Friday, February 29, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
Oh what a lovely war!
I was asked to write my memories of WW2 for a book on the subject; it was to be a compilation of different people's memoirs. I can remember vividly many incidents from that period, here's what I wrote.
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.
The “we” referred to throughout the following is myself and my friend John Webster, we were inseparable. I lived with my grandparents at 49 Barber road, Walkley, Sheffield and he lived around the corner at 337 Crookesmoor Rd with his parents and his sister Christine. We went to the same school and he was ten days younger than me.
Well, from my point of view, that is that of an 8, 9, 10 year old lad growing up in Sheffield and living with his Granny, it was a wonderful time. It was so interesting and there was always so much happening: I feel sorry for the kids of today having to grow up in this paranoid fear ridden and controlled environment, what we had was freedom and excitement.
We had regular air raids with sirens and bombs and air raid shelters and rationing and gas masks etc. but we weren’t old enough to know anything other that, so it seemed quiet normal. We listened to the radio a lot, to ITMA with Mrs. Mopp and Mona Lott and to the 9 o’clock news read by Alvar Liddell or Chester Wilmott with news about what was happening where our fathers and uncles were and which German cities we’d bombed last night. There was also ‘In Town Tonight’ and ‘The Brains Trust’ and “The Radio Doctor” and they all drew huge audiences, they were what held us together. And then there were regular visits to the cinema, in my case the Scala or the Western where we would sneak in through the back door because we didn’t have any money. There we saw the forerunners of TV news, the weekly ‘Newsreel’ features that showed the war on the home front and abroad in addition to the regular films of the day, many of which I can still remember.
We had double daylight savings time, the clocks went ahead 2 hours, so that in the summer it was light until well after 10 o’clock, so we stayed out and played ‘til it was almost dark and I remember many times telling my granny who was worried sick since I’d probably been gone since early that morning, that “I didn’t know what time it was!” Chances are we’d been out on the moors, walking for miles: we’d take the bus or tram to the terminus at the edge of the city for half a penny and then hike for miles. Once we hiked to Castleton which is 16 miles from Sheffield and then had to beg for pennies to get the bus fare home before it got dark.
There were many events interesting to a kid, like one night I awoke at about 2 am and came downstairs, probably to go to the outside toilet, I heard a weird noise, like an aircraft with a 2 stroke motorbike engine, and then suddenly this thing with a flame shooting out behind it went overhead very low: the next day the paper said that the farthest north sighted V1 had passed over Sheffield and had crashed into farmland,normally they didn’t have the range to target cities as far north as Sheffield, I just happened to see the only one they fired at us! And then 30 odd years later I made a TV documentary about 'em.
One summer afternoon about 5 o’clock I was out playing with my mates when a B17 with only two of it’s four engines working flew over very low, it was badly shot up, trailing smoke and in obvious trouble. We knew immediately where it was heading: Endcliff Park! This was a park about 2-3 miles away that lay along the bottom of a valley in a heavily residential area: a river ran through the length of park, on one side of the river were soccer and cricket areas and on the other a heavily wooded steep bank. We jumped on a bus that was heading directly towards the park and within a few minutes we were there. The plane had crashed into the trees on the hillside and broken up over a very large area, there were trees on fire and already a police cordon along the river bank to prevent public access. In a glance we knew how to get to the wreckage: there was a row of houses along the top of the ridge whose back gardens looked down on the burning trees. We quickly ran out of the park and up the main road to the street where those houses were and then through their gardens and onto the wooded hillside. As we neared the wreckage we saw that we not alone, we recognised several kids from Mushroom lane, a street very close to where we lived and they were already flitting from behind the trees and gathering souvenirs: down at the bottom of the hillside we could see a crowd with the police holding them back. Gathering bomb and anti-aircraft shrapnel after air-raids was a normal procedure for all kids back then, so we picked up pieces of debris from the wreckage and knew it was time to leave when we saw fire engines pulling up below and firemen heading up towards the burning trees. As we scrambled back up the hill with our booty we passed the Mushroom lane gang, two of them were struggling to carry a pair of 50 cal. machine guns that must have weighed a ton! Next day we saw them again and they invited us to their house to see the guns, we were extremely envious, we’d never found anything like that!
And then there was the blitz. Thursday December the 12th. 1941. Being winter it was dark when the sirens went at about 7pm but that wasn’t uncommon, we often heard sirens: that night however we were in for something special. The Jerries had a policy of saturation bombing the large industrial cities and it was now our turn. I was at home with my Granny and Grandad and we’d just had dinner. Normally we didn’t bother about air raid sirens ‘cos they’d go even if it was just a single enemy plane but it was soon apparent that this was different. Bombs started falling everywhere, there were constant explosions and fires burning and the sound of our anti-aircraft guns firing with dozens of searchlights criss-crossing the sky looking for the bombers: as the night progressed it got worse. Finally we went down into the coal cellar, we went down and sat on the cellar steps. Cold, dark and dirty with only a flashlight or candles for light: I don’t remember the details but I’m sure we must have had cushions to sit on and blankets to keep warm. It went on all night with some bombs falling very close and shaking the house and at one point there was a huge crash of breaking glass as the windows in the living room right overhead shattered from a bomb blast across the street. I remember it being 3am but soon after that I must have dosed off and I awoke to the all-clear sirens going off at about 7am.
My dad, who still hadn’t been called up yet, came by that morning, it was very difficult to travel anywhere since there was no public transportation, many houses and buildings were on fire, gas mains in the streets were on fire and water was gushing out of ruptured mains, electric power lines were down and there were lots of shattered and burning buildings and people out in the streets looking at it all. About 200 yards up the road from us was a huge landmine that had come down on a parachute, but had not exploded. It was black, about 8 -10ft long and 2ft diameter and covered with very interesting, but totally unintelligable German writing: it was lying in the gutter outside someone’s house. The bomb disposal people took care of it and removed one end and all the explosives leaving the empty carcass there for weeks after, it became a plaything for us, we used to go inside it.
Just down the street from it was a huge vacant stone house behind a large wall, it was perhaps three stories and we often went to play in the large grounds that surrounded it. One day we were there and one of us threw a stone at something and missed, the stone hit one of the ground floor windows and it shattered. What a lovely sound! Someone picked up another stone and threw it and another window shattered: there were about 4-5 of us and we each started throwing stones trying to outdo each other in hitting window panes. Within a few minutes there wasn’t an intact window in the house, every pane was broken, now it looked just like all those other houses in the neighborhood with bomb damaged windows! We didn’t give it another thought and went off to find something else to do, that is until the next day when there was a loud knocking on my Grannies front door, it was a copper who’d come to ask about what I knew regarding some broken windows in a house on Crookesmoor Rd. He was let in and and he started asking me questions and saying that someone had seen me there and what did I have to say about it. I told him that I knew nothing about it but I’d heard the same stories and I’d been told that it was the Mushroom lane gang!
It used to be called ‘mischief’, today it would be called juvenile delinquency and you’d probably wind up in the nick for some of the things that we did. Another time we were right at the Walkley terminus where the city ends and the moorland begins: it was a quite abrupt transition and where we were playing it was a large flat open area but about 100 yards away there was a vertical cliff dropping down into a valley. Some workmen had been laying cable there, heavy stuff about 1” thick: They’d left a huge drum of it, it was about 6ft in diameter and sitting upright. Of course two mischievous lads would want to give it a push to see if it would roll and of course it did, right over the cliff laying cable out behind it as it crashed down the hillside. We left in a hurry!
There was another time when the same ‘we’ had to leave again in a hurry. Sheffield is a very hilly city, consequently there are lots of valleys running through it. Close to our house at the top of Crookesmoor rd. there was one that had a small dam across it, it was a favorite place to play and swim. One day after swimming there we were cold and wanted to dry off and get warm so we decided to light a fire. The hillsides around the dam were covered with what we called ‘gorse bushes’ sometimes called ‘furze’ in other parts of the country. It’s a scrubby bushlike plant with hard woody stems that gets up to about 4-5ft and it spreads laterally. When it dies it becomes sharp and brittle and dry as tinder. We lit our fire under a clump and it roared into flame instantly, totally out of control, and on top of that the whole hillside was covered with it and it was contigious, every plant touched another! Within minutes the hillside was engulfed in flames and we knew it was time for another hasty retreat. We fled and ran until we were on the road that looked down on the dam from the opposite side of the valley and found a spot with a view of the entire scene. There were several people watching the fire so we asked one of them what was happening “Bloody mischievous kids, that’s what’s happening” he said, another adult piped in and said she’d seen kids running away from the fire just minutes before. Bloody mischievous kids! Adults would probably have said “No parental supervision, no coppers, no men around to control all these kids, everybody’s off at war, that’s why all these kids are running wild: and that’s probably true, but it was wonderful from our point of view.
It wasn’t all mischief, I used to sit in class and whatever the subject I’d probably be drawing pictures of aircraft, mostly German in my exercise books and I became quite good at it. Every teacher’s report card said basically the same thing “Tony lacks the ability to concentrate, he doesn’t apply himself to the lessons in class”, and that might have been true from their narrow perspectives. But there were a couple of teachers, both women, who made a difference. Our classroom had a 36” blackboard around three sides, one teacher asked me if I would like to draw a panorama along the back wall, I probably said OK, but I had no idea what a panorama looked like. So I asked my Granny, she had no idea either so she told me to go to the local library and ask there. They were not much help except the librarian pointed me to an alcove where the dictionaries and encyclopedias were kept and that was a turning point, from then on I always had a library card and spent hours there poring through those interesting books. That led to my going to the main library in the city where there was a much larger selection: one day after class another teacher asked me about something and I told her that I was going to the main library to return some books. “Oh” she said, “I’m a member there also and I have some books to go back, could you take them for me?” Well that became our instant bond, we belonged to the same library and she trusted me to take her books back for her, I was walking on air. I found out what panoramas looked like and then created something that was based on that famous photograph of St. Pauls Cathedral in London during their blitz, I drew a panorama of a night-time skyline during a blitz with German bombers, Spitfires, searchlights and fire and smoke: it stayed on the back wall as long as I was at that school, which was 'til the end of the war.
Neither incident really means much but they’ve both stayed with me all these years and in later life “lacks the ability to concentrate” became meaningless as I took advanced degrees at universities and also taught at them. I’ve mentioned the importance of the radio to us during the war, we also had an old gramaphone and about a dozen 78’s, mostly American dance music, I don’t think that it’s insignificant that I now host a weekly radio music program where I play records. Plus, one of the few presents that I remember getting from that period was a toy film projector, it was battery operated and came with some short black & white Disney cartoons that I used to project over and over. In my 30’s I produced a documentary that was related to the war that was well received plus I had several one man photo exhibitions of my work around the world. All these things tie together and as I look back I realise that I got very little from “school” , about all that I can really remember is learning to read and my 12 times tables, not much else. My real education began when I chose to pursue subjects that interested me and were in part related to the experiences of my wartime childhood.
A couple more items come to mind: there were frequent events and programs designed to create public support for the war, posters everywhere urging us to ‘Dig for Victory’ or beware that ‘Careless talk costs lives’ but in addition there were displays set up on bomb sites around the city. One such was a real Lancaster bomber and a real tank! I don’t know what the adults thought but we thought it was wonderful, we’d only ever seen them in either books or films, we’d never seen the real thing up-close before. So we went, but unfortunately there was a catch, an admission cost that we couldn’t afford, one and sixpence. The way it was set up was that you had to buy a one and sixpence saving stamp, put it in your savings book, and then they’d let you in to go inside the Lancaster.
We looked mournful, we stood at the fence and drooled and finally the sergeant said “OK, I’ll let you in, I’ll even give you the saving stamp and the book, but you have to start buying saving stamps "OK” we willingly agreed. So he made out two books, one in each of our names and glued a one and six stamp in each, we were in! We spent the rest of the day ‘til they kicked us out going through the Lanc and talking to the ‘crew’. When we left we read the fine print in our savings books and discovered that we could cash them in at any time, suddenly we were rich, we’d never had one and six in cash ever before, so we went to the post office and closed our accounts! One and six was more money than I’d ever seen but I don’t remember what I did with it, probably gave it to my Granny.
Another time we were in the center of town and we found ourselves in the cathedral gardens, before you knew it we were in the cathedral and spying a door in a dark corner we tried it and it was open. There was a staircase leading down into the vaults, we went down. Lo and behold this was where they stored all the sacramental wines, bottles stacked everywhere. We had no idea what we’d found so we decided to find out, we opened a couple of bottles and it was quite nice. Not what we’d expected, it was sweet and fruity so we sat down and passed the bottle back and forth. We also would steal occasional cigarettes from our parents so we usually had one or at least a butte in our pockets, so we lit one up and shared it. No one disturbed/discovered us, we finished our drunken orgy in peace, but I’ve wondered since if the Lord/Lady looking down from above has some special punishment awaiting us on judgement day? You know, sacrilage and all that.
I lived with my Granny: my Father and Stepmother had a house about 3-4 miles away, I would often visit and spend weekends there, it was always interesting. Their house was the weekly meeting place for the local communist party, it seemed like every weekend there was a meeting that quickly degenerated into a party: a party being a good sized group of people sitting around drinking, smoking and discussing everything under the sun. I quickly understood who uncle Joe was, even though we didn’t have any family members by that name. Marx and Lenin were names as familiar to me as many of those on the BBC but I didn’t know much about them though I heard their names often enough. When the weather was nice on a Sunday, and sometimes even when it wasn’t, we’d all go for long hikes across the moors in Derbyshire which probably has something to do with why John Webster and I spent so much time out there also. These hikes comprised about a dozen adults and me, me in short pants and on one occasion with my boots on the wrong feet, this wasn’t discovered until we’d walked many miles! They always ended at a country pub where everyone except me went in to continue setting the world in order and strategically planning how we should fight the war to aid our Red Army allies. Kids not being allowed in pubs I got to sit outside on the steps with a bag of crisps and a lemonade and as I sit here writing this 60 odd years later there’s a photo of us all on one of our hikes pinned on the wall in front of me, I remember every one of them and all their names.
On other occasions when the air-raid sirens went off at night we’d go out walking in the city: it seems like all the raids were at night. We’d leave the house and walk towards the outskirts of the city where there were hills with clear views of parts of Sheffield and often as we sat there during the air raids we’d see the results of bombs with fires and explosions off in the distance and my father always knew which area it was, I remember him once saying “Attercliff’s getting a pasting tonight!” There would always be barrage balloons, search lights and ack-ack fire but I never saw an enemy bomber get hit, though any that did get shot down wound up on bomb sites for the public to see and that was always a treat for those of us fascinated by German planes. Other times when we’d walk during the raids we’d go from one air-raid shelter to the next, they were scattered all over the city and usually fairly close to each other. Some houses had their own Anderson shelters buried in the back garden, the public shelters that we visited were very strongly built, ie 18” brick walls with baffles at the entrance and no windows and very thick concrete slab roofs. There was no lighting or heating just a platform bench that ran around the walls. People would leave their houses and go into the shelters usually bringing blankets and candles and guitars and accordians: it seems like every shelter we visited had a sing-song going on, there was a long list of songs that everybody knew by heart: “We’ll meet again” “White Cliffs of Dover” “Seigfreid Line” “Bless ‘em All” etc.
One clear summer day I was out playing by myself when I looked up and saw a sight like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were hundreds of allied planes circling around and around and forming up into formations. They were all bombers or transports, lots of DC3 Dakotas and Lancasters, no fighters and each one had something I’d never seen before: they all had black and white stripes on the wings and the fuselages. I had no idea what that meant but I was very intrigued. That night on BBC 9 o’clock news the announcer said “Today the allied invasion of occupied Europe has begun....” D Day had started and everyday thereafter we listened to reports from correspondents with the troops as they advanced towards Berlin. I have no memory of VE day and I’m at a loss to understand why since I can remember in vivid detail the street party that we had for VJ day.
For almost everyone in Europe the war was a terrible time, a time of separation and losses, of terrible fear, of shortages and rationing and of emotional turmoil, but for kids, particularly boys of my age in my environment, it was the most exciting time to grow up.
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.
The “we” referred to throughout the following is myself and my friend John Webster, we were inseparable. I lived with my grandparents at 49 Barber road, Walkley, Sheffield and he lived around the corner at 337 Crookesmoor Rd with his parents and his sister Christine. We went to the same school and he was ten days younger than me.
Well, from my point of view, that is that of an 8, 9, 10 year old lad growing up in Sheffield and living with his Granny, it was a wonderful time. It was so interesting and there was always so much happening: I feel sorry for the kids of today having to grow up in this paranoid fear ridden and controlled environment, what we had was freedom and excitement.
We had regular air raids with sirens and bombs and air raid shelters and rationing and gas masks etc. but we weren’t old enough to know anything other that, so it seemed quiet normal. We listened to the radio a lot, to ITMA with Mrs. Mopp and Mona Lott and to the 9 o’clock news read by Alvar Liddell or Chester Wilmott with news about what was happening where our fathers and uncles were and which German cities we’d bombed last night. There was also ‘In Town Tonight’ and ‘The Brains Trust’ and “The Radio Doctor” and they all drew huge audiences, they were what held us together. And then there were regular visits to the cinema, in my case the Scala or the Western where we would sneak in through the back door because we didn’t have any money. There we saw the forerunners of TV news, the weekly ‘Newsreel’ features that showed the war on the home front and abroad in addition to the regular films of the day, many of which I can still remember.
We had double daylight savings time, the clocks went ahead 2 hours, so that in the summer it was light until well after 10 o’clock, so we stayed out and played ‘til it was almost dark and I remember many times telling my granny who was worried sick since I’d probably been gone since early that morning, that “I didn’t know what time it was!” Chances are we’d been out on the moors, walking for miles: we’d take the bus or tram to the terminus at the edge of the city for half a penny and then hike for miles. Once we hiked to Castleton which is 16 miles from Sheffield and then had to beg for pennies to get the bus fare home before it got dark.
There were many events interesting to a kid, like one night I awoke at about 2 am and came downstairs, probably to go to the outside toilet, I heard a weird noise, like an aircraft with a 2 stroke motorbike engine, and then suddenly this thing with a flame shooting out behind it went overhead very low: the next day the paper said that the farthest north sighted V1 had passed over Sheffield and had crashed into farmland,normally they didn’t have the range to target cities as far north as Sheffield, I just happened to see the only one they fired at us! And then 30 odd years later I made a TV documentary about 'em.
One summer afternoon about 5 o’clock I was out playing with my mates when a B17 with only two of it’s four engines working flew over very low, it was badly shot up, trailing smoke and in obvious trouble. We knew immediately where it was heading: Endcliff Park! This was a park about 2-3 miles away that lay along the bottom of a valley in a heavily residential area: a river ran through the length of park, on one side of the river were soccer and cricket areas and on the other a heavily wooded steep bank. We jumped on a bus that was heading directly towards the park and within a few minutes we were there. The plane had crashed into the trees on the hillside and broken up over a very large area, there were trees on fire and already a police cordon along the river bank to prevent public access. In a glance we knew how to get to the wreckage: there was a row of houses along the top of the ridge whose back gardens looked down on the burning trees. We quickly ran out of the park and up the main road to the street where those houses were and then through their gardens and onto the wooded hillside. As we neared the wreckage we saw that we not alone, we recognised several kids from Mushroom lane, a street very close to where we lived and they were already flitting from behind the trees and gathering souvenirs: down at the bottom of the hillside we could see a crowd with the police holding them back. Gathering bomb and anti-aircraft shrapnel after air-raids was a normal procedure for all kids back then, so we picked up pieces of debris from the wreckage and knew it was time to leave when we saw fire engines pulling up below and firemen heading up towards the burning trees. As we scrambled back up the hill with our booty we passed the Mushroom lane gang, two of them were struggling to carry a pair of 50 cal. machine guns that must have weighed a ton! Next day we saw them again and they invited us to their house to see the guns, we were extremely envious, we’d never found anything like that!
And then there was the blitz. Thursday December the 12th. 1941. Being winter it was dark when the sirens went at about 7pm but that wasn’t uncommon, we often heard sirens: that night however we were in for something special. The Jerries had a policy of saturation bombing the large industrial cities and it was now our turn. I was at home with my Granny and Grandad and we’d just had dinner. Normally we didn’t bother about air raid sirens ‘cos they’d go even if it was just a single enemy plane but it was soon apparent that this was different. Bombs started falling everywhere, there were constant explosions and fires burning and the sound of our anti-aircraft guns firing with dozens of searchlights criss-crossing the sky looking for the bombers: as the night progressed it got worse. Finally we went down into the coal cellar, we went down and sat on the cellar steps. Cold, dark and dirty with only a flashlight or candles for light: I don’t remember the details but I’m sure we must have had cushions to sit on and blankets to keep warm. It went on all night with some bombs falling very close and shaking the house and at one point there was a huge crash of breaking glass as the windows in the living room right overhead shattered from a bomb blast across the street. I remember it being 3am but soon after that I must have dosed off and I awoke to the all-clear sirens going off at about 7am.
My dad, who still hadn’t been called up yet, came by that morning, it was very difficult to travel anywhere since there was no public transportation, many houses and buildings were on fire, gas mains in the streets were on fire and water was gushing out of ruptured mains, electric power lines were down and there were lots of shattered and burning buildings and people out in the streets looking at it all. About 200 yards up the road from us was a huge landmine that had come down on a parachute, but had not exploded. It was black, about 8 -10ft long and 2ft diameter and covered with very interesting, but totally unintelligable German writing: it was lying in the gutter outside someone’s house. The bomb disposal people took care of it and removed one end and all the explosives leaving the empty carcass there for weeks after, it became a plaything for us, we used to go inside it.
Just down the street from it was a huge vacant stone house behind a large wall, it was perhaps three stories and we often went to play in the large grounds that surrounded it. One day we were there and one of us threw a stone at something and missed, the stone hit one of the ground floor windows and it shattered. What a lovely sound! Someone picked up another stone and threw it and another window shattered: there were about 4-5 of us and we each started throwing stones trying to outdo each other in hitting window panes. Within a few minutes there wasn’t an intact window in the house, every pane was broken, now it looked just like all those other houses in the neighborhood with bomb damaged windows! We didn’t give it another thought and went off to find something else to do, that is until the next day when there was a loud knocking on my Grannies front door, it was a copper who’d come to ask about what I knew regarding some broken windows in a house on Crookesmoor Rd. He was let in and and he started asking me questions and saying that someone had seen me there and what did I have to say about it. I told him that I knew nothing about it but I’d heard the same stories and I’d been told that it was the Mushroom lane gang!
It used to be called ‘mischief’, today it would be called juvenile delinquency and you’d probably wind up in the nick for some of the things that we did. Another time we were right at the Walkley terminus where the city ends and the moorland begins: it was a quite abrupt transition and where we were playing it was a large flat open area but about 100 yards away there was a vertical cliff dropping down into a valley. Some workmen had been laying cable there, heavy stuff about 1” thick: They’d left a huge drum of it, it was about 6ft in diameter and sitting upright. Of course two mischievous lads would want to give it a push to see if it would roll and of course it did, right over the cliff laying cable out behind it as it crashed down the hillside. We left in a hurry!
There was another time when the same ‘we’ had to leave again in a hurry. Sheffield is a very hilly city, consequently there are lots of valleys running through it. Close to our house at the top of Crookesmoor rd. there was one that had a small dam across it, it was a favorite place to play and swim. One day after swimming there we were cold and wanted to dry off and get warm so we decided to light a fire. The hillsides around the dam were covered with what we called ‘gorse bushes’ sometimes called ‘furze’ in other parts of the country. It’s a scrubby bushlike plant with hard woody stems that gets up to about 4-5ft and it spreads laterally. When it dies it becomes sharp and brittle and dry as tinder. We lit our fire under a clump and it roared into flame instantly, totally out of control, and on top of that the whole hillside was covered with it and it was contigious, every plant touched another! Within minutes the hillside was engulfed in flames and we knew it was time for another hasty retreat. We fled and ran until we were on the road that looked down on the dam from the opposite side of the valley and found a spot with a view of the entire scene. There were several people watching the fire so we asked one of them what was happening “Bloody mischievous kids, that’s what’s happening” he said, another adult piped in and said she’d seen kids running away from the fire just minutes before. Bloody mischievous kids! Adults would probably have said “No parental supervision, no coppers, no men around to control all these kids, everybody’s off at war, that’s why all these kids are running wild: and that’s probably true, but it was wonderful from our point of view.
It wasn’t all mischief, I used to sit in class and whatever the subject I’d probably be drawing pictures of aircraft, mostly German in my exercise books and I became quite good at it. Every teacher’s report card said basically the same thing “Tony lacks the ability to concentrate, he doesn’t apply himself to the lessons in class”, and that might have been true from their narrow perspectives. But there were a couple of teachers, both women, who made a difference. Our classroom had a 36” blackboard around three sides, one teacher asked me if I would like to draw a panorama along the back wall, I probably said OK, but I had no idea what a panorama looked like. So I asked my Granny, she had no idea either so she told me to go to the local library and ask there. They were not much help except the librarian pointed me to an alcove where the dictionaries and encyclopedias were kept and that was a turning point, from then on I always had a library card and spent hours there poring through those interesting books. That led to my going to the main library in the city where there was a much larger selection: one day after class another teacher asked me about something and I told her that I was going to the main library to return some books. “Oh” she said, “I’m a member there also and I have some books to go back, could you take them for me?” Well that became our instant bond, we belonged to the same library and she trusted me to take her books back for her, I was walking on air. I found out what panoramas looked like and then created something that was based on that famous photograph of St. Pauls Cathedral in London during their blitz, I drew a panorama of a night-time skyline during a blitz with German bombers, Spitfires, searchlights and fire and smoke: it stayed on the back wall as long as I was at that school, which was 'til the end of the war.
Neither incident really means much but they’ve both stayed with me all these years and in later life “lacks the ability to concentrate” became meaningless as I took advanced degrees at universities and also taught at them. I’ve mentioned the importance of the radio to us during the war, we also had an old gramaphone and about a dozen 78’s, mostly American dance music, I don’t think that it’s insignificant that I now host a weekly radio music program where I play records. Plus, one of the few presents that I remember getting from that period was a toy film projector, it was battery operated and came with some short black & white Disney cartoons that I used to project over and over. In my 30’s I produced a documentary that was related to the war that was well received plus I had several one man photo exhibitions of my work around the world. All these things tie together and as I look back I realise that I got very little from “school” , about all that I can really remember is learning to read and my 12 times tables, not much else. My real education began when I chose to pursue subjects that interested me and were in part related to the experiences of my wartime childhood.
A couple more items come to mind: there were frequent events and programs designed to create public support for the war, posters everywhere urging us to ‘Dig for Victory’ or beware that ‘Careless talk costs lives’ but in addition there were displays set up on bomb sites around the city. One such was a real Lancaster bomber and a real tank! I don’t know what the adults thought but we thought it was wonderful, we’d only ever seen them in either books or films, we’d never seen the real thing up-close before. So we went, but unfortunately there was a catch, an admission cost that we couldn’t afford, one and sixpence. The way it was set up was that you had to buy a one and sixpence saving stamp, put it in your savings book, and then they’d let you in to go inside the Lancaster.
We looked mournful, we stood at the fence and drooled and finally the sergeant said “OK, I’ll let you in, I’ll even give you the saving stamp and the book, but you have to start buying saving stamps "OK” we willingly agreed. So he made out two books, one in each of our names and glued a one and six stamp in each, we were in! We spent the rest of the day ‘til they kicked us out going through the Lanc and talking to the ‘crew’. When we left we read the fine print in our savings books and discovered that we could cash them in at any time, suddenly we were rich, we’d never had one and six in cash ever before, so we went to the post office and closed our accounts! One and six was more money than I’d ever seen but I don’t remember what I did with it, probably gave it to my Granny.
Another time we were in the center of town and we found ourselves in the cathedral gardens, before you knew it we were in the cathedral and spying a door in a dark corner we tried it and it was open. There was a staircase leading down into the vaults, we went down. Lo and behold this was where they stored all the sacramental wines, bottles stacked everywhere. We had no idea what we’d found so we decided to find out, we opened a couple of bottles and it was quite nice. Not what we’d expected, it was sweet and fruity so we sat down and passed the bottle back and forth. We also would steal occasional cigarettes from our parents so we usually had one or at least a butte in our pockets, so we lit one up and shared it. No one disturbed/discovered us, we finished our drunken orgy in peace, but I’ve wondered since if the Lord/Lady looking down from above has some special punishment awaiting us on judgement day? You know, sacrilage and all that.
I lived with my Granny: my Father and Stepmother had a house about 3-4 miles away, I would often visit and spend weekends there, it was always interesting. Their house was the weekly meeting place for the local communist party, it seemed like every weekend there was a meeting that quickly degenerated into a party: a party being a good sized group of people sitting around drinking, smoking and discussing everything under the sun. I quickly understood who uncle Joe was, even though we didn’t have any family members by that name. Marx and Lenin were names as familiar to me as many of those on the BBC but I didn’t know much about them though I heard their names often enough. When the weather was nice on a Sunday, and sometimes even when it wasn’t, we’d all go for long hikes across the moors in Derbyshire which probably has something to do with why John Webster and I spent so much time out there also. These hikes comprised about a dozen adults and me, me in short pants and on one occasion with my boots on the wrong feet, this wasn’t discovered until we’d walked many miles! They always ended at a country pub where everyone except me went in to continue setting the world in order and strategically planning how we should fight the war to aid our Red Army allies. Kids not being allowed in pubs I got to sit outside on the steps with a bag of crisps and a lemonade and as I sit here writing this 60 odd years later there’s a photo of us all on one of our hikes pinned on the wall in front of me, I remember every one of them and all their names.
On other occasions when the air-raid sirens went off at night we’d go out walking in the city: it seems like all the raids were at night. We’d leave the house and walk towards the outskirts of the city where there were hills with clear views of parts of Sheffield and often as we sat there during the air raids we’d see the results of bombs with fires and explosions off in the distance and my father always knew which area it was, I remember him once saying “Attercliff’s getting a pasting tonight!” There would always be barrage balloons, search lights and ack-ack fire but I never saw an enemy bomber get hit, though any that did get shot down wound up on bomb sites for the public to see and that was always a treat for those of us fascinated by German planes. Other times when we’d walk during the raids we’d go from one air-raid shelter to the next, they were scattered all over the city and usually fairly close to each other. Some houses had their own Anderson shelters buried in the back garden, the public shelters that we visited were very strongly built, ie 18” brick walls with baffles at the entrance and no windows and very thick concrete slab roofs. There was no lighting or heating just a platform bench that ran around the walls. People would leave their houses and go into the shelters usually bringing blankets and candles and guitars and accordians: it seems like every shelter we visited had a sing-song going on, there was a long list of songs that everybody knew by heart: “We’ll meet again” “White Cliffs of Dover” “Seigfreid Line” “Bless ‘em All” etc.
One clear summer day I was out playing by myself when I looked up and saw a sight like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were hundreds of allied planes circling around and around and forming up into formations. They were all bombers or transports, lots of DC3 Dakotas and Lancasters, no fighters and each one had something I’d never seen before: they all had black and white stripes on the wings and the fuselages. I had no idea what that meant but I was very intrigued. That night on BBC 9 o’clock news the announcer said “Today the allied invasion of occupied Europe has begun....” D Day had started and everyday thereafter we listened to reports from correspondents with the troops as they advanced towards Berlin. I have no memory of VE day and I’m at a loss to understand why since I can remember in vivid detail the street party that we had for VJ day.
For almost everyone in Europe the war was a terrible time, a time of separation and losses, of terrible fear, of shortages and rationing and of emotional turmoil, but for kids, particularly boys of my age in my environment, it was the most exciting time to grow up.
Travels in Guatemala
This story requires a prologue, so let’s call this bit “The Prologue”
Sometime back in the 1980’s three of us, Ron, John and I planned to travel together to Guatemala for an extended summer trip in Ron’s VW Westphalia camper. The idea was for about 12 weeks but I could only get 6, so it was decided that they would drive down and I would fly down and join them 6 weeks later. At the last minute Ron met Terri, a statuesque dark haired beauty, and so of course he invited her to join us; not a unanimous decision! So it was decided that she would join me flying down at the later date.
A slight side detail: Since they would pass through and stay in Mexico City, Ron offered to make reservations for us at their hotel for when we arrived. The big day came and Terri and I flew to Mexico City and then took the bus into town: it was mid Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the hotel and there were, of course no reservations and no rooms available! Except for the “honeymoon suite”, we had no choice, we took it!
Anyhow, back to the story: We’d made plans to fly on the Sunday to Tapachula, a small Pacific coast town on the Mexico/Guatemala border where Ron and John would meet us. When we exited customs there they were waiting and we quickly left the airport heading for the border. Ron produced a pre-prepared lunch and insisted that we eat before we crossed the border, it was important to him that the crucial component of the sandwiches, which turned out to be psylocybin mushrooms, have their effects as we passed through Guatemala’s border immigration! I’m still not sure why.
My first awareness of the mushrooms happened once we were underway in Guatemala, we were driving along a quiet country road when we came to a bridge over a deep canyon, it looked so intriguing that we stopped and walked back. It was absolutely spectacular: a deep, steep sided canyon with a fast flowing river about 200+ ft below. the canyon sides were covered with ferns, orchids and lichens with rivulets cascading down. Hundreds of brilliant small parrots were flashing in and out of the beams of sunlight and dozens of multicolored butterflies flitted from flower to flower. The vision was real, but the mushrooms made it a spectacular, vividly memorable image that has lasted for a lifetime.
From the fellow travelers that one meets on the road Ron and John had found a source for “hongos” - the Indian name for “mushrooms” and they had also been told of the “Shangri-La” of Psylocybin mushrooms: Santa Maria de Jesus, a small village miles off in the interior, in the state of Quezaltenango.
The trip evolved into a situation where Ron and Terri spent most of their time in de luxe country villas and hotels, and thus leaving John and I to our own devices and having the use of the VW. We had found a very beautiful spot in the village of Panajachel which was on the shore of Lake Atitlan, a large turquoise lake surrounded by several volcanoes: one was active and every day poured out plumes of smoke and huge chunks of pumice floated in the lake. We were having dinner in a small cafe one evening and discussing whether we should go looking for Santa Maria the next day: there was a young American woman alone at the next table and we invited her to join us which then led to our inviting her to join us in our quest.
We picked up Susan and left at dawn the next day driving a primitive road that ran around the lake for about 25 miles. Once we’d reached the far shore we headed west across a barren plateau on very rough and often unmade roads: on our map Santa Maria was still about 50+ miles ahead. At about 11am we arrived at the village which was just a small cluster of cottages along the main street; the heat was intense, it was probably around 110 degrees! We parked the van and got out and were immediately surrounded by lots of kids, Susan, who was fluent in Spanish told them we’d come to buy hongos and the price of 5 cents each was agreed to. Immediately all the kids raced off and within 10-15 minutes they returned all clutching handsfull of mushrooms, we paid them all off and then consolidated our booty; we had a fairly large paper bagfull, probably about 1-2 pounds!
As we drove back out of the village I recalled seeing on the way in a huge tree which covered an area just off the highway: since we hadn’t eaten, breakfast sounded appropriate so I pulled off the road into the cool shade of that tree. We had all the where-with-all to cook our meals so a mushroom omelet with a bottle of cold beer sounded like a great idea. I did the cooking: about 1/2lb of mushrooms between three should be enough, right? So I started washing the mushrooms and cracking the eggs. Within minutes breakfast was ready: our table was set up in the shade, three chairs, tablecloth, napkins and three cold beers and glasses and we were in paradise. In retrospect I realise that one mushroom each would have been more than adequate!
Immediately after breakfast I felt something happening to me, odd uncomfortable sensations that I’d never felt before, a shortness of breath, the inability to take a deep breath, hot, hot, hot; sweating like mad. John and Susan thought we should all take a walk, I declined, thinking instead to take a lie down ‘til this “thing” released me from it’s iron grip!
That’s the only way I remember those sensations: it was like being in the grip of ‘something’ that wouldn’t release me. When I lay down and closed my eyes it was even worse; added to all of the foregoing my body started cartwheeling backwards through a black void! The only way out was to open my eyes and stand up, or to sit in the open; very uncomfortable! This went on for about an hour at which point I thought I’d look for John, which meant walking to the edge of the road which was about 30ft away: “much too far in this heat, I’ll drive.” So I did, I got in the van and drove it forward 30ft and there they were, about 1/4mile away across a meadow sitting under a tree. I tooted the horn and John shouted for me to come, little did he know that walking 30ft was more than I could handle at that point. He started running towards me in extreme slow motion and when he reached the barbed wire fence at the edge of the field he sailed over it just like a hurdler: he came to the van and said “Come on, it’s great over there” and at that point all of my discomfort vanished as though by a magic wand! We walked back across the meadow, found a cool mountain stream and spent the next couple of hours skinnydipping and at that point all the joys of psylocybin kicked in and it was wonderful! So that’s the Prologue, that’s how we got the mushrooms.
As the summer and our adventures continued we traveled and camped in many wonderful and interesting places and met lots of interesting people. Ron and Terri continued their “honeymoon” and John and I took dozens of trips into the mountains always seeking remote villages where the descendants of the Mayan’s wove beautiful fabric designs into their everyday clothes; by the end of the trip all the spare space in the van was taken with Indian textiles!
Ron being the obsessive that he is had the idea that “if a little is good, then a lot more must be much better!” So based on this philosophy he made plans that we should visit the Mayan city of Tikal during the period of the full moon: in fact he planned that we should spend the night of the full moon on top of the most sacred of the Mayan temples reinforced with the finest French wine [transported there specifically for this], psylocybin mushrooms, Thai ganga, which I contributed plus any thing else appropriate that might turn up on our travels! Which is why we found ourselves in the middle of the jungle at Tikal at full moon.
Tikal is an amazing place; it was the main center of the Mayan culture which covered most of Central America from about 2000+ BC ‘til 900 AD, when for reasons still unknown, their civilization vanished! Much is still unknown, their hieroglyphics had not been decoded back then and large aspects of the culture were a mystery. Tikal is huge, comprising many temples, plazas, civic structures and pyramids that have been restored and endless miles still covered by the plants, trees and vines of the jungle. Back then it was a fairly unsophisticated operation; the only accommodation was a few thatched cottages alongside the airstrip and there was only one place to eat, similarly a small thatched structure that served the most basic meals at several outdoor tables. You could drive there, but it was about 12 - 14 hours from Guatemala city on an unpaved jungle road so we flew, leaving the VW at the airport.
Mid afternoon of the day before the full moon we were lazing around in the cottage we’d rented; we were drinking beer and John brought out the jar of peanut butter in which the mushrooms were buried. We were not sure of their legality there so we’d stored them covered in peanut butter in a jar. It was sort of like a lazy afternoon snack, salt crackers with peanut butter and some cold beers and not much incentive to do much else: so we just sat and nibbled and drank for a couple of hours. It was about an hours walk on a jungle trail to Temple IV, so John and I set out at about 6pm to get there before dark. Ron and Terri were going to follow on later. About half way there was another complex of pyramids so we rested there for a short while and noticed a young Indian guy, approx. 20-25 showing off for a young American woman who had a young boy with her. The pyramid was stepped, but the steps were about 24” tall and very steep. He was racing up and down the steps as though it was a residential staircase, we watched amused and wrote it off to youthful exuberance.
When we arrived at Temple IV it was sunset: the only way up to the top was by pulling yourself up using ropes that were permanently secured there. The temple, which is 212ft high had not been restored and was still covered with vegetation and vines. We got up to a level platform at about the 150ft point and from there to the top there was a steel ladder fastened into the vertical stone wall: the rungs on that ladder were about 24” apart and it was exhausting getting up the last few feet. Down at the ground level in the dense jungle it was almost dark and very hot and humid, up above the treetops there was a beautiful cool breeze and a spectacular sunset. We sat on a flat platform on the west side of the pyramid enjoying the cool air and the sunset and off to our left about 75 ft away were four young women talking heatedly in German.
Suddenly, as if on cue from a Disney director, two beautiful huge white storks came into our right peripheral field of vision flying in perfect synchronization, in slow motion and directly into the psychedelic color scheme that was the sunset. It was so perfect that it would have been a cliche in a film. The German conversation paused for a moment and then resumed as an almost inaudible babble, but in the midst of it I clearly heard the words “Royal Air Force”. I got up and went over to where they were sitting and introduced myself: they spoke English and when I asked them about the RAF reference one told me that there was an RAF station near to where she lived in Germany and she was telling her friends the storks were so perfect that they reminded her of the RAF aerobatic team!
As John and I sat there enjoying the twilight the German girls left and we were suddenly alone up there: I had twinges of mushroom paranoia and started wondering if I really wanted to spend the next 12 hours sitting in total darkness on this stone ledge high above the jungle. The answer was “no” and I told John that I really didn’t want to stay and given how fast the light was fading if I was going to leave I had to do it immediately. He was adamant, he was going to stay the night, so I reluctantly started down the ladder alone. I made it to the jungle floor and was suddenly surprised to find that it was totally, absolutely black down there: not a glimmer of daylight penetrated through the trees. I was lost, I had no idea where the trail was, all I could see was total blackness in all directions: that is total blackness decorated with psychedelic hallucinations courtesy of the mushrooms!
I called out to John that I couldn’t see a thing, could he come and help. At first he was reluctant to do so but finally he came down and together we started walking along the trail: I asked him how he could see in such darkness and all he could tell me was that the path was like a tunnel through the darkness and that the patterns were broken indicating where the tunnel was. Hard to explain but easy to visualize, rather like two superimposed moiré patterns.
This visit to Tikal was my first exposure to the jungle: everything about it was new and wonderful, but the sounds were something I hadn’t anticipated. By day the sounds that several million insects make when they all join in a colossal chorus is unimaginable: it’s maybe slightly like being at the center of a soccer field when 100,000 fans sing and the sound reverberates and runs around the stadium in waves, except that insects have a much greater range than mere mortals and their combined choruses verge on choral ecstasy. There was a period when pop musicians discovered the joys of manipulating sounds in the studio: one of the most basic was to fade effects from the left chanel to the right and then back again and so on so that to the listener it sounded as though the music was spinning around inside his head: that’s exactly what the insects do. As we walked along that trail in total darkness there was an entirely different chorus of sounds: the most chilling was something very large roaring just like the 20th Centuries lion and only a few feet off to our left. Howler monkeys make an enormous racket which also can be a bit disconcerting under the circumstances and there were thousands of birds, parrots, toucans and storks all adding to the soundtrack.
We finally caught up with the German girls and joined them at which point John chose to return to the pyramid and I continued with them back to the cottage where Ron and Terri were getting ready for a night on the jungle.
Ron was now ready to tackle Temple IV: he had bathed, shaved, dabbed his anti-perspirant on in all the right places and dressed for the occasion. He had on his short shorts, his skinny tanktop and running shoes: with all that skin exposed and all that aftershave fragrance he was the anticipated evening meal for several million mosquitoes that night, and each one left a small red itchy spot to prove it. The next day he looked as though he’d splattered with red paint from a spraygun from head to toe! But I digress.
At this point I was feeling very good; it had been several hours since we’d eaten the mushrooms and the initial effects had generally dissipated leaving a warm inner glow, I was ready to return to the Pyramid.
This time we were smart enough to bring a flashlight and as we neared the first restored temple we heard the sounds of a flute wafting through the night air. The temple was part of a huge complex of buildings that surrounded an open space; the full moon illuminated the entire complex and somewhere high in one of the buildings someone was playing, it was a magical moment. I thought immediately of Paul Horn who at that period was recording flute improvisations in similar environments, ie the Taj Mahal and at the Egyptian pyramids. We enjoyed this moment and then continued on to Temple IV where John was waiting. When we arrived we negotiated the first section up to the ladder and then all the way up into the moonlight that lit the tops of the jungle to the horizon and illuminated all the adjacent structures that poked up through the trees. It was a brilliant sight and well worth all the effort to be able to partake in it. The four of us sat there for 2-3 hours and then by unanimous consent agreed that we’d had enough ecstasy for that day and it was time to get back to the airstrip and our cottage.
When we descended the ladder sitting leaning against the wall of the pyramid was the young American woman that we’d seen earlier in the day, she had the young Mayan guy who we’d seen running up and down the steps cradled in her lap, apparently asleep. “Do any of you know anything about scorpion bites?” she asked. “My friend felt something fall down the back of his shirt and when he reached for it stung him and he’s been unconscious ever since” Well John, our hero, stepped forward and said that we would have to get him to a doctor! What a dreamer, a doctor, here? But he reached down and gathered up the Indian guy and slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
We established a routine for descent which had John in the lead followed by Ron, Terri, the American woman and her son and me at the back with the flashlight shining it ahead so that everyone could see the ropes and stepping places. As soon as we started we saw that the entire area was alive with scorpions, dozens of them scurrying between the rocks that we were walking on, we had to step between them! We didn’t know at the time but they live in the crevices beween and under the stones that the pyramid was constructed with and they come out at night to feed! Amazingly we made it to the ground without mishap and John was the hero of that night coming down 150ft on ropes and vines with the guy over his shoulder. The first thing we saw when we got to the bottom was a VW Beetle with American plates just sitting there like it belonged; it was probably the only vehicle for miles around and it was sitting waiting for us. I reached in and sounded the horn several long loud blasts and within a couple of minutes two gringos just like ourselves emerged from the jungle. It was their car and when we explained the problem they loaded John and his invalid into the back seat and set off down the trail, the rest of us followed on foot.
The forces of good fortune continued to prevail. When the VW arrived back at the landing strip there was a communal fire ring with all of the visitors sitting around it swapping tales and drinking beer. As they lifted the guy out from the back seat two of the visitors came over to help. When John explained the problem they each identified themselves, both were doctors from Riverside, California: one was a snakebite specialist and the other a scorpion sting specialist! And they had medical kits for emergency procedures with them. They were two young doctors who loved to surf and had just been to El Salvador for a surfing vacation and had stopped over at Tikal en route home. By the time we who walked back arrived, everything was taken care of: the guy was sleeping in a tent and he awoke the next morning and went straight to work!
Sometime back in the 1980’s three of us, Ron, John and I planned to travel together to Guatemala for an extended summer trip in Ron’s VW Westphalia camper. The idea was for about 12 weeks but I could only get 6, so it was decided that they would drive down and I would fly down and join them 6 weeks later. At the last minute Ron met Terri, a statuesque dark haired beauty, and so of course he invited her to join us; not a unanimous decision! So it was decided that she would join me flying down at the later date.
A slight side detail: Since they would pass through and stay in Mexico City, Ron offered to make reservations for us at their hotel for when we arrived. The big day came and Terri and I flew to Mexico City and then took the bus into town: it was mid Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the hotel and there were, of course no reservations and no rooms available! Except for the “honeymoon suite”, we had no choice, we took it!
Anyhow, back to the story: We’d made plans to fly on the Sunday to Tapachula, a small Pacific coast town on the Mexico/Guatemala border where Ron and John would meet us. When we exited customs there they were waiting and we quickly left the airport heading for the border. Ron produced a pre-prepared lunch and insisted that we eat before we crossed the border, it was important to him that the crucial component of the sandwiches, which turned out to be psylocybin mushrooms, have their effects as we passed through Guatemala’s border immigration! I’m still not sure why.
My first awareness of the mushrooms happened once we were underway in Guatemala, we were driving along a quiet country road when we came to a bridge over a deep canyon, it looked so intriguing that we stopped and walked back. It was absolutely spectacular: a deep, steep sided canyon with a fast flowing river about 200+ ft below. the canyon sides were covered with ferns, orchids and lichens with rivulets cascading down. Hundreds of brilliant small parrots were flashing in and out of the beams of sunlight and dozens of multicolored butterflies flitted from flower to flower. The vision was real, but the mushrooms made it a spectacular, vividly memorable image that has lasted for a lifetime.
From the fellow travelers that one meets on the road Ron and John had found a source for “hongos” - the Indian name for “mushrooms” and they had also been told of the “Shangri-La” of Psylocybin mushrooms: Santa Maria de Jesus, a small village miles off in the interior, in the state of Quezaltenango.
The trip evolved into a situation where Ron and Terri spent most of their time in de luxe country villas and hotels, and thus leaving John and I to our own devices and having the use of the VW. We had found a very beautiful spot in the village of Panajachel which was on the shore of Lake Atitlan, a large turquoise lake surrounded by several volcanoes: one was active and every day poured out plumes of smoke and huge chunks of pumice floated in the lake. We were having dinner in a small cafe one evening and discussing whether we should go looking for Santa Maria the next day: there was a young American woman alone at the next table and we invited her to join us which then led to our inviting her to join us in our quest.
We picked up Susan and left at dawn the next day driving a primitive road that ran around the lake for about 25 miles. Once we’d reached the far shore we headed west across a barren plateau on very rough and often unmade roads: on our map Santa Maria was still about 50+ miles ahead. At about 11am we arrived at the village which was just a small cluster of cottages along the main street; the heat was intense, it was probably around 110 degrees! We parked the van and got out and were immediately surrounded by lots of kids, Susan, who was fluent in Spanish told them we’d come to buy hongos and the price of 5 cents each was agreed to. Immediately all the kids raced off and within 10-15 minutes they returned all clutching handsfull of mushrooms, we paid them all off and then consolidated our booty; we had a fairly large paper bagfull, probably about 1-2 pounds!
As we drove back out of the village I recalled seeing on the way in a huge tree which covered an area just off the highway: since we hadn’t eaten, breakfast sounded appropriate so I pulled off the road into the cool shade of that tree. We had all the where-with-all to cook our meals so a mushroom omelet with a bottle of cold beer sounded like a great idea. I did the cooking: about 1/2lb of mushrooms between three should be enough, right? So I started washing the mushrooms and cracking the eggs. Within minutes breakfast was ready: our table was set up in the shade, three chairs, tablecloth, napkins and three cold beers and glasses and we were in paradise. In retrospect I realise that one mushroom each would have been more than adequate!
Immediately after breakfast I felt something happening to me, odd uncomfortable sensations that I’d never felt before, a shortness of breath, the inability to take a deep breath, hot, hot, hot; sweating like mad. John and Susan thought we should all take a walk, I declined, thinking instead to take a lie down ‘til this “thing” released me from it’s iron grip!
That’s the only way I remember those sensations: it was like being in the grip of ‘something’ that wouldn’t release me. When I lay down and closed my eyes it was even worse; added to all of the foregoing my body started cartwheeling backwards through a black void! The only way out was to open my eyes and stand up, or to sit in the open; very uncomfortable! This went on for about an hour at which point I thought I’d look for John, which meant walking to the edge of the road which was about 30ft away: “much too far in this heat, I’ll drive.” So I did, I got in the van and drove it forward 30ft and there they were, about 1/4mile away across a meadow sitting under a tree. I tooted the horn and John shouted for me to come, little did he know that walking 30ft was more than I could handle at that point. He started running towards me in extreme slow motion and when he reached the barbed wire fence at the edge of the field he sailed over it just like a hurdler: he came to the van and said “Come on, it’s great over there” and at that point all of my discomfort vanished as though by a magic wand! We walked back across the meadow, found a cool mountain stream and spent the next couple of hours skinnydipping and at that point all the joys of psylocybin kicked in and it was wonderful! So that’s the Prologue, that’s how we got the mushrooms.
As the summer and our adventures continued we traveled and camped in many wonderful and interesting places and met lots of interesting people. Ron and Terri continued their “honeymoon” and John and I took dozens of trips into the mountains always seeking remote villages where the descendants of the Mayan’s wove beautiful fabric designs into their everyday clothes; by the end of the trip all the spare space in the van was taken with Indian textiles!
Ron being the obsessive that he is had the idea that “if a little is good, then a lot more must be much better!” So based on this philosophy he made plans that we should visit the Mayan city of Tikal during the period of the full moon: in fact he planned that we should spend the night of the full moon on top of the most sacred of the Mayan temples reinforced with the finest French wine [transported there specifically for this], psylocybin mushrooms, Thai ganga, which I contributed plus any thing else appropriate that might turn up on our travels! Which is why we found ourselves in the middle of the jungle at Tikal at full moon.
Tikal is an amazing place; it was the main center of the Mayan culture which covered most of Central America from about 2000+ BC ‘til 900 AD, when for reasons still unknown, their civilization vanished! Much is still unknown, their hieroglyphics had not been decoded back then and large aspects of the culture were a mystery. Tikal is huge, comprising many temples, plazas, civic structures and pyramids that have been restored and endless miles still covered by the plants, trees and vines of the jungle. Back then it was a fairly unsophisticated operation; the only accommodation was a few thatched cottages alongside the airstrip and there was only one place to eat, similarly a small thatched structure that served the most basic meals at several outdoor tables. You could drive there, but it was about 12 - 14 hours from Guatemala city on an unpaved jungle road so we flew, leaving the VW at the airport.
Mid afternoon of the day before the full moon we were lazing around in the cottage we’d rented; we were drinking beer and John brought out the jar of peanut butter in which the mushrooms were buried. We were not sure of their legality there so we’d stored them covered in peanut butter in a jar. It was sort of like a lazy afternoon snack, salt crackers with peanut butter and some cold beers and not much incentive to do much else: so we just sat and nibbled and drank for a couple of hours. It was about an hours walk on a jungle trail to Temple IV, so John and I set out at about 6pm to get there before dark. Ron and Terri were going to follow on later. About half way there was another complex of pyramids so we rested there for a short while and noticed a young Indian guy, approx. 20-25 showing off for a young American woman who had a young boy with her. The pyramid was stepped, but the steps were about 24” tall and very steep. He was racing up and down the steps as though it was a residential staircase, we watched amused and wrote it off to youthful exuberance.
When we arrived at Temple IV it was sunset: the only way up to the top was by pulling yourself up using ropes that were permanently secured there. The temple, which is 212ft high had not been restored and was still covered with vegetation and vines. We got up to a level platform at about the 150ft point and from there to the top there was a steel ladder fastened into the vertical stone wall: the rungs on that ladder were about 24” apart and it was exhausting getting up the last few feet. Down at the ground level in the dense jungle it was almost dark and very hot and humid, up above the treetops there was a beautiful cool breeze and a spectacular sunset. We sat on a flat platform on the west side of the pyramid enjoying the cool air and the sunset and off to our left about 75 ft away were four young women talking heatedly in German.
Suddenly, as if on cue from a Disney director, two beautiful huge white storks came into our right peripheral field of vision flying in perfect synchronization, in slow motion and directly into the psychedelic color scheme that was the sunset. It was so perfect that it would have been a cliche in a film. The German conversation paused for a moment and then resumed as an almost inaudible babble, but in the midst of it I clearly heard the words “Royal Air Force”. I got up and went over to where they were sitting and introduced myself: they spoke English and when I asked them about the RAF reference one told me that there was an RAF station near to where she lived in Germany and she was telling her friends the storks were so perfect that they reminded her of the RAF aerobatic team!
As John and I sat there enjoying the twilight the German girls left and we were suddenly alone up there: I had twinges of mushroom paranoia and started wondering if I really wanted to spend the next 12 hours sitting in total darkness on this stone ledge high above the jungle. The answer was “no” and I told John that I really didn’t want to stay and given how fast the light was fading if I was going to leave I had to do it immediately. He was adamant, he was going to stay the night, so I reluctantly started down the ladder alone. I made it to the jungle floor and was suddenly surprised to find that it was totally, absolutely black down there: not a glimmer of daylight penetrated through the trees. I was lost, I had no idea where the trail was, all I could see was total blackness in all directions: that is total blackness decorated with psychedelic hallucinations courtesy of the mushrooms!
I called out to John that I couldn’t see a thing, could he come and help. At first he was reluctant to do so but finally he came down and together we started walking along the trail: I asked him how he could see in such darkness and all he could tell me was that the path was like a tunnel through the darkness and that the patterns were broken indicating where the tunnel was. Hard to explain but easy to visualize, rather like two superimposed moiré patterns.
This visit to Tikal was my first exposure to the jungle: everything about it was new and wonderful, but the sounds were something I hadn’t anticipated. By day the sounds that several million insects make when they all join in a colossal chorus is unimaginable: it’s maybe slightly like being at the center of a soccer field when 100,000 fans sing and the sound reverberates and runs around the stadium in waves, except that insects have a much greater range than mere mortals and their combined choruses verge on choral ecstasy. There was a period when pop musicians discovered the joys of manipulating sounds in the studio: one of the most basic was to fade effects from the left chanel to the right and then back again and so on so that to the listener it sounded as though the music was spinning around inside his head: that’s exactly what the insects do. As we walked along that trail in total darkness there was an entirely different chorus of sounds: the most chilling was something very large roaring just like the 20th Centuries lion and only a few feet off to our left. Howler monkeys make an enormous racket which also can be a bit disconcerting under the circumstances and there were thousands of birds, parrots, toucans and storks all adding to the soundtrack.
We finally caught up with the German girls and joined them at which point John chose to return to the pyramid and I continued with them back to the cottage where Ron and Terri were getting ready for a night on the jungle.
Ron was now ready to tackle Temple IV: he had bathed, shaved, dabbed his anti-perspirant on in all the right places and dressed for the occasion. He had on his short shorts, his skinny tanktop and running shoes: with all that skin exposed and all that aftershave fragrance he was the anticipated evening meal for several million mosquitoes that night, and each one left a small red itchy spot to prove it. The next day he looked as though he’d splattered with red paint from a spraygun from head to toe! But I digress.
At this point I was feeling very good; it had been several hours since we’d eaten the mushrooms and the initial effects had generally dissipated leaving a warm inner glow, I was ready to return to the Pyramid.
This time we were smart enough to bring a flashlight and as we neared the first restored temple we heard the sounds of a flute wafting through the night air. The temple was part of a huge complex of buildings that surrounded an open space; the full moon illuminated the entire complex and somewhere high in one of the buildings someone was playing, it was a magical moment. I thought immediately of Paul Horn who at that period was recording flute improvisations in similar environments, ie the Taj Mahal and at the Egyptian pyramids. We enjoyed this moment and then continued on to Temple IV where John was waiting. When we arrived we negotiated the first section up to the ladder and then all the way up into the moonlight that lit the tops of the jungle to the horizon and illuminated all the adjacent structures that poked up through the trees. It was a brilliant sight and well worth all the effort to be able to partake in it. The four of us sat there for 2-3 hours and then by unanimous consent agreed that we’d had enough ecstasy for that day and it was time to get back to the airstrip and our cottage.
When we descended the ladder sitting leaning against the wall of the pyramid was the young American woman that we’d seen earlier in the day, she had the young Mayan guy who we’d seen running up and down the steps cradled in her lap, apparently asleep. “Do any of you know anything about scorpion bites?” she asked. “My friend felt something fall down the back of his shirt and when he reached for it stung him and he’s been unconscious ever since” Well John, our hero, stepped forward and said that we would have to get him to a doctor! What a dreamer, a doctor, here? But he reached down and gathered up the Indian guy and slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
We established a routine for descent which had John in the lead followed by Ron, Terri, the American woman and her son and me at the back with the flashlight shining it ahead so that everyone could see the ropes and stepping places. As soon as we started we saw that the entire area was alive with scorpions, dozens of them scurrying between the rocks that we were walking on, we had to step between them! We didn’t know at the time but they live in the crevices beween and under the stones that the pyramid was constructed with and they come out at night to feed! Amazingly we made it to the ground without mishap and John was the hero of that night coming down 150ft on ropes and vines with the guy over his shoulder. The first thing we saw when we got to the bottom was a VW Beetle with American plates just sitting there like it belonged; it was probably the only vehicle for miles around and it was sitting waiting for us. I reached in and sounded the horn several long loud blasts and within a couple of minutes two gringos just like ourselves emerged from the jungle. It was their car and when we explained the problem they loaded John and his invalid into the back seat and set off down the trail, the rest of us followed on foot.
The forces of good fortune continued to prevail. When the VW arrived back at the landing strip there was a communal fire ring with all of the visitors sitting around it swapping tales and drinking beer. As they lifted the guy out from the back seat two of the visitors came over to help. When John explained the problem they each identified themselves, both were doctors from Riverside, California: one was a snakebite specialist and the other a scorpion sting specialist! And they had medical kits for emergency procedures with them. They were two young doctors who loved to surf and had just been to El Salvador for a surfing vacation and had stopped over at Tikal en route home. By the time we who walked back arrived, everything was taken care of: the guy was sleeping in a tent and he awoke the next morning and went straight to work!
Nina Simone.
Nina Simone:
One day back in the '80's Bob Andy, Jamaican musician was staying with us in Long Beach California. On the Saturday I noticed that there was a free reggae festival in a park in south central LA. We decided to go. We were standing around between sets, sort of backstage, though there wasn't any real backstage when I saw Nina Simone standing alone about 40ft away. I couldn't believe it, I'd been a huge fan for all of my adult life, I'd never seen her perform, but there she was. I knew that she had a gig at the Wiltern theater in LA the following Tuesday so I excused myself from my wife and Bob and walked over to her, I introduced myself and told her how much I'd appreciated her music over the years and how much she'd meant to me. She was very cordial and we chatted, then I said "Nina, I'd like you to meet my friend Bob and my wife"; we walked back to where they were and I said 'Nina, this is my friend Bob Andy'.
Everything changed at that moment, I'd not even remembered that Bob Andy and Marcia Griffith had had a world-wide hit single back in the 60's of Nina's song "To be Young, Gifted and Black". 'Bob Andy' she screamed 'you're that Bob Andy?' 'You god damn motherfucker, you ripped me off, I never got a penny for that song and you made millions!'
What had been a pleasant surprise encounter had suddenly taken a nose dive, all there was now was anger and embarrassment. I tried to smooth things over but she obviously wasn't having any so we gingerly backed off and I said something to the effect that I looked forward to her concert. 'You show your face at my fucking concert you bastard, and I'll have security throw you out!' Oops, nothing I could say was going to work so we beat an ignominious retreat, but as we left I was approached by a guy who said that he was managing Nina and did I have any influence with the mayors office, I told absolutely none, I wasn't at all involved with any of that.
On the way home I had a thought. Whenever there were high end celebrity visitors to LA I noticed that there were day's proclaimed in their honour and the mayors office would issue proclamations, in the form of very ornate heraldic hand lettered documents listing that person's contributions to society etc. The guys question made me think it might be appropriate to send a note to the mayors office and suggest this. I had an image of some flunky coming onstage before the show and making a bit of a fuss and then giving it to her so I sent a note and promptly forgot about it.
Regardless of Nina's threats we went to both shows, the 7 pm and the 9 pm, I had a press pass that got us into the Wiltern and we could always grab any empty seats; we had two right in the front row and I had all my camera gear with me. I shot her discretely throughout the first show and then sat back and enjoyed the second. I didn't even notice that there was no representative from the Mayors office.
The next day I went to work and when I came home at around 5pm I checked the mailbox as usual and there was a large 16" by 20" envelope screwed up and stuffed into it, I opened it and it was the proclamation for Nina! And there was a nasty note attached to the effect that if I requested a proclamation, then it was my responsibility to come and get it! Oh dear! Little did I understand the inner workings of LA politics. So what to do with it? The manager guy, who I later realised was the Ethiopian Orthodox minister who had conducted the ceremony for Bob Marley's funeral at the National Stadium, had given me his card, so we called him and explained the screw up. He asked if we would bring it to her since she was leaving for Paris early the next day; she was staying at a place in the San Fernando valley which was about 75 miles from us and given her reaction on the weekend I didn't really feel like 150 miles of LA rush hour traffic just to be Mr Niceguy. But we weakened, we found the address, her apartment door opened, he stood there, we gave it to him, he thanked us and closed the door. And that was how we met Nina Simone!
One day back in the '80's Bob Andy, Jamaican musician was staying with us in Long Beach California. On the Saturday I noticed that there was a free reggae festival in a park in south central LA. We decided to go. We were standing around between sets, sort of backstage, though there wasn't any real backstage when I saw Nina Simone standing alone about 40ft away. I couldn't believe it, I'd been a huge fan for all of my adult life, I'd never seen her perform, but there she was. I knew that she had a gig at the Wiltern theater in LA the following Tuesday so I excused myself from my wife and Bob and walked over to her, I introduced myself and told her how much I'd appreciated her music over the years and how much she'd meant to me. She was very cordial and we chatted, then I said "Nina, I'd like you to meet my friend Bob and my wife"; we walked back to where they were and I said 'Nina, this is my friend Bob Andy'.
Everything changed at that moment, I'd not even remembered that Bob Andy and Marcia Griffith had had a world-wide hit single back in the 60's of Nina's song "To be Young, Gifted and Black". 'Bob Andy' she screamed 'you're that Bob Andy?' 'You god damn motherfucker, you ripped me off, I never got a penny for that song and you made millions!'
What had been a pleasant surprise encounter had suddenly taken a nose dive, all there was now was anger and embarrassment. I tried to smooth things over but she obviously wasn't having any so we gingerly backed off and I said something to the effect that I looked forward to her concert. 'You show your face at my fucking concert you bastard, and I'll have security throw you out!' Oops, nothing I could say was going to work so we beat an ignominious retreat, but as we left I was approached by a guy who said that he was managing Nina and did I have any influence with the mayors office, I told absolutely none, I wasn't at all involved with any of that.
On the way home I had a thought. Whenever there were high end celebrity visitors to LA I noticed that there were day's proclaimed in their honour and the mayors office would issue proclamations, in the form of very ornate heraldic hand lettered documents listing that person's contributions to society etc. The guys question made me think it might be appropriate to send a note to the mayors office and suggest this. I had an image of some flunky coming onstage before the show and making a bit of a fuss and then giving it to her so I sent a note and promptly forgot about it.
Regardless of Nina's threats we went to both shows, the 7 pm and the 9 pm, I had a press pass that got us into the Wiltern and we could always grab any empty seats; we had two right in the front row and I had all my camera gear with me. I shot her discretely throughout the first show and then sat back and enjoyed the second. I didn't even notice that there was no representative from the Mayors office.
The next day I went to work and when I came home at around 5pm I checked the mailbox as usual and there was a large 16" by 20" envelope screwed up and stuffed into it, I opened it and it was the proclamation for Nina! And there was a nasty note attached to the effect that if I requested a proclamation, then it was my responsibility to come and get it! Oh dear! Little did I understand the inner workings of LA politics. So what to do with it? The manager guy, who I later realised was the Ethiopian Orthodox minister who had conducted the ceremony for Bob Marley's funeral at the National Stadium, had given me his card, so we called him and explained the screw up. He asked if we would bring it to her since she was leaving for Paris early the next day; she was staying at a place in the San Fernando valley which was about 75 miles from us and given her reaction on the weekend I didn't really feel like 150 miles of LA rush hour traffic just to be Mr Niceguy. But we weakened, we found the address, her apartment door opened, he stood there, we gave it to him, he thanked us and closed the door. And that was how we met Nina Simone!
Jamaica's National Gallery
I had a wonderful surprise this week: I got a call from the past. Back in '84 Gina and I were in Kingston Jamaica, we had a Rasta friend there who ask'd us to come to his community: Waterhouse, probably the roughest, toughest area in Kgn to meet his friend the local elder, Jah Vic, an old Rastaman. So we went and spent the first of several visits with him. At some point during the day a little girl, about 8, wandered into the garden where we were sitting, her name was Nicola: Gina started talking to her and I remember her telling the little girl that "we were going to the National Art Gallery" the next day. "Can I come?" she promptly asked and I remember Gina saying that she'd have to ask her mother: they left to go across the street to ask. Apparently when the mother said OK, the little girl said "Can my brother come also?" Of course! By the time they returned the group had grown to about 14 young neighborhood kids who all wanted to go with us! Jah Vic entered into the spirit of things and volunteered to take us all in his "new" car: This was 1984 and Jah Vic's car was an early 1950's Hillman that didn't have a trace of paint left on it, though there were several places with large ares of Bondo filler. There were, in several places, pieces of wire twisted around various parts just to keep them in place; the windows didn't raise or lower, there were no lights, there were holes in the floorboards where exhaust gasses flowed in and the seats were in pretty sad shape! It was such a "classic" that I shot half a roll of film on it. But it was Jah Vic's first car and he was righteously proud of it and also of his being involved in the trip to the National Gallery.
The next day we arrived early and every kid was ready and waiting. Three adults, Jah Vic, [driving] plus Gina and I got into the car and then we had to get the kids in: don't ask me how we did it but I have photos of us all standing next to the car outside the Gallery! My main concern as we departed was that the car wasn't capable of making the 4-5 mile journey regardless of the load, but it did and we finally entered the National Gallery. The administrators were very intrigued, they'd never seen anything like this before, they followed us around everywhere we went. We had to tell the kids about looking but not touching etc. and they all caught on immediately and were wonderfully behaved. What I remember more than anything about that day was how this bunch of ghetto kids all related so clearly to the art. Jamaican art is so interesting because it is directly related to the history of the people, the culture and the places, there's no European art there and the kids picked up on it immediately and I remember them talking animatedly amongst themselves as they stood looking at the paintings. I shot several rolls of slides of all this and afterwards we all went out and bought ice cream for everyone from a vendor along the waterfront and sat on the grass and had a good time.
Thursday morning the phone rang and a woman's voice said "I'm looking for Tony and Gina Brennan who used to live in Long Beach" "That's us" I said and she went on to tell me that we'd met some years ago in Jamaica! When I asked her where and she said Waterhouse and went on to tell me about going with us to the National Gallery I realised who it was: it was little Nicola! Except she's now 29 and lives in Connecticut! Apparently Gina had bought her a dress and some trinkets and had given the mother our address and phone number in LB. Nicola moved to the US 10 years ago and when her mother one day came across the paper with the address on it she sent it to Nicola. The story that she told us was that the trip to the National Gallery was the most important and memorable event of her young life; what she remembered most of all was that this couple of total strangers made such a fuss of her and turned her on to something she hadn't known existed! It changed her life and she'd thought about us for all those years so when she got the address she tried to contact us only to find we were no longer there. So she started searching for us online and suddenly there we were: in Sebastopol! So we've had two long and interesting conversations, catching up on all the details of the last 20 odd years and all our friends in JA. It's been a wonderful experience.
She's very smart, very politically aware, has a decent job and a steady boyfriend; she uses the internet for everything and visits NY regularly to go to the museums and galleries! We invited her to come for a visit and we have a tentative yes for this summer. You might recall that I mentioned some weeks back that I was trying to get some callalloo seeds [a Jamaican spinach] I tried online and had one suggestion that didn't lead anywhere. I mentioned this to Nicola and she said "You want callalloo? I've got lots of it growing in my garden, I'll send you some plants and seeds" So everything that goes around comes around, it's a small world!
The next day we arrived early and every kid was ready and waiting. Three adults, Jah Vic, [driving] plus Gina and I got into the car and then we had to get the kids in: don't ask me how we did it but I have photos of us all standing next to the car outside the Gallery! My main concern as we departed was that the car wasn't capable of making the 4-5 mile journey regardless of the load, but it did and we finally entered the National Gallery. The administrators were very intrigued, they'd never seen anything like this before, they followed us around everywhere we went. We had to tell the kids about looking but not touching etc. and they all caught on immediately and were wonderfully behaved. What I remember more than anything about that day was how this bunch of ghetto kids all related so clearly to the art. Jamaican art is so interesting because it is directly related to the history of the people, the culture and the places, there's no European art there and the kids picked up on it immediately and I remember them talking animatedly amongst themselves as they stood looking at the paintings. I shot several rolls of slides of all this and afterwards we all went out and bought ice cream for everyone from a vendor along the waterfront and sat on the grass and had a good time.
Thursday morning the phone rang and a woman's voice said "I'm looking for Tony and Gina Brennan who used to live in Long Beach" "That's us" I said and she went on to tell me that we'd met some years ago in Jamaica! When I asked her where and she said Waterhouse and went on to tell me about going with us to the National Gallery I realised who it was: it was little Nicola! Except she's now 29 and lives in Connecticut! Apparently Gina had bought her a dress and some trinkets and had given the mother our address and phone number in LB. Nicola moved to the US 10 years ago and when her mother one day came across the paper with the address on it she sent it to Nicola. The story that she told us was that the trip to the National Gallery was the most important and memorable event of her young life; what she remembered most of all was that this couple of total strangers made such a fuss of her and turned her on to something she hadn't known existed! It changed her life and she'd thought about us for all those years so when she got the address she tried to contact us only to find we were no longer there. So she started searching for us online and suddenly there we were: in Sebastopol! So we've had two long and interesting conversations, catching up on all the details of the last 20 odd years and all our friends in JA. It's been a wonderful experience.
She's very smart, very politically aware, has a decent job and a steady boyfriend; she uses the internet for everything and visits NY regularly to go to the museums and galleries! We invited her to come for a visit and we have a tentative yes for this summer. You might recall that I mentioned some weeks back that I was trying to get some callalloo seeds [a Jamaican spinach] I tried online and had one suggestion that didn't lead anywhere. I mentioned this to Nicola and she said "You want callalloo? I've got lots of it growing in my garden, I'll send you some plants and seeds" So everything that goes around comes around, it's a small world!
Adventures in a foreign land.
My wife Gina used to have nightmares which always involved her being threatened or followed or chased by some unknown, unseen figures. When we were first married she would sometimes jolt me from sleep into instant awareness by shooting upright in bed screaming! As time passed these incidents happened less and less until they were almost forgotten. So when this happened in Zambia within a few days of our arrival in Africa, I just held her and I reassured her that everything was OK; I told her that she was just having a nightmare and she should go back to sleep.
We were staying in a huge, 6000 sq. ft. ranch-style house on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capitol of Zambia. It had a 10 ft. high concrete perimeter wall topped with broken glass and covered with 3ft of barbed wire; all windows and doors were covered with steel grill bars; the outside area between the house and the wall was brightly floodlit; there were two huge guard dogs - a Great Dane and a Rottweiller loose in the garden; and there was a full time security guard who patrolled within the garden wall all night long. Of course we were OK, it was just a nightmare.
She had awakened with a scream in the darkened bedroom and said in a frantic whisper that there was somebody outside our bedroom window. I knew that there couldn't possibly be anyone there since the dogs were silent; apart from the nocturnal insect sounds it was totally quiet. We both lay back down, I closed my eyes and relaxed. Within a minute I felt her freeze rigid "There's someone there" she whispered frantically. I shot up and sure enough there were shadows cast by the floodlights moving on the window drapes. I leapt out of bed and ran to the window. When I pulled back the drapes my heart stopped, there was a group of 6-8 men; all armed with clubs, crowbars and machetes standing about 2 feet from me and looking directly at me. I let out an incoherent shriek which I think in retrospect was supposed to be like the audible weapon that the Maoris used in Robert Graves short story "The Shout." It didn't work, at least it only worked very temporarily. The gang fled to the gatehouse which was about 25 yds away, but then, clearly illuminated by the floodlights, they paused, re-grouped, and immediately started back towards us. I knew that we were in trouble.
We were alone and we were locked in the house. The owner, our hostess, was staying in an apartment in the city, the housekeeper who lived in a cottage on the grounds had the keys and he locked all the doors when we retired and re-opened them at dawn. There was no time to think, they were right outside and had immediately attacked the windows and the steel security bars that were welded over them. Glass flew, plaster and wood shattered, the noise was terrifying, but even more so was the image of this gang who were determined to smash their way into the bedroom with no thought for the bedlam that they were creating nor apparently were they concerned that we, the occupants, might be armed. They could not have known it, but we weren't, I didn't even have my pants on, I was standing there stark naked!
We fled from the bedroom down a corridor to a phone on a table in the hallway where there was a list of emergency numbers taped to the wall. Our hostess, the owner of the house, had explained what each one meant before she had left us. The first on the list was the universal emergency number 999, this was followed by four different police stations, the fire dept. etc. I began at the top, 999. It rang 30-40 times and no one responded, I couldn't believe it, was I in my frantic state mis-dialing? I tried again and still no response. I tried the first police station on the list, "Let it ring" I told myself, after about 30 rings I hung up. All the while there was this incredible pandemonium about 3ft. from my head as the attack continued on an adjacent window. Try the next one, "Oh God, it's busy, try another", this time it was the number of our hostess's apartment in the city.
Her phone must also have rung 30-40 times, and again with absolutely no response. All the while total bedlam. They were now attacking every window on that side of the house; the noise was horrendous and I was standing there stark naked trying to find one person who could help. I shouted to Gina to ask her to get me my pants and to lock all the doors as she returned; she went to our bedroom, grabbed the pants and then locked the door, similarly locking two corridor doors and pulling the keys. When she returned I was dialling the last number on the list, the Roma District police station.
After an eternity, someone, who was very obviously asleep, answered. He was befuddled and was not responding at all. Over and over I repeated, "There's a gang of robbers breaking into the house at 5557 Magoye Road, there's at least 6-8 of them, they're smashing their way in through the windows; the address is 5557 Magoye Road, do you understand me?" In film and fiction the policeman is instantly alert, his voice, his authority has a reassurance, you can imagine the radios crackling, patrol cars with lights and sirens speeding to your aid immediately. But in this case our man was still struggling with sleep or perhaps my unfamiliar accent was difficult for him to comprehend. He was my only hope. I kept asking him if he understood, did he have the address and could he send assistance and I wasn't getting anywhere. Finally he said that he thought that there might be a patrol somewhere and he would try! So much for fact and fiction. On that note of positive re-assurance I gave up on the phone, and from the level of the noise it sounded as though they must be almost through the wall. We fled. As we passed the kitchen Gina pressed the buzzer to Mr, Tembo's house several times to alert him, but at 5'3" and hardly 130 lbs. we knew that he wasn't going to be any help, we were on our own.
I mentioned that the house was large; one day for no particular reason I paced the distance from the master bedroom to the kitchen; It was 55 yds! And the house extended 2 more rooms beyond the kitchen, probably close to 200 ft. total. On another occasion I looked in every room in the house, seventeen in all, to determine the most secure place in the house in the event of whatever. I certainly didn't anticipate anything like this, I didn't anticipate anything, but I suppose our being there alone, being so far from anyone we knew, and being generally somewhat security conscious caused me to check it out "just in case." Well, here we were right in the middle of "just in case!"
I knew that the size of the house and the endless rooms would give us a small degree of security. The place was so large that we kept discovering "new" rooms even after we had been there several days. We ran to the far end of the house, through the kitchen to what seemed to be a servant's bedroom. Off that bedroom was a tiny steel grill enclosed patio that had a toilet and a shower, primarily for outside use. It was the shower that we'd been using, since for some unknown reason it was the only one of four in the house that had hot water. When we'd passed the main door of the house and Gina had buzzed Mr. Tambo I'd noticed the dogs, they were there, right outside the door and totally oblivious to the bedlam that was happening on the other side of the house! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! In the mythology of guard dogs Rottweillers were second only to lions in their ferocity and aggressive natures. Ours was standing there with a glazed look and wagging his tail. His Dane companion was similarly quite unconcerned. I screamed at them to try and get them excited, I stood there screaming through the closed door "Kill, Kill" over and over as loud as I could. I don't know why I chose to scream that specifically, but I just wanted to get them agitated, excited, involved! They both stood and looked at me, tails wagging, as though I was silly, not a tinge or a trace of guard-doggedness, just a canine blank happy stare.
When we reached the guest bedroom I asked Gina to wait there for me, I was going back. I had decided that it would be better to have the dogs in the house with us, so I was going to go back to get them. I had to unlock the main door and then unlock the two padlocks on the steel grill, which enclosed a tiny entrance patio. I seized the Dane by the collar and tried to pull him into the house. Years of conditioning had brainwashed him into believing that he wasn't allowed into the house. So when I tried to drag him in he just dug his heels in and it was an impasse. It was like trying to drag a donkey through a door that he didn't want to enter, but I succeded. I then seized the Rottweiller and dragged him, also protesting, into the house. I started to re-padlock the grill, but at that instant the robbers came running around the end of the house. They came straight for me swinging their clubs and machetes at my hands as I fumbled with the padlocks. For the first time I saw them very clearly in the floodlit doorway; the only word that comes to mind as I try to re-create that scene is "crazed." There was a frantic quality in their eyes as we stood for an instant staring at each other separated only by an unlocked gate. I retreated into the house and locked the door, why I'm not sure since it was surrounded by two floor to ceiling plate glass windows, which was all that now stood between us and them. I grabbed the Rottweiller and ran, dragging him back to the bedroom where I'd left Gina minutes before.
The bedroom had a clothes closet along one wall with a large storage cupboard above it. Gina was nowhere to be seen and then I heard her whispering frantically "Come up here" She was hiding in the cupboard which was about 6' wide, 3' high and 2'deep, and about 6' from the floor. It must have seemed like an ideal hiding place to her in her terrified state, except we couldn't lock the bedroom door that was between us and them, there was no key in the lock. I demanded her to "come down," but she was terrified and not about to vacate her hiding place. She pleaded with me to come to where she was, but I knew that there wasn't any security there and insisted that she come down, I didn't have the time to explain why. There must have been something in my voice that clinched it because she very unwillingly came down and we exited that bedroom with the Rotweiller in tow into the shower/toilet area. I locked the final door behind us. When I looked around, the area we were in was only 6' wide by 3'deep with a padlocked steel security grill between us and the garden. The bars were 1/2" steel and were spaced about 7"-8" apart. As I looked around assessing our situation, I suddenly realised that we were alone, the dog was gone! There was nowhere he could go but he certainly wasn't there! The only place he could have gone was through the bars! He must have weighed 150 lbs, built like a truck, but he must have gone through that grill as quietly and quickly as if he were a cat.
We were extremely quiet speaking only in whispers; If there were any of the robbers close by we didn't want to reveal our location. But at that instant I saw over the garden wall, about 25 yds away, the neighbor. He was standing on his patio with a light on and looking directly towards us. I threw caution to the wind and shouted to him as loud as I could "Help, call the police, we're being attacked by robbers." I repeated this at the top of my lungs over and over for at least 2 minutes. But he just stood in the shadows of his patio and stared at us, it was like shouting at a statue, there was no reaction, no recognition, and no acknowledgement. Finally he turned, walked into his house and the door closed behind him. It was a very depressing moment, his total neutrality left me feeling very alone, and now the robbers were in no doubt that we were still in the house and they must know pretty clearly, exactly where we were.
The shower stall was a typical shower stall 6'x3' with a shower at one end and an area 3x3 behind the door. The door was a flimsy wooden affair that wasn't lockable, but if I sat on the floor with my back braced against it I could wedge my feet against a step up to the shower. Gina sat at that end silently terrified. She had the foresight to grab 2 kitchen knives as we ran through, nothing that you'd want to stake your life on, but they were all we had and were better than nothing. I took them both, one in my hand and the other tucked into my belt behind my back. I knew that the robbers had 3-4ft. long steel re-bars and 2ft. machetes. If it came to it, our only advantage, if you can call it that, was that we were in an enclosure, in darkness, and they could only attack us one at a time. Prayer might have been appropriate but I'd never thought much in those terms prior to then, so it didn't occur to me. The only thing that did was how to react when the time came, which I was sure it would. I had visions of them attacking the door with me braced against it. They would realize immediately that it wasn't locked and that the resistance was me. Therefore the logical thing to do would be to smash through the lower door, I didn't reach any conclusions on how to deal with that possibility.
The night was silent; I could hear my breathing and thought that anyone else close by must also. Earlier we had heard sounds of activity but now there was no indication of anything. I assumed that it must be because they were at the far end of the house and were being very quiet. With the door closed on that tiny space it became suffocatingly hot. During the day the temperature was in the high 90's, at night, probably in the 75-80's. I remember that we had been sleeping with only a sheet and a mosquito net. It became stifling,
I couldn't breath, the humidity was horrendous and I was aware of sweat trickling down my back. I decided that I must open the door to get some air and I told Gina what I was going to do,"Please, please don't open the door, please", she beseeched me in a frantic whisper. Beseeched is not a frequently used word, but it's the only one that conveys her terror at the thought of the door being opened. But I felt that I had to open it, so I moved my position slightly and cracked the door about 2"; the cool draft of air was wonderful, delicious. In an effort to waft some air back to where Gina was I tried to open and close the door gently but rapidly a couple of times. The silence was shattered when I misjudged it and accidentally banged it closed with a loud noise. We were rigid, the noise sounded as though it must have reverberated through the entire house! But they still didn't come. I remember trying to estimate the passage of time but I didn't know what time it was or what time this nightmare had started. I realised that when your senses are deprived it's almost impossible to estimate time. I wondered how long until dawn, there were no clues, no lightness of the sky, no bird chorus, just our breathing.
At some point, after what seemed like an eternity I began to think that perhaps there was a possibilty that we were going to be ok, that perhaps the robbers would take what they could find and leave. We couldn't hear anything, maybe they'd already left? Then I started to think about the bedroom. It contained everything we had with us, all of our money, close to $2,000 in cash and unsigned travellers checks plus our camera gear-3 Nikons with motor drives plus half a dozen lenses, our passports, plane tickets, clothes, everything. Everything that we owned was in that room, and that was the room that they were smashing their way into when we'd fled. There was no doubt in my mind that we'd lost everything. Gina had on a pair of pants and a T shirt, I had a pair of cotton pants and that was it, that was all we had between us!.
I thought about the nightmare of dealing with the Zambian Government, Zambian Airlines, American Express, the US Embassy etc; and as I began to think that we might escape this nightmare ordeal, I realised that it might, by the light of day, seem like "out of the frying pan and into the fire."But for that moment we still had to deal with our current set of problems.
After what seemed like eternity I heard voices outside in the garden, I peered past the edge of the shower door and saw the silhouette of a figure against the first light of dawn as it walked past the grill. I didn't recognize him and thought for sure that it must be one of the robbers now coming to look for us. Two or three seconds later another figure walked past, it was Mr. Tembo our housekeeper. My most immediate thought was that they were holding him and forcing him to show them the house. I was reluctant to reveal our location but on impulse and perhaps without thinking I called his name and he came back towards where we were. He couldn't see us in the shadows, but he said "You can come out now, the police have arrived" I remember asking him to bring a policeman to the grill so that we could see him. He said something and a man with an automatic rifle walked back towards us and stood there, It was just beginning to get light, it was 5:30 am.
Mr. Tembo unlocked the grill and we walked out; as we walked around the house towards the main door, the one where I'd struggled with the dogs I saw a plainclothes white man and another uniformed officer with an automatic rifle, they were both standing ankle deep in broken glass just inside the front door. We were both barefoot so I gave the plainclothes man the various keys that I had in my pockets and asked him to fetch us some shoes from the second bedroom down the corridor on the right. He returned a couple of minutes later with two pair of shoes, both Gina's. She went to get me a pair and came running back a few seconds later shouting "They haven't taken anything, everything is intact!"
We couldn't believe it, they had stripped the center section of the house of everything removeable, furniture, TV's, VCR, drapes, food, utensils, carpets, everything. But because we had locked all the doors behind us as we had fled they hadn't gone into that end of the house. My opening the main door grill to get the dogs gave them easy access, they only had to smash the large plate glass windows at the front door and they were in. At that point they must have given up on trying to break in through our bedroom, though they had came very close. Two of the bars welded to the window frame were broken and it it wouldn't have taken very much to break one more. My grandmother always said that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth! How liitle she knew.
It turned out that the "plainclothes man" was a visiting professor of Geology at the University of Lusaka, his name was Vaughn. Apparently there had been so much of this happening that he and a group of locals had formed, what he called a "vigilante" group. The problem was that the police didn't have cars, (Zambia is a very poor country) so the "vigilantes" would use their personal cars to transport the police. They would patrol the neighborhoods at night and communicate by walkie-talkie. Our "police dispatcher" had the address totally wrong, it turned out that there was no such address. They knew that something was happening somewhere but they didn't know where. While we were standing in the yard talking about all of this I noticed that the Great Dane was throwing up, I looked at the vomit and saw that it contained large chunks of what looked like pork fat, it didn't look like anything that he was regularly fed. Then the Rotweiller also began to vomit. The dogs had been poisoned which accounted for their unusual behavior. Apparently it was a common practice for thieves to throw poisoned meat over the wall an hour or so before they came over. Both dogs were rushed to the vet, the Rotweiller almost died but finally pulled through three days later. The Great Dane was ok.
We had to go to the police station to make a report at 9 A.M., our new-found geologist friend said that he would return and drive us there. We spent the intervening couple of hours packing our things and talking through the events of the night. We talked to the "security-guard" a man about 5'2", 110 lb. His job [for which he was paid almost nothing] was to walk around the property all night long and keep us safe from attack. To protect us he carried a stick. His story was that the robbers came over the wall, overpowered him by throwing a coat over his head and tying his hands. He said that he heard them talk about killing him, but one of them had said "Not now, later." He was left tied up in the guard shack. When they left they took his keys to open the gate, they were laden down with large "sacks," actually they were the drapes from each room which they tore down and used to create "swag" sacks.
When Vaughn returned he commented "That by now everything would be dispersed throughout the compound" "What do you mean" I asked, "Which compound, in fact , what is a compound? "You haven't seen the compound" he said, "I'll show you." Whenever we had left the house to go into Lusaka during the week that we'd been there we had always turned right outside the gate and walked to the highway, about a mile away and taken a bus into the city. That morning as we left in Vaughn's car, we instead made a left turn out of the gate. There was a bend in the road and as soon as we were around the curve I realized that we were in the midst of the most poverty ridden shanty town you could imagine. Nothing but rusty tin shacks, cardboard "houses", open sewers, not a trace of green anywhere, just dusty brown dirt. There are shantytowns in every country, but this was worse than anything I'd ever seen. There was nothing, no water, no electricity, no paths, no gardens, nothing, just poverty.
Suddenly it made sense, "our" 6,000 square feet mansion on the edge of this ghetto was too much, it was there everytime they had to walk into town, everyday they had to pass it with its lights, TV, music, gardens, privilage, everything. "They" decided to share the wealth and unfortunately for us they chose to do it the week that we were there.
We went to the police station and made our report, and then we went into town to find a hotel: there was nothing! Every room in the four hotels in town was full. It was about 10 am and we hadn't slept a wink all night, so we went through the InterContinental lobby, out to the poolside and ordered breakfast; then we dozed until mid-afternoon when a friendly Irish woman in a dripping bathing suit sat down next to me. "Well how's it going?" she asked, "Are you new here?"
I told her the story and she immediately offered to let us stay with her. Her name was Brigid O'Connor and she was the librarian at the British Council in town. What a lovely lady, we stayed with her for about 3-4 weeks and had a wonderful time and made a wonderful friend. All's well that ends well!
We were staying in a huge, 6000 sq. ft. ranch-style house on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capitol of Zambia. It had a 10 ft. high concrete perimeter wall topped with broken glass and covered with 3ft of barbed wire; all windows and doors were covered with steel grill bars; the outside area between the house and the wall was brightly floodlit; there were two huge guard dogs - a Great Dane and a Rottweiller loose in the garden; and there was a full time security guard who patrolled within the garden wall all night long. Of course we were OK, it was just a nightmare.
She had awakened with a scream in the darkened bedroom and said in a frantic whisper that there was somebody outside our bedroom window. I knew that there couldn't possibly be anyone there since the dogs were silent; apart from the nocturnal insect sounds it was totally quiet. We both lay back down, I closed my eyes and relaxed. Within a minute I felt her freeze rigid "There's someone there" she whispered frantically. I shot up and sure enough there were shadows cast by the floodlights moving on the window drapes. I leapt out of bed and ran to the window. When I pulled back the drapes my heart stopped, there was a group of 6-8 men; all armed with clubs, crowbars and machetes standing about 2 feet from me and looking directly at me. I let out an incoherent shriek which I think in retrospect was supposed to be like the audible weapon that the Maoris used in Robert Graves short story "The Shout." It didn't work, at least it only worked very temporarily. The gang fled to the gatehouse which was about 25 yds away, but then, clearly illuminated by the floodlights, they paused, re-grouped, and immediately started back towards us. I knew that we were in trouble.
We were alone and we were locked in the house. The owner, our hostess, was staying in an apartment in the city, the housekeeper who lived in a cottage on the grounds had the keys and he locked all the doors when we retired and re-opened them at dawn. There was no time to think, they were right outside and had immediately attacked the windows and the steel security bars that were welded over them. Glass flew, plaster and wood shattered, the noise was terrifying, but even more so was the image of this gang who were determined to smash their way into the bedroom with no thought for the bedlam that they were creating nor apparently were they concerned that we, the occupants, might be armed. They could not have known it, but we weren't, I didn't even have my pants on, I was standing there stark naked!
We fled from the bedroom down a corridor to a phone on a table in the hallway where there was a list of emergency numbers taped to the wall. Our hostess, the owner of the house, had explained what each one meant before she had left us. The first on the list was the universal emergency number 999, this was followed by four different police stations, the fire dept. etc. I began at the top, 999. It rang 30-40 times and no one responded, I couldn't believe it, was I in my frantic state mis-dialing? I tried again and still no response. I tried the first police station on the list, "Let it ring" I told myself, after about 30 rings I hung up. All the while there was this incredible pandemonium about 3ft. from my head as the attack continued on an adjacent window. Try the next one, "Oh God, it's busy, try another", this time it was the number of our hostess's apartment in the city.
Her phone must also have rung 30-40 times, and again with absolutely no response. All the while total bedlam. They were now attacking every window on that side of the house; the noise was horrendous and I was standing there stark naked trying to find one person who could help. I shouted to Gina to ask her to get me my pants and to lock all the doors as she returned; she went to our bedroom, grabbed the pants and then locked the door, similarly locking two corridor doors and pulling the keys. When she returned I was dialling the last number on the list, the Roma District police station.
After an eternity, someone, who was very obviously asleep, answered. He was befuddled and was not responding at all. Over and over I repeated, "There's a gang of robbers breaking into the house at 5557 Magoye Road, there's at least 6-8 of them, they're smashing their way in through the windows; the address is 5557 Magoye Road, do you understand me?" In film and fiction the policeman is instantly alert, his voice, his authority has a reassurance, you can imagine the radios crackling, patrol cars with lights and sirens speeding to your aid immediately. But in this case our man was still struggling with sleep or perhaps my unfamiliar accent was difficult for him to comprehend. He was my only hope. I kept asking him if he understood, did he have the address and could he send assistance and I wasn't getting anywhere. Finally he said that he thought that there might be a patrol somewhere and he would try! So much for fact and fiction. On that note of positive re-assurance I gave up on the phone, and from the level of the noise it sounded as though they must be almost through the wall. We fled. As we passed the kitchen Gina pressed the buzzer to Mr, Tembo's house several times to alert him, but at 5'3" and hardly 130 lbs. we knew that he wasn't going to be any help, we were on our own.
I mentioned that the house was large; one day for no particular reason I paced the distance from the master bedroom to the kitchen; It was 55 yds! And the house extended 2 more rooms beyond the kitchen, probably close to 200 ft. total. On another occasion I looked in every room in the house, seventeen in all, to determine the most secure place in the house in the event of whatever. I certainly didn't anticipate anything like this, I didn't anticipate anything, but I suppose our being there alone, being so far from anyone we knew, and being generally somewhat security conscious caused me to check it out "just in case." Well, here we were right in the middle of "just in case!"
I knew that the size of the house and the endless rooms would give us a small degree of security. The place was so large that we kept discovering "new" rooms even after we had been there several days. We ran to the far end of the house, through the kitchen to what seemed to be a servant's bedroom. Off that bedroom was a tiny steel grill enclosed patio that had a toilet and a shower, primarily for outside use. It was the shower that we'd been using, since for some unknown reason it was the only one of four in the house that had hot water. When we'd passed the main door of the house and Gina had buzzed Mr. Tambo I'd noticed the dogs, they were there, right outside the door and totally oblivious to the bedlam that was happening on the other side of the house! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! In the mythology of guard dogs Rottweillers were second only to lions in their ferocity and aggressive natures. Ours was standing there with a glazed look and wagging his tail. His Dane companion was similarly quite unconcerned. I screamed at them to try and get them excited, I stood there screaming through the closed door "Kill, Kill" over and over as loud as I could. I don't know why I chose to scream that specifically, but I just wanted to get them agitated, excited, involved! They both stood and looked at me, tails wagging, as though I was silly, not a tinge or a trace of guard-doggedness, just a canine blank happy stare.
When we reached the guest bedroom I asked Gina to wait there for me, I was going back. I had decided that it would be better to have the dogs in the house with us, so I was going to go back to get them. I had to unlock the main door and then unlock the two padlocks on the steel grill, which enclosed a tiny entrance patio. I seized the Dane by the collar and tried to pull him into the house. Years of conditioning had brainwashed him into believing that he wasn't allowed into the house. So when I tried to drag him in he just dug his heels in and it was an impasse. It was like trying to drag a donkey through a door that he didn't want to enter, but I succeded. I then seized the Rottweiller and dragged him, also protesting, into the house. I started to re-padlock the grill, but at that instant the robbers came running around the end of the house. They came straight for me swinging their clubs and machetes at my hands as I fumbled with the padlocks. For the first time I saw them very clearly in the floodlit doorway; the only word that comes to mind as I try to re-create that scene is "crazed." There was a frantic quality in their eyes as we stood for an instant staring at each other separated only by an unlocked gate. I retreated into the house and locked the door, why I'm not sure since it was surrounded by two floor to ceiling plate glass windows, which was all that now stood between us and them. I grabbed the Rottweiller and ran, dragging him back to the bedroom where I'd left Gina minutes before.
The bedroom had a clothes closet along one wall with a large storage cupboard above it. Gina was nowhere to be seen and then I heard her whispering frantically "Come up here" She was hiding in the cupboard which was about 6' wide, 3' high and 2'deep, and about 6' from the floor. It must have seemed like an ideal hiding place to her in her terrified state, except we couldn't lock the bedroom door that was between us and them, there was no key in the lock. I demanded her to "come down," but she was terrified and not about to vacate her hiding place. She pleaded with me to come to where she was, but I knew that there wasn't any security there and insisted that she come down, I didn't have the time to explain why. There must have been something in my voice that clinched it because she very unwillingly came down and we exited that bedroom with the Rotweiller in tow into the shower/toilet area. I locked the final door behind us. When I looked around, the area we were in was only 6' wide by 3'deep with a padlocked steel security grill between us and the garden. The bars were 1/2" steel and were spaced about 7"-8" apart. As I looked around assessing our situation, I suddenly realised that we were alone, the dog was gone! There was nowhere he could go but he certainly wasn't there! The only place he could have gone was through the bars! He must have weighed 150 lbs, built like a truck, but he must have gone through that grill as quietly and quickly as if he were a cat.
We were extremely quiet speaking only in whispers; If there were any of the robbers close by we didn't want to reveal our location. But at that instant I saw over the garden wall, about 25 yds away, the neighbor. He was standing on his patio with a light on and looking directly towards us. I threw caution to the wind and shouted to him as loud as I could "Help, call the police, we're being attacked by robbers." I repeated this at the top of my lungs over and over for at least 2 minutes. But he just stood in the shadows of his patio and stared at us, it was like shouting at a statue, there was no reaction, no recognition, and no acknowledgement. Finally he turned, walked into his house and the door closed behind him. It was a very depressing moment, his total neutrality left me feeling very alone, and now the robbers were in no doubt that we were still in the house and they must know pretty clearly, exactly where we were.
The shower stall was a typical shower stall 6'x3' with a shower at one end and an area 3x3 behind the door. The door was a flimsy wooden affair that wasn't lockable, but if I sat on the floor with my back braced against it I could wedge my feet against a step up to the shower. Gina sat at that end silently terrified. She had the foresight to grab 2 kitchen knives as we ran through, nothing that you'd want to stake your life on, but they were all we had and were better than nothing. I took them both, one in my hand and the other tucked into my belt behind my back. I knew that the robbers had 3-4ft. long steel re-bars and 2ft. machetes. If it came to it, our only advantage, if you can call it that, was that we were in an enclosure, in darkness, and they could only attack us one at a time. Prayer might have been appropriate but I'd never thought much in those terms prior to then, so it didn't occur to me. The only thing that did was how to react when the time came, which I was sure it would. I had visions of them attacking the door with me braced against it. They would realize immediately that it wasn't locked and that the resistance was me. Therefore the logical thing to do would be to smash through the lower door, I didn't reach any conclusions on how to deal with that possibility.
The night was silent; I could hear my breathing and thought that anyone else close by must also. Earlier we had heard sounds of activity but now there was no indication of anything. I assumed that it must be because they were at the far end of the house and were being very quiet. With the door closed on that tiny space it became suffocatingly hot. During the day the temperature was in the high 90's, at night, probably in the 75-80's. I remember that we had been sleeping with only a sheet and a mosquito net. It became stifling,
I couldn't breath, the humidity was horrendous and I was aware of sweat trickling down my back. I decided that I must open the door to get some air and I told Gina what I was going to do,"Please, please don't open the door, please", she beseeched me in a frantic whisper. Beseeched is not a frequently used word, but it's the only one that conveys her terror at the thought of the door being opened. But I felt that I had to open it, so I moved my position slightly and cracked the door about 2"; the cool draft of air was wonderful, delicious. In an effort to waft some air back to where Gina was I tried to open and close the door gently but rapidly a couple of times. The silence was shattered when I misjudged it and accidentally banged it closed with a loud noise. We were rigid, the noise sounded as though it must have reverberated through the entire house! But they still didn't come. I remember trying to estimate the passage of time but I didn't know what time it was or what time this nightmare had started. I realised that when your senses are deprived it's almost impossible to estimate time. I wondered how long until dawn, there were no clues, no lightness of the sky, no bird chorus, just our breathing.
At some point, after what seemed like an eternity I began to think that perhaps there was a possibilty that we were going to be ok, that perhaps the robbers would take what they could find and leave. We couldn't hear anything, maybe they'd already left? Then I started to think about the bedroom. It contained everything we had with us, all of our money, close to $2,000 in cash and unsigned travellers checks plus our camera gear-3 Nikons with motor drives plus half a dozen lenses, our passports, plane tickets, clothes, everything. Everything that we owned was in that room, and that was the room that they were smashing their way into when we'd fled. There was no doubt in my mind that we'd lost everything. Gina had on a pair of pants and a T shirt, I had a pair of cotton pants and that was it, that was all we had between us!.
I thought about the nightmare of dealing with the Zambian Government, Zambian Airlines, American Express, the US Embassy etc; and as I began to think that we might escape this nightmare ordeal, I realised that it might, by the light of day, seem like "out of the frying pan and into the fire."But for that moment we still had to deal with our current set of problems.
After what seemed like eternity I heard voices outside in the garden, I peered past the edge of the shower door and saw the silhouette of a figure against the first light of dawn as it walked past the grill. I didn't recognize him and thought for sure that it must be one of the robbers now coming to look for us. Two or three seconds later another figure walked past, it was Mr. Tembo our housekeeper. My most immediate thought was that they were holding him and forcing him to show them the house. I was reluctant to reveal our location but on impulse and perhaps without thinking I called his name and he came back towards where we were. He couldn't see us in the shadows, but he said "You can come out now, the police have arrived" I remember asking him to bring a policeman to the grill so that we could see him. He said something and a man with an automatic rifle walked back towards us and stood there, It was just beginning to get light, it was 5:30 am.
Mr. Tembo unlocked the grill and we walked out; as we walked around the house towards the main door, the one where I'd struggled with the dogs I saw a plainclothes white man and another uniformed officer with an automatic rifle, they were both standing ankle deep in broken glass just inside the front door. We were both barefoot so I gave the plainclothes man the various keys that I had in my pockets and asked him to fetch us some shoes from the second bedroom down the corridor on the right. He returned a couple of minutes later with two pair of shoes, both Gina's. She went to get me a pair and came running back a few seconds later shouting "They haven't taken anything, everything is intact!"
We couldn't believe it, they had stripped the center section of the house of everything removeable, furniture, TV's, VCR, drapes, food, utensils, carpets, everything. But because we had locked all the doors behind us as we had fled they hadn't gone into that end of the house. My opening the main door grill to get the dogs gave them easy access, they only had to smash the large plate glass windows at the front door and they were in. At that point they must have given up on trying to break in through our bedroom, though they had came very close. Two of the bars welded to the window frame were broken and it it wouldn't have taken very much to break one more. My grandmother always said that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth! How liitle she knew.
It turned out that the "plainclothes man" was a visiting professor of Geology at the University of Lusaka, his name was Vaughn. Apparently there had been so much of this happening that he and a group of locals had formed, what he called a "vigilante" group. The problem was that the police didn't have cars, (Zambia is a very poor country) so the "vigilantes" would use their personal cars to transport the police. They would patrol the neighborhoods at night and communicate by walkie-talkie. Our "police dispatcher" had the address totally wrong, it turned out that there was no such address. They knew that something was happening somewhere but they didn't know where. While we were standing in the yard talking about all of this I noticed that the Great Dane was throwing up, I looked at the vomit and saw that it contained large chunks of what looked like pork fat, it didn't look like anything that he was regularly fed. Then the Rotweiller also began to vomit. The dogs had been poisoned which accounted for their unusual behavior. Apparently it was a common practice for thieves to throw poisoned meat over the wall an hour or so before they came over. Both dogs were rushed to the vet, the Rotweiller almost died but finally pulled through three days later. The Great Dane was ok.
We had to go to the police station to make a report at 9 A.M., our new-found geologist friend said that he would return and drive us there. We spent the intervening couple of hours packing our things and talking through the events of the night. We talked to the "security-guard" a man about 5'2", 110 lb. His job [for which he was paid almost nothing] was to walk around the property all night long and keep us safe from attack. To protect us he carried a stick. His story was that the robbers came over the wall, overpowered him by throwing a coat over his head and tying his hands. He said that he heard them talk about killing him, but one of them had said "Not now, later." He was left tied up in the guard shack. When they left they took his keys to open the gate, they were laden down with large "sacks," actually they were the drapes from each room which they tore down and used to create "swag" sacks.
When Vaughn returned he commented "That by now everything would be dispersed throughout the compound" "What do you mean" I asked, "Which compound, in fact , what is a compound? "You haven't seen the compound" he said, "I'll show you." Whenever we had left the house to go into Lusaka during the week that we'd been there we had always turned right outside the gate and walked to the highway, about a mile away and taken a bus into the city. That morning as we left in Vaughn's car, we instead made a left turn out of the gate. There was a bend in the road and as soon as we were around the curve I realized that we were in the midst of the most poverty ridden shanty town you could imagine. Nothing but rusty tin shacks, cardboard "houses", open sewers, not a trace of green anywhere, just dusty brown dirt. There are shantytowns in every country, but this was worse than anything I'd ever seen. There was nothing, no water, no electricity, no paths, no gardens, nothing, just poverty.
Suddenly it made sense, "our" 6,000 square feet mansion on the edge of this ghetto was too much, it was there everytime they had to walk into town, everyday they had to pass it with its lights, TV, music, gardens, privilage, everything. "They" decided to share the wealth and unfortunately for us they chose to do it the week that we were there.
We went to the police station and made our report, and then we went into town to find a hotel: there was nothing! Every room in the four hotels in town was full. It was about 10 am and we hadn't slept a wink all night, so we went through the InterContinental lobby, out to the poolside and ordered breakfast; then we dozed until mid-afternoon when a friendly Irish woman in a dripping bathing suit sat down next to me. "Well how's it going?" she asked, "Are you new here?"
I told her the story and she immediately offered to let us stay with her. Her name was Brigid O'Connor and she was the librarian at the British Council in town. What a lovely lady, we stayed with her for about 3-4 weeks and had a wonderful time and made a wonderful friend. All's well that ends well!
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