LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 3

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***CHAPTER 4*** “There and Back Again”
Coming through Heathrow was a buzz. It was great to be back in England. All around me were English-speaking people, and for a change I could understand what was being said. The weather was cold but very bright, and I was happy to see the quaint old houses beside of the railway line as I travelled along the Piccadilly Line, up along towards Wood Green. I noticed every little thing, my senses were really sharp.
I went back to my parents’ house. In some ways things had stayed exactly the same, but in others they were radically altered. I had been away for three years. During that time my Mum had to have a lung removed when she developed lung cancer. The cancer had returned, and Mum was trying to get around on only one lung. She would struggle for breath every now and again, and have to reach for the big oxygen cylinder that the health service had provided her with. She would put the mask over her mouth and from over the top of it, I could see her frightened eyes looking at me. I did what I could to comfort her. I held her hand and told her some watered down versions of my travelling tales. I was clean from drugs and looked the picture of good health. But my Mum was grey and thin. She looked as if she had aged about forty years since I had last seen her.
The health service had assigned a special cancer-care nurse to her. Euthanasia had already been discussed as an option. My Dad told me that there was no way she was going to recover, and rather than her suffer needlessly, we were going to help her pass over. Now that I was back, the final arrangements were drawn up. I didn’t know what to say, and just went along with what seemed to be the best way forward.
On a cold and bleak February day, we took Mum back the Brompton Hospital. A nurse gave her a glass of clear liquid. Mum drank it down, and then, as she was staring straight ahead, she went totally still. She had gone. My Dad reached out and closed her eyes, and from somewhere inside me I remembered a prayer from the Koran, which I recited in Arabic. It was the prayer from the very beginning of the Koran, called El Fatah, or the Opening. My Dad and my sister were sitting there with me, not consciously understanding the words, but silently joining in the sentiments that this powerful prayer invoked. I then started to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, which they knew, and after the words ‘Our Father’ they joined in.
In one of the conversations we had shared before she went, my Mum had suggested that I get a job as a home help. So, I made my way to the local social services building in Wood Green, and asked to speak with the lady in charge, Mrs. Giddings. I was shown in and a stout, dark-haired lady behind a desk listened while I told her my story. She agreed to let me make a start as home help, and I was given an itinerary, listing the elderly people I was to visit each day. I would go round and do the chores for them that they were unable to do for themselves, such as cleaning, dusting, or the washing up.
My favourite was Old George, who was blind. Old George loved me like a son, but his relationship with Mrs. Giddings was a very tempestuous one. This was because he was absolutely determined to keep drinking. He maintained that it was his right as an Englishman to have a drink whenever he wanted. Mrs. Giddings had a bee in her bonnet about Old George, though, and was equally determined for him to stop. They both tried to get me on their side, and to draw me into their plans. Mrs. Giddings asked me to keep an eye out for any empty bottles that I might see in his place, in the course of my cleaning. But Old George knew what she was up to, and confronted me on this very point. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like the idea of being turned into a sneak, but wasn’t it part of my duties to tell her if things were happening to this very elderly person that might present a problem later on? Old George would get me to walk him up to the top of the road, where his pub was, each lunch time. I would drop him off there, and get back on my bike and pedal off to the next assignment. It was a job that I enjoyed doing and I got to meet some really nice people. I kept it going for about six months. By then I was back on the gear, and going out doing massive frauds to pay for everything.
Living in Richmond at the time, I was woken up one morning by the sound of someone knocking. Not really expecting a visit, I opened the door, and lo and behold, it was the Old Bill. I was arrested and taken down to Richmond police station. They confronted me with the evidence of the thousands of pounds of cheque fraud I had committed.
‘You’re going away for this lot, matey,’ one copper said to me, like something out of an old television program.
‘You’ll be getting about three to four years, my old cocker’ a second cop merrily chipped in, as they put me in a cell, shut the door, and closed up the little hatch.
I sat there in the cell, looking down at the obligatory piss puddle on the floor and trying to breathe through my mouth. How was I going to get away with this?
My only chance was in getting bail. Once out, I could head back to India. Let them look for me there! India is one hell of a big place to hide in. When the duty solicitor came round, I had to do some fast thinking. To be eligible for bail, I had to be protesting my innocence, so I told him that I was denying the charges, but would fill him in on the details at a later time. To get bail in those days, you had to own a property. When the solicitor asked me if I owned my own house I said that the house I was living in was mine, I had inherited it off my old Gran. He nodded, writing everything down on his yellow writing pad. Bail was awarded. I walked out of the courtroom with all my possessions in a big plastic bag in one hand. The Old Bill were gutted to see me walking away. I gave them a little wave, blew them a kiss and walked off with a spring in my step.
I went straight back to my little place, and from underneath the old gas cooker, pulled out my equipment; a package of small bottles of methadone, ready to be broken open at the neck to give me a nice little a hit. The liquid looked lovely; glinting in the sunshine, with a fresh needle sparkling at its end like a diamond. I was going to have to get a bit of money together and then leg it off to India. I knew the police would never chase me out there. So, gradually, I reduced the amount of methadone I was using, and within a couple of months was practically off it altogether. This gave me a regular stock I could sell to get enough money together for a flight. The day of my court case was getting closer and closer. My ticket was booked for the day before I was due in court. I was nervous getting on the plane, expecting the cops to turn up at any minute to drag me away. But hostess closed the door, locked it. As I felt the engines roar into take-off, I knew I had made it.
Getting back was great. Everything had stayed more or less the same. In Delhi, I checked into my favourite haunt, in an area called Parha Ganj. It is a compact area with dozens of cheap hotels, all with tiny, rabbit-hutch like rooms. Most of the travellers, freaks and assorted hippies came here. From the balconies, you could look down on everything that was happening in the street below. Cows would wander at will, unmolested by anyone, eating the fruits and vegetables that had dropped or been thrown out after the street markets shut down. Along the road were little booths, offering fruit juices, where they would crush the fruit in front of you using a hand-operated masher. People moved up and down the street selling incense, samples of which smoked away from their bicycles. Others would approach the westerners with offers of heroin.
I made a purchase from the first one who found me and went back to my little room. I sat up all night, chasing the little lines of dark-brown liquid up and down the silver foil, and listened to the sounds of the trains from the nearby Old Delhi railway station. For a long time I thought it was ships’ foghorns I was hearing, till I remembered that we were hundreds of miles inland. They sounded almost alive, like great beasts from millions of years ago, calling out to each other through the darkness of the Primordial Night.
In the hall, outside my room there was a little washbasin. It was the only source of water I had to cook up with. One morning I bumped into a French girl who introduced herself as Celine. She was really pretty, and she invited me to pop over to the room she shared with a couple of French lads. I took my hit and went visiting. The Frenchies eyed me a bit warily, which is normally a sure sign that they have got something valuable, like a kilo of powder perhaps.
They had just come back from Benares, the holy city of the Hindus. It was also one of the best places in India to buy large amounts of stuff. To try to break the ice, I looked around the room for something to chat about. I spotted a statue of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. I commented on this, and one of the French guys told me that he had discovered that this god could do things for him. He had started to freak out while he was speeding and tried calling upon Jesus for help, then the Buddha, then every deity or god that he had ever heard of. Eventually, so he said, he called on the name of Hanuman, and that is when the madness stopped, and his sanity was restored.
A few days later I realized that something was wrong. I hadn't seen Celine for several days. Then clouds of flies started to appear all over the place. There were hundreds of them, crawling underneath the door to the Frenchies’ room. I realized that I hadn’t seen any of them for days. I called the manager over. He looked really nervous, sweating and gulping a lot. We opened the door with his key. The Frenchies had already paid in advance, he said. It looked as though they had also moved out, because only the girl was still here. She was on the bed, dead and rotting in the heat. The sight of her swollen body hit me like a ton of bricks. I immediately emptied my stomach straight onto the floor, I couldn’t help it. Then, the stench hit us and we fell back out into the corridor. There must have been hundreds of flies, crawling in and out of her mouth, and nostrils, swarming all over her like a hideous black shroud. Sticking out of her arm was the syringe that had killed her, the flies trying to burrow their way into the spot where the needle had penetrated. They were swarming furiously in their desire to get to their food.
The police, when they came, wanted to put all of us into jail. This is always their reaction when a dead body turns up, especially when it involves a foreigner. It has something to do with the foreign embassies that are inevitably involved in cases like this. Eventually we convinced them that none of us had anything to do with her death and they let us all go. It was some time before I could close my eyes without seeing Celine's body.
A few days later, I was paying a visit to a friend who happened to be staying in a nearby hotel, when, I came across a European girl walking about in the street without any shoes on. Her dress was orange, which in India is associated with monks, and nuns, but the line of track marks all the way along the insides of her arms told me that the only shrines she had been devoting herself to in recent times were the ones associated with H.
She introduced herself as Joy, and asked me for any spare change I might happen to have. I reached into my pocket and gave her a rupee coin. I know what it is like to really need, so if at all possible, whenever I’m asked, I try to do something. Depositing the coin in an inside pocket, she then pulled out a single stick of incense from the same place, and proceeded to light it. Then she started drawing shapes with it all around me, as if casting a magical spell on me. It was amazing. I just became entranced by her and what she was doing. It soothed me, and made me feel incredibly peaceful. It was as if she had enchanted me, with the gently muttered prayers, with the motions of her hands around my head and body, and the fragrance from the incense. It was astonishing how simple a thing it was for her. At the time I was too swept away with the pleasure of the experience to question what I was doing. The next thing I knew, I was offering to buy her some food. We walked down by The Ghats, where they were getting ready for the cremations later on that day.
Soon, dozens of funeral pyres were being lit, and the flames roared upwards, ten, twenty feet into the air. The deceased Hindus were carried through the crowded streets on stretchers, visible to all as they went past, their faces painted in the ceremonial colours associated with their own particular deity. Some were painted in the blue and yellow of Lakshmi, whose image is that of a beautiful goddess with coins pouring from her hands. Some were painted in the reds and blacks of Kali, who is represented as a demonic woman with her many arms full of swords. The bodies were piled up high on the massive piles of wood and then, they were all set ablaze. It was an incredibly emotional sight.
Later, we came across one of the mini-altars dedicated to Lord Shiva, the god of destruction, who is shown with a trident, and who traditionally throws his thunderbolts at those who challenge the power of the Hindu family of the gods. We knew well these altars because there was always a small chillum, a cylindrical pipe for smoking hashish attached to the bottom. The herb is sacred to this deity, and the pipe was chained up so no-one could walk off with it after having their smoke there. Just then, a saddhu, or holy man came along. He was wearing the orange robes of all pilgrims in India, but his long dreadlock hairstyle marked him as a Shivaite. Joy had a small piece of hash on her, and she invited the saddhu to join us in a smoke. The pilgrim sat down on his heels, and patiently chopped up the hash, mixing it with tobacco from a cigarette. Then he funnelled this smoking mixture into the chillum, and prepared to light it, cupping his palms around the base. As Joy struck the match, the pilgrim raised his head upwards to heaven, and began to chant.
‘Bom Shankar!’ he called out to his god, asking him to accept this offering of sacrifice.
He drew on the chillum, and the tongue of flame from the match slipped down into the crater of the pipe. The pilgrim took three or four deep breaths, forcing the mixture to combust. There was now a deep red glow, as the mixture began to burn its way down, making smoke thicker and richer-smelling. The old man raised his head for a second time. His face was an icon of dignity and renunciation as the flames made the deep lines on his craggy face stand out in relief. He passed the pipe to the Joy.
‘Shiva Shaboo!’ she cried out. Her voice was more than a human voice now, it was almost an epitome of the thunder, which is believed to be the voice of the god himself. The smoke came out even thicker, and she passed the chillum to me. A monkey came and squatted alongside the three of us, tilting its head to the side as if it was considering joining us. Instead, it looked away, back across the river.
‘Bomboolay!’ I cried out, completing the ritual invocation to the deity.
After the smoke, the saddhu wanted to read our palms, not for any money, but because he felt this was what he could offer us in return for sharing the ritual with him. He told me that one day I would be involved in the occult, and that a true understanding of this subject would come with study of the works of Madame Blavatsky. I closed my eyes to try to take in what he had said to me, to impress it on my memory. When I opened them again the saddhu vanished. I had vaguely heard of this Madame Blavatsky, in connection with the Theosophical Society, I knew little about her at this time. Many years later I would read of her origins, her travels, and her discoveries.
Lal Babu had achieved legendary status amongst us Freaks on the hippie trail. He was the most famous heroin manufacturer in Benares. Joy and I met Frenchie while staying in Benares. He had known Celine's friends back in Delhi and he knew where to find Lal Babu. Frenchie led us through a winding trail of tiny alleyways into the Muslim part of town, where the temples thinned out and gave way to the mosques. Lal’s heroin-processing plant was based above a small clothes shop. He is probably still there, to this day. He was more or less immune from arrest. The money he was making was phenomenal.
Over the months I was there, Lal and I got to know each other quite well. I would stay in his shop, and even help him out in the laboratory. It was frightening how simple it was to make heroin from raw opium. There is no rocket-science about it. The lab consisted of a suction pump, a few basins, a gas burner, and the bags of chemicals, virtually all of which were quite easy to get hold off. Lal and I used to go down to the chemical suppliers in his Toyota and pick them up. If I had been paying more attention and not been so stoned, I would probably be able to remember the formula. But then again, it’s probably just as well that I don’t!
Whenever our supplies ran low, Lal would just jiffy up a couple of hundred grams if any of us needed a hit. To help out, I got into the habit of keeping an eye out for the westerners who were coming by the hundreds to Benares. They came to get their gear before they made their way back to their own markets in whatever country they came from. I would regularly help out on deals involving fifty or sixty kilos. The price per kilo was about $500, but, obviously, this would come right down if you were buying in bulk. To this day, I don’t know how I made it out of Benares alive.
But I did. The three of us made it out; Joy, Frenchie and me. Nine months after our first meeting we were at a truck stop, hassling the Indian truck drivers for a lift back to Delhi. We were totally broke but we had enough heroin to last the three of us back to Delhi, where I was pretty sure I would have a connection waiting. Why I thought this I don’t know, but in those days I would get all sorts of strange ideas into my head. There were hundreds of these great trucks in the truck stop, like a herd of buffalo all gathering together for a mass migration.
It was evening, and each truck was festooned with hundreds of lights. Representations of the driver’s favourite gods were painted in the cabins. We were able to find a lift pretty quickly. That may have been because Joy was with us. Maybe the driver thought he could be in for some pussy at a pinch. We trundled along at about twenty miles an hour and watched the Indian countryside rolling slowly past us. Water buffalo pulled great wagons along the winding country lanes that were supposed to be India’s highways. At night the driver would pull over so he and his cab mate could rest up. The sweet smell of smoking opium wafted up through the night air. None of us got down from the top of the truck to beg him for any, though, as we still have plenty of heroin left from our time with Lal
When we got back to Delhi, Frenchie evaporated into the air and I found myself alone. The last time I saw Joy she was getting into a car with a group of dodgy looking guys. She had answered an ad in the foyer of our hotel. They were looking for girls to ‘star’ in sex movies. It would be the last time I ever saw her.
Sometimes you meet people on the road and travel with them for years. Sometimes whole travelling communities form. One such community was the Children of God. There was I, walking along the road one day, enjoying the sunshine. It was Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. It’s supposed to be a time to celebrate the renewal of life, but there was trouble between the Muslim and Hindu communities. Gangs of Hindu youths were running around the Muslim quarter, throwing stones, brandishing swords and rioting. There would be a rush of people down into one street, then a great roaring sound, as a mosque or shop was set on fire. Then there would be a massive rush of people going in the opposite direction, being chased by an even larger contingent of young men from the other side. The rioting went on for hours until the Indian police turned up to try to bring some order. I saw them form a line across the street, and with their long, whip-like lathi sticks, they charged anyone who was still standing around in the street. It was time to get out of there. I fought my way out through the crowd just as the police began to wade in, whipping their sticks from way behind their heads, to get maximum swing. The fleet of blue police trucks were quickly filled with the bruised and battered remnants of the day’s procession. People were holding their heads in their hands, reaching outwards, imploring the police to let them go. The police were having none of it.
I got out of there as quick as I could and literally bumped into an American couple. Both were in their twenties, and were quite pleasant-looking, and friendly.
‘Hi. We want to talk to you about Jesus.’ they said.
‘Really, well, lets walk and talk. There’s a riot behind us,’ I said.
We quickly moved away from the scene of all the trouble. They asked me if I believed that the small bible in their hands was really the word of God. I said that I didn’t know. It could be. Why not? Probably.
I thought about it some more in the course of the little silence that had suddenly broken out and said, ‘Yes, I’d say that it is.’
I must have said it with more conviction than I truly felt, because they seemed to warm up at my sentiments. The next thing I knew, they were both holding my hands and praying with me, or for me, since both had tears in their eyes.
Perhaps they knew something that I didn’t. But why were they getting so worked up over me? It didn’t make sense. They took me back to their camp. It was a small settlement a little apart from the usual hippy zone. There were thirty people there. Quite a few of the girls had babies in their arms, even though many of them seemed quite young themselves, and from nowhere a gang of children materialized, all running around together with dirt on their faces and hands and their clothes in rags. It was startling to see European children after so long. In the centre was a cooking area where a huge pot sat slowly bubbling over a camp fire. It was nearly time for the evening meal. Vegetable soup with boiled rice, it formed the staple diet of these cult-members. They gave me a bowl of it, and I wolfed it down. Next was the guitar playing, with some new updated-kind of hymns, and songs about Jesus. Then about half a dozen of them came on stage to perform a play. I couldn’t help but be amazed at how kind and loving everyone was being towards me, especially as they didn’t really know me. The girls, particularly, were very friendly.
Then it was time for prayer, and we all sat in a circle, holding hands. A big bearded fellow called Moses, prayed in thanksgiving for bringing me, Terry, into the Family. That put me on the spot. I was conscious of all the stares, of all the attention, of all the love that was blowing my way. It was now like a great rush of adrenalin, making my heart beat faster and setting the blood racing in my veins. Then they all started praying that my heart would be touched by the Holy Spirit and that that I too, would receive Christ as my Lord and Saviour. I looked around and saw the look of hope and expectation on their faces. It would be terrible if I went and disappointed them now.
‘Of course, I accept Christ as my Lord and Saviour’ I said, and everyone was suddenly back to being their previous happy, warm, untroubled selves. I had obviously made the right decision, I could see that now. What a relief.
Moses then prayed that my heart be touched again by the Holy Spirit, that I might wish to become a disciple of Christ, and a true believer. Again I looked around at the serious and clearly very worried faces of all these nice people.
‘Definitely’ I said, and they all jumped up, clapping their hands together and dancing little jigs with one another. Some of the girls came and threw their arms around me, and landed big warm kisses on either cheek. I felt one of them slide her tits up against my chest and suddenly my dick was rock hard. Being on smack, I hadn’t even had a wank in months, but now there was pussy in the air, and it was heady stuff.
‘Praise God’ I said. Maybe this too was a blessing from God. I had never expected God to sort me out with crumpet! I certainly had a lot to learn.
Next I was given a name. One of the girls rolled her eyes back in her head and said, ‘Jeremiah’. So, I was now to be known as Jeremiah. Moses came along and asked for my passport. Like a clown I found myself unable to say no, and suddenly it was gone. I knew I’d never see it again. The first thing they do is make it hard for you to leave. But right then I didn’t want to leave. I wanted a nice shower and to go to bed. We all slept in the same room. They told me that this was because all the original disciples had shared everything, even their wives. One of them even flipped open the bible where it said that.
Okay, I thought. I was shown to a bed right in the middle. On one side was Moses, and on the other was a stunning American girl in her early twenties. As I slipped off my trousers I hoped no-one had spotted that my dick was almost bursting with devilish desire. If this was Christianity, then where the fuck had I been all my life? My Church of England background must have got it all wrong. Anyway, when everyone had gone to sleep, and I could be assured of a nice quiet King Arthur, I would ‘beat the bishops helmet’, or whatever it was called back then. My eyes were all on stalks by now, furtively peeping out over the covers to catch a glimpse of female buttock, or a titty maybe. I hoped I wasn’t going to go and blow it by being too randy. I wondered if there was something in the veggie soup and rice. If there was, I was off with the fairies by now anyway, so let the devil take his due.
‘Goodnight Solomon,’ one of the female voices called out.
‘Goodnight Rachel,’ came the reply.
And so each person there said goodnight to every other person. Then they started calling my name, and wishing me a goodnight, too. Not knowing all their names, all I could say was ‘goodnight’.
All of a sudden there was someone extra in bed with me. It was the American girl, kissing my ear and generally being as sexy as hell. There was a lovely smell of pussy in the air as they opened up like midnight flowers, and released their beautiful fragrances. It was like being in an exotic garden. Here and there I could hear the moaning and groaning of couples fucking. The smell of spunk in the air was now coming through to me. Some of it was sweet-smelling, some salty, like the tang of the sea breeze.
After I had come once or maybe twice, the American girl leapt out of the bed, and some one else was got in. It was getting as busy as Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night ! I began to get worried. I wanted to slow things down, but these people were serious gang-bangers. These girls wanted their dick and weren’t shy about showing it. Then she too was off, and yet another was sliding in. I began to wonder if I was going to be able to actually keep this up. I thought of praying to God for strength but it seemed like blasphemy, so I didn’t. Eventually, they slept, my mind raced, and I began to realize where all those babies had come from.
After I had been with the Family for a few months, they asked me to go back to Kabul with them. They were planning a new recruitment drive and they felt I could be useful there as I had already been in Afghanistan. The recruitment process was a fairly simple one. We would get chatting to a fellow traveller. Where you come from is a topic that always comes up and, as a member of the Children of God, we would name the place where we had first received Christ as Lord. So, I would say, ‘I am from Delhi,’ but whenever I said that people would look at me as if I was nuts. When that happened, I would then go off into the story of my conversion. It was a bit like learning to talk like a flow chart. Whatever the other person said it would all come back to getting them to pray with me and then receive Christ, then, once we’d gotten that far, get them into the Family. After that, it was all about getting them to donate everything they had into the group, and then start having lots of babies. There were a lot of drop-offs along the way.
While we were in Kabul, the government was getting ready for an international Islamic conference. They were encouraging westerners to make themselves a bit scarce for the duration and they weren’t making it easy for us to get into the country. Even I had difficulty in getting my visa from the Afghan consulate in Peshawar. There was a strange sense of something in the air. Everything had somehow taken on a really gloomy and almost surreal quality. People were edgy and tense. We had only been there a short time when the sound of explosions echoed across the city. We could hear machine guns and police sirens. Soon after, came the ominous rumble of army tanks and armoured vehicles. There were running battles between the police and the army, and by morning. hundreds of bodies in police uniforms lined the streets. Helicopters lit up the night sky, and tanks appeared across all the roads leading into and out of town. A large contingent of soldiers appeared outside each of the foreigners’ hotels In the news the next morning, we heard that the President of Afghanistan had been ousted by Nur Mohammed Teraki, the People’s Party leader, who had been in prison. Sections of the army had smashed down President Daoud’s palace gates and killed him, along with his wives and children. They had initially taken refuge in the French embassy. But when the French started getting bombed by the air force, the embassy officials there just chucked Daoud and his family onto the street, and let the troops wipe them out. The rebels had wanted Daoud to sign a statement handing over legitimacy to the armed forces, and when he refused, they had shot and killed each of his wives and children before shooting him.
The next day the troops came round to pick up the dead bodies, mostly loyal police officers who had stood by their government. The army officers who had taken over had all been trained by the ever-helpful Soviet Union.
I began to drift away from the Children of God sometime after the coup in Afghanistan. I found it exhausting trying to believe in something I felt was fundamentally false, and trying to be something I really wasn’t. In a way it was shame, because one good thing about the Children was that they got me off drugs. I back on the gear soon after I left them. At one point I bumped into a couple of Children of God that I had known. I felt really ashamed that I was back on the heroin, and got out as fast as I could, before they could catch up with me. I could see the look of shock on their faces as they took in my condition. I weighed about eight stone those days, far under my proper weight, and must have looked really ill.
I was smoking about a quarter ounce of the stuff a day, probably about the equivalent of twenty or thirty addicts’ worth in Britain. Even though heroin was cheap there, I still had to find money. I found myself drifting back towards Islam again. I was doing the prayers, and reading the Koran. It was wonderful to stand in a line with so many men and pray to God as a single entity. It made me feel part of something. The giving of alms to the needy is a traditional part of Islam. I must have looked very needy because soon people started giving me money, for food, in theory, but it mostly went up in smoke. I was given the name Abdur Rahman, which means ‘servant of the Merciful’ in Arabic and a certificate in Urdu and one in the English, proclaiming that I had become a Muslim. I was proud of those certificates. They each had a small green moon and crescent at the top, as they were written up in the Great Mosque in Bombay, the Jama Masjid in Shukat Ali Road.
Fairly soon, I was making a bomb out of it. I had a map listing all the streets where I’d already been and which ones I’d yet to hit. I worked my way through the cities of Peshawar, Islamabad, Rawalpindy, Karachi, to mention but a few. I did it for years. Everybody thought that, because I was a white boy, I was a holy man of some sort, but really I was just a skag head taking all the money they gave me straight to the local dealer. It was easy to trick these people. Whenever I was lucid enough to think about what I was doing, I felt guilty. But I needed the money. I was smoking piles of heroin by now and couldn’t stop.
The Afghan refugee camps that were springing up along the border after the coup were some of the best places to buy my drugs. As soon as I’d begged enough for my hit for the day, I’d be off on the bus up to the local camp. There, because I was wearing the local clothes of shalwar kameez, the billowing shirt and pantaloons of Afghan and Pakistan, I could blend in, get my stuff and then be away.
In Islamabad, I lived in a refugee settlement for about three months. It was known rather euphemistically as ‘The Tourist Camp’. Most of the people here were Iranian or Iraqi refugees, with a few Afghan and Sri Lankans thrown in. I was the only white boy there, with only my little begging letter for smack money. I saw terrible things in that camp. We lived in absolute squalor, not even having enough for a cup of tea for months on end. No one could give a shit. Everyone was too busy trying to survive to think about anyone else.
One day I managed to hitch a lift with a group of Iranian lads. As we drove along, I noticed an Iranian woman with several children up ahead, standing on the side of the road. She was wrapped in the hijab, the long black gown that Muslim women wear. For me, it makes women from there as sexy as hell; all dark flashing eyes peeping out across that blackness. As our car neared, the woman pushed one of her sons right in front of the car. The driver was ready for her, though, and slammed on the brakes, flinging all of us forward sharply and bringing the car to a dead stop.
‘What the fuck!’ I screamed, ‘What the fuck is she doing?’
The Iranians explained that this was a normal, everyday thing for them. The driver turned to me and smiled. Looking up at him I could see my reflection in his mirrored sunglasses.
‘She was trying to kill one of her sons. If he had gone under our wheels, we would have had to pay her a lot of money as compensation. She loses one son, but can then feed the others.’
We waited until the child had picked himself up from the road, and moved back to the kerb. His mother just stared straight in to us. She knew she had been rumbled, but what could we do? Okay, she hadn’t got us, but she would get the next car that came along. I just shook my head as we drove off. I was shocked. And angry. I wondered about all the children that had been killed this way. And all those people that had unintentionally killed them. But to my Iranian friends this was just a part of the wallpaper, something to be avoided as neatly and with as much fuss as spotting a dog turd on the pavement stepping over it.
I vividly remember when they re-introduced Islamic penalties in Pakistan for alcohol consumption. The standard punishment was twenty lashes for getting drunk in a public place. One Friday a public flogging was held to remind people of the penalties for breaking the law. A series of wooden triangular frames were built in the market square. The offenders were paraded through the square before they were tied to a frame. They were stripped of their shirts. Then, to the entertainment of the crowd, the floggings began. Three very beefy policemen carried out the punishments. Sweat ran down their faces as they lashed hard with all their strength. The men receiving this punishment screamed at the top of their voices until the presiding mullah stopped the flogging to complain about the noise. The men were gagged to ensure they could scream no more blasphemies. By the time the twentieth lash fell, the three offenders had pissed and shat themselves. This is normal in floggings, and added the crowd’s enjoyment. They called out names and made rude gestures with their hands towards the men being punished. It was a carnival-like atmosphere, and was probably the same when they hanged people from Tyburn Tree, in what is now called Speaker’s Corner in London. By the end each man’s back was a welter of bruises and blood. It was a shocking sight to see, a reminder of how easy it would be for this entire planet to slip back to more mediaeval ways of dealing with social problems.
I had managed to collect a fair bit of money, especially from the mosque in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad. The Imam there took a liking to me and, after Friday evening prayers, gave a speech to convince everyone there to throw some money into a blanket which they had spread across the floor. There were several thousand people at evening prayers, so the amount the collected for me was impressive. They even changed some of it into American dollars, so I could change it more easily as I went through Iran and Turkey.
Travelling by local buses, I was given free seats by the Muslim bus owners as I journeyed from city to city, passing through vast deserts. When we stopped for prayers, I remember the sound of absolute silence as we performed wadhu, the ritual washing, before lining up to face the setting sun. The tiny mosque had been built by the side of the road, adjacent to a well that probably went back to Biblical times. As soon as we crossed the border into Turkey, all the Iranian woman took off their heavy veils and started putting on makeup. The men got off the bus and came back with bottles of duty-free whisky, and copies of ‘Hurriyet’ and ‘Milleyet’, Turkish newspapers on the covers of which were startling photographs of Turkish belly dancers.
In Istanbul I had managed to get a job teaching English. The name of the school was DirimDil, which means ‘learning quickly’. They put me in with a class of about twenty or thirty young Turkish men, who wanted to learn English so they could chat up the foreign girls. So, the English lessons focused on the more practical aspects of the English language, rather than grammatical rules. As a result, my students really did learn quickly and I found myself the most popular teacher in the school. The young lads there regarded me with an almost mystical veneration, as they learned techniques of pulling the birds that I hadn’t used myself in donkey’s years. Classes would be filled with lurid, and probably over exaggerated accounts, of the nights of passion they had found in the arms, and between the legs, of the tourist girls.
Unfortunately, though, I was discovering the pleasures of drink at around this time. I was putting on weight, ferociously eating the bedazzling food dishes that Turkey offers. Coming off heroin had been unpleasant, but I had to do it. I knew that if I had stayed in Pakistan for that approaching summer I would have been a dead man. I liked the irony of going through cold turkey during a freezing winter in Turkey. I got drunk a lot and was drawn to the pubs where I rediscovered western pop music.
One of my lowest points in Turkey was when I tried to go to prayers in a mosque when I was pissed. I bowed forward on the first rakat, my belly suddenly wanted to empty itself. My mouth filled with vomit, and I had to get out quickly before I threw up. I just made it into the street as my stomach kicked again, forcing still more vomit up. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me if I had vomited inside the mosque
Things started to go wrong when the Turkish police arrested one fella I had been involved for selling heroin, and they beat him badly. I was told that the police were going to arrest me shortly. For what, I don’t know and it didn’t matter to them anyway. I decided it was time to leave Turkey
So, having precious little money I headed for the big lorry park where I hoped to get a free lift to the Greek border. I was there for days. I couldn’t convince any of the drivers to take me with them. I suspect that this was because I had come from Pakistan and they were afraid I was a smuggler. If I were to get caught with anything, they would get nicked as well. Most of them just shook their heads as I went round the tables and asked. Eventually one of them took pity on me and took me along with him. We rolled through the countryside, and over the border. The Greek official on the other side looked though my passport and, noticing all the Afghan and Pakistani stamps, asked me if I was smuggling any drugs. I laughed and told him no. Just then I looked down at my feet and noticed that I was wearing two odd shoes. I don’t know how that happened.
Then we were through into Greece, and the countryside became very beautiful. Turkey is, too, but it is a more forbidding kid of beauty. Greece was warmer, almost summery, compared to the winter we had left behind on the Turkish side. The driver was a good man. He got me out of tight spot back there and I thanked him for it. He asked me if I wanted to go with him up to Germany. I said no, I wanted to go down to have a look round Athens and see if I could get a job. I had heard that, in return for getting customers in, the cheap hotels would give you free accommodation, food and a commission. It sounded like easy work to me! He dropped me off on the road outside Thessaloniki, in northern Greece.
I tried for ages to get a lift on the road going south to Athens, but gave up and made my way to the main train station. I had to wait all night to get a train. But I didn’t have any money, so I was going to pretend my ticket and wallet were nicked. I got on the train, and we shunted out of the station. So far, so good, I thought to myself as I sat down in the small compartment along with an elderly Greek man and his wife. But the ticket collector came around too soon, and I had to pretend that my stuff had just been nicked. In India, this sort of thing would work, but it wasn’t working here. I was put off at the next stop where a couple of local policemen were waiting for me. At first they wanted to arrest me. The only problem was, what for? I hadn’t committed any crime. In fact, I wanted to report one – the theft of my wallet and ticket. They tried searching me for drugs, taking my two odd shoes as evidence that I must be up to something. Unfortunately for them, though, there was nothing for them to find, so, to get rid of me, they wrote me a note giving me permission to ride down to Athens to get to the British Embassy.
As the train pulled in to Larissa railway station, I got my small bag of stuff off the rack and stepped down onto the platform. Within seconds, I was surrounded by half a dozen or so Europeans, most of them young women in their twenties. In fact two of them are even English. It was amazing to talk with English people again, after so long. They are doing just the job I had heard so much about, getting people to come and stay in the hotel they are working for, ‘The Diethnes’.
‘Sorry girls,’ I say, ‘I don’t have two pennies to rub together but I am looking for precisely the kind of work that you are doing. Any ideas who I should talk to?’
‘Sure!’ chirps one of them. ‘Come and meet our boss, George. He’s bound to be able to help you.’
George looks me over curiously, and shows me to a bed in a dormitory room. He is surprised that I have come in from Pakistan; most of his guests and workers come straight down from Europe, and do this kind of work just to slow down on expenses. After settling in, I take a shower and make my way up to the main hotel. On the steps is a bunch of people, talking, laughing, and drinking wine straight out of bottles. I see the two English girls, and sit down beside them. We get chatting and they are all amazed that I have come in from the East, as they put it, like I am some kind of honoured hippy traveller. We sit and swap travelling stories until George comes out of the lobby and tells everyone to get down to the station. We troop down with our leaflets advertising our hotel, and start trying to pull in people to come and stay. I manage to bring back four people, which means I get two hundred drachmas immediately. Easy work, but I spend that money in the next hour on suflakis, Greek fast food, and wine. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow, and it’s off to sleep I go.
Early next morning, one of George’s acolytes shakes me to wake me up
‘What are you doing? You’ve got to get up! There’s a train coming in!’
But, no one wants to know. A group of workers from one of the other hotels have successfully bagged this batch, leaving us empty-handed.
I begin to see that this could be a fuck-up trip. A couple of months later and I know it is. I’m running around like clockwork soldier, running fast just to stand still.
Then I meet Benny. He’s American, but he looks quite like me. He has a plan to make us both some money. I will go down to the bank and pretend I’m him and cash all his traveller’s cheques. Then, he reports their ‘theft’ to the police, collects his refund and we spilt cash. Easy. To ensure that I won’t run off with all the cash Benny asks me for my passport. Fair enough I think and hand it over.
I go in and cash the cheques in, my heart beating fast. The girl on the other side of the screen hasn’t even looked at the picture on the passport. I come out with the money and a big smile on my face and look around for Benny. He’s gone. I eventually track him down, and ask for my passport back. He tells me that he thought I’d been nicked, and he threw my passport down the drain.
‘You are one cunt, Benny,’ I said to him disgustedly, as I got up. In my pocket was a good few grand in US and his American passport.
‘Benny,’ I said, meaning every word of it, ‘I was playing this straight with you, but you have fucked up. I was going to give you half this money, and your passport back, but now I am just going to walk away, with the lot!’ and with that I got up and walked away.
The next day I was on the bus to Zurich having booked the ticket under his name.
His passport would have to do. I was off to see Amsterdam. The bus trundled through what was then known as Yugoslavia, then Venice, before arriving in a very swish place that someone told me was Switzerland. After a quick beer at the railway station, I was on a train bound for Amsterdam, this time with an actual ticket in my hand.
We stopped at a station in Germany, and a few policemen got on board. They started checking everyone’s tickets, and looked at mine suspiciously. Did they know something? After a few words together, one shrugged his shoulders, and got off the train. Then the Dutch border guard got on. In one hand he carried a huge book, the size of a phone directory. He asked me my name, and for my passport. I showed him Benny’s, and he looked closely at the picture and then at me.
‘Is this really your passport?’ he said, checking my name against the massive list of names in his book. Had he sussed me?
‘Well pal,’ I began, in my best attempt at an American accent, ‘Let me put it this way…it sure as hell ain’t ma granny’s,’ trying to smile like Benny did in his passport photo. So there I was, hoping I’d made it but really expecting to get my collar felt, holding a fake smile at an impossible angle.
‘You haff money?’ he continued.
I pulled out a big wad, my lump from the bank job.
‘Sure as hell do, pal,’ I said to him, trying to smile again, even though my hand was shaking. I was looking down at this big wad of funny money, shaking in front of me, mentally shouting at myself ‘Stop fucking well shaking, you are going to get me busted, you cunt.’
The official just handed me back the American passport, and turned away, shaking his head. As he walked off, I could see him making the wanker sign with his hand. That had been a close call. I wondered if he had sussed me. Not far to go now. We passed Rotterdam, and I could see all the big old ships lined up along docks. I got off at Amsterdam central station, and immediately went to look up one of my old travelling pals. This English fella I met in Peshawar had given me his name and address and told me to look him up if I should ever find myself in A’dam. I have no idea how, but I still had his details. Amazing what you can dig out of your brain when you really need it.
I knocked on his door and was quite relieved when he remembered me. I told him that I had come into a few bob, and took him out for a drink. The cafes were amazing. Some of them even had menus listing the different types of hash you could buy! I ordered a bag for twenty five guilders and my mate and I blasted off. The next thing I knew I was staying in a squat that he found for me, with a young German girl and her dark, rather exotic-looking boyfriend. They were both on the needle. I could hear him fucking her on the other side of a miniature screen they had up to create the illusion that the room we were all in was actually divided.
The money was running through my fingers, and I had to do something. I decided on an ambitious plan. I would buy a whole big pile of drugs, and smuggle them all back to Greece for the summer. There, I could hang out and sell them to the many tourists who would be on their way down for the remains of the summer. So, from the Hell’s Angels pub in the centre of A’dam I bought a hundred grams of pure white speed and a thousand acid trips. This would keep me going all summer long, so that by the end of it I’d be set money-wise for the coming winter. Maybe I’d head back to India afterwards
The trouble was, I ended up shooting this stuff rather than selling it. The speed was ‘fuckin’ blinding,’ as they say. Shooting it would make you gasp, like a woman being fucked. It would kick you right in the heart, then the lungs, then seconds later it would light up the inside of your head like a Christmas tree
I bagged up all my gear in anticipation for my trip back south. It would be nice being able to really go through all the Greek islands, I thought to myself. I had heard about how beautiful were the islands of Lesbos, Ios, Mykonos. As the Greek border drew inexorably closer, I started to get worried. What if Benny’s passport came up on the alert lists on the Greek side? I had managed to get out of the country OK, but that had been immediately after pulling off the bank job. I got to the border almost too quickly.
‘Bollox,’ I thought ‘let’s go through with it.’
To my amazement, I got through. I felt like a million dollars, on top of the world. As a smuggler, there’s nothing like getting through to the other side when you’re carrying a big pile. Back in Athens the weather was far warmer than it had been in Amsterdam. I was busy shooting up my speed, and taking my time looking for contacts. I wanted to deal with the right people. You had to be extremely careful who you spoke with about anything, otherwise you could get your collar felt. Even if you had nothing, you could still expect a beating at the hands of the police, who had nothing better to do, and who seemed unaccountable to anyone. I started to get a bit paranoid. Was that someone following me? No, I was just getting a bit edgy. But imagine how I felt one morning, when I went back to where I had stashed all my gear and the whole lot had vanished. Someone had been stalking me, and had seen where I’d hidden all my stuff. By a strange coincidence, later that day I was arrested; Benny had reported me for stealing his travellers’ cheques. It was just as well that the stuff had disappeared. If the Greek police had caught me with all of that I’d probably still be out there in jail. I didn’t feel any bitterness towards Benny. He had to report the cheques stolen to get a reimbursement from American Express.
The next day I was in Koridalos Prison. It was surprising, as I went in through the gates, how many people I recognized, or who seemed to remember me from somewhere. Inevitably, it would turn out to be on the hippy trail. Some back-street cafe in Istanbul, or a chai house in Heart. The guard moved me into a cell from which I could see the Acropolis and the Temple of Athena through the window. Beautiful.
‘Fuckin’ beautiful,’ I thought to myself, as I dragged on my last cigarette, its embers momentarily lit up the darkness of my cell.
I had to wait a fair while until my trial day. I had no money for a lawyer. Without one, I would get slaughtered when my trial did eventually come up. There was no legal aid. I wrote to my family, but all of a sudden no-one had any money, at least for a lawyer. The most I got was a card now and again, or a small cheque.
When my case went to court they gave me seven and half years.
Just before going in the lawyer said to me, ‘Deny everything, then beg for mercy,’ and disappeared, like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
When the judge gave me that verdict, the pain there was unbearable. I was so ashamed of how badly things had gone that, at first, I tried to pretend I had only got three years. It felt like I’d been raped. I tried to put a brave face on it, but the lads soon found out and I had to admit that things had gone badly.
I found myself hanging out with a small group, mostly West African seamen, virtually all of who had been in Athens, and more particularly the port, Pareas, a long time. They were all in for smuggling heroin and had their own places and women in the city. One in particular, a huge Ibo called Kingdom Boa, became my friend. We got a cell together and somehow started up a daily Bible group. A huge black American called Havilah, a magnificent person, would join us too. He and his brother had been in the Children of God so we both had a lot of tales to tell and found we had much in common. All three of us managed to get bibles brought in, along with clothes and food, which we shared out with the others.
I got transferred to a smaller prison, outside Corinth, near Argos, called Tyrinthos. Tyrinthos Filaki was a breeze. After a short stay inside I was able to get on to the gangs that would go outside each day, picking oranges, or tending the tomato patches. Time went past peacefully there. It was here that I first began a serious study of astrology. I managed to get hold of some astrology books, the kind that teach you how to ‘do it yourself’. I was able to start drawing up peoples’ charts, and look at who they were, using their horoscopes. Then, after a time I learnt how to make future progressions, and do transits.
I also made up a deck of tarot cards from empty cigarette boxes. I had a tarot pack, years back and could remember how they were constructed. Drawing simple pictures on each of the seventy-eight cards was easy, and with this deck I was able to do basic readings for my fellow inmates. Imagine my astonishment when some of the lads started giving me cartons of cigarettes for my work. Somehow the things I told them rang true, and the predictions that I made for them actually started coming true! I was happy just to be able to do it. I felt that I had utilized my time there as best I could and had done fairly well.
After served my time, I was taken back to Athens in a van, and put on a plane back to England. Getting off again at Heathrow, on the tube back to Wood Green I yet again felt that I had just come full circle.