It was warm, the sun slanting through the window creating rectangles of light on the carpet, like reflections of the screen itself.
My father entered the room eating a pear just as the Desert Fox began to advance through Libya. There was a linking sequence of shots showing Berbers
with camels in the middle distance trudging over a stony desert.
“You know,” said my father, “I saw people like that when I was in North Africa and the first time I did, one of my friends was there
with me and he said, ‘For those chaps, crossing the Sahara is probably like going to the office every day.’”
He sat down in “his” chair. He never talked about the war, neither did my uncle nor my grandfather. Even when asked directly he somehow
avoided answering. But we always gave it a try, my brother and I.
“What else did he say?”
“He said, ‘We have something common with those blokes, they don’t need passports and neither do we. Our passport is the air force.’”
“What happened to you friend?”
“He got married to a Frenchwoman and went to live in South Africa.”
And that was the end of the revelation.
He was, as he put it, tired of travelling after all that and he vetoed my mother’s suggestion to emigrate to Australia on a £10
assisted passage. He never left Britain again. Indeed, had he been given the choice he would probably never have left the Scottish town where he was
born in the first place.
From other asides and over-heard conversational splinters I pieced together the fact that he left Libya via Tripoli, went to Sicily
and to Naples, climbed Stromboli and visited Pompeii and Herculaneum.
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He was shipped home after the war from Genoa the port where Marco Polo dictated his travels whilst sitting in prison.
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roam
it’s not safe to be roaming around the backstreets on your own | a tramp who had roamed the country for nine years
wander, rove, ramble, meander, drift, maunder; stroll, amble, saunter, walk, traipse; prowl; range, travel, tramp, traverse,
trek through...
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Passing through the Straights of Gibraltar, an announcement was made to the effect that everyone would be searched on docking. Any firearms
found, other than those issued officially, would lead to criminal charges. My father, like most of the others, dumped his souvenir Luger over the side
and into the Mediterranean. As near as I can judge he was just off Tangiers, birthplace of Ibn
Battuta who set off on his travels a year after Marco Polo died. A Berber, a Moslem and a lawyer, his journey was certainly as extensive
as that of Marco Polo and lasted almost thirty years. He visited China, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Middle East and parts of sub-Saharan Africa
from Mali to Mogadishu.
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