Elephants and Enfields, Evelyn Calvert [little readers .TXT] 📗

unpopular boy was designated ‘hider’ and after disappearing into the electric labyrinth with gusto, the designated seekers pissed off to the park for the day. The poor sod spent five and a half hours behind a Poppets Chocolate Raisin machine on Clapham North Station before returning to Morden Terminus in floods of tears.
Looking back on it, I’m surprised our parents let us all loose, daylong and unsupervised and equally surprised that none of us ended up being prized from the 630 volt third rail by the transport police. I wonder if the kids today are given such freedoms.
Back to Gatwick and embarking on the marathon which is the trek to the furthest boarding gate that BAA can allocate. Have you noticed as your breathing starts to sound like that of an asthmatic scaling the south face of K2 and your legs scream at your lungs for more oxygen, just how many unutilized boarding gates you pass? Have you ever heard of anyone in the history of flight who has been the recipient of the announcement…
”ping, pong……will all passengers travelling to Istanbul on flight TA 384 please make their way to gate number……..1”?
No, never! Gate 2 would be good. Gate 3 would be fine. Anything up to gate 10 would be acceptable. Instead, us gate 64’ers round the corner of yet another Costa coffee boutique to face a corridor which has a vanishing point! Art students from all over the world come here to study perspective. You can’t even see your boarding gate; not because of an absence of signage or failing eyesight but because of the curvature of the earth.
I don’t know why we even bother with the plane, let’s just walk to sodding India. I’m surprised that some canny entrepreneur isn’t doing flights from the concourse to the boarding gates……with a bloody five kilo baggage allowance!
Tapping it’s fingers on the tarmac at gate 64 was the ‘seen-better-days’ and ‘seen-fewer-seats’ Airbus bucket which would shortly spirit us to the land of elephants and Enfields. My enthusiasm for the ten hour flight, I admit, had waned slightly since having been allocated seats in the dreaded four-in-the-middle section. Both Hannah and I love the window seat. To sit and gaze downward like the bomb aimer in a B-52, whilst the deserts, oceans, rivers and mountains scroll beneath you and that purply-pink of twilight fades to bejewelled blackness is breathtaking and wonderous and eternal.
I despise the people who, having won the window seat lottery, prize out their beige inflatable flock neck cushions, slam shut the window blinds and are clocking up 'z’s before the plane has reached Reigate. Those are the people who should have the squalid slum that is the four-in-the-middle section.
It’s like the motorists with soft-topped cars who drive around on the most blisteringly hot sun-drenched days with the hood up. Why do they buy them? Why not purchase a black panel van and whitewash the windows? Other, less fortunate, souls with tin-tops and vitamin D deficiencies through lack of exposure to the sunlight should have the right to stop and politely point out to those occupants the folly of their ways. The ‘liberators’ should unceremoniously plant those sorry arses onto the softening asphalt and speed away with the wind in their hair and dappled warmth on their faces in their newly annexed cabriolets.
My sense of foreboding proved to be well founded when I saw the woman in seat E, row 31. Or should I say, seats D, E and F, row 31, for she was huge. Seeing her reminded me of the sequence in Lucas’s Star Wars when Luke Skywalker first cast his eyes on the Death Star. Her husband had half of seat F and I was to occupy half of seat D. Even with the armrest down, the cellulite excess-baggage oozed beneath it like the rubbery skin of Jabba the Hutt and adhered itself to my thigh and hip.
It was going to be a long ten hours and I already envied Hannah the aisle seat, despite the certainty of being clumped round the head with the flight bags of the thickos who refuse to accept that a 24 inch wide valise won’t pass along a 22 inch wide aisle sideways.
In order to stymie those of you who derive amusement from other peoples’ discomfort, I shall skip forward several hours and spare the description of the, now Amazonian, microclimate that was evolving between my right thigh and Mrs.Hutt’s left.
Just at the point when, despite the cramp in the hip and the crick in the neck, I manage to slip into a version of unconsciousness, a particularly astute stewardess seems to miss the fact that I have a blanket over my head and gleefully invites me to partake of a plastic cup half filled with tepid brown sludge. In a parallel universe where I am open and honest and truthful I hear myself reply “ I don’t want a ‘hot’ drink. I don’t want a cold drink. I don’t want an unopenable bag containing four peanuts. I don’t want an extruded plastic tray containing what looks like the contents of Tutankhamun’s loincloth. I don’t want a bottle of nauseating overpriced perfume, a plastic torch in the shape of a Monarch airliner or an exclusive designer watch which looks like the booby prize from a council estate bingo night. I don’t want to give you my loose change to transform the life of a one-legged, blind, Venezuelan crack addict. I don’t even want a twin pack of disposable gas lighters to replace the ones stolen from me at Gatwick security four hours previously. What I do want is for you to take your ‘Tut-Shop-In-The-Sky’ glossy brochure, resin-hard smile and orange painted face and jump out of the fucking window!
In reality I smile politely, decline the offer and pull the blanket back over my head.
I don’t know about you, but I invariably arrive at a point on a night flight when I start to realize that the fitful sleepless suffering is almost at an end and a new excitement and freshness kick in. It tends to coincide with the first whiff of plasticised scrambled egg from the galley and the first shaft of sunlight which the bastard in the window seat with the air-filled noose deigns to share with ‘steerage’ by sliding up the blind. My yawn and our reducing altitude causes the pressure pop in my ear as the plane banks tightly to port and a glance sideways is rewarded with the glimpse of a tiny fishing boat suspended on a rippled azure mirror. Twenty shafts of sunlight now track across the cabin ceiling as the other bastards slide up their blinds and the engines’ monotone drops as we slot to the glide path.
Over the intercom comes the captain’s announcement.
”Ping…..fur, fur, fur, Dabolim, ner, fur fur ner der toilets, fur ner, seatbelts, thank you”.
I don’t know what these pilots have in their mouths when they make these in-flight announcements but I could only assume that he wasn’t advising us that the toilets at Dabolim were fitted with fur seatbelts.
I’m never too sure about seatbelts in airliners. I’m all too aware that if captain Fur Ner Ner has partaken of one too many strawberry daiquiris over Afghanistan and we lightly skim a hillside before sliding to a halt in a cloud of red dust and splintered palm trees, I shall be grateful that my nose has avoided an intimate relationship with the clip that holds the meal tray to the seat in front. If however we lightly skim a hillside before careering wheel-less and screaming into the airfield fuel depot and consequent pyrotechnic fireball, then I feel sure that my chances of avoiding crispy skin and being welded to my seat would be enhanced should I not be wearing my seatbelt. Hopefully I shan’t be given the opportunity of finding out.
I snap shut the buckle, I’ll unsnap it post hillside clip. We swoop in over the Arabian Sea and touch down alongside 1960s Russian Illushin and Tupolev propeller aircraft operated by the Indian military and Coast Guard before taxiing to the low terminal building.
Dabolim’s single runway sits atop an isthmus south of the Zuari River about a third of the way down Goa’s coast and was built by the government of the Estado da India Portuguesa ( the Indian Portuguese State ) in the 1950s. It is jointly operated by the Airports Authority of India and the Indian Navy. Since its construction, at least 4 rupees have been spent on modernisation and upgrade.
I really shouldn’t be so derogatory to the ‘Portal of the Magic Kingdom’ but it can be both one of the most fascinating and frustrating places on the planet.
We all sit impatiently whilst the air conditioning nozzles spout wisps of cool condensation from above. Finally, the most orange-skinned air steward that I have ever seen in my life minces from his jockey seat and swings open the aircraft door. As we step through it, the heat of the day fetches a broad grin to our wintery wan faces.
Hannah and I both love the sun to the point where it’s harmful. We try to make the 100m walk across the hot concrete apron last half an hour, but all too soon we’re into the time-warp that is the Dabolim Terminal. Overhead and on every cream gloss-painted pillar are electric fans which afford if not coolness, then at least a movement of the warm air. The floor is tiled geometrically in cream and terracotta. Any visible wood is as sapele as a cheap office desk and the place has a perfume that is a blend of linoleum, hardboard, polish and . . . . sweaty passengers, I guess.
Everywhere are hand-painted signs in both English and that beautiful Hindi script. How I wish that I could write with such handsome and graphic flourishes. How I wish that I could read it. Top of the to-do list, I think.
I love the way that Indians have this obsession with labelling and numbering every fixture and fitting in sight. We pass Wall Fan No.11, Electrical Cupboard No.8 and Stupid Pasty Tourist Who’s Lost Their Passport No.5 on our way to immigration control. For once, the khaki-clad and very spruce navy security staff almost speed us through to the baggage conveyor. They must have arrivals stacking up behind us.
‘Coming for a stig?’ Hannah asks, though it was more a statement than a question. ( Our pet names for cigarettes are numerous and uncomprehendable to the majority. The derivations of most are long since forgotten.)
We decide to go for the stig option as there is no movement as yet from the carousel. Over in one corner of the arrivals hall is the small glass-walled cubicle set aside for lepers, people with contagious diseases or open sores, those carrying unsealed radioactive material….and smokers. I pull out my Golden Virginia, slickly roll a couple of stogeroonies and we enter the fish tank.
I don’t know why I bothered to make the cigarettes at all because the nicotine hit when the door is opened by a young Goan sponsored by Marlboro’ Lights must be the equivalent of that generated by every untipped Navy Cut cigarette smoked during WW2 combined with the atmosphere from a World Popeye convention.
The last time I smelled tobacco that strong was when my pipe-smoking French teacher leant down to me at my school desk and whispered in a matter-of-fact way…
‘The next time I see you stick soggy chewed paper pellets to the ceiling with a