Hemingway described for Look magazine readers what happened next.
One third of the way down the alleged airstrip, I was convinced that we would not be airborne successfully. However, we continued at the maximum rate of progress of the aircraft which was leaping from crag to crag … in the manner of the wild goat. Suddenly, this object … became violently air-borne through no fault of its own. This condition existed only for a matter of seconds after which the aircraft became violently de-air-borne and there was the usual sound, with which we were all by now familiar, of rending metal.
The tone of Hemingway’s casually flippant description doesn’t accord with what Abdul remembers of the aftermath of Reggie Cartwright’s failed take-off.
Standing amongst grazing cows in the wispy grassland which, apart from a rusted pole on which a wind-direction arrow still turns, is all that remains of Butiaba airstrip. Abdul remembers seeing the pilot climbing in, last of them all.
‘He was just a young boy,’ he says, as if by way of explanation.
He confirms that the plane took off, ‘just a little way, then landed again,’ hitting the ground, bursting the right wing tank and beginning to burn. Mr Hemingway was the last to come out of the plane (thinking he was trapped he’d head-butted a door open).
Abdul frowns in concentration.
‘He came running towards us. His hair was on fire and he was crying.’
Abdul beckons us to follow him through the yellowing grass to a point beneath a solitary goblet-shaped cactus tree they call a euphorbia. This is where the plane came down and this is where Abdul found pieces of the wreckage, some of which he has kept. He shows me parts of a cylinder, a battery and torn shreds of fuselage fabric. I ask him if anyone has ever shown any interest in these relics of one of Hemingway’s most serious accidents. He shakes his head. No one has been out here.
I look around. The wind-direction arrow squeaks and read-justs itself, the only landmark in the featureless bush. It’s hard to think that anything important ever happened here.
Hemingway’s survival of two consecutive air crashes was news across the world, and generally the cause of much rejoicing. But it had come at considerable cost. Writing to Harvey Breit ten days later Hemingway assessed the damage.
I ruptured the kidneys, or maybe only one, the liver, the spleen (whoever she is) had the brain fluid ooze out to soak the pillow every night, burnt the top of the scalp off, etc. Also … had to take two breathes in the fire which is something that never really helped anybody except of course Joan Of Arc.
He didn’t mention the sprained arm and leg and the crushed vertebrae and the paralysed sphincter and the temporary loss of hearing and eyesight.
We return to Masindi. Maybe it’s hearing the story of the crash that has darkened my mood, but I begin to notice the crueller side of life out here. Scrawled on the door of a house just outside the town is a slash of civil war graffiti. ‘Bondo Killers Boys’, it reads, ‘No Living - Child Rat Dog.’
That night a man comes to see me. He is called Ibrahim Bilal and he wears a pink knitted hat and sports a single very prominent white tooth. He and his friend speak Arabic. He worked for Ugandan Railways and remembers being sent from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, to Butiaba in January of 1954 to bring back an important group of Americans, one of whom was badly hurt.
He drove them back to Kampala in a Ford Zephyr staff car, with room for seven people, with a Ugandan, Dr Cabreta, in attendance. One of the men lay on a mattress in the back. Yes, Ibrahim remembers, he was in a serious condition.
‘Some of the time he was in agony.’
Appallingly enough, Africa had not finished with Hemingway. A couple of weeks later, recovering at a camp on the Kenya coast at Shimoni, he tried to help deal with a bush-fire nearby and fell into the flames. He suffered second and third degree burns.
We leave Entebbe for London tomorrow. The bad weather has cleared, the oppressive humidity lifted and, after bone-rattling rides through the bush, the pool at the Lake Victoria Hotel looks inviting.
Though we’ve not been here long it seems like a lifetime. Africa has a way of imposing its own time scale, reducing our busy western lives to its own pace, its own stately rhythm. In Africa the concept of the eternal seems much more meaningful. It also allows you more time to take things in. Events become clearer and impressions sharper and memories more indelible.
Perhaps that’s the way it was for Hemingway. He spent less than ten months of his life in Africa and yet from it came two books (one, admittedly, posthumous) and two of his greatest short stories - ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’.
Life in Key West and Cuba may have been safer, but never as intense.
CUBA
On 28 March 1928, Hemingway wrote to his new wife Pauline from the Royal Mail steam packet Orita, westbound from La Rochelle:
‘We are five or ten days out on our trip or tripe to Cuba … I have often wondered what I should do with the rest of my life and now I know - I shall try and reach Cuba.’
Though the letter was mainly a moan about the slow progress and lack of creature comforts aboard the Orita it was oddly prescient. Twelve years later, with the help of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, Hemingway bought a house in a village on the outskirts of Havana in which he lived for the next twenty years - the most permanent home of his life
.
I’d never been to Cuba until Hemingway lured me there in August and September, the hottest months of the year and the start of the hurricane season
.
At Jose Marti International Airport, Havana, jets are climbing into the sky above the gleaming facade of the brand new air-conditioned terminal but I’m in the car park, where the unconditioned air is 34 degrees centigrade and I’m leaning up against the side of a truck for some shade.
My bags are in the taxi, whose back axle is hoisted up on one side whilst our driver struggles to replace a flat tyre. The vehicle looks undignified, like a dog with its leg up.
If I’d wanted to get an instant flavour of what Havana was like in Hemingway’s time, they could not have done much better than finding me this beleaguered but handsome tangerine Plymouth, which dates from 1951 - the year he was writing The Old Man and the Sea. Even if it does have a 1960s Russian engine.
When we eventually hit the road and turn on to a wide, empty highway outside the airport, almost the first thing I see is a faded billboard advertising the Floridita bar, with Hemingway’s countenance sending out a broad, if unconvincing, smile of welcome.
I sink back into the leather seat with a delicious feeling of anticipation. It doesn’t last long. Half-way into Havana we hit the road again, only literally this time. There is a dull thud from under my seat and the Plymouth lurches painfully as the replacement tyre explodes, and the car slews round on its wheel rim before coming to a halt beside an embarrassingly crowded bus stop.
No one bats an eyelid. Not a hint of amusement, concern or even mild derision. It must happen all the time. The bus, which arrives a moment later, completely ignoring a tangerine Plymouth facing the wrong way, in the middle of the road, is unlike any form of public transport I’ve ever seen.
It’s an articulated hut for people, about fifty foot long with both ends higher than the middle - hence, I suppose, the local name for them - camels. With a belch of black smoke, the tractor unit hauls it away leaving us with the prospect of trying to reach Havana on three wheels.
No tyre is to be found, so I unload into another taxi, this time a slightly more modern ‘57 Chevy and, fingers crossed, proceed towards Havana.