I’m puzzled, though, by the lack of any ceremony. If this had been, say, the last journey of an Isle of Wight ferry, it would surely be full of people in anoraks pointing cameras and tape-recording the last blasts of the ship’s horn. Instead, it’s like a ghost ship. In the saloon the television screens beam American basketball to rows of empty seats. In the main lounge ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ thuds out to a few thin Moors with wispy beards and close-cropped black hair.
A vigorous westerly rips in as we reach the open sea, where the bottle-neck entrance to the Mediterranean shrinks to a mere 9 miles. This is dangerous water, a tide race of accelerating currents and a thousand ship movements a day, a difficult stretch to navigate at the best of times, but in a tiny boat, at the dead of night, potentially suicidal.
The bonus of this urgent west wind is a panorama of dramatic clarity. The fingers of Europe and Africa almost touching and between them, dead centre, the sun merging slowly with the horizon. I feel for a moment a jubilant sense of freedom, of being in limbo, beyond tribal loyalties, national boundaries, anthems, flags, customs, papers, permissions and prejudices, free from all restraints except the elements themselves. I feel positively Homeric. Then a particularly fierce gust picks me up and hurls me, bodily, into the bar.
MOROCCO
Day Three
TANGIER
‘When I meet fellow Americans travelling about here in North Africa, I ask them, “What did you expect to find here?” Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer reduced to its simplest terms is a sense of mystery.’
Thus wrote Paul Bowles, the American writer who adopted Tangier, in the book that lies where it fell from my bed last night.
Earlier in the evening, a group of elderly Moroccan musicians had played a thin, tinkling version of ‘Happy Birthday’ for me in the hotel restaurant. It was such an uncompromisingly Arab sound that it was only halfway through that I realised it was ‘Happy Birthday’ at all, and for that reason alone I shall treasure the memory of it.
It’s six o’clock now and I’m trying to shake off the first hangover of my fifty-ninth year. The new day glows cruelly bright behind the curtains and I can’t ignore it. I swing myself out of bed, surprised by the cool touch of a marble floor, and throw open the curtains. But the smarter the hotel the less easy it is these days to throw open the curtains, and by the time I’ve found the right cord to pull and disentangled the net from the main drape I’m seriously irritated and irreversibly awake.
The view is less spectacular and much friendlier than I’d expected. It’s a painter’s view. Below me is a small verdant garden, dominated by the luxurious crown of a palm tree and a solitary Norfolk pine standing with its branches out like a cake stand. Running roughly in line from west to east are a harbour wall, with a ferry boat alongside, a distant beach already covered with tiny figures and, rising gently behind the curving bay, the headland, beyond which a pipeline dives beneath the Strait, carrying 10,000 million cubic metres of Algerian natural gas into Europe every year.
The town is compact. Narrow streets rise and fall around low hills and their damp cobbles catch the morning sun. The buildings look more French than Spanish, with red roofs and white-plastered walls, sooty and streaked by the rain, from which sprouts a canopy of television aerials and satellite dishes. The sharp clarity of the light is softened by the drowsy mix of early-morning sounds - dogs barking, doves cooing, a fishing-boat engine springing to life.
I’m excited. I know there’s a way to go before we reach the Sahara but I’m on the starting grid. Tangier, where Europe clings onto Africa and Africa clings onto Europe, has a fine record for great departures. Among my birthday presents from the crew, piled up beside a bottle of duty-free champagne (empty), are two books about Ibn Battuta, one of the greatest travellers of all time and a Tangerine, born in this town in 1304. At the age of twenty-one, he set out on the first stage of a 75,000-mile adventure through most of the known world, across the Sahara to Timbuktu, up to Spain and through Europe to Persia, Arabia, Sumatra, India and China, returning home thirty years later to write a book about it.
Not a bad role model.
The El Minzah Hotel opens onto a busy street leading up from the port and the market. There are cars, but they’re well outnumbered by human traffic. Berber women, tough, pugnacious and wide, plod up the hill as if wearing all the clothes they own at the same time. Their low centres of gravity allow them to carry virtually anything. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of them with a small car on her back. The men, by contrast, don’t carry, they push. Covered from head to foot in thick woollen burnouses (the wind that’s keeping the clouds away is brisk and chilly), they steer rubber-wheeled handcarts full of bits of this and that up the centre of the road. Amongst the crowd are men in sharp suits doing nothing but standing and looking around. The admirable Alan, our fixer, tells me they’re probably policemen. At dinner last night a local man went out of his way to deny that Morocco was a police state.
‘Not at all,’ he insisted, ‘it is a well-policed state.’
There’s an Anglican church near by which was painted by Matisse, one of a number of artists, from Delacroix to Francis Bacon, drawn to Tangier by the quality of light and the tolerant hedonistic atmosphere, which also attracted writers like Bowles and Joe Orton and William Burroughs. Putting thoughts of hedonism aside for an hour or two, I fish out my only tie and walk over there for Sunday Service. My parents would have been proud of me.
Walking to church in Sheffield was never like this. The entrance to St Andrew’s, Tangier is virtually obscured this morning by a Berber street market. Doughty ladies from the mountains have taken over the pavement, spreading in front of them a fragrant assortment of fresh cheeses, onions, carrots, thick sheaves of mint, coriander, sage and rosemary.
Somewhere behind the piles of food I locate two white gateposts, which mark the way into the churchyard. Once inside, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is quite what you expect it to be.
Down by the gatepost, squeezed into a corner of the wall, is a makeshift wooden construction that I take to be a kennel, but which, on closer examination, proves to contain a bearded old man, who glares back at me. A moment later an attractive Arab woman pops in through the gate, squats down and begins to dictate a letter to him.
Leaving the boxed scribe behind, I walk up the shaded path. On either side of me is a thick, entangled, but artfully managed secret garden of cypress, gum and false pepper trees, jacaranda and creepers and assorted thick bushes, in the recesses of which I can dimly make out graves and headstones. On closer inspection most of these bear the names of people from the Scottish Highlands. Curiouser and curiouser.
Then there is the church itself. It emerges from all this greenery looking like something out of the Cotswolds, except that the tower from which the blue cross of St Andrew flies is decorated with Moorish tiles. The church porch has an Islamic horseshoe arch and inside is a chancel arch, around which the Lord’s Prayer is picked out in Arabic.
I’m warmly welcomed by a manic garrulous Moroccan, in white djellaba and black astrakhan hat, given to fits of giggling, lunging kisses and a curious staccato English punctuated regularly by the phrase ‘thank you very much’. He introduces himself as Mustapha Chergui, the church caretaker. Thank you very much. For thirty- eight years, thank you very much. In between pointing out such features as the coffered chancel ceiling, carved from cedar wood by master craftsmen from Fez, and the display of arum lilies, which he fetches every Sunday from the market, he has to rush away to help Mary Evans, one of the churchwardens, prepare the hymn books.