My mother’s most treasured reading was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.1 The book sat on her bedside table for years, silently rebuking the levity of my father’s favourite, The Count of Monte Cristo, which lay beside his pillow on the opposite side.2 The two heroes epitomized my parents’ contrasting frames of mind. I have every reason to suspect that the ‘The Pilgrim’ and ‘The Count’ presided discreetly at the launch of my own career.
Despite an obligatory pilgrimage to his birthplace at Elstow in Bedfordshire, aged seven or eight, I never really warmed to Bunyan. He was a Puritan and a preacher, earnest to a fault. Yet it was from him that I learned the wonderful allegory that presents life as a journey, that describes its ‘Sloughs of Despond’ and its ‘Delectable Mountains’, and promises a ‘Celestial City’ at the end. In school assembly we would all sing Bunyan’s stirring hymn with gusto:
He who would valiant be
’Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.3
The metrical melody by Ralph Vaughan Williams greatly adds to the impact.
I was brought up to sing hymns. I can still sit down at the piano and play scores of them from memory. And there’s none to beat Cwm Rhondda, the ‘Prayer for Strength’, sung in a sonorous A flat major, which is the ultimate girder-of-loins:
Guide me O Thou, Great Redeemer,
Pilgrim in this barren land.
I am weak, but Thou art mighty;
Hold me with Thy powerful hand.
Bread of Heaven! Bread of Heaven!
Feed me till I want no more.
When I pass the banks of Jordan
Bid my anxious fears subside.
Death of death, and Hell’s destruction
Bring me safe to Canaan’s side.
Songs of Praises! Songs of Praises!
I will ever give to Thee.4
Whenever a ‘Slough of Despond’ is looming, one or two quick bursts of Cwm Rhondda suffice to dispel it.
Once or twice a year my son Christian (who was named in part after Bunyan’s hero) takes me to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, both to watch the rugby and to listen to the singing. There, the Welsh words soar even higher:
Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r
Fi berein gwael ei wedd
Na does ynof nerth na bywyd
Fel yn gorwedd yn y bedd:
Hollaluog! Hollaluog!
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i lan
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i lan.5
Both my father and my mother lost elder brothers in the Great War. Most of the popular songs in their repertoire were drawn from that period, and would resurface for my benefit in the 1960s in Joan Littlewood’s brilliant show Oh! What a Lovely War. Themes of loss and longing predominated:
There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you.6
Few modern pop songs possess either the melody, or the mood, or the message.
In the third or fourth form at school we all read William Hazlitt’s ‘On Going a Journey’ as a classic example of English essay-writing. It was a revelation to me that someone could calmly dissect his own thoughts and feelings with such fastidious precision. Hazlitt (1778–1830), who had a miserable life, advocated the joys of solitude and the therapeutic benefits of travelling. The essay is best known for one sentence: ‘It is better to travel than to arrive.’ But it contains other gems, too: ‘I am never less alone than when alone’ and ‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner – and then to thinking!’7
To my eternal advantage several of my schoolmasters shared Hazlitt’s philosophy, and took us on numerous outings with much green turf beneath our feet. Before I was far into my teens, I had climbed the Lakeland hills (starting with Helvellyn), explored the Peak District (starting with Mam Tor), strolled through the glades of the ancient New Forest from our encampment in the Queen’s Bower, trekked across the wastes of Dartmoor, and pitched my tent below the battlements of a Highland castle, serenaded by the Laird’s piper.
Another schoolmaster who had a profound effect in a short time was David Curnow, later Professor of English Literature at the American University of Beirut. Newly graduated from Cambridge, he had the near-impossible task of injecting literary sensitivity into the blockheads of a group of sixth-formers who had already dropped English as a main subject. Tall and elegant, he played his part sporting a Teddy Boy quiff, a foppish cravat, and an immaculately pressed pair of cavalry twills. His technique was to sidle quietly into the room, hands in trouser pockets, to ignore the hubbub, and to take a piece of chalk and write a few lines of verse on the blackboard. He would then spin around, face the blockheads, say nothing, and wait for a response:
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.8
The effect was electric. The hubbub subsided. And silence fell onto a roomful of adolescent youths, all ‘pined away with desire’, who realized that William Blake was speaking directly to them about life, death, sex, and spiritual travel.
Around that time, almost by accident, I discovered the world of travel books. Wandering around Bolton municipal library, I hit on an unusually large travel section, mainly of Victorian vintage. Memorable titles included Arthur Young’s Travels in France (1792), Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (1844), George Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862) (which aroused my curiosity about family roots), R. L. Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), which fed a fascination with rural France, and Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (1900). My undoubted favourite, though, was William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830), which combined detailed descriptions of horseback journeys around pre-industrial England with trenchant political and social opinions. Long before I went up to Oxford, Cobbett had told me what to expect:
Upon beholding the masses of buildings at Oxford, devoted to what they call ‘learning’, I could not help reflecting on the drones that they contain and the wasps they send forth! However malignant as some are, the great and prevalent characteristic is folly: emptiness of head, want of talent, and one half of the fellows, who are what they call educated here, are unfit to be clerks in a grocer’s or mercer’s shop … And I could not help exclaiming to myself: ‘Stand forth, ye big-wigged, ye gloriously feeding Doctors! Stand forth, ye rich of the Church whose poor have given them a hundred thousand pounds a year … Stand forth and face me, who have, from the pen of my leisure hours, sent among your flocks … [more] than you have all done for the last half century!9
No less inspiring for a growing boy were works of fictional travel. I was whipped into a white heat by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. I read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine when confined to bed with mumps or measles, and it only added to the delirium. In my mind I invented my own machine that could recover the light rays emitted by historical events and thus, by setting the dials to a particular place and a particular date – such as Thermopylae at -480, or Hastings at +1066 – could reconstruct a picture of the relevant scene. ‘There are really four dimensions,’ Wells wrote, ‘three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.’ And it stuck. Arduous journeys through Time and Space would be rewarded with limitless knowledge, untold marvels and the secrets of the Earth.10
Today, I am struck by the fact that supposed experts who draw up lists of their ten or twenty ‘Best Travel Books of All Time’ almost always ignore the foundations of the genre.11 Most contemporary commentators appear blissfully unaware, for example, of Goethe’s Italian Journey, one of the pillars of the canon. Goethe toured Italy for two years immediately before the French Revolution, but only published his diaries of the journey more than three decades later, having expanded them with extensive reflections and commentaries. At first sight, his work looks similar to the innumerable descriptions of the Grand Tour that well-heeled Europeans had been producing for centuries. In fact, it was highly innovatory. Goethe convinced himself that the highest purpose of travel was self-discovery; travel was eine Schule des Sehens, ‘a school of seeing’; he wanted, he said, ‘to discover myself in the objects I see’. By confronting new landscapes, works of art, and people, he was gauging his own reactions, and learning about his personal tastes, preferences, and opinions. He did so in large measure by what has been called his ‘Discovery of the Antique’ – the realization that the Greeks and Romans had left behind living traditions, not merely piles of ruins. He was engaged, in fact, in an experiment, one that was both psychological and cultural.12
Goethe’s work was anything but a simple chronicle. Although based on diaries from 1786–8, the overlayering of later elaborations gave it a strangely ambiguous quality. It was, he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘both entirely truthful and a graceful fairy tale’. His love for the land beyond the Alps was lasting:
Kennst du das Land? wo die Zitronen bluehn
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen gluehn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht.13
(Know you the land where the lemon-trees bloom?
Where golden oranges gleam in dark foliage?
A gentle wind blows from the blue Heaven.
The myrtle is still, and the laurel stands high.)
The opening line of Italian Journey is, famously, ‘Et in Arcadia ego’.
I believe that the late Margaret Higginson, headmistress of Bolton School, who dared to lead a party of pubescent boys and girls to Venice, Florence, and Verona in the Easter vacation of 1956, was moved by the same sort of ideas. For reading on the long train journey, she recommended a small book on classical literature called Poets in a Landscape.14 I was hooked for life. What I did not know then is that the book’s author, Gilbert Highet, a Scots professor of classics who made his name in the United States, had earlier produced the subject’s ‘bible’ – The Classical Tradition.15 ‘The world is quite small now,’ Highet wrote in yet another book, People, Places and Books, ‘but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting into a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.’16
Aged just eighteen I went abroad for the first time on my own. Having passed the Oxford entrance exams, I went to Grenoble in the Dauphiné, to learn to speak French fluently and to test my survival skills. I dreamt the expedition up for myself, determined to follow in the footsteps of a favourite cousin, Sheila, who had studied there before the Second World War. My choice of destination was strongly influenced by the vicinity of the Alps. I attended classes at the university, while taking a room with the family De La Marche at 5, Rue du Lycée (long since demolished). I gained much from the kindness of my widowed landlady, ‘Madame La Baronne’, made friends with her sons, Christian and Bernard, and, though not funded for skiing, took to the hills whenever possible. One of the best ways of learning French, I found, was to help the boys’ sister, Marie-Louise, with her homework and to repeat the exercises in her textbook. Marie-Louise, then twelve or thirteen, was known in the family as ‘Choupette’. One day she was given a sixteenth-century sonnet to learn by heart:
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy-là, qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.
Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage?
Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux
Que des palais Romains, le front audacieux:
Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine.
Plus mon Loir gaulois, que le Tibre latin,
Plus mon petit Liré, que le Mont Palatin
Et plus que l’air marin, la douceur angevine.17
(Happy is he, like Ulysses, who has made a good journey
Or like the other one, who conquered the Golden Fleece,
And has then returned, full of experience and good sense,
To live among his kin for the rest of his days.
When, alas, shall I see my little village again,
Its smoke rising from the chimney? and in what season
See once more the enclosure of my poor house,
Which is a province for me, and much more besides?
The shelter that my ancestors built pleases me more
Than the palaces of Rome, with their bold facades;
And fine slate is more pleasing than hard marble:
I prefer my Gaulish Loire to the Latin Tiber,
My little Liré to the Palatine Mount
And the gentleness of Anjou to [harsh] sea air.)
The author, Joachim du Bellay, had made the long journey from his native Anjou to Rome, and was suffering from a bout of homesickness, as I did occasionally in Grenoble. Where, I wonder, is Choupette now?
Ulysses, of course, was the Roman name for the Greek Odysseus, the archetypal European wanderer. Homer had made him the hero of European literature’s second founding classic. Odysseus, whose name means ‘Trouble’, a veteran of the Trojan War, was kidnapped by the predatory nymph Calypso, and only returned to his native Ithaca after a decade of adventurous travels. Homer’s epic treatment of the story runs to 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameters. My own copy, in an English prose translation, was bought at a time when I was being pressed to apply for the school’s elite Greek set. The translation, alas, struck me as less than exciting. ‘All the survivors of the war had reached their homes by now,’ it began flatly, ‘and so put the perils of battle and of the sea behind them.’18 My enthusiasm might have been greater had someone told me about the much earlier translation by George Chapman (1559–1634), a contemporary of Shakespeare, who was born only one year before Du Bellay died, or about the white-hot enthusiasm of John Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.19
The object of Keats’s enthusiasm was composed in ingenious rhyming couplets, each of two, ten-syllable lines:
The Man (O Muse) informe, that many a way
Wound with his wisedome to his wished stay;
That wanderd wondrous farre when He the towne
Of sacred Troy had sackt and shiverd downe.
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, mindes and fashions,
He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
Much care sustaind, to save from overthrowes
Himselfe and friends in their retreate for home.
But so their fates he could not overcome,
Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise,
They perisht by their owne impieties,
That in their hunger’s rapine would not shunne
The Oxen of the loftie-going Sunne,
Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft
Of safe returne. These acts, in some part left,
Tell us, as others, deified seed of Jove.20
With Greek foolishly spurned, my classical education was confined to Latin, whose dignified cadences and superb grammatical motor I learned to admire. I soon progressed enough to be introduced to Virgil and his Aeneid, which I read more with reverence than with effortless mastery. And I frequently resorted to a parallel crib:
Arma virumque cano. Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit
litora - multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram,
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
inferretque deos Latio – genus unde Latinum
Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.21
(This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile, he was the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy, at its Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high Heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in warfare. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land: and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the Lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome.)22
The impact of such writing on Western literature was permanent. Foremost among the many heirs and successors of Homer and Virgil was Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose divine Divina Commedia still awaited me, and which would provide the centrepiece of my Special Subject, ‘The Age of Dante’, during my studies at Oxford. Dante’s spiritual journey through the afterlife was based on a Christian vision that pagans such as Homer and Virgil could not have shared. Even so, the Florentine belongs to the great triumvirate of spiritual journey-makers. He called Virgil lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore, ‘My master and my author’, choosing him as his guide on the first stage of the road to Paradise.
Through all of this, I became increasingly aware that there was more to travelling than simply going from place to place. Education, in fact, draws partly on class-teaching and book-learning, but equally on the formative effects of putting the learner into new and stimulating surroundings. At first, I willingly subscribed to the apparent axiom that ‘travel broadens the mind’. I would have agreed with Mark Twain, himself a globetrotter, who wrote ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness … charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.’23
Nowadays, I am less sure. In a world where travel has lost many of its mental and physical exertions, one meets people who fly thousands of miles to do a bit of shopping in Dubai, to lie on a beach in Bali, or to watch a cricket match in Adelaide. ‘I have been to the Galapagos Islands three times,’ a well-heeled American lady told me on one long-distance flight, ‘and can’t think where to go next.’ What do such people learn other than variations in temperature and the techniques of negotiating airports? Some travellers travel enormous distances and keep all their preconceptions intact. The mind, alas, is not broadened automatically. ‘Travel makes a wise man better and a foolish man worse’, as the proverb puts it.
Only recently did I read that one of the earliest pioneers of travel writing, the Italian poet Petrarch, reached the same conclusion nearly 700 years ago. In 1336, and uniquely for the time, Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence with his brother, and recorded his impressions. He took a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions with him, and read a relevant passage on the summit. ‘People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks,’ St Augustine wrote, ‘by the waves of the sea, by waterfalls and oceans, and by the revolution of the stars, but not by themselves.’ This mountain-top moment has been described as the ‘opening day of the Renaissance’.24 Petrarch, moreover, was thoroughly disgusted by a group of colleagues who had refused to join him on the ascent. In his words, they displayed a frigida incuriositas, a ‘frigid lack of curiosity’.25
The full name of Bolton in Lancashire, the former County Borough where I was born and raised, is Bolton-le-Moors, which derives from its designation as such as a mediaeval parish. (Its takeover by Greater Manchester was hardly more justified than Putin’s recent annexation of Crimea.) I spent many happy days as a youth wandering those moors, feeling the strength of my legs, finding my bearings in the mist and rain, and wondering about life’s directions.
On a fine summer’s evening one could stand on the edge of the moors at Rivington Pike, and watch the setting sun over the distant Irish Sea. The spike of Blackpool Tower, forty miles away across the flat Fylde, was usually visible; and, if the angle of light and the humidity were right, the shadowy outline of the Isle of Man would peep above the horizon. That, for me, was the West. Beyond the horizon lay Ireland, beyond Ireland, the Atlantic, and beyond the Atlantic – America. For many years, though, I was never tempted to cross the western sea. And I have yet to set foot on the Isle of Man.
My perch at the top of the Pike, sitting beside the Beacon Tower and watching the fire-red sun as it slowly sank from sight, also supplied an occasion for reviewing my own place in the galaxy. The obvious temptation, which had deluded mankind for millennia, was to think that the Sun was moving, and that I, the Beacon Tower and the Pike itself were stationary. Yet somewhere in my school lessons I had been taught the Copernican principle about the Earth rotating around a static Sun. Indeed, the Earth was not only revolving around the Sun at a mean 30 kilometres per second; at the same time, it was spinning on its own axis, giving rise to the phenomena of nights and days. And it was spinning at one hell of a rate. At roughly 53°N, Rivington Pike (together with me, the whole of the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere around it) was cruising along at a cool 600 mph. One couldn’t feel it. But the breeze in one’s face betrayed the atmospheric drag, and by closing one’s eyes it was not difficult to imagine what was actually happening. Despite its apparent movement, the Sun was hanging still, whilst the Pike and its surroundings were hurtling up and away in a huge elliptical arc. Without being able to perceive it directly, I was riding a colossal, planetary double thrust, one larger and the other smaller. The only thing to which it could be compared was the complex motion of the merry-go-round at Bolton’s annual New Year Fair, where the great carousel revolved in its orbit round the central pillar and the individual ‘whirler’ cars spun simultaneously on their own axial track.
Far more frequently, however, I was drawn not to the West but in the opposite direction, and would plunge into the wild, mysterious moorlands on the inland side. Standing on the eastern scarp of Winter Hill, I could easily pick out the Peel Tower on Holcombe Hill above Ramsbottom, and further off the dark line of Blackstone Edge on the frontier of Yorkshire. In the era before motorways, Yorkshire, ‘the Land of the Tykes’, was a strange and inaccessible country, where people spoke in graveyard tones and always drove down the middle of the road. That, for me, was the exotic East. Beyond Yorkshire lay the North Sea, and beyond the North Sea, I knew, mainland Europe. So if ‘the Pike’ was the temple of the sunset, Winter Hill’s scarp was the belvedere of the sunrise. One could sit among the heather and tufted grass, listen to the skylarks and curlews, and watch the growing sunlight as it illuminated the ridges and valleys of England’s Pennine backbone.
Such was the wonderland of my youth. There was no better place to orient oneself in time and space, and it was on our doorstep. I would take the 19 or 20 bus to Doffcocker, or higher up to Montserrat, and stride along the old Chorley road, hugging the fence of the sheep fields and looking down to where several million souls were squeezed into a great industrial conurbation. In front the open sky beckoned, the breeze off the hills, and blessed emptiness. After a mile or so, I would cut up the quarry track opposite the ‘Jolly Crofters’ at Bottom o’th Moor, push on between the dry-stone walls, and, panting with expectation, step onto the high, windblown heathland – lord of all I surveyed.
I was aware from an early age that my freedom to roam the moors was a privilege that had not existed during my father’s boyhood, and indeed that my own youthful roamings were technically illegal. Until the early twentieth century, the good people of Bolton were forced to stay at home and stifle in their own coal-fired pollution because the Bridgeman Earls of Bradford, the owners of the moors, would not grant access to territory reserved for grouse and partridge. It was a topic close to the heart of William Cobbett. In his day, men could be transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing a game bird and executed for resisting a gamekeeper; he boiled with righteous indignation:
It is said, and I believe truly, that there are more persons imprisoned in England for offences against the game laws than there are persons imprisoned in France (with more than twice the population) for all sorts of offences put together. When there was a loud outcry against the cruelties committed on the priests and the seigneurs … of France, Arthur Young bade them remember the cruelties committed on the people [of France] by the game laws, and to bear in mind how many had been made galley-slaves for having killed, or tried to kill, partridges, pheasants and hares.26
After the Game Act of 1831, which introduced both the registration of gamekeepers and the closed season for shooting, protests moved onto issues such as the right of access to land and the law of trespass.
I am proud to say that my Uncle Don – Donnie Davies, who was killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958 – played a prominent role in the mass protests that finally opened our section of the Pennines to the public. In 1910 he and his fellow conspirators invented a spurious pretext for erecting a historical memorial on the ancient track across Winter Hill. They found the records of a Scottish tinker called George Henderson, who had been ‘foully murdered’ on Rivington Moor in November 1838, and then gained permission to erect a monument to his ‘eternal memory’. Policemen and gamekeepers were on hand as the commemoration party struggled up the steep path from Belmont with a donkey cart carrying the heavy iron caisson. But once ‘Scotchman’s Stump’ had been fixed in its base and the unveiling ceremony started, hundreds of determined ‘mourners’ appeared over the brow of the moor, completely swamping the forces of order. A handful of protesters were fined for trespass. But all attempts to bar access to peaceful walkers were henceforth abandoned. Elsewhere in England the campaign persisted much longer. The biggest of all mass trespasses was organized on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire in 1932. The legal ‘right to roam’ was not finally established before the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000.
Rambling round the moors, I also gained the habit of digging out local history, honing perhaps a latent detective instinct. Wherever I went, it became second nature not only to ask ‘What can I see?’ but also to wonder about everything that can no longer be seen at first sight. I became intrigued by the things that used to be there, but were no longer easily visible.
Roman Britain, with which the English feel an imperial affinity, left few sites in Lancashire. Manchester’s origins begin with the Roman fort of Mancunium, whence stone roads radiated northwards. My father once drove us over to Affetside to inspect the meagre remains of one of them, locally known as Watling Street. Twenty miles further north, an important military settlement at Bremetannicum Veteranum (now Ribchester) lay on the banks of the Ribble. A silver cavalry helmet found there is now displayed in the British Museum.27
The Roman legions left in AD 410, but the subsequent wave of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invaders did not reach our western coast with any great speed. I mistakenly took a tiny place near Bolton called Anglezarke, which is now surrounded by reservoirs, as proof of the Angles’ early arrival. I was wrong about the derivation of the name, but right to assume that they and their culture did eventually arrive.
Since both Romans and Angles were immigrants, I was long puzzled by the identity of Lancashire’s indigenous inhabitants. If they didn’t speak either Latin or Old English, who exactly were they? With a Welsh surname like Davies, I ought to have guessed. The clues lie with a couple of hills, one called Pendle and another, just across the Yorkshire border, called Pen-y-Ghent. Pen- means ‘Head’ or ‘Peak’ in Welsh, and the names reveal that Lancashire’s pre-Roman and pre-Anglo-Saxon ‘aborigines’ were Celtic ‘Britons’. The native Lancastrians belonged to Wales before they belonged either to England or to Lancashire. Lancaster bears a name that can be traced to the Brythonic appellation of the River Lune; and it is entirely possible that large parts of the future county once lay within the bounds of the Clyde-based ‘Kingdom of the Rock’.28
The supposedly fearsome Vikings always attracted me; my own first name means ‘Norseman’. Their dragon-prowed longboats appeared in the ninth century, after which they settled in Ireland, in northern Scotland (which they called their ‘Sutherland’), in York, and in Cumbria. At some point, I learned that ‘Anglezarke’ derived from the Old Norse Anlafserg, meaning ‘Anlaf’s Hill Pasture’. (There once was a Viking king of York called Anlaf Guthrisson.)
The Normans, who conquered England in 1066, were also ‘Norsemen’ in origin. They had arrived in France a few generations previously. Their French-speaking knights divided up the English land, and one of them, Harvey de Walter, a companion of ‘The Conqueror’, built a castle atop a hill not far from Bolton. His descendants thereon took the surname of De Hoghton. I once dragged my mother to Hoghton Tower on a trip involving many buses; there was nothing to support the rumour that Shakespeare had once taken refuge there, and the visit of King James I in 1617 when (as legend has it) he knighted the ‘Sir Loin’, was the sole national historical event with which it was connected.
The people of mediaeval England, therefore, were not quite as English as we were led to believe. Bolton’s existence was first recorded in 1185 under the name of ‘Boelton’, but I could never work out what language or languages the original Boltonians might have spoken. The town’s oldest building, a half-timbered inn called Ye Olde Man and Scythe, dates from 1251, but the name was unlikely to have been in place when the first drink was served.
The Protestant Reformation was a capital moment in English history, and I was greatly moved by the melancholy sight of the ruined monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII. I used to collect the brochures of the Ministry of Works, which was responsible for their upkeep, and would write off to the Ministry in London to obtain them. The magnificent ruins of Bolton Abbey, which we visited, are located in Yorkshire. But Furness Abbey was ours. I learned that Lancashire had been one of the centres of the Pilgrimage of Grace and of Catholic recusancy. A biography of the martyr St Edmund Campion undermined the myth that England was by nature a tolerant country.29
The Elizabethan Age, the last before Britishness set in, is much loved by the English. There are few signs of it in Bolton, except for parts of Smithills Hall, a beautiful half-timbered Tudor mansion. Beacon fires were lit in the summer of 1588 on Rivington Pike and elsewhere to warn of the Spanish Armada.
By the time of the Civil War, however, Bolton was firmly under the control of Cromwell’s puritanical parliamentarians. In May 1644 it was the scene of a horrific massacre in which two thousand townsfolk were cut down by Prince Rupert’s royalist cavalry. After Cromwell’s victory, the leading local royalist, James, Earl of Derby, paid for the massacre with his life. Before his beheading, he took his last refreshment in Ye Olde Man and Scythe. Our Junior School class listened to the tale, standing awestruck beside the Churchgate Cross.
The Industrial Revolution turned Britain into a world power, and Boltonians are convinced that it was they who started it. Samuel Crompton (1753–1827), inventor of the ‘spinning mule’, who worked as a weaver in the old black-and-white timbered manor house at Hall i’ th Wood, was the local hero. When we toured the house as schoolchildren, we learned that the town grew rich from Crompton’s invention, whilst the inventor died a pauper.
My mother’s family, whose surname was Bolton, clearly had older links to the town than my father’s. My maternal grandfather, Edwin Bolton, was a stonemason and builder, who went bankrupt in the Great Depression of the 1930s. His wife, Elizabeth Isherwood, came from a family whose past was only discussed in whispers. As the family historian, I eventually rooted out the truth in the Census Return for 1861, when Major James Slater was living under the same roof as a serving girl, Betty Isherwood, in the Slaters’ manor house at Egerton (the birthplace, incidentally, of Bolton Wanderers). Their son, James Slater Isherwood, was well educated and trained as a lawyer, but drank himself to an early death; hence my mother’s lifelong dedication to the Temperance Movement, to godly living, and to John Bunyan.
The origins of my father’s family, the Davieses, were more obscure still. My paternal grandfather, Richard Samson Davies (1863–1939), was allegedly a Welsh-speaking orphan, who walked into Manchester at the age of sixteen with a halfpenny in his pocket and a head full of myths. In the Congregational Chapel at Pendleton, he met and married Ellen Ashton, the child of a miner’s unmarried daughter, with whom he lived happily for forty years and produced nine offspring. In the spring of 1901 they walked the ten miles from Pendleton to Bolton, pushing a handcart loaded with their worldly goods and surrounded by their five oldest children. Their sixth child, Richard, my father, was born shortly afterwards in a tiny, terraced cottage (now demolished) in Ash Street.
Yet, despite the hard beginnings, the Davieses prospered. Grandpa rose to the lofty status of general manager of Hodgkinson and Gillibrand’s Globe Hosiery Works in Lower Bridgeman Street, and bought a detached house, which he called ‘Wigmore’ after the orphanage that had once sheltered him; it was considerably grander than anything that I was later able to afford. His eldest daughter, Lydia – my Auntie Sis – attended Cambridge, and his eldest son, Don, attended Bolton’s long-established Grammar School (founded 1514).
Both the Davieses and the Boltons, like most British families, were sorely stricken by the First World War. My father’s second brother, Norman Davies, was killed in September 1918, a nineteen-year-old pilot. My mother’s eldest brother, James Bolton, an infantryman with the Lancashire Fusiliers, died on the Western Front on the morning of 11 November 1918.
In addition to Bolton’s grandiose Town Hall (1873), Bolton Wanderers Football Club was a premier source of municipal pride. Together with our neighbours, Blackburn Rovers, it was a founding member of England’s Football League. In the decades before television, its stadium at Burnden Park formed a weekly, male-only mecca. My Uncle Don, an amateur international, played there before moving to Stoke City. (One of his earlier teams was the ‘Northern Nomads’.) My grandpa, Richard Samson, claimed to have scaled the walls of Wembley Stadium in London to see the Wanderers win the Cup Final of 1923. I arrived on the terraces post-1945, to watch all the ‘greats’ of the era – Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney, and Wilf Mannion. Bolton’s fearless centre forward, Nat Lofthouse, who worked down a local coalmine before joining the club, was my boyhood hero.
Many aspects of early twentieth-century Bolton were overshadowed by the activities of its most illustrious son, the industrial magnate William Lever (1851–1925), later Lord Leverhulme and founder of the multinational Unilever corporation. The noble lord funded both the Congregational Church on St George’s Road, which my parents attended, and the re-founded Bolton School, where I was educated. He was born in a small house on Wood Street, similar to my father’s birthplace, and laid the foundations of his fortune by making and selling Sunlight Soap. As schoolchildren, we were all dutifully taken by coach to the model village of Port Sunlight near Liverpool, where his main factory was located and where a tanker fleet landed coconut oil from his African plantations. Less known is Lord Leverhulme’s extravagant country house or ‘bungalow’ and its Japanese Garden overlooking the reservoir at Anglezarke. The bungalow was burned down in 1913 by militant suffragettes, and never rebuilt. Forty years later, when I was roaming around, one could still hack into the overgrown shrubbery, and collect handfuls of the former garden’s exotic oriental blooms. If ever there was a lesson in the transience of human fortunes, this was it.
As I progressed up the school, the scope of our expeditions became ever more ambitious. While the annual camps of the 19th Bolton Scout Troop had been held within Britain, the Senior Scouts were customarily sent abroad. Our journeys do not compare with the school trips of the jet age, which routinely despatch boys and girls to Nepal, to Namibia, or to Patagonia, but they were no less exciting or challenging. In a short space of time, I found myself camping in Luxembourg, where we unearthed rusting helmets from the Battle of the Bulge; canoeing down the River Loire, where we inspected the chateaux from midstream: trekking in the Carinthian Alps on the frontier of Yugoslavia; and mountaineering in the Tyrol, where the alpine guide who led us across the Dachstein Glacier at dawn had only recently been released from Soviet imprisonment. This sturdy Austrian mountaineer told us his story as we munched a meagre breakfast at the glacier’s edge, and my eyes were opened to the other, hitherto unfamiliar side of the Second World War. Still a teenager like us, he had been conscripted by the Wehrmacht, captured at Stalingrad, and worked to the brink of death in a Siberian camp where most of the prisoners perished. He was saved by a strong physique and by survival skills learned in boyhood in a more extreme environment than that of Winter Hill.
In those same years, I started to keep a notebook in which I recorded my favourite quotations. All the formative influences are there – Shakespeare, Hobbes, Michelet, Macaulay, Milton, Vidal de La Blache (the founder of human geography), Bacon, Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, St Augustine, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamartine, Donne, Gray, Carlyle, Mill, Hazlitt, and many others. One of the first entries, dated August 1955, is a quote from Cobbett:
God has given us the best country in the world; our brave and wise and virtuous fathers … gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!30
The last entries were noted down on completing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall:
If the Christian apostles, St Peter or St Paul, could return to the Vatican, they might possibly inquire the name of the Deity who is worshipped with such mysterious rites in that magnificent temple.31
Both authors seemed to be telling me that the world always goes downhill.
My eclectic collection of poetry inevitably contained numerous items connected with journeys and life journeys. On this, as on most things, Shakespeare’s observations are incomparably exact:
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind when body’s work’s expired.
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide …32
Here, three hundred years before Rainer Maria Rilke, was Rilke’s insight that ‘the only journey is the one within’. Rilke, whom I encountered much later, wrote eloquently about the effect of travel on the traveller:
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has it: inner light, even from a distance –
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are …33
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), whose Treasure Island and Kidnapped were standards of my youth, was a traveller who journeyed so far that he never came home. He is buried in Samoa. Distant lands filled him with childlike joy:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie,
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats;
Where in sunshine reaching out
Eastern cities, miles about,
Are with mosque and minaret
Among sandy gardens set,
And the rich goods from near and far
Hang for sale in the bazaar …
Where are forests hot as fire,
Wide as England, tall as a spire,
Full of apes and cocoa-nuts
And the [native] hunters’ huts;
Where the knotty crocodile
Lies and blinks in the Nile,
And the red flamingo flies
Hunting fish before his eyes …
Some deserted city stands,
All its children, sweep and prince,
Grown to manhood ages since,
Not a foot in street or house,
Not a stir of child or mouse,
And when kindly falls the night
In all the town no spark of light.
There I’ll come when I’m a man
With a camel caravan …34
Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) – like Stevenson a lifelong invalid – was a magical wordsmith too. I heard of his literary prowess during my student days from girlfriends – Margaret, Helen, and Jenny – who all were reading Modern Languages. His poetic collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) put him in court for ‘offending public morals’, and as a youth he had been sent by his stepfather on a long voyage to India, to cure his alleged indolence. The experience did not change his wayward habits, but he recalled it with delight:
Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! …
Dites, qu’avez-vous vu?35
(To a child who is fond of maps and engravings
The universe is the size of his vast appetite.
How immense is the world in the light of a lamp!
In memory’s eyes how small the world becomes …
One morning we set out, our brains aflame,
Our hearts full of resentments and bitter desires,
And we go, following the rhythm of the wave,
Cradling our infinite in the finite of the seas …
But the true voyagers are the ones who only leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And, without knowing why, they always say ‘Let’s go!’ …
Our soul’s a three-masted ship searching for Icaria;
A voice resounds on the bridge: ‘Open your eyes!’
From the Crow’s Nest, a voice, ardent and wild, cries:
‘Love – Glory – Happiness’ Damnation! it’s only a shoal …
Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories
We read in your eyes that are deep as the seas!
Show us the treasure chest of your rich memories,
Those marvellous jewels made of ether and stars …
And tell us, what have you really seen?)35
I was one of those boys ‘in love with maps and engravings’, and I was as eager as anyone to hear the ‘splendid stories’ from the travellers’ ‘treasure chest’.
When I eventually came to the Divina Commedia at the age of twenty, I found to my surprise that Dante firmly places Ulysses, the archetypal wanderer, in the eighth circle of the Inferno, where he is permanently encased in a burning flame. In Dante’s scheme, a pagan could not gain access to the cleansing realm of Purgatory, still less to Paradise. But, as a famous figure of Antiquity, one feels, he might have been treated more leniently. Dante’s severe judgement, therefore, has provoked lengthy scholarly debates. It turns out that the luckless Ulysses was not condemned for his travels but rather for the earlier part he played in the stratagem of the Trojan Horse. For this he was cast into the company of ‘fraudulent counsellors’, and tied within the flame to his co-conspirator, Diomedes. Dante had to rely exclusively on Latin sources, which were traditionally pro-Trojan and anti-Greek. (The Romans believed themselves to be Trojan descendants.) In their view, and Dante’s, the Trojan Horse was an example of despicable and dishonourable tactics.
Nonetheless, once the reason for Ulysses’ misfortune has been explained, Dante allows him a long and eloquent speech in which he recounts his voyages and his motives for setting sail. He was driven, above all, by ‘the ardour for becoming an expert in the world, and in human vices and virtue’:
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pietà
del vecchio padre, né il debito amore
lo quale dovea Penelope far lieta
vincer poter dentro da me l’ardore
ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e delli vizi umani e del valore
ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto
sol con un legno e con quella compagna
picciola da la qual no fui diserto …
(Not fondness for my son, nor any claim
Of reverence for my father, nor love I owed
Penelope, to please her, could overcome
My longing for experience of the world,
Of human vice, and virtue. But I sailed out
On the deep open seas, accompanied
By that small company that still had not
Deserted me, in a single ship …)36
To ‘become an expert of the world’ is no mean ambition.
Further on, after reaching the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses tells of the half-time pep talk that he gave to his crew to stop them losing hope:
O frati, dissi, che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti all’occidente …
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
(‘O brothers who have reached the west,’ I began,
‘Through a hundred thousand perils, surviving all …
Consider well your seed:
You were not born to live as a mere brute does,
But for the pursuit of knowledge and the good.’)37
One could not put it more plainly: we travel to seek virtue and knowledge and to be more human.
After these forays into Romance languages that I had learned at school, I gradually turned eastwards and began a long Slavonic journey that is still in progress. I have often wondered whether it happened by instinct or by choice. It nearly began at the age of eighteen, when, on registering for compulsory National Service, I opted to join the Royal Navy, having learned that the Navy was running intensive Russian language courses. But I never made it into the Navy, because National Service was abolished before I could be called up. Instead, after arriving in Oxford, I found that beginners’ Russian courses were available for students at the Oxford Polytechnic (now Brookes University), where they were sponsored by the rogue publisher and MP Robert Maxwell, for the benefit of his firm, Pergamon Press. Maxwell, born in Czechoslovakia as Jan Ludwig Hoch and later known as the ‘Bouncing Czech’, was involved in all manner of dubious deals, many of them behind the Iron Curtain. He was using Pergamon Press to re-publish scientific and technological books and journals translated from Soviet Bloc sources, and he occasionally invited the budding linguists across the road for drinks at his home, Headington Hill Hall. In this way, I took my first steps along the Slavonic trail, which after numerous twists and turns and stops and starts would eventually lead me to a second degree, in Russian Studies, at the University of Sussex.
Meanwhile, during my first long vacation at Oxford, I joined three of my former Boltonian classmates, who had bought a second-hand US Army jeep, and planned an overland expedition to Turkey. I had been reading Gibbon, and was eager to see the Theodosian Walls of Byzantium for myself. Europe was newly divided by the Iron Curtain, and the road to Istanbul ran right across the Soviet Bloc. It was an unforgettable (and risky) experience to drive east out of Vienna on an empty road, to notice that all the signposts to Budapest had been removed, to negotiate the triple line of tank traps, watchtowers, and barbed-wire fences, and then to hear the huge metal gates clanking shut behind us. We could easily have disappeared without trace. As it was, after ‘a hundred thousand perils’, we somehow completed the journey unscathed, returning home with the knowledge that the eastern half of our continent was filled with fascinating, forbidden historical fruit.
In the spring of 1962, having signed up for a student trip to Moscow (which was abruptly cancelled by the Soviet authorities without explanation), I found myself by default in Poland, a country of which I was hitherto blissfully ignorant. The great Faculty of Modern History at Oxford had taught us absolutely nothing about Poland’s thousand-year past, and I began to mug up the basic elements from sheer shame. This inauspicious start led eventually to a PhD from the Jagiellonian University, to a lifetime of close personal and family links with Poland, and to a writing career, which began with Polish subjects.
I finally made it to Moscow after a year’s delay. Our group arrived on the morning after Stalin’s remains had been secretly removed from the mausoleum on Red Square. Lenin’s mummified corpse, with its green skin and bright orange beard, had been left in situ, like that of some ghoulish Italian saint. But anyone could see that the sandstone plaque over the entrance bearing the late leaders’ names had been crudely altered. We had reached the world capital of historical jiggery-pokery.
Russians, of course, possess both the largest country in the world and a magnificently rich language in which to describe it. Their literary and musical traditions are as wonderful as their political habits are deplorable. Their national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), was passionate, fiery, and politically dissident. ‘I was not born to amuse the Tsars,’ he once said. He fought no fewer than twenty-nine duels, and died in the aftermath of the last one. Yet his formative influence on modern Russian was comparable to Shakespeare’s on English or Goethe’s on German. One poem that figures in almost every anthology is Zimnii Put’, or ‘Winter Road’, which is all about mood, and the tedium of a long, night sleigh ride.38
One might think that Pushkin’s sublimely simple cadences are easy to translate. Yet the briefest of internet searches produces some hilarious results, where weird vocabulary, contorted grammar, ponderous word order, and artless rhythms defeat all attempts to cope with even the first stanza:
Through the cool and wavy hazes
Cuts the moon her slow way;
On the glades of sadness, endless,
Her distressing light she spays.
Or:
Breaking thro’ the waving fogs
Forth the moon is coming,
And on the gloomy acres
She gloomy light is shedding.
Or again:
Through the rolling, wavy fog
The moon is making its way
Sadly shining its light,
Shining onto the sad glade.
Or even:
Through the murk the moon is veering,
Ghost-accompanist of night,
On the melancholy clearings
Pouring melancholy light.
Here is the strongest argument for learning Russian.
Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), was Pushkin’s exact contemporary and, during exile in Russia, a personal friend. Like Pushkin, he wrote poetry that is filled with Romantic sentiments and classical restraint in equal measure, confounding the classifiers. He is forever associated with the opening lines of his epic Pan Tadeusz: ‘Oh, Lithuania, my homeland! Only he who has lost you can gauge your true worth!’ Yet he wrote everything from epics and sonnets to dramas and academic lectures. My own particular favourite, The Steppes of Akkerman, was written during his journey through the boundless expanses of southern Ukraine:
Wpłtynąłem na suchego przestwór oceanu …
(I have sailed onto the expanse of a dry ocean.
The wagon plunges into greenery, and, like a boat, wanders
Through the prairie’s rustling waves, gliding through flowers.
I pass coral islets of rank vegetation.
Already dusk is falling. No road here, no dolmen.
I look up, seeking the stars, my ship’s couriers.
There, afar, a cloud gleams in the sky. The morning star glimmers.
There lies the glistening Dniester! There the pharos of Akkerman!
Halt! How still! I can hear the flight of cranes
Which are invisible even to the falcon’s stare.
I listen to a butterfly snuggling in the grassy lanes,
And to a smooth-breasted snake nestling in the clover.
In such silence, my curious ear strains
To catch a voice from Lithuania … Drive on! No one’s there.)39
Eastern Europe is a rich hunting ground for travel writers, inviting the same sort of ‘orientalism’ that has often been directed at the Middle East. Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815) was the great pioneer, often known, since he wrote in French, as Jean Potocki. An ethnographer, Egyptologist, and philologist, as well as a wealthy aristocrat, his journeys stretched from Mongolia to Morocco, and were described in numerous published accounts, but his collection of fictional stories, Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (1815), is most celebrated.40
Juliusz Słowacki (1809–49) – pronounced ‘Slow-Vat-Ski’ – who vies with Mickiewicz for Poland’s national laurels, was another traveller-bard forced to emigrate. His epic poem, Podróż na Wschód (‘Journey to the East’) was written in 1836–8 on a tour that took him to Greece, Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Land.41 Part 1 contains his brilliant thumbnail sketch of ‘Europe’:
Jeśli Europa jest nimfą – Neapol
Jest nimfy okiem błękitnem, – Warszawa
Sercem, – cierniami w nodze Sewastopol,
Azow, Odessa, Petersburg, Mitawa; –
Paryż jej głową, a Londyn kołnierzem
Nakrochmalonym, a zaś Rzym … szkaplerzem.
(If Europe is a Nymph
Then Naples is her bright blue eye
And Warsaw her heart; Sebastopol,
Azov, Odessa, Petersburg are the thorns
In her feet; Paris is her head;
London, her starched collar,
And Rome – the scapular.)
He then related his departure from Italy:
I ruszyć w podróż, bo się pieśń przewlecze
Niejedna jeszcze przerwana ideą.
Jutro kurierem wyjeżdżam do Lecce,
Jutro więc zacznę śpiewać Odysseą,
Albo wyprawę o Jazona runach
Na nowej lutni i na złotych strunach.
([I must] make a start, for the song drags on
With yet another interrupted idea.
Tomorrow I take the stagecoach for Lecce,
Tomorrow I shall start to sing of the Odyssey
Or of Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece
On a new lute, and with golden strings.)42
A Romantic poet from Europe’s eastern periphery was summoning up the selfsame classical precedents as Joachim du Bellay three hundred years earlier.
My youthful forays into travel books did not stretch as far as Słowacki. But Bolton’s library was well stocked with items connected with Central Asia and the Great Game, such as Fred Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva (1876), Lord Curzon’s Russia in Central Asia (1889), and Frank Younghusband’s Heart of a Continent (1896). I also lapped up the work of the great travelling orientalist-illustrators, such as Edward Lear and David Roberts. From there I graduated to more modern books like Peter Fleming’s Travels in Tartary (1941) and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1952). Patrick Leigh Fermor had yet to cross my path. But Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches (1949) were more than sufficient to fire an appetite. The East was firmly planted in my head long before I got there.
In that same era I was strongly reminded of the rapidly accelerating rate of travel. On one occasion, by complete accident, I ran into the world’s first cosmonaut, the smiling Yuri Gagarin, who was visiting the Earls Court Show, and who, to my amazement, shook my hand. On another, I was taken by my French friend Henri to the airport at Le Bourget to see the world’s first transatlantic airliner, a Pan American Boeing 707 parked on the tarmac.
My father’s second elder brother, by contrast, did not live to see either jets or space rockets. Uncle Norman, in whose memory I was to be named, left school in the New Year of 1918 to join the newly formed RAF. After a few weeks of training, he received an officer’s commission and, still a teenager, flew with his squadron to the Western Front in France. It was to be his one and only international flight. As I would duly learn, he was nevertheless a true globetrotter – but one of the kind who trots the globe in mind only. He was a passionate stamp collector.
The family stamp album started its career under Uncle Norman’s guidance in about 1912, when he was thirteen years old. It is a wonderful repository not just of postage stamps but also of political geography and of period charm. Entitled The World Postage Stamp Album, Revised & Enlarged, it was compiled by T. H. Hinton – a member both of the International Philatelic Union and the Société Française de Timbrologie – and, sometime early in the reign of Edward VII, was published in London by E. Nister & Co., 24 St Bride Street, EC. It contains one page or more for every country in the world; and the head of each page is illustrated by a line of stamps. It is undated, but the latest stamp to be shown was issued in Transvaal in 1902.
The album is divided into six parts: I British Empire, II Europe + European Colonial Possessions, III Asia, IV Africa, V America, and VI Oceania. Underneath the illustrations, neatly separated by dotted lines, were spaces for thirty stamps per page. With 224 pages, there was room for 6,720 stamps. A note inside the cover, ‘3/0’, indicates that the album cost three shillings.
Once the album was purchased, Uncle Norman further adorned the inside of the front cover with a large, flowing monogram of his initials, ‘ND’, beautifully drawn in blue ink. Sometime later, however, he was joined, willingly or unwillingly, by his younger brother Richard (my father), who was innocently known to the family as ‘our Dick’. Presumably to prevent any more of the Davies brood from muscling in, young Richard wrote an open declaration beside Norman’s monogram: ‘This book is the sole possession of N and D Davies’, and he added the family address: ‘Wigmore, The Haulgh, Bolton, Lancashire’.
In due course, further inscriptions appeared. They included their elder brother’s signature – ‘Donny Davies, International Outside Right’, ‘Lancashire XI, Old Trafford’, and ‘Queen’s Scholar, Cambridge’ – a copperplate depiction of the word ‘Philately’, a cryptic insult in pencil reading ‘Toshi, the One-eyed’, and a fragment of someone’s French homework: ‘Comment vous-portez vous? Je vais tres bien!’ Was ‘Toshi’ Uncle Norman’s nickname? And did he ever have the chance to practise his French in France? I doubt it. At all events, Uncle Don never followed his sister to Cambridge. After winning his scholarship, he was called up for service in the Royal Flying Corps, crashed his plane behind enemy lines, and spent the rest of the First World War in a German POW camp.43
The inside pages of the back cover were used for recording running totals for the collection as a whole, broken down into ‘European’, ‘Australasian’, ‘American’, ‘African’, ‘Asiatic’, and ‘Others’. The earliest entries in the series read ‘over 500 on Nov 2 1914’ and ‘1980 on May 5th 1915’, indicating an average increase of over 200 per month and 7 per day. Beyond that, the calculations are hard to follow. Written in pencil, many have become illegible, and many, I suspect, were the product of creative accounting.
Since the boys’ father was a mill manager, it is reasonable to suppose that the cotton trade brought in a regular flow of commercial correspondence and with it a ready supply of foreign stamps. Yet the cotton trade does not explain the very substantial number of stamps from offbeat places such as Persia, Uruguay, Haiti, Mozambique, and the Ottoman Empire. How on earth did a couple of Lancashire schoolboys lay hands on so many exotic items? They would obviously have been swapping stamps with their friends in the playground. But in 1915 Dick fell into disgrace, through slacking at school, and was ordered by his father to work in the mill. It’s hard to believe that Norman’s pocket money and Dick’s meagre wages permitted much extravagance. Even so, there are tell-tale signs of professional contacts. One yellowing packet contained five superb pieces from New Zealand showing the young Queen Victoria on the country’s very earliest issue from 1852. How did those stamps reach them?
For thirty years, after Uncle Norman’s death, my father never added to the collection; it was probably too painful for him. He occasionally brought it out of the cupboard to show his wife and children and to tell them that it was their ‘insurance policy against a rainy day’. He only set his reluctance aside when paternal duty prompted him to teach the rudiments of philately to me. For my ninth birthday I was given a copy of Stanley Gibbons’ Simplified Stamp Catalogue (Fourteenth Edition, London 1948); and Uncle Norman’s hallowed album was placed in my hands with the words: ‘This is what your uncle really loved.’
My strongest recollection, however, is one of confusion. Searching through the album’s 224 pages, I couldn’t find the countries for some of the stamps that I had already collected. My Auntie Ivy’s lodger, whom I knew as ‘Uncle Joseph’, had given me some unusual stamps from his native CZECHOSLOVAKIA. (He was a wartime refugee from Prague.) And my Auntie Doris had a mysterious connection with a missionary, who wrote to her from SOUTHERN RHODESIA. But where had ‘Southern Rhodesia’ come from? It was in the catalogue but not in the album.
Turning to my father, I learned that many countries had been freshly created in the decades since the album was published, and others had ceased to exist. Czechoslovakia, for example, came into being in October 1918, barely one month after Uncle Norman’s last flight. And Southern Rhodesia was created in 1923 after the break-up of an entity that appears here of the album as BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA (RHODESIA). And there were lots of others – ADEN (where my cousin Peter was serving in the RAF), ALGERIA, EIRE (where Peter’s girlfriend, Vera, came from), FINLAND (where my sister had a penfriend), JUGOSLAVIA, LEBANON, LITHUANIA, LATVIA, POLAND, SYRIA, VATICAN CITY, and quite a few others.
At which point, my father made a momentous decision. Uncle Norman’s album, no longer fit for purpose, would have to be replaced. He bought a new, expandable, loose-leaf Pacific Stamp Album, and a large packet of loose leaves. We then set about the laborious task of writing out the name of every country in the catalogue onto a separate page of the new album, together with their capital cities. The operation took weeks, if not months. After that, we started on the still more laborious task of transferring the stamps from the old album to the new one. This was the burden that broke my will as a stamp collector. One, two, three years passed, and sometime in 1950 or 1951 I just gave up. I packed the World Album, still half-full, into a box, and put the Pacific Album on top of it, still half-empty. Instead of sticking in stamps, I turned to kicking a ball.
By the time that I returned to the unfinished task, nearly sixty years later, I was preparing to write a book called Vanished Kingdoms. The book’s theme was based on a simple historical observation: that all political states – whether kingdoms, empires or republics – have a finite lifespan. Like human beings, they are born, they live for a longer or shorter time, and then they die. I now see that my early brush with ‘timbrology’ played a distinct part in planting the theme in my head.
So, remembering Uncle Norman’s album, decades later, I took it out of its box and began to check its contents. The album’s largest section, pages 6–88, was devoted to the BRITISH EMPIRE – an entity that had now completely vanished. The second section, on ‘Europe’, pages 89–162, contained relatively more survivors, from BELGIUM and BULGARIA, to SPAIN, SWEDEN, and SWITZERLAND. But the AUSTRIAN, GERMAN, RUSSIAN, and OTTOMAN EMPIRES had all gone up in smoke. A very long list of COLONIAL POSSESSIONS OF EUROPEAN POWERS had ceased to exist, and no fewer than seventeen German states, from BADEN, BAVARIA, and BERGEDORF, to PRUSSIA, SAXONY, THURN AND TAXIS (NORTH AND SOUTH), and WURTTEMBURG, had disappeared without trace. The island of CRETE, though an independent state, was described as being ‘under the joint administration of Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy’; it declared union with Greece shortly before Uncle Norman started his collection. The DANISH WEST INDIES were sold to the United States in 1917, while the Davies brothers were still at school, and have been known ever since as the ‘US Virgin Islands’. MONTENEGRO, described as a ‘Principality’, became a Kingdom in 1910 only to be cruelly annexed by Serbia in 1918 – the only Allied state to be destroyed by the First World War.
In Asia, most of the former sovereign states, such as CHINA and JAPAN, have hung on, though most have seen their regimes transformed, and several have changed their names; PERSIA became Iran, and SIAM became Thailand. KOREA, which is classed in the album as ‘under the administration of Japan’, has since split into two. In Africa, LIBERIA and MOROCCO are still intact, as is ABYSSINIA, now renamed as Ethiopia. In the map of the Americas, North and South, there have been no changes at all, except for the Venezuelan port of LA GUAIRA, which issued postage stamps from 1864 to 1869 for use on the ferries steaming to Curaçao. In the album’s section on Oceania, the Territory of HAWAII was presented as a ‘US Protectorate’, although the United States had already annexed it. Its incorporation as the 50th State of the Union occurred in 1959.
Vanished Kingdoms took up five years of my life. When it was finished, I was at a loss. I had passed the milestone of ‘three score years and ten’; thanks to the brilliant Birmingham hip-surgeon, Derek McMinn, I had regained mobility; and I had won a literary prize, which could be spent on long-distance travel tickets. So, while waiting for my publishers to make up their minds about what I should write next, I took matters into my own hands and organized a global tour.
Vanished Kingdoms drew its examples exclusively from Europe. Now, after poring again over Uncle Norman’s album and contemplating my own circumnavigation, I began to realize that vanished kingdoms can be encountered at all ends of the Earth. I also saw that human history is a tale not just of constant change but equally of perpetual locomotion. Ever since the first specimens of Homo erectus stood up some 1.9 million years ago, almost certainly in East Africa, their descendants have ceaselessly moved on: from one abode to the next, from continent to continent, and from the mainlands to the islands. By the time that prehistory was merging into recorded history, they had reached most parts of the globe, except Antarctica. Like their creators, the creations of humankind develop from nothing, flourish, perish, and are replaced. And, like the individuals who make up the crowd, the species as a whole was born to move: to crawl, to walk, to run, and then to falter and pass the baton on. Throughout the ages, people have decamped from place to place, endlessly seeking the greener side of the hill. They may pause for a while, even for centuries, but sooner or later they will always gird up their loins for the next stage. They wander and explore, climbing and descending; they lead or they follow; they flee disaster or forage for new pastures; they stick together or split up; they advance or retreat, arrive or leave; they steer a steady course or they stray; they diverge, divide, detach, and disperse; they converge, collide, coalesce, and cohabit; they stir, flit, or drift, roam, rove, or ramble, spurt, scuttle, or scamper, plod, trudge, or tramp, rush, saunter, or slouch; they hasten or dawdle, walk, sail, ride, or fly, constantly migrating, emigrating, immigrating, populating, settling, colonizing; sometimes competing, clashing, conquering, or capitulating, and necessarily interacting, adapting, and evolving. They sally forth as solitary souls or wend their way in family groups or tribal masses. Like the Mongol horsemen, they may race across the steppes and prairies, or like the Boers and Mormons trek through the wilderness in their winding wagon trains. They have crossed the oceans in style in first-class cabins, in the squalor of the steerage deck, in the agony of slave-ship holds, in great Viking longships and Polynesian canoes, in coracles and carracks. Like the Roman legions, they may march in orderly step, or, like the ancient barbarian hordes and modern twenty-first-century migrants, they may burst the borders through sheer weight of numbers. And all the while, in order to survive, they everywhere instinctively breed and reproduce, thereby keeping up the flow.
The world today is the net product of all these accumulated movements. Thanks to humankind’s elemental drive, the Earth is filled with a profusion of races, religions, cultures, tribes, societies, linguistic families, ethnicities, nations, states, political groupings, and power blocs. A multitude of good neighbours, bad neighbours, allies, rivals, and enemies have proliferated. And I, a solitary traveller intent on making my own journey, was about to plunge into the profusion.
It all started with an invitation to give the keynote speech at a ‘Third of May’ event in Melbourne. My wife and I were happy enough about going to Melbourne but not about the prospect of a 24-hour, non-stop flight. The obvious solution was to fly to Australia by easy stages – via Dubai, Delhi, and Singapore. The longest stay would be in Tasmania, where friends were waiting to entertain us, and whence my wife would return home. Next came the realization that, with little extra effort, the return journey could be made by continuing eastwards – via New Zealand, Tahiti, and the United States. But there was no hurry, and no point in going to faraway places only to leave each country after a lightning guided tour, a quick, bland meal and sleepover at some anonymous airport hotel. Taking time was essential, and extra destinations could be added at will. Hence, Baku, Kuala Lumpur, Mauritius, and Madeira joined the growing itinerary. All were magical names on the map of places I had never seen and was unlikely to see again. Most definitely, as the day of departure approached, the frisson of excitement swelled. And I was determined not to be outdone by our son, Christian, who, suffering a similar fit of Reisefieber, had taken off – as young people do these days – for the Central Asia that I had known only from books. Instead of the usual banal greeting, his postcard to his parents carried the four stunning lines of a stanza that could well stand as the Wanderers’ Watchword:
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the golden journey to Samarkand.44
What my exact motives were for embarking on a circumnavigation of the globe, therefore, I can’t exactly say. I certainly didn’t prepare myself by studying the many theories of why people need to travel, I submitted to the primeval urge to get up and go. I don’t belong to the class of travellers who, in Baudelaire’s words, ‘leave just to be leaving’. Nor was I setting out, like Bunyan, on a high-minded pilgrimage. My goal was probably closer to Goethe’s ‘school of seeing’ – to test my powers of observation, to spot the recurring themes and catch the fleeting details, and then to tell the story. I hoped that the telling of this impulsive adventure would have a touch of Cobbett’s caustic wit, a feeling for Hazlitt’s ‘blue sky above my head and the green turf beneath’, and the hint of Goethe’s ‘truthful and graceful fairy-tale’. Perhaps, like the ageing Ulysses of Lord Tennyson, I was just another ‘gray spirit’, who was yearning for one last adventure:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world …
[For] my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.45