Travelling With and Without Monsters

When I was just over 6 years of age my Irish family migrated (again) from the East End of London to Australia.

Those six weeks on board the migrant ship, Orcades, were to prove the most profound of my life journeys. Even today, more than half a century later, some indefinable scent in the air immediately transports me, synaesthetically, back to my first ever glimpse (probably somewhere near the Straits of Gibraltar) of an unbroken horizon where the dark blue bloc of the sea met the light blue bloc of the sky along a single vanishing line. That startling first intimation of infinity carried on salt-laden air still evokes in me a rush of undifferentiated visceral pleasure, as though the reduction of the universe to those two primordial blue bands allowed me to experience the entirety of my body with an expansive openness to the world for the very first time. This overwhelming experience occurred in the very first day or two of that grand journey but which became the decisive moment in the liminal passage from early childhood to some new awareness of the spectacular strangeness of the outside world. Being a child, I had absolutely no part in planning or shaping that journey except in my mind’s eye but somehow that absolute lack of agency and responsibility which marks much of childhood only added to the oneiric quality of that experience.

As the voyage unfolded I would be thrown into a visual, auditory and olfactory whirlpool with random entry and exit points which included walking around the base of Mt Vesuvius, the traffic mayhem of Naples, Arab traders riding on camels seen from the ship’s decks as we passed through the narrow Suez canal, Yemeni traders in small boats pulled up to the sides of the ship to trade with the migrant passengers, offering powerfully scented leather goods and bright new Japanese-made transistor radios hoisted over the deck rails in baskets with cash lowered on return. In Bombay, we toured the city’s temples and pavilions by taxi and on foot and again the wonderfully potent stench of the world pervaded the streets where great humpbacked cows ambled, shat and chewed their cud apparently unmolested by human masters. Either in Bombay or Colombo a robed and turbaned snake charmer was brought on board to simultaneously charm and terrify the passengers just as his reed flute enticed a cobra from its wicker basket.

In retrospect, we children must have also received our first explicit and implicit introductions to the colonial narrative of white supremacy, alongside being taught to abide by the strict class divisions between upper-deck tourists and the residents of our below sea-level migrant class cabins. My two older brothers and I would be shooed back below if we wandered too far beyond our station. There was even a neat resonance between our E12 East London postcode and our E Deck cabin class.

But, blissfully, all I really saw then were previously unimagined explosions of colour, astonishing animals such as flying fish, camels, elephants, sharks, monkeys and parrots, strange and somehow frightening ways of being human, weird desert and jungle plants and fruits and previously unseen heavenly phenomena like the Milky Way and the Southern Cross. None of this, though, is etched more deeply into my consciousness than that first blue heaven of the horizon’s gaping indeterminacy.

Arriving in Australia was a great anti-climax. Shuffling down a gangplank in duffle coats against a cutting southwesterly wind and a cold winter rain onto the grey Pt Adelaide wharves was the opposite of what I had imagined: a vast desert plain teeming with kangaroos presided over by just one building, the fabled Sydney Harbour Bridge, with everyone wearing Tom Sawyer-style overalls and straw hats. Indeed, it was as though we had travelled a circular route back to a scaled-down version of Tilbury Docks and maybe this was part of the colonial fantasy all along.

Over the next few weeks living in a migrant hostel, though, I was delighted to find that I had escaped a recurring nightmare which had tormented my nights in the period before leaving London. In that dream, a massive ape-like King Kong-type being with a spiraling rainbow for its head would approach my bed as I cowered in fright. Just as it reached the end of my bed I would wake up in a cold sweat. The enormous size of the monster could be gauged by the fact that a blue Ford Anglia parked next to its feet only reached as far as the top of its big toe.

So, when this dream came back to haunt me a few weeks after arriving in Australia, I experienced a sense of despair that the huge journey I had undertaken had in fact failed to shake-off that terrifying chimera- the ape being had followed me halfway across the world!
Mercifully, the nightmare recurred only once, as if to bring home to me the fact that one can traverse the globe but you cannot outrun your demons. Perhaps this inescapable return of the repressed was the reason that I was so moved to the core on my first hearing when I was about 15 (and many times subsequently) of Robert Johnson’s magnificent ode to the compulsive beauty of travelling, “Hellhound on my Trail”

“I got to keep movin’, I got to keep movin’
Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail
Hmm-mmm, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin’ me
There’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail”