To the accompaniment of the Hammerklavier, we travel along the road Anthony Burgess — and Victor Crabbe — took into Kota Bharu (called Kenching in The Enemy in the Blanket) after arriving at the airport. It was 1955. Burgess was met by school staff; Crabbe and Fenella had nobody to meet them, for Herbert Talbot failed to appear as promised. Their means of conveyance was first a trishaw, then Rupert Hardman's car: '"We'll have to go somewhere," said Fenella. "I feel like death. Is there no way we can get into the town?" '"Hitch-hike, that seems to be the only way," said Crabbe. "That looks like the main road. Let's get on to it." 'Soon the sullen journey commenced, hard muscular legs circling, on the sandy road to the town. On their right was the conventional tropical paradise of sea and palms, slim girls bathing in soaked sarongs, attap huts and waving children. On their left were paddy-fields and massive buffaloes. Above them merciless blue and the sun at its zenith. 'But then they stopped their wrangling, for ahead of them a car had halted. A dusty car, and from it peered a face, a European face, and then a greeting arm. "A sort of Livingstone and Stanley," said Crabbe. "Nice of him." 'The face was pale, the eyes pale, the hair almost white, the eyebrows invisible, the eyelashes seemingly singed away. It was a young face, however, pointed, pixyish.' The scene is not so very dissimilar today, though without the slim girls bathing in soaked sarongs. Burgess writes in the first volume of his Confessions: 'Lynne and I, and Lalage loud on elected heat in her basket, took an aircraft of Malayan Airways [probably from the airfield outside Ipoh, now the Sultan Azlan Shah Airport] to Penang and awaited a flight thence across the spine of mountain and jungle to the East Coast. Yusof Tajuddin and his wife Puteh met us for a drink in the airport bar....we boarded our plane, Lalage howling in insincere chinta berahi....The principal and vice-principal met Lynne and myself at the [Kota Bharu] airport or tempat kapal terbang (place of flying ships)....'

• published: 17 Dec 2013
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