The Tall Girl from Somerset 14

Harvey and Jake established a routine. Up in the morning, make a hot breakfast which was mainly fried eggs. ‘The flaming eggs are sticking to the flaming pan!’ These were the words which greeted Harvey almost every morning as he woke in the tent, and Jake was making breakfast outside. The expression lent a homeliness to the endless plains of Asia. It helped to make the journey manageable.

With the day still cool, the routine was the same: pack up the tent, load up the van, put the tent on the roof, tie it down, put the stove in the back of the van, check the site, find the frying pan, now there’s nothing left, good, whose turn to drive?  Then, on the move again, from A to B, and from B to C, first Europe and then Asia passing by outside the window, 200 miles or so every day, each day travelling towards the east (Wordsworth? Probably), always moving on.  “The great affair is to move.”   (Stevenson?  Definitely)   Tedium cannot harm you when you’re moving. The goal was to arrive; the evening of each day saw each day’s goal achieved, and a new goal emerged for the next.  There was always another hill.  Travelling, moving, going east: that was what mattered.  Leaving tracks which criss-crossed the Arab world, driving over the long, lonely expanse of Asia, wandering up and down India, and then, selling the van and sailing over the Indian Ocean past the Andaman Islands (‘The Sign of Four’?  Yes).

As they drove along, Harvey felt separated from all the scenes they passed through. People just the other side of the windows of the van were in a different world.  A quarter of an inch of glass made all the difference!  They stayed, he moved. Their world was that house, that shop, that street.  Harvey carried his world with him like a snail carried its shell.  Children going to school, old women buying their daily bread, men loading a lorry or a camel: he was irrelevant to them. He was living with no involvement in life.  He was not even involved in his own life.  Career objectives, in fact all objectives except leaving London and finally reaching Australia, were deferred.  For Harvey and Jake the open road was a suspension.  So, in this way, for over a year, they lived and travelled, travelled and lived, and finally, near the end of December, weary and fit, thin and brown, they reached Singapore.  There they embarked on 'The Eastern Princess' bound for Freemantle, Australia, but more of that later.