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3. Aden

I’ve already written of my voyage to Aden in the MV Dunera in my novel Standing on Shamsan, but I will repeat a little of what is in that supposed work of fiction. The Dunera was around 12,000 tonnes and in 1954 was being used as a troopship. On board were forces and families travelling to the Middle and Far East, where Britain still had the remnants of an empire. Dad was already in Aden, having got there by way of Suez, where there had been some bother. I’m not sure what he did in the Suez emergency, being a clerk by work and nature, but I’m sure he gave it his best shot. Now he was stationed at RAF Khormaksar and on arrival my life took on an excitement I’d yearned for ever since I had heard other sons of servicemen talking about their time in Bulawayo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and such exotic places.

As soon as I got on board the ship and was shown my cabin (thankfully well away from my mother’s) I met Max. Graham Maxwell, a Welsh boy, was to become my best friend for my time in Aden. We would become inseparable, even sharing a chaste but sweet love affair with Rosemary Burns, a thirteen-year-old lass from Kilmarnock in Scotland. Max had already lived in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, so his status in my eyes was high.

It was evening when we set sail. The first thing Max and I did was go into the communal wash room and put a tin mug under the fierce shower. The ways of youth are strange and unfathomable. The tin mug under force made a terrific ringing noise which echoed throughout the lower decks. Looking back on it I think we just did it because the tin mug was there, handy as it were, and the shower water was coming out like lead shot. Anyway, we enjoyed making a din for about ten minutes, then left the washroom, only to find people rushing about with their lifejackets on.

‘Quickly,’ cried my mother, on seeing us, ‘get your lifejacket on and follow me to the muster station.’

Women and children, and men too, were milling around wearing faces the colour of flour.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, still a bit bemused by the panic.

‘Din’t you hear it?’ shouted my brother Ray, gleefully. ‘The alarm bell’s bin ringin’. The ship’s sinkin’ down in the water, I expect.’

Ray seemed rather pleased about the fact that we were all going to go to the bottom of the North Sea.

The ship wasn’t sinking, of course. It was the brutal shower water on the hollow tin mug that had imitated the ship’s alarm bell. Naval officers came and assured the families that it was a false alarm, though they too were puzzled by what had actually caused the ‘ringing’ noise. No one ever discovered the source of the sound. Max and I certainly weren’t going to own up to causing a panic among the passengers and it would have been a very astute person who could guess what had happened. We went to bed in our respective cabins shortly afterwards and I don’t remember that Max or I ever mentioned the incident again.

We entered the Bay of Biscay, famous for storms, and seasickness overwhelmed me for two days. Once I was able to leave my bed, I went up on deck and stared out over the vast ocean. Sailors have a unique spiritual adventure, every time they go to sea. It has probably been so since the beginning of time, when Man first left the sight of land behind. Water, water everywhere, and always changing shape, always altering colour. Sometimes choppy and churning, sometimes giant waves, always a momentous swell. Various shades of green, grey and blue, depending on the state of the surface, the time of day and the light. The planet’s fluid coat. It fascinated me, even as a twelve-year-old, with its endlessness and variability.

We were supposed to go to school on the MV Dunera, but the idea that we would have to suffer classes during this wonderful experience of our first ocean voyage left us boiling with indignation. I think Max and I went to about two hours’ worth, before losing ourselves between the decks. My brother Ray went a little longer, but then he and his new friends soon followed suit. Derek was only six years old, so he did as he was told. We ignored ‘school’ for the rest of the voyage, arguing that there was much more to be learned from the world at large.

We reached Gibraltar after a few days and entered the Mediterranean Sea, which was sunny and warm after the wintry Atlantic weather. I had a Brownie box camera with which I recorded our progress through the Med. Mostly they were photos of Max standing on his head, or pretending to throw up into a lifeboat.

We passed Malta and Crete and were approaching Egypt’s Port Said when our captain received an emergency SOS call. Another British troopship, the SS Empire Windrush, was on fire somewhere in the Med. However, we were too far away from the tragedy to assist in the rescue operation. The passengers of that ship, service families like us, had taken to the lifeboats. Eventually the crew did the same and the rescue ships that reached the area attempted to tow the fiery hulk to Gibraltar, but apparently this was unsuccessful and the Windrush sank. This was all grist to the mill of my imagination. I did at last feel I was living the life of Kipling’s Kim and that daily crises would be the norm.

I awoke one morning to the sounds of a bustling port. There were cries all around the ship, with dogs barking in the distance and the hum of a busy harbour at the entrance to the Suez Canal, which led to the Red Sea. Port Said. When I went up on deck I found passengers leaning over the sides of the ship. Down below were the owners of small craft known as ‘bum boats’, these vessels full of goods such as gambia knives, bullwhips, wooden carvings, brass trays, and all sorts of paraphernalia, casting lines up to potential buyers on the main deck.

There was a basket tied halfway along these lines into which the Arab sellers were putting their wares. These would be hauled on board and the buyers would then put the price of the item they had purchased into the basket to be hauled down again. A certain amount of trust was required of the passengers, who could if they were of a criminal nature not bother to put the money into the basket. There was no way the Arab seller could get on board to demand his money. However, I don’t recall any problems of this kind. I do remember fierce haggling going on, before the purchase of the goods, but once the price had been agreed then honesty seemed to be the order of the day.

One of the baskets which I observed being used was lined with an Egyptian newspaper. I was fascinated by the Arabic writing with its centripetal swirls and alien flourishes. Not just a foreign language, an exotic one with (to me) an unintelligible alphabet. I was given that newspaper by the vendor, who flashed me a golden smile and told me to ‘Keep it – a present for you!’ I treasured those pages as I might have done diamonds. Here was ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, the ‘Thief of Baghdad’ and ‘Sinbad the Sailor’. This was the land of bedtime stories and I was in it, living it, part of it. Amazing.

Over the flat rooftops of the whitewashed square houses of Port Said strode Johnnie Walker. The Johnnie Walker sign was a huge two-dimensional man in top hat and coat-tails, carrying a cane, caught in eager mid-stride. It did not seem as incongruous then as it does to me now. A giant whisky advertisement in a land where alcohol was banned by religious edict? Egypt was not then a European colony, though of course it had been at one time, but Johnnie must have been up there for the benefit of ships like ours. At the time, to me, it was just another one of those wondrous symbols of the Middle East, like the newspapers and the bum boats, not to mention the Gully-Gully Man.

The Gully-Gully Man was an institution in Port Said and I had been told by ex-Aden boys back in England to expect him.

The Gully-Gully Man visited most passenger liners that stopped in Port Said. He was quite simply an Egyptian magician who performed amazing feats for the grown-ups and children from a dull and insipid land: doves came from his nose, silver coins that glittered in the Eastern sun came from between his toes, bright ribbons and scarves came from his ears. His body was a treasure trove which required only the magic words – abracadabra, open sesame, zebristi – for that body to mysteriously relinquish its contents. He entertained us for a whole afternoon. In the evening young Arab boys swam out to surround the boat, yelling for coins. Passengers threw them in the water and the boys would dive down, retrieving them from the depths. I was twelve years of age and didn’t know whether those boys were collecting coins because they were starving or because they were – as I had been when selling home-made lemonade to passers-by outside my house in England – simply earning a bit of pocket money. I didn’t know. I still don’t know, but I suspect they relied on those tossed sixpences and shillings to eat.

Next day we entered the Suez Canal and glided gently through that magnificent waterway. On the banks of the canal were fields being worked by Arab farmers. I could see men drawing water using Archimedean screws to fill their irrigation ditches, and donkeys turning wheels with pots on them, doing a similar job. Between the ship and the banks of the canal were hundreds of feluccas, some fishing, others carrying bales of goods. There was a dusty, musky smell to the air which pervaded everything on board. The East was enveloping us, packaging us in its sights, sounds and smells. I was entranced by the whole biblical scene. It was as if one the pages of my Sunday school books had suddenly sprung to life before me. There were the palms that were spread before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem.

Suez was the line between a pleasant temperature and an uncomfortable heat. Once we entered the Red Sea we were in the furnace. It didn’t bother us kids as much as it did the adults, who complained constantly about the heat, just as they had complained about the cold and wet back home. There was no satisfying grown-ups. We knew that from experience. If you had offered them the best climate in the world, they would probably have called it boring.

The Red Sea voyage confirmed my sense of wonder in the Middle East. We passed Ethiopia, the Yemen, and went on down to Somaliland. One morning the deck was covered in silvery flying fish. On another Max and I were looking down into the water and saw giant manta rays cruising just below the surface. Then there was the occasional shark, when the ship’s butcher threw offal into the water. And of course dolphins that played around the bows and in the ship’s wake.

All this is commonplace now, in the 21st Century, but back in 1954 very few working class people left the shores of Britain. There were those on passage to Australia of course, and one or two shipping out to India and Hong Kong, but for the most part the experience I was having was a rare one. I felt very special and also privileged to be able to see such wondrous things and come into contact with such exotic cultures. I don’t think my parents appreciated it as much as I did. They enjoyed what they were doing, but I believe they were more impressed by the cheap alcohol and the fact that we – a common-or-garden family – would have servants in our new home. We had been raised to the status of imperialists simply by leaving our own shores and by being British.

It sounds very high-colonial, but my parents were people of their time, ignorant of any wrongdoing. Their government ruled a foreign land and they had not the mental tools to question it. They were not unkind, that I can state emphatically, nor were they arrogant, being too close to their own peasant roots for that. My dad’s father still scythed the grass on the byways of Essex. My mum’s mother still gutted fish in Harwich fish market. Mum and dad were the offspring of parents whose work was similar to that of Said, the Somali cook-bearer we eventually employed.

Said was an African. He came from a land with deeper, richer smells. Musk and animal dung and the earthy odour of coming rain. A place where the sunrises enveloped the landscape, enfolding it in a blanket of swirling colour, mostly dark and fiery reds. Where the sunsets could cause one’s heart to skip a few beats. Africa had shaped his tall, shiny-black, angular body and had formed his sharp mind. I was always, as a child, very much in awe of this quiet, secretive man who, it always seemed, found me faintly amusing and in need of guidance in life. Said had a family but rarely spoke of them. His work and his loved ones were separated by the Red Sea, an impossible commute.

Mum’s daily orders to Said were very occasionally overridden by us boys, since she was a female. Said much preferred to receive his daily duties from a male member of the family.

Once, mum said, ‘We’ll have lamb today, Said.’

When she’d left the room my brother Ray, who hated fatty meat at that time, whispered, ‘Change that to egg and chips, Said.’

We duly got egg and chips, but rightly so it wasn’t Said who got it in the neck, it was us boys.

We rarely did countermand our mother’s orders for dinner or other things, since mum was definitely the head of the family and a very fiery-tempered head at that. Dad was a meek fellow, not given to confrontations, and was happy for mum to rule the roost. I never blamed him for that. Despite being five feet two inches tall and weighing six and a half stone, mum was a veritable termagant when crossed. We were all afraid of her. I loved her of course, as did my brothers, for she could be as fierce in her love and protection of her sons as she was in the condemnation of their wrongdoings.

My parents did of course find the Middle East ‘dirty’, being people of their time. Post Second World War many housewives seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness. This was in an era when people were fascinated by modern inventions, such as nylon and rayon, and were contemptuous of anything old fashioned. I doubt my mother looked out over those fields on the banks of the Suez canal and got excited by waterwheels and irrigation ditches as I did. She probably shuddered and went down to her cabin to play with her new electric hairdryer.

~

In 1839 an obscure British sea captain by the name of Stafford Bettesworth Haines sailed into the harbour of a poor Arab fishing village and claimed it as a possession of Queen Victoria. A local sultan’s son took exception to these Europeans on the beaches of Aden and engaged the British in a smart little war. The British marines overcame the opposition and eventually the sultan signed a lease allowing the British to use the village as a ship’s coaling station. One hundred and ten years later that same fishing village had been transformed into the second busiest harbour in the world (after New York). At the time of the occupation Aden was thickly forested. Mimosa, tamarisk, camel’s thorn and myrrh shrubs grew in abundance. These were populated by rabbits, hares, gazelles, foxes, hyenas and a great deal of bird life. By the mid-1800s the land had been deforested by the successors of Captain Haines, to build houses and ships, and other things necessary to the flourishing of a great port.

The village was 180 miles from an ancient city once known as Sheba, the home of King Solomon’s regal visitor, Queen Bilquis. Their child’s descendants became the emperors of Ethiopia. The people of Sheba were descended from Qahtan, the Joktan of the Bible’s Genesis. Today that city is known as Sanaa. It rises out of a tall plateau of red stone like a geometrical flower the petals of which are sandstone houses and the rigid stamens, gold-tipped minarets. Sanaa is in the Yemen and Aden is to the south of that city, separated by a narrow desert in an area known to us as the Radfan. If you want to know more, read The Barren Rocks of Aden by James Lunt, an informative book.

We duly arrived in Steamer Point, or Tawahi, which is surrounded by red volcanic rocky hills and sand. Sand everywhere. It was extremely hot and unbelievably sultry, being the Cool Season. When we complained about the high temperatures and cloying atmosphere we were gleefully told to ‘wait until the Hot Season’ which was indeed much much hotter and much more humid than the Cool Season. Stepping off the boat after two weeks my legs felt like jelly on the static ground. I was immediately assailed by Arabs in cotton kilts and turbans selling watches and wallets. I was told that if I didn’t buy anything their children would starve and I wouldn’t go to Heaven.

My dad met us on the quay and of course mum burst into tears, then berated him for leaving her alone in the first place, in the full knowledge that dad had had no choice in the matter. Then, after the drying of the tears, we climbed into a bus and were taken to RAF Khormaksar. Dad’s work was there and we had married quarters on the edge of the desert, out of which gazelle used to roam. The house was whitewashed, inside and out, with red-tiled floors. I loved it. I did not love the fact that on entering my bedroom I saw that the wall was decorated with the largest spider I had ever seen. I learned later that this monster, as big as a dinner plate, was a camel spider which had a nasty poisonous bite.

Dad then did something which I now regret, since I’ve grown to love and respect spiders, and think them the saviours of the house. He squashed it with a large encyclopaedia. Even flattened under this monster tome, the spider’s hairy legs stuck out all around the edges of the book. They were as thick as my little finger and as black as jet.

There was other wildlife present. Red ants thrived in the wall’s cracks, as did bed bugs. Quite a few smaller cousins of the camel spider inhabited the cupboards and under the stairs. Chit-chats (gecko lizards) lived on the walls and around the curtain rails. A bootlace snake had made its home in the garden and proved impossible to catch. Large brown kites nicknamed shite-hawks perched on the flat roof and glared down at us as we went to and from the house, as if the place belonged to them and we were the intruders.

Mum blitzed through the place with DDT sprays and various newspaper cudgels, until it was a clear zone. She was persuaded to leave the chit-chats alone, since they ate mosquitoes and were at least a little more cuddly than the camel spiders and white scorpions. An invisible sign went up outside our front door after that, telling the creatures of the desert that they were not welcome in our home. Even the mild wide-eyed gazelle were chased off the veranda by mother’s broom, since they did indeed eat the vegetables she planted and then thanked her by crapping on her clean tiles.

Around the married quarters the lone and level sands stretched far away. Nearby was the airport, where Constellation passenger planes and military aircraft took off and landed. In the other direction, just a few miles away, a giant extinct volcanic crater rose from the earth to dominate the area. This was Crater, whose peak was known as Shamsan. Inside the cone was a whole town, accessible from the sea side, but with only a narrow gateway on the land side. Crater was in later years to become a terrorist hotspot when the British were being chased out of Aden Protectorate.

The sea was about a mile from the house, beyond the black volcanic sands. No golden beach for us, but a grey-black shore which curved all the way along the coast. Near to the water’s edge was the station’s salt-water swimming pool, fed by the sea’s tide. This was the meeting place for the kids after school finished at one o’clock on most days and here I perfected my swimming until I was a veritable fish.

Max and I started at RAF Khormaksar School straight away, much to our chagrin. The headmaster there was a Mr Currie, who wasn’t a bad sort as far as headmasters went, though he caned me once for smashing a window with a football. The school itself was not far from home, perhaps a quarter of a mile. The road went past the BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) offices. I wore khaki shorts, sandals and polo shirts to school. Max’s hair was Brylcreemed into a glossy quiff, but as mine was tangled curls I didn’t bother with hair oil.

Since there were two of us, Max and I didn’t have to go through the ‘Hey, new kid!’ stuff that usually ensued on arrival at a strange school. We presented a formidable front. Max was a well-built lad with a body like a boxer’s. I was somewhat leaner and to be honest still a bit pretty-looking even at twelve, but I had learned to deal with changing schools by setting my jaw in a defiant manner. It didn’t always work, especially on psychopaths, but on this occasion it was effective. I didn’t have to have that initial playground fight to prove my worth. In fact we joined in a game of cricket, a pastime at which I have always been only average, but which I enjoyed as much as any English boy.

Khormaksar School proved to be a little less dull than all the other schools I had been to. I was to get a much better education in Aden, since there was only one school and naturally it taught to the higher level. Many service children missed out on a grammar school education due to the fact that they moved every eighteen months to two years. If two children were competing for a single place in a grammar school, and one was a local resident while the other was from an RAF camp, it made sense to the authorities to give that place to the local child. I am vehemently against that early grammar school system, which was totally unfair. It also lacked any logic, since in adulthood several of my secondary school friends obtained good university degrees.

So, in Aden I was to learn Latin, algebra and poetry all of which I came to love, though my Latin fell away very quickly afterwards. The poetry, taught by an enthusiastic schoolmistress whose name on the one school report I still have is undecipherable and lost from memory, stuck with me all my days. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Granchester’ was my first introduction to poetry and I thought it a most marvellous piece of writing. Since then I have gone on to many more poets who leave me breathless with admiration – William Carlos Williams, John Masefield, Ted Hughes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Robert Burns, William Souter – many many more. Max hated poetry and we had a fight about it. He called me a name and I called him a name, then we came to blows. This was all forgotten as soon as we had got up from the dirt and dusted off our clothes.

Outside of school I learned enough Arabic to get by in the company of local boys and the chowkidars, the Arab nightwatchmen and guarders of the gates. Languages come easy at that age. Max and I, and other boys, went swimming almost every day. We also joined the Air Scouts and after what seems to me now to be a short time, we both became patrol leaders – I of the Hawk Patrol and he of the Eagles. There were only two patrols, so between us we had cornered the market in leadership roles. I’m not bragging here, it just happened. Maybe we were lucky and showed more enthusiasm than others. I had already been a Sea Scout at Felixstowe, so perhaps experience told. Anyway, we both loved it. At heart we were Boys of the Empire, wanting to emulate men like Baden-Powell of Africa, and John Nicholson of India. Stories like Kim and King Solomon’s Mines were our bread and butter. One day we were going to conquer Africa and India, or Malaya, or Burma. Why, here we were in South Arabia, kings of the sand!

After a couple of months in Aden for some unknown reason my mother had the bright idea of putting me into Maalla Technical College. It was run by Arabs for the sons of Arab civil servants. Classes were mostly in English so that was not a problem, but I was the only white boy in a class of thirty Arab boys, and got a bit lonely. They weren’t unkind to me, quite the opposite and we were fascinated by each other. I was even invited to one fourteen-year-old’s wedding and ate sheep’s eyes. But I naturally felt out of place and can empathise with anyone of any nationality who find themselves in a similar position. You just feel an odd outsider. I made one really good friend among my classmates, a boy called Salem Yafu. He lived at Sheikh Othman, where we used to go camping, and I met his family there. Adenis were always so very hospitable.

Mum took me out of the college when she saw how miserable I was and I went back to Khormaksar School with the colonial kids. They were not all service children. Some were sons and daughters of oil workers, or diplomats, or civil servants. There was a one girl, a Scottish lass named Rosemary Burns, who was the daughter of a meteorologist.

One day we were collecting razor shells and scallops on the beach to whizz into the wind and get back like boomerangs, when Maxy shyly confessed to me that he was infatuated with Rosemary Burns. He didn’t put it in those words of course, but we’re talking teenage crush here. I had not noticed her until that point, but took the time to study her over the next week. She was not a classical beauty, but she was pretty and glowed with health and was probably the most intelligent student in our class of twenty. She wore plaits, had blue-grey eyes and had a trim figure. Her Scottish burr was wonderful. The more I saw of her, the more I tumbled into the pit to join Max. She was lovely and I fell desperately in love with her. OK, I was thirteen, but don’t tell me you can’t fall in love at that age. I fell like a brick down a well. However, to my great shame I didn’t tell Max of my feelings. I don’t know why. Perhaps I didn’t want to upset him and get beaten to within an inch of my life.

Anyway, one day on our way home from school we walked with Rosemary to her house. It was in the officer’s patch, so we were a little overawed to begin with. Max finally confronted her and said, ‘Rosemary, I like you a lot. Will you be my girlfriend?’ Almost immediately I followed up with, ‘I like you too. Will you be my girlfriend as well?’ Max shot me a look of astonishment, which might have turned to blistering anger if Rosemary had not laughed and replied, ‘I’ll be a girlfriend to both of you, you dopes.’

And so she was.

I was ecstatic. Max was ecstatic. To give him his due, he only asked me once if I was sincere and I apologised to him for the surprise but explained, ‘Couldn’t help myself’. He understood that. Rosemary was unique. There was no other girl to touch her. It was unsurprising that a young, impressionable boy should fall in love with her. From that point on we visited her house at least three or four times a week. Her parents were extremely indulgent and only once did I cross them, when I made a stink bomb with my chemistry set and turned their veranda into a temporary sewer. They took us with them to Tarshyne Bay, the officers’ swimming pool, though we did get banned from there for rowdy behaviour. Rosemary’s dad was a strong-backed Scot, who awed us with stories of his voyages on weather ships to the Arctic. Her mother was a genteel woman of shining intellect, whose brainpower had been passed on to her daughter. Then there was Brian, Rosemary’s younger brother, who disdained us as much as we disdained him. A good lad, for all that. Just younger.

We never did do very much except sit on the veranda and talk. There was no touching, which seems very strange in this day and age, not even holding hands. Normally, Rosemary had a great sense of fairness, but on the odd occasion the two Celts ganged up on the Anglo-Saxon. I felt aggrieved at those times but rifts never lasted very long.

The Burns family had a gramophone and a heap of classical records, but there was one particular long-player by an American singer I loved called Eddie Cantor, who sang Al Jolson songs. It was my first experience of the jazz music which was to influence my life as an adult. Eddie Cantor sang songs like ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Row Row Row’. Not jazz exactly, but in the same vein.

‘You and your Eddie Cantor,’ groaned Max, whenever I asked Rosemary to play the LP, ‘you’ll send us all barmy.’

Those long hot innocent days in the company of a boy named Max and a girl named Rosemary were the most wonderful of my childhood. We would talk while watching large brown hawks gliding on thermals over the desert sands and jump, startled by the sudden crack of a dhow’s sail as it filled with wind out in the Gulf of Aden. I have never forgotten those afternoons and the sense of happy contentment.

That triangular friendship awakened new depths of emotion and thinking in me. Contemplations which turned me eventually into the writer I am today. It was magical, my time in Aden, when I was close to desert cities that were symbols of stories like Tales from the Thousand and One Nights and The Thief of Bagdad. I had the Hadhramaut Desert on my doorstep, an extinct volcano with a whole town inside its cone, a sea full of strange fish both harmless and dangerous, a harbour crammed with ocean-going liners, the sleek racehorses of the waves. The east was draped over my head and around my shoulders, a light mantle, warm and wonderful, and I never ever wanted to leave and go back to that cold, grey forbidding place which ironically we called ‘home’. This was my spiritual home, this land of dark-skinned people with gossamer souls and fire in their feet.

So, that was Aden. Rock climbing up Shamsan; visiting Rosemary; swimming; scouting; camping at Sheikh Othman; reading Classic Comics, Captain Marvel, Batman, and a host of real books in my bedroom; venturing out (but not too far) into the Hadhramaut Desert, which was on the hem of the vast Empty Quarter, a place where men could and did get lost forever by wandering just a few yards off the track; going to the open-air cinema and leaning back to look up at the night sky full of still and shooting stars when the film got boring. A hell of a life for a boy. It seemed a long long childhood out there, though in fact it was quite brief in adult terms.

There was a violent side to Aden. Britain was tussling with the Yemen and sent Meteor jets to quell rebellious tribes. Photos were passed around the school playground, of severed heads stuck on stakes outside the city of Sanaa, where an imam ruled the country on the lines of an ancient Persian satrap. Those who fell out of his favour either ended up in chains in his dungeons or their heads were used to decorate the city gates. Closer to home a commanding officer’s wife swam outside the lido net and was attacked by a shark. She lost her leg and bled to death before anyone could save her. An Arab fisherman had jumped out of a canoe and beat the shark, in relatively shallow water, with his paddle and earned the respect and admiration of the whole colony. Incidents of this nature were part of the life and death of Aden, and of not especial concern to a youth on his way to manhood.

Always I was torn between the outdoor life, which I loved, wanting to emulate Kipling’s Kim, and reading. I adored reading and went through dozens of books during my time in Aden. The ‘Just William’ stories, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Herman Melville, many many others. Fortunately there was time for both in the land of prickly heat and sunburn. There was time for running wild in the desert with no shoes on and time for lying on my bed devouring fiction.

I still had my Brownie box camera and would photograph things like the Aden Protectorate Levies doing their drills. These were a British ‘cavalry’ regiment mounted on dromedaries. I’m not sure whether they had British officers but the soldiers and NCOs were local Arabs with turbans and khaki uniforms. Their base was right outside our home and I used to be fascinated by the camels racing by my bedroom window each with a soldier on its back waving a rifle.

Towards the end of my time in Aden, when I was around fourteen, Max and I did our ‘Journey’ badge, which we needed if we were ever to reach that ultimate goal of obtaining our Bushman’s Thong and also becoming Queen Scouts. To do our Journey we had to plan a two-day hike, camping out on our own. Because we were in a land that held more potential hazards than the UK, where unusual situations might develop, the scout master had wisely decided to meet us at a rendezvous point on the first night. Once he had reassured himself that we were safe and well he would leave us to our camping. This proved to be a life-saving plan on the part of our Skip.

Max and I set off with packs on our backs, full of zeal, and enthusiasm for our task. We started the hike by following the beach that closely skirted the colony’s large extinct volcano. This would take us a few hours until midday. There was initially a margin of black sand between the sea’s edge and the steep, rocky sides of Crater, but to our consternation this strip of beach eventually disappeared once the tide came in. Cut off and unable to turn back, we were forced to climb up the sides of the volcano cone. To worsen our situation, while climbing a rock chimney to escape the rising sea we lost the backpack containing our water. It fell, bouncing from crag to crag, down into the dark waves below. The incline of the hillside was very precipitous and the going was incredibly slow and difficult. There were goat tracks among the jagged outcrops, but we were not goats with small, nimble feet.

When the evening came we were still following these narrow dusty tracks that were barely visible between boulders, still trying to find a way down off the sheer slopes. There was no habitation in sight and we still had the wild sea far below us. Once, we saw an Arab fisherman in a canoe and tried to hail him, but I don’t think he saw us. With our water gone, we were in a desperate situation. It doesn’t take long in the high temperatures of South Arabia for heat exhaustion to set in. Even as schoolboys we knew that kidney failure was fatal. We knew if we did not get water soon, we would be in serious trouble.

There was a whole town deep down inside the volcanic cone up which we were scrambling, but it was a long, difficult, rugged climb to the top. Perhaps an impossible one, with many overhanging crags and steep faces. And who knew what we would find on the other side? Perhap sheer drops and an impossible descent. The sea was now a long way below us, a much more difficult climb down than it had been going up, and there was no telling whether we would again be able to navigate the goat paths we had used to get where we were.

Although all the water had been in the lost backpack, we still had some of our food in the surviving pack. We sucked on raw potatoes to try to alleviate our thirst. My head was full of visions of frosted Coca Cola bottles, waiting for us when we eventually reached safety. Then there came a point, late in the evening as it was getting dark, when we realised there was a good possibility that we would not be rescued that day. I felt ragged and exhausted, as well as having a mouth lined with sandpaper. We slept fitfully on the rocks, throats raw and bodies aching for water, waking frequently and trying to comfort one another.

The next morning brought no immediate relief and with no rescue imminent we were both thoroughly scared. We continued to scramble along the hillside, sometimes among loose scree, at other times on solid but jagged igneous rock that had knife-sharp edges and points. Certainly we could not travel quickly. Foolishly, we tormented ourselves with talk of water. The sun blazed down unrelentingly and the day grew hotter with every hour, until we realised we could go no further over such difficult ground. The track had disappeared, to be replaced by unending furrows of serrated rock. With raging thirst and swollen tongues we rested on a landscape crawling with scorpions, lizards and spiders. I’ve never been concerned about lizards or spiders, but I do loath scorpions.

Finally, when we were absolutely desperate, we heard distant sounds coming from somewhere down on the beaches. I jumped up to see an RAF launch cruising near the shore far below us. They were using a megaphone. Max and I stood on the highest point available and waved our shirts, yelling with hoarse voices. Some time later, quite a long time later, Skip and a couple of other men, with ropes and climbing gear, had reached the spot where we were waiting for them and everyone began talking at once. We were given a little water. Then we were taken down to the boat and transported back to Khormaksar, where our parents were waiting, having spent many anxious hours hoping for news.

My mother, I knew, would be calm but distressed. Dad, well it was always difficult to tell what dad was thinking or feeling. Deep down he was still a farm boy, who said very little and gave away almost nothing. Mum was furious, with everyone but me, and most understood why. Said, the quiet Somali of our household, came privately and gave me his prayer beads. ‘You keep these,’ he told me, ‘and Allah will protect you from any more terrible adventures like this one.’ I paraphrase his actual words of course, since I cannot remember them verbatim, but even as a callow youth I was extremely touched by Said’s gesture.

Rosemary visited both Max and I separately, as we recuperated in our beds. She brought me some chocolates.

Not long after our adventure, Rosemary’s father’s tour came to and end and they left by ship. We bought her a porcelain sheepdog between us, Heaven knows why or where we got it from. She gave us our one and only kiss before she left. Max she kissed first, on the cheek, but I wasn’t having that. When she came to do the same to me, I twisted my head and kissed her full on the lips. She screwed up her nose and smiled.

I wrote to Rosemary for two years after that, then somehow, somewhy, the letters stopped. No doubt she had found a new boyfriend and felt she was being disloyal by writing to an old one. I don’t know whether Max kept up any correspondence with her. Anyway, I still have some of Rosemary’s letters, in my Cabinet of Curiosities. They’re typical schoolgirl letters of the time. My own letters were probably full of spelling mistakes and errors of grammar. I wanted to be a writer in those days, but my skills at the craft were horribly limited. I read widely and loved literature, but found the craft of writing difficult.

~

My family left Aden on the MV Devonshire, a sister ship to the Dunera, and that episode of my boyhood was over. However, my time in Aden as a youth shaped the rest of my life. My memories of those years remain vivid and when I try I can still smell the heat and dust. Aden remains embedded in my spirit, part of who I am today.

Strangely, I would reluctantly return to its shores as a man, as a telecommunications corporal in the RAF, to take part in Britain’s withdrawal from a violent and blood-drenched colony in 1966-7.

Still that second experience, one of the most hated periods in my life, could not overshadow my earlier time in Aden when I was hopelessly in love with its romantic desert places.



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Framed