Beyond Nowhere: The Crutch Chronicles Continue

By Roger Crutchley

AND YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ALL OVER

 

Roger Crutchley's book The Long Winding Road to Nakhon Nowhere wasn't the 'end of the road' for the author. After many years working at the Bangkok Post, even after retirement readers still look forward to his musings in the Sunday edition. His column makes them smile, laugh out loud or get angry and write letters to the editor.

 

In his new book, Beyond Nowhere, Roger has come up with more amusing reflections of his five decades in Thailand and even his early years in England. In it he also recalls experiences in China, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and other countries he visited.

 

Read about hilarious police raids, the orangutan who tried to board a Bangkok bus, the art of how not to bargain, the singing taxi driver and the Thai food that sparked a dramatic London police raid. Then there are the ghosts that struck terror in the Northeast, the day Sir Alec Guinness spoke fluent Thai and the infamous raid on a Pattaya bridge club. And of course there are terrific tales from where it all began, his fascinating experiences at the Bangkok Post dating back to 1969.

 

(Includes color photgraphs)

• Language: English
• Publisher: DCO Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9786164560611

Book preview

BeyondNowherecover450

Beyond Nowhere

The Crutch Chronicles Continue

By Roger Crutchley

DCO Books

Beyond Nowhere:

The Crutch Chronicles Continue

Copyright © Roger Crutchley, 2023

First Published 2023

DCO Books

eBook edition published by

Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

Bangkok Thailand

http://www.dco.co.th

ISBN (eBook) 978-616-456-061-1

Edited by Richard Baker

All Rights Reserved

These are purely personal observations of my early days in Thailand and are not intended to be a comprehensive historical account of events in the kingdom or at the Bangkok Post. Roger Crutchley.

To my dear brother Eric and his wife Cindy who have both sadly passed on. Not forgetting my long-departed mum and dad whose love gave me such a happy start in life. Also to my wife Prapatsorn (Aon) for putting up with me for so long.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Nakhon Nowhere Is Everywhere

2. A Bundle for Britain

3. Long Trousers Time

4. Life on the Overland Trail

5. The Early Days

6. Established in 1946 … That’s Some Time Ago

7. Full Steam Ahead

8. Watching the River Flow

9. Law and Disorder

10. The Boys in Brown

11. Creatures Great and Small

12. Battling the Barkers

13. A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

14. The Joy of Bargaining

15. Three Wheels, Nine Lives

16. From Cobra Swamp to Golden Land

17. The Great Debate

18. Things That Go Bump in the Night

19. No Pie-in-the-Sky

20. On the Beach

21. Please Do Not Adjust Your Set

22. Once It Was Almost a Botanical Garden

23. Walk on the Wild Side

24. The Rescue that Gripped the World

25. The Great Communicator

26. A Walk in the Park

27. No Place Like Home

28. Good Morning and Thank You

29. The Land of Hair Curlers

30. Where Politeness Is a Way of Life

31. Finally Reaching the Land of Oz

32. Going a Long Way to Have a Nice Day

33. Keeping in Touch With the Old Country

34. Halfway to the Stars

35. Back in the USSR

36. Returning Heroes

37. Farewell to Old Friends

38. The Great Cover-Up

Acknowledgements

A special word for the indispensable Mr Noi (husband of my late maid Ms Yasothon) who still looks after the house and garden and is a true friend.

Thanks to long-time friends and colleagues Tony Waltham, Peter Finucane, John Leicester and Colin Hastings for their invaluable support over the years. Also to Alan Dawson whose encouragement has been invaluable.

Good wishes to Anurat Manibhandu, Chalikon Suraphongchai, Normita Thongtham and Sanitsuda Ekachai who were such a delight to work with at the Post. Also to the Post sports desk led by Wanchai Rujawongsanti.

Thanks to long-time friend and colleague Kusuma Bekenn and to former Bangkok Post editor Pichai Chuensuksawadi for their much appreciated support.

Greetings to Clarence Shettlesworth for his friendship on the overland adventure and Brett Bartos who was so helpful in those early days.

Acknowledgements to publisher Danny Speight for his always cheerful manner and Richard Baker for his helpful advice.

Special thanks to the Bangkok Post and librarian Kateprapa Buranakanonda for the use of a number of photographs.

Finally thanks all former colleagues at the Bangkok Post who are too numerous to name but contributed to my life at the newspaper being so enjoyable.

n.b. Extra picture credits to a wandering Australian for the photograph of Queen Victoria’s statue and the original internet posters of various Thai sign or object pictures used.

1. Nakhon Nowhere Is Everywhere

Coming face-to-face with retirement

It was Ernest Hemingway who once said, Retirement is the ugliest word in the language, although there are plenty of worse words I can think of. Let’s just say, when you retire from work, you don’t necessarily withdraw from life.

I eventually retired from the Bangkok Post in September 2011, after 42 years at the newspaper, or, to put it another way, approximately 15,300 days of writing dodgy headlines, putting commas in the wrong place, splitting infinitives, misappropriating apostrophes, and leaving participles dangling.

I was half hoping that retirement would be a bit like being transferred to an inactive post, like all those lucky Thai civil servants. I’d be so busy doing nothing, I wouldn’t have time to do anything. It didn’t quite work out that way. For a start, the wife, Prapatsorn (Aon), put her foot down, understandably not wanting a bored Crutch taking up space in the house all day. So I was assigned the important post of assistant shopper, which meant trailing around after her on expeditions to markets and, to a lesser extent, malls – my usefulness, however, being limited to paying the bills. Actually, that’s very unfair on my better half, who has been terrific company with her good humour and always calm manner. Thank you, Aon.

Clearing out the desk in the office after all those years was quite an effort. They say you can tell a lot about someone’s character by the contents of their desk. If so, that’s a bit of a worry. There were a couple of T-shirts I’d brought into the office as a precaution against being ambushed during the annual Songkran celebrations. One bore an image of Saddam Hussein kissing George Bush Sr., with a Make Love Not War message in Thai. I can’t recall ever wearing it because it looked kind of silly, although I do agree with the message. But I didn’t throw it away.

Then there were all the press accreditation dog-tags for sporting events, some dating to the 1990s and featuring rather unappetising mug shots – I didn’t look like that, surely? The name was often misspelled. The ID for the visit of Liverpool FC at Rajamangala Stadium in 2009 read Chuchley – which wasn’t a bad stab at it really. In the desk there were also several missives I’d collected and forgotten about from PR companies who invariably got my name wrong, with Cratachley, Crusherly, and Clutchly being some of the better efforts.

I haven’t been totally idle in the decade since retirement, although it was quite tempting to take it easy and simply loaf around. I even found time to write a book.

Over the years, many people I have met expressed interest in my overland journey from England to India, in 1969. They were also curious about what life was like in Thailand in those days. So I thought I should at least write it down while my memory banks were still semi-functioning. It was much harder work than I’d imagined, but eventually there emerged The Long Winding Road to Nakhon Nowhere, which was published in May 2018.

Promoting the book was hard work too, but also enjoyable. I had a wonderful time meeting old and new friends at the first launch, held at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT), followed by another at the renowned, now sadly defunct, Check Inn 99 – which, at one time, held the honour of being Bangkok’s longest-running nightspot. At least nobody fell asleep – well, not too many – as I rambled on about Afghan deserts, Indian train journeys, and ancient Beatles songs. Not being a great orator, I was fortunate to have support in that respect from former colleagues Tony Waltham, Colin Hastings, John Leicester, and the person brave enough to publish the book – Danny Speight.

One question I’ve been frequently asked since the publication of Nakhon Nowhere is the meaning and origin of the expression Nakhon Nowhere. I’ve used it quite liberally in my regular Sunday PostScript column, but I’m not the originator of the expression, and will endeavour to explain how it all came about.

The first person I ever heard use Nakhon Nowhere was my former colleague and good friend, Brett Bartos, a Kiwi with a dry sense of humour. Shortly after the Bangkok Post moved from Ratchadamnoen Avenue in 1973 to the U Chu Liang Building opposite Lumpini Park, Brett, who had previously been working on sport, was appointed supplements editor. It was a very responsible position, as the supplements provided an important source of advertising revenue.

The mainstays of the supplements were those promoting either newly-formed companies, or businesses and other establishments celebrating a special anniversary. I think it was in one of the latter that Nakhon Nowhere had its derivation, surprising though it may sound.

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Intrepid journos: Bangkok Post colleagues Brett Bartos and Peter Finucane in Thailand’s first national park at Khao Yai in 1970. Brett was the first person I met to use the expression Nakhon Nowhere.

Many of these promotions provided a brief biography of the board of directors, and so on. In one supplement, the original copy included the CV of one bigwig, but the part where it was supposed to say which university he’d attended had been left blank. A deadline was rapidly approaching and, in those pre-computer days, the copy had to be expedited. So, Brett, who had other important content that needed more urgent attention, typed in University of Nakhon Nowhere, intending to change it when the correct institution was discovered.

No prizes for guessing what happened. With the pressure of work, the case of the missing university was all but forgotten, and the supplement was published with one director proudly having attended the University of Nakhon Nowhere. Interestingly, there wasn’t any comeback, so maybe people thought the University of Nakhon Nowhere actually existed. Maybe it does.

As to the actual meaning of Nakhon Nowhere, you can interpret it how you like. I’ve always regarded it as a reference to any place in the remoter parts of Thailand where the happenings in Bangkok have little or no direct impact on the local way of life. In extensive travels throughout the Northeast, for example, I’ve found that many country people have zero interest in the news stories emanating from the metropolis, even major occurrences such as attempted coups. Shortly after one such incident, which had virtually paralysed Bangkok for a week, I was in Ubon Ratchathani and asked local people what they thought of events in the capital. Just about everyone answered with a shrug of the shoulders and something like, That’s Bangkok, that’s not here. So, maybe we should let Nakhon Nowhere remain that mysterious place somewhere in Thailand that you won’t ever find on a map, but you’ll definitely experience if you travel around the Kingdom.

The origin of Nakhon Nowhere reminds me of a similar tale from Britain many years ago. On early county maps of England, a mapmaker was unsure about the name of a village in the southwest. So he wrote down Query on the draft, intending to correct it later. Of course, it was forgotten and, for a long time, the village of Query remained on the map, a place that was impossible to find.

In the previous book, I began with the time in my late teens and early twenties, living and working in London, shortly before embarking on the overland trip that would change my life and eventually see me end up in Thailand. However, some readers indicated they would have liked to learn a bit more about my earlier life in post-war Britain – ration books and all. So, before venturing into more tales of Thailand and beyond, I’m taking the liberty of including a couple of chapters about my earlier days growing up in the Berkshire town of Reading, and which may have had a bearing on my adventures in later life.

2. A Bundle for Britain

The joy of ration books and annual holidays on the south coast

It’s best to start at the beginning – not that I remember anything about it. Born at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading in July 1946, one year after the end of World War II, I was regarded as a Bundle for Britain, marking a generation of baby boomers. Many years later, I felt proud when I discovered that was the same hospital where doctors had saved the life of wartime Royal Air Force hero Douglas Bader, after he crashed at nearby Woodley Aerodrome in 1931, losing both legs.

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Tying the knot: Parents Kath and Eric on their wedding day, September 11, 1934 in the village of Cove, near Farnborough, Hants.

My parents, Eric and Kath, were both born and bred in Cove, a village near Farnborough in Hampshire, but moved the 30 kilometres to Reading in the 1930s after they married, because my dad secured a job as an accounts clerk with the local brewery, Simonds, which was later taken over by Courage. They lived on a modest housing estate in Caversham, and 12 Kildare Gardens was to be my family home for the next 22 years, although for the last five of those I also shared flats in Kingston-upon-Thames and London.

Apparently, my grandmother chose the name Roger, but unfortunately she didn’t add a second name, which in later years made me feel a bit deprived. Everyone else seemed to have a middle name, and on official forms I’d receive some quizzical looks and was sometimes even castigated for leaving middle name blank. Everybody has a middle name, sniffed one local civil servant.

The absent middle name was just as well because my elder brother was named Eric John, while my father was Eric George. Presumably, to avoid confusion, my brother was called John in our household, and that’s what he became known as to all our relatives. But when he went to boarding school at Christ’s Hospital in West Sussex, he was called Eric by the teachers and fellow students, and that became the name he was comfortable with and used for the rest of his life.

One of my earliest claims to fame was when I went missing under the baker’s horse. In those days – the late 1940s and early 50s – the baker used a horse-drawn cart for his rounds. When he arrived at our street, I’d go out with my mother to greet the horse, loving the smell of freshly-baked bread. My best mate, Ken Chambers, who lived opposite, told me later that on one occasion I followed my mum out as usual but suddenly disappeared. No one knew where I’d gone. Mum was frantic, and neighbours ran down the street looking for me. Then someone spotted me standing underneath the horse, tickling its tummy, totally oblivious to all the drama.

As I grew older I became very fond of the horse, which was nicknamed Dobbin, although it bore a closer resemblance to Hercules, the old nag from the Steptoe and Son TV series. The poor old thing used to stagger down our cul-de-sac looking like it was about to drop dead – which of course is what eventually happened. After that, our bread was delivered by van, which wasn’t nearly as interesting.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mum getting the ration books out of the drawer and checking to see if we had enough food stamps, before walking down to the local shops. I was fascinated by all the stamps, but had no understanding of the reason for them in those austere days after the war. Incidentally, one butcher in town happened to be called Mr. Bacon, which my dad thought was highly amusing.

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Flying visit: Dad, holding elder brother Eric while on leave from the RAF in the early 1940s at the height of World War II. Note the blacked out windows as a precaution against German air raids.

Strict rationing was to continue until about 1953, when sugar and eggs were finally taken off the list. It ended altogether in 1954; meat being the last item to become freely available. Ironically, rationing was responsible for a considerable improvement in the health of Britons. For the first time, they were forced to eat a balanced diet, and life expectancy soared.

May 8 was a special day in our household. It was what they call VE Day – Victory in Europe – marking the end of World War II, in 1945. It was also my father’s birthday. He was quite proud that this auspicious day should also fall on his birthday and, in his later years, his celebrations inevitably led to him relating wartime memories, which I found fascinating. I only wish I’d written them down.

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Brothers in arms: With elder brother Eric in the late 1940s in Reading when I was a real nipper.

My dad was relatively lucky. He was in the Royal Air Force, but not as a pilot, navigator, or rear gunner. Intelligence he used to tell me, with a wry smile – and, from what I could gather, his main role was analysing photographs taken by the bombers during their raids over Europe. He was initially stationed at RAF bases in southern England, and at Oakington near Cambridge. There was plenty of action as he watched the Blenheims, Wellingtons, Spitfires, and Hurricanes limping back to the airfields after missions. Some didn’t make it; others crashed, attempting to land. Knowing many of the flight crews, he lost a host of friends. The Spitfire was his favourite aircraft, and he’d come close to tears talking about the bravery of the young pilots who flew them.

He was then transferred to Reykjavik, Iceland, which the British had invaded in May 1940, fearing it could be used by Germany as a base. Despite the occupation, he found the Icelanders very friendly and, during his two-year stint, was often invited into their homes. He also spent a lot of time playing football for the RAF against the locals. He recalled that his only negative memory of Iceland was getting horribly seasick on the stormy voyage from Scotland.

Back home, Reading, which is about 50 kilometres west of London, though not a major target of German bombing, saw its fair share of raids. In 1943, a Luftwaffe bomber killed 41 people in the town centre. It became known as the People’s Pantry bombing, most of the victims perishing in a popular cheap restaurant of that name. Earlier, during the Battle of Britain, some of the airborne fighting drifted Reading’s way, with the odd bomb landing not too far from our home.

Our next-door neighbour, Fred Reeves, had an Anderson bomb shelter in his back garden. It was made of corrugated iron, partly buried, and covered with earth and weeds. He still had it ten years later, and I used to play in it with his son, Richard, pretending the war was still on. We’d shoot down enemy aircraft, with branches from the apple tree serving as our machine guns.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like cooped up in that shelter in the event of an air raid – and the prospect wasn’t too comforting. I don’t think the shelter would have survived a bomb blast from a mile away, let alone a direct hit.

My dad was home on leave for a few days in 1940 when the air-raid sirens went off. He and my mum took up their customary air-raid positions under the stairs and, after a while, they could hear planes zooming overhead. About five minutes later, there was a knock on the window. It was Fred, who’d emerged from his bunker. It’s okay, he said chirpily. Nothing to worry about. The planes are ours. Relieved, my dad went out into the garden to have a look. His relief quickly turned to alarm as he saw a Messerschmitt fighter swooping low over our estate. It’s theirs, not ours, he shouted as everyone sprinted for the shelter – one of the few times it actually served the purpose for which it was designed.

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Say cheese: Aged five in my page-boy outfit before Auntie Margaret and Uncle Ray’s wedding in the early 1950s. With me are brother Eric and childhood friend Ken Chambers.

Some years later, as a kid, I began to assemble Airfix plastic model kits of the World War II planes. The first was the Spitfire, probably influenced by my dad. Then came the Hurricane and Mosquito, followed by the heavy bombers – the Wellington and Lancaster. The bombers were more of a challenge, as they had a few fiddly bits. I went on to the German planes – the Messerschmitt fighter and Stuka dive bomber, plus the heavyweight Junker and Dornier. They all eventually hung from the bedroom ceiling and, many nights, I fought the Battle of Britain about 15 years after the event, from the comfort of my bed.

After the war, in the late 1950s, my parents took part in an exchange programme in which German students were placed with British families, in a bid to heal the cultural wounds of war. We had this very pleasant young German fellow with us called Juergen, from Bielefeld, which had been heavily bombed. As none of our family knew any German, conversation was a bit on the thin side, and his most frequent expression in English was, I’m sorry, I don’t understand – a bit like my Thai today. One evening, my mother suggested I show Juergen my favourite books. So, I went up to the bedroom and returned to proudly present my dad’s RAF wartime magazines full of photographs of German fighters and bombers being shot down and cities being bombed, with captions like Take that Adolf! I was too young to realise what a faux pas I’d made, although Juergen didn’t complain and actually took quite an interest in some of the remarkable aerial photographs. For my attempted contribution at improving Anglo-German relations, I got a clip round the ear from mum, who assured me I wasn’t going to have a diplomatic career.

I attended the Hill Primary School from 1950 to 1956, and those were extremely happy days. It was a fairly new school and, as the name suggests, was on top of a hill in an outstanding location overlooking the Thames Valley. It also backed on to the BBC Monitoring Centre at Caversham Park, located in the grounds of a stately home formerly called Crosley Park. It was a twenty-minute walk from our house to school. Caversham Park was a terrific place to play hide and seek because it was such a large area with so many places where you could conceal yourself. Copses, ponds, and even secret tunnels added to our fantasies about strange goings-on in the manor. In the mid-60s, the land was sold, and much of it became a housing estate known as Caversham Park Village.

Hill Primary was separated from the BBC grounds by a wall just about high enough to keep the kids out. We knew it was some sort of monitoring station and, with the war still fresh in people’s memories, we imagined it was full of spies – which it probably was. But everyone simply referred to the place as the BBC. If you were travelling from Paddington Station in London by train, as you approached Reading you could always see to your right – and still can – the BBC building perched on the hill, even though it’s miles away.

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Birdie boys: On the putting green with my dad in Bournemouth in the late 1950s.

My dad, who loved the countryside, would take me for long walks around the Caversham Park area, and it was quite sublime, a vast tract of undulating natural parkland in the foothills of the Chilterns. Father knew where all the birds’ nests were, and I knew the locations of the conker trees – horse chestnuts to give the correct name. Sometimes I’d return home with a bagful of conkers to prepare for keenly-contested tournaments in the school playground. That schoolboys’ game is perhaps only known in Britain, and an explanation may be required for those who’ve never heard of it. As briefly as possible: A hole is drilled through the conker, and a string threaded through and tied so that it can both hang as a target and be used as a swinging bludgeon. You and your opponent then take turns trying to smash each other’s conker to pieces. The hardest conkers usually win, and schoolboys used to have various ruses to toughen them up, including baking them or boiling them in vinegar. These days, with everyone, including school kids, addicted to phones, I’m not sure if the game survives.

My mother worked part-time as a supply teacher – someone who filled in when the regular teacher was sick or didn’t show up. She taught in about every school in Reading and, before I was even old enough to go to school, she’d take me with her and I’d sit in on the lessons and be fussed over by the older kids. Later, on some occasions, she taught at my own school. In the early 1950s, before we had a telephone, the headmistress, Miss Alderson, would send me home to fetch my mother when there was a teacher shortage. Just like Forrest Gump, I’d run the whole way, primarily because it was downhill. Then I’d return with mum at a much slower pace. So, young Crutch did have his uses.

It might seem a paradox, but I didn’t enjoy having