The journey back alone from Manila is somehow less arduous. My heart lightens with each turn of the wheels leaving the city behind. The first glimpse of the sea – even if it is framed by the scummy reaches of an estuary where we embark – is a benediction. By the time I reach Bulangan in mid-afternoon the following day I am transformed, lighter by the weight of generalised anxiety which has slipped from me along the way. In Malubog I greet a shopkeeper with perhaps too much effusiveness. Pleased as I am to see him, it is only eight days since I last did so. I cover up this lapse by buying from him several tins of Alaska condensed milk for families in Sabay: it is not done to return from any trip without a pasalubong.

In so doing I nearly miss the last jeep of the day to Sabay. This is just leaving, already laden past the point where it is worthwhile to wonder how it functions at all. Glad I do not have to wedge myself inside and look sheepish for being so huge I stand instead on an empty fish-box roped to the tail grid and cling to the edge of the roof-rack which is itself piled high with luggage and children. The bright air whizzes past, we duck beneath sprays of leaves. From my eminence I look down at the boy beside me who has just clambered on and found a toehold. I recognise one of Intoy’s younger brothers. His small hands are clenched around the edge of the polished aluminium roof, tendons standing out. The brown and serious face stares into the wind. From this angle the fine silk on the side of his cheek and the corner of his upper lip is a pale powdery nap. More extraordinary is his hair whose straight Asian jet shimmers in the airflow. Its movement is continuous like a stream of water, like the slide of water seen from over a boat’s edge, a hypnotic lively rush. It is as if hair in an unending bow-wave were bursting from his temples and scurrying back off his head with its passing glints and lights and flecks of foam. I almost expect to look behind and see a growing wake of tresses in our following dust.

That night I walk the shore of Tiwarik alone, seeing my footsteps agitate invisible grains into momentary phosphorescence, living granules stranded by the outgoing tide. The shingle is alive with hermit crabs, a constant seethe of tiny castles lurching and jerking across a battered terrain which remarkably affords them rich pickings. I salute them for their life on the edge, being neither wholly of the sea nor of the land, living in cast-off forts, scavenging their sustenance from anything left by sea or man. Here and there two engage in battle, overbalance, roll down into the water. Others bump into each other, pass, following their own wandering courses with implacable purpose. How could each have a separate, valid path to pursue over those hillocks of dead limestone, among those valleys and crags and boulders? Is their progress merely random? Do they become confused and distracted by all the olfactory intertwinings? To understand what each crab is doing, exactly why it goes where it does, would be to understand something significant. Here in the moonlight by the still sea it is possible to glimpse an end to the world, aeons after the last human corpse has yielded up the ghosts of its last aminoacids, the hermit crabs still busy with the sea’s mullings, shuffling and clicking their tangled paths which with the terrain they cross are daily washed into new configurations.

The sun next morning is not the same star which baked the photochemical smog above Manila into a pale brown dome. It is utterly direct and clear. It bleeds away the terpenes from the forest above, it strips off any human folly which I might have draped about the place. In that brilliantly-lit discourse between land and water something other is going on which I long very much to follow. For above all else the light reminds how unsatisfactory it is to look at the sun and say ‘sun’, at the sea and say ‘sea’. It is no use pretending they don’t have metaphoric status, that the rocking dazzle of noon about Tiwarik does not also contain all manner of departures from light. Thus one glimpses behind any landscape a fleetingness as if something not visible to the eye were racing through, something which nearly was the eye, amorous and transient, intelligent and thirsty.

This is the eye to cultivate, the way of looking which leaves behind the ego. The proper eye does not care to be liked nor does it feel it has to amuse. Tern-like it drifts on the thin gale amid arctic glaciers or stares into holes beneath ultramarine fathoms. When it looks at skin it marvels at the easy rubbing away of desire but knows of longing forever unassuaged. Uneasy winds blow through all it sees and can leave very clear and unexpected outlines. Tiwarik at noon has the contours of a mind, massively quiet and sentient with its humming surf. Like some mysterious vehicle at rest it waits, ticking over. The passenger goes up to his hut, sits on the floor in the shade. A different kind of journey has begun.

On this journey, which takes place at any time, he learns he has no right to expect a free passage. The landscape carries him along but it is not going his way. His desire that it be ravishing or mystical is only his desire he tries to foist onto it; the landscape couldn’t care less what he wants. Underneath it is proceeding in its own way with extreme energy and economy, entirely self-aware and entirely uncompassionate. In the forest, on the beach and among the reefs it goes, in a manner which looks to a human observer like war. But the complexity of what is happening, the sheer beauty of the huge structure has nothing to do with human interpretations but merely encompasses the raw terms of life. The bristle worms fluff out their brilliant feathery crowns; the coral algae are busy with their photosynthesis, the polyps with their daily routines of chemistry and light. Outside the reef a hammerhead glides like a priest. He is quite clear from the bluff above the head, unhurried, not hungry, for he passes over the deep blue trench within a few metres of half a dozen bluefin. Both shark and fish must be perfectly aware of each other but whatever the means of communication it bears a message which allows them to continue their separate routes that so briefly crossed. The bluefin do not alter course. Like the hermit crabs they are purposeful, on the way somewhere or merely on the way through miles of sunlit water. Slowly, too, the hammerhead fades. I watch him in his magnificence growing dim, becoming a faint shape scribbled across by surface ripples, his image erased by wind.

From my vantage point I can look down and speculate about the million messages carried on the currents below, intercepted and acted on, heard, smelt, tasted, seen, palpated, received. Some of the messages are highly dangerous in themselves, cytotoxic and neurotoxic venoms leaked from a variety of sting-cells, spines, fangs, glands. Such messages are often received by human swimmers and the fishermen of Sabay answer back in kind, for in addition to being accomplished bombers they are poisoners as well. It is only at these moments the reef becomes a battlefield, when man deploys weapons designed for effects on a different scale and on different terrain.

How resourceful they are, these people who have learned hard how to stay alive by such a variety of means. Not only can a Sabay fisherman turn his hand to agriculture on the steep slopes behind the village, planting rice and cassava when the rains come, fishing with net, spear and explosive when the sea is right, but he has yet another source of income. This is from two distinct activities known collectively as similya or ‘seedlings’. One involves children trudging up and down in the breakers at certain seasons towing behind them billowing nets of the finest mesh to catch the tiny fry of bangus. The bangus or milk fish (Chanos chanos) is greatly prized in the Philippines and has been elevated to the status of National Fish. It is expensive and hence much farmed. The fry are bagged in plastic and shipped off to agents for rearing in fish pans.

The other kind of similya is the gathering of live specimens of coral fish for export to dealers abroad who specialise in tropical fish for the world’s aquaria. Once again the methods of the Sabay fisherfolk are illegal and ingenious. The technique this time depends on sodiúm or kuskus: sodium cyanide which is smuggled in from a distant province in the form of white crystalline chunks looking for all the world like washing soda. These are put into plastic Shell Rotella motor oil containers fitted with a short spout and diluted with seawater. Lighter boats are used than for dynamiting since the corals being fished are generally in shallower waters and there is no need for a compressor. Goggled swimmers hold onto the boats’ outriggers and drift in the water above the corals until a suitable species is seen or a likely outcrop spotted. Then the poisoner swims down and squirts his bottle into cracks and holes. It appears that diluting the cyanide with seawater makes it less lethal and more anaesthetic in effect. By the time the poisoner has come up to exchange his bottle for a light net the first fish are beginning to reel out of the coral, moving dopily on their backs, on their sides, acting drunk. The ones that are wanted are scooped up and transferred to polythene bags of seawater in the boat. Once back in Sabay they are rebagged according to species and twice a week are shipped up the coast for collection by an agent from Manila who generally pays the fishermen one-sixth of the price he will ask foreign dealers two days later.

Local lore has it that kuskus crystals are more dangerous to the humans and their families than they are to the fish, for doped fish appear to recover quickly if the dilution is correct. Unfortunately the truth of this extends only as far as the Sabayans’ observation: it is what they don’t see, the effects of kuskus on invisible plants and animals which is so disastrous. In the meantime if kuskus becomes temporarily unavailable there are potent alternatives, among them bayati and tubli root, both common enough plants but harder to use because more powerful even than cyanide in salt water and tending to kill the fish outright rather than just anaesthetising them. They are useful for flushing out large and dangerous prey such as big eels, however, allowing a spear-fisherman time to place his shot while less menaced by the slashing mouthful of teeth which can strip flesh off a hand like a glove. Fishermen who tackle big morays many feet down are grateful for all the help they can get; a squirt of tubli root slightly up-current of that swaying, fanged head can make all the difference.

Poison, like dynamite, is not something I have ever used myself nor ever shall. For one thing I am far too afraid of it. For another I hate its imprecision, its casual slaughter of micro-organisms which happen to get in the way of the pursuit of a single small aquarium fish. Besides, because I do not have a family to feed I can afford to adopt the weird and quirky view that if one chooses to engage with a large moray one should be responsible for one’s temerity as for one’s skill. A true hunter could never allow poison into his armoury; it is a matter of pride and good taste. Eels are not at all difficult to shoot but they are excessively hard to kill. They have terrifying strength and once they have retreated into their holes enough for half their length to have gained a firm anchorage, one may all but tear their heads off without budging them. To me it is a sad and piteous sight, a great eel with his head slashed, a spear through one eye and his lower jaw torn off, the white flesh hanging in shreds in the current, still with his muscles locked in a tetanic spasm and his blank remaining eye fixed on the nearest enemy. He can never survive in that condition but maybe he can hold on for another hour or so (for his brain is tiny and inaccessible), long enough perhaps for weary hunters to give up and move on, leaving their ruined prey. Anyone who has ever seen his own blood blossom in green stranded clouds around him in the water ought not to lack feeling for tenacious life, the proximity of death.

Meanwhile the villagers’ use of sodium cyanide remains a vital part of their similya operation which in turn provides a significant proportion of their income.6 It is not a form of fishing which interests me at all so no doubt its finer points of technique elude me. Sodium cyanide dissolved in seawater may indeed be an endlessly subtle poison worthy of a Renaissance venefice. But then, plenty of apologists for dynamite – Arman himself included – will argue how selective and accurate that can be. It is true these techniques have been around a long time and still there are fish in the waters of Sabay, in Tiwarik’s coral reefs. But I myself have not been here long enough to know how much better fish stocks and corals were ten or more years ago. At a local level, then, knowing the people involved and knowing their lives I sometimes think they are getting by, just on the edge between destroying the marine environment on which they depend and allowing it to survive.

This may be how the particular and partial eye observes and reasons. But if that eye withdraws far enough to see Sabay as just one more tiny village whose fishing activities are not untypical, the whole archipelago presents a gloomy prospect. No matter how skilled they may be the Filipinos are steadily destroying their corals as they are their forests. Dynamiters are often little more than cowboys raiding other people’s fishing grounds in powerful boats, stuffing their ice-boxes with corpses and pushing casually on, leaving behind them shattered corals, dead and dying creatures, vital colonies of micro-organisms annihilated. In its own way cyanide fishing is even more destructive because what the villagers do not see are the coral polyps themselves being poisoned, the algae on which they depend and the hidden life deep within the reef being killed.

This is a national problem since probably almost 80 per cent of the world’s salt-water tropical fish come from the Philippines, a market supplied by a comparative handful of rapacious and cut-throat exporters. It is they who keep the fishermen supplied with the cyanide, buying off local coastguards and policemen in order to get the drums of poison distributed among the islands. Certain species of fish are now becoming quite scarce. Some of the larger angel fishes such as the Majestic (Euxiphipops navarchus), the Blue Face (Euxiphipops xanthometopon) and the Imperator (Pomacanthus imperator) have been decimated. Blue Tangs (Paracanthurus hepatus) are increasingly rare as are several species of butterfly and clown fishes. As stocks decrease the prices rise and competition becomes still more unscrupulous. The American and European owners of calm and bubbling tanks which sustain their mournful slivers of life as clinically as any life-support system cannot guess – or prefer not to know – the other end of that chain. The world in which those fish were taken is lawless and destructive: greedy fiefdoms protected by bribed local officials, smuggled sacks of poison, exploited fishermen and dying habitats. For every live specimen which survives to expire on its life-support system in somebody’s living-room are an uncounted number of fish which die in the process of being poisoned on the sea bed, bagged, tagged and exported.

Many months later and far away a small incident was poignant with recollections for me. I was in London, intending among other things to have an ear seen to – presumably the constant diving had affected some remote piece of tubing. Thanks partly to a family connection I was to be seen by a private ENT consultant. One morning I found myself in a typical consultant’s waiting-room.

From the room itself there was no way of telling whether waiting patients were to pass through a dark red mahoganyesque door for new contact lenses, a hair transplant, dental work or a gynaecological examination. They might from the look of the place expect to be told they owed three thousand pounds or that with a lucky remission they might just have six months to put their affairs in order. The air smelt of Cavendish Square. Deep carpet on the floor, a standard lamp with a gold shade in one corner, leather armchairs, stacks of Vogue, Punch, Country Life, The Lady, Autocar on low tables. Heavy moth-coloured curtains framed a view of what were basically eighteenth-century rooftops misshapen with grimy aerials, asphalted water tanks and corroded heat exchangers. On the marble mantelpiece stood a marble clock of enormous weight and absurdly slow tick: ‘Festina lente’ said the apt admonishment in copperplate script near the top.

But the ordinary gloom and tension which always pervades such fake-clublands was pricked into real poignancy by a large aquarium which stood in the corner opposite the lamp. In it were the usual sorts of small fish inertly doing nothing among the little thermometers, the thin plastic tubes emitting sprays of bubbles, the whimsies embedded in the gravel at the bottom. The purposeful, unreadable courses the fish would have been swimming in their natural habitat were impossible. Suddenly from behind a pirate’s chest purporting to spill a cascade of jewels onto the sea bed swam an old friend: a tiny specimen of the Queen Trigger such as I had often hunted for my supper. Each species of fish has its characteristic movements and attitudes in the water. Listless and foully lost as this poor creature was it was not so denatured as to have unlearned how to face a threat from in front, in this case my affectionate fingertips on the glass at its nose. It hung there in that familiar head-on posture, dorsal and ventral fins appearing to move in contrary motion, then half-turning to back up and re-face the threat from a little further away. That was the moment juste for the spear, as it briefly presented a side view. Mentally I fired and heard the pok! of tough hide being pierced, heard alarmed drumming as I headed up through thirty feet of water (for Queen Triggers prefer a bit of depth), my prey spitted. Even as I rose to the sunlit surface I had swept the fish back along the steel rod onto the catch-line trailing below me, starting the process of re-loading before my head broke through into bright air.

‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ I had been joined by the receptionist who had shown me into the waiting-room. ‘Are you a fish fancier?’

I made some non-committal remark and asked whether they had had the Queen Trigger for long.

‘About a week. Handsome little devil, isn’t he? We’ve had several like him already. If you look very carefully you can see he isn’t black at all but midnight blue. And if you look really close you’ll notice his scales are sort of fake: they’re just a diamond pattern on his skin. I don’t know why, that kind never seem to last very long. Only a month or two usually.’

I wondered whether to tell her about its high first dorsal spine which locked vertically up to wedge the fish defensively into cracks and which could only be released by pressing down the lower second spine, the trigger. I didn’t tell her the fish were very tasty if wrapped in a banana leaf and roast over an open fire. Instead I wondered whether this particular specimen had hatched into life as fry in the offshore swell of Tiwarik, later to be stunned by Arman’s cyanide and retrieved in his net, from that moment destined to stare for the rest of its life not through thirty feet of vivid tropical sea but through a few inches of reconstituted seawater warmed by electric bulbs at a wall of glass until saprophages grew in its gills and killed it.

The receptionist ushered me away and into the presence of the doctor who within minutes told me that I had mould growing in my own left gill and wrote me up for some anti-mould drops. That infection cleared, but the trouble persists. I have never been back, though, to see if the little Queen Trigger has survived. From time to time I think of it in its pitiless exile surrounded by fake gems and living in the poop of a bogus galleon eighty feet above the streets of London.

From a dream that the sea was dead, poisoned and lifeless I awoke, expecting to smell the stench of carrion from the strand below, the hermit crabs tearing at heaps of putrefaction. Instead the lively ocean rested in its bed, washed by moon and stars, its breathing body fanned by light pulses of air from across the strait. I went and sat outside, watching the cordillera opposite skip from one side of the sky to the other like a graph. Immediately I was caught up in the universe. Off-guard with the remains of sleep I was like some careless factory-worker whose clothing is snagged by the machinery he leans over, wrenched bodily into the mechanism and swallowed up. I became as if melted into the sea. My heart beat in time with the mountains. Stars poured down into my head. Without ears, without tongue I heard myself say the words I must always have used, will always use, whose meaning is Why, you knew all along and It is always here, always now – banalities beyond translation, beyond speech. In that silence alone the universe can be heard talking in pebbles and weed, in glittering plankton and predator’s brain, in the ineffable sound made by the hills as they fold and pleat themselves. How can it ever be forgotten? But I do forget it. I am incredulous. How can I pretend none of this is so and allow myself daily to become dragged down by foolishness?

If one were to weep for this idiocy the tears which glistened in the starlight would at least be proper tears of regret and not of pity. To forget the only thing there is seems like a crime for which there could be no redemption. The consequence would properly be that it all became dead things: the sea turned to mere water, the mountains to lumps of geology, the wind and rain became more or less inconvenient. But miraculously the cordillera across the strait is still hefting its crags and shrugging its forests. By the standards of the world’s great mountain ranges it is nothing, this cordillera, a comparative South Downs. But tonight it is the loftiest imaginable perhaps because the sea lying at its feet gives no indication of scale as would a valley floor with houses and the thread of roads.

At once, sadly, angrily, comes into my head my father, who loved mountains. I give a start of surprise at finding him there, but the more I consider it the less surprised I become. It is not just the mountains; it is not even because of my memories of war over landscapes and uneasy oppositions of all kinds. It seems quite specifically because of the dream of poison from which I have just woken, but I cannot quite grasp why.

My father entered my life when I was four. Quite suddenly, this demobbed stranger came into the house claiming to be my mother’s husband. What intelligent child could believe a tale like that? Husbands and fathers were supposed to be an indispensable part of family life yet my mother and sister and I had seemingly got along very nicely without one. Why then the sudden need? Four years later still I was off among the South Downs for months at a time, months which themselves stretched on for another ten or eleven years. In the holidays my father and I scarcely met. He was overworked and testy, the rushed professional who seemed to spend less and less time in the house. In such ways it is quite possible for someone to grow up never knowing his own father. As with the God one heard about at school, the obligations were always there to love and respect and fear him but the outline was dim and hazy, the features blurred. From the remoteness on the other side there came no answer excepting only that sometimes inexplicable rages played like lightning about one’s head.

Why then do I any longer think of him? How could this vanished stranger play any part in my present life, still less have anything to do with my being here on this island? I do not quite know. I do know he is not irrelevant, though, and that the reason is slowly becoming clearer. Therefore I will stare at the mountains across the strait and force myself to consider once more this business of poison. It is cyanide; and it takes me straight back to that second school.

The headmaster met me just before lunch in the corridor outside the dining hall. I stood to attention, held my hands out and turned them over for inspection. Even I could see the wrists were grey above the tide-line but he didn’t so much as glance at them.

‘Your father’s coming this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be interested.’ He wasn’t smiling. A school myth was that when he was wearing green, particularly a green tweed suit, he was in a mood for blood. He was at this moment in a brownish sports jacket with leather buttons but his tie was green and hairy. I didn’t dare ask him why my father was coming unexpectedly. Obviously my behaviour and schoolwork had sunk below the point where the ordinary measures of fortnightly reports and informal conversations by the tea-tent on Parents’ Day were any longer adequate. He had been called to take me away. No, worse: there was going to be a Parent’s Caning.

Another myth at this school, more dread than that of the Second Cellars, so awesome nobody even much liked talking about it, was of an event called a Parent’s Caning. This allegedly took place once every twenty years or so when a boy had done something so truly awful that no ordinary punishment could meet the case. It was the prep-school equivalent of being flogged round the Fleet. So brutal was it the boy’s father had to be called in to witness it along with the school doctor who checked the victim’s pulse after each stroke. The entire thing was a pack of lies, of course, mere schoolboy hysteria, but it didn’t stop us believing in it and now in the corridor outside the dining hall I knew I was to be the victim. I was so frightened I didn’t even bother to wonder what I had done to deserve it. And my father was a doctor, too! That clinched it.

When at the end of lunch the headmaster stood up to make an announcement I was ready to faint, in such a state I would have interpreted anything he might have said as proof of my impending execution. The news that the whole school could have a half-holiday and spend it in the swimming baths would have been utterly plausible. What more natural than that a special site was necessary for a Parent’s Caning, somewhere unusual to impress the gravity of the occasion on everyone present? Actually the man merely said that we should keep clear of the top of the field beyond the junior cricket pitch and walked out. Electricity shot through me. What did that bit of waste space contain but the old oak? Of course. The Hanging Oak, as it was known for its stout horizontal limb with a scar around its bark from the days when the Hall was newly built and it had regularly been used as a gibbet for insubordinate coachmen, cocky servants, mutinous lackeys. The Hanging Oak! The perfect spot for a Parent’s Caning.

It was a Saturday and so we had the afternoon off in any case. At two o’clock a few informal games of cricket convened in a leisurely manner here and there around the playing fields. Some boys were expecting their parents to arrive and pay them a visit. So was I, now, but how different was to be my father’s role! Many of us stood about, not actually near the forbidden tree but for that matter not very far from it. Speculation ran high about what was going to happen. Somebody suggested they were going to cut the Hanging Oak down and that there would be danger to bystanders from the displaced ghosts of those who had dangled from its limb; we had been reading M. R. James under the bedclothes by torchlight. I kept quiet, not daring to tell them the truth because I knew that once I had said it everybody would recognise it as the only plausible explanation.

At two-thirty a familiar car emerged from the rhododendrons at the far end of the drive and crunched to a stop in front of the school. My father emerged carrying a clinical-looking bottle. Sal volatile, of course, to restore my vital functions. I didn’t dare run to meet him. Instead the headmaster, who was already chatting to a group of parents, detached himself from them and shook my father’s hand with, I thought, a smile significantly tinged with graveness and sympathy. Together they began walking up the grounds towards the junior cricket pitch and the tree.

‘Do you have a stick?’ I heard my father ask.

‘There’ll be one there,’ replied the headmaster.

Since I could no longer postpone the inevitable I went to meet them, unable to feel my legs walking beneath me.

‘Hullo!’ my father greeted me with tasteless cordiality. ‘This is unexpected, isn’t it? How about this for a pretty bottle?’

The bottle he carried was indeed striking, ribbed and blue, bluer even than those milk of magnesia bottles, round and with a ground glass stopper. On the label was a red skull and crossbones. I nodded miserably.

‘Cyanide,’ he said.

‘Cyanide?’

‘That’s right. Awfully dangerous stuff.’

‘It’s extremely good of your father to have come,’ the headmaster said with the hypocritical expansive smile we all knew headmasters reserved for boys whose parents were nearby. ‘It was poor old Pollock last night that finally did it.’

Pollock was the First XI wicket keeper who had been stung by a wasp the day before and was all swollen up in the san, instead of playing against a school in Kent which was full of wets but which had really good sausage rolls for match teas.

‘So,’ the headmaster went on, ‘I got old Bisley to do some sleuthing and when he’d tracked it down I thought immediately of your father, being a doctor and so forth, and he very kindly nipped over to the hospital pharmacy.’

‘Yes but what are you going to do?’ I asked miserably.

‘Kill a wasps’ nest, what did you think?’ my father asked.

‘Well actually,’ the Head said, ‘I quite deliberately didn’t tell them what we were up to. If you announce to a lot of small boys that a large wasps’ nest is going to be attacked at two-thirty with the most deadly poison known to man, and they are on no account to come anywhere near it, there’s not a boy in the school who won’t be there. If, on the other hand, you keep it vague and casual there’s just a chance … Hello! Over here a bit more, I think. Bisley said it was about fifteen yards from the oak and that he’d marked it. Yes, there’s the stick. Good. Now stand back everyone.’

And the sun which had been vertical, molten and glary slumped several degrees and began to shine benignly in a beautiful June afternoon, on this island surrounded as yet invisibly by creeping suburbia. The trees cast their shade in which Tortoiseshells and Brimstones and Marbled Whites fluttered and in the distance white-clad figures scampered and the pock of ball against bat came flatly on the drowsy air. We boys were waved safely back while I proudly watched my father advance with a pint of the world’s most deadly poison to do battle with what were clearly hornets and not wasps at all, probably the biggest and most dangerous nest ever found in the south of England.

And when his crouched figure had straightened up, slightly red in the face from holding his breath, the headmaster sent someone for a spade and they covered it all up with a mound of soil leaving nothing but a faint and pleasant smell of almond essence. How far away those days now seem, not because they are in the least bit faint but because they enclosed a way of life which seems unthinkable in a modern England. What more reasonable and straightforward way to deal with a wasps’ nest than to ring up a consultant neurologist and get him to trot down to Pharmacy for a pint of cyanide and come on over in the car and pour it into the school grounds? Then back to the house for a cup of tea and maybe watch the Second XI in the nets and take your coat off and chuck some nasty balls at the slip-catching machine which even Pollock couldn’t have taken. And finally remember to pick up the cyanide bottle which you think you may have left in the pavilion but later, after a worried search, you discover in the boot of the car where you had put it for safety’s sake, and back down the drive in a low-lifting cloud of dust and away through the rhododendrons leaving a small son ecstatic with relief and full of pride.

It was a way of life which was really a hang-over from a relaxed patrician world which had ended with the General Election of 1945. On Tiwarik the distant cries of cricketers on slumbrous June afternoons might come back as fresh as ever if I let them; but that regular pock of their play would now sound to me like the ticking of the termites in the night which slowly reduce my house’s framework to dust from within.

It seems incredible now that I should ever have felt myself so terrorised as I did then, at the whim of any figure in authority. But unknown to myself it must have produced an anger in me because after all my father had won in his heroic campaign against the wasps that afternoon: he had punished me with drawn-out terror for once trying to kill him with a wasp. At one level this was only fair; at another it was horribly unfair to blame me for his not being more lovable, better loved. A defiance, a stubbornness grew in me which later resulted in my refusal to think and do as he and his paid deputies, his headmasters, so clearly wished. It had been all of a piece to deny the beauties of the English countryside and to go on failing maths ‘O’ level. Those two incidents were perhaps ten years apart but another twenty-five were to elapse before this simple connection occurred to me, something which to anybody else would appear as trivial as the laboured self-perceptions of others always do.

The cordillera opposite is still busy; the idea that hills are always motionless is visibly absurd. The moon, meanwhile, has slid to another corner of the sky. Its newly angled light has thrown up different aspects of the slopes and screes and ravines which now seem to be poising themselves to roar down and engulf Sabay, asleep without trace among the black line of coco-palms fringing the coast in either direction. Mountains. How predictable that I should have resisted mountains longest of all.

Among my father’s books had always been, discreetly laid flat beneath other things, an album of text and photographs done up like a book and titled Those Kingly Days … It was the record of a fortnight’s climbing holiday which he, his younger brother and two friends had spent in Norway in July 1939. My uncle wrote the text, my father took the photographs, some of which are of great beauty and accomplishment. I am sorry now that my father did not write the text as well. My uncle’s style, eminently readable, was still that of a very young man (he was then nineteen) and leaned slightly back towards the world of Three Men in a Boat, poised sometimes on the edge of the facetious without ever quite being so. In fact he adroitly counteracted this tendency by giving detailed accounts and diagrams of climbs the party made each day and in this respect Those Kingly Days … is a short and quite serious climber’s journal. Of course the camaraderie was of its time; it is nearly half a century ago now. Reading between the lines one can see the holiday must have been a miraculously snatched interlude. My father was a newly qualified doctor; probably never again did he and his brother spend so long together. If there was a flavour of old times the new times were obtruding remorselessly: six weeks later Britain was at war and some seven months after that Norway was occupied by Nazi troops. But the reason I wish my father had written the book himself is that he might have given something away. All one really learns about him is that he had to go home a day or two early, to the regret of the others, although the reason is not given. In fact he went to take up his first houseman’s job at UCH.

Yet this very muteness of my father’s part in the story is itself eloquent. Nobody who did not possess a tender eye could have taken those photographs: they speak for him. From the text I first learned he had been there at least once before, in 1937, so much of the point of this chronicled trip must have been to re-climb peaks he had already climbed, perhaps acting partly as guide and partly as one who longed to pass on some of the pleasure he had already experienced. Fifty years on a poignancy clings to those neatly laid-out pages, those black and white pictures of pale English young men bathing naked in glacier water. For my father, at least, the sense of temporary freedom and adventure must have been overwhelming.

To understand why, it is necessary to imagine how it must have been for a child to be packed off from China half the world away to southeast London to live thereafter cut off from his parents as from the magnificent wild terrain which surrounded his birthplace in Kuling – to live out of suitcases in a succession of the suburban homes of devout and elderly relatives for most of his schooldays, like so many other sons of the Raj and the Missions. How those long terraced streets must have mocked him with their ironic and inappropriate names of Scottish scenery: Glenshiel Road, Glenesk Road, Glenlyon Road, Balcaskie Road. How that nonconformist dullness must have oppressed him. (I never remember hearing my father speak once about Christianity: his loyalty to his family was too great. But I am quite certain now he never believed a word of it.) An atmosphere of worthy impoverishment, both financial and spiritual, pervades what few accounts of his youth I ever heard, except for the brief remissions of occasional holidays in the Lake District where he walked and climbed. There he must surely have re-discovered long unstructured days of wild silence and exhilarating exercise, sublime antidote to the cramping admonitions of the Congregationalist zealots of south London whose ugly churches he had dutifully to attend.

It was sad for him when, as a paterfamilias, he wanted to take the family somewhere which had meant much to him, and my sister and I were little enchanted by the Lake District. I was particularly scornful. To a boy already accustomed to roaming the South Downs in search of cordite, a lot of rain-soaked peaks full of gloom and wet sheep was no antidote to anything except good temper. My mean querulousness ruined several of my father’s holidays and probably did much to contaminate our relationship. It was one more of a short enough list of possible pleasures he was destined not to share with his only son.

I believe the Norwegian expeditions remained for him one of the high spots of his life, to judge from what I remember now of his accounts in the days when we were still talking. There were comrades and good fellowship, a certain amount of expertise and danger, breathtaking landscapes. In those days such parts of Norway were presumably not much travelled except by climbers, probably little more than Iceland was when Auden and MacNeice went there a year or two earlier. There were language problems and discomforts (great stinging clegs) and pleasures (kilos of wild strawberries). Above all, literally, there were mountains. My father returned in states of exaltation: Kolåstind … Vellesaeterhorn … Kvitegga. The mountains.

Another high spot of his life, like that of many a young man at the time, must have been the war. What other set of circumstances could have turned a recently qualified houseman into a Major in the RAMC and taken him out to India? The Himalayas. It is hard to get details of exactly where he went and for how long, but I remember his accounts of climbing and his face would be transfigured by the images behind it of majestic peaks and snowfields and glaciers of savage and unearthly beauty. He had stood, if not on the very roof of the world (for he was an amateur climber and no Mallory), then at least in an upper storey and from it had gazed eastwards across Tibet to the country of his birth, to where his own father was at the moment racked with typhoid in a Japanese concentration camp. He must also have looked westwards towards where he had left a newly married wife and an infant son.

Afterwards he was very quiet about it all, becoming more so as I evinced my assertive uninterest in his boring old mountains. But along the way he had secreted his own treasures, strange and beautiful pictures taken with his Zeiss Ikon. One of the earliest, a picture of Smørskredtind taken for Those Kingly Days … he kept framed on the wall of his study for the rest of his life, which for a man of almost painful modesty must have been a token of deep private significance. Perhaps as career and family took their toll he came more and more to recognise the appropriateness of that title. For years I assumed it was a quotation from Shakespeare, a dying Falstaff dreaming of his youth, maybe. It was not until recently that I read the album properly through and on the last page found the stanza from which the quotation comes. It is by G. W. Young, the mountaineering poet and probably the greatest English climber of his generation:

But at the time all this was wasted on his son. Nor, sadly for him, did I share his passion for ships which in those days pre-dating mass air travel were still invested with a degree of romance quite hard to imagine now. What complex associations ships must have had for any expatriate who necessarily viewed them as instruments which could unite as well as sever families, bearing them laboriously off on journeys across half the globe, each mile of which was truly felt to be travelled. Like many schoolboys then he knew all the shipping lines together with their flags and funnel insignia. He could stand wistfully at Tilbury or Southampton and know merely from its name and livery more or less exactly where each ship was bound, from where it was likely to have come. (It would not be at all the same to stand today at Heathrow and see a Boeing of the British Airways fleet. Not only would destination or provenance remain opaque but the aircraft itself would be identical to that of any other airline, differing only in its paint. My father could say ‘P & O’ or ‘Viceroy of India’ just by glimpsing a silhouette far out to sea.)

Under those conditions the world was viewed differently and experienced differently. Journeys meant and felt something different, the lands eventually reached were not the same lands reached today because they occupied a different place in the traveller’s imagination. A change in transportation changes the destination. This sounds strange but nevertheless it is so. In a trivial way this was demonstrated one day when I knew enough about the currents off Tiwarik to swim to Sabay, have lunch and swim back. At that moment both places took up different positions in my mind and since then each has felt different. This is a mysterious law and it must have been well known to my father as to countless thousands of mariners and passengers who overlapped with the air age.

I can visualise my father most clearly now not with his camera, with which he was so accomplished, but with his battered and treasured pair of binoculars. I think the reason is that whenever I glimpsed him with his eye pressed to his camera’s viewfinder I knew that what he saw at that moment we would later see ourselves and feel obliged to admire. But when I glanced sideways and saw his face concentrated into the eyepieces of his binoculars I knew he was somewhere else and seeing things nobody would ever be privy to except when he elected to share them. One holiday when I was very young I walked with him to the top of a cliff somewhere on the southern coast of England. Down below was a small port and outside this in the roads a warship of sorts lay at anchor. My father became excited.

‘By golly, look, it’s the Matapan,’ he said and trained his binoculars on it to confirm his certainty. He then handed me the glasses, taught me how to focus the individual eyepieces and then the entire instrument, and spent some time on his stomach in the grass next to me pointing out details of the ship below. I now remember only its grey paint, its small size, the circular all-weather clearview windows set in the raked panes of the bridge and, above all, its name. Matapan. For quite thirty years this name had associations of something sweet and bitter: ‘marzipan’ and ‘pa’, probably. Then after I had first visited the Philippines I had a vivid dream about the ship which seemed to come out of nowhere, out of the depths of memory. The ship itself wore my father’s face: its face and hair were grey and it seemed to be snarling as if in terrible rage. I awoke in the grip of infantile fear. The source of this dream was one thing, but I puzzled for days to find what had made it take that particular shape. Then I thought of the new language I was learning. In Tagalog matápang means ‘strong’ and ‘courageous’ with, in the case of alcoholic drink, connotations of ‘fiery’ and ‘fierce’. It was quite precisely my father’s rages I had feared. Living with him in the school holidays had been like walking across mined territory. One never understood quite why a particular step had been false beyond the fact that it had blown one up. The explosions were terrible.

A vignette from yet another holiday is imbued for me with a piercing melancholy. I have no idea now what we were doing there but we were at a place called Allhallows in the Thames Estuary, just downstream from Tilbury. It was probably mid-September, late tea-time. The afternoon was thick with mist. I recall only a damp marshy place at the edge of a waveless stretch of disappearing water. In this half-light my father was standing, sweeping with his binoculars the bank of fog which had rolled in from the North Sea. From somewhere within this fog came a deep bass hooting which gave everything an atmosphere of utter doom. After a while he said: ‘I think it’s the old Burma Star. Quick’ and handed me the binoculars. Somewhere in the grey I caught a glimpse of a greyer bulk out there before the fog swallowed it up. It might have been some prodigious mammal heading seawards to its secret burial ground. Then from behind that glooming opacity the heavy sound of a ship’s engines rolled across the water. ‘Yes,’ said my father in satisfaction, ‘that’ll be the old Star. Ohh.’ He gave a great sigh. ‘Think of it: Marseilles, Genoa, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Rangoon …’ His litany made me want to cry.

The last memory I have of him with his binoculars did involve real tears. It was our last holiday together. I had just left Canterbury and was about to go to Oxford. I was miserably in love, crotchety, not wanting to be on a family holiday at all, not really wanting to be anywhere. My father now had less than a year to live. To this day I do not know whether he knew it. Doctors are as good as everybody else at concealing truths from themselves. We were in the south of France, had been to Avignon, had seen Arles, had passed north of Marseilles to rejoin the coast below Fréjus. At some point well inland, it might have been near Draguignan or even as far east as Grasse, we picnicked on high ground. My father trained his binoculars on the horizon. Glowering at some pâté I was only half-aware of a sound he made. Then looking up I could see from my position slightly behind and to one side of him an eye brimming with tears. I was shocked. It had not been a good day so far, nor an easy holiday. Horrid late-adolescent egotist that I was I chose to interpret his tears as disappointment with his son. Full of self-pity I slumped further.

I am now sure my father’s tears were for nothing so immediate or prosaic. Most likely they came at one of those moments when anyone of a certain age can sit amid the ruins of a picnic and be suddenly unable to look through a pair of binoculars without seeing something besides what is merely imaged. Maybe from the perspective of an anxious and complicated life he was looking across eighty miles of shimmering French clarity at the southernmost tip of the Alps and feeling once more with a panging rush what mountains were to him, had always been, at a former uncontaminated vision which his every turning since had seemed only to muddy. Perhaps he knew, perhaps not, how little time he had left; but at forty-six and at his professional eminence he would have known he could never again find the time or fitness to set foot on a glacier or brew tea with meltwater from Annapurna. For that matter nor would fate once more afford him such blissful circumstance that he could be invited to sit in the pilot’s seat of an RAF DC-3 and, completely unqualified, fly thirty officers and men for a quarter of an hour high above Burma. In their way those, too, had been kingly days.

What is he to me now? I am at last old enough and temperate enough to be able to see what I have inherited from him. A physical likeness, certainly. Now and again I surprise a look on my face like the one he wore for his television appearance as a neurological expert in the series ‘Your Life In Their Hands’: part wistful, part stuffed. We are still opposites in much that I was determined we should be, but more and more I catch my own voice as out of nowhere saying ‘He would have liked that,’ or ‘If only he could see this.’ There was, finally, a part of him which escaped his parental family’s urge to do good. It escaped his own doctoring and his begetting and his breadwinning, it undercut his yearning for respectable stability and could be caught gazing through binoculars at distant ranges where such things were of no account. In short there must have been times when that part of him wished me dead.

I am immeasurably cheered by this. It is a liberating realisation for a son to have because it frees him from any obligation to reciprocate that messy parental turmoil which masquerades as a simple and straightforward love. Instead I can meet him on that other level about which he could not speak and I would not have listened. For the first time I feel a certain closeness to him. Given how father and son hardly knew one another and scarcely ever talked it is strange this feeling I have that of all people it is he who would most readily understand what it is I am doing in the forests of Kansulay and among the reefs of Tiwarik, although he would have been as diffident about attempting to put it into words as I am ultimately unable. This reflection serves partly to remind me that I have no son with whom to share an experience, any more than my own father had.

Now, far too late, I miss him. He is long gone.

The cordillera opposite has stilled. Behind it the dawn is coming and the strengthening light has frozen its black outline in mid-skip. The stars are dimming and night is leaving in a great turquoise sigh. I get stiffly to my feet and stretch. Down there beneath the sea across whose face the dawn wind skitters the parrotfish will be slipping out of the mucus sleeping-bags they made themselves for the night. Among the corals shifts are changing: the predators of darkness are giving place to the predators of day. Between them are a suspended twenty minutes or so of near-inactivity, a general pause as if the attention of all creatures were preempted by the daily miracle of growing light.

I walk down to the shore. The hermit crabs have gone; nothing moves. I cup my hand and drink several mouthfuls. It is harsh, sweet, alive. Naked I swim out and slide down the blue gulfs.