Around the World in 80 Years. Eric Newby
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Hammersmith Bridge, outside our flat
At this time I experienced a great feeling of inferiority at my inability to cope with problems of a mathematical nature which had to be solved algebraically. At that time (in the 1930s) a pass in Mathematics was obligatory. In spite of being good in History and English, I failed Mathematics. I was sixteen so my father took me away from St Pauls and put me into a fashionable advertising agency in W1. Two years later I left it to go to sea.
It is the sea that has influenced me most, although I am no great sailor, an oarsman more than a mariner. Introduce me to a sailing ship sailor who hasn’t been influenced by it. There is nothing more unpredictable than a sailing ship, engineless, at the mercy of the winds and currents. And there were times when the ship would show her different faces: when she was running with 63,000 sacks of grain under the hatches, or utterly becalmed in an oily sea with turtles sunbathing around her. Then there was the sound of the storm in the rigging, nothing more awesome in all the world, and going aloft in it and working the winches and grinding away at the capstans; and hearing but not seeing whales surfacing around the ship in dense fog. And St Elmo’s fire (the corposants) running along the steelyards until they seemed to be ablaze.
The year I left school (1936) and went into advertising.
And the ship itself – washing it down, chipping the rust off it, inside and out on the way to Australia, the darkness of the hold in ballast, and then red leading the great dark heart of it, like a cathedral. And washing for the crew, and cleaning the loos, and cleaning the pigs and their sties and chasing what never seemed less than half a million bedbugs below decks.
But you would die for your ship if called upon to do so, in order that she and the rest might survive. These influences will remain with me until I die.
My life has been an exercise in erratic navigation – I can see that now. Looking back on it I realise how very unpredictable it has been. But somehow I feel I can’t take the entire responsibility for what has happened. Often it has been as if a chunk of raw material has been offered to me and I have either taken or rejected it. I’ve been very lucky, both man and boy. I’ve had health and strength and quite early on the way I was able to appreciate the extraordinary diversity of the world, its beauty and mystery, as well as to witness its horrors.
With my wife Wanda, Rome 1948. We married in Florence in 1946.
Self 1945
E and W, Salcombe, Devon 1947
With daughter Sonia aged four at Hammersmith
Family at the races, Epsom 1950
In the garden of our flat by Hammersmith Bridge with Wanda and Sonia.
I didn’t get wounded or drowned off Sicily in 1941, or fall off the mountain I was trying to get to the top of (with a friend) in the Hindu Kush, in 1956. Nor did I fall in 1938, when I was blown out of the rigging of a four-masted barque, from 160 feet up – a friendly wind blew me back into it.
If all this – the description of my life sounds all too perfect, as if I am trying to make myself out to be an efficient, omnipotent traveller, I want to let it be known that this is not so. In fact I am horribly untidy. I can reduce a railway compartment to a shambles in two minutes flat and panic if my luggage is out of sight for more than a few seconds, which some might regard as a reasonable character defect. And as I get older I have become a worrier. A few days ago I was told that I was becoming a chronic worrier. The future looks black.
Several books have been a great inspiration to me. One of the books that did the most to influence me in my pursuit of the open air life was Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft: A Hand book for Vacation Campers and for Travellers in the Wilderness. The others were The Happy Traveller: A book for Poor Men by Frank Tatchell, Vicar of Midhurst. He travelled so extensively that it must have been awkward for him to function as a vicar at all. Another book that was a great inspiration was The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, which I wrote about in A Travellers Life. Kephart’s book was first published in New York in 1917. He travelled widely in the North American wilderness, and remained in it for long periods, building cabins as the spirit moved him and later, in his book, giving advice on how to build secret camps.
Staying at a stately home in Italy. Eric, Wanda and family and Chicchi Mapelli Mozzi.
Wash and brush up for the family while camping in the Dolomites 1954.
Camping in France with specially made tents
The book begins with a description of how to build a luncheon fire, and later a dinner fire. ‘So, in twenty minutes the meal will be cooked,’ he wrote. ‘Whereas a man acting without a system can waste an hour in pottering over smoky mulch.’
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