An old Mercedes
Parked in a silent street
Will be going nowhere
Mercedes during ‘lockdown’
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By train through Hungary and a slice of watermelon
I USED TO VISIT HUNGARY regularly in the 1980s before the end of Communist rule in that country. Sometimes I drove, other trips I travelled by rail.
In 1985, I boarded a train at London’s Victoria Station. As I was settling down in my seat, a couple accompanying an older man asked me if I could look after on the journey to Hungary. He was their relative and only spoke Hungarian. My knowledge of that language was limited to a vocabulary of less than 100 words including ‘fogkrem’ meaning toothpaste and ‘meleg szendvics’ meaning heated (toasted) sandwich, and ‘menetrend’ meaning timetable and ‘kurva’, which you can look up yourself! I agreed to do my best to look after the gentleman.
After taking the ferry across the English Channel, we boarded an express train bound for Budapest. The gentleman and I were in the same couchette compartment along with some young people.
We stopped in Brussels early in the evening. A late middle-aged Belgian couple entered our compartment, and we set off eastwards. After nightfall, the Belgian couple left us. Several minutes later, they returned. They had changed their clothes. They had dressed in pyjamas and silk dressing gowns. Clearly, they were either unfamiliar with travel in 2nd class couchettes or had formery been used to travel in 1st class Wagon Lits sleeping cars.
We arrived at Hegyeshalom, a Hungarian border town close to Austria. As I was planning to visit southern Hungary, I disembarked there. So did the man who I was ‘looking after’. He was met by some of his family. Although they spoke no English, they expressed their gratitude for me, and kindly offered to drive me to Győr, where I wanted to catch another train.
At Győr, they helped me find my train. I boarded a basic looking local train bound for Keszthely on Lake Balaton. After a while, the train stopped in the middle of the countryside and everyone except me disembarked. I looked out of the train. We were not at a station. Someone saw me and signalked that I should also leave the train. We all boarded buses that had been laid on to substitute for the train that could not proceed further because of track repairs.
After a ride through flat agricultural terrain, we reached a small station, where we boarded another train, which carried us to Kesthely, arriving at about 4 to 5 pm.
I looked around the station at Kesthely and for some unaccountable reason I decided that I did not want to stay in the lakeside resort. I looked at a timetable and discovered that a train would be leaving soon, bound for Kaposvár, which was on the way to the southern city of Pécs.
A Hungarian couple with one child ‘got wind’ of my plan to join the train to Kaposvár, and took me into their care. I boarded the train with them and travelled in their company as the train followed the southern shore of Lake Balaton.
My ‘minders’ left the train at the lakeside station at or near Balatonlelle. Before they disembarked, they asked a man, a stranger to them, in our compartment to look after me. He spoke only Hungarian.
As the train wound its way inland through hills south if Lake Balaton, the sun set and it became too dark to see the countryside through which we were moving slowly. Although there were light fittings with light bulbs in our compartment, they were never turned on. The two of us travelled in total darkness. We tried conversing, but with little meaningful success.
We both left the train at Kaposvár station. Darkness reigned. I had no idea where or even whether there was a hotel (szálloda) in the town. However, my latest ‘minder’ led me to a large state run hotel, the Kapos.
The young receptionist spoke good English. She asked me if I had any books in English. I did. I gave her one that I had already finished. She was very happy.
After a heavy meal in the hotel’s large restaurant (etterem), I retired to my room. The hotel had poor sound insulation. There was a party somewhere in the building and my room seemed to be throbbing with the loud music.
After a while, there was a knock on my door. I opened it and found a waitress holding a plate with an enormous slice of watermelon. She muttered something about ‘recepció’. I realised that the watermelon was a thank you gift from the receptionist.
I took the watermelon into my room and stared at it. Then and still now, I cannot stand eating watermelon. I could not throw it away because it was bound to be discovered and that would have seemed very ungrateful on my part. So, after a bit of thought, I carried the slice of fruit downstairs to the receptionist to whom I had given the book. I thanked her, and then explained, telling a ‘white lie’, that I was allergic to watermelon. She seemed to believe me.
That night, I found it difficult to sleep partly because of trying to digest my heavy dinner and the noise from the party.
On the following day, I took another train to Pécs having stayed in a city I had never heard of before.
Picture of Hotel Kapos in Kaposvar in 1985
Adventurous crossing
BEST TO WATCH THE SHORT VIDEO (1 minute) FILMED IN BANGALORE (India) BEFORE READING THIS!
Watch here: https://vimeo.com/409423869
SINCE THE ‘LOCKDOWN’, and the worldwide decline in road usage, what is written below has temporarily become historical.
Crossing main roads in Bangalore and many other Indian cities requires an act of faith and is quite an adventure. There are, of course, some pedestrian crossings controlled by traffic signals that are usually but not always obeyed. Once we were in an autorickshaw in Ahmedabad. The driver hardly ever stopped at red signals. When we asked him about this, he told us that there was no need to stop at red lights unless there was a policeman nearby.
Despite the availability of controlled pedestrian crossings in Bangalore, most people cross busy roads wherever they feel like and however hectic the traffic, putting life and limb at risk every time.
Now, I do not want you to think that I am singling out Indian road users including pedestrians for their exciting approach to road safety.
Long ago in Rome, I got the feeling that pedestrians who expected motorists to stop at pedestrian crossings mostly stimulated drivers to drive more rashly when they were trying to cross the road.
In another former imperial city, Istanbul, which I visited in 2010, motorists drove fast and recklessly. When drivers paused at pedestrian crossings, it was only briefly. They were like energetic dogs straining on their stretched leashes. I had the feeling that at any moment cars would charge forward to crush the people scurrying across the road.
Indian drivers, although seemingly undisciplined, expect anything to happen on the road, be it a cow that suddenly strays onto the carriageway to vehicles driving in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic and people who have decided to dry their grains on a sun drenched flat road surface. Most Indian drivers, expecting the unexpected, seem to have good reflexes. So, pedestrians wandering across the road wherever and whenever they feel like it do not pose a great problem for drivers. That said, I feel that crossing busy roads in Bangalore requires much courage and faith in the skill and care of drivers.
My approach to crossing busy roads in Bangalore is as follows. Quite simply, I look for someone else nearby who wants to cross. As these strangers are often locals, I assume, perhaps naively, that they are experienced in crossing the road. I join them to take advantage of their supposed experience and because any sensible motorist would rather injure one pedestrian rather than several at once. Foolish reasoning, maybe, but apart from making long detours to find allegedly controlled crossings, I will willingly accept better suggestions.
Well, at the moment (April 2020), the streets of Bangalore and London, where I live, are pleasantly devoid of traffic apart from occasional cars, delivery motor bikes and public service vehicles.
Even in London, where drivers are not mentally prepared for pedestrians wandering into their paths away from controlled crossings, traversing the street ‘Bangalore style’ has become possible. My worry is that when ‘lockdown’ is unlocked, will people in London be able to get out of their newly acquired habit of crossing wherever and whenever they feel like it?
The lost city
IN DECEMBER 2005, we spent a Saturday night at a bed and breakfast in a remote spot near Winchelsea in East Sussex. In those days we still had our own car and could stop where we wanted on or even off the route.One of our stopping places was Redhill in Surrey. We wanted to visit its contemporary Roman Catholic church of St Joseph and St Paul’s, but not for religious reasons. The architects, who had designed it, knew that my late uncle WS Rindl, an accomplished structural engineer, was a keen amateur sculptor. They asked him to make some decorative features and a crucifix to adorn the exterior of the church. In addition to the concrete crucifix, my uncle designed and constructed concrete gargoyles to run off rainwater from the roof. Each of these gargoyles is decorated in bas-relief with castings of the tools used by builders and engineers. On one of these drainage spouts there is a representation of what looks as if it were an early rather bulky model of a pocket calculator. The church, completed in 1984, is a lovely example of imaginative 20th century architecture, well worth a detour to see.The rurally located bed and breakfast was housed in a building that was at least 300 years old if not older. The accommodation was comfortable but the breakfast was disappointing. The fried eggs served seemed as if they had been made long before breakfast and kept warm; they were not as fresh as the frost that had coated the surrounding countryside overnight. We made a brief visit to Winchelsea, a place that has always fascinated me. Founded as ‘New Winchelsea’ by King Edward the First in the 13th century, the town was a coastal port, complete with city walls. By the 1520s, what had been a thriving centre of trade declined rapidly because of shifting of the coastline resulting from silting up of its harbour. Apart from some of the town’s mediaeval gateways and the large church of St Thomas the Martyr, it is difficult to imagine that Winchelsea was once a bustling metropolis. The decline of Winchelsea is one of many examples all over the world of how environmental changes can affect the ability of civilisations to thrive. In January 2020, we visited Lakhpat in Kutch, a part of Gujarat in western India. This huge walled city, far greater in size than Winchelsea, was a thriving seaport until the early 19th century when an earthquake caused the sea inlet on which it stood to become transformed into a salty desert. Today, the seven kilometres of intact city walls contain not a city but only a few widely separated dwellings and a Sikh Gurdwara. The church, which dates back to the 13th century, looks large. However, what can be seen today is all that is left of what had once been a far larger cathedral-like building.On the Sunday morning when we entered the church, a service was being held. There was the priest and his congregation of less than eight people, looking a little lost in the huge church. Seeing the three of us entering, he welcomed us, and said in a pleading voice:
“Do stay. Come and join us. You will help swell our numbers.”
This ancient church, although beautiful, was sadly unused in comparison to the modern one we had seen at Redhill.We could not stay for long because we had a prior arrangement to meet our friend Tony at the art deco De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea. He had invited us to view an exhibition of 20th century furniture being held there. I was amazed to find that many examples of the kind of furniture my parents had bought in the 1950s and 1960s were now regarded as classics of design and commanded high prices at the sale. I remember that some of that furniture was comfortable and some it looked good but was uncomfortable. We revisited Bexhill on Sea recently to see an exhibition of works by the op-art artist Bridget Riley. We stayed in a lovely Airbnb near the pavilion. On this visit, we had time to wander around the town, a paradise for lovers of charity shops that raise money for good causes. Bexhill is also a popular town for retired people to live out the rest of their lives.Our Airbnb was next to one of Bexhill’s numerous charity shops. This particular store, which lay between our accommodation and the Pavilion, specialised in secondhand wheelchairs, walkers, bedpans, and Zimmer frames. I guess that there is a high turnover of such items in the town.
Route 66
MY MOTHER’S ANCESTORS included a Seligmann family, which can be traced back to the area around Ichenhausen Bavaria in Germany.
In January 1995, we visited Arizona in the USA and drove along a stretch of Route 66 on our way from Lake Havasu City and the Grand Canyon. On the way, we spotted a tiny settlement called Seligman . Even though its name differed to my ancestor’s family name by having only one ‘n’, we felt that we should make a small break there.
Seligman on the Santa Fe Railway is named after Jesse Seligman of JW Seligman & Co, who helped finance the railway and others in the area. The founder of the company was Jewish from Germany. Many German Jews who migrated to the USA with surnames ending with a pair of consonants, such as Seligmann and Wolff, dropped the final consonant on arrival in the States.
Seligman looked like a typical ‘boondocks’ place. It was just what I expected to find in the Wild West despite the dismal weather and the snow on the ground.
We came across a pen in the centre of the town. A weathered notice next to it said that the enclosure contained an ageing buffalo that was once displayed at Buffalo Bills Wildwest Show. My wife suggested, frivilously, that she should should into the pen to pose for a photograph next to the sign.
Despite being 7 months into pregnancy, she began climbing the fence around the pen, and stopped suddenly. What we thought was empty, was not. The pen housed an enormous, sleepy, aged buffalo. She had a lucky escape!
Later, we arrived at the Grand Canyon where the snow fall had been heavy. We were fortunate to see this spectacular geological area decorated with snow.
Unsuitable for the elderly
I HAVE ONLY VISITED Nandi Hills once. That was in 1994. My wife’s grandmother was approaching the age of 97.
We were staying with my in-laws in their two storey house in Koramangala in the south of Bangalore. One day, it was decided that a visit to the Nandi Hills would be fun.
Nandi Hills is about two hour’s drive north of Koramangala. Perched on the summit of a steep hill, Nandi Hills used to be a summer fortress of the great Tipu Sultan, whose life ended at the end of the 18th century.
Given that at our excursion destination there would be steep paths and uneven ground, it was sensibly considered that it would not be a good place to take a frail 97 year old.
My wife’s grandmother (‘Granny’), who was fully alert intellectually, was not at all happy with the idea of missing the trip.
While the family was assembling the copious amounts of food to eat during the journey and at our destination, several of us noticed Granny, who usually never left the ground floor, sprinting up and down the stairs leading to the first floor.
When Granny had completed her athletic feat, she came up to us and said:
“See? I can easily manage the stairs. So, I can join you on the trip to Nandi Hills”
My parents in-law employed a great deal of tact tinged with a modicum of firmness to get Granny to agree, somewhat reluctantly, to remain at home.
The road that ascended from the plain up to the fort at the summit of the Nandi Hills was spectacular. It had at least twelve extremely tight hairpin bends, each one numbered.
We spent a pleasant couple of hours picnicking in the garden amongst rusty old cannons near the fort. My wife and I walked to some stone Hindu temples overlooking a sharp cliff-like drop down to the plain far below. One of the temples housed a large stone carving of a Nandi Bull, a creature found in many Hindu temples.
I suppose that once travel becomes safely feasible again, I would love to pay another visit to Nandi Hills.
Adventures in South Africa
In August 2003, we went on a driving holiday in South Africa, concentrating on visiting places connected with my ancestors who began settling in the country during the nineteenth century. We also saw some places unconnected with my family history. Although the main roads in South Africa were excellent. However, some of the minor roads were adventurous to say the least.
My mother spent the first ten years of her life in a tiny town, Barkly East, in the Eastern Cape. We decided to drive there from Lady Grey, where we had been staying for a couple of nights. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was instrumental in getting the South African government to extend the railway across the mountains from Lady grey to Barkly East. Nelly, a barmaid at the Mountain View Hotel in Lady Grey, told us that the railway no longer ran. About 11 years before we met her, she went on this train along with many other children from Lady Grey on an excursion. Disaster struck. Someone who had had too much to drink took over the running of the train, and it went out of control. She remembers the train coming to a very sudden halt and being thrown forward. She was lucky only to have received ‘skid-marks’ on her skin: three of her young friends were killed instantly. It would have interesting to have travelled on that line, because like the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in India’s West Bengal my grandfather’s railway negotiated the steep slopes of the mountains by a series of zig-zags with switchback reverses.
People at the hotel at Lady Grey said that instead of taking a new main road to Barkly East, we should go via the longer but far more picturesque via Joubert’s Pass. This was very scenic but quite hazardous. The road was no wider than our car and covered with loose gravel to which the car’s wheels could hardly grip. I would have enjoyed the spectacular views from the winding road on the way up had I not needed to concentrate so much on keeping the car attached to the road (‘track’ or ‘footpath’ would be a better description of the road). My heart sank when we saw a car approaching us from the opposite direction. The road was so narrow that one of us would have to reverse a long way. Fortunately, the occupants of the approaching car recognised us; they had met us at a barbecue party in Lady Grey on the night before. Kindly, and hazardously, they drove backwards at hair-raising speed along the winding road until they reached a passing place. After the summit of the pass, the road surface improved and we descended into farmland, deserted except for a few sheep and cows. The road wound around following a river, which lay at the bottom of a steep sided canyon. Eventually the road re-joined the main Lady Grey to Barkly East highway. In a way, this was our ‘baptism of fire’ as far as South African roads are concerned.
Later during our trip, we headed for Hogsback, a quaint place high in the Amathole Mountains about 40 miles northwest of King Williams Town, where my mother and her siblings were born. Some say that Hogsback was the inspiration for his “Lord of the Rings”. However, this is unlikely as Tolkien, who was born far away in Bloemfontein, left South Africa when he was three years old. Whatever the truth of this, we set out for Hogsback from Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. We drove via Whittlesea to the tiny village of Seymour.
My wife, our navigator discovered on the map that there was road – a shortcut, led from Seymour up the side of a mountain to Hogsback. On our detailed map, the thoroughfare was marked as “narrow but with tarmac, not for four-wheel drive vehicles alone”, which we interpreted as meaning that it was suitable for saloon cars such as our hired vehicle. We began driving along it through almost level farmland. We stopped to ask a local whether we were on the road to Hogsback. Somewhat drunkenly, the fellow pointed skywards, and said what sounded like:
“Herp, herp, herp.”
This we understood to mean that we had had to go ‘up, up, up’ the hill. Gradually the road began ascending, at first gently. A post-office van passed coming from the opposite direction passed us. This reassured us that the road was motorable. Soon, the road became amazingly steep.
This road, the so-called shortcut, proved to be the worst surface that I have ever driven on. Compared to it, Joubert’s Pass was a motorway. It got progressively worse as we painfully slowly approached Hogsback. The road had everything against it and us. There were potholes, and deep furrows where streams of water had eroded the gravel. Bare rock showed through the road and made steep steps that had to be carefully negotiated. Worst of all were large rounded boulders, which were difficult to drive around as the narrow road was bounded either by ditches or, more often, walls of rock. We were lucky that we neither capsized the car nor grounded it, nor damaged the sump or some other vulnerable part of its under-surface. Negotiating the car safely over some of these boulders reminded me of performing some of my trickiest difficult tooth extractions. In the dental situation, the operator has to avoid cutting the patient’s nerves or large blood vessels. On the way to Hogsback from Seymour, the driver has to avoit severing the fuel line that runs beneath the vehicle. One false move, and we would have been in big trouble, especially as on this lonely road there was neither a mobile telephone signal nor anyone else around. Hair-raising to say the least: I still shudder when I remember this journey. Things improved at the end of the road. We were amused to see a road sign at the Hogsback end of this road that advised: “Road not recommended for caravans”.
Later, when we returned to Cape Town, I was talking to a cousin about this road. He told me that he had driven along it but managed to ground the car on a rock and sever his car’s fuel line. I have no idea whether this awful road has been improved, but, even if it has, I will not tackle it again.
Hogsback was delightful. However, when we arrived snow began falling in a serious way. The temperature dropped. The cottage we had hired was freezing cold. One tiny heater was provided to try to warm the whole place. It was useless. Hogsback like large parts of India suffers from cold during winter months. Yet, in both places, proper heating seems to be considered unnecessary. Apart from being cold, we enjoyed our brief stay at Hogsback, where we were fed with well-prepared food in a restaurant near our accommodation, run by Dion and Shane.
The two journeys I have described were somewhat risky and adventurous. Writing this reminds me of the parting words of a librarian in, Philippolis (in the Free State), the birth town of Sir Laurence Van Der Post:
“Whatever we die of in South Africa, it won’t be boredom.”
Photo taken in 2003 on the Joubert Pass
In quarantine
Face to face they sit
Waiting safely in lockdown
For healthy release
The importance of being British
I HAVE ONLY VISITED CRETE once, and that was in the late 1960s with my parents and sister. We were based in Heraklion and made excursions from there around central Crete, visiting sites including Knossos, Matala, the windmills of Lasithi, Malia, Aghios Nikolaos, and Phaistos. This piece concerns three memories of my late mother on that visit.
The first recollection is of the rather non-descript but very comfortable hotel where we stayed in Heraklion. It had its own swimming pool. My mother, who could not swim, and was always a bad sailor, could not bear to look at the pool; it made her feel seasick seeing its water.
The next memory is of a hot day somewhere in the Cretan countryside. We were all thirsty and ready for a drink. We passed a house with a garden. Some people were sitting at a table sipping the tiny cups of coffee that Greeks favour. They were drinking what many people call ‘Turkish Coffee’, which many Greeks prefer to call ‘Greek Coffee’ or even ‘Byzantine Coffee’.
My mother walked up to the gate leading into the garden and using one of the few words of Greek that she knew, called out:
“Kafenion?”
Kafenion (καφενεῖον) is the Greek word for ‘café’. Another Greek word she knew well was ‘siga’ (σιγά), which means ‘slowly’. She used it almost in every car that we were being driven in Greece. She was terrified that others driving her would have an accident because as a child in South Africa she had been involved in a dreadful car crash.
Getting back to my story, the coffee drinkers invited us into the garden and asked us to join them. My mother was mildly embarrassed to discover that this was a private house, not a ‘kafenion’. Soon, we were all supplied with Turkish Coffee. One of our hosts spoke rudimentary English. He had been a sailor when younger and excitedly told us that he had been to ‘Kong Kong’, in his own words.
Then, my mother noticed a single brightly coloured flower in the hedge surrounding the garden. She pointed at it, exclaiming “oreia” (ωραία), the Greek word for ‘lovely’. Our hosts burst out laughing. They found my mother’s reaction to the flower hilarious. One of them took Mummy to the flower and showed her it was artificial, attached to the hedge with a fine wire.
The third thing I recall about our Cretan odyssey relates to a commodity that was in great demand recently here in the UK: toilet paper. When we used to visit Greece in the 1960s and 1970s, there were usually people sitting at the entrances to public toilets. These folk, often elderly women, were there to sell sheets of toilet paper to people about to make use of the facilities.
We were in one small Cretan village when my mother needed to answer Nature’s call. We found a public convenience. An elderly toilet paper vendor was sitting by its entrance. My mother rummaged in her handbag for small change. While she was doing this, the lady asked my mother:
“Deutsch? German?”
My mother answered:
“British.”
The lady handed her some toilet paper and would not accept the customary two Drachma payment.
We were in Crete at least twenty years after the German occupation of the island had ended in spring 1945. The Germans had perpetrated many horrific deeds on the Cretan population. The woman outside the toilet was certainly old enough to have had strong memories of that ghastly time. Had my mother been German, she would have had to pay for the toilet paper. Being British, she was like the great writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) who fought the Germans in occupied Crete, a representative of a nation which helped rid the island of its unwelcome occupiers. This toilet attendant’s small act of kindness towards my mother helped drive home how awful it was to have been occupied by the Germans during WW2.
Shadow
The shadow on the wall
Produced by evening sun
Portends day’s end
yamey 