The Complete Pratt (149 page)

The Range Rovers are another problem. They’ve arrived, and we don’t know what to do with them! Only three of the English staff drive anything, let alone Range Rovers, and I wouldn’t dare give them to the Peruvians, because they’d simply get too excited at the prospect of driving something so magnificent.

Peru is a smiling, rickety land, full of humour. The main newspaper has a photographic feature on its front page called ‘Pothole of the Day’. An elderly lorry bears the legend, ‘Apollo 2½’. On the frequent, teeming, breast-feeding, sombrero-shaking buses between Cajamarca and Baños Del Inca, the conductor calls out the stops by name. ‘Sausages,’ he cries as we approach Bratwurst Bernhardt’s. I turn to smile at you. You aren’t there.

I flew to Lima last week, on business. I can’t begin to describe Lima and its contrasts, the rich suburbs, the endless shanty towns, it would depress you. I came back on the night bus – a fifteen-hour trip! All along the Pan-American Highway the great lorries roared through the night, lit up with fairy lights, liners of the road! I turned to share the romance with you. You weren’t there.

At every stop, in the dusty, single-storey villages, small boys came on the bus to sell limes and pancakes. Even at four in the morning the boys came. To sell a few limes is worth losing a night’s sleep if your family is really poor. Yet they smile and look bright and well. We stopped every now and then at roadside stalls, rich with sizzling meats and pancakes, the Little Chefs (!) of Peru.

The bus began to growl up into the Andes. The headlights picked out the rocky hills. Dawn came quickly. We were winding through a narrow, astonishingly green valley. White storks were feeding in their hundreds in paddy fields that made me think of China. High above us the road wound ever upward through the sierras, pale yellow and green, dry but covered in plants except for a few rocky outcrops, briefly turned red as the sun rose. It took us two hours and forty minutes from sea level to the summit. As I saw the Cajamarca Valley laid out before us like a smiling woman, I turned to share the moment with you. You weren’t there.

To have this amazing continent to experience, and yet not to be able to share it with you, it’s the story of my life.

One day I’ll share everything with you, my incredible darling,

With ever deepening love,

Your pen-pal!

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

March 28th, 1982

Dear Martin,

I’ve been meaning for a long while to tell you how sorry I was about the way the election turned out and about my part in it. I’m in
Peru
now (!) running a Government Overseas Aid project, and getting a very different slant on life.

The people here migrate from the poverty-stricken countryside to the teeming towns, squat on the outskirts, build primitive shanty towns, skimp and scrape and slave and eventually turn them into houses. It may take thirty years to create a respectable neighbourhood, but they do it, and in the end the State conveniently forgets that they’ve done it all illegally, and gives them electricity, water and sewage as they can afford them. To see the patience, determination and good nature of these people makes one ashamed of Western assumptions. To regard dishwashers, video machines and microwaves as essentials seems to me to be deeply obscene.

I don’t suddenly have renewed faith in the Labour Party or any less disgust at its feuding and pettiness. I don’t believe in grand designs and great schemes, or centralised planning. I still have a lot of sympathy for the Liberals’ approach. But I now believe that only socialism can possibly solve the world’s problems, because at least some of its supporters care enough even if its leaders don’t.

I have no more party ambitions. I don’t believe the world will ever change for the better from the top downwards. It can only change for the better from the bottom upwards, through the actions of millions of good individuals. It’s unlikely, but it’s the only hope.

Nevertheless I’d like to canvass for you in the next election, if I’m home. We’re the only two members of the Paradise Lane Gang who’re still in touch. Can we be friends again?

All best wishes to you and Mandy,

Henry

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

May 8th, 1982

Dear Cousin Hilda,

Thank you very much for your letter, and I’m really sorry I never replied to your Christmas letter. My only excuse is I’ve been really
busy
. If I tell you that our twelve Range Rovers haven’t moved since they were parked on some waste ground outside Baños Del Inca, you’ll realise how busy we’ve been. Getting greenhouses built is a major problem. The greenhouse is a foreign concept here, like the garden shed, probably because they don’t have a
Radio Times
to advertise them in!

Some of our staff have left, partly because they don’t see us getting quick results, and partly because it’s not very good to be British here during the Falklands War! Yet again my timing’s bad. Peruvians believe that in withdrawing our survey ship we signalled to Argentina that we weren’t interested in the islands, they believe our huge fleet to knock the conscript troops off the island is a colonial fantasy, they believe the sinking of the
General Belgrano
was murder on the high seas. The play
No Sex, Please, We’re British
, which ran in Lima under the somewhat less catchy title of
Nada de Sexo, Por Favor, Somos Británicos
would stand no chance now. I can hear you saying that that would be a good thing!

I was moved to hear how moved you were to know that I was thinking of you on Christmas Day.

I was interested in all your news in your letters. I’m glad Jack’s been visiting you. He’s very fond of you. I hope the bus shelter in Thurmarsh Lane Bottom has been repaired, and fancy Macfisheries closing. It’s the end of an era.

This will have to be the end of this letter, as I have a budget meeting to attend and I want to catch the post.

With much love as always,

Henry

PS You ask if Apartado is a nice street. It isn’t the street name. It’s actually the equivalent of PO Box 823.

Honeysuckle Cottage

Monks Eleigh

Suffolk

May 19th, 1982

Dear Henry,

I’m sending this to your friend Lampo Davey for forwarding, as agreed, just in case Doris sees the address on the envelope and worries about your being in Peru.

We’re as well as can be expected. I have some arthritis, and Doris continues to slip an inch at a time towards a world of her own. My job is to make sure that it’s a happy world. Of course she can never remember when she last saw people, and will fret that it’s ages since she saw someone who called that very morning, but in your case I think she has a genuine feeling that it’s been a very long time. She does have moments of comparative lucidity. So perhaps you could drop us a line, not mentioning Peru, saying you had a nice visit.

I hope everything’s going swimmingly for you, and that the Peruvians will soon be enjoying cucumber sandwiches for tea. I wish you could find some way of sending me your news.

With much love,

Uncle Teddy

9, Bromyard Mews

London SW3

June 4th 1982

Dear Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris,

Thank you very much for having me last weekend. It was a very enjoyable visit, as always. It was good to see you both looking so well and it was nice to have good weather for once. I was disappointed that I didn’t win any of the games of Scrabble, but
c’est la vie
, and at least they were hard-fought scraps.

I had a good journey back and when I got home I found a letter from a friend who’s living in Peru. It was full of good news, he’s doing well with his government project, loves the country and is in friendly correspondence with his ex-wife, so that cheered me up no
end
and prevented my return home being an anti-climax, as these things sometimes can be after a weekend of your hospitality.

Well, I won’t bother too much with my news, as I hope to see you the weekend after next and will tell you it all then.

Have that Scrabble board ready. I think my luck’s about to change.

With much love as always,

Henry

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

Sept 6th, 1982

Dearest Hilary,

I’m writing this as the train rumbles through a land halfway between mountain and jungle, beside the Urabamba, a tributary of the Amazon. Lampo and Denzil are sitting opposite me. They send their love. I send more than love. I send a shriek of desire.

When we meet I’ll tell you of the sights we have seen on this almost memorable holiday. We travelled on the second highest railway in the world. Our beautiful train, so beautiful that the excited station staff at Arequipa kept it for two hours before letting it go, wound across the desert, up over the arid mountains, past rare oases and shy, gentle vicuña, past lakes seething with bird life, down to Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake.

I’ll tell you of Puno, where the restaurants are full of strolling bands who play the haunting music of the
zampona
(pan-pipes), the little pipes of the
antara
, the cane flutes called
quena
, the twelve-stringed
charango
with body made of armadillo shells. They even make music with a comb stroked against the side of a gourd. They play music fervent with lyrical sadness, sometimes hauntingly yearning, sometimes ferociously triumphant. Every note sings to me of love and absence.

I’ll tell you of the long train journey from Puno to Cuzco, through the
altiplano
, the great upland plain of the Andes, empty save for isolated thatched stockades and adobe villages. Waiters set
tablecloths
throughout our third-world train, and without leaving our seats we ate stuffed avocado, beef casserole and a banana. Eat your heart out, InterCity Catering. A lone Indian on horseback watched gravely as a whole trainload ate their bananas. What did he think?

I’ll tell you of the almost memorable town of Cuzco, Spanish elegance built upon foundations of massive Inca stonework that has stood undamaged for five hundred years although no mortar was used, such was the perfection of the masons.

I’ll tell you of the almost memorable four-hour train journey from Cuzco to the foot of the great mountain on which the almost memorable Inca city of Machu Picchu was built, of the climb round hairpin bends on buses brought by train to this road that connects with no other road, built of materials brought by train, to the immaculately terraced, deserted city of the sky, high on its narrow rock several thousand feet above the curving Urabamba, mortarless stonework unflinching before four hundred years of winds.

Why were these great sights only almost memorable? Because you are not here, my impossibly wonderful love.

Henry

PS You’ll never guess who we met in Lima. Neil Mallet, who tried to destroy my journalistic career with deliberate misprints. He went white at the sight of Denzil and me. He’s working on an English-speaking paper in Lima. Hardly a glittering career, and I found I couldn’t hate him any more. Not all of us have to cope with the sackfuls of envy and inadequacy that were dealt to him. We all had a drink together, but he had to leave early to do his laundry.
Plus ça change
…

Sarajevo

Rua de Matelos

Altea

Costa Blanca

Spain

30th September 1982

Dear Henry,

I’m glad you enjoyed your holiday. I enjoyed living it through your letter.

Yes, I too am looking forward to our meeting. It’ll be nice to see my pen-pal. I wonder if you’ll look the way I imagine you!

I won’t look the way you imagine me. I’m quite a shadow of the person I was, Henry, and I don’t think you should be using phrases like ‘my impossibly wonderful love’. Even if I ever was wonderful, which I doubt, I’m not now. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a kind of emptiness, a sense of there being nobody there. I doubt if I’ll ever again be able to cope with the great rousing excitements of life. Please, please, please don’t expect too much of me.

Kate and Jack both managed to get over for a few days. We’re blessed in our children, and that at least gives me hope that there was and is something worthwhile between us. Camilla sends her love via them, which is nice. I know that you write to them all and are disappointed that they aren’t managing to get to Peru, but they’re all very involved in building their own lives.

With a heavy heart, I have to report that Benedict has been sighted in Portugal – in Albufeira, in fact. My informant – that makes me sound like a policewoman – saw him in a restaurant in unsavoury company and looking as if he might be drugged up. The informant is reliable. He’s none other than my own dear Daddy. The Mathesons have a villa there and invited us both. I didn’t go as I thought Daddy needed a break from me.

I feel depressed by my country. It’s strange that we’re both among Spanish peoples at this time. The Spaniards here feel that the Falklands War was the last dingy death-twitch of our imperialist illusions. (Not that Spain wasn’t imperialist!)