2:

My Odyssey Begins

I had grown up among people who had lived their formative years in Britain or Ireland, and who spent a good deal of their time shuddering about the climate back there, so it was no surprise to find that conditions on the western fringes of Europe were damp and chilly. If anything, the grey skies of Dublin were not as bad as I had expected: every sunny day was a revelation, because I had never quite believed that such things were possible in Ireland. The main cultural adjustment for me was having to wear so many clothes in a new world where short trousers were spurned for anyone over the age of eleven.

But there were ample compensations. I had spent my entire life to date in the intellectual backwater of colonial Africa, so I had almost no culture written on me. My home city of Salisbury had been founded barely more than half a century ago. Now I found myself in the Georgian quadrangles of Trinity College, an institution dating back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. History was everywhere in the city, from the stately old merchants’ houses to the down-at-heel Victorian tenements, and Dublin was tight-knit and dense compared with the relaxed, largely single-storey sprawl of the Rhodesian capital. I was proud of my family roots in this historic place, and I was determined to soak up every new experience here.

Unfortunately, my fellow first-year students were disappointing companions. Growing up in the bush, I had matured early. I had been getting drunk and going with girls since I was twelve or thirteen, so these pursuits held no illicit thrill for me. The same could not be said for the unwashed puppies straight from English public schools among whom I found myself. They pitched themselves into these new experiences with great enthusiasm and not much discipline, and I had no desire to join them, which left me fairly isolated. Fortunately, the second-year students were much more grown up. They were the last generation of students to have done their National Service, which meant they had already engaged in the real, adult world. They had stories to tell of the Malayan Emergency or fighting the Mau Mau, and they were more interesting company all round.

Despite that, I only had one real friend at Trinity, a like-minded Englishman in the year above me named Simon Boreham. He and I concluded that the key to any sort of social success in campus life was to be eccentric, and in pursuit of this aim, we hit on the idea of attempting to travel the hundred-odd miles from Dublin to Belfast on foot. It would be an arduous trip, but we managed to secure sponsorship from Urney’s, which was the household-name chocolate brand in Ireland. Their participation would help us attract the attention of the media, and, happily, the sponsorship was offered in kind, so we were given huge cartons of chocolate bars to sustain us on our journey. We did some practice walking around Dublin for about a month. On the day of our departure, we finished our lectures and then met up at six o’clock in the evening at Trinity’s main gates, amid a large gathering of press and students, who were either cheering us on or heckling. We had our last cigarettes – I had taken to using an ivory cigarette holder – and then set off on our way, smiling and waving confidently. Naturally, we also set about eating our chocolate rations, which we foolishly mixed with segments of orange.

We had left the city limits of Dublin when we began to realise this might not have been the best idea: it was clear that this mixture had a powerful emetic effect when consumed in any quantity. After about fifteen miles, we were in crisis. With no facilities in sight, we had no alternative but to pollute the side of the road.

After another fifteen miles I discovered that I had another problem. The fracture in my left femur after my accident in the marula tree had left me with one leg shorter than the other. Consciously or otherwise, I had developed the habit of never fully extending my right knee, as a way of compensating for the difference in leg length. This knee was now inflamed, and it hurt like hell. I tried to soldier on, but it was becoming impossible, and when we saw the welcoming lights of a roadside pub, we dragged ourselves inside. It was well after hours but the place was still going strong, and we drowned our sorrows over our failure to complete the walk, and then slunk back into college the next morning on the bus. Our return was marked by general derision, although we earned a degree of sympathy for our sorry tale of the emetic effects of chocolate bars. Urney’s, for obvious reasons, dropped us like a hot potato. The sole consolation was that the press which had helped wave us off had better things to focus on.

That humiliation took some living down, and it did nothing to improve my social standing. However, my isolation from my peers was trivial alongside the biggest disappointment of Trinity: the course itself. We had to begin by studying pre-med, which was little more than a rehash of my science A-levels at school, so I was not stretched. Furthermore, now that I had medic friends in the years above me, I could see that they had a level of commitment and dedication to medicine that I could not match. Comparing myself with them, I could see that many of them were cut out to be healers in a way that I was not, and I was by no means certain that I had the patience to spend all my professional life with sick people. I realised it had been a mistake to try to study this subject, and I resolved to leave Trinity at the end of my first year. More than anything else, I was curious about the world, and hungry for as diverse a range of experiences as possible.

I passed all my exams bar chemistry, which I did not even bother to sit, because I had already made my decision. A far better education for me would be to set out to see as much of the globe as I could, learning whatever the world could teach me as I went. It might be rash to enter adult life without a degree of some kind, but I could always get one somewhere else later on. And ultimately, I had already decided, I wanted to follow a piece of advice my mother had given me before I left Rhodesia: that I should go to live for a while in a Buddhist monastery in Asia in order to explore the spiritual philosophies of the East. Precisely how I could make that happen was something I had yet to work out. In the event, it would take me several years, a cross-continental trek in North America and numerous jobs and adventures before I got there.

Eight months later, I was in Frankfurt, and the alarm clock with its two big bells on either side was trilling away so enthusiastically that it threatened to jump off the side-table. As I did every morning, I flung out a bare arm to try and slap the button on the top that would stop the din. I missed a couple of times before I finally hit it.

“You have to get it faster, otherwise Wilhelm will hear,” whispered the woman by my side. She was ten years older than I, but her skin was soft and sweet-smelling, and getting out of the bed was the last thing I wanted to do.

“I’m trying, Traute,” I whispered back. “I’m just not at my best at six o’clock in the morning.”

Stumbling around in the dark, I pulled on some pyjama trousers and a dressing gown and gave my companion a kiss on the lips.

“Biss spater,” Traute whispered after me. See you later.

I opened the door to find a dishevelled male shape in the doorway. It was Traute’s husband, Walter.

“Guten Morgen,” I whispered.

“Morgen, Michael,” he whispered gruffly back, and clapped me amiably on the arm. As I squeezed past him, he slipped inside the room.

There were two doors opposite me, one ajar and the other firmly closed. Softly, I entered the open doorway and got into the warm bed that Walter had just vacated.

“Morning, Rachel,” I whispered to the shape under the covers alongside me.

There was no reply, just the soft sound of breathing. Turning away from her, I pulled my side of the covers over me and closed my eyes in the hope of another decent hour’s sleep before I had to get up again.

I had started my exploration of Europe by lodging with a family near Bonn, the small, functional capital of the demilitarised, chastened West Germany. There I briefly worked as a builder in a mental asylum, until a resident attacked one of my workmates with a hammer and tried to put a nail in his head, whereupon I decided that the job was not worth the danger. I then managed to get a scholarship to a Heimvolkshochschule, or cultural college, in an old monastery near the East German border, where I spent six months learning German folk dancing, attending lectures on German culture and cleaning endless supplies of potatoes, which were a staple of the post-war German diet – as well as picking up enough of the language to get by.

After the course was over, I went to stay with a cousin in Frankfurt and got a job stapling circulars together for the German railway workers’ union. It was tedious work, but there was no danger of being attacked with a hammer.

One night in Frankfurt, I met Rachel. Originally from South Africa, she was trim and attractive, with black hair, and about seven years’ my senior. She told me she was the mistress of a married German artist in his late thirties named Walter, with the full knowledge and consent of his wife. This Walter was looking for someone to help him sell his chocolate-box paintings of Bavarian country scenes to the American military, and when Rachel told him about me, he decided I was the ideal candidate because I was a native English speaker and, hopefully, I was confident enough to knock on doors. The job sounded more interesting than stapling circulars all day, so I accepted, and every evening Rachel drove me around the US military bases. I would go and knock on doors clutching a couple of paintings. Sometimes I was seen off like a mad dog, sometimes I would be allowed in, and occasionally I even sold a painting.

I was invited to live in Walter’s shambolic flat. Initially, the arrangement was that I would share Rachel’s room, which was unorthodox, considering that there was nothing romantic between us and she was attached to Walter. But the domestic set-up would soon become more unorthodox still. Once I moved in, Walter’s wife Traute took a shine to me. She was a sad-looking woman, and certainly no beauty, but she was thoroughly pleasant, and her melancholy demeanour intrigued me. The four of us worked out a deal: I would live with Traute, and Walter would live with his girlfriend, in the same house, in two separate bedrooms. But Walter and Traute had a seven-year-old son who was too young to be told about the unconventional circumstances in which he was growing up. So we agreed that, every morning, when little Wilhelm got up to go to school, we would re-arrange ourselves so that he could say good morning to mummy and daddy in their bedroom and have his breakfast with them. Somehow we managed to get away with it, and the only downside to this otherwise blissful arrangement was that Wilhelm was an early riser; he got up at six-thirty, which meant the rest of us had to swap beds at six.

This ménage à quatre worked wonderfully for a few weeks, but all good things come to an end and I was anxious not to get too comfortable, because I had a world to explore. High on my immediate agenda was Berlin.

Since the post-war division of Germany into two states, the old capital of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich was surrounded entirely by communist East Germany. The city was formally divided into four sectors, controlled by the Americans, the British, the French and the Russians. In reality, however, it was divided in two: the part controlled by the Western allies effectively belonged to West Germany, and, even in its truncated form, was that country’s largest city. It was accessible by air or by a road corridor through East Germany. The Soviet-controlled sector of the city, which included the old Prussian centre and many of the great buildings of the city’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century heyday, was the capital of East Germany.

After hitch-hiking along the road corridor, I checked into a hostel in West Berlin and spent a few days exploring. The obvious first impression was that it looked very different to the German cities I had seen so far. Frankfurt and the area around Bonn had been relatively untouched by Allied bombing, but Berlin was visibly shattered.

For me, East Berlin was the real attraction, partly because it contained many great architectural jewels – the cathedral and the great museums on an island in the Spree, and the heart of the old government quarter – but also because it offered a glimpse into the hidden world of the Eastern Bloc, with its brutal concrete buildings and its chilly Stalinist order. I discovered that it was easy to cross into the East, on the other side of the now deserted Potsdamer Platz, without even showing a passport. Every day, tens of thousands of East Berliners commuted to work in West Berlin on the S-Bahn railway. There was also plenty of traffic in the other direction, from shoppers seeking the few goods of quality made by the East Germans, which were a fraction of the price of those in West Berlin, and which were bought using black market exchange rates.

I joined these bargain hunters and went across on the S-Bahn. Once there, the atmosphere changed abruptly: the place felt immediately hostile, and at times a little scary. Cold War tensions were intensifying, and Berlin was famous as a listening post for spies from both sides. As a result, I felt I was being watched everywhere. It was impossible to know if anybody really did care about a young traveller from colonial Africa, or whether I was just being paranoid. This became a real dilemma as I began to explore some of the camera shops in the crumbling heart of the city. 

Because of the weak currency, the specialist photographic equipment that East Germany excelled in was a complete steal in the Eastern sector. The problem was that the official tourist exchange rate bore no relation to the actual value of the currency. There were strong restrictions against black market exchange, and there was a potential jail sentence if one was caught. In the West, the idea of the security services stalking an ordinary tourist committing a minor breach of currency laws would have been absurd, and maybe it was absurd in the East too, but never having lived in an authoritarian country, I had no sense of what was likely and what was not. After a lot of agitated humming and hawing, I decided it was worth the risk.

I found a black-market money-changer and did my deal, having done my best to discreetly establish that no homburg-hatted agent was watching me from behind a newspaper or from a shadowy doorway. A couple of hours later I was the proud, if nervous, owner of a wonderful Exakta camera with some superb Jena lenses and other equipment, at a third of the normal cost. All I had to do was get it back to the West. I installed it with the rest of my camera gear to make it look as if I had owned it all the time, and got back on an S-Bahn train across the border, doing my best impression of a carefree tourist with nothing to fear. Happily, nobody stopped me, and perhaps it really was absurd to be so worried.

I was fortunate in my timing, however. Nine months later, the communist government in East Germany shocked the world when it started building a fortified wall between East and West Berlin, complete with razor-wire and military checkpoints. Crossing became much more difficult for tourists like me, and all but impossible for residents on the eastern side. For the next twenty-eight years, any East German caught trying to climb the Berlin Wall to escape to the West was liable to be shot dead in the attempt.

A rendezvous with my mother in London, and her gift of fifty pounds, gave me the balance of funds I needed to visit my Trinity friend Simon in Canada, where he was now enjoying an odyssey of his own.

In those days, meeting up with other people on the move was a complicated business. The only way of contacting fellow travellers was to write to them at the poste restante – a public mailbox at the city’s general post office – of whichever place one expected them to have reached. One would suggest a meeting at some prominent landmark on a particular day, and then the same thing the following day if that did not work out, and one would just have to hope that the other person received the letter. It is hard nowadays to imagine how anyone ever managed to pull that off, but it was a normal part of travelling back then, and it was how I made contact with Simon. Once I had docked at the head of the half-frozen St Lawrence River, he and I duly had our reunion in Montreal. He showed me around the city for a few days and then we put French Canada behind us, setting out on the long train journey across the endlessly flat landscape of wheat plains to Calgary, the oil city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

We had nowhere to stay when we arrived, and very little money. But we saw a newspaper advert looking for encyclopaedia salesmen. I had already sold paintings to the US military, so door-to-door selling to civilians was well within my comfort zone, and I started shifting the volumes with some success. The job had lows and highs: I was punched a couple of times, but I was also seduced a couple of times. On one occasion, the two may even have been related.

The itinerant life was not for Simon, however, and after a while he decided to return to England. I waved him off and settled back into my routine as a solo traveller. I was good at being self-sufficient, and I was confident in my ability to make new friends whenever I had a need for company. I continued selling encyclopaedias, but one day, when I got back to the hostel where I had been staying and put my hand in my pocket to pay in advance for the night ahead, I found that my wallet was not there. I checked the other pocket, then the back ones and every pocket of my coat, and I frantically turned my bag inside out. But I did not recall putting it any of those places, and as each part of my search proved fruitless, I realised it was much more likely the wallet had fallen out of my pocket on the electric trolleybus back from the suburb where I had been hawking my wares. I did not even have the change for a phone call, so I raced off to the bus station to see if there was a lost property office. It was still open, but nothing matching the description of my wallet had yet been handed in, and frankly I could not imagine it ever happening. Even if someone did hand it in, the chances of it still having any cash in it were remote, and while I was sorry to have lost the wallet itself, because it had been a gift from my parents two or three years earlier, the loss of the money inside was of much greater practical significance. I always spent cash sparingly and I knew how to get by on very little, but suddenly I did not have a cent to my name.

Retracing my steps to the hostel, I told the owner what had happened and pleaded to be allowed to stay for a few days before I got my next pay packet from the encyclopaedia company. He shook his head and said it was out of the question. He did not even look me in the eye.

I had no choice but to pack up my few possessions and move on, trying to assess my options as I did so. If the worst came to the worst, I could eat by pilfering food from a market. But shelter was going to be more of a problem. I had been so busy pounding the streets selling my encyclopaedia subscriptions that I had made few local contacts, and certainly nobody I knew well enough to ask if I could stay for a few days. There was no such thing as a Rhodesian consulate in Calgary where I could go to ask for an emergency loan. But I had to find somewhere to sleep: even though the winter was drawing to a close, it was still bitterly cold at night, so it was not just a matter of comfort, but of survival. Downtown Calgary was beginning to look like a lonely place as darkness fell and the last commuters disappeared. I found myself wandering aimlessly in search of inspiration, and my path took me into the Memorial Park, a formal garden outside the city’s main library. It had once been the pride of the city but now had a sad and neglected air. At the centre of the park stood a large equestrian statue commemorating the Canadian soldiers who died in the Boer War. The bronze cavalryman wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep the southern African sun out of his eyes, a memory of home that served to emphasise all the more my present cold and miserable state.

I continued my forlorn trudge along the formal paths of the garden. Over in the trees at the fringe of the park was a small, stone-fronted building with a dim yellow bulb glowing over the doorway. I had been there once before: these were the public conveniences, and they had left little positive impression on me at the time. Now, however, I saw the building in a new light. Here at least was a place where I could get out of the wind and snow. I checked that it was open all night and unattended, which it seemed indeed to be. After spending a further couple of hours searching for scraps of food, I came back at the end of the evening and managed to settle myself into a fairly discreet corner. I passed a fitful night on the dank, hard-tiled floor, using my rucksack as a pillow. Not many people came in to use the facilities, and most of those who did looked at me warily and made themselves scarce as quickly as they could.

The next day I was drained. I had running cold water on hand to give myself a basic wash, but there was no soap, and I had spent the night in my clothes so I felt fairly gruesome. One glance in the grimy mirror told me that I was in no fit state to go out knocking on suburban doors to sell encyclopaedia subscriptions. In any case, I did not even have the trolleybus fare to get there. Thus I began the classic spiral down into homelessness. My own jealously guarded territory became my safe space, and I felt a degree of security there that would have been impossible to imagine myself feeling just a week earlier. But with the search for food and the need to protect myself in my shelter becoming my all-consuming priorities, it was hard to think about anything beyond the confines of this narrow world. At night, drunks would taunt me, and some of them found it amusing to relieve themselves directly onto my sleeping bag. I did my best to fend them off, but I was also anxious not to get into fights. So I became meek and diminished. Seeing how quickly my circumstances threatened to transform me was a revelatory experience, and I discovered a new respect for the homeless people I might previously have walked past.

As I shivered at night, I could easily see how tempting it might be to insulate myself against cold and loneliness with cheap beer or worse. But I told myself I must fight such thoughts: keeping my head above the surface was a constant struggle, but I needed even greater strength if I was to pull myself out of this situation.

For two weeks I scoured the job ads in every discarded newspaper I could lay my hands on, and eventually a notice caught my eye. A resort hotel up in the Rockies was looking for a photography assistant in preparation for the summer season, and crucially the post came with accommodation. Fortunately, I still had my precious East German equipment, guarded with my life, inside my rucksack. I managed to beg enough small change together to make a phone call, and somehow I made myself presentable enough for an interview downtown. I do not know whether it was desperation helping me talk a good talk, or simply an absence of other suitable candidates, but they told me the next day that I was hired. They were even prepared to give me a complimentary rail ticket. So I rolled up my poor, abused sleeping bag and said goodbye to Calgary. I was unlikely to forget my stay there.

The Chateau Lake Louise was a vast lakeside mansion originally built in the late nineteenth century by the Canadian Pacific Railway as a way of luring affluent travellers to the west of the country by rail. My work there involved photographing guests and managing the camera accessories shop in the hotel lobby. I was grateful for a comfortable room and very decent food, and once the summer season started, I got on well with the students who came to work through their long vacation. But my time there came to an abrupt end after a clash with my German boss, who had shown from the outset a tendency to order me around. As I became more established, I knew I was doing my job well and I determined to stand up to him. I duly did so – and I was told to pack up my stuff and leave. I could see it was fruitless to argue: I had miscalculated and lost. But the loss was not that great. I knew my way around the resort by then, and before the day was out I had a new job as a soda jerk at a nearby hotel. After a short interlude there, I fell in with three English girls who had a big, clapped-out Chevrolet which they wanted to drive down to the southern United States and then across to New York. Mindful that it would be useful to have a man along, they asked if I would like to join them.

Our journey took us south, across the border into Washington State. Technically a US visa was required, but the border officials were fairly relaxed on the matter if a traveller had, as I did, a valid Canadian visa. We drove on through Oregon and into California, where we saw the Yosemite National Park, and then continued across the desert to Las Vegas. In those days, guests were given a free room in the hope that they would gamble. I had very little money, so I was not inclined to throw it away on the gaming tables, but we spent a couple of days seeing the sinful sights and eating and drinking largely for free. Then we drove on to the Grand Canyon, where I convinced the girls to walk down with me and spend the night on the canyon floor. It was not a restful night: a skunk ambled across our little campsite and when two of the girls woke up and saw it, they started shrieking. They were so scared they ended up spending the rest of the night halfway up a tree.

The next day, after the arduous climb back out of the Canyon, the girls wanted to carry on to Phoenix, but I had had my fill of tourism. Although my travels so far had been haphazard and fairly aimless, I had resolved by now that my ultimate destination was Asia. I was following the lure of those mythical dragons and griffins my grandfather had told me about, and it would also be my opportunity to learn more about the great religions of the East, as my mother had urged. In that context, to head back towards the East Coast of the US felt like going in the opposite direction. So we said our goodbyes and I hitched a ride towards Los Angeles with an English couple. This journey was chiefly memorable for the sandstorm that blew up midway across the Mojave Desert. We were forced to pull over for an hour, and it was remarkable to be inside the cocoon of the car, with fine dust coming through the cracks and the air intake. When the storm finally passed, we got out to inspect the damage and found that the blue car was now silver, having lost its entire paint job in the assault.

Three days later, I was back in Oregon, where I woke up in jail.

The English couple had put me up for a night in Los Angeles, from where I continued up to San Francisco, where Gordon Littleford, my motorbike mate from Rhodesia, now lived with his family, across the bay in Oakland. I heard from them that one could ‘dead-head’ cars – delivering them long distance as a way of getting there oneself – and after they helped me find an appropriate agency, I got a contract to drive a car to Seattle.

The fee for driving the car from California to Washington State was enough for the petrol and minimal food, but it did not leave much over for hotels and proper meals. By nightfall I had got as far as Grants Pass, a small town in Oregon, and I was dog-tired. The car was too cramped to sleep in, so I had an idea. I asked for directions to the local highway patrol office to see if I could stay the night in one of their cells. The patrolman said that would not be possible, but perhaps I would have more luck at the local police station in town. I did as he suggested and repeated my request at the front desk. The officer on duty looked bemused at first but then he shrugged and said: “Okay, but I’m going to have to book you for vagrancy.”

It would be my first (and last) arrest, but I did not see what harm it could do. So I had my photograph and fingerprints taken, then he took away my shoelaces and my belt and led me into the back of the station. He gestured towards a large, bare room equipped with what felt like a searchlight on the ceiling – the bulb must have been two hundred watts – with an open toilet in the corner and a number of empty bunks.

I stared at the cell.

“What’s this?” I said.

“This is the drunk tank,” the officer said.

“But I’m not drunk.”

“It’s fine, this is where you’re going to sleep.”

I had been hoping for a single cell with a nice comfortable bed, but when I said as much, he seemed to find that hilarious. It was a small town and he was probably bored, so the whole episode was clearly amusing him. On the other hand, if he had been busier, he might just have told me to get lost and I would have had to sleep in the car after all, so I had to count what blessings I could find. At least there were no other occupants that night.

He woke me up at six the following morning.

“Out,” he said.

I went back to sleep. I had a long drive ahead of me and I needed all the rest I could get. Besides, I was twenty years old, and I was not good at early mornings.

The officer came back ten minutes later and said: “If you’re not out in five minutes, you’ll stay in here for the week.”

I leapt out of bed with great alacrity, and he gave back my shoelaces, belt, wallet and watch. I went on my way, and I have no doubt he chuckled over the story for the rest of the week.

When I reached Seattle later that day, I had no more money in my pocket than I had had in the morning. But I had at least discovered a way of getting a free bed for the night, so I decided to try my luck once again. I rang what I hoped was a local police office from a phone booth, and got straight through to an operator at the city’s central police station. I explained my predicament.

“You really don’t want to be in one of the cells here,” the operator said. “We have all sorts of unpleasant people – rapists, murderers, drug dealers. You might be assaulted in one of the general holding cells. Why don’t you just come up and see us in the telephone operators’ room?”

I did as she suggested and found the woman I had spoken to on the third floor of the police station. She and five colleagues faced a large switchboard on which a light would blink whenever a call came, whereupon one of them would grab a cable and stick it in the socket for that line.

I caught their end of the various conversations.

“I see, you’ve just found a dead man in your garden. We’ll send a squad car round, ma’am.”

“So, to be clear, your father has just assaulted you?”

“Calm down, sir. You say you’ve just killed your wife?”

The woman had not been joking when she said they had plenty of serious crime in this city.

As I stood in the doorway, one of these operators turned and said, “You must be Michael. Come and sit down with me.”

She walked me to some chairs in the corner of the room and said: “We really can’t organise for you to stay in jail. But some of us have children of your age who are travelling, and we hope that people will help them if they get into difficulties. So we’d like to help you.”

They had collected fifty bucks to put me up in a cheap hotel across the road.

“Please, with our compliments, have a safe journey onwards,” she said.

I was touched beyond words and I went around the room giving each of these kind middle-aged ladies a big kiss of gratitude. That took them by surprise, because America is not much of a kissing culture, but I was overwhelmed by their generosity to a complete stranger.

A friend from Lake Louise had invited me to visit him at his fraternity house in the University of British Columbia. After delivering the car, I used what was left from my donation from my telephone operator friends to buy a bus ticket to Vancouver, a hundred and fifty miles away. I ended up attending some courses that took my fancy at UBC for a few weeks because I was living free at the fraternity house and my friend there kindly gave me a small loan. I didn’t ask for permission to do so, I simply joined the other students at lectures, and the professors never even noticed. I imagine they were more worried about students cutting classes than about strangers taking extra ones.

I knew, however, that I had to get a job if I was ever going to earn enough to get to Asia, and I managed to secure a position in a Vancouver department store selling gloves. I am by nature a good salesman. I had run my own sweet business at school, so I knew I had commercial flair, and my interest in other people was genuine. Unfortunately, those skills were of little use in my department, when there was scarcely a customer in sight from one hour to the next. With winter having started, most who wanted gloves already had them, and I said no more than fifteen or twenty words a day. It might have worked better had I been allowed to approach people and tell them I had a great deal for them, but that was not the style of the store. So I stood there all day, shuffling gloves from one tray to another. It was one of the only times in my life that I have suffered genuine, profound boredom. My frustration must have been obvious, because the manager fired me after three days.

I needed to find something more constructive, and I had heard there was a logging camp at Port Alice, at the far north-western end of Vancouver Island. It was a remote place. The island was visible across the bay from the city, but it then extended three hundred miles northwards, and that was where the camp was. Since there was no road there, it was only accessible by boat or seaplane.

I made my enquiries and discovered that the place was run on a Catch-22 arrangement: only union members were allowed in, but it was impossible to join the union without having a job.

Despite that, I managed to talk my way into the company’s Vancouver office.

“What can you do?” asked the recruitment manager dubiously.

“I’ll do anything,” I said truthfully. “I’m fit and willing, and I’m a fast learner.”

“Well, you could be a logger,” he said, not looking convinced by his own words. “But it’s a tough job. You have to start at the bottom as a choker-man. You put a choker chain around the trunk of a felled tree so the crane can haul it up. Then it goes on a trailer to the pulp mill. It’s the worst job, and accidents happen.” He looked down at the dog-eared résumé I had optimistically offered him. “This medicine course you say you did. Did you do any chemistry?”

“Yes, certainly. A year of it.”

There was no need to tell him I never wrote the exam. He did not have the air of a man who would care.

“In that case we have an opening in the pulp mill,” he said. ”We need a lab assistant to analyse the pulp as it gets processed. You’ll need to work shifts, but I’m sure you could handle that.”

I agreed, and I was officially accepted into the camp.

It was a tough place, populated by refugees from the normal world. Most of these loggers and pulp mill workers would come and work like crazy for three to six months and then go to Vancouver and blow their earnings on booze and prostitutes, after which they would come back and repeat the cycle. I stuck out a mile. My affectation of smoking with an ivory cigarette holder caused a good deal of mirth. Although I was fit, I was tall and thin, rather than burly like my lumberjack colleagues, which added to their amusement. And of course I spoke with an odd accent. Rhodesian sounds like a softer version of South African, without that harsh Afrikaner throatiness, and my own version of it was an educated one, so to their ears I simply sounded English. But I could cope with being teased, and to the amateur social anthropologist in me, everything about them was interesting.

My shift colleague in the pulp mill laboratory was another matter. He was a working-class Englishman called John who had somehow found his way to Canada in middle age. He was disgruntled and unhappy, and I guess he saw in me the other side of life: I had chosen to go there, and I would probably go on to something else, whereas he was forced to remain in that place. Whatever the reason, he made it clear he hated me from the day I walked in and said good evening to him.

Every day after that I would say good morning or good evening, and every day he would studiously ignore me as we tested the pulp that was being cooked in giant vats. It was not persecution on his part, so much as an absolute refusal to co-operate. I had learned at school not to waste energy worrying about hostility when it was clearly the other person’s problem not mine. John had to live with himself, and I was doing fine living with myself. But it was nonetheless a frustrating experience to spend many months working alongside someone who, for no rational reason, hated me and had no intention of moderating that attitude.

The pulp mill manager invited me for dinner from time to time – I imagine because he was bored and isolated too, and I was a better conversational prospect than just about anyone else in the camp. That was my only social life, and when I was due a couple of weeks’ vacation, I had no desire to go back to Vancouver to drink away my hard-earned cash like my workmates. Instead I discovered there was a log cabin on a lake, about fifteen miles inland from the pulp mill, where I would be allowed to stay.

The only way to get there was on foot. I arrived laden with my basic rations for two weeks – mainly cans, cereals and powdered milk. The cabin itself more than lived up to its billing. It consisted of just one room, with rather primitive cooking facilities, but it was barely ten metres from a lake on which there was an ethereally beautiful mist every morning, and the whole place was surrounded by virgin forest. After the crudeness of the logging camp, the peace and isolation was a joy – at first, at any rate. At that age, because of my general curiosity, I was essentially a gregarious person. With nobody else for miles, a limited supply of books and no telephone or radio, I began to feel the weight of loneliness. The only noises were the sounds of the forest, and after four or five days I started talking to myself. I realised that being truly alone is something few people ever experience – except prisoners in solitary confinement. Unlike them, I could walk outside and admire the scenery. I could also have trekked back to the camp any time I liked, so I was not trapped. But staying was one of the toughest things I had ever done.

At the end of the two weeks I knew I had had enough, but I was also encouraged that I had been able to take it. It reinforced the ambition that I had been steadily developing: once I finally got to Asia, I would seek out a monastery where I would further test my powers of endurance, in every sense of the word, which would help me to tackle the far more difficult task of making spiritual progress. I had every intention of taking seriously my mother’s instruction to explore the world’s great belief systems. With its focus on self-knowledge and awareness of one’s place within the universe, Buddhism was the philosophy that interested me the most. I was beginning to sense that I might be more or less able to handle its disciplines.

Back in camp, I resumed my place in the kind of world where solitude was an impossible aspiration. The bunkhouse was rife with drinking and gambling, and the room next to mine was occupied by a particularly burly French Canadian who used to invite all his mates in to get loudly drunk with him. One night I was woken by a monumental crash as a fist came through the wall about a foot above my face. I heard drunken laughter through a hole in the well.

“Did you get the English bastard?”

“No, I missed,” said the owner of the fist.

The pugilist was clearly on a roll now and thought he would have another go. So there was another loud crunch, but this time it was followed by a howl of agony.

“Christ, I think I’ve broken my wrist!”

He had punched straight into a joist, so the game came to an end and I could go back to sleep.

After I had accumulated a couple of thousand dollars in savings, I packed my bag and returned to the United States, once again getting by on my Canadian visa.

Having been toughened up in the logging camp, I now felt I could handle anything. Staying once more at the Littlefords’ place in Oakland, I presented myself at the Alameda docks, the heart of the port of San Francisco. The selection process was haphazard: one had to turn up with a bunch of other deadbeats at six in the morning and hope to be picked by the foreman. Fortunately, because I was fresh and eager, I was selected most of the time.

On my first day, keen to show that I was capable of hard work, I was rushing around moving crates when the foreman came up to me and said: “Hey kid, see that pile of bags over there?”

“Yes,” I said, following where he was pointing.

“I want you over there and fast asleep in five minutes, for the next two hours. We’re in no rush here. You’re making us all look bad.” After that I slowed my pace.

The other eye-opener, in these days before the advent of containers, was the number of deliberate accidents. A crate from Japan would somehow ‘fall off the forklift’ and break open. Suddenly there were all these Sony radios lying on the floor and everyone was stuffing them in their bags.

“Help yourself!” someone would say.

I declined. I didn’t want to seem priggish, but I disapproved. Although I had no intention of snitching, this large-scale, deliberate pilfering seemed pretty venal to me.

There was plenty of time for other pursuits outside working hours. I made contact with Jane, an English girl I had met in Vancouver, who was now living in San Francisco. At her apartment one day I picked up a book which would change my life. Entitled The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, it had been written immediately after the war by an American anthropologist called Ruth Benedict. She had never set foot in Japan – it was impossible for Westerners to do so in the war years – and she had written the book at the behest of the US Office of War Information, which wanted to predict the behaviour of the Japanese by gaining a better understanding of their national culture. Despite this unpromising genesis, it had come to be accepted as the seminal work on the country, and it made a convincing attempt to describe the code of behaviour in Japan and to explain why the Japanese were so perplexingly different to most other people in the world. One of Ruth Benedict’s arguments was that most early societies, once they had the tools, tried to control their natural environment, and from there went on to try to control everything else, but the Japanese had never tried to control nature – they had simply accepted that they were part of it. Typhoons, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis had, over the centuries, given them an absolute sense of the immutability of the natural world, and as a result, they lived closer to a state of nature than any other nation, both literally and figuratively. In nature, there is only survival and balance, and a recognition of that fact had had a major impact on their spiritual philosophy, and their attitude to one another. Since it was inappropriate to impose ideals of fairness and order upon nature’s random and often brutal acts, many Japanese did not experience guilt, because they did not believe in fairness, even as an ideal. This seemed to me a startlingly good way of understanding their behaviour during the Second World War: while undeniably appalling, it was perfectly consistent with the standards evolved by their civilisation. They did what they had always done, and they did unto others as they did to their own people. What the Germans did under Hitler was abhorrent and a complete break with their Christian belief system and culture.

It made me see that railing against this reality or assessing blame for their wartime conduct served little purpose, and by the end of the book I was gripped by this fascinating country and its culture, marked off by place, time and history from the rest of the world, and in many respects remaining as Japanese as it had been for hundreds or even a thousand years. Now, more than ever, I was determined to see Japan for myself and immerse myself in its culture.

I set to thinking seriously about the practicalities of getting there. I heard that the US Coast and Geodetic Survey was looking for sailors to crew one of its survey ships. It was heading up to Alaska and then down to Hawaii and back to San Francisco. That was a good enough start – it would get me halfway to Japan without my having to part with a cent, and I would get paid into the bargain. Along with one of Gordon Littleford’s brothers, I went to sign up. Thanks to my lab experience at the pulp mill, I was immediately taken on. One of the ship’s tasks was to analyse seawater samples at different depths, and my job was to run the lab where this was done. It was very similar to the task at the logging camp, except that I would not have to spend all my working hours in the company of someone who openly disliked me. It sounded excellent.

We embarked for the northern seas and encountered some seriously rough weather off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. Waves would rear ten or fifteen metres over the stern of the boat, and we crashed up and down with them. It was hairy stuff but we got through it intact. In due course we carried on down towards Hawaii. But as we sailed into the central Pacific, I realised I might have a problem. When I signed on, I had told the Coast Guard recruiting officer that I was the son of an American diplomat stationed in Africa, in order to cover the fact that I did not have a US visa in my passport or a social security number. In those days, if one said that kind of thing with sufficient confidence, and looked the part, one could get away with it. But now one of the senior sailors tipped me off that we were all automatically being checked out because of the quasi-secret nature of the survey work, and I would be in a mess if they realised I had effectively entered the country illegally.

“Your best option is to jump ship in Hawaii before things catch up with you,” he advised. “If they do catch you, you’ll be deported and then you’ll never be able to get back into the United States.”

It sounded good advice. I notified the captain that I had a family emergency, whereupon I was given my last pay check and wished good luck. I now found myself on the quayside in Honolulu, halfway across the Pacific and with cash in my pocket.

I fell under the wing of some friendly local Hawaiians, who took me to live on a plantation in the Kona district, famous for its coffee, on the Big Island. We picked coffee beans by day and in our time off we hunted wild boars with knives and spears – or at least, I went with them while they did it. Leaping on a wild pig with a huge blade was a little too muscular for me, but I enjoyed eating the roast meat. Unfortunately, I lost a front tooth and I had to return to Honolulu, where I got it fixed – at no cost – on the US naval base, as my navy PX Card was still valid. I then managed to get a job in a parking garage in Honolulu, where I became friendly with a native Hawaiian who ran a surfing concession on Waikiki Beach. I had started surfing on family holidays in Durban and Mozambique, and had become quite good at it since arriving in Hawaii.

“Look,” my friend said one day, “one of my buddies has just dropped out, and you can surf, so why don’t you come and join me, teaching tourists?”

Within the space of a year I had been a paintings and glove salesman, a lumberjack, a stevedore, and a naval lab technician. Now I was to become a professional surfer. And although I could not know it when I took the job, this role would give me an introduction that would determine the course of the rest of my life.

Waikiki was a busy beach with lots of tourists, ninety percent of them from the US mainland. Some were young and fit and genuinely wanted to surf, but many were bloated landlubbers who merely played with the idea. There were a few Asian tourists too, and one afternoon a young Japanese guy in shirt and swimming trunks, with a completely shaved head, approached me.

“Want to rahn suffing,” he announced.

“What?” I asked.

“Want rahn suffing,” he repeated.

I said I was sorry, I really could not understand what he meant.

“Suffing!” he said, getting agitated now.

“Ah,” I said as the penny finally dropped. “You want to learn surfing!”

The conversation became less stilted as my ear grew used to his accent. He told me his name was Koichi, and he had only just arrived in Hawaii. He had been sent by his temple in a monastery complex in Mount Koya to open a similar temple on Oahu, the island where Honolulu sits.

As I listened to him, an idea was forming. I had already established through my own research that anyone who wanted to go into a Japanese monastery was expected to lie on the front steps for a number of days, and sometimes for as much as a couple of weeks, in rain or snow, to show how serious they were about becoming a monk. But I had also learned from reading The Chrysanthemum and the Sword that if I did Koichi a favour, he would feel a sense of obligation to me, as his abbot probably would, because I had helped one of his monks. That was the Japanese way.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s my ambition to go to a monastery in Japan, and I would be very grateful for an introduction to your abbot. If you’re able to give me one, I will give you free surfing lessons. I’ll also help you find a place to live and look after you while you settle in.”

Koichi considered for a moment and then told me he would accept the deal. I duly spent a couple of months teaching him to surf and I took him under my wing, as other people had taken me under theirs.

I had been calculating to some extent, because I had not known him when I made my offer. But I was confident it had been a good idea. I already had enough money from the logging camp, the survey vessel and the surfing to buy a ticket on a liner to Yokohama, and now I had an entrée into a Buddhist monastery. I was about to put into practice my mother’s advice of investigating one of the great religious philosophies of the world at its source. All I had to do was book my passage.