SETTLING DOWN. 

THEY STILL RODE HORSES on Rotten Row, and one could still park a car there all day for free, which I did and walked across Park Lane to my new office. This was a lazy, sunny June in 1957 and I had just moved from Bristol to London to start work at the offices of BISRA, the British Iron and Steel Research Association The work, Operations Research, was new and the team: young, mostly statisticians and economists, with me as the token engineer. The front room was filled with something I had never seen before, a computer. The two programmers, paper tape draped across their shoulders, were identical twins, perhaps appropriate for the binary nature of their work. “Shoot” said the Director of Research, a monosyllabic Canadian, as I was ushered into a back room. And my new team-mate Peter Thursfield, a cheerful Yorkshireman,  then described the simulation exercise that the computer was to work on. To get the data for the computer Peter and I were to go to Glasgow to measure the pouring of molten steel into huge ingot moulds. “You’ll have to jump down into this long pit, drill holes in the ingot moulds, attach wires to the temperature measuring equipment, and get out before the steel arrives.” We had been told it would take one hour for the bucket with 100 tons of liquid steel traveling along over the pit to reach us as we had crouched between the moulds. So, two days later we filled the back of a station wagon with instrumentation, and four of us shared the driving on another novelty, a motorway. And, next morning, we began to see something of what had so stirred up Marx, Engels and Dickens a hundred years ago, the terrifying power, noise and smoke of Britain’s industrial revolution. We had not been warned of the psychological effect of the deafening clamour, the searing heat, and the enormous size of the bucket hanging from its overhead crane. And, of more personal concern, how did they know it took one hour? And could we scramble out in time if it sped up? Just to cheer us up they told us about yesterday’s funeral. “He put the tractor in reverse by mistake and it ended up upside down in the pit. They had to stop the bucket.”

A MUNRO is any mountain in Scotland over 2000 feet high. Unsurprisingly, we needed a break at the weekend and Peter suggested we “bag a Munro”. So we took a train to the highlands and bagged one. At the top we drank from an icy stream, relaxed on the heather, and gazed at the other Munros across the misty Highland landscape before heading back to the “dark satanic mills” (William Blake?) of Glasgow. Back in London and it was still high summer, warm enough to go swimming in the lunch hour. The Serpentine was just across the road, and the water was kept clean by a launch named “Chlorynne” which chugged up and down alongside us distributing a white powder. London rents, considerably higher than in Bristol, were now forcing me westward, to a tiny bed-sitter at Earls Court, where the cupboards were smeared with something like ghee, and yellow and orange powders lay clustered in the corners. But London was now much closer to Martlets so I could escape for weekends with Mother and Dad. In the summer there was grass waist high in the paddock. Jennie the goat did her best to keep it down but Dad now had a large agricultural grass cutter. In the autumn there were blackberries to pick in the lane and, in the winter, walks across the railway line in early afternoon before it got too dark and cold.

RECONNECTIONS. I was now making connections again but with a global network of people, testing that theory again of “Six Degrees of Separation”. So let me start this network with an eccentric, Arthur Barron. In World War One he crashed his biplane over the trenches in France. Next day, in hospital, his hair turned white, though he was completely bald when I knew him, laughing and carrying Priscilla high up on his shoulders along the Main Street boulevard. Dad thought this behaviour quite extraordinary, “infra dig”, and much later I wondered what he thought of me doing the same with Madeleine. Priscilla’s Mum was a Farrar so I suppose Priscilla is a sort of cousin. Anyway, our paths were to cross again in Barbados where she was a gauche schoolgirl, and in London where, anything but gauche, she captured the hearts of Frank Ruhemann and Mike Toogood. Now back to Georgetown and the photo of me aged four with Elizabeth Coyer, aged two, sitting on the Sea Wall. Soon after, Dr. Coyer was to take my tonsils out and prescribe ice cream for two days, which I remember with pleasure. And I seem to remember Mrs. Coyer serving ice cream for desert when they invited me and Joan, newly wed, to dinner in London. Because Mrs. Coyer remained a close and supportive friend to Mother, particularly after Dad died, I wrote her Christmas letters until she died in 2009 aged 96. Back to Georgetown again and, aged about seven, I started in Olwen Allen’s Georgetown preschool with her daughters Margaret and Jennifer. Possibly due to her husband’s waywardness, Olwen eventually took her girls to England, and drove an ambulance in the Bristol blitz. She then divorced and married Roland Coxon. The children, unaware of her reasons, sadly often the case, abandoned their mother. Later on Mother, who was a great friend of Olwen’s, spent a whole year tracking down the girls and arranging a reunion and reconciliation. The Coxons lived in Dartmouth Road in London, across the road from their GP, a Dr. Naschen. Mrs Coxon took in boarders and I was one briefly while studying for the Mechanical Sciences Tripos entrance. So, years later, I was invited to a party there. I took a shy Frank Ruhemann and an effervescent Priscilla with me and we met up again with the three other Guyana girls: a jolly Elizabeth, an introvert Margaret, and an extrovert Jennifer, and to talk about the world we had left far behind. It was quite a party. And, some ten years later, Dr. Naschen was to deliver our son John late one night in our flat just round the corner from Dartmouth Road.

JOAN. By now I was sharing a flat in Kensington High Street with Mike Toogood and, after two years, changing jobs again. So now, on April Fools Day 1959, I started work with Hawker-Siddeley Industries in St James Square. I was sharing an office with Bill and Ian and they were teasing another newcomer, an Australian girl, Joan Hogan. I noticed that, though she was good-looking, she kept her cool and got on with her work. After a few weeks she was suddenly hospitalized and I was delegated by the office staff to take flowers to her. There were other visitors and, although Joan was very weak, I noticed the way she carefully introduced us all, something the English are not very good at. Joan recovered, returned to work and then changed her job. By then we were going out together and I was trying to impress her, “The Eroica is definitely Beethoven’s best”. So, before we went to the Proms to hear it, Joan impressed me by getting the score out from the Kensington library. I had to confess I couldn’t read music and was then a little more circumspect on musical matters. My work now was engineering consulting with a fair bit of traveling so, getting back from trips on Friday evening, we were discovering new cuisines and Bhindi Ghost and Sweet and Sour.

Joan had decided to test me out with a visit to John and Gill Duberley and, especially, my reactions to their tiny twins. Last time I met John Chelsom from BISRA he had described their new baby as “soggy bundle leaking at both ends”, so I was not all that well prepared. However, I was woken in the morning by two little girls smiling at this curious newcomer stretched out on the settee. They adopted me for the weekend, and I seem to have passed the test. Now it was time for Joan’s test, meeting with my parents. She started off badly changing onto the wrong train from Lewes and ending up at Seaford. “I must be an absolute moron” she apologized to Mother and Dad as I watched them appraising her thoughtfully. Though we had now both past our first tests, we waited a year before getting engaged, slowly becoming aware of and resolving parental concerns. Joan’s family concerns, about her marrying a non-Catholic, ranged from very mild to strong. My parents, with a history of global family migrations, saw the possibility that we might migrate to Australia. As it turned out, it was eight years and three children later before we did migrate, during which time Ann, Mary, Mum and Pa all had the opportunity of visiting us in our home in England and meeting my parents. Meanwhile I had joined IBM; we had taken a lease on a flat in North-West London and were planning our wedding. So why was I marrying Joan Therese Hogan? Was she attractive? Yes, and as the song goes, if I “Take a pair of sparkling eyes” I will be a lucky man. Was she practical? Yes, as another song goes “Dashing away with a smoothing iron, she stole my heart away”. Commitment? After knowing each other for two years I knew she was right for me. I also admired the guts Joan had to be marrying a non-Catholic, because she has decided I was right for her. Do these add up to love? Almost, but there is something else that I could not define then or since: the continual emotional surprises of being with Joan.

“I haven’t seen sun like this all summer” said Tim as we peeped out of the window of the sleeping car. The vine-covered slopes of the Rhone valley were already ablaze with the sort of sunrise that never happens in England. It had been Joan’s suggestion that I joined Mother, Dad and Tim for a week of their continental holiday, and soon we had unloaded the car at Lyon station and headed east to Switzerland. But “Go south to Italy” advised the Swiss hotel manager as we all looked at grey curtains of rain drifting across Interlaken. Europe is not large and soon we were unpacking Mother’s picnic on spongy turf under the pink crags of Italy’s Dolomite mountains. At Verona I never dreamed that Joan and I would one day sit on those 2000-year-old marble steps waiting for our cue for the Dies Irae. Italians have their own Pomp and Circumstance and, waiting for dinner, we watched the fascinating spectacle of two characters out of Gilbert and Sullivan, swords, medals and plumed hats, gesticulating as they strutted around and around Verona’s town square, no doubt discussing the appointment of the next town clerk.

 MARRIAGE. Suddenly, there was the dressmaker, holding an umbrella over Joan’s wedding dress as we emerged into drizzle from the porch of St George’s Catholic Church. It was the 3^rd of April 1961, Mike Toogood was my best man, John Duberley gave Joan away, Uncle Jack played the organ, Mother and Dad provided the reception at Martlets, and Andy Mustard attached “Just Married” signs to the Ford Prefect. “Now where on earth has Dad got to?” but there he was at the garden gate, to be the last to shake hands with me. The April showers cleared and we set off on our honeymoon. Aunt Marjorie had warned us that there is always someone who is offended at a wedding and, since we omitted to send her a postcard from France, it happened to her. “Hello” I thought “Did I once repair this one in Bristol?” I had worked on Bristol Freighters in the aircraft factory and here was one opening its jaws to swallow our car for the short flight across the Channel.

As if going through a small, magic door we were now in a quaint and ancient world called France. Climbing up through the rambling Old Mill at Etamps, we passed a grey-haired old woman working a spinning wheel. She smiled and pointed up to yet another floor. There, our room looked down onto a large ornate garden in which a romantic young couple was strolling leisurely, hand in hand. Later, to our surprise, they turned out to be our waiter and waitress at dinner. This was definitely not England. Next day we followed empty roads, turning west along the Loire River to Vouvray. At breakfast next morning we were joined by workmen calling in for their morning glass of wine. In Tours the sky, and the Cathedral stained glass, were the deepest blue I have ever seen. We crossed the moat and struggled to follow a tour conducted in French at Azay-le-Rideau. Years later we were to walk across the bridge to the same island chateau with Rebecca. Now turning south, at Cahors, though we were the only guests and Madame was running the inn by herself, there were wisteria petals in our finger bowls. A detour took us to Lascaux where we were amongst the last people allowed to visit the famous prehistoric cave paintings before preservationists closed them down. Now down at the bottom of France, I think our visit to Lourdes was on account of Jim’s daughter’s name being Bernadette, but I went along with it all the same. At an ancient village high up in the Pyrenees heavy wooden shutters opened and closed to see who it was who must have lost their way – there was no other reason to go there. But from there we drove even higher to the Circque de Gavarnie at the edge of Spain. Later, in one of my recurrent dreams, we are driving in a horse and carriage up along the South Downs, overlooking on the left the Sussex of my boyhood. But then, somehow suspended above the Beachy Head escarpment, is the Cirque, an immense horseshoe of ice and snow still glittering in that April sunshine. Working our way east along the foot of the Pyrenees we stumbled on that long, medieval hill town, Carcassone where, years later, Nigel Kennedy was to startle the local French aristocracy with his version of The Four Seasons. At Perpingnon there were steaming hot bowls of Bouillabaisse and next day we hit the Mediterranean, quite literally, getting bogged in beach sand. “You guys in trouble?” asked the American in a Mercedes. Speaking fluent French he waved down a passing truck, helped tie a long rope, and advised us on a suitable tip. Working East along the Cote d’Azur , Bezier, Sete to the Carmargue and those strange wetlands where wild horses still roam. Sur le pont d’Avignon, and it really did stop in mid-stream. To complete the square we turned north and, at Fleurville, the express train racketed past our hotel window at 2 a.m., reenacted in the film My Cousin Vinnie. We still have the little floral pot that once held the mustard we bought in Dijon.

Across the Channel and driving up to London, a police car stopped me. Since I was driving on the wrong side of the road I got out, apologized and explained we had been honeymooning in France. The police were more polite in those days. “Best wishes to you and your wife, sir. But please don’t let it happen again”. Eight years earlier Aunt Marjorie and Aunt Dorothy had attended my graduation in Cambridge and we had then driven up to stay overnight at Ye Olde Nags Head in Castleton in the Peak District. Then, the proprietor was playing the Emperor Concerto in the bar. Now, he was still playing it when Joan and I stayed. I also remember it as the occasion when I fused the hotel’s power supply with a special adaptor I had made for my razor and, from later calculations, as the possible date of Kate’s conception. Joan had by now adapted to England’s beaches by wearing her overcoat, which now protected her from the icy summer winds up here on the moors. And soon she was making yet another new adaptation, to the changes in her centre of gravity. But we will have one more pre-natal holiday, a weekend at Keepers Cottage. It is a fairy-tale cottage at the bottom of a fairy-tale valley next to a fairy-tale brook, and we just sit in deck chairs and “talk the sun down the sky” (Aristotle?) until it is time to stroll down along the valley with Mike and Molly for a glass of cider at The Shoe, a village not far from where Chris and Madeleine now live.

 

KATE. I was reading in bed when the scratching noise started. Joan, always multi-tasking, was filing her finger nails while “saying” her rosary. Then, opening her book, she startled me again. “Oh no, their yak has died”. She was reading Seven Years in Tibet while I was reading Introduction to Motherhood. Since hospital beds were still in short supply only first children were born in hospital. At the Middlesex, Kate arrived faster than anticipated and I could hear Joan as I raced up four flights of stairs. That a doctor was putting an oxygen tube into Kate’s mouth was probably routine but I didn’t know that and I was more than relieved, after waiting half an hour, to see Joan happy and Kate well. Now I could cradle my first child in my arms and experience sensations that my upbringing had not prepared me for. Joan was now getting to know her ward neighbours and, since hospital beds were high and Joan was not, one of them used to help her get back into bed. Tim visited Joan in hospital and later commented, as I might well have done years ago looking at a newborn squashed face, “what an extraordinary looking thing”. But this extraordinary looking thing was a miraculous part of me and I loved it. So we phoned our parents and our baby was welcomed into our families. And then there was the Christening, of Katarina Maria, or Catherine Mary.

162 WALM LANE. We had signed a four-year lease on the first floor of a Victorian house in North-West London and, to smooth ruffled feathers, we had invited a delighted Aunt Marjorie to stay as our first guest. The bow window of a large, airy living room opened onto Walm Lane. Two Parker-Knoll armchairs, possibly the only new things we bought in 30 years, flanked our first big mistake, a brown vinyl settee. But we had now found the antique shops of the Portobello Road, and the leather-topped desk and carver in the bow window are still with us. Alongside lay the second bedroom, and. there was a third, tiny bedroom largely occupied by the components of a project I carried from Bristol to London to Sydney without ever finishing it. I had bought a universal circular saw, a beautiful piece of German precision engineering. Uncle Jack had given me a rotary planer, and a motor out of an old washing machine. The idea was to assemble these onto a pair of bed rails into a general purpose woodworking machine, and its insoluble problems kept me happily occupied for many years. But in the big freeze two years later all three rooms were sealed off while the three of us survived with an electric heater in our bedroom and a paraffin heater in the kitchen. I am now looking at a pen and ink sketch of that kitchen. Joan is stirring a pot on an old electric stove with cast iron Queen Ann legs. On the floor is my first attempt at a doll’s cot, for Kate. The fittings and equipment hanging off the corner walls are ugly, typical of rented accommodation but, in the other corner sit the round Victorian table and five beautiful regency chairs that have also followed us round the world. Joan didn’t have a watch so, another sketch, from the kitchen window, shows the largest egg timer in the world, St Gabriel’s church clock opposite. Our landlords, the Zaraiahs live downstairs. They come up to use our bathroom once a week and once a week we go down to watch television with them. It is the era of David Frost, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Dame Edna Everidge. After visiting Buckingham Palace Dame Edna says “It is nice to find some of the Poms have a decent standard of living”. During the big freeze, David Zaraiah’s new Skoda started rusting in the street, and a one metre icicle hanging from our toilet overflow pipe was pointing at his bonnet, causes us concerns over public liability. In the end the icycle crashed loudly but harmlessly on the footpath.

KATE’S FIRST HOLIDAY. That summer and Kate at four months, we stayed in that part of North Wales where they spell things with two ells where one would have done. William Williams’ family had run the farm for four hundred years and they told us how to find the beach. We had heard of baby-sitters but not yet met any. But now, the beach was hot, the surf inviting, and a nearby mum offered to watch Kate in her Moses basket. So we swam cautiously, with our backs to the surf and faces to the Moses basket. Then, our luck continued when Mrs. Williams offered, and we were able to go out to dine in Llangollen (or was it Pthelley). If you ever were to own a restaurant, never, ever leave it in the charge of three languid, incompetent girls with Mayfair accents and imperious attitudes. The place was almost empty, but “We can just squeeze you in” as I jumped out of the way of a large Brunehilda, advancing menacingly on me. She waved at a spare table with a Wagnerian gesture and we crept over and sat meekly, wondering what would happen next. After two more couples were interrogated and permitted access, Brunhilda then seemed occupied with some mental arithmetic. “Pippa” she shouted over our heads and in the general direction of the kitchen “You will have to go out and get some more frozen peas”. We were eventually served with something, I think it was burnt steak, along with green peas and a bottle of warm white wine.

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. We kept a large, old-fashioned pram in the hall and Kate, and later John, would be wheeled into the back garden for fresh air, and sometimes sun. It was not the sort of neighbourhood where you met many neighbours. There were Poles round the corner who spoke Latin in church, the Irish up on Cricklewood Broadway who got fighting drunk on Friday night and, in the flat below, our landlord, whose ancestors had been migrants from Spain, and objected to all immigrants, Polish or Irish. There were still occasional horses pulling carts and, a lady passing in the street did once admire Joan for her courage in scooping up some equine generosity for our small vegetable plot. Up the street, near the tube called Willesden Green, were curious remnants of a past age, “W. Coggins, Practical Boot and Shoe Repairer”, and a shop displaying the same unsold dust-covered kitchenware year after year. One of these objects, a Pyrex dish, appeared two months after they told Joan they were out of stock and would reorder. But meanwhile we had found a replacement and the reordered dish was still accusing us from the window the day we left Walm Lane. The Broadway was a more vibrant metropolis with a useful hardware shop and Kate, aged three walked there with me one Saturday morning. And for the first time I saw Kate as an independent autonomous human being when she insisted, swinging it firmly away from me, on carrying the large heavy box of screws all the way home.

JOHN. There were these biscuits Joan had made. “Parturition biscuits” said Dr. Narschen  as

he and I sat munching and chatting on the bed while Joan got ready for another push. Then another miracle, John arrived and now “I didst have a daughter and a son, standing twixt heaven and earth, begetting wonder” (Shakespeare).The photo shows Kate proudly looking after John in the same pram she had, and that Madeleine and Rebecca will have in due course. But while we are at Walm Lane we have some intrepid Australian visitors. Ann arrives on a Vespa motor scooter on her way from Australia to Cornwall, and Paree and Neil Hartley arrive from a honeymoon in Vienna. Their visit coincides with the arrival of a stray kitten on the doorstep and Neil and I are delegated to drive it after dark to another suburb, preferably a well-to-do neighbourhood, where it will be well looked after. We stop, Neil puts the kitten on the footpath and we take off. There is a yeoul from behind us, and Neil says grimly “Keep going”. We hope it will be well looked after. We hear that our Bristol friend Mollie Windrum is going blind and we visit her in a London hospital. Next time we see her she will be so delighted to meet, but be unable to see, our four children.

MADELEINE. We had moved to our own first house, at Farley Road in South London. Kate went to her first kindergarten, John had a tricycle and an infectious sense of humour, we called him Sunny Jim, and Joan was carrying Madeleine. I had just accepted a position as a computer programmer in Colgate-Palmolive when they reorganized, cancelled the position, and gave me a month’s salary in lieu of notice. So we decided to blow it on a two-week holiday in Elba. We flew to Pisa and took a coach that wound slowly through exuberant crowds in quaint market towns to the port of Piombino. A short ferry trip landed us at Porto Azzurro and then a bus to a little hotel above a beach. We hired a tiny Fiat Topolino (little mouse) one day and discovered a beach with something I had never seen before: surf. It was hard to get Joan out of the water. And now, three months later I had actually started to deliver Madeleine when the mid-wife arrived very late. I slept that night under the little canvas cot the Duberleys had lent us, listening to each sniff and snuffle from above. Joan had worked with Avril and Bill Oswald at BMRB and now we were living not far from Sevenoaks. Paree and Neil Hartley were also close, having moved to Croydon, at the bottom of our hill. Soon after, Mary arrived to see us at Farley Road, ultimately on her way to live in Canada for a few years with Ann, and then followed Joan’s parents.

MUM and PA. At the time we got married the idea of a visit to Australia, probably with children and saved up for out of an English salary, seemed impossible. And so, it was a sad day when I explained to Joan that she might not see her family again. As it turned out later, Joan was able to see Ann and Mary again when they visited England. Meanwhile, I had started work on a secret plan. The companies that had sold a lot of computers to the Commonwealth Public Service forgot to tell them they would need programmers, and I am now a programmer. The plan was simple. We can rent out our house in England, travel free to Australia and, perhaps in three years, save enough to get back to England. I apply, I get appointed to a position but, then we hear that Mum and Pa are coming on a visit to England. So I ask for a deferment from someone straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan: The Deputy Assistant Director General of the Post Master General’s Department, for a deferment and we stay on at Farley Road another year.

Mum and Pa arrived to stay a few months, and in no time Mum was busy in the house and Pa in the garden. “Don’t push your brother like that” said Pa, digging a vegetable bed. “Get on with your work, old man” replied Kate, now in a new self-assertive phase. One evening, as Mary and Mum were planning what to wear for a garden party at Buckingham Palace, an amused Pa said “Little woman, you’ve come a long way from Pampoo Street”. And he would smile quietly at some of our domestic exchanges. “I can’t find the scissors” I say. “Where would you like me to keep them?” “I don’t mind so long as they stay in the same place”. And “There won’t be enough recipe cards for me in this box” “Well, when you’ve filled them all in, I’ll buy you another box”. I’m still waiting. By now the three children had got to know Mum so well that she offered to baby-sit one weekend. But across the Welsh border heavy rain slowed us almost to a stop. “We could always go back East and stay with the Duberleys” said Joan. We stopped at a wind-blown beach as the rain lashed the windscreen. But, suddenly a sharp line of sunlight on the horizon was racing towards us and we turned North along the coast. As we rounded a bend there was Harlech castle and the mountains of Wales again, sharp against a bright blue sky.

44 FARLEY ROAD. Our house was semi-detached with four bedrooms and a long back garden. The number 64 bus took me to work in Croydon and Kate’s kindergarten was round the corner. There were shops up on the High Street that hadn’t changed since before the war. Milk was delivered by a man in uniform and Pa, used to milkos wearing sweaty singlets, thought he ought to salute him. Pa fought on the Somme in World War One and he and Mum joined a tour to visit the battlefields. Later we were all invited to the Duberley’s farmhouse amongst steep wooded hills near Hereford. “This is like New South Wales” said Pa. “But I thought Australia was all desert” I replied. I will soon have a lot to learn. We met Mother and Dad for a family picnic in Heathfield forest where Pa was quietly amused at a row of small brooms “To be used in the event of a forest fire”. And when I took Kate and John down to paddle in the stream I assured Mary that there were no snakes there. Again, I will soon have a lot to learn. A while back, staying with the Richardsons, Chris had driven us, four adults and, I think, five children, round Somerset in their Mini-Traveller. Like Dr Who’s Tardis the mini was larger inside than out and now they had driven over to stay with us. Chris has a hidden agenda, to sell me the mini. “But there is no point in our buying it, Chris, we are going to Australia”. “But why not take it with you?” So, when the time comes, for forty-five pounds the mini is winched onto the deck of the SS Baradine and two months later the NRMA is jump-starting it In Sydney. But that is another story.

  EMIGRATION. An estate agent will let our house, and Tim is saying goodbye to Kate and John. I am now looking at this sketch of Martlets. While painting it I was being filmed on our family video, brush in one hand and trying to persuade a one-year old Kate that one artist is enough. A generation later I will watch a similar encounter when a one-year old Rosie clambers over to help John Henshaw with his sketch, at Maitland Bay. John was more tolerant than I was. But I suppose he had just started his sketch, mine was nearly finished.

And now Tim and Wendy Luckie are seeing us off at Heathrow. Our 707 is not the only thing that breaks down at New York. John, still curious at this stage of a 36-hour flight, finds a button marked STOP. “Dad, John has stopped the escalator” yells Kate in excitement. In San Francisco there is yet another fault, and in Honolulu it is dark but by then we don’t notice. Later, as we cross the international date line, and my watch says midnight, Kate asks “Is it tomorrow yet?” and I am too tired to apply the differential calculus to what is really a metaphysical question. After the stop at Fiji we all clamber aboard again and start to unwrap our toys from the duty free shop. Amid gasps of annoyance and disappointment I hear the Purser mutter “They never learn.” As the acceleration hits us in the back and it sounds like everything in the plane has worked loose Kate, always indefatigable, say “This is the part I love”. At Sydney Jim, Mary, Kathy and Paree are there to meet us. Paree takes Joan and the children to Paree’s and Neil’s home at High Street. Apparently I was expected to start work in Melbourne but I get taken to the computer centre in North Sydney until the confusion is resolved. It is nearly 4:36 (the postal unions had gone on strike for that extra six minutes) and I am invited to join Tom Carley and Des O’Donaghue for a few beers at Friday night Trot races. While excusing myself on the grounds of semi-consciousness, Tom asks “So what are you looking forward to in Australia?” Though tired, I sense exactly the right thing to say. “I’m looking forward to trying some of this Australian beer I’ve heard so much about.” But that too is another story.

REVELATIONS.

It was not on the Road to Damascus, but on the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London that I was hit by some startling revelations. The first was dramatic, occupying the opening ten minutes of an evening class in Political Economy. Vic Blundell, our tutor, introduced himself and then held up a headline in the Evening Standard that asked what the problem was with this country. “The problem is over-population. No, it’s the wrong sort of population. I think it’s the capitalists. Wrong, it’s the unions that’s the trouble. No, it’s the farmers.” After ten minutes of heated argument, Vic stopped us and asked us to define capital. We couldn’t. He then suggested we were wasting our time without some clear definitions, which he then proposed, and we started to untangle the question. It then hit me with blinding force that perhaps all differences of opinion hang on different meanings of the words we use.

The second revelation was slower, unfolding over three terms at the little evening college. At the end of term three we all now felt we could understand the reality behind the news reports in the media. But let’s go back to that first evening, where Vic was explaining that simple definitions were better than none.  “Britain, or any country, produces goods and services. Workers need somewhere to work and tools to work with. Whether the work is physical or mental let us call it labour. Whether the place of work is a wheat field or an office site let us call it land. Whether the tools are blast furnaces or typewriters or the third floor of this building let us call it capital.” Vic then asked us, if we were starting a business, how we would pay for these inputs. Now we were catching on and, fairly quickly, we agreed on wages, rent and interest.  But then someone asked “How much do labour, land and capital deserve to be paid?” and this led to another ten minutes of heated argument. Vic then asked us to open the ads pages in our evening papers and look for jobs and bed-sitters. Geof finds an ad, a demand for his particular skill, and he is now considering the salary before offering to supply his labour. Jane wants a bed-sitter and is prepared to pay only so much per week. The owner of the bed-sitter, before placing the ad, had to weigh up the cost of the land rent (which is very high in London), the costs of the bricks, mortar and gas cooker (which cost pretty much the same anywhere), and some entrepreneurial costs (advertising, risk of damage and default, etc). We now knew that we were discussing markets, not only in goods and services, but in land, capital and labour. And, just before the coffee break, we began to realize we were responding to supply and demand in various markets.

After the break, Vic sensed some prejudice against capital, markets, landlords, and landed gentry (the idle rich was a popular catch-cry in those days) coming from the back row of the class, Vic now reminded us that capital (tools) and markets (where capital, labour, land and goods and services are exchanged) have existed for several millennia and, if we tried to exist without markets, Homo Sapiens would face extinction. Vic now asked us to consider two kinds of landlords. Those who bought houses in competitive markets were providing a service in renting them out to you and me. He explained that interfering in that market, for example by ceilings on rent, led to undesirable consequences in that the supply of rental housing then tended to dry up. Though Bob, who was enjoying a rent-controlled flat in Baker Street, didn’t quite get it, Tom, Dick and Harry in the back row soon realized that the unintended consequence of Bob’s privilege was that they were having to pay slightly more rent as a result. On the other hand, Vic went on, the landed gentry, maybe five percent of the population of every country, had their roots far back in institutions of conquest, feudalism, caste, and colonialism, institutions that created and perpetuated monopolies in land ownership.

Way ahead of his time, Vic then suggested that the worker deserved his wage and the investor of capital deserved his interest, and heavy taxation discouraged both. He then argued that highly unequal ownership of the world’s land and natural resources was the largest cause of poverty, inequality, and armed conflict, and he explained what, in our textbook, was called “The Remedy”. Fifty years later and the remedy has kick-started the entire green movement. But without the remedy, “Count up the results of 50 years of human rights mechanisms, 30 years of multi-billion dollar development programs and endless high level rhetoric and the general impact is quite under-whelming…this is a failure of implementation on a scale that shames us all.” (Mary Robinson, UN Human Rights Commissioner).

REFLECTIONS ON THE RIGHTS OF BOAT PEOPLE

I suppose, leaving Guyana in 1945, we were boat people and we certainly took risks in a worn out boat surrounded by predators. But we had British passports and were welcome. A decade later, large numbers of Jamaicans were arriving, also with British passports. Then, there was a growing concern that they were taking our jobs, until someone asked what would happen to our hospitals and public transport if the Jamaicans were shipped home. Later still, there was an even larger wave of immigration, from Pakistan. Britain introduced restrictive citizenship legislation, while I happened to be away on another island. But “No man is an island…Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. So, the British government tolled a bell, cancelled my passport and, in so many words, told me to go back to my country of origin.

As I write a boatload of political refugees from Sri Lanka is also being told to go back to their country of origin. But behind these many more boats wait to come. And behind these, over the next decades and all over the world, desperate refugees will flee increasing political oppression, war, terrorism,  unsustainable development, human rights abuses, rising sea levels,  encroaching deserts, failing food supplies, environmental deterioration, and the economic effects of the global financial meltdown. They will pile up against historically arbitrary sovereign boundaries designed to stop outsiders getting at the natural advantages of land and resources held by those who were there first. And, as someone once said “Where goods [and people] cannot pass, armies will.” Vic Blundell’s plea that our global heritage in land, and all the natural resources above and below it, should belong to everyone since they were not produced by anyone, has a long history which I will return to at the end of the book. Meanwhile, here is a parable that has much to say about relative deprivation, which is the central problem facing economics, politics, sociology, poverty, human rights and conflict resolution. “Imagine a small island to which castaways swim as ships are successively wrecked on a nearby reef; eventually the earlier occupants will be able to present new castaways with the choice: be our slave, or keep swimming.”

HOW WILL THE STORY CONTINUE?

Up to now I have used chronology on which to hang the story of my childhood in South America and the Caribbean, the exodus to England, growing up and settling down there, and now another exodus. But from this point on, the story will contain my “struggles to understand” what I find on each new journey. I will group them geographically: Australia where we live, the richer countries collectively known as The North, the poorer countries collectively known as The South, a personal preoccupation with Oceania, and what I have discovered about a collection of challenges facing the planet and called Globalisation.