Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face
Michael Hulse
THE TRAVELS OF A FAT BULLDOG by George Courtauld Constable, £16.95, pp. 288 Tobogganing in Outer Mongolia, George Courtauld falls off when he collides with a frozen yak pat. One of the hazards, apparently, of being a Queen's Messenger. This excellent bedside book, a diary of two years leading up to the Gulf War, takes Courtauld, his diplomatic bags and whatever other business the Official Secrets Act may forbid him to mention, to the ends of the earth: to 'squalid Lima, ugly Mexico City, drab Tel Aviv, boring Bonn, even more boring Riyadh' — but also in quest of the Limpopo river. The fat bulldog discovers that 'the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea is dark and isolat- ed enough for its surreptitious use as a pissoir', that a toucan in flight looks like 'a large, yellow, flying nose', and that the mausoleum'd body of the Angolan president,
lying in a crystal coffin in an un-aircondi- tioned basement, began to disintegrate — but for his hands, feet and head; these have done a Michael Jackson and turned white.
He discovers that medicines in Hong Kong include
birds' nests, bears' gall bladders, toads' secre- tions, scorpions, antlers, silkworm moths, the sloughed shells of cicada grubs, snakes, the sexual organs of stag and seal,
that above the door of the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in Washington 'there is a pleasant carved scene of a gathering of nudes disporting in a bubble bath', and that an archive in the same city contains Ger- man aerial reconnaissance photographs of his own part of Essex, taken in 1940: 'The dot on the lawn isn't me in my pram, it's the old magnolia which died last year.' It is not only the curious trouvailles that make this travel book a special pleasure. Unusually, it gives a full portrait of the author's life at home as well (he seems to manage a few days there every month). George Courtauld is an Essex farmer, clearly a good custodian of the land in his family's keeping, a man who is affection- ately enraged by the stupidities of livestock one moment and the next is congratulating the mighty copper beech planted by Great Aunt Min on its centenary. Tetchy he may be, but he's good at people, in full portrait or in caricature, from the bizarrely clad crone on Third Avenue, who 'resembled Peter Pan's Tinkerbell going to her 100th birthday party' to an ex-pat who contracted leprosy, 'sat in a cane chair in his garden, under a jacaranda tree, and sipped pink gins and rotted'.
The fat bulldog? Lord Curzon once greeted the late arrival of a King's Messen- ger with the words, 'Silver greyhound indeed! A fat bulldog would be more apt!' This bulldog eats fried eggs with chop- sticks, lip-reads the Flintstones on Peruvian television, and is peed on by a baby crocodile. Sadly, he never does find the Limpopo. But then, as Stevenson said, 'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.'
Previous page
