Virtue - Blazing the HIppie Trail in 1959 Calcutta to London on £10

On The Road with Geoff and Jules

A Journey at the Dawn of the Hippie Era 1959-60

Gerry Virtue, Copyright, 2013

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Gerry Virtue

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Chapter One

He had sharp, pale blue eyes and a thick bushy beard. Seated at a low table in a corner, he was writing in a large exercise book. Small, slight, with sharp and beady eyes, he was totally engrossed.

I glanced at him from time to time, but he was so intent that he paid no attention to anybody or anything else. He had compelling eyes. Very alert, maybe a little wild, they gave him an edgy, self-confident look. Absorbed as he was, he seemed indifferent to the social niceties. And he mumbled as he wrote. Not loudly, but as though he was in some private conversation with himself. A very contained man.

It was Christmas Eve 1959, and we were in the communal sitting-room of the Salvation Army Hostel in Sudder Street, Calcutta, just a few yards off the main city road, Chowringhee. I was down in the dumps since my South African travelling companion had been booted out of India a day or two earlier for attempting to enter the country on an Apartheid era South African passport. So here I was in this Christian stronghold looking for a taste of Christmas, a festival largely ignored in the Hindu world.

There were others there like myself, a small, scruffy and haphazard collection of wanderers from various parts of the world. With its Christmas tree, decorations and fussy English missionaries, the Sallies Hostel was a haven. Although mostly godless and shabby, we got along well enough with the missionaries. There is something about such gatherings; everybody is a stranger and everybody is passing through, yet theres a camaraderie. There are outrageous travellers' tales and a constant exchange of information. Free doss-houses, black-market currency dealers, porous borders, temples that welcome travellers, suppliers of bogus student cards, and a hundred other items of vital interest to those with little money and big itineraries.

But in all this hubbub of conversation, my attention kept coming back to this self-sufficient scribbler. He had a slight build and was wearing a grubby blue jacket, old and food-stained, together with a pair of shapeless gabardine trousers, shiny with age. He could have stepped straight from the gold-fields of nineteenth-century Australia. With his thick beard and a profusion of brown wavy hair he could have been any age between twenty and fifty. He looked up and squinted across the room for a moment, then scribbled away again, hunched, with one arm thrown protectively around his journal. You could imagine him at the river bank peering into his sluicing pan, eyes alert for the faintest gleam, the archetypal digger of years gone by. Had to be Australian. When he next looked up I caught his eye and called Hello.

He jumped up, eyes gleaming, and rushed over. G'day! How ya goin? Australian right enough. A penetrating, almost rasping voice, and he preceded his words with a cough - a sort of compulsive clearing of the throat. I'm Geoff Watt, he said. Where're you from?

New Zealand, I replied.

Oh, he said. Yeah, sounding vaguely disappointed. I thought you were a Swede. He went on at once, I met two New Zealanders yesterday in the market. One was called Clive. Funny pair of buggers, always asking each other about cups of tea. Very polite, you know, but a bit peculiar. Where are you going? The words tumbled out in a rush, and he barely paused enough to hear me say I was waiting for a plane to England. Jeez! I'm going to England too! It was a commonplace, but he made it sound like a revelation. I've been on the road four months. Going like a beauty too, until those Burmese bastards buggered me up. And he continued with a lengthy tale about leaving Japan some months earlier travelling twelfth class on a French ship bound for Singapore, and then hitchhiking through Malaya and on to Bangkok. Hed then gone to Burma and hitchhiked up the road to Mandalay. In honour of the song, he claimed, and to see if the dawn came up like thunder, something Id also wondered. It didn't, he said. Just straggled up pale and wishywashy.

He stood there declaiming, one hand upraised, finger pointing to the heavens like Moses with the Ten Commandments. With flamboyant gestures he continued his tale, illustrating an occasional point with a little run or leap.

Hed been arrested in Burma for trying to make an illegal land crossing into India, and was taken into custody by a policeman on a bicycle brandishing a huge revolver. He illustrated this incident by careering across the room on tiptoe, legs apart, eyes gleaming, waving his arms and shouting.

The missionaries regarded him with astonishment; I was delighted. It was an unselfconscious performance, and our fellow-travellers regarded it with admiration, appreciating it at once as a most superior style.

He told me he would stay for Christmas dinner the following day and then hitch-hike to Darjeeling, the hill-station township perched on a high ridge of the Himalayan foothills.

After lunch we walked out on Chowringhee Road and he told me about himself. He was a keen athlete, a marathon runner, and a burning desire to run in some of the world's big races had started him travelling. Never quite good enough to be selected for the Olympics, he had decided the only way hed get to compete internationally was to make his way round the world to wherever these events took place. And so he had 'fronted up', as he termed it, for the Boston Marathon in the United States, then received an invitation to Korea to run in the Seoul International, and then some time later presented himself for the Japanese Marathon.

I never got better than tenth in any of them, but they seemed happy enough to have me there, I think the beard got them in ... they were really intrigued by it in Korea and Japan. The papers used to write me up as the bearded Aussie, and the spectators always gave me a pretty good go ... Id play up to them, and they liked that.

His money was running low now, so he needed to get to London, where he could work and build up enough funds to run in some of the English and Continental marathons. But he saw no reason to hurry.

You can go a hell of a long way on a few quid. I reckon I'll be four or five months on the road yet. He told me about his training in Australia where he used to run in the sandhills at a place called Portsea Beach with an assortment of athletes ruled by an eccentric old despot called Percy Cerutty. This volatile old bloke had apparently overturned all the orthodox methods of training and considerably upset the athletic establishment of Melbourne by producing an occasional champion. At the previous Olympic Games he was often to be seen, a suntanned, white-haired old man surrounded by athletes, holding forth at length about training methods.

They all wanted to hear what he had to say, said Geoff, and after a couple of hours of talking and demonstrating he hadn't even scratched the surface, so they arranged for him to give a lecture to the athletes in one of the little theatres nearby. Well, old Perce turns up and the place is filled - mostly blokes, but quite a few sheilas too - and first up he strips right off down to a G-string. Now, says Percy, I'm in the ready position for fight, flight or copulation! That sort of held their attention for a start. It was a beaut lecture!