The Road to Wujdan

I’ve been away a long time. Put it down to anxiety because that’s what it was. When I was a kid, the BBC had a humorous series called, “Much Binding in the Marsh.” I didn’t understand the title then. I think I do now and there’s way too much binding in the political marshes in Cairo these days. Stops one from thinking. Today I decided to do something about it. Actually, I decided last night as I put my head down to sleep. “I am 11 years old again,” I told myself, “and tomorrow I’m leaving for Wujdan.”

Why 11 years old? Because that was how old I was when I learnt how to get to Wujdan. It started with learning how to get up at 5am without using an alarm clock.

Whenever the family had to go on a long car journey, my mum would want my brother and me to get up at five in the morning. Early morning journeys didn’t agree with me. I was okay for driving around at any other time of day, but early morning drives brought on motion sickness. It got so that as soon as the alarm clock rang I woke ready nauseated for the trip. So, what I did was to hit my head on the pillow five times and say, “I’ll get up at five.” And that’s what happened. I’d wake up at exactly five and slam down the bell on top of the clock just as it started to ring.

I don’t remember who or what put me on to this trick. It certainly wasn’t Alroy. Alroy isn’t really full of great advice.... It could have been Pericles, our gardener. But I can’t say for sure.

Eventually, after I had been through the pillow banging bit and woken at 5 am a number of times, waking up at a precise time became a doddle. Many years later I used the trick to wish away a wart that had appeared on the forefinger of my right hand.

My mum, who was a doctor, had removed it with an electric spoon but it came back again and she removed it once more. When it returned for the third time I whispered it away as my head lay on my pillow. It took a week to disappear, but, after that, it didn’t return.

More years passed. I had started smoking when I was eleven, sneaking cigarettes out of my mum’s packets. I eventually became a chain-smoker. Then, years later, a heart attack hit a friend who also chain-smoked. It panicked me. I began whispering to my pillow again. I said things like,” I do not smoke” and then, more positively, “I have taken up non-smoking.”

Self-suggestion brought the number of cigarettes I smoked down, from 80 a day to about 20. But I wanted to stop really quickly and cheated. I found a Chinese doctor who cured me of the habit in five days by acupuncturing my earlobes.

My pillow-whispering experiences, however, led me to Wujdan by way of pleasant semi-waking dreams. Perhaps my trip there was akin in some way to Alice’s experience of falling own a rabbit hole, but I didn’t feel myself to be falling, still less to be in a hole. I would find I was in a small house with an internal garden full of flowering shrubs. I would be sitting in front of an enormous picture window, a table between me and the window with my computer on it and I’d be wittering away at a story.

That translated into reality when I had had my morning shower and got down to doing my stint of producing, or trying to produce, a daily quota of five or six written pages however nonsensical their content.

Am I nuts? Definitely, I’m at least half nuts. In hindsight, I laugh over much that was hurtful to me in life. There seems to be nothing else to do. Perforce of the greying locks and deepening lines of creeping decrepitude, one abandons the stance of the angry young man and laughs. Which seems to me an acceptable way to move ahead in life. But nothing, so far, has explained to me why I have a desire to try to reproduce on paper so much that was, after all, well nigh a horror show.

I do not even pretend to know the answer to that. But let me say in my defence of wanting to write that the scenery that enters my head when I do write and eventually surrounds me, blending perfectly with the objective scene, is more than beguiling. It calms my frequent panic attacks.

Wujdan is an amalgam of places I have visited and fallen in love with. At the centre is Granada surrounded by the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, whose mountain passes take me to other places for a change of scenery. Southwards, I walk on marl white roads under the green hush of bamboo naves in Jamaica’s St Elizabeth Parish and swim at Montego Bay’s Doctor’s Cave.

South East, I visit Jalali and Moroni, the guardians of Muscat’s sickle moon bay and journey to Yitti’s pink lagoon of flamingos.

When summer temperatures rise to unbearable heights, I sometimes catch glimpses of children skating on the lakes round Oslo.

Then, as dusk falls, I return to Wujdan’s entry point at El Ayn El Sukhna on Egypt’s African coast with views of Gebal El Galala (Majesty Mountain) inland and out across the Red Sea to the Sinai desert.

It’s a good place to write. Nobody knows you are there. So the doorbell doesn’t ring, neither does the telephone. Nobody knows the number.

How do you eat if you spend the day writing and you happen to be the family cook? Easy. You have three slow-cookers (crock pots) going at it while you write. One contains the beans for several Egyptian breakfasts. That one you plug in on the terrace so that the smell of cooking fava beans, not a pleasant one, wafts away to sea.

The other two you plug in anywhere convenient. One cooks the rice and the other a somewhat exotic dish of stewed leg of lamb. I’ll share the recipe with you next time.

That way you only interrupt what you are doing in order to turn off the rice when it is cooked and to make a salad.

Alroy

Of course it was Alroy’s fault, but in the end—and the end was many, many years later ---I was glad of what happened that afternoon because I got a story out of it and, eventually, more than one.

Great Aunt Consuela told me about Alroy. She didn’t actually introduce us or even name him. As a matter of fact she was pretty vague about how she knew him.

She’d been married to an Irish police inspector in the colonial service, visited the Emerald Isle with him regularly on holiday and was into all things Irish. She was a widow, when I knew her, but the Inspector remained very much alive for her. She consulted him constantly in one mysterious way or another. His “going over,” as she put it, seemed no obstacle to his talking to her.

Ireland and its folklore came to life for me when she spoke of them. The Banshee wept audibly for her before bad news reached her of one of her friends, and she had what appeared to be an uneasy relationship with Leprechauns. She would, I thought, when I grew up, have made a superb copywriter for the Irish tourist business.

“The Leprechauns,” she said, “are cobblers by trade and are fond of gold. Sometimes they can warn you, or give you good advice. But they can be wicked, you know. Not really wicked-wicked. Tricky-wicked. They can cause trouble.”

“What do they look like?”

“Little old men about three feet tall. They turn up here in the rainy season. They wear very old fashioned clothes: red jacket, red knee breeches, black stockings and buckle shoes. You shouldn’t try to catch them. They’re suspicious of humans, but you can talk to them.”

‘Here’ was Jamaica.

Shortly after she said that I went down with a bout of fever and when it had run its course, my Mother left me in the care of the owner of a guest house in the countryside to recuperate. I kept getting malaria and must have stayed at every country house on the island. It was always excruciatingly boring. They never had books any normal person would want to read and I had read most of mine and only ever had no more than one to take with me on those exiles from home.

This particular house had a straw table on the veranda piled high with murder magazines. One morning before breakfast I leafed through one of them and found a story of an elaborate murder plot that apparently hadn’t worked. There was a picture of a bomb hanging on a rope under a bed over a jar of acid. The victim, had there been one, needed only to get into bed to weigh the bomb down into the acid to make it explode.

I didn’t want to read the story. The guest house was a gloomy, old plantation ‘great house’ that now took in guests and needed no assistance to give me the creeps. I dashed out into the garden, climbed over the wall at the back of the house and made off into the woods which were dripping wet from rain in the night.

Alroy, which was what he said his name was, seemed to be expecting me. I knew him immediately, red suit and all. He even had red hair! There he was, sitting under a tree in the blue-green-pink light of a rainbow that sprang up to the sky through the trees from near his feet.

“How is your aunt and where is she?” he asked.

“She’s in Montego Bay. How do you know her?”

“She’s a friend of the Little People,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came for the Captain’s gold.”

“What captain?”

“Old Sir Henry’s. He has no use for it now...”

“Sir Henry?”

“Yes. Sir Henry Morgan. And what are you doing here?”

I told him and I told him how awful things were and that I wanted to go home.

“Easy,” he said and winked. He it was who put me up to the idea of knocking back half a dozen peppers or so. (You can read the story I’ve posted to see what happened. It is, of course, a fiction. But it is firmly based on the reality of my eating peppers and a hurricane that I thoroughly enjoyed as a small boy.)

Since that first meeting, Alroy has shown up again more than once, though not exactly in the same place. I don’t summon him. He sometimes turns up when I visit my home in Wujdan, a tiny house with an inner garden and a view of snow-topped mountains on one side and the sea on the other. I go there when I want to think about something serious, or when I want to write. Where is it? You may well ask. It is in a country that lies somewhere between Egypt’s Red Sea and Jamaica’s Ocho Rios.

Alroy likes the garden. I guess he must climb over the roof to get in. I have never seen him coming or going. He has taught me some interesting things. But I’ve learnt to watch my step when he gives advice with a wink.