I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan of the third of them.
Category: Travel
Watching Marraz Biltoo And Jan Sooknah Play Football And More, Mauritius, 19 July 1979
An overview of my 1979 trip to Mauritius, courtesy of the wonderfully hospitable Biltoo family, can be found by clicking here or below:
Here is an extract from my third letter, which is in effect my diary entry for 19 July 1979:
Okay folks it’s tonight in fact and we are not going anywhere else so here is the news from today. This morning we wrote some letters and went out. We met one of our new found friends who works in the bakery and he showed us around that. Then we returned home, had lunch, and the Marraz took us to see the sugar plant – a most interesting sight, sweet!!?
Then we came home to meet Jan Sooknah. Marraz and Jan play football for a club team and we four, along with Bhavesh (Marraz’s eldest son) went there. Marraz is a superb player. He used to play for a first division team and without him his team would never have drawn two-all. Jan is okay but too fat!!!
Then we went home for supper, which was a superb curry. The food is all marvellous here. Then Anil and I went for a walk down to Lynford Smith’s, but he was out so we came home again.
A bit of bad news. We saw a beautiful bird out of the window and Marraz immediately went and got his own beautiful pair of binoculars: good job I hadn’t given him those binos earlier. What I plan to do is to bring home the binos and buy something here. In a way it is good, as Marraz has no car at the moment as it is being repaired, so plans have been changed and we will stay with lots of other relatives during the five weeks, so I can buy several small gifts.
Anyway, see you soon, lots of love, Ian
I think this might have also been the day that I bought some hand-crafted silver earrings for Grandma Anne. I wanted to get her an especially nice present, as she had always been very generous to me and in fact might (on reflection) have part-funded my flight to Mauritius.
It was an in-joke in the Harris family that Grandma Anne never really liked the presents she was given and that she had a trunk into which she threw most such presents after receiving them with grace, the present never to be seen again.
But she did like big, dangley earrings and I took soundings with Marraz and Anandani. The latter was the school mistress at the local primary school. She suggested that I go to the parents of one of her charges. They were silversmiths and would have a range of hand-crafted silver earrings of every possible description.
Anandani sent Bhavesh with me and Anil on this errand. Bhavesh blurted a message in creole to the parents, which Anil loosely translated as a statement that I was, to all intents and purposes, a member of the family and a threat that all hell would break loose if they tried to charge me a tourist price rather than a sensible price.
I chose a particularly dangley pair of highly-crafted silver earrings. They quoted a price. It sounded fair to me, but I asked them, through sign language and some very rudimentary Creole if that was the last price. They assured me through sign language and expertly-deployed Creole that it was absolutely the local, last price, below which they simply could not go. Anandani seemed very satisfied that she had done her bit when i showed her the wares and told her the price I had paid.
Grandma Anne said that the earrings were lovely when i gave them to her, but I still half-expected never to see them again. Except that is not what happened. In fact, Grandma Anne was rarely seen wearing any other earrings for the rest of her life – albeit only a couple of years. Either she genuinely liked them, or she was genuinely proud of the story – i.e. that her grandson had gone off to this far away place and chosen earrings for her, or both. In any case, the gift was a great success.
Alexandra Falls And Chamarel Coloured Earth, Mauritius, 18 July 1979
An overview of my 1979 trip to Mauritius, courtesy of the wonderfully hospitable Biltoo family, can be found by clicking here or below:
Here is an extract from my third letter, which is in effect my diary entry for 18 July 1979:
Dear Mum and Dad,
Hi! How are things? We are having the time of our lives here!! Just thought I’d tell you about yesterday. First thing was the trip to the caverne (just down the road) with Anandani’s brother (Marraz’s brother-in-law). Then Anil and I were given a papaya by him which he climbed up the tree to get. Then Anil and I went into the village, bought some provisions (i.e. nuts and bananas) and returned home. Spent the hour or so before lunch noshing and resting, as we knew we were going to be busy this afternoon, because Narrain was taking us to the other side of the island.
After lunch Anil, myself, Min and Baby (daughters of Narrain) set off for the other side of the island.
Left to Right: Baby, Shahil, Min, Anil, Nanda
Strangely, my memory of the papaya incident was that the gentleman did his stunt on the day we arrived in Mauritius, but it seems it was Day Three of our trip.
We first went to Grand Bassin, a place where the long pilgrimages go in Mauritius (Hindu ones). Then we went to Alexandra Falls and then to see the coloured earth (a plateau with earth of all different colours interspersed). I’ll be bringing back colour sample. There is some wonderful photography to be done in these places so we will return for a photographic session.
Then we also saw an incredible Mauritian sunset.
Then after supper we went out with our new-found Mauritian friends, down to a drinking house. Rum is very cheap here (£1.30 a bottle) as are bananas (10p for six). All home produce is very cheap. Anyway I’ll finish this letter either tonight or tomorrow.
Second Letter From Mauritius, 17 July 1979
I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan and then transcription of the second of them, which relates to 17 July 1979.
Dear folks,
As you may have realised from the drift at the end of letter one, I had the inspiration to save writing time. You want to know what I’m doing all the time and I want to keep a diary. Thus I am sending you my diary as I go along which is why I wanted to keep the letters for me when I come back. Please send me news from home about once a week or fortnight or I will feel forgotten.
This morning we first went to Lynford Smith’s house (the priest from England) who drove us to Rose Hill to Garçon’s house…
In July 2019, writing up these pieces around the 40th anniversary of my visit, I managed to trace Lynford Smith to St Barnabas Church, an Anglican community in Vancouver – click here.
If anything changes at St Barnabas, here is a link to a scrape of that page taken in July 2019.
… from where we went to Port Louis for the day .
There we had a workers lunch in the market, a full lunch for a big 10p (a little less). We then visited Jan Sooknah a cousin of Bill’s. who immediately insisted we go to his house for tea and was very pleased to see us. He is a lawyer. All lawyers here are very rich. He lives in the district which is the Mauritian equivalent of Beverly Hills or Hampstead Garden Suburb!!!
They want us to stay there for a while: we may do later. Then we came home for supper where we had octopus; the food is superb!!
We went for a walk after supper and befriended the sons of the owner of the café (very convenient) and some of their friends. Marraz Biltoo is very popular around here and knowing him means instant acceptance and friendship.
Sugar cane grows like grass in Mauritius, you just tear it off the trees. It has the fascinating property that the fibres (if you carry on chewing rather than spit them out) clean your teeth and are good for the gums.
We are having the time of our lives here, the weather is good And improving. It is so different from England you wouldn’t believe it.
I won’t write a whole letter every day; soon the news will become less no doubt, so I will dig sections of letters, but I will be writing each day, you could say.Anyway all the best, have fun, lots of love Ian
First Letter From Mauritius, 16 July 1979
I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan followed by a transcript of the first of them, which relates to 16 July 1979.
For those who struggle to read my beautiful manuscript, here is a dictated transcription:
Dear Ma and pa,
Well here I am, in Mauritius. It’s 7:15 AM and the sun will soon be making its presence felt. We are right at the tail end of the wintry weather (that means cold nights), but wrapped up in a blanket I was quite warm enough, so the assurance that I won’t need the blanket for much longer is quite irrelevant. Mindyou, I’d have slept like a log through anything after getting about half an hours sleep on the plane.
The flight was most enjoyable. At Heathrow we met a Biltoo, Arriss, who travelled with us and being in aviation he knows the ropes. Bahrain, our first stop (at 1:45 GMT 3:45 Bahrain time) was smelly, with workers sleeping around on the airport floors etc.Seychelles wouldn’t let us off, as it was raining when we stopped there, but the weather in Mauritius was lovely.
We arrived at 11:15 GMT, 2:15 Mauritius time and were met by Marraz (whose home I am in now) Garçon (with chauffeur to take all our bags) and Narrain (whose wife is one of Bill’s sisters). Of course they brought their families with them, (except Narrain as there was no room to 6 kids). First of all we drove to Garçon’s house.
The first thing that struck me on the journey was the extreme poverty. People living in rusty shacks etc. The second thing was the wonderful smell of the island, this mainly caused by sugar cane.
Garçon’s house at Rose Hill is like a mansion. We may stay there for a while. We quickly moved on to Narrain’s house – that was when we met Tiffin (Bill’s sister) and the six children. Then we went to Marraz’s house. Marraz has pull here, so the words Marraz Biltoo got us straight through customs etc. at the airport.
That evening we were visited by the Anglican priest from Catford [Lynford Smith] who I recognise and who recognises me. He says you can’t possibly see Mauritius unless you live with Mauritian people for some time, like I’m doing.Anyway I’ll be in touch soon, lots of love Ian.
PS Please keep my letters as I’m too busy to write everything down for you and keep a diary
I refer to Anil’s dad as “Bill” in these letters, but I remember him as Dat (or Dutt) and I am pretty sure everyone in Mauritius called him Dat. Perhaps Bill was his nickname or simplified name in England.
Confirmed Mauritius, The Overcrowded Barracoon, 10 April 1979
So this was the day that I confirmed that I would spend five weeks of the summer of 1979 in Mauritius.
The kind Biltoo family gave me an extraordinary opportunity, in 1979, to visit the beautiful island of Mauritius as a family guest, not as a regular tourist, for five weeks, along with Anil (my school friend at Alleyn’s) and his father Dat. It proved to be a life-changing, life-enhancing experience for me; an act of wonderful generosity and hospitality on the part of that family.
I have written up the visit extensively, starting here:
There is a placeholder posting with links to photos and film – click here or below:
As far as I can tell, this is the one and only one reference to my trip to Mauritius in my diary, prior to the visit:
Saw Anil today. Confirmed Mauritius…
I want to use this date to record my thoughts about VS Naipaul’s extensive essay/article about Mauritius, written in the early 1970s, The Overcrowded Barracoon.
Actually I cannot remember when I read The Overcrowded Barracoon at Dat Biltoo’s request. I am fairly sure that Dat more or less insisted that I read the article before making my decision as to whether or not to join the Biltoo family for five weeks in Mauritius.
It’s not a very complimentary piece. Perhaps Dat thought it would put me off. Or rather, that if it did put me off that it would be better that I didn’t join them. Or rather, that if the essay sparked my interest rather than put me off, that I would be a suitable companion for them. It did the latter; I was fascinated.
I think Dat lent me the book and I think that both my parents read the article too.
I remember thinking that the politics of that island sounded incredibly complicated and I remember not really understanding many of the points that VS Naipaul was making. For example, his comments about South Africa and Mauritius not being a place that would appeal to the anti-apartheid protester only made sense to me once I got to Mauritius.
In fact, the only point from the article that really stuck in my mind for 40 years was the notion that young, unmarried women of South Asian origin were chaperoned on Mauritius. Perhaps that point stuck because chasing girls formed a fairly major chunk of my brain space by the spring of 1979. I was 16 for goodness sake. Perhaps that point stuck because my father warned me quite sternly to be careful in my behaviour towards girls.
I do recall asking Dat some questions about the article before we went and that he answered my questions kindly, with brevity, mostly in the style of “you’ll see when we get there”. He was right.
I also recall one of my questions relating to the swastika symbol which I found perturbing but which Dat explained is a good Hindu symbol that had been misappropriated and used as an evil symbol by the Nazis.
On rereading The Overcrowded Barracoon 40 years later (August 2019) I realise what an insightful yet flawed essay that article was. The thoughts on Mauritian post-independence politics were fascinating, with the benefit of my direct experience and then hindsight in the following years.
But I think VS Naipaul’s derision about hopes for the tourism industry and the risk of overcrowding on the island have proved misguided. Naipaul was sniffy at the idea that Mauritius might increase its annual tourist footfall from 20,000 per annum to 300,000 per annum. Within 50 years of independence, Mauritius was happily accommodating over 1.3 Million tourists per annum. The population has also grown, from c800,000 to just over 1.3 Million. Almost exactly one tourist visit per Mauritian resident from 2016 onwards.
Whether or not the place is now overcrowded is a matter for conjecture, but it is certainly no longer a de facto slave colony, nor is it dependent upon munificence from dodgy neighbours and/or former colonial powers. Indeed Mauritius is now perceived as an economic success story and a major tourist destination.
But I had the opportunity to visit the nascent independent Island state (just over 10 years after independence) through and with a large, diverse Mauritian family. As my travelogues attest, that was a very special experience for a 16 tear old kid. I shall be forever grateful to the Biltoo family for giving me that experience.
Visits To Greenwich and Brighton With Mum and Dad, 29 to 31 August 1977
I actually set out this morning (I am writing on 31 August 2017) to Ogblog 31 August 1997, in the form of a “what were you doing the day that Princess Diana died?” That I shall do once this piece is writ…now done – click here!
But once I realised that Janie and I went to a Greenwich tavern to meet John Random and Jenny Mill on 31 August 1997…
…and then realised that my previous visit to Greenwich for such purposes must have been about 20 years earlier…
…and then looked up that my previous visit had been EXACTLY twenty years earlier…
…I thought I’d better Ogblog both anniversaries and start with the earlier of them.
Here is a link to the Flickr album with the photos we took on those three days.
The diary page helped me a lot with this one:
I had wondered, when looking at the photo batch, whether I had got some negatives mixed up, as it looked to me as though some pictures of my dad in Brighton had got mixed up with a day trip to Greenwich.
But the diary reminds me that we went to Greenwich twice, going to Brighton on the day in-between.
That summer was the first time in my childhood that we had no family holiday.
Dad must have been very short of money at that time – the business had been doing badly for a few years by then. Dad probably couldn’t justify the expense of getting someone else to run the photographic shop for any amount of time during those commercially better end of summer weeks, even if he could have afforded the holiday itself…which he probably couldn’t.
So he/we simply took a long bank holiday weekend – I suspect he just kept the shop closed until the Thursday.
I have done this as a photo piece using the picture captions to tell the tale; I think the pictures themselves tell most of the story.
The diary suggests that we very much enjoyed our lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern.
Probably we enjoyed the lunch so much so that we didn’t get to see all the things we’d intended to see in Greenwich that day.
On 30 August, we went to Brighton. Only three photos from there that day – all of my dad being blown or blowing in the wind:
We clearly decided to return to Greenwich to finish our sightseeing on 31 August. We took lunch in the Cutty Sark this time, which I don’t think we liked as much as the Trafalgar Tavern back then, if I am reading between the lines of my diary correctly.
The weather looks miserable in the 31 August pictures, as does my mum:
Holiday In La Manga, Spain, With Mum And Dad, 21 August To 4 September 1976
This turned out to be our last family summer holiday together. The following year dad was brassic (skint) so we just did some day trips and stuff, e.g. Greenwich:
Then the year after that, I did BBYO camps while mum and dad went off and did their own thing early autumn.
I turned 14 on this La Manga holiday and I do remember feeling, even at that tender age, that I had sort of outgrown those family holidays. I sensed that mum and dad wanted some prime time together and I was no longer intrigued by going off and doing stuff with random youngsters who just happen to be on holiday with you.
We stayed in the Hotel Entremares – not the sort of place I might stay in now, but it is still there and looks OK. Mixed reviews now.
The hotel (and to some extent the resort) was brand new then and I suspect my dad picked up a late booking at low cost for a place that hadn’t yet gained a reputation.
Clearly we were treated like visiting celebrities:
There is a movie for this holiday which, believe it or not, actually did yield some “famous for 15 minutes material” many years later, when Visa rewarded me handsomely enough and used some clips in one of their adverts and vines. Here is the whole movie:
Here’s the Visa ad, which shows dad slapping on the tanning oil:
While here is a link to the Vine (remember those) of me and mum looking silly on a pedalo.
In those days La Manga was positioning itself for tennis in particular…
…but latterly (he says writing in February 2019) it has superb cricket facilities by all accounts – at least Middlesex CCC bowlers have just toddled off there to train.
In fact it was reading about Middlesex training in La Manga that made me reach for the 1976 file and Ogblog this holiday.
1976 was the cricketing year the the West indies thrashed England in every conceivable way. I missed the ODI thrashings by being in La Manga.
It also looks as though I missed a thrilling London derby at The Oval too – click here for the scorecard. I do like a match with a happy ending…
…and a season with a happy ending too – see the 1976 final table. So hopefully La Manga will be auspicious for Middlesex again in 2019.
Here is the full stack of photos from our 1976 family jaunt:
A Short Mediterranean Cruise, Stopping At Malta, Catania (Instead Of Tunis), Palermo & Naples/Pompeii, 24 to 31 August 1975
We’d done a serious (two week) cruising holiday in 1973:
Clearly that experienced had pleased me/us sufficiently that dad snapped up a one week cruise as a second half to our holiday in 1975. Frankly, my memories of the 1975 one pale into insignificance next to the 1973 one.
The fact that I have not, in 50+ years, returned to a cruise ship might give the reader a clue that ships and me don’t really get along. I marvelled at seeing lots of places in a short period of time, but I think the novelty wore off, for me, and my folks, once the second cruise was done.
My diary sets out the itinerary pretty well – almost legibly:
I remember very little about the day in Malta.
I do remember the disappointment at missing out on seeing Tunis, due to an outbreak of cholera there. All the more disappointing because we docked instead in Catania, on the eastern side of Sicily, near to Taormina, where we had holidayed the previous year.
As a result, I don’t think we did any touring that day, saving our energy for the next day’s scheduled stop in Palermo, on the other side of Sicily, which we had not explored the previous year.
I recall from our 1974 holiday in Taormina (which I shall Ogblog in the fulness of time), that a brace of young American women, who were staying in our hotel, ventured to Palermo one day and my dad asked them to report back to us, as he was considering booking a day trip for us. Their one line report was:
You can put Palermo in the trash can…
…which still sticks in my mind, albeit as an unfair assessment, but in 1975 I was possibly a little deflated to be visiting, on my birthday, a place that, by all accounts, belonged in the trash can.
Perhaps consequently, dad arranged for us to tour places near to Palermo but not Palermo itself, if the surviving photos are anything to go by.
Afficionados of mid 1970s fashion will surely dig the flared trousers I wore that day. Photos of all earlier days on that holiday had me in short trousers. I’m guessing that mum took no risks for a day in or near “trash can Palermo” and insisted that I wore longer trousers as a preventative measure against flea bites. More likely, the day of touring in Malta had probably highlighted that long trousers would make more sense than shorts when touring.
It looks as though we celebrated my birthday in style…with fizz for the grwon ups and cake for me and the grown ups.
The final day of touring was the highlight – to see Pompeii. My parents had been before – dad’s 1961 sound film from that holiday being a classic of it’s kind. Pompeii is c3’10 to 5’25.
No film from our trip, sadly, just a handful of snaps:
My diary excitement the following day, which was all at sea, comes in the phrase
Captain’s Dinner Great.
I understand this to be a traditional thing on cruises and I obviously took great joy in the luxury of it and the fuss that was being made of me as a birthday boy at the Captain’s Table.
My 31 August diary entry simply reads:
Arrived home. Great!!!!!!
Glad to be on dry land, perhaps? Anyway, that was cruises out of my system for good. 50 years on, I still haven’t done another and don’t suppose I ever will.
Photos from this holiday can be found in two Flickr albums – this first one scans of prints – click here or below:
…or this one, which is still raw stereo images at this stage – click here or below:
A Week In Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, In The Hotel Argentina, Prior To A Short Mediterranean Cruise, 17 to 23 August 1975
Dad had almost certainly booked this holiday from a bucket shop using whatever paltry savings he had left after shelling out for my Bar Mitzvah. I suspect he got good bang for his bucks on this one, holding out until the price became too tempting for him.
The diary sheds little light…
…but we do have some photos and cine. Not much – I think dad (and mum)’s enthusiasm for holiday photos and the like had waned by 1975. Still, we have a few prints, a short snippet of cine and a box of stereo photographs, all of which I have digitised but I have not yet (end 2025) turned the individual images from the stereo box into digital stereo images.
Also, we have my memories of the place – assisted by the pictures.
I communicated with a lot of the younger people (who were mostly East German, Yugoslavian or Russian) through chess and cards.
Please note the writing pad with a posh-looking floral cover. Dad had bought up a job lot of those, which he thought might serve me well as a budding scribbler for quite some time.
By this stage of my then short life (I was still not yet 13), I clearly fancied myself as a hand-held cinematographer, following in my father’s footsteps:
We have, from this holiday, four-and-a-half minutes of cine, all of which is either filmed in Dubrovnik itself (when we went there on the Wednesday) or in and around the hotel. It can be seen minutes 7’20 to 11’50 on this reel:
Confusingly, we had been to Dubrovnik at the end of our 1973 cruise, so you can also see Dubrovnik at the start of this reel.
Sadly, no film from the 1975 cruise survived. I know I shot some, but suspect that the film got spoilt by getting caught in the camera or inadvertently exposed to light prior to process. That used to happen sometimes.
I also have a few impressionistic memories from our week in the Hotel Argentina.
I really liked the place. It seemed really cool – especially the great big round leather chairs and ceiling lamps – that felt futuristic/Star Trek like to me at that time. It just looks quintessentially 1970s to me now.
There was a strange late middle-aged East German resident who used to walk around the hotel all day and would occasionally approach people who were talking, put his finger to his lips and say, with a thick German accent:
Shhhh – there is sickness here.
Dad thought he was probably on temporary respite release from a nut house. (Dad’s choice of phraseology – I am merely reporting it to you, dear reader, not approving my father’s choice of terms). I was fascinated by this bloke and used to look forward to his unexpected interventions.
For years afterwards, if I was making more noise than dad wanted to hear, he would put his finger to his lips and incant, “shhh, zer is sickness here” in his best mock-German accent.
You can see all of the scanned prints from this holiday through this Flickr link – here and below:
The unedited stereo slides (in their raw and multiple form) can be seen through the following Flickr link – here and below: