I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.

I will abroad.

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode,

Loose as the winde, as large as store.

George Herbert The Collar

XXX

I first went abroad in 1974.

There was, of course, nothing unique about my decision to travel. Back then, there were lots of young men who, not wanting to become mere slaves to the establishment, had fled their homes and set off in search of adventure and to try and find themselves.

For me there was another motivation as well.

I had just spent a year doing my National Service and then another year stuck in the District Commissioner’s Office in Wedza. I hadn’t exactly enjoyed either experience. I was tired of feeling trapped. I needed an escape hatch, preferably to a place where I got to make the decisions instead of having them made for me by somebody else.

So I booked a flight to Heathrow. It was a huge relief to be able to discard my personal relationship with both Internal Affairs and the military machine; to feel free of all obligations, and to escape the prevailing political and moral atmosphere.

My brother Pete was waiting for me at the Arrivals section of Heathrow Airport. Like a seasoned traveller he steered me through the labyrinth that is the London Transport System and the next thing I knew I was on a train heading to the small village of Marden in Kent where he and two friends, Doug and Ron, were picking hops and working in the apple orchards.

From my seat on the train I looked out over a skyline of roofs, chimney pots and rows of terraced houses which kept making me think of the Giles cartoons I had pored over as a kid. Used to the harsh, bleached landscape of Rhodesia in the dry season I couldn’t get over how soft, green and luxuriant the countryside was.

Once at the farm, Pete showed me our accommodation. It consisted of a large, silver, corrugated iron shed in which a few old beds had been placed, like a dormitory. Other than that the furnishing were minimal and there was little to keep the cold out.

That afternoon, I joined the others in the field, picking apples. It was a job I took to like a duck to water. Although the days were long and the work often tiring being amongst the fruit trees and watching the English robins – who seemed to take a deep interest in everything we did – induced a feeling of calm bordering on happiness.

I would stop to gaze at the loveliness of the apple blossom when the sun came out after a shower or watch the steam rising off the piles of discarded hops. Every evening, after we had finished work, we would head down to The Mile Bush, a cosy old pub on the corner of the farm, still wearing our gumboots and raincoats and drink pints of Shepherd’s Neame bitter with the other farm workers. It was a routine I loved.

Far from the stresses and strains and oppressive politics of white-ruled Rhodesia I felt obliviously contented, like I had gone to sleep and woken up the next day in a John Keats poem

No longer having to worry about trying to live up to other peoples expectations of me I felt unfettered and free. I felt like I had abandoned my identity and exchanged it for the anonymity of England where I was more than happy to be just one of the rootless millions.

• 

• 

After our job in Kent had finished we all moved up to London, taking rented rooms in South Kensington. I got odd jobs – working in factories, plucking turkeys, sticking labels on coffee bottles and mixing with ordinary Londoners whose world often extended no further than the pub at the end of the street.

October came around and I could see my brother Pete, a farmer, growing restless and unhappy. It was planting season back home. Pete was very much a man of the soil, psychologically programmed to respond to its call.

I wasn’t at all surprised when he, Doug and Ron opted to return.

I wasn’t ready to do that. I was still searching for authenticity and experience. I stayed on.

Keen to make my mark in London, I grew my hair long and took to wearing a Donovan-style cloth cap in a rather unconvincing attempt to show that I had turned my back on my middle class origins and thrown in my lot with the masses. With very little money of my own, my uncultivatedly shabby appearance helped foster the illusion.

I generally avoided hooking up with all the other Rhodesians in London, because I didn’t want to be seen as just another tourist and also because it didn’t fit in with the vagabond image I was trying so assiduously to cultivate.

The one night I did pop in to the Zambezi Bar in Earl’s Court – a popular hang-out for homesick white Rhodesians – in the company a young, blond-haired, Canadian lady I had met who worked as a Bunny waitress in the Mayfair Playboy club.

It was a mistake. All the morose conversation in the bar reminded me of is why I had decided to try and expand my cultural horizons by going abroad in the first place. I kept wondering what they were doing here (although some were obviously draft-dodgers). They didn’t express much interest in anything around them – the art, the architecture, the history or, for that matter, the people. In fact, they didn’t even seem to approve of the country.

I had to get out of the place. I finished my beer and we both bolted for the door.

Moving from South Kensington to Earl’s Court, I ended up sharing a dingy, mouse-infested room which smelt of stale,sad, old smoke with two young English drop-outs. Because we were all broke we were forced to subsist on a diet made up mostly of chip butties – an English speciality which I once heard described as a “deranged, nonsensical, sandwich” – and cheap bottles of cider. After a couple of months of consuming little else, I began to have the same cheesy pallor and hollow-cheeked look of the folk I saw on the tube every day.

This pleased me no end. I was starting to blend in.

Realising I was in one of the great cities of the world I went on a crash culture course, visiting all the galleries and museums. I also went to a lot of plays and shuffled my away around with all the other tourists through Westminster Abbey, The Tower of London, the Victoria Albert Museum, St Paul’s and the like.

I listened to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture being played at the Albert Hall and very nearly had a heart attack when the cannon went off just above me. For a terrifying nano-second I thought I was back in the Rhodesian Bush War.

Hoping to gain more “insights”, I did a quick dash through Europe taking in as many of the famous sites (Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Florence, Salzburg, the Red Light District of Amsterdam – I looked but I didn’t touch – the tulip fields of Holland, St Peter’s in Rome) as you could cram into a few weeks. We travelled in an ancient old bus which had a sign, above the windscreen, which said “We are lost but we don’t give a shit!”.

• 

• 

• 

• 

It kind of summed up my mood at the time.

After I had done with Europe, I returned to the City and carried on as before.

Winter arrived. One grim London day I decided I had had enough of the low horizons and grey skies of England and booked a bus trip to Spain where, I confidently expected, the weather would be more to my liking.

It wasn’t. I woke up on the bus on my first day in Spain and looked out the window to see the countryside around us completely blanketed in a thin layer of snow, something I had yet to see in England.

So I pushed on further south. In Algeciras, where I got off the bus, I linked up with a young Australian girl who was on her way to take up a teaching post on Gibraltar. In those days, because of the dispute between England and Spain over the ownership of that enormous, ape-inhabited, chunk of rock, the only way you could get to it was to cross the sea by ferry to North Africa and then catch another boat back.

My new friend was a little worried about making the crossing all on her own so I offered, on the spur of the moment, to accompany her as far as the Moroccan port of Tangiers.

The ferry, that plied its way across the Straits, did not take sail directly to this port but dropped anchor, instead, at Pseuta, a small Spanish enclave on the North African coast. Here, we were lucky enough to cadge a lift with a high ranking local Government official who my companion had struck up a conversation with on the ferry.

He was obviously a man of some importance because the soldiers manning the checkpoints we passed through leapt to attention and saluted whenever he showed them his documents. It made us feel important too.

• 

• 

I spent two days in Tangiers. The city turned out to be a slightly bewildering labyrinthe of a place. Setting off to look for the souk our presence did not go unnoticed.

We soon found ourselves besieged by hordes of scruffy, streetwise urchins promising us a “good time”. They were like persistent, irritating, mosquitos following us everywhere.

I quickly grew tired of this so as soon as I had seen my Australian friend off to Gibraltar, I jumped back on the ferry and returned to Algeciras. I still sometimes regret my hastiness because it would have been good to follow the old hippy trail to Rabat, Marrakesh and the Atlas Mountains.

Back in Spain, I headed back up the Costa del Sol, stopping off in Barcelona where I managed to find a cheap pension down in the docklands. This was, of course, long before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics so they hadn’t started sprucing things up yet. The whole area was a wasteland of crumbling warehouses, obsolete factories, railway tracks and dumps. The beaches were fouled with industrial effluent.

It didn’t bother me much. I had always wanted to visit the region which had inspired George Orwell’s classic book about the Spanish Civil Way, Homage to Catalonia. It was here, many also believe, that the seeds were planted for both Animal Farm and the nightmare world of 1984.

I also wanted to see Barcelona’s great buildings especially those constructed by its most famous architect, Antoni Gaudi, the last of the great cathedral builders.

Feeling pleasantly lonely, I wandered around the streets of the Old City – the Barri Gotic or Gothic Quater – for the next week, taking in the sites and anthropologising. I then turned my eye on myself and was encouraged. I felt my soul was still improving.

Then home to England.

A couple of months later, I was back, this time in the company of an American girl called Monica (my mother’s name), a graduate of Yale who I had met on my first whistle-stop tour through Europe.

We caught a ship from Southampton to Bilbao and then travelled through San Sebastian and Basque territory up into the day-long sunshine of the tableland of Castille. Arriving in Madrid I made a bee-line to the Prado Museum because I had always wanted to see the work of the great Spanish painters – Velazquez, El Greco and Goya. I found it all as wonderful as I had hoped.

At the time of my visit, the country was still under the control of General Franco, the invader from Morocco, who having won the Civil War had swept aside the reformist ideas of the Spaniards and imposed his own form of grim authoritarianism. His long tenure as head of government was still destined to run another year or so although you could sense the growing unhappiness with the ageing dictator.

The country was in an edgy state and feelings were running high, perhaps hardly surprising when you consider the thousands of his opponents who had been abducted, murdered and buried in unmarked graves that are still being discovered.

I actually saw the Caudillo driving in a cavalcade of limousines through the streets of Madrid with the US President, Gerald Ford. As a gesture of solidarity with the working classes – and in homage to my literary hero, George Orwell, who had fought against Franco – I did not wave.

Despite the obvious opposition to his rule, the people of Spain never did rise up and overthrow Franco. Instead they waited until he died in 1975 and then brought in parliamentary democracy.

Not that I allowed any of this to dampen my own mood. As we travelled, I was re-reading my copy of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a book which held enormous appeal for a rootless young man like myself. It had been one of the reasons behind my decision to journey to Spain.

I got a much better feel of the country this time around. I found myself entranced by the three old Moorish cities of Seville, Cordoba and Granada. With their intriguing mix of both Islamic and Catholic Christian influences, they captured the romantic, sun-burned essence of Spain; their easy going lifestyle delighted me.

• 

• 

The other city that ensnared me in its web was Cadiz, right at the southern-most corner of Spain where the Atlantic rollers come in.

Walking its streets, history assaults you from every angle. Thought by some to be the oldest city in Europe it was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100BC. It later became a Roman naval base but its real boom period came with the discovery of the Americas with Columbus sailing from this port on his second and fourth voyages.

I quickly developed a fondness for its sherry taverns and the slightly seedy, down-at-heel, feel of the old town whose once stately architecture reminds you of the important sea port it had been.

Back in London, I moved from one menial factory job to another but eventually managed to obtain slightly more rewarding employment working for a company that was doing liquidation work on a large travel company that had just collapsed in a mass of adverse publicity. I also found a lovely old flat in Streatham, in South London.

It was far superior to anything I had lived in up until that point. I shared it with a New Zealander who had a job at Harrods. As a birthday gift he gave me a special Harrods cheque made out for the sum of a million pounds but did not sign it. I used to wave it around whenever I wanted to impress someone. I kept it for years until I lost it in one of my many moves.

There was also an opera singer living in our block of flats who we became friendly with. Being from the boondocks I had never met one before.

Every morning I used to wake up to the sound of him doing his throat exercises in the room directly below mine. It reminded me of the roosters back home on the farm.

I was beginning to feel like I had achieved something. I was no longer the raw colonial boy of before; I had learnt a lot of culturally useful things and was well on my way to becoming an urban sophisticate, a man of the world.

I felt at home in the city. It was more than just the museums and the famous architecture, it was about the conversations on the bus, dropping in to the local pub, walking in the parks and exploring the countryside outside of London.

It was also about meeting my English relations for the first time and discovering how much I liked them. By getting to know them I felt I was getting to better understand my mother whose past had always been something a mystery to me. In turn this gave me more of an insight in to my own nature.

I would have been content to stay on indefinitely but I had promised my brother, Pete, I would return for his wedding in Rhodesia.

The plane I boarded was half-empty and it seemed strange to me that some of my fellow passengers were also heading home as well; they had that half-resigned, half-expectant look of people soon to see familiar sights and familiar faces again and who were equally unsure about what lay ahead.

Stepping onto the tarmac at Salisbury Airport and feeling the harsh glare of the African sun on my face once more, I tried to convince myself I was glad to be home but it was hard to escape the feeling I had returned not because I wanted to but because I was being pulled back, yanked by the past.

The next thing I knew I had returned to my starting point, the army, being yelled at all over again. The message they were intent on ramming down my throat was that I must obey orders and not question authority. Or else…

No longer the master of my own fate I began to wonder if going abroad had taught me anything at all…