Growing Old Outrageously

A memoir of travel, food and friendship

Elisabeth Davies, Hilary Linstead

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781743316818
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925575361
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Two old school friends reconnect unexpectedly after thirty-five years and discover that they both love travelling - and the more exotic and far-flung the location, the better! Not having a clue whether they will get along, the eccentric pair embark on a trial journey to Morocco. That tentative beginning has turned into a series of wonderfully unusual holidays, and Hil and Liz have been circumnavigating the globe ever since.Among many other destinations, they have taken in Marrakech, Fez and the Atlas Mountains; Patagonia and the Galapagos Islands; Istanbul and Cappadocia. They've been on safari in Namibia, Botswana and the Serengeti, attended music festivals in Naples and Prague and made a pilgrimage to the western isles of Mull and Iona. Along the way they have encouraged, enraged and entertained each other, while living through countless adventures.This is a book for thrillseekers and armchair travellers alike, a celebration of friendship and laughter - and an inspiration for anyone who's longed to venture outside their comfort zone and travel to exotic places.

1

Off to Morocco and Prague

‘What wouldn’t I give for an icy pole!’ I called out to Liz as I wandered around our hotel room in the nude, fanning myself with the laundry list.

We had arrived in Marrakech the night before. The temperature was 45 degrees, the air thick with insects and the cloying perfume of jasmine, gardenia and lemon. We could hear Arabic voices chattering in the gardens below.

Liz had just wandered in from the swimming pool. Her expression froze in horror as she sighted my Buddha-like stomach.

‘Put something on,’ she said as she disappeared into the bathroom. A few minutes later she emerged covered from head to foot in a hand-woven caftan.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said, and made a dash for the door, carefully averting her eyes.

Charitably, I supposed this theatrical response was aimed at setting me a good example. I put on a flimsy cotton nightie—not quite the thing for a would-be nudist. Having had an English upbringing in which nudity was frowned upon (a sign of ‘whore.ishf behaviour), I spent most of my life trying to overcome shyness about naked bodies and was proud that I had largely overcome my problem. Oh well, I thought, I’ll have to confine nudity to times when Liz is out on her early morning walk. Just as well she’s an early riser and is gone before I’ve even thought about getting dressed.

I never thought I would have to compromise over nudity in the bedroom! I felt liberated and was damned if I was going to give in to Liz’s hidebound approach to the naked body.

By the time she returned from her walk she had put the ‘nude’ episode behind her and was keen to give me the ‘good oil’ on Marrakech. Meanwhile, I had secured an upgrade to our room by insisting to management that I had originally booked a room facing the garden. Liz was delighted when she walked into a larger room on the third floor. We now overlooked a tiny courtyard with ornamental tiling and the gentle splash of a fairytale fountain.

‘Brillio. What a gorgeous view,’ she said.

Despite her change of mood I still had a lingering worry that Liz was going to weigh me down with ‘rules and regs’. What would she say in the evening about late-night CNN and BBC World, to which I was addicted? I would soon see.

*

I had arrived at Heathrow after twenty-two hours of flying. I stared out of the plane window at the drizzling day and thanked my lucky stars that forty years ago, throwing off parental shackles, I had escaped those interminable grey skies and sailed away to Australia, romantically following a man and a dream of becoming an actor. Even though neither of those dreams had proved long-lasting, it had been a good move.

Liz was there to meet me.

‘Hurry up, Hilly, the next Heathrow Express to Paddington leaves in five minutes—we’ll just make it.’

‘Hang on. I’ve got to wait for my luggage.’ I pointed behind me to a porter who was bent double pushing a low loader with my multiple suitcases.

‘Good heavens, Hilly, you’re only staying four weeks. It’s a holiday, not a lifetime.’

Liz started calling out to anyone who would listen, pointing to my luggage.

‘She’s brought all this stuff—will someone please take it away?’

‘Sure, I’ll take it—and you too,’ said one aspiring wit, peering lasciviously at Liz.

When we finally got into a taxi, Liz said, ‘When we go to Marrakech you must take only what you can carry on and off the plane, because I won’t be helping you.’

‘Charming! I’ll remember that when you’re groaning with Marrakech belly and incapable of carrying even a knapsack,’ I replied.

‘We don’t want to be held up at Heathrow by baggage handlers with their endless stop-work meetings. It’s bad enough enduring the body search at security.’

*

Liz had a tiny two-storey house in Vauxhall, a working-class area just across the Thames from Westminster.

‘In among the monuments,’ she pointed out. She hardly spent any time there now that she had retired.

‘Sixty-four days last year,’ she said proudly.

Comfort was not her bag. ‘I don’t have a bedroom, I don’t care where I sleep. You can have the big bed in the front room. You sleep all the time anyway, I’ve heard, and you’ll need to get over your jet lag.’ I was touched by her offer and recovered from the flight lulled to sleep by the swish of trains rolling into Waterloo Station.

Her house was very cosy: books and pictures lined every wall. Jars of nuts and fresh ginger mingled happily with strange little sculpted figures on the kitchen bench while the dining table was covered in articles of interest cut out from the daily papers. When I remarked that she was a hoarder, she countered, ‘They’re not mine. Guests leave things behind when they go.

Every time I come back to VW (Vauxhall Walk—she called it vee double-u) I find eggcups, jars of pickled herrings and pot scourers. They assume I cook, when nothing could be further from the truth.’

It was exhilarating to be in London, so after a cup of tea I bussed it into the West End and made for my favourite clothes shop for fatties. Liz was horrified by the number of bags I brought back.

‘Not more stuff, Hilly. You don’t need it, and there’s no room.’

My luggage was to become a constant irritation for her during our travels. For me, shopping is an addiction. I travel overseas with one large and heavy case (which has inside it a large, soft bag that returns to Australia containing presents and the detritus of travel), an overnight bag, a handbag and a haversack (if I can get away with it).

‘You can’t leave all this here,’ she said. ‘The Paks are coming while we’re away.’ (She was referring to her Pakistani friends.)

‘Sorry, Liz,’ I said. ‘This is my luggage. Half of it is pills anyway.’

‘You can’t be serious, Hilly.’

Well, I was, and I suffered the dressing-down. I am a disgracefully obvious traveller and Liz said that we would not be able to visit what she called RIZs—Robber Infested Zones—with me standing out like a neon sign. Liz travelled light, either with a backpack or carrying a red sail bag held together with a piece of yellow rope. The bag contained multiple pairs of knickers, notebooks, assorted socks, thick handmade cotton nightshirts and brightly coloured ribbon-covered skirts made to measure in Karachi. And then there were her T-shirts. With messages such as ‘Recycle now’ or ‘Aged for maturity and taste’ blazoned across the front of them, I thought Liz, too, might be a magnet in RIZs.

I noticed after a day or two in London that washing did not appear to be high on her list of priorities.

‘Unnecessary,’ said Liz, ‘a waste of water. Why do you wash so often?’

‘Once a day is not excessive,’ I replied.

‘I’ve been doing my research,’ Liz continued. ‘You only need an occasional brief shower, none of these vast baths you go in for.’

‘Well, I’m not sure that I’m prepared to wait until someone points out that I smell.’

But Liz was unstoppable.

‘And what are you going to do about your food? It’s all processed, genetically modified and full of poisons,’ she cautioned, wagging her finger. ‘AND the quantity you eat. Coupled with no exercise and diabetes, you’re a recipe for heart attack or stroke.’

‘What you fail to grasp, Liz, is that haranguing me is the worst way to get me to change my behaviour. So lay off.’

Liz was quick to discover the topics that got a rise out of me and she quite enjoyed needling me about them. (Over the years I would learn to silence her patronising put-downs with ‘Be careful not to fall off your plinth, Liz’ or if she started to bang on about my unfortunate food habits, I’d say, ‘It’s just as well, isn’t it, that you will make such excellent compost.’ The needling has abated with time—or maybe we have become more accommodating because we are exhausted with arguing.)

Two days later we were off on our first holiday together. As we flew out of London, Liz commented that she had never been on a planned holiday with a proper itinerary before.

‘When I was young I would leave the office at five o’clock on a Friday evening in high heels and a suit and be cycling in Ireland the next morning in the same high heels and suit.’

‘Really! Didn’t the heels get caught in the spokes?’

‘There wasn’t any leisure wear in those days,’ said Liz, quick as a flash. ‘Or I might catch the night train to Paris and see some Goyas in the Louvre and then move on to Madrid to see some more. If I spent a long weekend in New York I would fly back overnight to arrive at Heathrow at eight o’clock in the morning and be at my desk in the office by nine o’clock. My holidays were tough, none of that dotty “chilling out”. I’d be up at dawn and still trucking at midnight. And I’d travel alone.’

‘Why?’ I asked her.

‘I haven’t a clue. Maybe I wanted to get away from everything and everybody. Get off people’s map. It was the heyday of hippiedom, so perhaps I was trying to find myself, plumb my potential, gain wider horizons. Who knows?’

‘And did you find yourself?’

‘I lost interest as I grew older. After a while I ceased to care. That in itself was relaxing. And anyway, who wants to relax? We’ll be dead soon, so we’re better off trucking!’

Liz’s holidays sounded heady with promise, dangerous and quite rarified to me, and I felt a bit envious. I wish I’d been as bold as she had been, but really I’d had so little time for holidays.

I’d just tack on a few days to the end of a business trip—like the time I went to Hong Kong with my cabaret group, Pardon Me Boys, and to Edinburgh for the international launch of Tap Dogs. It was incredibly exciting to be part of the whirlwind of openings in London and Los Angeles and then New York and Paris, but for me it was always bound up with the stress of looking after ‘the Dogs’, which meant picking up the pieces if something went wrong. On the way home I’d stop off at a resort and recline in a bubble bath, with a masseuse at the ready. Or I’d book into a health farm for yet another attempt at weight loss.

When I told her this, Liz looked at me in wonderment. ‘Golly,’ she said. ‘What an adult life you lived.’ I, by contrast, saw Liz as a free-spirited, brightly coloured gypsy bird flying on wind currents all over the world, dropping in on friends, stirring the pot, delivering her famous one-liners and catching up on gossip, then taking off again before she could outstay her welcome.

*

The flight I’d booked us arrived at Marrakech airport at midnight, where Liz was quick to draw attention to my lack of travel experience.

‘Not a good idea to arrive anywhere later than teatime,’ she muttered as we staggered out into the hot, starlit night, the last passengers to emerge.

There were a few taxis waiting at the kerb. I had asked the flight attendant the cost of the fare into town and was appalled when the first driver I approached mentioned a figure three times higher than the sum she had suggested. I tried to bargain but he was tough and wouldn’t budge an inch. Neither would the second driver; they were in cahoots, I was sure. I joined Liz, who was tapping her foot.

‘I refuse to let them get away with it,’ I said.

‘We’ll be here all night,’ she replied, ‘and the airport’s closing.’

‘Airports don’t close.’

The story had an almost happy ending. One driver, older and more kindly than the others, had been watching us arguing and took pity, agreeing to take us into town for double instead of triple the fare.

We sank back in the taxi as we drove through the velvet night, stars studded brightly above. Ahead, Marrakech beckoned to us with twinkling lights: there was no orange neon glow hovering over it like most cities.

When we finally reached the hotel it was a delight, an oriental fantasy dreamed up by an American architect who had fallen in love with Marrakech and poured his heart into the building. Even the gardens had been lovingly designed as a series of courtyards, each decorated with exquisite tiles and featuring an ornamental fountain. Modern craftsmen had refashioned tiles with ancient designs for every surface of the building. The result was colourful and inviting. We were far too excited to go to bed, so sat on our balcony and ordered Moroccan cocktails. They arrived—vodka and pomegranate juice with the liberal addition of mint and ginger and a splash of ginger ale and apple juice. Delicious. We soon felt at peace with the world.

The next day Liz bounded off for her walk while I eased myself into the day and consumed a leisurely breakfast. She joined me for coffee and outlined her suggested activities for the day. She was agitating to get going, so ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE: UNDAUNTED, THE DREAM TEAM STEPS OUT
• 1. OFF TO MOROCCO AND PRAGUE
• 2. RESPONDING EXTRAVAGANTLY TO SOUTH AMERICA
• 3. A DISGRACEFULLY HUGE HOLIDAY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
• 4. TIME FOR REFLECTION: FALLOUT IN TURKEY
• 5. SPINIFEX, SPIRITS AND SONGLINES
• 6. PACKAGE TOURS: CRUISING THE BALKANS AND MUSIC AMONG THE MAFIA
• 7. STAYING WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY: SEARCHING FOR AN ELUSIVE POETRY FESTIVAL IN DONEGAL AND ENDING UP IN SPAIN
• 8. EXOTIC STORIES AND ISLAND REVERIES
• 9. LIZ TAKES CHARGE: TRAINS, ART AND EXHAUSTION IN EUROPE
• 10. AND SCARLETT MAKES THREE
• EPILOGUE: FIFTEEN YEARS ON: WHAT NEXT?