But it’s all going to disappear: clean, well-maintained cars, healthy, polite, heavily insured drivers will be the minicab norm — soon they’ll have to do the “knowledge.” But picture the scene: it’s 2005 or 2006, very late in the evening and you are almost the last to leave a dinner party far from your home. You turn to your host: “I’d better get a cab.” He says he’ll call a licensed local firm. Then he turns to you: “Or would you rather go unlicensed?” Ancient, uninsured cars, he says, all the drivers are asylum seekers. The hairs on the nape of your neck prickle. You realize how you’ve missed the authentic minicab experience. You decide to go unlicensed. Five minutes later you hear that old familiar peremptory honking outside. You leave; you locate your car. Strange music emanates from it, your driver speaks to you but you can’t understand what he says. The static from the radio cuts through your brain. You slide into the back seat, there is dampness under the soles of your shoes and an unfamiliar odour fills your nostrils. “Drive,” you say, a catch in your voice — it may be illicit, but it’s real.
This is a fantasy, of course, but it is a fond one. And I suspect it contains an element of truth: however they legislate, however they seek to root out the old-style minicab it will linger on in secret parts of London, tenacious and ineradicable — like an arctic lichen, a Coelacanth, a Tas-manian devil — a little bit of England that refuses to lie down and die.
2001
Montevideo
Montevideo, Uruguay … Why did I want to go there? I had never been, but there was one very good reason why I shouldn’t have planned a visit: the opening pages of my last novel are set in the place and I have found it’s a very bad idea to check out the validity of your research — your assumed knowledge—after the book has been published. I have written novels set in the Philippines, Kenya and Berlin, for example, and have still to visit these places. I had travelled there in my imagination and my imagination had enjoyed the experience — it seemed somehow unnecessary, or risky, to have to verify if it knew what it was talking about.
But I found myself, this July, in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, and was due to move on from there to Rio de Janeiro. Across the vast estuary of the Río Plata lay Uruguay and Montevideo — this strange South American city that my imagination had inhabited for some months. I knew the layout of its streets, I knew where to find the cathedral, I knew about its solitary hill with a fort on top, I knew the name of the street where the hero of my novel had been born. So close — two hours away by speedy hydrofoil — it would have been a crime not to have checked it out.
Novelists travel — or don’t travel — for all sorts of perverse reasons. And as I boarded the sleek buquebus (the hydrofoil) at Puerto Madera in Buenos Aires I started to wonder what had made me select Montevideo as the starting point for my last novel. These decisions are, more often than not, made almost unconsciously. My novel, Any Human Heart, was the story of one man’s progression through the twentieth century narrated via the medium of his intimate journals. For some reason I wanted this man, this Englishman, to be born abroad, to be somewhat deracinated, and I chose Montevideo as his birthplace and the locus of the first few years of his tumultuous life. For “some reason.” The first reason was simple: corned beef. Everyone older than me, everyone of my generation and perhaps younger, for all I know, has heard of Fray Bentos corned beef. But not many people know that Fray Bentos is not a brand name but a city in Uruguay. A city built in the late nineteenth century around beef and its processed variants. Corned beef, “bully beef,” that staple of our national diet for well over a hundred years, originated in large part from frigor’ificos—vast abattoirs and canning factories in Uruguay. Corned beef — iconic food of the British nation — came from Uruguay. Where better to start an Englishman’s life story?
But this wasn’t the complete explanation. I recently reread Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul, which is set in Paraguay. It starts like this, in a mood of classic Greenean evocativeness.
Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag … It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.
I realized that when I had first read the novel on its publication (in 1973) I had conjured up from these few sentences an abiding image in my mind of South America — however factitious and romantic. Dusk, a broad river, a certain world-weariness. I knew that something that had lingered with me from Greene’s novel had, decades later, made me start my own in Montevideo.
The buquebus headed off from Puerto Madera at high speed, judging from the fountaining spume of its impressive wake. The Río Plata was ideally calm but there was no possibility of going on deck — forbidden. Crossing the huge refulgent river as the sun set was almost like being in a plane. As we travelled towards Uruguay I realized there was another personal connection that was urging me on to Montevideo. When I was very young, I was best friends at school with the son of the famous film director Michael Powell. The one film of his that we saw in those days was his (now virtually forgotten) version of the hunting and destruction of the German battle-cruiser, the Graf Spee, in 1939—The Battle of the River Plate (1956). The Graf Spee, pursued by the British fleet, made for the safety of Montevideo harbour. Uruguay was neutral and the Graf Spee was allowed only forty-eight hours in port. Rather than face the British ships waiting offshore the captain scuttled the ship in the river and committed suicide. Something of this connection — Michael Powell, this forgotten film, my early schooldays — had suggested Montevideo to me, also. Such is the strange congruence of sources that combine and cohere in the writing of a noveclass="underline" corned beef, Graham Greene, an old black and white war movie. And now I was going to see the place for myself.
It was in the final fading light of sunset that we pulled into Montevideo’s harbour — light enough for me to recognize (as if it was familiar somehow) the low conic hill that signalled Montevideo to so many visitors over the centuries. It was a strange moment. I had written in my novel (some two years earlier): “Did I weep when I looked back at my beautiful city beneath its small, fort-topped conic hill as we left the yellow waters of the Río Plata behind?” Now I was arriving in this very city — and the hill was duly there, but the waters of the Río Plata were black with the oncoming darkness, reflecting the dancing lights of the custom house. Moreover, I had been writing about a Montevideo that existed in 1914—would it still be beautiful?
The short, brutal answer is “no.” But the city, as I explored it over the next two days, was no less fascinating for that. I was there, I should say, for only two days in the middle of the Uruguayan winter — nowhere looks its best in winter (unless it’s a ski resort). Montevideo was the thin sliver of corned beef in my South American sandwich: Argentina and Brazil being the thick slices of bread. I was really doing the city — let alone the country — no justice and my motives for being there were both arcane and personal. The sandwich analogy is apt in other ways, however. Uruguay’s export economy has suffered greatly in recent years: first from Brazil’s devaluation of its currency in the late nineties and second (how unlucky can you get with these two neighbours?) with the Argentinian financial crash of 2001. While Buenos Aires and Rio both show healthy signs of recovery and some evident civic pride, Montevideo is still clearly reeling from this double whammy.