The Tall Girl from Somerset 12 Harvey

Harvey

Almost in Australia

Harvey and Jake established a routine. Up early in the morning, then make a hot breakfast.  This was always 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 on the little camping stove outside. Jake’s frustration with the frying pan lent a homeliness to the endless road over Asia. It helped to reduce the huge size and loneliness of the plains to something manageable.

They woke early when the day was still cool, and the routine was always the same: have breakfast, 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 is it to drive?  Then, on the move again, from A to B, and from B to C with 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 catch you when you’re moving. The goal was to arrive; the evening of each day saw each day’s target achieved. They pitched the tent and then they cooked a meal. Eggs and potatoes. It was always eggs and potatoes! How many eggs did they eat between London and Australia? And then they slept. In the morning a new goal emerged for the next day. There was always another hill.  Travelling, moving, going east: that was what mattered.  They left tracks which had criss-crossed the Arab world, and now they are driving over the long, lonely expanse of Asia. Later they would wander up and down India, and then, after selling the van, they would sail over the Indian Ocean past the Andaman Islands (‘The Sign of Four’?  Yes).

As they went along, Harvey felt separate from all the scenes they passed through. The 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 their house, their shop, their 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 finally reaching Australia, were deferred.  For Harvey and Jake the open road was a suspension, an interlude.  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.