A Traveller's Life

I first discovered Eric Newby in 2011, when I read his exciting, and often hilarious, climbing adventure, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.  After ten years as a women's dress buyer for a London fashion house, he telegraphed a diplomat friend in Brazil, "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?"  And leaving the world of London fashion, he set out to climb the allegedly unclimbable, 19,000-foot Mir Samir in Afghanistan.  He had absolutely no climbing experience.   The pair came within 900 feet of succeeding.

Who was this guy, I wondered?

I later read another of his books, The Last Grain Race, in which he describes how, as the recent graduate of a tony London "public" (prep) school, he signed on as an apprentice sailor on a Finnish sailing vessel carrying grain from Australia to Britain.  His first day, while still dressed in street clothes, he was ordered to climb the rigging to the top of the mast.

Again I wondered, who was this guy?

I have a better picture of the lad now, after reading his 1982 collection of reflections, A Traveller's Life.  In 35 chapters, he discusses and reflects on the travels of his active life.  But he explains, in an Introduction, that he broadly defines "travels" to include any experience outside his home -- beginning with his birth, moving along to his boyhood explorations with his mother of Harrod's department store, and his experiences on his own as a school boy.

To anyone looking for a more traditional travel book, these early experiences might seem frustrating.  To me, they are the best part of the book, giving a first-hand picture of life in Britain, from a schoolboy's point of view, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Newby was born, in 1919, and reared in Barnes, a district in west London, bordering the south bank of the Thames.  Immediately to the north, on the other side of the river, is Hammersmith, which in turn is bordered on its north by Kensington.  At the time Newby was a child, Barnes was what he describes as a middle-middle class community.  Hammersmith was a rougher, working class area.  Newby, a day student, had to walk to St. Paul's school in Hammersmith (now relocated to Barnes), a nerve-wracking experience which may have given him a certain ability to confront hardship, as well as to deal with persons of other classes and nationalities.

The first three chapters paint a vivid picture of his Barnes environment at the time of his birth and boyhood, including visits to the Isle of Wight and, beginning when he was five, annual visits by motor car to the beach at Branscombe in South Devon.  He reminds us that until 1931, the speed limit in Britain was twenty miles per hour.  It was in Branscombe that he overheard a family "friend" comment to his aunt, "She didn't ought to 'ave 'ad 'im" -- a comment that seemed to still haunt him decades later.   En route to Branscombe, he recalls visiting Stonehenge, where there was only one human visitor -- and a lot of sheep.  The family''s drive from London  to Branscombe is described in great detail -- a fascinating read if you enjoy observing the changes that the years bring about.

Chapter Seven -- "Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith" -- is the real start of Newby's adventures as a solo traveler through foreign and dangerous regions.  The daily travel required just to get to school and back, wearing St. Paul's odd school uniform and a mandatory bowler hat, carrying an umbrella in hand, and yet keeping his health and sanity intact was hair-raising.  He describes Hammersmith:

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavor.

Travel through Hammersmith (now gentrified)

engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger, and despair that some nineteenth-century travelers experience in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the central highlands of New Guinea.

Most of us remember similar feelings when confronted with certain neighborhoods (and their scary inhabitants) that were, objectively, far less threatening.

Newby had hopes of attending Oxford, but he failed the mathematics section of his graduation exams (later the O-levels), and his father decided he wasn't clever enough for university, and should go into business.  After eighteen months, he made the fateful decision to apprentice himself on the crew of the S/V Moshula, sailing to Australia.  He was still in many ways a school boy, now thrown in with a tough crew, none of whom spoke more than a few words of English.  He wrote long, brave letters home, each touchingly begun:  "Dear Mummy and Daddy."  But he did well, won the grudging respect of many -- not all -- of his shipmates, and was invited to sign on to the next sailing.  As he writes in the closing words of The Last Grain Race, he took one last look at the vessel, walked away, and never saw her again.

World War II had begun.  He joined the Navy, served as a demolitions expert in the Levant, was captured by the Italians in Sicily, was shifted around from one POW camp to another, transferred to a camp in Germany, and was finally liberated by American troops.  He then married a woman he had met in Italy, and returned to the London fashion industry as a buyer. 

His adventures as a buyer might well be interesting to those involved in the world of retail sales or women's fashion, but those chapters merely made me wonder how he could stand it as long as he did.  Finally, he sent the famous telegram to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1956 headed for Afghanistan.

The final half of the book describes his new career as a travel writer, and especially as a writer for the late lamented American magazine Holiday.  He sums up various trips rather briefly.  Many of these later descriptions seem little more than diary entries.  But it's difficult for a travel writer's life to be boring.  He includes sketches of experiences in India, the Scottish isles, a drive from Amman to Aqaba in Jordan, Kenya, the Orient Express,  Istanbul and the Pera Palace Hotel, a scary visit by him and his wife to Haiti, and a fascinating visit to St.Katharine's monastery on Mt. Sinai. 

He also devotes a couple of chapters to New York, including the "adventure" of walking up Broadway from the Battery to a point north of Columbia University.  Hey, I've done that.  It's not really an adventure, and, from his tone, I think Newby agreed.

He ends the book with a lament for the incursion of motorized tourism into every part of the world, on roads not built for the convenience of the local population.

They were made for tourists in motor cars who never got out of the their vehicles at all.  No one who lived in a remote place and enjoyed doing so was safe from the panoramic road. . By 1973 they had already destroyed the solitude of the high Apennines which I knew and loved so well.

Even worse will be the day, which has not yet come, when the desire to be alone has finally been extinguished from the human heart.

Who of us hasn't uneasily shared that concern?