Overcoming my fear of travel

by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 24 Feb, 2019 | Journeys

Although I loved the city of Liverpool I found the university itself really boring. What helped me stick it out was mixing with ordinary people. In my first year I had hung out on a building site – there was too much drinking and fooling around to say that I actually worked. I was one of the few students with the opportunity to get to know working class Liverpudlians, or Scousers, and this felt like a privilege.

In my final year I worked as a travelling salesman for Canongate Publishing, a struggling publishing company that my parents had set up in 1974. My job had started out as a challenge by Dave, a bearded Australian roughneck, who always had a rollup sticking out of the side of his mouth. Dave was in charge of distribution which meant he spent his days wrapping up books and muttering at anyone who walked past. When I told him I was studying history and politics at Liverpool university he laughed:

– Liverpool! They’re illiterate down there!

– How can you say that?

– There’s not one bookshop in Liverpool!

– But I’ve been to some really interesting bookshops in Liverpool. There’s an interesting one called News from Nowhere…

– Humph. Well they’ve never ordered a single book from us!

One thing led to another and I ended up working as a book rep for them in Liverpool. I bought a silvery suit from an Oxfam charity shop for two quid and a plastic yellow bag, with Kodak branded all over it, into which I could fit plenty of new Canongate books, most of which were by obscure Scottish poets. My training consisted of Dave reluctantly showing me how to use an invoice book.

The bookshops in Liverpool did buy from me and I was delighted to be sent to sell books in another unknown area of the map – south west England – where I honed my camping skills. By day I was wearing a suit and driving a decrepit old Vauxhall Viva that I had bought for £200, and in the evenings I would change into jeans, carry a rucksack, cook dinner on a petrol stove and sleep in a waterproof sleeping bag on a beach. I loved the idea of opening the boot of my car and changing from a besuited sales rep into a backpacker.

The final year of university dragged on and I couldn’t wait to make my grand escape. I had a flat in the centre, in Toxteth, and my routine was fairly nocturnal. When I went to lectures I tended to fall asleep, and during one particularly boring seminar I fell asleep as I was talking.

We were limbering up to leave university. Big companies and public institutions came to make fancy presentations and size up the best students. This was called the Milk Round and my friends saw it as the logical next step, the obvious way to plug into a career. The idea was to choose what branch of industry suited you and friendly career officers would give advice. The top spot was diplomacy but you needed a First in your finals just to get an interview. If you weren’t sure what to do with your life you went for accountancy and the lowest of the low was sales. The secret intelligence services were recruiting too; they hired the biggest ruffian I knew, an alcoholic brute of a rugby player, on the basis that he was studying Russian.

I had my own plan: I was going to hitchhike to Shanghai. At the university’s Careers Office they weren’t impressed with this; China was unknown to them as a career destination as it was under hard-line Communist rule. They said that good jobs in the financial sector were available in Hong Kong – still a British colony at the time – but I had been a mathematical disaster area in school so that conversation didn’t go anywhere. But they did come up with one useful suggestion: perhaps the People’s Republic of China needed English teachers? The address of the Chinese Embassy in London was located and I wrote them a letter.

The Chinese Embassy wrote back, confirming that they needed English teachers and asked me to undergo a series of blood tests and fill in a massive form. This is my big chance, I thought, surprised at how easy it was all turning out. I went to a local clinic and the nurse was amazed at how many different blood tests the Embassy wanted but she proceeded anyway and filled up five different syringes with my blood – until I passed out on the chair. The embassy never replied to my application but this just made me more determined to get to China.

There was also a political angle to all this. Much of the northern hemisphere was under Communist control at the time: the map was red from the China Sea to the Adriatic and I was attracted by the fact that this red blob on the map was considered a dangerous no-go area by most people I knew. I wanted to get away from the comfort and security of bourgeois life and get a job without the assistance of my parents’ good reputation. Every job I had had until then was due, in some way, to family influence and I wanted to prove to myself that I could get a job on my own. My grandmother was a Conservative voter who hated Socialism and Communism and all things left wing. Anyone who votes Labour, she would say, should go and live in Russia. That will show them what it’s like. When I was a kid this kind of talk would scare the wits out of me but later on it was an inspiration.

At sixth form college in Edinburgh my politics teacher had been a true Communist and he converted me to look at the world through the prism of Marxism. Although the effect didn’t last very long – how can you hand over absolute power to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and expect them to share it? – it did encourage me to go and see what it was like to live in a Communist country. Marxism is a useful analytical tool for seeing the world from the perspective of the underdog; it helped me understand it better and build-up my confidence to explore.

One of my best friends at University was a Northern Irish charmer called Peter Morgan. He studied architecture and only came to life at night. His room was on the ground floor of a student block near the best pubs in Toxteth, the city centre area that became synonymous with the 1981 riots. Drunken friends would knock on his window at all hours of the night and he used to say he hated being interrupted but whenever I showed up he was keen to chat, drink and smoke. One night he taught me what it’s like to experience fear.

I knocked on his window after a late night boozing session and he invited me in. He was drawing with intensity on one of those huge draughtsman tables that can be moved to different angles. There was a single anglepoise lamp that lit up his work but left the room in darkness. I saw a tube of lip moistuiriser and rubbed it on my lips. Pete’s face suddenly dropped and after a long pause he spoke:

– Did you use my lipsalve?

– Yeah. So what?

– You shouldn’t have done that.

– Why not?

– Have you got little cracks on your lips?

– Yeah.

– Oh dear. You know I’ve been away a lot recently?

– Yeah.

– Well, I haven’t told anyone yet but I’ve been diagnosed with AIDS. I’ve been getting intensive treatment for it but I’ve not got long to live. I also have little cracks on my lips and I just used that lipsil. That means I’ve probably passed it onto you. I’m really sorry Rupert.

I stood there in the dark and the silence for what seemed like an eternity as his words sank in. I was going to die. I didn’t have long to live; a year, maybe two, perhaps just months. How long do people with AIDS survive? It was a newly discovered disease at the time and the media used it to put the fear of God into my generation.

I was overcome with fear, as if I had been hit by a train. I could see my life flashing by. My body became instantly weak and I couldn’t stand up any more. I wanted to projectile vomit across the room and the contents of my bowels felt ready to burst out onto Pete’s floor. I was gripped by terror, frozen to the spot and it took all of my energy to focus on one simple task: to lie down on the floor and try desperately to control my body. I was wrestling with an overwhelming feeling of panic that I was about to die – not in six months time but right now. Marijuana can contribute to these feelings of panic and I had smoked several joints that evening.

I felt as if I was lying in my grave. Gradually I accepted the fact that I was going to die and I realised I must stand up and deal with it: I would face the last days of my life like a man. The feelings of uncontrollable sickness passed and I stood up and faced Pete, shook his hand solemnly – as if for the last time – went home and lay in bed wondering what I should do with the time I had left. By now I had found a sense of calm and had the wild feeling of fear under control. The next few days passed in a blur. I couldn’t think of anything special to do with the rest of my life and neither was I ready to tell anyone; I knew they would react with horror and make a big deal out of it. I just wanted to ignore it and get on with my life.

A few days later I ran into Pete and he casually told me that the whole thing was a wind-up: he didn’t have AIDS but he had got a lot of laughs out of convincing me that I did. He had told our group of friends and they were all smirking at my strange behaviour.

Pete knew it was a cruel trick but I was grateful to be alive – I felt like he had given me a new lease of life. To move from the fear of death to the knowledge that I could live my life to the full was a powerful and liberating experience.

Sometime later Pete drove up to Edinburgh in a hired car. I met him in a tiny village just outside of Edinburgh called Nine Mile Burn where I had been living in a cottage, writing this book. We had agreed to meet on the Edinburgh road and I was going to guide down a narrow track to the cottage. By the time he showed up it was dark, I got into his car and we started chatting intensely.

Suddenly he turned into a huge field, stopped chattering and stepped on the gas. The grass was wet and he pulled on the handbrake, spun the steering wheel and went into a long skid that seemed to go on forever. I was used to his reckless driving and knew that he was quite competent behind the wheel. It was unlikely that he’d take us through a drystone dyke and, even if he did, a spot of bother with the police was exactly what he needed.

Then he stopped the car and asked if I would like to drive. What young man can resist an invitation to drive a car recklessly? So I stepped out of the passenger door to make my way round to the driver’s side. Then he zoomed off, leaving me standing alone in the darkness. What’s this all about? I wondered calmly. Pete reached the far end of the field, turned round so the headlights were pointing at me, stopped and gunned the engine. I felt like I was in a bad movie but there was no script, director or stunt coordinator.

He started driving towards me and built up more and more speed. One option was to run to the edge of the field but it was so far away that I couldn’t even see it. I would stay exactly where I was and jump out of the way at the very last moment. He was getting closer and closer, faster and faster, still heading directly for me. I didn’t panic; my mind was calm and adrenalin was keeping me alert.

When the car was just a few metres away Pete steered to the right. But he was going too fast, the grass was too wet and the car didn’t steer as he wanted. It started to skid directly towards me. I waited until the last possible moment before moving and, when the time came to run, I slipped and fell on the wet grass. The car made a whooshing sound as it passed by my legs. He missed me by a matter of inches.

The car came to a shuddering halt not far away and Pete got out. He was ashen-faced, shaking and kept apologising. He realised that his prank had almost resulted in his friend getting killed and this really shook him up. What haunted him most was the idea of having to tell my mother, with whom he got on really well, that he had killed her son. He was surprised that I wasn’t upset but he was so angry with himself that what good would it have done? There was a certain satisfaction in seeing Pete being humbled by his own recklessness.

Getting drunk and waking up in Bangkok

by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 23 Feb, 2019 | Journeys

My brain stopped working. I couldn’t think, couldn’t come up with the right words and couldn’t stop the room swaying. I was pickling in a hot bath, trying to stay awake and vaguely aware of conflicting feelings: the opportunity of a free ticket to Asia; depriving Stewart of his holiday due to my irresponsibility; lumbering Moona with a guardian just when he thought he could have a moment of freedom. These thoughts weren’t coming  together, they were like different coloured liquids that weren’t mixing properly in a glass. I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t resist Stewart’s determination. Next thing I knew I was sitting in First Class, flying over Europe and wondering how on earth I had managed to get there.

– Where’s Stewart? asked my Mother when I met her in Bangkok Airport.

She had no idea that I was coming out to Thailand instead of Stewart. There were no emails or mobiles in those days. I was so excited by the turn of events that I didn’t notice if my Mother was upset at finding out that he hadn’t turned up. My explanation of what had happened the night before didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was the truth and I didn’t want to dwell on it. I wanted to explore Thailand, a country I knew absolutely nothing about.

My Mother had been told that the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok was the best hotel in the world and she was expecting Stewart to take her there, at least for a night. I’d talked to Stewart the night before about money:

– Have you got any money on you, Rupert?

– Er… no…

– No problem. I’ve got a fifty quid note you can have.

– Fifty quid. Is that enough?

– Do you have a credit card?

– Yes.

– Good. What’s the credit limit?

– A thousand pounds.

– Excellent. Spend it all. I’ll reimburse you. Give your Mother a good time.

A thousand pounds was a lot of cash in 1984. My Full Grant at university, for rent and living expenses, was £2,000 a year. I felt like a rich aristocrat who had the world at his feet; with these funds we could go anywhere. We spent our first night in the Oriental Hotel, which was impressive, but I kept wondering why it was considered the best hotel in the world.

I had never seen anywhere as crowded as Bangkok – a vast sprawl around a big dirty river that was full of little wooden boats, each one packed with exotic fruits and mysterious looking boxes. The sky was overcast and the air was humid and smelt of spices and petrol. It was so hot that we sweated continually. Each street was blocked with cars, each pavement was full of people hurrying along and I was glad to find that the Thais are a friendly people.

What do people do on holiday in Thailand? We found out that tourists’ head for the beach or the hills and because we were fabulously wealthy we did both. We flew south to an island called Phuket, a hilly paradise covered in forest, beaches and bulldozers. We hired a motorbike and a grass hut by the beach.

We soon realised that Thailand is riddled with prostitutes; not the middle-age toughs that used to patrol my street in Liverpool but young and enticing beauties. I was afraid of getting tangled up with them but they assumed my Mother, who was attractive and young looking, was my girlfriend and they left me alone. But when I was on my own these pushy young women would follow me and hustle like drug pushers.

I went to the beach-side disco one night, was given juice and spirits, got totally smashed and went into a blackout. I came to my senses in a shower with a young man washing my back. How the hell did I end up here? I realised what was going on and felt a stab of fear; I was being prepared for homosexual sex. In a panic I got dressed and hurried out past a group of young men who lay expectantly on mats.

Many of the prostitutes I had seen were transvestites. The best looking woman in the disco turned out to be a guy, which I found out by being in his powerful grip on the dance floor. Thailand had developed this type of economy because of the huge numbers of American soldiers who would come over the border to Rest and Recuperate from their pointless war in Vietnam. I was told that there were over one million prostitutes in Thailand and that sex plays an important part in their economy.

We got the bus back to Bangkok. The southern part of Thailand is a thin strip of land covered in forest and when passing through the thickest part of the forest the bus was stopped by a squad of heavily armed soldiers. They swarmed onto the bus and checked my passport and the ID cards of the locals. I was surprises to see that the soldiers were friendly and that I wasn’t terrified.

We didn’t hang around in Bangkok. We got a modern sleeper train to the northern city of Chiang Mai. I was most impressed by the fact that our wagon had a shower, something I had never seen before on a train. We found a guide who took us trekking through the jungle of the Golden Triangle – a vast area covering parts of Thailand, Burma and Laos and said to be the world’s second biggest area of opium production. We would hear the odd explosion but none of the locals seemed even to notice them and I knew nothing about the struggles taking place between national armies, drug smugglers and liberation fighters hidden in the jungle.

We had been sold a Jungle Trek but the trees seemed rather thin and ordinary. There was no soundtrack of chattering monkeys, screaming parrots and the other sounds that accompany all televised presentations of the jungle. We could have been in France.

But when we reached the first village I realised we were in another world.  I’d seen primitive villages in books and films but only at that moment did it strike me how attractive they are. Everything about these villages was magical: the surrounding forest, the lack of roads and modern communication, the simple houses and especially the half-naked people who were curious and so different from anyone I had ever come across. They would watch our every move with a patience I had never seen before, in a manner that felt unthreatening.

I was intrigued by these people and particularly by their feet. Because they never used shoes their feet were much stronger than ours, with well developed muscles around each toe. It was almost as if each of their toes had a personality, unlike our toes which are crushed into one ugly shape by constantly being trapped in tight shoes. Some of them had sores and fungus and I dispensed tiny amounts of anti-fungal cream that I happened to have in my bag for athlete’s foot. They seemed very grateful, word spread and soon there was a queue of people wanting a dab of cream.

The villagers’ houses were inspiring. A simple wooden frame would be covered with grass and leaves. Thin strips of split bamboo were used to make floors and these flexed every time you stepped on them – with bare feet of course; entering with muddy walking boots would have been criminal. The buffaloes lived downstairs, on the earth under the hut, and the family above. You could see, hear and smell the animals but it all seemed quite natural. They would invite us in and give us glasses of milky coloured alcohol, strange food and sometimes opium – which we smoked from pipes while lying on our sides – a narcotic that made the place seem like paradise.

They used tiny candles and I was really impressed that even the young children were aware of the risk of fire; as the candles guttered and burned out a small child would nimbly manoeuvre across the bamboo floor and, in a single movement, grab it and extinguish it. I was also impressed that my Mother entered into the spirit of all this like a young traveller; gone were the worries of publishing and running a big unruly family in Scotland. I had never seen her so relaxed.

Back in Bangkok the money was running low and my Mother was quite happy to stay in a cheap hotel. She had shared in my enthusiasm for the villages and encouraged me to visit somewhere else on the way home. My fear of travel had been replaced with a thirst for discovering Asia and a wonder for primitive lifestyles.

I changed my return ticket so that I could stop off in New Delhi and spend a month in India. The ticket didn’t cost much but I was down to my last hundred dollars and surely this wasn’t enough for a month in India?  In Thailand I had spent over a thousand bucks in just two weeks but we ‘d been living well and India was said to be really cheap.

It turned out that a hundred dollars was more than enough to get round India in 1984. Everything seemed to cost a dollar or less: a delicious spicy meal from a street hawker, a bed in a cheap hostel or a train ticket to Agra, location of the Taj Mahal. I got a bus into the Himalayas, for not much more than a dollar, and ended up in Kashmir. The journey over those mountains was the most terrifying trip of my life and a useful opportunity to exorcise my fear. The bus was packed to the gunnels and just when I thought it can’t posibly get any fuller, it would stop and more people would push their way in. The noise — people yelling, and Indian music blasting through tinny speakers – was deafening but strangely inspiring. I held a place by the windscreen and the more full the bus got the more bodies pressed me up against the front windscreen. Eventually I was held there like an insect squashed against the glass, unable to move.

I had a bird’s-eye view of the Himalayas which were unfolding before us – wave after wave of high, black ridges. The road was narrow, twisted and steep. The black-bearded driver gunned the vehicle to its top speed until the engine screamed in protest. When he hurled his vehicle round the first sharp mountain corner the front end of the bus was momentarily suspended over open space. I caught a glimpse of a bottomless chasm, hundreds of feet deep – and I knew we were were all going to die. I closed my eyes and imagined the bus was already flying through open space and in less than a second we would hit the ground.

Somehow we were still driving. We had survived although nobody but me seemed to notice our miraculous escape. And then the same thing happened at the next corner, and the next. The driver, who was obviously insane, showed no sign of slowing down.  I had the same shock when oncoming trucks would hurtle down the road towards us, each one of which would be taking up more than half of the road – as was our bus – making an impact inevitable. But neither driver made any sign of slowing down and they would pass each other smoothly.

Gradually I realised that we weren’t going to die and this was just how they drive buses in that part of the world. The driver and the passengers showed no sign of fear so why should I? What would be the point of worrying? All I could do was get off the bus and walk but it was a cold, hostile environment out there and it was getting dark. On that journey I felt as if I was looking death in the face and I learned to accept it, to not fear it, and as soon as I did this I started to enjoy every moment.

The bus drove through the night and we would stop for short breaks now and again, at tea shops in the middle of nowhere. Rickety wooden beds were laid out on the road and huge kettles of tea were bubbling on charcoal fires. The next day we passed a small mountain town and the bus stopped. On the pavement opposite the bus was a man in a white jacket pulling at the teeth of another man in a chair. The man in white was presumably a dentist and he was pulling with all his strength. The man in the chair made no sound. Eventually the tooth came out and the dentist held it up triumphantly. The seated man bent forward and spat big gobs of blood into a white metal bowl that was placed between his feet. Half a dozen other men were seated in a semi-circle, looking on approvingly.

In Srinigar, the capital of Kashmir, I stayed in an old wooden houseboat on Dal Lake, where high cliffs seem to climb directly out of the water. I spent an evening with the houseboat-family, who stayed on a small wooden vessel behind the one I was in. Crossing from one to the other involved walking along thin planks suspended above the water. We sat on the wooden floor of a large room that had no furniture whatsoever, and the evening’s entertainment consisted of watching the smallest children play. The toddlers were responsible for the infants and the older kids were in charge of them. It all seemed to make perfect sense.

Many years later I realised that I had visited India during its curious period of economic isolation, a period that lasted from independence in 1947 until the early 1990s. Before getting entangled in globalism and becoming the back office for capitalism, India occupied an unusual position between the global blocks of Capitalism and Communism.  They used to describe themselves as a Non-Aligned nation, along with Yugoslavia and a few other countries, and as Fabian Socialists who aspire to socialism without the hassle and violence of a revolution.

You could see small shops and individual businesses on every street – so they obviously weren’t Communist – but the leadership believed in Marxist ideals and western investors were kept out. The cars were ancient British models, and the roads were full of buses, bullocks, hand painted trucks, ancient British Enfield motorbikes and tiny home-made motorised trikes they called phut phuts.

It was the only non-Communist country that refused the Coca Cola Company the right to sell its fizzy drinks.  I felt particularly close to India as my grandfather was born here, as were his parents. For hundreds of years my ancestors were soldiers in the British Army in India and I felt this gave me a special connection to the place. In a way I felt like I was coming home.

Getting back to Heathrow airport in London was one of the most depressing moments of my life. I was missing Asia as if I had left my lover behind and I didn’t want to be in this freezing, mechanized, impersonal, unfriendly hell. I saw a couple of tough English lads, bursting with pent-up aggression, standing at the entrance to the airport. They looked at me as if to say: Look at that hippy! He needs a good kicking! and it struck me how I had never felt fear like this during all my recent travels in Asia, where people are a lot poorer.

I was so badly underdressed – sandals and shorts and my ridiculous looking leather jacket  — that I felt real humiliation. All I could afford was an undergound ticket to North London where I stood on the M1 motorway, held up a piece of cardboard that said Edinburgh and waited to get a lift home.

I had no idea that home could be so depressing. I was suffering from culture shock and talked about Asia continually, sharing my travel experiences with anyone who’d listen. Then my brother Gavin, who has always been honest to the point of brutality, said: Here he goes! Talking about Asia again. It struck me like a physical blow, a shock, a stab of shame, as I realised that perhaps not everyone wants to hear all about my travels! I learned something very useful that day: don’t talk to people about your travels unless they seem genuinely interested; and it soon became clear that most people are not.

Fear of travel

by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 22 Feb, 2019 | Journeys

We lived in a white house on the Firth of Forth, the estuary just north of Edinburgh. It was called Society House and there was a sign at the top of the road which read Private Road to Society. It was so close to the sea that in rough weather waves would crash into the sea walls and throw spray over the hedge and onto the windows. We would explore the rocky beach and the woods that people rarely visited, climb the walls of Blackness Castle, only a few miles down the coast and sometimes sleep rough in the garden.

One day I was standing on the sea wall when my elder brother Kim turned up. He had left school under a cloud of bad behaviour a year earlier and had gone to France and Switzerland. We hadn’t heard from him in ages but we knew from occasional letters that he had learned French and got some work.

There he was, standing in front of me with a big grin on his face. The thing that impressed me most was his jacket: elegant, dark grey and beautifully designed. It had thin red piping along the seams and a large unusual collar which looked like it could be wrapped round your neck in a blizzard. There was no sign of luggage, just a small leather bag.

– Where d’you get the jacket? I asked.

– Switzerland. It’s a postman’s jacket. I was thrown out of Switzerland for working illegally. I’m home.

To me this was the definition of cool. This was someone with courage. How could I be like him? How could I get out of this place? The idea of travelling abroad on my own was scary. I just didn’t have the courage to do it. I had never jumped into the unknown to such an extent and – worst of all – I didn’t know how to overcome this fear of travelling alone.

It was 1982 and I had managed to scrape my way into Liverpool University where I studied history and politics. I chose Liverpool because it was easy to get into, thanks to the nine-day riot that had taken place in 1981. The riots had stunned the nation as it was the first time since the nineteenth century that Englishmen had risen against the state. The names of the inner city areas where the riots took place – Toxteth in Liverpool and Brixton in London – were burned into the nation’s consciousness.

My Mother was a book publisher and she encouraged us to follow our dreams. She had separated from my father who, in the sixties and seventies, had written a couple of great novels. My Dad now drove a truck between Edinburgh and London, carrying paintings and artworks. His company was called Moving Pictures and it was a chaotic one-man-show. He took great care of the paintings, was always on the road, couldn’t delegate and often didn’t send out invoices. I would help him load furniture and I learned to pack paintings into a truck without breaking them; each painting had to be wrapped in a blanket and then tied to the side, making sure that the edges of one painting couldn’t puncture the canvas or glass of another. It was an art form and my Dad was the best in the business.

My Mother lived with a young builder called Stewart Anderson, an ambitious and inquisitive man whose black moustache was a source of mockery to my three brothers and I. He was interested in what I was reading in history and we talked about Napoleon, the colonies, Latin America, Asia and the world wars. Stewart renovated old houses in Edinburgh and every holiday I would get a job with him as a labourer. I learned to manoeuvre a wheelbarrow full of rubble up a narrow plank into a skip and how to take abuse from the other workers.

In the summer of 1984 the British Council invited my Mother to go on a tour of the People’s Republic of China – which back then was just coming out of the grip of Mao Tse Tung’s dictatorship. The idea was that a delegation of British publishers would meet their Chinese counterparts. She later told me that most of the Chinese publishers insisted that they met up in her hotel as they were too ashamed to show their offices. After the China trip she had booked a flight from Beijing to Thailand where she was going to meet up with Stewart for a romantic two week break.

My introduction to Asia was totally unexpected. I was working as a labourer for Stewart, renovating a terraced house in Edinburgh. My job was to break up big stones, shovel the rubble into sacks, carry these to the street and empty them into a skip. It was hard, filthy work but there were plenty of jokes (and joints) floating around and I imagined it was making me tougher. I remember seeing a street sweeper pushing his brush, enjoying the sunshine, and me thinking: Now that’s a cushy number.

I wasn’t earning enough on the building site so I got a second job – washing dishes in a restaurant. My boss was the sous-chef, a dictatorial Turk who enjoyed shouting at me. By the second night the sous-chef was no longer there and the chef yelled at me as soon as I walked in:

– Where the hell is that useless Turk?

– No idea.

– Can you cook?

– Me?

– Get over here and start making salads!

– I’m just the dish washer.

– Screw the dishes, get over here. Now!

He grabbed a handful of lettuce and threw individual leaves, very precisely, onto a line of plates that were neatly lined up on the stainless steel counter. Then he showed me a huge jug in which the salad dressing was kept. My task was to prepare these side salads, drip a blob of vinaigrette onto them, wait for the main dish to be dropped on the plate and then get them out to the waitresses. The speed, atmosphere and swear words were exhilarating.

After that second night in the kitchen I decided to celebrate my promotion by going out to get drunk. There was no way I could go straight to bed after working until 2am and Edinburgh has always been a great city to go boozing in. Later that night I ran into Najma, a beautiful dark-skinned former girlfriend of my brother Moona, and we ended up drinking far too much beer. We both staggered back to my place, singing and swaying and shouting.

We got into the house and I put an LP on the record player. My brother Moona popped his head into the room and said:

– What the hell are you doing?

– Come and join us? We’re gonna make a joint.

Moona, my youngest brother, was only about 16 at the time – and that night he started behaving like an adult. He calmly turned off the music, sat down beside me and started talking, as if giving a pep talk at a sports game:

– You know Stewart is going to Thailand tomorrow morning?

– Yeah…

– And he’ll be there for two weeks, with the Boss [our Mother]. This is the first time in ages that we will have the place to ourselves.

– Yeah, s’pose so.

– And you’re blowing it. Coming in here at this time, making that racket. You’re gonna wake him up and freak him out. Either shut up of get outta here. Please.

But it was too late. Stewart’s face then appeared through the door with an intense look that said I’m wide awake, fully alert and haven’t slept a wink. He asked me to come upstairs and then told me to get into the bath. I protested. I didn’t want a bath, especially with him watching. And what about the beautiful drunken girl that I’d left downstairs? He told me I needed to sober-up fast. I said I needed to go to bed. He ran the bath and went to get me a cup of coffee.

Then he hit me with a bombshell: he wanted me to go to Thailand instead of him. My befuddled brain couldn’t comprehend this so I got into the bath and listened:

– I have a plane ticket for Bangkok leaving at seven this morning [Stewart paused and looked at his watch]. We’ve got less than three hours. Rupert, I want you on that plane instead of me.

– What?

– I’ve been thinking about it all night. I can’t leave Moona on his own here, he’s only 16. You’re in no state to look after him. Your Mother would enjoy a holiday with you, and you want to travel. I’m giving you a free ticket.