Elephants and Enfields by Evelyn Calvert (most popular novels of all time TXT) 📕

CHAPTER 1

No Gain Without Pain

The Folly Of Family Names – Computers and Grandchildren
Excess Baggage – The Joys of Flight – Dabolim

‘Goa is for druggies’ they say. ‘Sure it is’ I retort.
And I’m right, it is. But the drug I am talking about isn’t the kind of stuff you’d scrape from a pop-nobody’s nostril or the little brown ‘blim’ your fourteen-year-old will try to convince you fell from his guinea pigs bottom, it’s far purer than that. The drug of choice for my wife and I is Goa itself.
We have been addicts for some time now, Hannah and I, our feeble, spineless bodies hopelessly failing to resist the lure of this tiny state half way down the west coast, the Arabian Sea side, of India.
‘Evelyn can resist everything but temptation’.
In a manila folder in one of those numerous under-bed briefcases, I still have the faded pages of my grammar school report which include this, what I thought at the time to be slanderous, inclusion.
‘We continue to be concerned by Evelyn’s disruptive behaviour’ and ‘I have not seen enough of Evelyn this term to make an assessment’ are two further examples of how I was so cruelly and erroneously judged by the stripey-blazered grammar Gestapo…. but I digress. It seems that they were right all along. It seems that even the Betty Ford twelve-step recovery programme couldn’t prevent our zombie-like shuffle beneath the ‘GOI’ sign at Gatwick. I wonder if there’s a white-walled room somewhere full of twitchy, sunken-eyed people with beaten up Gladstone bags or those Germoline-coloured Argos suitcases where I could sit alongside other likeminded wasters in a circle and declare ‘My name’s Evelyn and I’m an addict’?
Forgive my rudeness, I haven’t even introduced myself. The astute amongst you will have deduced that my name is Evelyn (pronounced eeverlin). Thanks dad, it’s been a real boon over the course of the last fifty-two years to have been named so, how shall I put it, individually. It has given me no end of satisfaction to have amused my army colleagues and school friends so….how we laughed!
Families eh? The really funny thing is that my father’s middle name is Evelyn.
This ‘family name’ was passed to my brother David Evelyn, my sister Jane Evelyn (the female gender pronounced ever-lin) and to me Evelyn Jeremy Charles. I even had the magnanimity and generosity to pass it like a genetic defect to my son Leigh Evelyn James. It was only following my grandfather’s sad demise that a rummage through his bureau and the sparse, inked-paper remnants of his life threw up copious correspondence of an amorous nature bearing this same name.
Yes, we’d all been named after my grandfather’s mistress. I bet he’s looking down and laughing his arse off.
I am married to the lovely but twisted Hannah and have been for the last twenty-five years. Sounds like it’ll be an expensive present this year. I’m not sure what denotes this anniversary; ivory, Teflon, asbestos?.......I’ll tell her it’s Tupperware. Who decides these things anyway and who gave them the damn right?
The only kids who haven’t left the family home in Cornwall are Jasmine, Cato, Munchie, Chai, Zheera and Ceefa, the six spoilt, four-legged, feline surrogates who deign to allow us to pay the mortgage on their bungalow and lavish favours upon them. Actually I lied….five four-legged felines and Munchie who is a tripod, having lost by way of knockout to a blue Ford Transit van some years ago and as a result is ( as Peter Cook so descriptively put it ) ‘deficient in the leg department’ to the tune of twenty-five percent.
What is it with cats? I never used to like cats when I was younger. My parents always had dogs. It was always collie saliva that dribbled down my neck when crushed into the loadspace of a Morris Traveller on long holiday journeys to Dorset.
It grieves me to admit to it but I used to walk past cats sitting on front garden walls sunning themselves and try to elbow them into the rose bushes. Hannah introduced me to their delights and now I couldn’t imagine life without them. Come to think of it, it would be impossible to have a life without them seeing that every tick-laden, bus-ticket-eared, boot-faced, incontinent specimen in the county moves in to our house 'sans invitation'. It must be my punishment!
So you can see that I’m an ordinary bloke with an ordinary life and probably not the type of person whose travelogue will make the Evel Kneivel leap from Microsoft word on budget A4 to published page with a shiny cover and embossed foil title nestling between Phileus Fogg and Bill Bryson. But if nothing else, I am determined to reward the perseverance of my English teacher and write a book and if only one person enjoys it, it won’t have been time wasted.
Hopefully it will fare better than my last effort….I wrote six whole chapters once of a novel that was surely destined to sit on a shelf labelled ‘International Bestsellers’ and be inextricably linked to Whitbread. And I don’t mean being used as a beer mat. I had a great story. I had a great title. I had a great enthusiasm. Unfortunately what I didn’t have was the foresight to save those eloquent and riveting words to data disc before generously allowing the three grand-daughters to Bebo, MSN and Facebook all over the computer on which I was writing.
What is it about these sites? One minute you have a perfect, superfast, working example of Mr.Dell’s genius on your desk and within 30 seconds, a nine year old and Mr. bloody Bebo have reduced it to little more than skip fodder. The technological marvel now takes an hour to boot up and grace you with a start screen. The start screen whose wallpaper has somehow miraculously been transformed from a glorious, high-definition photographic study of ‘The Hodge 301 star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula’ into a jpeg of the latest, talentless, pus-encrusted, twelve year old pop marvel to be plucked from obscurity and deprivation by Simon Cowell and hopefully destined for a speedy and painful, drug-induced, vomit-soaked martyrdom.
The machine is now so full of data miners, viruses and badware that even the finest crap-cleaning programmes throw up their little binary arms in despair. Still, at the speed I type, or think for that matter, it should still be more than fast enough.
You’ll have to forgive my meanderings. I shall try my best to resist the urge to ramble obliquely or rant maniacally as only a middle-aged man can, but it’s not easy.
Goa, that’s right, I was going to tell you of our latest trip to Goa. Just sitting here with the fading suntan and the sound of English rain pelting horizontally against the window pane makes me want to click on the ‘save’ icon and ‘Google’’Holidays’ but I’ll resist it for now.
This year we chose to visit in early January. The climate and availability of cheap charter flights largely dictates to us poverty-gifted, non-professional travellers the timing of our trip and January is just great. It knocks a small hole at least in the eleven month limbo that is an English winter.
Goa’s tropical winter lasts from about mid October until March/April and that about coincides with the availability of packaged cattle flights from the UK. Warm seas, warm evenings, hot days with cloudless cerulean skies and the plethora of bars, shops, markets, restaurants and palm-shaded beach shacks make this the best time for western visitors.
Goa has its monsoon between June and August and the coastal areas are lashed with fierce storms and torrential rains for days on end and squally winds whip up the seas and send palm leaves and litter skittling down red-rivered roads. Brown rats and snakes are washed from their holes and head for the drier areas or peoples houses as they are called. The frogs and toads croak incessantly. Temperature and humidity is high and can be oppressive from about mid-April until late September. Even the locals tend to stay indoors, hold their collective breaths and play Tetris on their mobile phones until October.
We hmm’d and ha’d about whether or not to fly from Newquay to Gatwick but despite the paltry fifteen kilo baggage allowance, the risk of coastal fog resulting in a flight cancellation and the danger of missing the return connection, it was with unbridled enthusiasm that, at 1pm on a startlingly sunny Saturday, we boarded the little turbo-prop and sped skyward.
In reality I had overlooked the paltry fifteen kilo baggage allowance and had forgotten the pleasure of donating twelve kilos of kettle, travel iron, clothing, shells, beach rocks, duty-free Indian whisky, presents for cat sitters, shirt-off-my-back etc to a wide-mouthed bin in Gatwick’s South Terminal on a previous return trip after having been presented with an excess-baggage bill which, I’m sure, exceeded the total debt of a small African nation. We’ll just have to be prudent and less exuberant when scouring the night bazaars, markets and beach stalls.
I wonder what happens to all those travel irons and kettles. I bet that, somewhere in Gatwick, there is a tramp wearing a bin liner, a shoebox on one foot and a pair of trousers with razor-sharp creases, sloshing as he trundles from bin to bin with all the tea he’s been making with garnered travel kettles. Or, more likely, a team of cleaning staff with e-Bay feedback scores climbing past the million mark and doubling their salaries with every delve.
We touch down in Gatwick with sufficient time to check in the luggage, neck a ‘Frankie and Bennies’ lamb shank, slap on a 5 million milligram nicotine patch and play on the free robot train which plies between the north and south terminals.
Riding this short railway always takes me back to my early childhood in Merton Park, London when the absolute epitome of fun for the group of eight and nine year olds I chummed around with was ‘Underground Hide And Seek’. This differed from regular hide and seek in that the bounds of the game weren’t the usual boring house and garden or even house only, but rather the whole thirty-six mile length of the London Transport Northern Line from Morden in the south to High Barnet in the north. For the price of a platform ticket (1 old penny to my recollection) you could spend all day in this subterranean wonderland. Needless to say, certain rules needed to be applied to a game of this magnitude :-
1) Hiders must stay on the ‘up line’ platforms only and not stray all over the fifty odd stations served by the line.
2) Hiders must not take any of the spur lines off of the main route.
3) Hiders must not secrete themselves in broom cupboards and must wear a distinctive top. (Believe me, some of my 1960’s home-knitted tops were distinctive).
4) Seekers must seek.
This unlikely rule was brought in when a temporarily