A Scrap of Wool
We used to play a game over dinner using The Times Complete Atlas, which has 220,000 place names. We were blindfolded and had to select places from the index until we had one in each of Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. The idea was that we all had to leave the next day and go to each of our places in turn. The first time we tried my pin landed on: Butuceni, a village in Moldova near the Dniester River, in what was once called Bessarabia; the city of Guwahati in Assam on the Brahmaputra, whose waters have flowed as the Tsangpo across much of Southern Tibet; a place called Tumatumari Landing, near the confluence of the Potaro and Essequibo Rivers in Guyana and home to the Arawak and Akawaio tribes; and then a wadi in Niger, which I realised I had crossed ten years before, when travelling the Sahara north to south.
The piquancy was in the anticipation of the unknown, the excitement of getting to somewhere that hitherto has been only a name on a map, a heady temptation for wanderlust.
Scraps of Wool is the story of travel writers titillating that wanderlust. It is told through the advocacy of many correspondents, all of them sharing a love of the adventure, and some, the writers themselves, having the enviable talent to communicate it. In no way is this collection a critique of travel writing or an accolade for individual titles. It is simply a celebration of writers who have inspired and amused. These are writers who understand that a simple narrative of a journey tends towards the dull. Their responsibility is to fashion a flowing story from their collection of incident and experience. As one of them, Jonathan Raban, wrote: ‘… these bits and pieces of the random world are little more than scraps of wool on a barbed wire fence; they’re there to be collected, spun and woven into the fiction of the book …’ The noun is fiction, not fabric. There are over one hundred different writers from eighteen countries of origin, that have followed these principles. Even the books that appear to be in diary form, such as Byron’s Road to Oxiana and Kinglake’s Eothen, have been carefully crafted, written and rewritten many times, so as to create a work that demands and deserves the readers’ attention.
For more than forty years I have collected and read travel books. The process was more dilettante than disciplined. But I had marked passages that enthused me and so had gathered a library that was annotated by triangular corner-folds and barely decipherable jottings. This was my own inadvertent wool gathering. As I have expanded the process to build this book, I have learned and been stimulated by how little I really know, and how much more there is to discover. It has been a pleasure to which I could turn at any moment; the library is a big barrel of refrigerated chocolate truffles, from which I have been allowed to choose more than a hundred, without any fear of getting fatter. The only pain has been a hankering after those left uneaten.
Scraps of Wool can be no more than an interim report on a burgeoning library; the classics of future years are now being written by writers ever more perceptive, as they must be in a world already so intimately explored.
I have had a treasure chest of recommendations from others and continue to receive them, the most valuable of which have been those accompanied by some personal anecdote or comment. Some of these are reproduced in the final chapter. The result is this collection of passages, sometimes no more than a sentence, that have inspired us to go or at least to dream of going.
My own first taste came one evening lying in a bunk in a yacht club in Cowes, Isle of Wight, with wind-blown rain on the porthole windows. I chanced upon a copy of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs. There is only one paragraph in the book that is not about the Iraqi Marshes and the waterborne life of the Madan Arabs. It is hidden in chapter sixteen. It refers to what he had done between visits to the Madan, in a completely different part of the world. This is the paragraph that would inspire in me a lifetime’s interest in Central Asia.
I had left in the last week of July 1952 and it was now an early afternoon in February. Seven months later; it seemed longer. In that time I had crossed high passes through the snows of the Hindu Kush to the cold blue lake of Korombar where the Chitral river rises; I had looked out over Wakand from the Borogil Pass and seen in the distance a glint that was the Oxus; I had slept on the glaciers at the foot of Tirich Mir, and in dark, verminous houses among mulberry orchards, where the last of the Black Kafirs lived on the borders of Nuristan.
I had no idea where the Chitral River or Tirich Mir were to be found or what the Wakand was, although the latter was to play a part in my life much later. But I knew I had to go to find them.
This book is for those who understand that feeling. It is for those who have what John Steinbeck and Ryszard Kapuściński both call the disease of travel, a disease that is ‘essentially incurable’.