Noted down at the time as part of a discussion about how lucky we are to have food.
Me: Grandpa (i.e. my father) said that when he was younger, if you were eating an apple in the street then children would come up to you and ask “Can I have your apple core Mister?”
Daughter aged 5: Why? Weren’t you allowed to eat apples inside?
Me: Yes, but if you ate them inside the children wouldn’t see you eating them.
Daughter: They could have looked in through the window.
Paul Theroux:
The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (5*)
In 1973, Paul Theroux set off alone by train from London to Tokyo, taking numerous side-tracks along the route. But this is not so much a book about the countries he passes through, it is more an account of his experiences and emotional states. He does not seem to have enjoyed it much. Neither would I. It was what walkers call a Type 2 experience: you enjoy the telling of it afterwards. Like my Iceland saga?
He meets lots of strange characters along the way. I knew it was going to be entertaining when he introduces the first, Duffill, who carries his luggage in paper parcels. They board the Orient Express. Duffill takes a top bunk. Theroux struggles to sleep beneath.
And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.. (p24)The great thing for a writer of this kind of travelogue is that once they have done with a character they can simply get rid of them. Duffill gets accidentally left behind on an Italian station platform and Theroux hands over his parcels to an official at Venice.
... a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle … bizarre, this manmade thing in so remote a place, competing with the grandeur of the enormous gorge and yet seeming more grand than its surroundings … the water rushing through the girder legs and falling on the tops of trees. (p230).
Memories of British dominion are everywhere. One eighty year-old tells his life story of starting as a cook in the Royal Artillery officers’ mess and ending up praised in person by the likes of Field Marshall Slim and Chiang Kai-shek (p215), almost like a Burmese version of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day.
Theroux also encounters the inevitable hippies and commercial travellers in all kinds of unlikely goods: seamless tubes, plastic washers, bleaching agents and rubber casings for lugged sprockets (p158). He sees so much poverty: people crouching by the side of the railway to defecate, children who raid the train at stops to steal water from the toilet compartment, Singhalese living in ramshackle huts with an acute shortage of food.
I am reminded of George Orwell’s point in The Road to Wigan Pier, that our comfortable English lives are the legacy of a hundred million Indians living on the verge of starvation (p148). It has been estimated that, over the course of two hundred years, the British extracted £45 trillion out of India at present day prices.* That’s a million pounds for each person living in Britain at the time. It remains all around in the infrastructure, institutions, artefacts and systems you see, and in the shipwrecks and shrapnel scattered further afield.
I am also reminded of Ted Simon’s books about his trips around the world on motorbikes, the first around the same time Theroux was on the train, in which he fears that when the countless millions see what we have and they don’t, “there probably will be hell to pay”.
They’ve seen it now.
*George Monbiot, The Guardian, 30th October, 2021.