June 2015 News

June's bestsellers were:

In 1st place: Boathouse to Botswana by Nick Green
Joint 2nd: Notes from Overground by Tiresias, and My Forever Heartache by Bernard Horton
3rd place: Three Journeys to Patagonia by Nick Green

Don't miss the next Kindle Countdown sale beginning next Sunday 4th July!! Happy Independence Day USA...

Best Summer Reads 2015

Chickenshit

There were four of them; Hal, Scott, Benny, and Lucas
and they were in deep shit, behind enemy lines without a
radio. The jungle was untouched, too fresh. Whoever moved
through here had all the time in the world to carefully
replace leaves and gently push branches to one side. They
knew there should have been a village one mile east, which
meant one of two things was happening; either (they were
between the village and the river) the villagers didn’t use
water, or the village was used as a base for Cong operatives
so that every approach to the settlement was watched and
most likely booby trapped.

‘How the fuck did we get left in this dump?’

‘You tell me Benny,’ Hal answered quietly. ‘Weren’t you
guarding the fucking radio?’

‘Man, don’t get on my back, Hally. You saw me leave
the goddam set to try and get Paul a medi-pack, I gave him a
shot, he smiled and died, and that’s when the whole fucking
fox hole was shelled out of the ground. Jesus, I don’t have to
justify my shit to you, you don’t hold rank on me.’

‘But I do, and you two had better shut the fuck up before
we all earn the snipers another medal. We all saw the radio
get hit and without another one we’ll probably all end up
hanging from trees on guitar string so we can quit blaming
each other and find out if we are where we ought to be on
this map. Lucas I want you to trace this bank down to the
river, if you find water check its flow and look for boats or
anything else like that tucked away, if we’re where we think
we are this really is the closest the river gets to the village,
and we’ll need to cross it and find out if the village has a
radio set we can borrow.’ Scott grinned. ‘Benny stay here,
Hal and I are going up to see if there’s any movement over
this rise. I want everybody back in fifteen minutes and two
rounds one second apart if anyone’s compromised o.k.?’

Lucas crept through the undergrowth, stopping every two
yards to listen to the jungle, without breathing, listening for
voices, steps, water. The river was close, he saw it four
minutes after leaving Benny and he’d only had to head due
east to get there. Too easy, he thought. He’d seen none of the
usual booby trap give-aways like roughed-up bark and neat
little openings in otherwise dense forest. It was still thick but
now he lay down to crawl more slowly, every inch of his
body pricked by thorns or nibbled and itched by mosquitoes
and giant ants that he habitually ignored, more concerned
with not losing an eye to the sharp little sticks that he
couldn’t focus on with the sweat running down his face.

After a whole minute at the edge of the water, Lucas risked
kneeling long enough to establish that there weren’t any
obvious signs of boats or even of people, and that yes, they
probably could cross there. It was narrow with enough
vegetation on both banks to set up a rope and then give each
other cover.

At dusk they were only a hundred yards outside the
village. From their rise they looked down onto the main
cluster of houses and realised now, why the river where they
had crossed it was not busy. A crude canal brought water to
the edge of the fields from where it was then run along
wooden troughs into the village itself. A bamboo water
wheel provided the necessary push. Their vantage point was
trees on the edge of the jungle proper and no one worked the
fields nearest them. Prolonged surveillance through
binoculars had shown no sign of any armed factions. By now
they were all keen to get on with it.

‘We go as soon as it’s dark,’ Scott smiled. ‘We don’t
know what to expect going in, but it probably won’t be
armed resistance. If it is, we’re probably better armed than
they are and whatever happens I don’t want any shooting
that isn’t return fire, the last thing we want is confusion of
any kind. We go in formation, me and Lucas entering each
building in turn starting with the biggest in the middle there,
then the two to the right and finally the two to the left which
look the least inhabited, you two cover our backs at every
door. The one thing we can expect, regardless of whether we
find a radio or not, is company on the way out. Again, we
stick together, if there is a radio, Benny you of course carry
it. If Benny gets hit, Lucas you take it. That way Hal can
look after the heavy toys and we should move like a fucking
tank until we get to cover again over on the west side where
those four trees stand taller. Right, do we all know what
we’re doing?’

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The Angel of the North

There was no wind and the persistent snowfall made the

forest quiet. Big individual flakes fell in a steady rain,

weighing down his eyelashes and wetting the sentry’s

already frozen beard. It was mid-afternoon and dark below

canopy level. The North was colder than he’d expected and

so far his experience of this posting was doing nothing to

refute the claim by the other soldiers that the seasons

disappeared up here, that there was only one long winter. He

looked down at the gateway, shuffled his feet and beat his

arms across his chest to increase the flow of blood to his

numbed hands. Was there a hooded shape through the snowy

mist? Could he really hear a woman singing? He shouted,

hailing the stranger but there was no answer and he felt his

voice inadequate against the snow’s impenetrable silence.

Above the treetops there was still some daylight left. He

marvelled at the impressive strips of red and pink sky

stretching out across the far corner of the horizon. These

sunsets reminded him of home and restored his faith in the

gods that had brought him so far away from it. Dusk showed

the mountains to good advantage. It was a humbling time of

day, made all the more poignant by the fact that it heralded

the onslaught of night, and with it the everpresent danger of

attack and death. He looked down again at the gateway. This

time the shape moved and he shouted for whoever was there

to state their business. Nothing.

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King of New Beginnings

Beyond the open sash window the distant hum of an electric lawn mower; the smell of freshly cut grass blows into the bedroom and the curtains flick gently in the breeze. In short the perfect English summer’s day. Sarah twists on the bed.

It’s clear from her body-language that I am expected to take her from behind while she watches – admiringly, intrigued – in the mirror. I oblige unsure if this is for her or me, suspecting the latter. In the middle distance the sun catches white windmills and then the sea. The room is beautiful with thick, luxuriant carpets. We are naked and comfortable with it. Drinks, laughter. Cadborough Farm in Rye, East Sussex is the location for this surprise break. Somewhere I’ve never been, before or since, but a place of significance for me at the time. I am so overwhelmed that I write the owners a thank you note one year later on the anniversary of our stay, but by then I’m already battling to keep Sarah. How had she chosen Rye? I was confused.

‘Did you know that this was the village where Conrad Aiken taught Malcolm Lowry how to write?’ I’d asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I saw it in one of the books you’re reading.’

As a biochemist specialising in neuroscience, Sarah was pretty sharp but I found it hard to imagine her thumbing through the Lowry biography Pursued by Furies and registering that he’d been in Rye – maybe. Maybe it was just coincidence. But I don’t believe these things ever happen by accident, some things are pre-ordained, others are meant, just as some are not meant. The universe had simply aligned itself in such a way that I was treading cobbled streets in Lowry and Aitken’s footsteps and falling deeper in love with Sarah.

We kissed in public, which was out of bounds in Oxford, and made love in the sand dunes (caught or nearly caught red handed by a priest); laughing at all the local pubs with their blackboard adverts for ‘pie and liquor.’ It was one of those hot English summers which only come around every five or ten years.

Such were the thrills associated with falling in love with Sarah. It would take me years to recover once it all went wrong, as it inevitably does.

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Boathouse

“You are probably not overly familiar with Wisconsin, Nick?”

“That’s something of an understatement, Jim.” I reply meeting him at the fire to top up his champagne.

We are in the kgotla at Savuti Bush Camp celebrating Jim and Mary’s 50^th wedding anniversary. Jim is a giant of a man with a deep voice and big hands. He has made his living selling snow-clearing equipment in a four-state area; Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas. Later in the evening we discover that he and several other of the guests, from New Zealand, are all keen skiers.

His wife, the diminutive Mary, is playing “pick a card” with the female staff who are coming one by one from the staff village to see her. She has already won them over by cleaning dishes back-of-house and presenting them with sweets, clothing, pens and pencils. The cards are postcards from their home state and each one represents a plant or animal native to Colorado.

It’s Monday, which is traditional dinner night, and there is much to celebrate as another couple in camp are celebrating forty years of marriage. The staff, including me, sing and dance round the fire. It’s a good performance and tears are shed under our star-studded backdrop.

The next morning at breakfast one of the Kiwi men congratulates me on a wonderful evening saying that I really do do a great job with the “liquor and beverage.”

It’s a simple slip of the tongue (I am the F n B, or food and beverage manager, after all), but one that quickly enters the camp vernacular.

“Oh wow,” one of the American girls pipes up referring to F n B, “I wouldn’t mind a little bit of that, whatever it is!”

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Three Journeys

I am eighteen and my love affair with Latin America has just begun. It is intoxicating. The heat – 45-plus – hits me like a hammer, it is much hotter than anything I’ve experienced before. The tropical location, the glamorous, half-naked, beautiful black people on white sandy beaches, four-lane highways of cars racing the strip along Ipanema and Copacabana, the palm trees, the music, the city rising up into the hills dripping with favelas like hanging gardens and higher up, the jungle proper. It is insane. The whole spectacle overseen by a giant Jesus statue against a backdrop of electrifying tropical storms. It is hot, and humid as hell.

The fact that I am (was) in Brazil is Harriet’s fault. The somewhat beautiful older sister of my next-door neighbour, on whom I had an entirely predictable, mainly hormonal teenage crush who had recently returned from a three month over-landing trip to South America with Exodus Travel. She raved about it and much to her mother’s dismay now planned to elope to New Zealand with her ice-cream and pizza-parlour magnate boyfriend, Giovanni, who she’d met and fallen madly in love with on the truck.

I was a hopeless virgin, clumsy and shy with girls. A friend from school, Alice, had managed to track me down and book herself into my room in the hotel as a surprise. She was also travelling with Exodus, on a different truck, but we shared the same itinerary for the first couple of months. At 18, the difference between us in terms of mental maturity might as well have been twenty years, even though we were the same age. We were both headstrong and chose to hang out with different people most of the time. On the beach she stubbornly ignored all advice and got sunburnt back and front determined that she’d just go brown the next day. It must have hurt.

It was Alice who read In Patagonia while we were in Patagonia and afterwards recommended it to me and lent me the book, which in conjunction with the place itself, has been a real inspiration ever since. To the extent that I’m now writing my own book about Patagonia, it was a moment that changed my life.

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