The Stratocruiser represented the ultimate in luxury. Twin-decked, with a glassy round bulbous nose, the plane tried to simulate the elegance of the Pullman cars in transcontinental express trains. Seats were arranged in fours, pairs facing each other. Above our heads was a reach-me-down bunk bed for children. On the lower deck was a small bar accessed by a tight spiral staircase, which I remember my parents descending for a cocktail before the meal was served — a side of roast beef on a silver trolley, the steward carving slices off it as if he were for all the world in the Savoy Grill and not twenty thousand feet above the dark wadis and sand seas of the endless Sahara.
All these aeroplanes and their successors — the Britannia, the VC10, and so on — were in the livery of BOAC — the British Overseas Airways Corporation — crisp white and navy blue and badged with the famous speedbird logo (now long vanished). As I grew older and became conscious of our annual trips back to Britain on leave, the planes, and by extension the company, came to represent the country by proxy, as if a little segment of Britain had been sent out to the colonies to fetch us back to the motherland. It was a kind of idealized metaphor, I suppose — the smart modern planes and their smart modern crew luring us on board with their smiles and their trays of boiled sweets — showing us what we had left behind, reminding us of our good fortune in being able to return.
My early experience of air travel instilled in me a love of flying, of airports and all the accoutrements of aviation which has not left me to this day. How could such an introduction to flight, at such an impressionable age, and with such magnificent ambassadors, not fail to entrance? As children our idea of a treat was to be driven from home to Accra airport to look at the BOAC plane. One runway, one uneven expanse of tarmac apron, a control tower, a few hangars, some low sheds doubling as immigration and customs, arrival and departure halls, Accra airport was modest and unassuming in the extreme. Across the road from the airport was the airport hotel, called The Lisbon for some forgotten reason, a single-storeyed wooden building with a wide veranda. On Saturday nights a highlife band would play and the more daring young expatriate couples would come there to dance. Like all airport hotels in Africa it effortlessly maintained a louche and faintly racy ambiance. We children would take our drinks — our Fantas and Cokes — and go and stand at the wood paling fence and stare at the silver giant, propellers stilled, parked on the tarmac. Fuel bowsers and generators hummed, linked trolleys bouncing with luggage trundled from the departure lounge, engineers and cleaners ran up and down the wheeled steps set against the doorways. Then came the crew, then came the long lines of passengers. Doors were closed, propellers turned, the plane was freed of its various appurtenances and it taxied to the end of the runway.
To see it lift off and climb into the dusty evening air was both exhilarating and melancholy, emotions perhaps not fully comprehended then but more easily analysed now. It has to be understood that in the fifties, certainly from an African perspective, these tremendous aeroplanes, and the world they both encompassed and conjured up, were for us a vision of immense and modern glamour and at the same time, like all people being left behind, we felt a sense of flatness and disappointment lingering as we returned to the car and were driven home, counting the weeks and months until it would be our turn to cross that cracked uneven piste towards the blue and white flying machine and be carried away by it also, cosseted and nourished, across the desert to Europe, to England, homeward.
As you mounted the steps towards the door, almost swooning with excitement, the first impression, aside from the stewardess (a figure of unearthly exoticism), was olfactory. The smell of the flyspray that was liberally pumped throughout the plane’s interior prior to take off was both sweet and oddly choking. It was a smell replicated nowhere else in my range of nasal memory — part marzipan, part cough medicine, part liqueur, part candy, part liniment… I could not place it: our flysprays at home did not smell remotely the same. But whatever it was, whatever brand it was or compound of chemical meeting unnatural fabric in a confined space, the BOAC version was potent and palpable. It was always, for me at least, the first smell of England. It was a kind of Rubicon; as you stepped over the threshold and were directed down the aisle, your lungs were filled with this curious reek. You soon became used to it but it signalled that your journey home had truly begun.
And yet my real home was in West Africa, in the Gold Coast — which in 1957 became Ghana. Until my tenth year I only spent summers in Britain, almost always in Scotland. But my parental home was in Ghana, and so were my bedroom, my things, my school, my friends. Scotland was where my relatives lived, where we rented a house and my parents caught up with their families. We were always in transit, welcomed but always “just visiting.” The real business of my life lay at the end of another plane journey in the reverse direction. And the comparative brevity of the annual leave never allowed us fully to integrate, to take things for granted, to become au fait with the latest fads and fashions. Little details remind me now of that sense of apartness. I felt ill at ease walking past school playgrounds, always stared at. Why wasn’t this boy (me) at school? (one could sense the unspoken question). How were my sullenly curious coevals to know that African school holidays did not coincide with the British? If I had not detoured, I crossed the street, head down. I never felt comfortable with children of my age group, en masse. I remember my father too, a man of status and real importance on the university campus where he ran a hospital and health clinics responsible for 20,000 people, fumbling like a new immigrant with his unfamiliar change as he tried to buy a newspaper in Edinburgh. You could sense the newsagent’s impatience building as my father picked and prodded hesitantly at a palmful of coins. I possessed also a vague embarrassment about my clothes. The shorts and sandals and shirts made from local tie-dyed cloth — which were wholly unexceptional in Ghana — seemed eccentric, not to say bizarre, in breezy St Andrews or the High Street in Peebles. I had no long trousers at all, and how I coveted my first pair of jeans — finally bought at the age of nine with an aunt in a department store in Birmingham — at last, knees covered, I might not stand out from the crowd. Needless to say I never felt like this in Africa, where I roamed about the countryside, cycled through the streets and boulevards of the enormous, sprawling campus, possessing the place so thoroughly, so intimately, that such unreflecting familiarity has never been reproduced, no matter where I have subsequently lived. I knew paths through the bush, short cuts through servants’ quarters. I knew where the biggest mangoes grew, the best spot to catch pythons, what pie-dogs to avoid, how to eat fufu, who would sell you a single stick of chewing gum, what were the rules and penalties of a complicated game involving the spinning of hollow snail shells … My life in Africa up until the age of ten was a modest but genuine idyll and its basic elements will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in the tropics — the child, the white child, still possessed a form of tolerant laisser passer denied the adult. We were unnoticed, or barely noticed, everywhere — which, when freedom to come and go is all you ask, is the best and most sincere form of welcome.