Border Crossing Read online

  Border Crossing

  On the Road from

  Peking to Paris

  Rosie Thomas

  Copyright © 1998, Rosie Thomas

  For Phil and Dan and JD, Melissa and Colin, Chris and Howard, Carolyn and David, David and Angela and Helen, Adam and Jonathan, David and Sheila, Murray and Amanda, Andrew, David and Keith, Thomas and Maria, Anton and Willemien, John and Mike, Phil, Greg and Mark and Rick, Trev and Jingers and all the other crews and officials in the 1997 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, for their long-suffering families and friends, and for my own family in particular – Caradoc and Charlie and Flora.

  Thank you all for the adventure of a lifetime.

  Rosie Thomas was born and grew up in North Wales. She read English at Oxford and worked in publishing. Since the birth of her first child, she has written twelve novels including Every Woman Knows a Secret, Other People's Marriages and Moon Island. She lives with her literary agent husband and two children in North London. Border Crossing is her first work of non-fiction.

  Many people helped us to prepare for the Peking to Paris. Foremost amongst them were Tony Barrett, Delroy 'Noddy' Burke and Geza Demeter, with the assistance of Junior and Fitz, at South Service, Stamford Bridge, London, and John Wheeler in Somerset. Without their expertise and ingenuity we could not have made it out of Beijing, let alone all the way to the Place de la Concorde.

  We are also indebted to: Ianto Roberts, Mark Lucas, Mindy Lucas, Lennie Goodings, Philippa Harrison, Rosalie Macfarlane, Gail Rebuck, Simon Master, Susan Sandon, Ian Taylor, Helen Fraser, Araminta Whitley, Anthony Silverstone, Colin Bryce, Kit and Louise Chapman, Jim Livingstone, John Davis, Tony Wiggett, Nick and Jenny Evans, Graeme and Judith Robertson, Lindsay Thomas, Richard Sparks and Jenny Okun, Rik Gadsby at Virgin, Exodus Expeditions, Tony, Stephanie, Frances and Sophie Bowen, and Philippa Gimlette.

  Various companies kindly provided equipment, and we recommend their products as well as valuing their support for a pair of untried rally drivers. Thanks are due to Ghost, Tim Turnbull at Aquaman UK, Derek Danks and Mandy at Britool, Stuart Galbraith at Champion Automotive Products, Colin McKinnon at Cirrus UK Ltd, Angela Clifford at Cotswold Camping and Debbie Urquhart at Timberland UK Ltd.

  RT and PB, 1998

  CONTENTS

  The Challenge

  Scrutineering and Final Drivers' Briefing, Brooklands, 8 June 1997

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Challenge

  You know you want to. Just say yes. P.

  The note was scribbled on a travel company's compliments slip, and it was paper-clipped to what looked like a holiday brochure.

  It was 20 December 1996, the morning after my husband's fiftieth birthday. We had given a big party the night before in a favourite restaurant; there had been music and dancing and most of our friends, and much champagne had been drunk. Now the house was full of oversleeping people and piles of not yet unwrapped birthday presents and the squinty, tenderheaded aftermath of a big night. My sister Lindsay was sitting across the crumbed breakfast table watching me sifting the morning's heap of Christmas cards. I gazed at the note, and flipped through the brochure without being able to decipher what it was about.

  Lindsay poured more tea. Tea is a big thing between us, it reminds us of our Welsh childhood and the distance we have put between us and it.

  'What's that?'

  'Um. Something about a car race. I don't know, have a look.'

  She took the brochure, and the note.

  'Who is this P?'

  'The guide who led our group to Everest.'

  'Oh, him. I see. And do you want to?'

  I closed my eyes.

  Later, clearer-headed. I read the brochure more carefully and gazed at one of the pictures in it.

  It was a photograph of a man, shrouded in a dustcoat and a sola topi, crossing a desert landscape with a watering can in his hand. Ahead of him stood a motor car with the Italian flag hanging limp from a rod mounted to the spare wheel. It was a very old car indeed, just two grey metal boxes mounted on crude spoked wheels with the steering-wheel sprouting from the gap between the two matchboxes, a child's barely representational scribble of a car. There was another man in a sola topi in the driver's seat.

  The picture dated from 1907. It was taken in the Gobi Desert and it showed Prince Scipio Borghese at the wheel of his Itala, with his mechanic and chauffeur bringing water from a well. Borghese was the eventual winner of the first – and so far only – Peking to Paris Motor Challenge.

  The brochure I was now reading proposed a ninetieth anniversary commemoration of the Challenge, and offered a coloured sketch-map of the projected 1997 route. I looked at it for a long time, and then I checked the list of already-confirmed entrants and saw that the closing date for last-comers was the end of January, a little more than five weeks off. I swallowed very hard at the size of the entry fee, and then flicked back to the page with the drawing of a pagoda at one end of a red line and the Eiffel Tower at the other. The line forged across twelve countries, and bisected the Himalayas in front of Everest.

  P – Phil Bowen – was right. I did want to.

  Scrutineering and Final Drivers' Briefing, Brooklands, 8 June 1997

  On quiet summer nights, the ghost drivers still race there.

  The track is a ruin now, overgrown and desolate, but the people who live in the neat houses set beyond the Surrey birch trees claim that they can sometimes hear the distant roar of the phantom cars as they spin around the steep bank of the old circuit. Once or twice the police have been called out because of the noise. But when the panda cars pull up and the officers step out, the high curving walls of the race track are deserted and there is nothing to be heard except the wind in the trees.

  To me, even on a late afternoon in midsummer with the sun still shining on the crimped purple petals of rhododendron flowers, even though the slabs of concrete were cracked and broken and weeds pushed up through the fissures, the sound of the racers was only just beyond hearing. Like a tinnitus buried deep inside my head, it was elusive and inescapable.

  Our car looked very small, drawn up just where the concrete began to curve up from the horizontal, which was precisely as far as Alf, the guardian of the ruined track, had allowed Phil and me to drive it. It was a white Volvo, an Amazon, vintage 1968.

  In a matter of weeks we would be driving it out of Beijing.

  From my vantage point on a bridge spanning the track I could look down beyond the car, and the cat's cradle of shadows cast by the bridge girders, to where Phil was standing talking to Alf. The old man's neck craned forward and his grey head nodded; he was telling the Brooklands circuit stories. In my mind's eye the lean-lined cars were just as clearly visible as they flashed beside and beneath me. The drivers wore leather helmets and goggles and their faces were no more than pale crescent moons. More than a dozen of them were killed by their compulsion to loop the two-mile oval faster, and faster just one more time.

  After the race-track was closed down and the war came, the site continued as an aircraft factory, for Hurricanes and Lancaster bombers and a runway was built so the finished planes could take off. One night during the Blitz the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit, and eighty-seven plane-makers were killed.

  In the years that followed the factory became outmoded and aircraft production
was moved elsewhere, and the site was turned into a motoring museum. The circuit itself was abandoned and left to crumble, cut off by the surrounding belt of trees from the populous web of suburban Surrey.

  A couple of hundred yards away, on that June evening, the paddock of Brooklands Motor Museum was humming. The bar was busy and knots of people were still gathered around the open bonnets of Bentleys and Buicks. It was the day of the last briefing for competitors in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. My co-driver Phil Bowen and I were one of the ninety-eight teams who would be taking part.

  We thanked Alf and said goodbye. He stood aside to watch us go, his back to the sun and his face dark under the shadow of his raised hand.

  'Wish us luck, ghosts,' I whispered.

  'Help us go well,' Phil echoed, just as solemnly.

  He might have laughed, but he didn't. I was pleased we had shared this secret superstitious moment.

  When we drove into the paddock that morning it felt like the first day at a new school. Cars were rolling in – a big silvery Bentley with sexy lines like a dolphin, another Amazon, dark grey and more finished than ours, an old Land Rover – all of them decorated with their red and yellow Peking to Paris badges. More than half of the entrants in the rally were attending. We would be driving half-way around the world in their company, and this was our first sight of these companions and competitors. I must have been in a tiny minority – maybe I was actually the only person who did so – but I looked at the people first, the drivers and not their cars. All other eyes went straight to the 1915 Vauxhall Prince Henry, the preppedup '64 Mk 1 Cortina, or the 1928 Bugatti.

  I hadn't reckoned on this. It was the exotic route that had attracted me and the challenge of the adventure itself. The fact that it was a rally for old cars had been a matter of insignificance.

  I didn't know much even about modern cars and it hadn't occurred to me to ask myself whether I was a good driver, although I'd had a clean licence for 25 years. I packed the week's shopping into the boot of my own car without understanding or having any wish to understand what went on under the bonnet. I could park outside the kids' schools in a space a couple of inches longer than the car itself, that's all that mattered. What was the local garage for, otherwise?

  Maybe if men and women adopted less of a Mars and Venus attitude to the design and function and semiotic importance of motor cars, a touch more equality and mutual respect in the matter might develop. Maybe pigs might also wing their way to Harvey Nichols in search of a witty little anorak decorated with classic car insignia. To most women a car bore ranks only a notch or two above a trainspotter with hayfever.

  Accordingly I knew nothing and cared just about the same about the rare vintage and cherished classic models that were lining up in their polished glory all around me. An old car was an old car, even though it was whispered that one or two of these were worth half a million pounds. But in this company I suddenly understood that my indifference might be a disadvantage instead of proof positive of my acceptability as a human being. The very language spoken seemed to be some obscure sub-dialect of English.

  – Torque down the head bolts . . .

  – Need a seven-to-one compression ratio . . .

  – Course, we've supplemented the stock system with 30-amp relays . . .

  – Double-check the rocker-box gasket. Seen what they've done to the Delage?

  To distract myself, I took a walk around the paddock and wondered which of all these new-to-school milling strangers would turn out to be the equivalent of the class bully, which the school hero or games captain, the brown-nosing form monitor or the charming cheat destined to grow up into a dazzling entrepreneur.

  I found more than enough material to speculate upon as I wandered between the avenues of chrome bumpers and polished wings and sponsors' logos.

  There was an English duke who looked exactly as a duke ought to look. There was a plain madman in Rupert Bear trousers and a pork-pie hat, several burly men whose scarred and oil-grimed hands indicated their calling as mechanics, women in serious earrings and maquillage, and a pair of slightly younger women in matched Bermuda shorts outfits who had already commanded the attention of the motoring press and camera crews. The line of cars queuing for the rally scrutineers already stretched out of the gates.

  I went back to find Phil, who had the car bonnet up and was knowledgeably expounding on the engine modifications to a small circle of onlookers. Even Phil was speaking the new mechano-English with acceptable fluency.

  'You can run on two head gaskets to help the compression ratio . . .'

  I nudged him. 'Phil, look at the queue. Let's get in line.'

  He glanced back over his shoulder and raked a hand through his hair. I'd seen this gesture before, in fact it was the first of his mannerisms that I'd noticed when we were introduced, eight months before, in a dingy hotel foyer in Kathmandu. He was vain about his hair. Even with oily hands.

  'Nope. I think we should hang on a bit.'

  If Phil had been my husband, I'd have argued the issue. But the whole point of our partnership in this enterprise, the fulcrum on which our mutual undertaking gently rocked, was the fact that we had no relationship outside it. We were both putting our disparate all into preparing for this bizarre rally, but we were polite to each other because we didn't know each other well enough to be otherwise. I swallowed my dissent.

  Later, we went up to the museum's first-floor lecture room to sign for our entrants' documentation. The crew list gave us a start position of 82, well down the field, because of our Amazon's relative modernity, engine capacity and likely top speed. There was a high-pitched buzz of nervous conversation in the crowd, like the early stages of a cocktail party that might not quite gel, before the drink takes hold.

  The driver of one of the other Amazons shouldered his way over to say hello. Daniel Orteu was preparing his own car, but he was buying his parts and spares from our ace mechanic and Amazon expert, Tony Barrett. Daniel had a pronounced dimple in his left cheek and a nice smile.

  'What's your start number?' he asked.

  'Eighty-two. What's yours?'

  'Sixty-nine.' The dimple deepened. 'I think the girl in the rally office fancies me.'

  The Rally Organiser emerged from the crush. His large frame and his lowering expression combined to give an impression of belligerence. I had met this man before, but he strode right past me and cordially shook Phil by the hand. Apparently non-car-buff women (is there such a thing as a car-buff woman?) were only visible in the shape of a well-rounded signature on a fat entrance-fee cheque. Phil raised his eyebrows at me. While he talked to RO I wandered away again. Two sides of the big lecture room were lined with wooden screens, and to the screens were pinned unfolded maps and photographs. I started at the left-hand corner and saw Beijing. From Beijing, wavering north-westwards and following the pink thread of a road, was a line of bright yellow highlighter. The line wavered across the first map and on right across the width of the next and the map after that, a defiant statement of geographical chutzpah that connected China to Paris via lakeside road and mountain pass and desert track. It ran under the Great Wall and over the Tibetan plateau. It slanted across the Himalayas and Iran and switchbacked across Europe from Turkey to Alsace. The route must have covered thirty or forty feet of map. Every inch was being closely scrutinised by drivers and navigators who peered over their bifocals and then scribbled on their own maps and in notebooks. They knelt on stiff knees to get closer to the accompanying photographs, which showed off-road sections heaped with football-sized boulders and river crossings in which water swirled up and around the car axles.

  At least, I encouraged myself, just one of my battery of fears about the event was groundless. I had been anxious that all the other crews would be young and fit and thirtyish, like Phil, and Dan and his co-driver in the other Amazon, and the matched pair of women. But it seemed that a large proportion of them was actually even older than me. There was a man in front of me who must have been in his s
eventies, and there were several others who could have lost a stone or two without suffering too much. If following the thin yellow line turned out to be a gruelling trip, I would probably not be the only one to find it so. Behind me, a woman was audibly worrying about the effects of altitude.

  'Camping at 17,000 feet' she kept repeating. 'What happens if you get altitude sickness?'

  'Pour another vodka,' someone quipped.

  Phil was now several feet into the maps, and instead of marking or making notes he was videoing the route.

  'I can transfer this to a VHS cassette for you, and you can use your video recorder to look at the map markings at home in your own time, instead –' he jerked his chin ' – of doing it all in a rush now.'

  'Good idea.'

  'I've quietly filmed the underside of one or two of the tastier-looking cars as well so Tony can have a look at what reinforcing and waterproofing has been done to them.'

  'Well done.'

  While I had been wandering around staring at people and wondering about the school sneak. Not for the first time, I felt my complete lack of relevant practical skills. The terms of our partnership agreement were that I would put up the money for our entry and be the co-driver, and Phil would be the crew leader, chief driver and camp director, mechanic and medical aide and general all-round expert. He had some experience in the field. Before becoming a full-time Amazon mechanic and re-fitter he had earned his living as an adventure tour-leader in Nepal, Morocco and the Yemen, but he had also worked as a pearl-diver, charter-boat skipper and mountaineer. He was one of those cheerful and confident people who appear to be good at things because they always have been, so there has been no reason or opportunity for disabling self-doubt to bloom and grow.

  On the other hand I am probably best at not being able to convince myself that I am particularly good at anything. I was aware that we made an ill-assorted couple, but for the sake of morale and crew solidarity I tried not to make too much of an issue of it. And it was true, I encouraged myself, that Phil had invited me to be his partner on this trip, not the other way round.