Changing World

For various reasons which are not particularly relevant here, over the past few months I have been doing a fair bit of house clearing, which has involved going through what has seemed like Himalaya-grade mountains of family documentation, some recent, and some going back into the mists of time. Amongst all this, I came across a diary and a magazine article taken from it covering a journey my parents made in the autumn and winter of 1973.

One of my elder sisters was (and indeed still is) married to a New Zealander and living there. My parents decided that that year they should go and spend Christmas with them. Now, the normal approach would have been to jump on a comfortable BA first-class flight, and be wafted in luxury via Singapore or Bangkok or wherever they were making the stopover in those days, and arrive in Auckland primed for the festive season with their daughter and son-in-law.

No, that didn’t cut the mustard for my father - he’d done that too many times before. So he persuaded my mother - and I take my hat off to him for getting agreement to this one - that rather than fly, they should drive from Sussex to Auckland; obvious approach to take……

So what is the relevance of a fifty-year old road trip? Why should I write about it and why should you read about it? Well, the answer to that is that geopolitics has changed our entire view and understanding of the order of the world. Reading what my parents wrote, the countries through which they passed which were of “concern” were those of the former east bloc - Hungary, Yugoslavia (as it then was), Bulgaria - and Turkey.  Indeed, the only theft they experienced was the car being broken into in a hotel car park in Budapest. When they crossed the Turkey/Iran border, it was as though they had found their way back to the “civilised west”. Iran and Afghanistan were both transited with relative ease - although the accommodation in the latter did not come up to my mother’s high standards….

But just think for a moment of the way the world has almost turned through 180 degrees in the last fifty or so years. This week is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. My Polish uncle - who arrived in England in 1945 as part of the free Polish contingent of the British army - did not go back to his homeland at all, until the Wall had come down. Likewise my mother, who didn’t visit her childhood home in the Erzgebirge also until the Wall came down, because it was, post-1945, in Eastern Germany. And yet in 1973, she felt comfortable and at ease in Iran, at the time of course ruled by the Shah.

Today, though, it’s all reversed. Everybody goes to the former soviet states of eastern Europe, and finds them mostly welcoming and thriving. Iran, though - and Afghanistan - have a very different vibe, and are most emphatically not welcoming to western - or probably any other - tourists. (Although I did visit Iran in the late 1990s, and actually found it an interesting - not disturbing - experience.)

If there is anything to be drawn out from these musings, perhaps it is that totalitarianism, of whatever shade, is not very welcoming to visitors. One last anecdote on that score - a friend of mine visited Albania in the late 1970s, and was one of only about five or six foreign visitors in the country at the time. He told me he was openly and obviously followed wherever he went by what he could only assume to be the security services.

Fences and walls built to keep people in can also satisfy the need to keep people and ideas out.