One time back in the 1980s, Johnny Shedbuilder and I were on our way to Nairobi, to spend a couple of days hiring a jeep and heading out for the game reserves. On the plane we read the Lonely Planet Guide to Kenya. It warned us about a scam that young Kenyans played on naive westerners when they got off the bus from the airport.
We’d also read about Cairo, too, where we’d stopped off for a few days en route. It had rightly prepared us for the wonderful and infuriating chaos of the crowded city, and the charm of the old parts where we went wandering and incongruously came across a full size table tennis table in a tumbledown alley. We played games with the kids there, then had tea in a small cafe before heading off for the pyramids where we were unsuccessful in unravelling the real reason they’d been built.
The guide had warned us not to drink anything with ice in it because the water it was made from could contain traces of sewage. But the small market stalls sold juices made from whole fruit crushed into ice, irresistible in the heat and dust. So we ignored or forgot about the warning.
We got off the bus in Cairo and a very nice young chap approached us. He was dressed in black jacket, white shirt, red tie, and looked studious. He was very apologetic, explaining that he’d like to talk to us because we were from England where he had an invitation to attend Reading University and would like some help in preparing for it. He was very convincing and we offered to buy him a cup of coffee and hear more about his situation. He led us to a cafe and while I noted the flicker of recognition in the owner’s eye, I didn’t pay it much attention.
Our new friend told us a most unhappy tale about how he’d studied hard to win a university place in England, and how much he would love to go there. But . . .
Well, let’s just say Shedders and I were on the verge of writing the fellow a cheque before we finally remembered the Lonely Planet’s warning. Almost everything they’d detailed had been reflected in the young guy’s tale. And yet we’d still almost been taken in.
A couple of days later, we drove our hired jeep to the outskirts of Nairobi where my ex-girlfriend was head teacher of a school. On the second night there, my stomach suddenly decided to impersonate Mount Vesuvius, erupting without warning in two opposite directions. All night, I evacuated painfully. My friend called out the school nurse who gave me medicine which did the job. God knows what would have happened if we’d been out in the middle of some huge game park.
Another warning ignored.
I also managed to suffer heatstroke on the same trip. And on my last night, after Shedders had already gone home, I was staying in a coastal hotel owned by my teacher friend’s friend but decided to visit another hotel a mile or so up the road, going by taxi. The guide book warned that westerners should stay in their hotels because they could be subject to various crimes in-between them, especially given the comparative poverty of the local people. But my hotel was dominated by British people I could always get plenty of back home, so I went to a hotel that was dominated by Germans and perhaps in a moment of universal insight, soon realised that they were just as boring as my lot.
The guide book warned that local women frequented the western hotels, looking for men who’d pay for sex. I indeed met one such woman in the bar and we spent the next few hours talking. I told her right at the outset that I didn’t want to have sex with her; that I was in love with my new girlfriend back in London. She seemed to understand and turned out to be a very interesting and intelligent woman. She told me that her day job was weaving but that the twenty pounds she could get for sex was more than a month’s pay.
At the end of the night, she called a taxi that I said I’d pay for, to take me back to my hotel and then to take her to her village. But the taxi stopped between the two hotels and my female friend demanded that I pay her twenty pounds, the taxi driver turning in his seat to fix me with a steely gaze. I said I didn’t want to have sex and wasn’t going to pay. Which in retrospect was probably not very clever. There was a long silence during which I guess she weighed up various balances; perhaps she even realised she’d made a mistake in not taking me at my word. Whatever, she nodded at the taxi driver who re-started the car and took me back to my hotel.
These stories aren’t in my book, ‘Subbuteo in My Soul’, which contains various other adventures Shedders and I got up to. I didn’t select them because they didn’t fit the purpose of that particular book. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you need to have a wide range of material you can select from, not just take the first idea you come up with. This applies to fiction as much as to biography. Too much fiction reads like the author is using up every last scrap of his imagination. Huge multi-part series are probably to blame, at least in the Fantasy genre. And publishers don’t help, demanding that authors write in the same genre and use the same characters as far as possible.
It’s very easy as an author to end up like the host of an organised tour, where all the sights are worked out beforehand and the reader is going to feel totally catered for. However, it’s getting dysentery you remember; and nearly being robbed or offed on the east coast of Africa. Until in the end the reason every Fantasy story you write takes place in a medieval European type village where all the white locals drink ale from tankards and smoke long pipes and dandle wenches on their knees while the evil wizard in the woods cackles like Vincent Price and would come out as gay except you didn’t realise that was a good idea to boost your demographic until after the books have been published is because you no longer drink water unless it’s been sterilized or passed through a mountain at great expense.