No, when a writer’s frauds become too flagrant there can only be one solution: send them to Botany Bay. And I’m not talking New South Wales here, but Botany Bay near Enfield. This little village was dubbed by a Victorian wag who found it inconceivably far from London, and the name stuck. Graham Greene would’ve been perfectly happy in exile there penning a great Australian novel.
Line of Control
In February 2002 I was in India, visiting an arms fair to make a film about the death-metal trade for the BBC. It was a sensitive time. In Kashmir a million troops were massed along a euphemism, the so-called ‘Line of Control’, while the two subcontinental nuclear powers rattled their plutonium sabres with unashamed glee. It was a tense time for me, too. Before leaving London I’d visited the BBC’s medical unit, which was housed in a steel-clad, paint-by-numbers block under the lip of the Westway. Here I’d been given a galaxy of shots — for cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and God knows what else — as well a small rucksack full of malaria pills. It hardly seemed necessary for a four-day sojourn in the developing world. (Another great euphemism: if somewhere with a five-thousand-year continuous civilisation is the ‘developing’ world then what does that make Britain, the ‘foetal’ world?)
Together with the director, Amir, a charming, faun-like Anglo-Iranian, and David, the cameraman, an avuncular presence, I was holed up in a vast New Delhi hotel. Laid out on two storeys in a series of bewilderingly similar corridors and halls, the hotel reminded me of an Escher print, and as I made the trek to my room I kept expecting to see my doppelgänger disappearing around the next corner.
On the first evening we met up with our local fixer, and the four of us headed out to dinner at a restaurant of great repute. Suddenly we were plunged from the mock-oriental straight into the real thing. It was the first time I’d been in India since the 1980s and while I hadn’t forgotten the visceral impact of the place it still came as a shock when we climbed out of the taxi and met a forest of begging arms, many of them deformed. The sheer unadulterated hugger-mugger of old Delhi with its tuk-tuks, naked light bulbs, mud walls and teeming, pan-chewing humanity surged in on me like a wave. Then, sitting in the restaurant, I had a gastro-epiphany, registering the exact moment when a bacillus crawled off my fork and into my mouth. Sod it, I thought, in for a rupee in for a lakh, and I kept on eating.
The following day as we stalked the arms fair, trying to get oleaginous Department of Trade and Industry wonks and British Aerospace Systems salesmen to talk to us, my innards dissolved into a muddy flux. ‘You too?’ I squealed at Amir as we dashed between aisles of machine guns and missiles to the khazi. He nodded in pained acknowledgement. But when we both emerged he had in his hand a capsule as big as a smart bomb. ‘Take this,’ he told me. ‘The BBC gave it to me; it’s so strong that it’ll kill any known stomach bug stone dead in twenty-four hours.’
‘Why didn’t they give me one?’ I wailed petulantly.
‘Look,’ he thrust it at me, ‘I’m giving it to you now — take it!’
The next twenty-four hours saw Amir and me reach a state of considerable nervous hilarity as we attempted to interview reluctant arms traders while breaking off every ten minutes to answer the anguished howl of our diseased natures. We were reduced to spoofing the death-metal dealers — on camera — with a series of skits which we thought wildly funny:
Self: (to Swedish artillery manufacturer standing in front of a model of one of his guns) Is that the actual size of the 200mm Bofors?
Swede: Um. . no. . it would not be operational at that size.
Self: (to Finnish camouflage specialist) What’s the biggest thing anyone’s ever asked you to camouflage?
Finn: Um. . I don’t know. .
Self: How about a whole country, could you do that?
Finn: Well. . it would be. .
Self: Could you camouflage a whole country as another country?
Self: (to South African sniper rifle salesman) Tell me a little about this one. South African: The Springbok 8809 is a versatile, laser-targeted weapon capable of 99 per cent accuracy at a range of two kilometres.
Self: So in your opinion would this be the right weapon to hit someone in a motorcade?
SA: Errr. . I guess.
Self: Like a head of state?
SA: You could do that.
Self: For instance. . Robert Mugabe?
SA: Robert Mugabe?
Self: Yes, he’s up that river operating without any control at all and we’re going to terminate him. . with extreme prejudice.
Needless to say, none of this made it on to the box — but at least the Delhi belly was forced back up its line of control. But a week later we were back in England, and I had to raise a delicate matter with Amir.
‘Have you, um. . been burping sort of sulphurously?’
‘Yup — you too? It must be because those pills have worn off.’
‘Yeah, either that or we’ve been internally camouflaged by a miniaturised special forces unit.’
‘As a volcano?’
‘Yeah, obviously, as a volcano.’
‘Best call Geoff Hoon2 then.’
‘Yeah, yeah, better had.’
Tea Towel Archipelago
I was standing at the bar of the Taversoe Hotel on the northern isle of Rousay in the Orkneys. My interlocutor had the slushy vowels and beetling brows of a local. ‘Where’re you going on holiday then, Will?’ he asked. ‘The Scilly Isles,’ I replied. The Orcadian peered for a while into his glass of Dark Island stout, a brew as black as the heart of a berserker, before replying, ‘That’s not just silly — it’s fucking stupid.’
I could see his point. From the vantage of the Orkneys, where the wind only stills for 2 per cent of the average year and the lethal swell of the Pentland Firth crashes against the 600-feet-high cliffs of Hoy, the Scillies not only appear remote but also implausible. In my mind’s eye I could visualise a few flower-patterned handkerchiefs of land crumpled in balmy waves; Harold Wilson — the last British Prime Minister who could conceivably be described as ‘cute’ — sat puffing a pipe in the garden of a bungalow submerged beneath running roses; dwarf cattle wended o’er the lea; a hippy made hay with a pitchfork the size of a table fork. The whole archipelago was so dinky that it could be placed on a tea towel and flogged to a tourist.
Boarding the Scillonian at Penzance I found myself in an island fugue. The ferry looked stubby compared to other, similar vessels, high in the water and a short jog from bow to stern. Across the bay St Michael’s Mount rose out of the surf, a tidal nipple of an isle, prinked from the swelling breast of mother England. The Scillonian cast off and within twenty minutes it was rollicking around the long Atlantic swell. I began to feel sick, very sick.
The Scilly Isles are the last vertebra in the long, bumpy spine of Cornwall. These dinky nibblets of land — St Mary’s, St Martin’s, Tresco, Bryher et al. — are all that are left of a decent-sized island, Ennor, that was gradually submerged between the end of the last Ice Age and 2,000 BC. Ancient field systems can still be traced below the lagoon of St Mary’s Bay, and there are sufficient dolmens, tombs and cryptic maze formations to give the islands a satisfyingly mythical cast. John Fowles believes that Shakespeare had them in mind when he was location-spotting for The Tempest. Bermuda is the other island that lays claim to the play, and personally I think the two populations should fight it out between them using only whatever magical powers they possess.