The Escape Committee

By Matthew Button

The chance discovery of his parent's journals was all it took to upset Matthew's plans for a sedate life. In 1967's Summer of Love, they had abandoned their jobs and set out across a Europe wrestling with post war confusion and new philosophies. Braving earthquakes, riots and juntas to explore their new frontier, they navigated through the ashes and optimism, learning that teabags are the only true currency. Miraculously, this was all achieved without mobile phones, satellite navigation or Facebook.

But is there any of that raw adventure or romance left under the slick veneer of modern Europe, or has the innocence of travel forty years ago vanished amidst the proliferation of tourism?

Snatching up their journals and photographs, Matt squeezes into an old Austin Cambridge, just as his parents had done decades previously, charting a course in their footsteps. Exploring countries that no longer exist and cities besieged by modern uniformity, he finds himself amongst 731 million people under an often uneasy 'union'. Trundling toward the Syrian border he finds charming eccentricities beneath the banality of globalisation, and finally learns how to fix a car. The Escape Committee is a truly unique voyage of one man's self-discovery, set to the backdrop of one of the most beautiful and varied continents on earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910266755

Book preview

Prologue

Working wipers had seemed important a moment before. One minute I had been fighting valiantly to see through a storm ravaged windscreen, where the glories of the Austrian Alps had been reduced to a blur of earthy greens and brown, the next the fight went out of the steering wheel, the grip left the tyres and without fanfare or warning we were set free of the world of friction and slid sideways towards thousands of vertical feet of nothing.

Time congealed.

There I was clutching the steering wheel of a fifty-year-old car, hunched ready for impact and grimacing the idiot grin of the utterly petrified.

Why had I left the sanctuary of Kufstein that morning?

Why the endearingly old British car?

Why the boot full of Spam, Smash and teabags?

The blame lies in 1967, the Summer of Love, when social barriers were coming down at roughly the same rate that political ones were going up. The Swinging Sixties may have decorated London in its new acrylic technicolours and paisleys, but even this pageantry couldn’t shake off the greys and angles hidden beneath, not for two people who had grown up through the Blitz, rationing and conscription. My parents, Pat and Pam, chafed at the confines of post-war London. They daydreamed of the exotic spice laden East with all its charm and mystery.

Throughout my life, stories from their escape had dripped into my soul. On those long boring car journeys or on rainy afternoons of my childhood I heard them over and over again. And now almost fifty years later I’d had the brilliant idea to follow in their footsteps. Sat on the garden steps in the warmth of a Cornish spring, it had all seemed so charming, so exciting and so wonderfully romantic. Swallows flew sorties over my garden and the bantams pottered about the lawn as I decided I would cruise about the highways and byways of a European summer in an old Austin Cambridge just as my parents had done. With one arm hung out of the window, sunglasses in place, I would play with the warm breeze, humming along to their music – Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and, if it couldn’t be avoided, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard. I would be a very cool cat.

Instead everything I possessed had been sodden for weeks. The roads were more like streams. It had rained so often and everything was so damp that I had more chance of growing moss than cultivating a debonair tan.

The root of aquaplaning was buried in my desire for authenticity. I hadn’t been content to simply follow their path armed with Mum’s dog-eared journals and faded photographs. I had found a 1962 Austin Cambridge, almost identical to the one they had taken, and had escaped from my own mundane life in Cornwall in search of the beauty and adventure of the Sixties.

Yet a month in and I was sliding terrifyingly across the alpine road. If I hit the barrier head on I could look forward to some Austin Cambridge heraldry imprinted on my forehead as it slammed into the steering wheel. If I didn’t it was a long fall.

Mum and Dad’s adventures had permeated their lives.

And mine, too.

They had struggled through dictatorships and juntas. They had scaled lofty peaks and languished with the lotus-eaters of the deep blue Aegean. There were new friendships, exotic foods and novel experiences, the most extraordinary of which had been the deceased proto-hippy bobbing his less-than-groovy way past their Turkish campsite bound for the Bosphorus and the Med beyond. Not your average scene in Islington. I’d had challenges and incidents aplenty since leaving but where was my exotic adventure? Where were my secret police and camel trains? Where was all the joie de vivre of the Sixties? Where was my dead hippy? Above all, where was my sunshine? Had the EU stripped the world of fun and adventure? Had mass tourism and cheap flights kicked the life out of the continent? Would the EU even be standing as Greeks battled in the streets and the euro teetered dangerously? Could I make it through Syria and into Jordan and succeed where they failed? I had set out to find out for myself and if, by some miracle, the tyres gripped once again, and by the same miracle we didn’t hit the barrier and plunge to the valley floor, then maybe I would have my adventure, my exotic intoxication of the East and possibly some answers.

Chapter One – Out of Nowhere

(Charlie Parker)

‘D’you think Pat’s all right?’ asked Ernie as he returned with the round of drinks.

‘I’m sure he’s fine. Thanks, Ern, mine was the lemonade,’ said Pam as another gust shuddered the windows and sent a thick whorl of woodsmoke rolling out of the hearth. It was 1967 and outside the weather was thrashing the Welsh valley, sending the walkers and climbers scuttling for refuge and leaving only the crofters behind in the darkness. She peered through the downpour to see her husband leaping, with less than gazelle-like grace, from island to island across the flooded car park.

‘Ernie, shhh! We’ve moved on from bloody climbing. Now let Pam finishing telling us about her and Pat driving to Africa. Jimmy might go with them,’ said Annie. ‘How wonderfully romantic, Pam. I’m so very jealous.’

Pat had reached the car and as he busied himself finding the map the pub’s bird table, stand and all, pinwheeled through the beer garden. Shoving the map under his arm he attempted to lock the door when a fresh blast tore at the map sending it chasing after the bird table.

Turning back Pam said ‘Well, Aqaba in Jordan first,’ as she basked in their admiration. Oh, the heady middle-class dream of it all. Pam could leave behind all the friends and colleagues who had surrendered to the imprisonment of motherhood. Nothing could convince her to give up the cars, travel, clothes and climbing that she and Pat had enjoyed since getting married ten years before. She had fitted carpets. They went horse riding in Barnet on the weekends. They were the first in the family to own their own refrigerator, although she played down the fact that they had to share a loo with their neighbours.

‘I’ve wanted to go there since seeing The Snows of Kilimanjaro up at the Odeon. Pat and I are going to quit our jobs and drive east. We’re not sure exactly where or how’, but she was sure. They had been poring over the AA map for weeks; romance, after all, needs a little planning. ‘Pat’s been chatting to this Greek lad at the exchange. Can’t remember his name, Pat will tell you. Anyway, this lad’s been going on about the beautiful beaches and unspoilt Greek country life.’

‘You’re going where?’ Ernie burst out. ‘Shit! Isn’t there a coop or something in Greece? It was in the papers this morning.’

‘Ernie, it’s a coup and you don’t even know where Greece is.’

‘Nor do any of you, Annie,’ he retorted.

‘No one was questioning your bravery, Ernie, but blimey, what about London?’ They all laughed. Jim and Ernie’s ice climbing had made respectful ripples through the climbing fraternity, but on his first trip to London Ernie had wandered the mean streets of Knightsbridge in full mountaineering regalia certain that no thieving southern herbert was going to get the better of a Yorkshireman armed with stout boots, an ice axe and a no-nonsense bobble hat. Here was a man who would dangle from frayed rope halfway up a cliff yet cowered at the horrors of chips and mayonnaise.

Jimmy, however, was keen to get as far away from his engineering apprenticeship as possible and test his mettle in the Alps. His climbing buddy rounded on him incredulously. ‘What’s wrong with England, Jim? The food is great. No horse meat or snails here, lad.’

‘That’s France, Ernie, not Greece,’ interrupted Pam.

‘Who cares? Nought good happens over there, Jim. It’s all bombs and foreign buggers cutting off each other’s goolies!’

With that the door slammed open and a mud monster stalked menacingly through the crowd and thumped a sodden mass of paper onto the table. ‘It’s supposed to be bleeding spring! Jimmy are you coming or not?’

‘Time you made a cup of tea, son.’

Dad woke me from my daydreams, as he turned off the X-Factor repeat before Mum noticed. The rainy autumn afternoon was dragging on into evening. Soon Mum would pull the curtains across as the last of the day’s light gave up.

‘It’s all right, Pat, I’ll make it.’ Mum, having finally succumbed to parenthood nearly four decades before, rose. ‘Do you want a piece of cake or a biscuit?’ I’ve never been a cake person, not since I have been old enough to make my own dessert related decisions, yet Mum has remained as single minded as a crack dealer in her offerings of shortbread, fruit slices and carrot cake.

‘I’ll put the stollen out anyway. Your father will probably eat some.’ Pausing at the door she added, ’Pat, did you tell Matthew Jimmy called?’ Then she was gone, off to get the cakes of torment.

‘You remember Jimmy? James Holmes? Came with us when we took the Cambridge to Turkey?’ Not really, I last met him at my brother’s christening when I was two. ‘She wants you to copy some of those old snaps we took and send him some copies.’ It’s fair to say that Jimmy couldn’t have imagined what a quick phone call to an old friend would set in motion.

I was aware that I had become increasingly tetchy over the previous weeks so, by way of a peace offering, I suggested that Mum dig them out. It was supposed to be a hollow gesture. Dad grabbed his walking sticks and was up out of the chair, calling through to the kitchen, ‘Pam! I’ll make the tea while you dig out the photos. Have you got your old journals? Matt might like to see them, too.’ Turning to me he said over the top of his glasses, ‘You never know, you might find in there why you can’t sit still for two bloody minutes.’

As the sounds of the British tea ceremony mingled with the extracting of files and boxes from unseen cupboards, I sat in quiet innocence unaware that a touch paper had been lit.

‘Here we go,’ Mum half placed, half dropped a bursting cardboard box on the coffee table, and with that a landslide of faded transparencies made a bid for freedom. ‘We haven’t exactly kept them in order,’ she said holding one up to the light. A tiny stained-glass image coloured her forehead briefly. ‘I think this is Kufstein. What do you think, Pat?’

Returning with the tea Dad put down the tray and had a look. ‘Nope, that’s near the Scheffau.’

‘No. It’s definitely Kufstein, don’t you remember we stopped to take some photos on the pass?’ she said, now armed with her reading glasses.

‘Pam, we stopped and Jimmy took photos at every pass. Anyway Kufstein was the campsite we stopped at. Scheffau was near one of the first passes we went through after leaving Germany.’ Dad rolled his eyes at me.

‘That’s right; we were going to do some climbing.’

‘No, not in this photo.’

The image went back and forth again. ‘Look, the roof rack is fully loaded. We never climbed unless we were camping, so that’s why I think it’s on the way through Scheffau.’

Nearly five decades had passed, years of children, different homes and holidays were clouding their memories. Only the journals would settle it. As Mum flicked through dog-eared pages I finally had a chance to see the image for myself. Holding it up to the light I could see, captured in faded splendour, two vaguely familiar people, one male and one female, relaxing by a car.

I was dimly aware of having seen it before. Or was I thinking of another trip? There were so many old photos of their adventures in post-war Europe. All my life their stories had drip fed into my soul on long car journeys and rainy afternoons. I remembered the tales of hours of climbing in the clouds, using teabags as currency and of the occasional dead body floating past.

Looking again at the photo framed against the lamp there was something in those faces captured in the muted tones of ’60s Kodak glory. On the left, looking cheerful, content and even a little smug, is Mum. She’s leaning against Dad affectionately. He’s looking pretty smart and dapper. The third member of the group, unseen, is Jimmy. In this image Dad is a man of style and panache, which grates strangely against the Dad I know at home. ‘Oh, your dad was always pretty smart and he had such beautiful hair,’ said Mum. Was it my fault? Mine and my brothers’? Was there a correlation between the arrival of children and his slow decline into fashion criminality?

In 1967 as they stood messing about in front of the camera they couldn’t have known that their trip would set off a chain reaction that would see them travel as far and wide as they could and eventually passed on to me, along with green eyes and gappy teeth.

I wandered as far as my feet would take me along the Cornish coast and even once I escaped to university I kept gazing at the horizon just as they always had. Almost immediately upon arriving at uni I began to chafe at the confinement of Stoke’s inclement winters and even with all the glories of university life I still couldn’t wait to leave. During my final year, as my peers decorated their walls with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin posters mine had unconsciously begun to mirror Mum’s office walls before they left in 1967. The Wonder Stuff and Dinosaur Jr. were replaced with clippings from Thomas Cook brochures and strip-mined surfing magazines.

At the first opportunity I had left to blood myself in the search for a life less ordinary. I’d had to go to the dusty and unloved corners of the world to get the same sense of excitement and the exotic they’d had on their early trips. I’d ridden through hidden valleys with Kyrgyz nomads, hitchhiked through Iran, and even paddled dugout canoes along the Sepik in Papua New Guinea in search of salt-water crocs; why would I ever think of Europe? I had a slightly jaundiced view of our neighbours. Surely there was no adventure left there? Certainly not on the scale my parents had found in a continent still shrugging off the Second World War. Their Europe had a Germany still divided, an Iron Curtain pulled tight, a malevolent Cold War contrasted against the radiance of the Summer of Love. Today, gilded by Brussels uniformity, it’s all mass-tourism and all-inclusives as far as I was concerned.

‘Somewhere between Kufstein and Scheffau,’ they eventually concluded. But I was still taken with the image. There was a fascinating look of excitement and joie de vie about them. Their calmness and confidence radiates through the way they stand in that snowy mountain car park in July.

‘The car was still clean,’ he pointed out. ‘And so are we. By then we were into the second month of the trip.’ They were road fit but not yet road weary. At this point the niggles and annoyances of camping had been sanded away by the joys of movement and freedom.

In the corner you can see their car, a brand new Austin Cambridge A60. It had been the perfect beast of burden, carrying them from the grey streets of Islington to the azures of the Austrian Alps. There was no reason yet to believe it wouldn’t carry them all the way to the bleached boulevards of Aqaba in Jordan. Jimmy was adamant that they shouldn’t clean it. He wanted it to gather that respectable patina of grime from the open road. It should become a badge of honour and return home caked in experience and the exotic. ‘He went mental when