A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (43 page)

Soon we could see him clearly. A tiny, wizened man, bent by a lifetime of toil, toothless so that in profile his mouth looked like a new moon. He was old, how old it was impossible to say, anything between seventy and eighty, quite possibly even more.

As he drew near we could hear him talking to himself in an animated way, and occasionally laughing at some private joke. He was certainly nothing like a
gompa lama
, more like a benevolent gnome.

He was dressed in a pale-coloured jacket, baggy trousers, a white, open-necked shirt and on his head he wore a big, pale-coloured cap that looked a bit like an unbaked sponge cake. Everything about him was very clean looking.

Now he was abreast of us and I prepared to welcome him, or for him to welcome Signora Angiolina, or welcome the three of us. But he did neither of these things. Instead, he looked at us benevolently, cackled a bit while fishing a modest-sized key from a pocket, said something that sounded like
‘Bisogna vedere un po’
the equivalent of ‘I’ll have to think this out a bit’, then opened the door to ‘Attilio’s Bedroom’, took the key out of the lock and went in and shut the door, still continuing to chuckle away on the other side of it.

‘What we’ve got to do, before we buy the house, is to talk to him,’ Wanda said; but trying to interview Attilio proved to be like trying to interview a will o’ the wisp.

Plates

My father and mother at Henley before the first war.

Picnic with my mother in Surrey, aged two.

At the helm of
Moshulu
, in 1938. There were twin wheels which could be manned by four men in an emergency. Two men at the wheel was a normal occurrence in rough weather.

Painting the hull in Belfast before sailing for Australia, October 1938. Every morning while we were in port we went over the side to chip rust and to red-lead the shell plating before painting it.

Unloading ballast – which contained two dead dogs – off port Victoria, Spencer’s Gulf, with the temperature in the hold up to 120°
F.
The ballast, 1500 tons of it, consisted of coarse dark sand used in the manufacture of pig-iron, huge lumps of paving stone, granite blocks, the best part of a small house, and the two dead dogs, added by the Belfast stevedores, which we eventually located and spooned up with our shovels.