Flying Visits Read online

  Like millions of other travellers I soon got used to walking on board a heavy and going anywhere I felt like in a straight line. But when the straight line was stretched around a curved world it sometimes meant that if the eventual destination was Tokyo or Los Angeles then you had to spend a couple of hours at Anchorage, Alaska. Sharing with Bahrain the distinction of being an airport from which absolutely no transit passenger ever gets the urge to take a taxi into town, Anchorage is like a British Rail waiting-room equipped with kiosks flogging Eskimo artefacts made in Taiwan and large segments of duty-free raw fish which the Japanese buy gift-wrapped. You will see half a dozen Japanese team up to buy the component pieces of a killer whale. From a glass case a stuffed polar bear looks on, beady-eyed with boredom. But if you bag a plastic seat near the window and look up into the sky, you will see the heavies queueing to land. When the air is clear you can see them stacked up, a couple of minutes behind one another, all the way to the stratosphere.

  The greatest number of heavies I ever saw in one place was at New York’s Kennedy airport after a storm. There are almost 400 747s in the world and it looked as if half of them were queueing to get away. Unfortunately I was in one of them and so didn’t get a very good look. The best airports to watch big jets taking off at are those in which a single main building parallels a solitary runway. Dubai gives you an excellent show, especially at night. While the locals snatch a quick kip on the floor of the coffee lounge, you can take a window seat and enjoy an uninterrupted view of a heavy full of furiously praying pilgrims rolling out of nowhere and heading straight up.

  Dubai is a very good-looking airport, whose Moorish formality, like a bleached Alhambra minus the filigrees, suggests the controlling hand of an Arab designer conscious of his heritage. In fact the architectural firm involved was English. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s Dharan airport, which looks just like Dubai, was dreamed up by Minoni Yamasaki, the same Japanese architect who designed New York’s Trade Center. Aesthetic considerations have become more important now that the hazards which once gave airports their individuality have perforce been eliminated. There are not many airports left like Hong Kong’s Kai Tak, and even there the precise ground control has made the wing-and-a-prayer element illusory, although the illusion can be hair-raising on a stormy evening when the pilot seems intent on flying you into a hillside tunnel. In the old piston-engined days, if Chicago’s O’Hare airport had cloud down to the deck the pilots on their approach leg used to correct for drift by the neon sign on Joe’s Diner. No such news comes out of Chicago today. When there is a big tangle on the ground, it usually, as at Tenerife, happens under a clear sky, with all the right signals being given but one man out of his senses. At Madrid it happened in a fog but that was an exception – even at Madrid.

  While you sit in the airport coffee-lounge killing time, it is extremely unlikely that the aeroplanes you watch will be killing people. One pilot might have a heart-attack while climbing away, another might complete his landing run in an adjacent suburb – both those things have happened near London in my time – but usually at the airport itself you will be offered only the subtler forms of drama. They can be very pleasing. At Tullamarine airport in Melbourne you can sit high up in the terminal building and see the whole take-off run with nothing in the background except unspoiled country. The experience is easier on the eyes than anything they are likely to encounter in the cabin once you get airborne, unless you are flying with Singapore Airlines, whose stewardesses really are as advertised. They are far more beautiful than they need to be and in First Class there seem to be two of them assigned to each passenger, filling him continuously with delicious food and bursting discreetly into tears if he stops eating. The Singapore commitment to the putative beauty of air travel verges on the mystical, and not just in the air. The same applies to Changi airport, which is currently the second most beautiful piece of aerospace architecture in the world. But after admiring the indoor fountains and having been suitably dazed by the shops full of microchip prosperity, you might need something to read. Relax: your needs are catered for. The bookstalls all carry several different biographies of Lee Kwan Yew, whom Singapore has got the way Salzburg has got Karajan. But somehow, read in that glittering context, Lee’s story becomes exciting instead of tedious, in the same way that the coffee tastes better than it should. It is because there are so many aircraft in the vicinity. Airfields made even Kafka happy: his Die Aeroplane in Brescia of 1909 is a cry of love. Proust was mad about airports until his beloved Agostinelli wrote himself off in a crash.

  The most beautiful piece of aerospace architecture on earth – no ifs, buts or cults of personality – is undoubtedly Narita, which has now replaced Haneda as Tokyo’s number one airport. The students did all they could to stop Narita being built, but now that the fait is accompli it is hard not to be glad. Haneda was a health hazard and Narita is a work of art. The main building is one vast, deceptively simple arrangement of glass and distance, while the runways at night are a ravishing display of emeralds, sapphires and rubies. Heading south from Narita in a JAL DC-10, I climbed unharmed through miles of sky which had once been full of screaming danger. Here was where the last great strategic battles between aircraft that the world will ever see were fought out to the bitter end. The Japanese, improvising desperately against time, built fighters that could fly just high and fast enough to knock B-29-san down. But as Admiral Yamamoto had realised before Pearl Harbor, the war was lost before it started. High over Saipan, whose defenders once fought all the more savagely for having no chances left, I knew just enough Japanese to ask the hostess for more coffee (Kohi aramas ka?) and she knew just enough English to ask me if I wanted a hot towel (You rike hot taoaroo?). As cultural contact goes it might not have amounted to a securely united world but it beat having to drop bombs on her.

  The airliners haven’t shrunk the earth. Going all the way around it still feels like a journey. But they have turned it into one place. Beyond the airport boundaries, each country remains odd enough to satisfy anybody’s thirst for strangeness. Meanwhile the airports hint at a world which might become peaceful simply by being too pointlessly busy to do anything else. My only regret is that I will probably be too old for space. I have done my best to snare a window seat on an early space shuttle but so far they are being niggardly with the tickets. To go up so far that there is no down is still one of my dreams of heaven.

  Meanwhile, as always, there is poetry enough in the here and now. All I do for a living is put words beside each other but I have been shown wonders without even asking. With raw egg dropping from chopsticks into my lap I have looked down on the North Pole. Over the Persian Gulf at midnight I have looked down and seen the oil rigs burning like the damned. Best of all, I have found that every way you fly leads home. Crossing the paralysed red rock ocean of Australia’s Dead Heart as the sun comes up, Qantas flight QF2 lets down over Sydney Harbour before the morning glare has burned the pale-blue summer mist off the silver water. Over there on the right is my house, the sideboard now full of intact crockery.

  Nowadays I go home too often to get particularly excited about it, but I was fifteen years in Europe before I first made the trip back, with the result that the two pieces about Sydney at the start of this book are perhaps slightly overwrought. My home country struck me not so much with its foreignness as with a familiarity I had not taken sufficient notice of in the first place: hence the uneasy urge to pontificate. But Donald Trelford, newly appointed as the Observer’s Editor, graciously announced that I had stumbled on a new format: the Postcard, which might be written not just from Australia but from anywhere in the world I could get to in those few weeks of the year when I wasn’t sitting in the London dark reviewing television. In the age of jet-lag most travel pieces by a non-resident correspondent were condemned to impressionism anyway. The last thing a visiting fireman could do was to investigate the causes of the fire. Leave that to the man on the spot. The Postcard writer would make a virtue of necessity. Whereve
r he was, he would be there for only a few days, but nowadays the same applied to almost everyone. Now that first impressions were common currency, they counted more than ever. Get them down and bring them home.

  Which is pretty well what I did. The Postcards are arranged chronologically and the reader will discover, if he keeps going, that the writer became less and less inclined to wax sententious, asked fewer and fewer important people for their considered views, and grew more and more shameless about doing corny tourist things, down to and including the guided tour of the catacombs and the pool-side barbecue billed to your room. Somewhere out there in the allegedly shrinking world I lost some of my pride.

  It could have been because my curiosity was expanding. Life is so various that the first things you notice will be strange enough to go on with. At any foreign airport you will meet your sophisticated compatriot who will tell you that everything you are about to see is a cliché and that the real life is behind the scenes. But he himself is the cliché. You will learn more from the local man with the bad shave who sells dark glasses. One hot afternoon on the West Bank near Alara, a Palestinian taxi-driver showed me his house. It was Ramadan, so the children could look at the cakes his wife was preparing but were not allowed to eat them. I, on the other hand, was not allowed not to eat them. In the glass-fronted tall oak-veneer cabinet against the living-room wall, sets of coloured glass tumblers and cups were displayed in their original cardboard cartons. He was making something of his life but either didn’t believe that he would be doing worse under Arab rule or else thought it irrelevant. Eventually, he hoped, the Arab nations would destroy Israel, but meanwhile the British would combine with the Americans and turn against his people, unless Lord Carrington came back as Foreign Secretary. I couldn’t think of a polite way to tell him of my suspicion that the Middle East problem was no longer high on Lord Carrington’s roster of priorities. Helping to keep me tongue-tied was the inescapable fact that this man was myself under another name. He had merely been born somewhere else, and in less kind circumstances. The main difference between us was that I had seen something of the world. The main hope for the future is that his children will see something of it too. That chaos in the airports is our chance to live.

  Postcard from Sydney

  1 Home, James

  CHUGGING through the stratosphere for twenty-four hours from London to Sydney, the Qantas Boeing 747 City of Newcastle did its best to keep us all happy, but apart from watching The French Connection Part II and consuming the numberless meals delivered to one’s lap by the hardest-working cabin staff in the history of aviation, there was little to do except make increasingly feeble attempts to keep one’s children out of mischief and go to the toilet.

  This every single one of the several hundred passengers did at least a dozen times on the voyage, making a total of many thousands of separate visits. Queues for the loo stretched down every aisle. It was somewhere between Bombay and Perth that the vision hit me. Our enormous aircraft, the apotheosis of modern technology, was filling up with gunk! Converted into chemical inertia by the cobalt-blue reagent in the flushing water, the waste products of our skyborne community were gradually taking over the plane!

  I adduce the above fantasy only to demonstrate the intensity with which one hallucinates after nearly a full day in the sky on the long haul out to one’s homeland. I had been fifteen years away from Australia. While I had been gone, the whole of the modern phase of Australian politics had taken place. The Gough Whitlam revolution – often called a ‘renaissance’, to emphasise its air of cultural euphoria – had been and gone. The same conservative forces were now back in power as had ruled the country so suffocatingly when I left. How much had I missed out on? And what if, despite my unfortunate timing, the place had indeed altered past recognition? Trepidations about culture-shock were eased only by the knowledge that the captain of our aircraft was called Barry Tingwell. The sheer Australianness of that name was as antipodean as a sand-fly bite or a sting from a jelly-blubber.

  In fact culture-shock had already begun a few nights before I left London, when I had seen the National Theatre’s Hamlet and Barry Humphries’ opening night as Edna Everage in the same thrill-packed evening. From the Hamlet, an austerity production in British Army standard-issue boots, to Edna’s non-stop spectacular, with its voluptuous wealth of sequins and gladioli, had already been a large step from the old rigour to the new expansiveness. As Hamlet, Albert Finney had lacked lustre. As Edna, Barry Humphries had had lustre to burn. Edna’s Proustian savouring of the things in her rich life – the gaudy catalogue of Australiana she carries in her dizzy head – was a call from the homeland as imperative as Penelope’s sigh. Thus it was that Barry Tingwell steered me south-east around the curve of the world.

  The first view of Australia was the coast near Perth: reefs, white beaches, shallow water like the juice of emeralds. In the suburbs, hundreds of swimming pools the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes attested to affluence. But then, I had never seen Perth before. Perhaps it had always been like that. The transcontinental haul was fascinating to one who had never flown over Australia before in his life. (I had come to Europe by ship: a five-week voyage costing about £60 sterling. In those days everybody you knew was too poor to fly.) Look at those circular salt lakes, each a separate colour like the little tubs of paint in a child’s paint-box! But an Australian businessman in a short-sleeved suit who had got on with a blast of reminiscent heat at Perth explained that this was nothing – the really fantastic scenery was further north. I should try it some time. Perhaps I should, and one day shall: but I felt resistant. For this trip, the eastern seaboard would be enough, and I wasn’t even sure I could manage that. For the first time I was becoming physically aware of how far-flung the land was into which I had been born. There had been another change of pilots at Perth. Where was Barry Tingwell? Help.

  At Sydney the 747 made its landing approach low over the suburb where I was born and grew up – Kogarah, on Botany Bay. It was night. Sydney was a vast field of lights: since the Aussie’s ideal is to own his Own Home, the cities sprawl inordinately. Not all that much less than London, Sydney filled the sky with costume jewellery as the 747 heeled over, shaken by a great inner surge of cerulean goo. The flaps jacked out. The turbofans lapsed from a whine to a grumble. Like a winged supertanker full of odoriferous amethystine ordure the colossal machine brought me back to my roots.

  Next morning the roots were on display in bright sunshine. Whatever overtones of unease eventually accrued to my four-week stay in Australia – and I should say in advance that I ended the trip feeling even more of an interloper than when I began – nothing should be allowed to detract from a proper celebration of that first, and continuing, impression of Sydney and its harbour. It remains one of the Earth’s truly beautiful places. Apart from the startling Manhattanisation of its business district, the city was more or less as I remembered it, except that for the twenty-one years I lived there I never really appreciated it – one of the big things that can be said in favour of going back, partly offsetting the even bigger things that can be said for remaining an expatriate once you have become one.

  The late Kenneth Slessor, in his prose as much as in his poetry, probably came nearest to evoking the sheer pulchritude of Sydney harbour. But finally the place is too multifarious to be captured by the pen. Sydney is like Venice without the architecture, but with more of the sea: the merchant ships sail right into town. In Venice you never see big ships – they are all over at Mestre, the industrial sector. In Sydney big ships loom at the ends of city streets. They are parked all over the place, tied up to the countless wharves in the scores of inlets (‘You could hide a thousand ships of the line in here,’ a British admiral observed long ago) or just moored to a buoy in mid-harbour, riding high. At the International Terminal at Circular Quay, the liners in which my generation of the self-exiled left for Europe still tie up: from the Harbour Bridge you can look down at the farewell parties raging on their decks. Most important,
the ferries are still on the harbour. Nothing like as frequent as they once were, but still there – the perfect way of getting to and from work.

  Some of the big Manly ferries have been replaced by hydrofoils, but there are a few of the old ones left. Always the biggest ferries on the harbour, they were built strongly to sail unperturbed through the pelagic swell as they crossed Sydney Heads to Manly. Poems in blond wood and brass fittings, they were named after surfing beaches: Dee Why, South Steyne, Curl Curl. Now there is a fund being raised to save the South Steyne from the breakers’ yard, while the hulks of some of the others are to be seen lying derelict against the Pyrmont wharves.

  Riding across to Manly in the Forties, we used to lean perilously over the balustrade of the open engine-room and watch the reciprocating whatchumacallits clonk and gwerp – ‘we’ being children in English-style school uniforms of flannel short-trousered suits and long socks. The smell of the machine-oil and the sensual heave of the ferry in the Pacific waves is an abiding memory, which I found unimpaired by repeating the experience as an adult. Towards sunset, when the light strikes the harbour at a shallow angle and turns the water silver, the ferries, their setting deprived of all perspective, hang in space, like long-lensed photographs of themselves: dream-boats.

  But where the ferry somehow survived, the tram did not. Melbourne keeps its trams but Sydney had got rid of them long before I left Australia. The toast-rack tram – open to the sun and breeze, full of character and incident – was the best form of street-transport ever invented. Unfortunately it sorted ill with the motor car, which since the early Fifties has ruled the city father’s dreams, as if Sydney might be a new Los Angeles horizontally, just as it aspires to be a new New York vertically. It was in this spirit that the Cahill Expressway – a flyover of heroic ugliness named after the same politician who gave birth to the Opera House – was built over Circular Quay, almost totally destroying the atmosphere of what had, after all, once been Sydney Cove, the site of the First Settlement.