reading

Bill Colegrave has collected and been inspired by travel books for more than four decades. He also published them as owner of Cadogan Guides. His own book Halfway House to Heaven (2011) tells the story of his journey up the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan to find the source of the Oxus River in the High Pamirs. He has visited more than 110 countries. He has represented Great Britain (seniors) at real tennis and also in the World Pétanque Championships. He lives in London.

‘Arne was a superb leader, choosing the right people to work with and consult, then making firm clear decisions. He was always a delight to be with, on a mountain or ski slope, in a restaurant or pub; that wicked smile, boundless enthusiasm and warmth of spirit that led to so many great adventures.’

Sir Chris Bonington, who joined Arne and his Norwegian team on the successful 1985 Everest expedition

‘A buccaneer adventurer, he always wanted to defy the odds and the conventions. His great gift was to enthuse others in these endeavours; it was my privilege to be one of them.’

A dedication to our father who left us too young from his kids, Chris, Katinka, Leona, Ross, Evan, Nicklas, Louis

‘… these bits and pieces of the random world are little more than scraps of wool on a barbed wire fence; they’re there to be collected, spun and woven into the fiction of the book …’

The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type wool5 in the promo code box when you check out.

Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in the Years 1795, 1796 and 1797

ONE

Introduction

We used to play a game over dinner using The Times Complete Atlas, which has 220,000 place names. We were blindfolded and had to select places from the index until we had one in each of Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. The idea was that we all had to leave the next day and go to each of our places in turn. The first time we tried my pin landed on: Butuceni, a village in Moldova near the Dniester River, in what was once called Bessarabia; the city of Guwahati in Assam on the Brahmaputra, whose waters have flowed as the Tsangpo across much of Southern Tibet; a place called Tumatumari Landing, near the confluence of the Potaro and Essequibo Rivers in Guyana and home to the Arawak and Akawaio tribes; and then a wadi in Niger, which I realised I had crossed ten years before, when travelling the Sahara north to south.

The piquancy was in the anticipation of the unknown, the excitement of getting to somewhere that hitherto has been only a name on a map, a heady temptation for wanderlust.

Scraps of Wool is the story of travel writers titillating that wanderlust. It is told through the advocacy of many correspondents, all of them sharing a love of the adventure, and some, the writers themselves, having the enviable talent to communicate it. In no way is this collection a critique of travel writing or an accolade for individual titles. It is simply a celebration of writers who have inspired and amused. These are writers who understand that a simple narrative of a journey tends towards the dull. Their responsibility is to fashion a flowing story from their collection of incident and experience. As one of them, Jonathan Raban, wrote: ‘… these bits and pieces of the random world are little more than scraps of wool on a barbed wire fence; they’re there to be collected, spun and woven into the fiction of the book …’ The noun is fiction, not fabric. There are over one hundred different writers from eighteen countries of origin, that have followed these principles. Even the books that appear to be in diary form, such as Byron’s Road to Oxiana and Kinglake’s Eothen, have been carefully crafted, written and rewritten many times, so as to create a work that demands and deserves the readers’ attention.

For more than forty years I have collected and read travel books. The process was more dilettante than disciplined. But I had marked passages that enthused me and so had gathered a library that was annotated by triangular corner-folds and barely decipherable jottings. This was my own inadvertent wool gathering. As I have expanded the process to build this book, I have learned and been stimulated by how little I really know, and how much more there is to discover. It has been a pleasure to which I could turn at any moment; the library is a big barrel of refrigerated chocolate truffles, from which I have been allowed to choose more than a hundred, without any fear of getting fatter. The only pain has been a hankering after those left uneaten.

Scraps of Wool can be no more than an interim report on a burgeoning library; the classics of future years are now being written by writers ever more perceptive, as they must be in a world already so intimately explored.

I have had a treasure chest of recommendations from others and continue to receive them, the most valuable of which have been those accompanied by some personal anecdote or comment. Some of these are reproduced in the final chapter. The result is this collection of passages, sometimes no more than a sentence, that have inspired us to go or at least to dream of going.

My own first taste came one evening lying in a bunk in a yacht club in Cowes, Isle of Wight, with wind-blown rain on the porthole windows. I chanced upon a copy of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs. There is only one paragraph in the book that is not about the Iraqi Marshes and the waterborne life of the Madan Arabs. It is hidden in chapter sixteen. It refers to what he had done between visits to the Madan, in a completely different part of the world. This is the paragraph that would inspire in me a lifetime’s interest in Central Asia.

I had left in the last week of July 1952 and it was now an early afternoon in February. Seven months later; it seemed longer. In that time I had crossed high passes through the snows of the Hindu Kush to the cold blue lake of Korombar where the Chitral river rises; I had looked out over Wakand from the Borogil Pass and seen in the distance a glint that was the Oxus; I had slept on the glaciers at the foot of Tirich Mir, and in dark, verminous houses among mulberry orchards, where the last of the Black Kafirs lived on the borders of Nuristan.

I had no idea where the Chitral River or Tirich Mir were to be found or what the Wakand was, although the latter was to play a part in my life much later. But I knew I had to go to find them.

This book is for those who understand that feeling. It is for those who have what John Steinbeck and Ryszard Kapuściński both call the disease of travel, a disease that is ‘essentially incurable’.

TWO

The Skin of a Brontosaurus

Some writers only discovered the thrill of the journey after they had already embarked. It hit them like a new love, a revelation, and they have remembered and recorded that moment. Others knew they were travellers from long before they even left for abroad. Here are four such writers, connected by their pre-adolescent urge to travel.

There is Dervla Murphy’s realised ambition to cycle to India, and there is the young Judith Schalansky, entirely ignorant of the outside world whilst growing up in an East Germany that hardly admitted its existence. There follow two of the most celebrated openings to books: Joseph Conrad explaining how he came to want to go to Africa, the experience which he fictionalised in Heart of Darkness. Then the opening pages of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, which has been the first and best-remembered travel book for many. Chatwin got the ‘skin of the brontosaurus’ opening so right that it has been a bane of comparison for writers that have followed. Many have been asked by their editor: ‘Can’t you find an opening like …?’ The editor is always thinking of Chatwin. Nearly every writer of his generation and the next has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin; wanted, like him, to talk of Fez, Firdausi, Nigeria and Nuristan with equal apparent authority.

DERVLA MURPHY

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965)

Dervla Murphy (b. 1931), an intrepid Irish woman of the old school, is a doyenne of living travel writers, with more than twenty books to her name. Dervla is the opposite of the many British travel writers of the previous generation. They set out to enhance literary reputations by writing about the world; Dervla left school at fourteen to look after her mother in Lismore, County Waterford, and was rarely able to travel until she was thirty-two. Then she set out on her bicycle Roz to achieve the ambition that she had nurtured for twenty-two years. Full Tilt, her first book, tells the story of that journey. In later books she is often accompanied by Rachel, her daughter, who first travelled with her aged five. Dervla is not one of those seeking to impress with her hardiness or exclusive access; she is not one who wants to impress with accomplished philology and erudition. She just wants to take us on a holiday to unlikely places in the company of her bicycle or daughter.

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India. I’ve never forgotten the exact spot on a hill near my home at Lismore, County Waterford, where the decision was made and it seemed to me then, as it still seems to me now, a logical decision, based on the discoveries that cycling was a most satisfactory method of transport and that (excluding the U.S.S.R. for political reasons) the way to India offered fewer watery obstacles than any other destination at a similar distance.

However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders. I did not want to be soothingly assured that this was a passing whim because I was quite confident that one day I would cycle to India.

That was at the beginning of December 1941, and on 14 January 1963, I started to cycle from Dunkirk towards Delhi.

The preparations had been simple; one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition. I already possessed an admirable Armstrong Cadet man’s bicycle named Rozinante, but always known as ‘Roz’. By a coincidence I had bought her on 14 January 1961, so our journey started on her second birthday. This was ideal; we were by then a happy team, having already covered thousands of miles together, yet she was young enough to be dependable.

Six months later Dervla is at the Babusar Pass at the end of the Kaghan Valley going north towards Gilgit and Baltistan in North Pakistan.

For a combination of beauty, danger, excitement and hardship (of the enjoyable variety) today wins at a canter.

As I was resolutely chewing my breakfast of beans and one chapatti (made from about two ounces of maize flour and given me in honour of the occasion) an incoherent but kindly old man came along and told me that a pony-caravan had left the hamlet about three hours ago in a desperate attempt to cross the pass on the Mahomet-Mountain principle; they hope to collect essential stores from the camel-caravan which has now been held up at Butikundi for ten days. At the time I didn’t quite grasp why the old man was telling me this – but before long I got the message!

Roz and I started out at 7 a.m. (it was rather a holiday feeling not having to be up at 4 a.m. to beat the sun) and it took me nearly two and a half hours to walk slowly up the six miles I came down yesterday in less than one and a half hours. On this stretch I passed several groups of nomads, the smoke from their little camp-fires sending an incongruously cosy smell across the bleak landscape. Equally incongruous seemed the persistent call of a cuckoo. Apart from this, the only sounds to break the distinctive silence of high places were the whistles of nomads directing their flocks and the careless melody of sheep and goat bells.

I reached the first glacier in good shape, but the sun was now high and I noted with some alarm that this great bank of melting snow had moved a few yards since yesterday. However, the pony-trail was encouragingly clear and we were soon safely over; it was at this point that the penny dropped and I saw the import of the old man’s information. I stopped here to eat some of the glacier, remembering my last meal of snow in the mountains between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Already I was almost painfully hungry and apart from quenching my thirst the feel of the solid snow in my mouth was absurdly welcome.

For another mile the track remained clear, though so torn by the thaw that it resembled a river-bed. At this height no trees grow and the rock-strewn pastures, which in a few weeks will be a rich green, were wearily yellow after the long winter. Ahead I could now see a gigantic glacier, more than two miles wide, extending to the Top. The track disappeared beneath this about a mile to the west of where it crossed the Top and hoof-prints in the thaw-soft earth showed me that the ponies had branched off to take a direct route up, cutting all the hairpin bends which obviously lay beneath the glacier.

At this point I stopped to consider what I should do. To follow the track approximately would be much less exhausting than to take the short-cut, but it might be much more dangerous for someone ignorant of the idiosyncrasies of glaciers. So I decided to drag Roz up the direct route, not suspecting that what looked like a twenty-minute climb would take almost two hours.

By now clouds were dark and close, and a sharp wind sent gusts of little snow-flakes whirling around me at intervals. I revelled in this and went bare-headed, enjoying the keenness of the air. High peaks surrounded me, cutting off the valley below, and it was a rare joy to move alone among them with the chaotic symphony of re-echoing thunder as background music.

I was now higher than I had ever been before and when I stopped at six-minute intervals to regain breath my heartbeats sounded as loud as the thunder. This suffocating sensation frightened me until I realised that the illusory feeling of repeatedly coming to the point of death was simply the mountains’ way of teasing novices. By the time I was halfway up the ponies’ wisdom seemed open to doubt – their trail crossed many outcrops of rock and every time I lifted Roz over one of these barriers I collapsed with exhaustion. In places the snow was so soft that I sank into it up to the knees. Elsewhere it was so hard that even the ponies’ hoofs had made little impression and I kept upright only by driving my specially nailed boots into it at each step – a process which still further exhausted me. After about an hour and a half of this struggle I was at that peculiar stage when one doesn’t really believe that one’s objective will ever be reached, and when one’s only mental awareness concerns the joy (to some incomprehensible, if not downright unnatural) of driving one’s body far beyond the limits of its natural endurance. Then, having dragged Roz up another savage gradient, and over yet another litter of boulders, we suddenly found ourselves on a level plateau, about a quarter of a mile square. Sitting where I had subsided beyond the rocks, and still clutching Roz, I slowly assimilated the unlikely fact that we were on Babusar Top.

I was understandably anxious to photograph Roz at this historic point where, because of her owner’s mental unsoundness, she had become the first bicycle to cross the Babusar Pass; but though I took three shots I doubt if the light was strong enough for a cheap camera. Yet, between the intermittent snowfalls, I had a clear view to east and south, where the sun was bright on a sparkle of angular peaks and on the flawless, smooth curves of the glaciers that united them.

By now the thunder had ceased and when the wind dropped the overwhelming silence of the mountains reminded me of the hush felt in a great empty Gothic Cathedral at dusk – a silence which is beautiful in itself. However, I could afford no more than half an hour on the Top, for I was still fifteen miles from the head of the Kagan Valley. In my enthusiasm to get up, the process of getting down again had not been very seriously considered; possibly I was suffering from lack of vitamins to the brain, because I’d assumed that once on the south side all hazards would be left behind. This delusion was fostered during the first stage of the descent.

From the plateau, I could see, about 1,000 feet below me, a vividly green valley some eight miles long and two miles wide, with a foam-white nullah flashing down its centre, and a reasonably-surfaced earth track descending at a comfortable gradient along the flank of the mountain, where snow had lain too recently for any growth to have covered the brown scree. On reaching the valley floor the track crossed the nullah and was visible running level along the base of the opposite mountains before curving away out of sight halfway down the valley. As we began to free-wheel I reflected that this was a delightful road to follow, with all the characteristics which thrill a wanderer’s heart.

Half-an-hour later I was rapidly revising my opinion. The track’s first imperfection was revealed when we arrived at the nullah, to find that where a bridge should be stood two supports, stoutly upholding nothing. I looked up- and downstream with wild surmise. The ponies had not returned, therefore the ponies had forded the nullah at some point. But at what point? Unfortunately the ground here was so firm, and the bank so stony, that my diligent search for prints yielded no clues. Then, as I stood looking pathetically around me, in the faint hope of seeing some nomads, a solitary black cow (for all the world like a good little Kerry) appeared some twenty yards upstream, walking purposefully across the meadow towards the torrent. There was no other sign of life in the valley, either human or animal, and in retrospect I tend to believe that she was my guardian angel, discreetly disguised. But when I first noticed her I did not pause to speculate on her nature or origin. She was obviously going to ford the nullah for some good reason of her own, and we were going with her. I pedalled rapidly and bumpily over the grass to the point for which she was heading. There I hastily unstrapped the saddlebag, tied it to my head with a length of rope mentally and appropriately labelled ‘FOR EMERGENCIES’, and was ready to enter the water.

The cow, when she joined us on the bank, showed no surprise at our presence, nor did she register any alarm or despondency as I put my right arm round her neck, gripped Roz’s cross-bar firmly with my left hand, and accompanied her into the turmoil of icy water. It had occurred to me that if I found myself out of my depth this could become an Awkward Situation, but actually the water was never more than four feet deep, though its tremendous force would have unbalanced me had I been alone. My friend, however, was clearly used to this role and we crossed without difficulty, unless the agony of being two-thirds submerged in newly melted snow counts as a difficulty. I felt that there was a certain lack of civility about our abrupt parting on the opposite bank, after such a meaningful though brief association, but our ways lay in different directions and I could do nothing to express my gratitude. So I can only record here my thanks for the fairy-tale appearance of this little black cow.

JUDITH SCHALANSKY

Atlas of Remote Islands (2009)

Judith Schalansky (b. 1980), who lives in Berlin, was brought up in the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. Her illustrated account of ‘visiting’ fifty of the world’s most distant islands, first published in 2009, was also voted the most beautiful German book of that year.

I grew up with an atlas. And as a child of the atlas, I had never travelled. The fact that a girl in my class had actually been born in Helsinki felt unimaginable. But there it was in her passport: H-e-l-s-i-n-k-i. Those eight letters became a key into another world. To this day I am baffled by Germans born, for example, in Nairobi or Los Angeles. They might as well claim to come from Atlantis, Thule or El Dorado. Of course I know that Nairobi and Los Angeles exist – they are on the maps. But that someone has actually been there or even been born there still feels incredible to me.

I probably loved atlases so much because the lines, the colours and the names replaced the real places that I could not visit. When I was eight, I saw a documentary about the Galapagos Islands. I stared, fascinated by the enormous iguanas with their tiny heads and jagged combs. I still remember the breathless commentary: Day after day these animals bask motionless on the rocks. This is how the earth must have looked millions of years ago. My reaction was immediate: I was going to be a naturalist and travel to these islands. I dragged our atlas down from the shelf and, as the researchers on the television inched their way towards some nesting birds, I heaved open our map of the world. I quickly found the Galapagos. They were a cluster of dots in the light blue ocean. I want to go there now, I announced. Maybe one day, said my mother, sadly.

But I wasn’t to be deflected, and I pushed my index finger across the Atlantic to the tip of South America, turning before the southern polar circle and taking a new direction north at Tierra del Fuego. Take the Panama Canal, that’s shorter, she recommended, tapping on the line that separated North from South America. And thus I undertook my first voyage round the world.

This map had several colours. The Soviet Union was a bibulous pink. The USA was a reserved blue, nearly as bright as the sea. Then I looked for my country: the German Democratic Republic. East Germans could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders. It took a frighteningly long time to find. It was as pink and tiny as my smallest fingernail. This was hard to equate: at the Seoul Olympics we had been a force to reckon with, we had won more medals than the United States: how could we suddenly be so infinitesimal?

My love for atlases endured when a year later everything else changed: when it suddenly became possible to travel the world, and the country I was born in disappeared from the map. But by then I had already grown used to travelling through the atlas by finger, whispering foreign names to myself as I conquered distant worlds in my parents’ sitting room.

The first atlas in my life was called Atlas für jedermann (Everyman’s Atlas). I didn’t realise then that my atlas – like every other – was committed to an ideology. Its ideology was clear from its map of the world, carefully positioned on a double-page spread so that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic fell on two separate pages. On this map there was no wall dividing the two German countries, no Iron Curtain; instead, there was the blinding white, impassable edge of the page. That, in turn, the provisional nature of the GDR was depicted by the mysterious letters SBZ (Sowjetische Mesatzungs-zone, ‘Soviet-occupied territory’) in the atlases used in West German schools was something that I only found out later, when I had to memorise the rivers and mountains of a home country that had more than doubled in size.

The rest of the book is a little treasure house, a guide to tiny islands and enclaves that neither we nor Schalansky are likely to visit. Or maybe we will. They are attainable and provide a store of possibilities for those who love the adventure of being somewhere that they have only ever known from a map, which can create an anticipation that a photograph may only blunt.

This clenched heart lies untamable, protected from the wind by the great volcano of the neighbouring island. Here, at the outermost edge of the archipelago, the clouds hang low and it rains more than on the other islands, which are continually battered by desert winds. Dew forms on the leaves of the almond trees and the date and coconut palms, on the petals of the fringing lobelia, oleander, hibiscus, jasmine and bougainvillea. This island has veins of rivers and strong muscles in its mountain range. The faint beat of the melancholy morna sounds, and the old song pulses relentlessly in a minor key, a lament about the inescapability of fate. It is the longing for an unnameable moment in the past, for a distant land, for a long-lost home. A feeling, scattered like these islands, the yearning for a place that is at once everywhere and nowhere. This is the song of a land without original inhabitants. Everyone who lives here is descended from the planters who stayed behind and from their slaves, from those who chose to move here and those who were forced to, a people with blue eyes and black skin. // The melody starts hesitantly, following the wide arc of a legato. The guitar adds a bass line in four-four time, accompanied by the plucking syncopations of the cavaquinho, sometimes backed up by a violin. These songs live in the bars and dance halls of the harbour: Who goes with you / on this long journey? / Who goes with you / on this long journey? // This journey / to São Tomé // Homesick, homesick / homesick/ For my country São Nicolau // When you write to me / I will write to you / When you forget me / I will forget you // Homesick, homesick / homesick / For my country São Nicolau // Until the day / that you return. // Two-thirds of Cape Verdeans do not live on the islands any more.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Heart of Darkness (1899)

Heart of Darkness is a novel, but is included because the opening passages are autobiographical with Joseph Conrad putting his own story into the mouth of Marlow, the narrator of the novel. Conrad (1857–1924) was Polish, but was born in what is now the Ukraine. Although one of the most admired of all English language writers, he did not even speak it until his mid twenties. He began a nineteen-year career in the merchant marine on French ships. He joined the British merchant fleet in the late 1880s. Much of his writing drew closely from his experience in the merchant marine in in India, Borneo, Australia and South Africa. It was a three-year employment as a captain of a steamer on the Congo River that enabled him to write his most celebrated work, Heart of Darkness.

‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.” The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.

‘True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird – a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water – steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

BRUCE CHATWIN

In Patagonia (1977)

In 1972, Bruce Chatwin (1940–89) was working for the Sunday Times. He interviewed the ninety-three-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map she had painted of the region of South America called Patagonia. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ Chatwin told her. ‘So have I,’ she replied. ‘Go there for me.’ He went.

In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.

My mother knew the names of two prehistoric animals, the brontosaurus and the mammoth. She knew it was not a mammoth. Mammoths came from Siberia.

The brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the Flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the Ark. I pictured a shaggy lumbering creature with claws and fangs and a malicious green light in its eyes. Sometimes the brontosaurus would crash through the bedroom wall and wake me from my sleep.

This particular brontosaurus had lived in Patagonia, a country in South America, at the far end of the world. Thousands of years before, it had fallen into a glacier, travelled down a mountain in a prison of blue ice, and arrived in perfect condition at the bottom. Here my grandmother’s cousin, Charley Milward the Sailor, found it.

Charley Milward was captain of a merchant ship that sank at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. He survived the wreck and settled nearby, at Punta Arenas, where he ran a ship-repairing yard. The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among men – tall, silent and strong, with black mutton-chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes. He wore his sailor’s cap at an angle and the tops of his sea-boots turned down.

Directly he saw the brontosaurus poking out of the ice, he knew what to do. He had it jointed, salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I pictured blood and ice, flesh and salt, gangs of Indian workmen and lines of barrels along a shore – a work of giants and all to no purpose; the brontosaurus went rotten on its voyage through the tropics and arrived in London a putrefied mess; which was why you saw brontosaurus bones in the museum, but no skin.

Fortunately cousin Charley had posted a scrap to my grandmother. My grandmother lived in a red-brick house set behind a screen of yellow-spattered laurels. It had tall chimneys, pointed gables and a garden of blood-coloured roses. Inside it smelled of church.

I do not remember much about my grandmother except her size. I would clamber over her wide bosom or watch, slyly, to see if she’d be able to rise from the chair. Above her hung paintings of Dutch burghers, their fat buttery faces nesting in white ruffs. On the mantelpiece were two Japanese homunculi with red and white ivory eyes that popped out on stalks. I would play with these, or with a German articulated monkey, but always I pestered her: ‘Please can I have the piece of brontosaurus.’

Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin. My grandmother said I should have it one day, perhaps. And when she died I said: ‘Now I can have the piece of brontosaurus,’ but my mother said: ‘Oh, that thing! I’m afraid we threw it away.’

At school they laughed at the story of the brontosaurus. The science master said I’d mixed it up with the Siberian mammoth. He told the class how Russian scientists had dined off deep-frozen mammoth and told me not to tell lies. Besides, he said, brontosauruses were reptiles. They had no hair, but scaly armoured hide. And he showed us an artist’s impression of the beast – so different from that of my imagination – grey-green, with a tiny head and a gigantic switchback of vertebrae, placidly eating weed in a lake. I was ashamed of my hairy brontosaurus, but I knew it was not a mammoth.

It took some years to sort the story out. Charley Milward’s animal was not a brontosaurus, but the mylodon or Giant Sloth. He never found a whole specimen, or even a whole skeleton, but some skin and bones, preserved by the cold, dryness and salt, in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. He sent the collection to England and sold it to the British Museum. This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true.

My interest in Patagonia survived the loss of the skin; for the Cold War woke in me a passion for geography. In the late 1940s the Cannibal of the Kremlin shadowed our lives; you could mistake his moustaches for teeth. We listened to lectures about the war he was planning. We watched the civil defence lecturer ring the cities of Europe to show the zones of total and partial destruction. We saw the zones bump one against the other leaving no space in between. The instructor wore khaki shorts. His knees were white and knobbly, and we saw it was hopeless. The war was coming and there was nothing we could do.

Next, we read about the cobalt bomb, which was worse than the hydrogen bomb and could smother the planet in an endless chain reaction.

I knew the colour cobalt from my great-aunt’s paintbox. She had lived on Capri at the time of Maxim Gorky and painted Capriot boys naked. Later her art became almost entirely religious. She did lots of St Sebastians, always against a cobalt-blue background, always the same beautiful young man, stuck through and through with arrows and still on his feet.

So I pictured the cobalt bomb as a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. And I saw myself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud.

And yet we hoped to survive the blast. We started an Emigration Committee and made plans to settle in some far corner of the earth. We pored over atlases. We learned the direction of prevailing winds and the likely patterns of fall-out. The war would come in the Northern Hemisphere, so we looked to the Southern. We ruled out Pacific Islands for islands are traps. We ruled out Australia and New Zealand, and we fixed on Patagonia as the safest place on earth.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

Then Stalin died and we sang hymns of praise in chapel, but I continued to hold Patagonia in reserve.

THREE

‘Our Feeble Hearts Could Not Stand More’

I was eight when I first crossed the Channel. We flew from Lydd Airport in Kent in a short fat aircraft; we drove our car onto it. It flew us and three other cars to Le Touquet. Then we were on to the French roads. We stopped at a café. We had no cafés in late 1950s Britain, at least where I lived. I remember the wide green ribbed coffee cup, the smell of the coffee and fresh croissants. This was the smell of abroad.

A few years later my father took me on a boat from London’s Tilbury Docks. It was Union Castles’ Braemar Castle. I shared a cabin with my twin sister. We went to Gibraltar, Genoa (‘avoid the beaches at Rapallo; there may be topless girls’; there were), past Stromboli, erupting gently at night, then silently eased through the Strait of Messina, seeming to push the shore lights apart for a channel, and across to Alexandria. I did not sleep that night, just knelt at a hotel window and watched. Nightlife was new to me – men in white dresses, talking, bargaining, scurrying, just doing, all night – and by early morning a bustling, spicy market, urgent with opportunity for an innocent boy from Sussex.

We docked at Aden, where they walked around with guns on the street and even at midnight it was hotter than the best English August. Across the equator with all the ceremonies, accompanied by dolphins and phosphorescent flying fish, and then we nosed our prow through green tropical channels up into Mombasa. Real Africa.

In this chapter others describe how they fell in love with abroad, or bits of abroad. The first is Nicolas Bouvier, whose tribute to the excitement of new feelings of liberation gives the title to the chapter. I have felt the same; until I read Bouvier I would call these pinnacle moments ‘feeling in the chest events,’ after a line that I so clearly recall from Gavin Young’s Return to the Marshes but now cannot trace. They happen for me without warning: in a fly-swarmed meat market on a Kabul hill; whilst wandering among sheep on a stony dune south of Laghouat in the Algerian Sahara; the first glimpse of the Oxus after a fifteen-hour journey through a Tajikistan night in the back of a hijacked military truck; the first view of the Potala Palace. It is the drug that finds you, not the other way around.

Some, such as Bouvier, Jack Kerouac and John Masters, are young and on their first adventure. Or they may be on their first journeys to a particular destination, like Henry Miller in Greece and Paul Bowles in North Africa. Some, such as John Steinbeck, have many years of adventure behind them but are still thrilled at the new and searching for the meaning of their yen for travel.

NICOLAS BOUVIER

The Way of the World (1963, 2007)

It’s a gap year 1953-style. Bouvier (1929–1998) is a twenty-four-year-old Swiss, travelling and exploring for the first time. In this passage he finds himself in eastern Turkey. First published in 1963, L’Usage du Monde appeared in English translation in 2007 as The Way of the World. The first extract comes from his preface and the second is the last three paragraphs of the chapter ‘The Road to Anatolia’ and ends with the glorious words that give this chapter their title and represent the spirit of all of Scraps of Wool as a collection.

From ten to thirteen I had stretched out on the rug, silently contemplating the atlas, and that makes one want to travel. I had dreamed of regions such as the Banat, the Caspian, Kashmir, of their music, of the glances one might meet there, of the ideas that lay in waiting... When desire resists commonsense’s first objections, we look for reasons – and find that they’re no use. We really don’t know what to call this inner compulsion. Something grows, and loses its moorings, so that the day comes when, none too sure of ourselves, we nevertheless leave for good.

Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.

East of Erzurum the road is very lonely. Vast distances separate the villages. For one reason or another we occasionally stopped the car, and spent the rest of the night outdoors. Warm in big felt jackets and fur hats with ear-flaps, we listened to the water as it boiled on a primus in the lee of a wheel. Leaning against a mound, we gazed at the stars, the ground undulating towards the Caucasus, the phosphorescent eyes of foxes.

Time passed in brewing tea, the odd remark, cigarettes, then dawn came up. The widening light caught the plumage of quails and partridges … and quickly I dropped this wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again. You stretch, pace to and fro feeling weightless, and the word ‘happiness’ seems too thin and limited to describe what has happened.

In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.

JOHN STEINBECK

Travels with Charley (1962)

In 1960, at the age of fifty-eight and possibly already aware of his failing health, John Steinbeck (1902–1968), author of Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men, set out with his French poodle Charley and his camper pick-up truck on a journey across his native America. Two years later Steinbeck would become one of the more controversial Nobel laureates in literature.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am 58 perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must have, in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, where to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teenagers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration is an entity different from all other journeys. It has temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognised can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

HENRY MILLER

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

Contents

ONE

Introduction

TWO

The Skin of a Brontosaurus

THREE

‘Our Feeble Hearts Could Not Stand More’