany.  I knew there had been a Hapsburg Empire but not what that entailed, apart from Austria, battles with Turks, and an Emperor whose nose came so close to his jaw that he fed through a spout. Perhaps he was the one who sat on a ballroom floor crying 'I'm a poached egg, don't touch me.'? 

Deviation

More recently I've had my own serious thoughts on the Diet of Worms, not the assembly that summoned Luther, but the sort of worms I sometimes sever with my spade....
We under-estimate these peristaltic ancestors of ours, the way they move themselves through the earth by moving earth through themselves. Worms, as Darwin noted, are world-changers. They're also a metaphor for the way have always taken in the world as we engage with it.

The primordial worm lives on in us, almost literally. Between our brains and the arms and legs we reach out and and walk about with, there runs not only a spine and spinal cord but the formidable worm of our digestive tract. It no longer moves us directly through the world, but delegates that other business to an array of more peripheral organs and limbs. These accessories may fancy themselves, but serve mainly to keep our grand old gut in the state they've made their own for the last hundred million years.

From my elevated human vantage point, I also note that what I often feel most deeply – the physical sensations of emotion – are registered more in gut than heart or brain. When I feel 'upset' my digestion upsets too. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't some vestigial adjoining site, precursor and template for subsequent losses and challenges. Whatever happened after our birth to the inside end of the umbelical cord? What became of the bits of us that found themselves redundant when the grand central supply-line was cut  and the entrance port sealed off?

Where did that all go? Did no scar, trace or echo of that severance remain? Could such dramatic change go entirely unregistered? Would not a palimpsest remain, to be retraced in the light or dark of subsequent events? That might become a natural repository for later losses, fears and challenges.

When I mentioned these musings to a teacher-acquaintance, she pointed me to this:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Back to the German city of Luther and Liebfraumilch -  'lovely woman's milk' and/or tribute to the Liebfrauenstift convent and nuns who made the wine. What I noticed about the surviving vineyards was the way they came right into town. A Leibfraumilch hoarding stood amid sooty rows of vines, in the triangular spaces between converging goods and passenger lines.

Like Mannheim, Worms was battered by allied bombing. Pierre Ceresole, the Swiss founder of the SCI, had organised his first workcamps after WW1 to make good war damage and reconcile old enemies. Some of the enemies did not take kindly to each other, but our later camps may have had subliminal benign effects. They were organised by the SCI's German branch, International Zivildienst (IZD). We didn't think of ourselves as peace-makers, but took each other as we came, living and working together as best we could across the usual barriers of race and language. Fewer people spoke English then. We made no special effort to address our differences or dig up the past. We got on with digging trenches, weather permitting, and with each other more or less as we worked and joked, drank and danced at weekends. Our half-built estate was unusual in that it already had a social centre, a nissen hut that served as meeting room and cafe-bar, with a platform for bands and wooden floor with chairs and tables around.

I dont remember much about our work or the houses we were helping build, but for a while I fetched and carried for a big South-German bricklayer. As I see him now, he crouches toad-like in a manhole at my feet, almost filling the square hole as he shapes the bottom round the open drains.  When he runs out of mortar, he looks up at me and shouts 'Shpeise.' That sounds to me at first like German for 'shit,' but then I understood or he explained that the word began with  s not sh.  'Speise' means 'food' and the slurred beginning was his accent, or a speech defect.
This 'speise' was not food but mortar, as in now or 'schneller.'  So I'd shovel a dollop past him onto the board in the hole. When I was slow to understand or respond, he sometimes abused me in a not-unfriendly way.  'Dolborer!'  was a word he used, if I heard it right. He tapped his head as he said it, so I thought that 'dol' might mean dull, and 'borer' have something to do with  'born'... Born stupid. dimwit? Macht nicht. 

At home and abroad, over the years, I grew familiar with coded rudeness among men on building sites and in heavy industry. Insults also express the closeness implicit in 'work-mates'.  In jagged, noisy places, soft words get lost. Shouted insults get across, take us to each other and the edge where Cain and Able meet. It's an old brink-manship, between sword-hilt and handshake, and the better we know each other the ruder we can be. When my brother worked as a trainee in the Ebbw Vale steelworks, he knew he was accepted  when a furnace-man brought a heavy hand down on his shoulder and said 'You're a right buggar, Martin.'  But the edgy banter has a darker side: take it wrong, show yourself hurt or fail to answer in kind and it turns to bullying - at work as in school.

Our foreman on the Worms site was a kind old veteran, Herr Vetterman. He carried the plans in his head, knew what needed doing and gruffly got the message through language barriers to us.  He drank too much and knew we knew he knew. His face was wizenned, like the fine-lined mug of a chimp behind bars. He made do with his rag-tag labour force, irregular deliveries, clapped-out equipment, flood or freeze.  As he set the fire in the hut each morning, he sent one of us  to the shop for his beer ration.

The high point of my time on the site was driving an old Ford tipper-truck that served  to carry sand and materials round the site. I had learned to drive before leaving home, had a go on a farm tractor but never a lorry before. In those days you often had to double-declutch between lower gears, but this lorry had no lower gears, except in reverse. To get it moving you had either to make sure you parked on a downhill slope, or tap-dance between clutch and accelerator to coax it to walking speed. Once over ten miles an hour, you were riding high, but risked spilling the load on a bend. The pleasure was in the challenge, as with the boy mahouts who competed to ride to ride rogue elephants.

When it froze too hard to dig or mix, we did maintenance jobs, knocking the layers of stone-dry cement and concrete off barrows and cement mixers.  Herr Vetterman did his best to keep us busy and warm and we took extended breaks round his stove. In Switzerland, the man I remembered was Clemente, chipping away at our bit of the Alps. Here in Germany it was a carefree American. His name's gone, but not the refrain he chanted as he chipped away at his fossilised mixer drum.  'Cement mixer, putty, putty...'  once, twice, a hundred times. We thought he was improvising and began joining in. He said this worksong was not his own but a comic one he'd heard in America. Now at last I've found it:

Cement mixer, putty putty 
  (x 5)
A puddle o’ vooty, a puddle o’ gooty,
A puddle o’ scooby, a puddle o’ veet concrete.
First you get some gravel, pour it on the vout
To mix a mess o’ mortar
You add cement and water
See the mellow roony
Come out slurp slurp slurp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdrnTTDTqo.

The words harked back to warmer days, before the frost turned water, sand, cement to stone, when the mixer could have done its job. The version of the ditty that I found was by Slim Gaillard, a black entertainer switching between guitar and piano, sometimes with his hands upside down. We could have done with more jitterbug warmth in the shell of a house where we lived, one stove in the living room, gas rings for cooking, spare  blankets to seal off unplastered door- and window-frames.(There are much flimsier refugee camps around Syria as I write, Christmas draws near etc?)

Weekend evenings were a welcome break. Work-mates and residents filled the nissen hut, with music and dancing as the evening wore on.  I remember sitting with Herr and Frau Vetterman, and him leaving me at the table with his wife when he went back to the bar. I had learned a few words of German and she had a few in English. With that and the beer, we had the illusion of communication abd with the noise of the band we had to bend our heads close to hear each other. As more people crowded the dance floor, I tried an opening-line I'd picked up at a youth-club dance-lession in Mannheim. 'Darf ich bitte?'  May I, please? And with something like 'Thank you kindly,' Frau Vetterman stood up and took my hand.  Among all the other couples on the floor, across an age-gap older than me, we felt comfortable in each other's arms, no more need to talk..

Later in the evening, a fight would break out, or we would guess as much from the shouting and clacking of furniture out of sight. The music stopped... Then a hidden ring-master called 'Musik!'  and the band struck up again.. Combatants separated, ejected or reconciled, glasses refilled, all's well that ends...another genial knock-about and home to bed.

On one day off from Worms – unless it was from Mannheim  the year before - I took a trip to Heidelberg. Somebody told me there was a clinic where I could sell my blood.That would pay for the day-trip and leave me a mark or two in hand. Heidelberg was in the American zone, with enough English around to make it easy. Everything went as planned.  I found the bloodbank, alll clean and correct. I was in and out in half an hour, then swanned around to the Red Ox inn...

As advertised by Mario Lanza's  'Student Prince' film and drinking song.. I'll spare you the Youtube clip of  his 'Drink, drink' on a table top. My measure of red blood was turned to red wine but I had mixed feelings about the Red Ox kitch, unless that set in later when Heidelberg follies blurred in with later ones at Oxford. When I matriculated at New College, I wore a hydrangea in my mortar-board, but the Latin gobbledygook and gowns didn't stop there. For dinner in 'hall' long gowns were required for Scholars, short for Commoners. Bemused by this nonsense, I recalled meeting an otherwise rational young German taking pride in the fine white line of a duelling scar on his forehead. One evening, as we sat down to dinner at New College, a brainwashed fellow student 'sconced' me for appearing  - not for the first time - without a gown.

Why did this feel like an offer I could not refuse?  Perhaps because if I failed to gulp quart of beer without a pause, I would be expected to pay for it. The drink put me off my dinner, but I was also fed up with myself. Why did I not brush the challenge aside, refuse either to consume or pay for a drink I hadn't ordered and sit down sit down to my oxtail soup?  Manners Maketh Man, archaic nonsense seeps from crumbling structures into impressionable heads.

I had no remorse or embarassment after selling my blood in Heidleberg. If that was prostitution, I felt quite pleased with myself. Pride in guilt? No harm done, I'd got away with it, and a private bloodbank was hardly the House of the Rising Sun. Not long ago, I saw a picture in the paper of a sex-worker on a protest in London. Her poster read 'Better sell your body in Soho than your mind in the City,'

Next stop, Bruhl, and I've no idea now what work we did there. The building we lived in had a church-like look, a warm kitchen where we ate - orange cheese, red jam? - and a tower with a winding staircase. One night, after a festive meal that may have been our Christmas dinner, I climbed to the top of the tower with a young Dutch woman in a sari or sarong. She had been brought up in Indonesia, and put on the wind-around silk dress in honour of the occasion. When we got to the top and looked out on a Brueghel winter night, I realised she was shivering, and put an arm round her waist. Her body felt warm through the silk, but very thin, all ribs and vertebra. I felt sorry for her. She talked about her family leaving Indonesia. They must have packed up in a hurry after Pearl Harbour, and she made it feel like a fall from paradise.

From my own colonial relations, I've sometimes had the same impression. Partly it's the cold,  loss of tropical sunshine, status, servants and cheap drink. Repats sometimes seem like the cartoon creatures that keep running in the air when they're over the cliff. Back home after the war, as Labour began letting go of colonies, the indigenous middle classes had already got used to cooking for themselves, with hoovers and washing machines to lighten the load. Great-uncle Chunky had retired from the Sudan political service to a flat off the Earls Court road and a bottle of whisky a day. He cooked his own dinner and put on a dinner jacket to eat it, seemed cheerful whenever we met. I noticed – or my mother remarked on - his tiny feet. Apparently he'd had a thousand square miles to govern and police with a little platoon of askaris.

The other side of the world, in the Philippines, Aunt Lorna and her children spent the war in a Japanese camp (as I write her son Rupert, my contemporary, lies in a coma after a collapse of his immune system). In Kenya, my mother's sister Erica married a German gold-miner and got interned by her own government when war was declared. When the Mau-mau won, Erica and her family left Kenya for the UK. Erica and Rudi hated it, went abroad again, and  their children spent their holidays with us.

On Boxing Day, or was it New Year's day, in Bruhl I walked out across the snowscape with a man called Andrew Rutter. I had recognised him from school, though he'd been several years ahead of me. Now on this glittering holiday, we had more time to get to know each other. The land between the town and the Rhine was flat and would have been too soggy to walk across without the snow and frost. There were no hedges or ditches between most of the big flat fields.so we could walk straight to where river should be. On the way,  at what might have been a dividing line between two fields, we came to an arch of thorny trees. A lych-gate between nowhere's, and we stopped for a moment under the leafless twiggy branches. With a few berries, perhaps, left over by the birds. By mistake or on purpose that I bumped into one of the scrawny tree trunks. That shook a silver rain of frost onto our heads, and down our necks. That was the trick, and the treat was in the glitter of crystals floating down around.

Today I chanced to read of a UCL experiment where human guinea-pigs were paid to give themselves and others electric shocks for money. It turned out they were more ready to take the pain and cash themselves than to profit by hurting others. Might this apply to suicide bombers too, their own first and most certain victims.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1114/181114-rather-harm-selves-than-others-for-profit

Before we knew the Rhine was just ahead, we saw what looked like a pantomime ship sliding across the fields, but when we got to the water's edge there were no more boats in sight. The river flowed too fast for ice to set on it, too fast for us to keep up with at a normal walking pace. When we threw in a bottle or can for target practice. it left us behind while we looked for stones to throw..

I  remember things Andrew said to me. He hoped to become an architect, but first he wanted to work his way around and help build things himself - learning his trade from the ground before drawing castles in the air. He described some time he'd spent on a community project in West Africa. When he took off his shirt or vest, people would come up and slap him on the back. His skin was unusually white and they took his freckles and moles for insects biting him. He'd been flattered but confused when a woman told him she'd like his babies. When I began writing this, I emailes our old school - which I had once been asked to leave - to see if they had his address. They did. I've not yet answered a long letter I got from him, with drawings of buildings he helped preserve in WInchester. I'll send him this in return in case he remembers it.

From Bruhl, it was.home to England and the last few weeks of my 'international service.'  As usual, that journey runs into earlier and later ones. I have postcard images in mind of vineyards, castles on crags along the Rhine. Plus my own down-to-earth ones of tarmac, grass and gravel verges, traffic coming and going. Often there were roads on either side of the river. When I could see across, there seemed to be more traffic on the other side. I visited no castles but crossed several bridges and paid for ferry crossings in the hope of a better lifts. Big cars rarely stopped.  It was mostly smaller, older ones, and lorries or vans. I formed a prejudice against fat Belgians in big cars. They seemed to travel a lot but never stopped, unless one did but censored it to save my prejudice.

Hitch-hiking can be a way of NOT seeing the world, narrowing it down to tarmac, a barcode of hopes and disappointments. At major junctions and roundabouts, there was a loose etiquette between hitchhikers: first come, first out, the latest arrival going furthest down the road and acknowledging the others on the way. Sometimes it made sense to double up. A car that stopped might have room for more than one, a girl might welcome protection and her new companion be more likely to get a lift with her. We may have set out to see the world, but  the means became the end, a roller coaster of highs and lows, starts and stops.

Sometimes, if the driver was only going another two kilometers there would be another let-down. One cold evening, I got dropped off at a small side-turning, not in a town or village but with the dark river on one side and a few houses and old buildings on the other. The bank of the river was built up, to shore up the road and/or provide a morring for barges and river boats. None of the houses looked inviting, the buildings were empty, disused perhaps but surely locked. There were no open sheds or haylofts for me and my sleeping bag.

Then about 50 yards ahead of me I saw the dark hulk of a boat against the quayside not far from the road. If it was a barge lying empty, there might be some flat, dry space inside. As I approached, I realised it was not a barge and not quite empty. At the far end was a deckhouse, with a glimmer of light through a shuttered window.  I nerved myself up to knock and ask if they might have a space below deck.

B efore I could say Hans Schmidt, the door was opened by a friendly young man. He must have noticed my rucksack and seemed neither surprised nor annoyed when I asked about the hold – I knew the word for sleep and pointed back down for the hold. 'Come in' he said, making way for me through the narrow doorway. In and down into a warm little cabin living room. In a kitchen space beyond stood a young woman who left her stove when he called and came greet me. When he'd explained my presence, she offered me coffee. As I drank it they asked where I'd come from, where I was going and...had I already eaten. They must have been about to eat and now they set another place. When we finished eating, in what I feared might be a parting gesture, they offered me drink. When that was finished, they pushed in the chairs on one side of the table and opened a sliding door in the wooden cabin wall. Inside was a little box-bed almost filled with a fat duvet. Better than hay in a manger, or getting dropped off at an inn by a Good Samaritan. 

Or being eaten by wolf in grandmother's clothing. I slept like a baby, and when I came out of my box in the morning, they had coffee waiting again. Over breakfast, the offered me a job as deck-hand. That must have been what the box bed was for. I almost jumped at it, but I was supposed a 'conscientious' objecter with another couple of months of international service to do with IVS.  A ride on a river boat wasn't quite the service I'd been excused the army for, and I could hardly renege on my deal with IVS. I told them how much I wished and thanked them for their kindness, but had to say No.

Did I? I've always half-regretted it, especially since I cant remember what if anything I did for IVS when I got home. Another petty paradise lost. What could have been better than spring and summer on a river boat?  Tough and bronzed as we whizzed downstream between those cliffs and vineyards, stately cities, smoky Ruhr to mighty North Sea ports. Then turn about, reload and push our bow-wave back upstream.

 
I said goobye and trudged back onto the drab old road. Between Bonn and Cologne I must have turned left, west in the direction of the chanel and Calais. With hitching, you never quite which way you'll go, your route the sum of other people's, unfolding as you go.  'Heaven knows how we will get there...'

 https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=youtube+woyaya&ei=UTF-8&fr=chrf-yff29

I cant remember getting home, or anything from my remaining months with IVS in London. Had the IVS hostel and office moved from Pembridge VIllas - in W11 not far from where we'd lived at the end of the war - to Oakley Street up near King's Cross? Perhaps my family had already moved from our little red house in a field to a substantial stucco pile on the road out of Wokingham. That may have been later, while I was away somewhere else. Wherever home was I was glad to get there, like any more or less prodigal son, happy to see my parents, brothers and sister again. 'Bless Daddy, Mummy, Martin, Richard and Susan,' in that order from my childhood bedside prayers.

But who the hell was that Hans Schmidt? Here's a choice of two. The first resembles my father as a young man, the second my step-grandson now aged 10, the third's a German conductor. And then there's that chariot.

 

 

How on earth did such narrow wheels not get stuck in the desert sand or cultivated land around the Nile? Or was the face of the earth quite different then, the Sahara teaming savanna...flat as a showcase floor?

11. Lebanon late summer 1956

I had begun to think I'd dreamed that summer camp in Lebanon. It's nearly 60 years ago and sometimes my day and night imaginings get mixed up. So I was relieved when I checked on the web to find that there WAS an earthquake in Lebanon in 1956, with its epicenter near Sidon.'

Sidon is a place I remember, on my route to the damaged village we helped rebuild. According to my internet check, the earthquake killed 136 people and destroyed 6,000 buildings, though not all in one place. The village where we worked was called Laba'a, between Sidon on the coast and a hilltown called Jezzin. near the Litani river I got to Lebanon on a Turkish ferry from Genoa to Beirut. One sunny deck is much like another and I'd got quite accustomed to summer passages across the Mediterranean. The year before I'd sailed back and forth as a deck passenger between Marseilles, Algiers and Oran. This year it was Beirut via Alexandria.

Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it overlays and blurs perception. Once we can take things for granted, we don't register them with the same detail and intensity. We save our conscious mind for new threats and challenges. I remember bits and pieces, chance encounters from various sea crossings, but not which came when or on the way to where. As with ferryboats, so with ruins. There must have been damage to see in that Lebanese village but I don't remember it. By the time I got there, the worst of the rubble would have been cleared and the wounds no longer raw. The only death I heard about was somebody's uncle, from old age. But my indifference to the damage may also have something to do with bomb sites in wartime London. I was quite used to rubble and gaps between buildings.

Not everything's a blur. Some images stand out, though not for any obvious significance:.

• a baker's daughter, sitting on a stool by little outdoor fire. Over the fire is a smooth metal dome. I'm taken with the face and figure of the girl who twirls the dough into a sheet across her arms. She flattens a lump between her hands, then hands and fore-arms dance as they stretch it wide and flat. Her skin glows and she smiles, quite unembarrassed, when she sees me watching. When the dough has become a thin white mat she flips it over the dome to cook.
• A scorpion crouches in one of the six holes in a hollow concrete block. IAs nervous of us as we are of it.
• A mute sea laps on Sidon beach, slashed across by a tail of setting sun. On a headland up left is the silhouette of what I'm told is a crusader castle Behind me trundle battered 'service' cabs, old US saloons and station-wagons that pick up passengers along the coast road.
• A cluttered littlel shop near the AUB (American University of Beirut) sells me some cheap swimming trunks. Two triangles, stitched beneath and clipped at the waist. I feel cheated when I'm turned off the university beach because there's not enough of them.
• Dogs howl outside our tents at night. No wonder 'kalb' – the Arabic for dog – is such serious abuse in Arabic, though in Egypt dogs were gods.

The day I got to Lebanon, one of those 'service' cabs picked me up on the road out of Beirut. I had no map but knew roughly where I was going. It seems odd now that we came with no training or introduction. All I knew was the name and rough location of the village, and that a rebuilding project had been organised by American University Alumni – whatever that meant – and our European SCI (Service Civil International).

The road south from Beirut ran along the seashore. 'Warm are the still and lucky miles...' That was W.H. Auden but this bit of coast was not so lucky. The Americans, who rightly pulled the plug on the Anglo-Israeli-French Suez adventure, were soon to send in US marines, storming up the beach to be met by Lebanese ice-cream vans along the coast road. The base established by the US troops was subsequently blown up by suicide-bombers – 'the cowards' as some of their enemies described them.

Before and during those summer months in Lebanon I had no inkling of local tensions or wider conflicts, though I noticed that some of the 'service' cabs had little crosses or virgins swinging over the dashboard, and some didn't. (What did they have, prayer beads, or Koranic inscriptions?) This was 1956, the year of Suez attack, but I knew nothing much about Colonel Nasser and the nationalisation of the Suez canal. I may have taken a stand against war and been in at the start of the Algerian independence struggle, but I hadn't begun to put the pieces together. The Litani river valley, epicentre for our earthquake, was later to become the front line in a war with Israel.

At my tribunal hearing in Reading – where conscientious objectors' claims were judged - a notable on the bench remarked on my ignorance. If they hadn't given me the benefit of the doubt, I might have gone to prison or joined the navy in time for the Suez landings. My father had served in the wartime navy. He told me how the 'panic-stations' alarm was sounded when enemy aircraft were sighted, how his shipmates fought each other to get on deck, and how, in Alexandria, children greeted them with the words 'fuck off'' – which they took to be English for 'hello'.

I think I knew that Lebanon, like Algeria, had been ruled by the French. My school French, brushed up in Algiers the year before, was more useful than English in Lebanon. It didn't occur to me to learn Arabic, buy a guidebook or local newspaper, but I enjoyed the intercontinental buzz of Beirut, variety of colour and clothes, trailing flowers over balconies, cheap drinks, tasty food and Latin rythms.

I lived in the present, there and then. Many months on the move had cut me off from newspapers and radio news. I hardly thought of home or wrote to my family. Phone calls and cables were for emergencies and I'd not suffered any. After years of boarding school and compulsory weekly communication, letter-writing had lost any charm it might have had.

Looking back, now that writing has become a crutch to my consciousness, I wonder what I did with my experience before. How much can we understand or remember if we cant put it into words? Or images, or images in words... I didn't keep a diary, and there was nobody to tell about what happened from day to day. So I'm left with fleeting glimpses of tents and half-built walls, golden beaches and a golden girl, a shady cane-break where we stopped to rest and talk one day.

As in Algeria the previous summer, our tents were pitched beside the building site. Our team was half Western (European and American), half Arab (Lebanese, Egyptian and Palestinian). One sponsor who came and visited was a Lebanese businessman and politician called Emile Boustani. He had his own Black Cat construction company and airline Village notables kow-towed to him but with us he was genial, and informal ,in lightweight trousers, leather belt and short-sleeved shirts. He sat on a straw mat with us as village tributes piled up in front of him - chicken, cakes, fruit – which the Big Man passed on pointedly to us.

As in Algeria, we worked early and late, avoiding mid-day sun. In Lebanon I don't remember feeling the heat , we were further inland and higher-up. With Boustani and AUB funding, we were well-fed and in good health. A boy with a donkey came round with an earthen water jar and a little round spout from which to hit or miss our mouths. I doubt if it would be possible now to assemble such a mixed team in a Lebanese village. Then it took me a while to distinguish between Muslims and Christians. For all I knew or know, there were Jews as well. Differences that emerged as we talked added to the interest and pleasure we found in each other's company. It helped that we had something useful to do together.

The technical side of the building was decided for us but we organised our own camp life,. Our job was not to rebuild from the ruins. Then as now, construction was quicker and cheaper from scratch, on a greenfield site, though in this case the earth was already dusty brown. We dug and laid concrete foundations, then fetched and carried hollow concrete six-trous blocks - light to carry and easy to handle. I cant remember what the roofs were like, if only because they were not yet on when I left.

I could have asked Makram, the young engineer in charge. He was almost one of the team and had the plans in his tent alongside ours. Years later, I had to give more thought to roofing. In Wales I built a couple on our smallholding and back in Algeria after the independence war, roofing was a problem we never solved. Villagers left homeless by French regroupement, - ethnic cleansing/concentration camps - insisted on traditional flat roofs. But the forests that once provided beams and joists had been felled for firewood or to deny cover to fellagha. We had no money for imported steel and concrete, though later it occurred to me that these materials might have been a more useful than unskilled foreign volunteers.

In Laba'a, the plans were already agreed and it was not ours to reason why. Our job was barrowing blocks, sand and cement, mixing mortar and getting it onto the masons' boards before it dried in the sun. Sometimes I wished I could be up on the scaffolding laying blocks along a line. Most of the masons were local men, but one young Egyptian, Arabic-speaker, athletic and quick to learn, got promoted to join them. The nearest we got to drama on the ground below was when somebody got stung by a scorpion while picking up a block. I got there in time to see the foreman pick up a stick and smack lightly at the puncture spot, like a playful teacher with a ruler.

Scorpions, like adders, are not mostly as dangerous as they're cracked up to be. People like to dramatise, even welcome risk. In a book called Jungle Green (Arthur Campbell 1953) about British exploits in Malaya, I read that boy-mahouts would compete for killer-elephants. On British building sites workers sometimes scorned helmets and harnesses, and later sneered when EU regulations cut the weight of cement bags. How can a man be a man if health and safety rules? What's to live for if nothing's to die for, and where do I stand?

In Lebanon as in Algeria, there were several women in the team but their job was mainly to cook and cater. In what was still an Arab country, we were already breaking new ground with boys and girls camped out together... That was easier then when secular nationalism trumped traditional religion, veils were coming off not on.

We felt like a band of friends, which seemed quite new to me. There was a handsome young Greek from Cairo. Larger than life, he wore a neat dark beard and championed Rhetoric. If I remember, he argued that truth was whatever most people could be led to believe; the word WAS God if you could find the logic and imagery to make it stick. It helped his case that he looked like a classical god himself.

Poppy - we never called her Poppea - had another lovely head. She had been working as an air-hostess when air travel was still an exclusive business but never made a thing of it:. A waitress was still a waitress at ten thousand feet. She had a slender neck, bright eyes and tight dark curls you could have cut in stone. (Carved hair works much better than carved eyes: you can almost hear snaky locks hiss, but whoever got petrified by looking stone Medusa in the eye?)

Poppy was witty and good natured. So, in a softer more ebullient way, was Haifa, a young Palestinian woman who once stubbed her cigarette out on my arm. What can I have said? What was her history and how did I cross her? Haifa was fair and buxom with waves of red hair. Her lips would tremble before she laughed and she was quick to match or deflate Greek rhetoric. I've no idea how I provoked her. It wasn't until years later, living with a gay black American (David du Bois) in Cairo, that I was forced to question some of my own presumptions. When I came across his obituary a few years ago, it said he went on to edit the Black Panthers' magazine.

There was another Palestinian called Azmi, probably a scholarship-student. He seemed less affluent, more diffident than the rest of the AUB lot and it was he who first alerted me to Palestinian history, He took a group of us home with him to a refugee camp, Ain Helweh (?). His family lives in a garage-sized house with thin concrete walls and mattress-couches that served as beds at night. After our tents, the house felt cool and homely, interior walls and ceiling not white- but blue-washed, sky blue. We sat round a low table or mat for mint tea, followed by big hot dishes that everyone dipped into. Weeks later, after some roundabout questioning, I reckoned our meal must have used up the family's meat ration for a month. Azmi would get cross when I said reflex 'thank yous' for this or that. 'Brothers don't thank,' he said.

Before we parted at the end of my time at the camp, Azmi gave me a book called 'Palestine is our Business' (Burrows Millar, Westminster Press, 1949), I had seen a little of French Algeria and just about remembered post-war recruiting posters in the UK for the Palestine Police: upstanding chaps in boy-scout uniforms, sick of civvy-street. Azmi's book lifted the lid on British colonial rule and I couldn't help believing it. An insight on the British mandate brought some dirty washing nearer home. Was 'our business' in Palestine and other British territories a sort of family business? I had two grandfathers, an aunt and several uncles who had made a living in India, black Africa, distant islands and Sudan.

That was a passing shadow, with no bearing on my conduct in Lebanon or for many years afterwards. Only after the US and UK invaded Iraq, did I return to Palestine for a closer look Here in Lebanon I was intrigued by what seemed to be a layer-cake constitution, with positions alternating down from Christian President through Muslim Prime Minister to a marble-cake of religious and tribal parties in parliament. The arrangement seemed quite reasonable, more like the French Assembly roundabout than our two-party ding-dong at Westminster. One day we were invited to a tall French town-house in Beirut. As we sipped from our coffee cups, we looked out between half-closed shutters on the sun and shadow in an elegant tree-lined street. Paris a la Libanaise. Back out in the street, we dropped into a little cafe-bar, a few steps down from the pavement, the sound of music wafting up. My pocket money stretched to a cool drink or two a week..There were no other customers about, and the waitress-hostess seemed content to pass the time of day with us. She taught me some cha-cha steps – rocking forward, side and back on a space the size of a handkerchief – then when the record changed I took her through a couple of jive turns. It came easily, felt close, warm and natural, No holds barred or strings attached.

The Beirut I recreate in my mind has a lozenge of central park, near the sea front but not along it, with traffic turning round it and main roads leading off. When I check on a satellite view, that could be any one of several 'squares'. Did I walk round it, take it in from a street-map or spot it from the air, later when we flew overhead on a day-trip to Jerusalem? The world population has grown threefold since the 50's and Beirut can't be far behind, even without the flood of refugees from Syria. What's left of what I might have seen? Were some relics of colonial Beirut frozen in time like the pride of Imperial London: SW1 etc.

My uncertainty washes this way and that. Our Lebanese building site no sooner takes shape in my mind than it morphs into others before and since, one on the outskirts of Algiers, another on the Manchester overspill estate where I went to live and work in the 70s. Maybe we fall back on a simplified repertoire of found or given archetypes. Like children with paint on paper: Man, Woman, Tree and House, four windows, door and chimney – even if the real chimney came down years ago. For larger spaces we may adopt a standard frame, landscape or portrait, foreground, background, left and right. Surviving fragments of memory are slotted in to order like mosaic chips... At my prepschool, I got laughed at – in a more or less friendly way – for writing something to the effect that rivers in northern Russia weren't much use for navigation because they flowed upwards and got frozen from the top, blocking the way to the arctic sea.

The barking dogs outside our tent were true to life, facts on the ground and I did crawl out to throw stones at them. Dogs, like people, may lead double lives. Trusted household pets - guard-dogs, hunting dogs - revert to older feral forms. The howling wolves and hyenas on our building site were probably mild house-dogs in their other lives. In Partington, Manchester, the space behind our new council house became a sort of free-range greyhound track when all the dogs around came out to play. The ill-assorted pack ran wild at night and sometimes in broad daylight, within yards of our back doors. Rumours spread of bites and indecent assaults, mothers grabbed their prams and push-chairs, whisked their children back indoors.

Some of my best friends have been dogs. Sammy, the first of these, was a curly black-haired labrador who must have been as big as I was when we met. I don't remember him ever howling, biting or mounting us children, but he abandoned ship around the end of the war. According to Mary, my mother, two ladies up the road fed him cake, and didn't pull his hair, so he went to live with them. I do remember Mary, howling once, when she got the phone call about her younger brother's death. It seemed to me she felt pain differently from us, or perhaps it was just that she wasn't brought up a boy. She would squeal or yelp when she broke a finger-nail, cut a finger or banged her shin. But during the flying-bombs, she seemed so calm and cheerful we could not be afraid.

The howling outside our tents got on my nerves. When I hurled the stones, I wanted them to find their mark. Mostly they clattered on the stony ground, but once I scored a softer thump and, yes, a yelp. Then silence, sleep tinged with of guilt, but no tell-tale bloodstains on the ground next day.

Hell has no fury like a man or woman scorned - put down, let down or simply taken by surprise. Persons, places, pets or things - we like them to stay as they were, where they were and true to type. When they change, then so may we we, a different side of us comes forth. Young men – mostly men - who tattoo LOVE and HATE across their fists may have a point. 'If the right one don't get you then the left one will' (Sixteen Tons, Merle Travis 1946 and Tennessee Ernie Ford). Don't take us for granted, they say. Love hurts anyway.

Back to building.. Our Egyptian Icarus in Lebanon had his counterpart in Manchester, their twin silhouettes atop a single scaffold, quarter of a century apart. In Manchester c.1981, I combined a part-time M.Ed degree with a six-month government bricklaying course for unemployed. The bricklaying instructors were natural teachers. They couldn't explain the motions of wrist and hand as they rolled and spread the mortar, but we could watch them do it, take it in and try it for ourselves. Again and again, when we got it right, we knew how it looked and felt. The same with ski-ing, tennis, dancing, a mix of observation, empathy and mime Older circuits by-pass frontal lobes, linking limbs and conditioning reflexes with no distinction of 'yours' and 'mine'.

When I saw Van Gogh paintings in Amsterdam – I almost said 'in the flesh' - what moved me was the dance of brushstrokes imprinted in the paint. Rapid stabs and dabs, rythmic, repeated and varied. At a London exhibition of VG paintings and letters, I found him comparing his brushwork to a violin bow. Rolling and spreading mortar was a bit like that, but I was slow to pick it up. I made up for lost time when we got to laying bricks. In a life I'd spent months laying out and pasting lines of print, 'artwork' so-called for a litho press. Now, words to bricks, I'd got an eye for intervals, verticals and parallels. Our Manchester prodigy was a long-haired fee spirit from Liverpool. While most of us built and rebuilt basic walls, he worked his miracles, Roman and Gothic arches, corbelled eaves and dog-tooth cornices. Our tradesmen-teachers combed their repertoire to keep him busy for another day

What did our Lebanese foreman think of us? Playboys, gilded youth? Makram, the engineer, was patient and friendly, with his sunny smile and floppy cowboy hat. He came from Dhour el-Chuweir, another Christian village to the north, and may have qualified at the American University,. Later I learned that Dhour el-Chuweir was renowned for its traditional masons, and the boyhood home of Edward Said. Makram didn't criticise or order us about, perhaps he left that to the NCOs, foremen and masons made of sterner stuff.

Out of working hours we got to know some families in Leba'a. The baker must have noticed my admiration for his daughter and took me by surprise as I passed his bakery one day. What I understood him to say – his French perhaps no better than mine - was 'Would you like to marry her?' The girl was nearby. I wondered if she'd heard or understood. Was she in on it, or was it just a joke of his? I mumbled something like 'What can I say?' or 'How could I say no?'

Another family we got to know a bit better because a grown up daughter spoke good French and seemed glad to talk to us. She wore sober European skirts and dresses and like a Chekhov sister, she seemed to long for something better somewhere else. It was her uncle who died while we were there, but she showed little emotion when she invited us to the village for the funeral. On the day, we cleaned up and went down to watch if not join the procession to the church. Among the mourners were a group of women in black, who wailed and tore at their hair. Among them was our modern-minded friend and guide.

In a Camus short story, Exile and the Kingdom, an expat engineer watches a ritual religious procession in South America. He's looking out for a fisherman he'd met out drinking the night before. After surviving a shipwreck, the fisherman had vowed to join the procession and carry a boulder to a hilltop shrine. The engineer watches the procession pass, is turning away when when spots his drinking companion, stumbling under the weight of his stone at the very end of it. Then fisherman falls and fails to get up. Gladly thy cross-eyed bear... The young engineer steps into the road. Fit again after a good night's sleep at his hotel, he heaves the stone onto his back. Fisherman at his heels, the foreigner follows the crowd to the top of the hill, drops the builder at the chapel gate. The fisherman's family are there to meet them. They invite the stranger in without ado and sit him down to eat with them. Copains, companions, friends with whom we break our bread.

Who said 'If he hungers, feed him; if he sleeps, cover him; if he leaves, forget him' ? An Icelandic saga perhaps.

The next outing I remember was an unlooked-for grace. A group of us went walking near Jezzin. When the sun got hot we found shelter in a clump of tall reeds, the sort used for windbreaks, sunshade roofs and screens. 'Raised in a canebreak by an old momma lion...' was another line from 'Sixteen Tons' but here there was no threat or sweat. What we got was just what we saw, a little oasis of dappled shade and welcoming dry ground.

Chaste dejeuner sous l'herbe. We reclined entwined between each other and the straight, smooth canes. Companions from here, there and everywhere in the middle of nowhere. I don't remember if we'd brought drinks or sandwiches, but time stood still. For an hour or two we talked and laughed as though we'd known each other all our lives. I wonder if any of us kept in touch, or remember that lucky break. By then I'd given up taking addresses, it seemed an empty gesture when I knew I'd never visit or write to them.

Our trip to Jerusalem was more obviously notable. It arose from a bit of cheek and quick thinking on the building site. Boustani, the contractor and airline boss, was touring the work-site. 'Well done, lads,' he said. 'Keep it up and you'll deserve a prize.' On his next visit, an American volunteer – I don't remember his name - called down from the scaffolding, 'What about the prize?'

'What about what prize?'

You said...'

Did I say prize?'

'Jerusalem,' said the American off the top of his head. 'Trip to Jerusalem.'

'Did I say that...OK, I'll see what I can do.'

A few days later we were given a date and time to be at Beirut airport, to be met by a Black Cat plane.

Arab East Jerusalem was part of Jordan then, set against an expanding Israeli West. We landed at nearby Kalendia airport, drove to the old city and spent the day visiting markets and Holy Places. I was happy with all the sights, sounds and smells of the market, haggling for bits of leather, blue glass or olive-wood. Not so happy when the haggling resumed in the Holy Sepulchre. I may no longer have believe in God or Jesus by then, but I liked the Christ who kicked the money-lenders out of the Temple yard. An unctuous usher took my arm to see me a place where the rock split when Jesus died. Before unhooking the cover, this attendant held out his palm. It felt like 'What the Butler Saw' on the pier. Back in the sunlight, taxi drivers were scrabbling for our fares to other sacred sites.

My next visit to Jerusalem was in 2003, by which time Arab East Jerusalem, the old city, was a ghetto in what Israel claims as its undivided capital, Kalendia no longer an airport but the mother of all checkpoints. What was left of the field was cut across with a trench to stop it being used as a rat-run round the checkpoint barrier. Across the trench was a plank, with Palestinian taxis lined up on either side. Passengers got out of one cab, teetered across the plank, and got into another on the far side..

The reception we got from people in Lebanon 1956 was warmer than I'd found on the Algiers camps the summer before. Algeria had been on the verge of war. Unlike Algeria, Lebanon had never been heavily colonised by France. Indirect rule allowed a semblance of mutual respect, and traditions of hospitality survived. We may have even benefited from our visitor status. There was no mass tourism, hippies were unheard of and the AUB was Ivy League or Oxbridge in the Middle East... For whatever reason, we were kindly received by several Lebanese families and no-where shunned..

First Azmi's home in the refugee camp, then a weekend with engineer Makram and his family in Dhour el-chueir, a resort village up the long hilly road that leads from Beirout towards Baalbec and Syria. On our way up, the hairpin-bends gave us a succession of sea and mountain views, a string of villages and way-side cafes. Each seemed more enticing than the last, with outdoor, canopies of vine or bougainvillea. Cloudy arak on ice, strings of lights and more ch-cha-cha, intercut with songs in Arabic.

I'd hardly begun to think about cultural and religious differences, but I did realise in Dhour el-Chuweir that Makram's family was Christian and Ramzi's Muslim. Ramzi was an AUB student and fellow volunteer, his family had a newly built holiday home on the outskirts of the village. Makram's family were more modest and deeply rooted. They put us up in a rambling old house half-hidden by fruit-trees and creepers. Ramzi's family was richer, flashier, no old vines or creepers yet but bright sunblinds. There were also pretty bright sisters who made us welcome and changed their dresses several times a day. Perhaps, once we were in the village as Makram's guests Ramzi's family couldn't be outdone. That suited us, though sometimes back at the camp I had found Ramzi a bit pushy - I got my own back one day by pushing him backwards into a wheel-barrow. Makram also had two sisters, less flamboyant than the girls at Ramzi's house. There the father was in charge, while at Makram's things seemed run by women. When we woke up, mother and aunts were already busy. Before breakfast they were in the kitchen preparing lunch, stripping little leaves off stalks for salad or soup. Mealtimes were a pleasure, informal with hot and cold dishes and conversation between.

One afternoon, after a long midday meal, we went for a walk round the village. At some point we branched off the road, uphill across a field now bare of crops, short-cut to a vantage point above. Once off the road, the ground was stony, steep and dotted with scrub. I had been trying, hesitantly, to make conversation with Makram's elder sister. Her name was Laila, acquiline, proud or shy. I wasn't sure she wanted to talk to me but gathered she worked as a nurse at an English hospital in Beirut. The English Hospital, perhaps. Laila was older than me, and I felt she might have more important things on her mind. As we climbed the rough ground, I noticed she was having difficulty. She'd probabpy come out expecting a stroll round the village, in light sandals or slipper shoes. Now her feet were slipping backwards out of them. She looked up and saw me watching, half-smiled, and carried on as best she could. She did not complain but slipped back again. I held out a hand. After moment's hesitation she took it, with a look that seemed to say 'Alright, if I must.' If the ground had not been stony, strewn with sticks and thorns, she might have kicked off her shoes. Instead, unwilling to turn back, she took a firm grip on my hand and got the traction she needed to stay in her shoes. I admired the strength and slenderness of her hands, hoped she wasn't put off by the size and sweat of mine.

By the top of the slope, we talked more easily. When we got to the road above, she did not immediately let go. The distance between us had gone. For the next day or two we were all back and forth between the two houses, bright surfaces at Ramzi's, quieter at Makram's. I didn't have much more talk with Laila but when we came to say goodbye, she asked me to come and visit at the English hospital. I think she mentioned that the English – or Scottish? - matron would like to meet me too. Again, what could I say? I felt honoured, excited but didn't know if the opportunity would arise. I said I would try.

And I did, as soon as we got another break. Did I phone, or write? I found the hospital and Laila greeted me in the hall, graceful in her uniform. In this setting, she seemed more confident, radiant. The Matron had obviously been expecting me and Laila left us together while she went to change. I had the feeling this mother superior was sizing me up, but she may just have welcomed the chance to talk to a young English visitor. If she was indeed Scottish, I probably told her about a work-camp I'd been to in Govan, Glasgow, a crane-view of the dock at night, and Sunday morning in Harmony Row, the cobbles sparkling with broken glass.

How did Laila and I pass our time around the hospital? No idea, except that by now, the shyness was on my side. I had become adept at new encounters, in arguments and practical arrangement, the shallows of flirtation and social chat. But I had no capacity for more intimate, intense or slow-burning relationships I was glad to see Laila again and glad that was pleased to see me. I found her beautiful, dark hair, pale skin, vivacious now. But

I did not know what she expected of me. She said I could stay. I said I would like to but might have to get back. As deciding-time approached, she asked me again. Perhaps there was a guest room and she took it for granted I'd sleep in that. But I wasn't sure, didn't ask and this seemed serious. I was used to teenage kissing and groping, I'd shared a bed but never made love. In those days it was almost expected, for young men to make advances, press on until women said no. Now I was faced with what seemed like an invitation, from someone I had come to admire and respect. Laila was older than me, seemed to know what she was doing. But perhaps not, perhaps she too was on new ground, taking her life in her hands.

I took fright, out of my depth, longing for the light flirtation of the Ramzi sisters and cast iron convention to save us from misunderstanding or mishap.

Laila might have shown me to a guest-room, kissed me goodnight, perhaps, and welcomed me to hospital breakfast in the morning. But rightly or wrongly I felt a rubicon had been crossed on that hillside when she took my hand. Did I mislead her in any way, then let her down, or have I been making something out of nothing all these years. Would Laila even remember, if she's still alive? I've put orr writing this for fear of compromising her.

Late afternoon at the hospital, I made my excuses and left. We never met again or wrote to each other. Back at work I saw Makram, as usual. He was friendly as ever, but this wasn't something I could talk to him about. The family may have been Christian, but they were also in an Arab country, with honour and duties to mach. A couple of years later, a younger sister, Najla, came to London to train as a nurse. She had my address and I took her out for a meal. This sister seemd sexier, more worldly-wise than Laila. She'd clearly made plenty of friends and was as uninterested in me as I was in her.

On the way back from the hospital in Beirut, I stopped for a while on Sidon beach. What I bought this time was not a bikini but two bottles, of pop and gin. As the sun set, I swam in my underpants and drank. Warm water, warm sand, warm cocktail and setting sun. I fell asleep. When I woke it was dark, but not too late for a service cab back to the village. The one that picked me up was already full, but the passengers pushed up to make space for me. The diesel engine laboured, soft springs swayed around bends until my belly got the better of me. The driver stopped to let me out, waited with engine running as I walked back. Out of sight along the verge, I hoped. When the retching stopped, I straightened up and stood alone for a few moments in the cool air. Cicadas resumed their refrain as I climbed back in among the other bodies, arms and legs. More tolerance than sympathy, perhaps, but no hostility, contempt. Next day, back at camp, was another day of course, the sun rose and I made it back to work.

I've been writing, rewriting and setting aside these last few paragraphs for the past two years. Get in close, said Cartier Bresson... But Louise Brooks, silent star of Pandora's Box, said she couldn't write her autobiography because it would have been untrue without the sex at the heart of things. She was raised in the Mid-West and the bible belt was still too tightly strapped for that, she said. For me the difficulty is only partly with my own modesty. To put it at its simplest, we dont fuck ourselves, our bodies overlap. Not just bodies but the stories we come in and out with. You cant just mind your own business, or mask out your oppo when you let the light in on yourself. People often write novels because they cant tell the truth, but that seems a bit of a cop-out too, and too much like hard work.

NOTE

I found the stuff on Louise Brooks, in an Observer colour supplement , an unusually sensitive and respectful article by Kenneth Tynan c.1979: ( http://www.freewebs.com/everybreeze/tynan.html )

Brooks was in her seventies when Tynan sought her out, living alone and largely forgotten in a small appartment. A bit like the dancer-turned-writer Jean Rhys before her reincarnation in 'The Wide Sargasso Sea.' The title Brooks chose for the book she never wrote was 'Naked on my goat,' a glimpse of youth and age from Goethe's Faust.. The goat-rider is a young witch, bare, immaculate and beautiful. The old witches who watch her pass intone 'You're young and tender now, but you'll rot, we know you'll rot.'

Brooks would not write her own story but turned to books for company. She said her reading took her back to her mother's knee, her mother's voice and touch. Mary, our mother, used to read to us. At bedtime it was often a sort of reconciliation for me, washing away anxieties and arguments. One summer afternoon, on an idyllic little lawn in Somerset, she overestimated our capacity and read to us from Spenser's Faery Queen. I lost track but found myself looking up her skirt. I looked away, then back into the dark between her legs. Perhaps I could never leave well alone, perhaps we got off to a bad start, it took most of our lives before we could embrace whole-heartedly,

10. Early summer 1956: Swiss Cheese

Chandolin

Early summer and a work-camp to build a dairy in the Swiss Alps, so peasant farmers could make their cheese near the high summer pasture rather than carry milk-churns to the village on their backs. The aim, to help preserve a dying peasant way of life. ( I got a clearer understanding of that many years later when we moved to a smallholding in Wales. Like most small farmers around, we could not survive on our land alone. We had cars and went out to part time jobs to make ends mee.  A century  earlier many hill farmers had preferred 12 hour shifts in coalmines to 16-hour days in all weathers without the security of a regular wage, however small.)

I dont know how our Swiss dairy turned out, how much cheese it produced or whether the  villagers still ound more profitable pursuits as ski-instructors, mountain guides or merchant bankers. The main thing I remember about our work up that mountain was the job it took two of us to widen a stretch of footpath into a track that would allow a tractor or truck to pass. 

My workmate and mentor was Clemente a Spanish anarchist who had moved to France when Franco won. I didn't know much about that, except that my godfather had hoped he might offer air-cover to the Republicans. On his first training flight, as passenger with a pilot friend, he was killed when their light plane crashed into an English field.

I wonder now why I hardly questioned Clemente about his own experience before and after the civil war. My expensive schooling had included A-levels in Geography and History, but not Curiosity, unless we just too busy with the job in hand.

Our path skirted the mountainside on its winding way down to the village. Chandolin was said to be the highest all-year settlement in Switzerland, a church and  cluster of houses with no more than 100 residents. St Luc was the nearest place with shops and bus. The rock that occupied us for what seemed like weeks projected from the mountainside and left no space for widening the path. Not the sort of rock you could prise out and roll away, but part of the mountain. There were few obvious faults in the rock and it didn't crumble like the tufa we’d hacked out for drainage pits in Algeria. 
 

After knocking off a few flakes, loosened by years of alternating frost and sun, we were up against the core of it. Too much for the SCI's traditional pick-and-shovel, pelle et pioche, so we worked like stone-masons with hammers and chisels. One ray of hope for me was a rumour that we might given some gelignite to blow it apart if all else failed. Roll on failure... but Clemente was more patient and determined than I was, less willing to admit defeat,. He may have had enough of explosives in a previous life. Lump-hammer and cold chisel were his  weapons 0f choice. Each time I gave up, each time a hairline crack petered out, he would light on some faint suggestion of another fault. Soon he would have it open, with just enough rock flaked off to raise his hopes and lower mine.

When Clemente got tired, not to be outdone, I’d take my turn. As a break from breaking rock, we'd stop for a smoke from time to time. More than 30 years later, when I was frightened into giving up smoking, I didnt miss the nicotine as much as the little ritual, practiced handiwork and punctuation to a working day. Plus companionable exchange, exchange of tobacco, or a light with hand to shield it from the wind.

Smoke breaks were also time to look around. With such post-card peaks to marvel at - snow on top, rock and greenery below - what possessed us to keep chipping bits away, when we could have been exploring or catching trout? The more exasperated I got, the more I admired my indefatigable mate. 

Obviously there was more to this rustic work-camp than two men and a rock, but I cannot recall much else from day to day, who else was there, what we did or talked about, what we ate or where we slept. Had the cows already been let out to graze, could we hear their bells? Did we meet the villagers, they visit or invite us in? Perhaps not; perhaps this summer dairy hadn't been their idea, but a well-meant offer they couldn't refuse. Wouldn't I remember if we'd sampled their cheese?
 

Maybe not. It's not just dreams that must be recalled when fresh to save them from oblivion. Our ancestors in caves would have told their families about encounters on the hunt, as well as recording highlights on the walls. Moving from place to place, constantly meeting and parting, I had no call to recall, yesterday's events got lost behind today's. Not that records do justice to the past.. I'm often irritated by the way snapshots substitute themselves for memory, perpetuating one moment at the expense of all the rest. Although I still have a camera, I rarely use it. What to do with all those pictures, might I not save some fleeting image or reflection in my mind?

Near that camp in Switzerland, some of us caught wild trout with their hands. A dream come true, I'd heard about tickling trout under English river banks and the Compleat Angler was embodied for me by (great) Uncle Clive. Like a playful fairy godfather, he handed me his rod by the river bank one day while he disappeared behind a bush. He'd cast his line across a sluggish little river in Somerset. No sooner had he left me to it, than a fish took the fly so perfectly laid out for me. The old man had told me how to strike, to fix the hook and reel it in, but I was too excited to remember that, I whipped the rod back and the fish flew over my head and landed in the meadow behind. The Alpine stream was a world away. The water rattled fresh and clear along a bed of rocks. The art now was to select a likely rock, one that stood out of the water with shelter of slack water behind it, then to wade upstream behind the rock and lower your hands towards it, using the V of rough water as cover for your handst. Then, with one hand on either side, close in, fingers outstretched to form a cage to hold any fish that might lurking there.  Once I felt, or thought I felt, a fish as it escaped. One or two other people were quicker or luckier, and I saw the fish they held aloft, flexing silver in their hands.

Another outing, which could have ended badly, got safely filed in memory, underLucky Escape. It was June by now and we had a crude map of mountain walks for summer visitors. On one free day, we selected a path that formed what looked like a convenient loop, up the side of one valley, over a ridge well below the mountain top and back down the valley next door. From our camp we could see snow on the high peaks giving way to rock, trees and green below. The day was fine, and most of the snow should be gone by now, uncovering the summer paths. We had no mountain gear but our working boots and clothes were sound enough. We followed our sketchy up the nearest valley and along the side of the ridge above. Sooner than we expected, our path ran into snow, patchy at first and unmarked but not too deep to walk across. Beyond the tongues of snow, we could mostly see where the path resumed. As the slope got steeper, snow and vegetation gave way to bare rock and scree. Across the loose stones, there was no obvious track. Either the snow had been late to melt or we had climbed higher than we thought,  but from our map it looked as though we were nearing the half-way point, the col at the top of the valley that would lead us across to the valley leading down.

Two problems arose. First the patches of snow joined up to form one blanket. Blank indeed as a veil of cloud or mist drifted in around us, dimming the sun and making it impossible to distinguish any form or feature in the snow ahead. Or back... We'd already had some un-nerving moments on the rocky bits. One of our little group was an unusually clumsy American. We were as distressed as he was when he missed a foothold or dislodged a rock. If we let him go ahead, he would be sure to fall. If we kept him behind, so we could catch him if he, we put ourselves in the path of the rocks he set rolling down. Without a rope, we took it in turns to stay beside him, lend him a hand and pointing out hand- and footholds.

Between blind snow and hard places we kept going in what we guessed to be thre right direction, slithering on frozen crusts or sinking in thigh-deep. Until we reached a sort of step or lip. A sudden drop, with no way of seeing what lay beyond or below, but our map showed no cliff or crevasse. On approaching the edge, we could see it stretching away to left and right, but no way round or down,  By now we were afraid, but going back seemed as bad as going on. We needed to get home before it got too dark and cold.
.

I figured that a high cliff, as distinct from a snowy slope, might reveal something darker at the bottom, below the cloud and snow line. We dropped snowballs over the edge but they just disappeared. With someone holding my feet, I tried lying face down and reaching over the edge. Then I tried the other way round, arms up, legs down to reach a few inches further. Where my toes touched the snow wall, it seemed to get less vertical. 

I got back up and sat on the edge, legs dangling.  Impatience or desperation got the better of me.  'What the hell,' I thought, and pushed off with my hands. Over the edge I fell, a meter or two onto crusty snow. Steep enough to make the landing easy, but irreversible so I slid on down. The surface was quite smooth, not bumpy or uncomfortable. After a minute or two I was almost enjoying myself, but then saw the dark shape of rocks ahead. No way of avoiding them, so I prepared to fend off, cushion the impact with my feet. But as I hurtled onto it, I found the  rock-face was almost flush with the snow. I slid on over it, beginning to feel my luck might hold. And it did. The snow began to soften and level out, allowing me to dig my heels and elbows in.  Then snow gave way to grass, a field. The mist dispersed, the evening sun shone through and I could hear running water.  Such sweet relief, a gentle valley and a stream to lead us home...

Amazing Grace on Alpenhorn. I yelled back up to the others to follow in my tracks. Down they came in ones and twos, laughing and whooping out of the cloud. Whatever work-camp may have achieved for peasant farmers, this was a memorable outing for us international volunteers. 

At the end of my time in Chandolin, I met another mountain face to face. My next project was in Lebanon, a rebuilding effort after an earthquake. I had only a few months left of my two years 'alternative service' and this seemed like a quite important job in a strange new country. I had booked to board a ferry at Genoa on July 1^st and left myself two days to get there by bus and train from Swiss Valais through northern Italy. That would give me a night's sleep and time to look around before the boat sailed that afternoon.
 

What I'd forgotten was that the month of June has 30 days, not 31. By the time I realised, I had less than a day for the journey and the last bus had already gone from St Luc. If I missed the ferry, I didn't know how long I would have to wait for another, or whether my booking would hold.  I threw my things into my rucksack, someone gave me food and after hasty goodbyes I ran off down the path we'd been working on. Past the big bruised rock to Chandolin, then on down the zig zag mountain. It was a long way to run after a day outside at work, but nearly all downhill. Gravity spared me a lot of effort but bore down on my knees. Between the hairpin bends in the road, like the slash on a dollar sign, ran steep short cuts. From one of these straight dirt paths I almost overshot the road below, grabbing at a tree on the other side to steady myself. As I regained my breath, I saw how far I'd have fallen if I hadn't met the tree. Below this edge, there was a real cliff, with a panoramic out and away, accumulated rubble far below.. A few yards up the road from where I stood, a section of the verge had disappeared, as if bitten out. More gravity, and that, I now realised, was where another tree had stood, companion to the one I leant against. Looking down, I saw the trunk of it among some fallen rocks. Silver-grey and bare of bark, smooth apart from a few spikes of root and stubs of broken branches. I felt shocked, not so much with horror as a mixture of gratitude and recognition. Mutual recognition...? Suddenly I felt calmer, light-hearted, perfectly akin to that treetrunk lying peacefully there among the rocks. Whoever would care if we swapped places?

I was no longer panicked at the thought of missing the boat or making a fool of myself. Now I could resume my journey, with no certainty but not too bothered either way. I would do what I could and make the best of it, in time or not.
.

As it happened, I got a lift and then a bus to a station at Sierre - I think that's where it was. A night train on to Genoa was due in a couple of hours time.  I got a ticket, found the platform and lay down on a bench. With my rucksack as a pillow, I fell asleep.

In what seemed like no time, I was woken by loud voices, laughter and the grating of a bottle neck against my teeth. Red wine dribbled down my chin. My gift-horses were Italian workers happy to be going home and determined to share it.  I sat up, made room on the bench and drank with them.

There were no seats left on the Genoa train. I stood wedged in a corner of a corridor and sleep caught up with me, my head in the crook of my arm. I awoke with the sun on my face and red through my eyelids. The railway ran south along the side of a long lake, with the sun rising over the mountains on the other side. Light and warmth from lake and sky. At any other time I would have been eager to look out of the window, but for now I was happy to hang on the edge of sleep and let it come to me.
 

'Oh Lord, I need two wings to veil my face..' sang the spiritual. Not with a bright heaven in mind but 'so the devil wont do me no harm.'  In Arabic, where blinding desert light might seem most threatening, the noun for sun – ash-shams – is feminine. Somewhere I read that the New York poet Marianne Moore could only bear a day week out in the city. The other days she stayed indoors, or in bed.
.

I realise now that I had taken in too much in months of travelling around. The more I saw, the more people I met, the less I retained and remembered. For much of my life, I've been spoiled for choice. Now I'm sometimes frustrated with the feebleness and sloth of getting old, but every now and then, there's a glint of a silver lining. The other day, walking up a footpath from the sea with Ada (my wife), I got breathless and stopped to rest. She was some way ahead and the place where I stopped was rather overshadowed by low trees and hedge. I began to pity myself. Looking out towards the light, I noticed a leaf about the size of a postage stamp, twiddling in mid-air. A single blackthorn leaf, suspended on a single strand of spider's web, it spun a few seconds clockwise then a few seconds anti-clockwise.

Magically, manically, mechanically.