CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER.

The Khyber Pass

A recent blog was all about a wall, so I thought I would continue the theme with another story about boundaries, borders, frontiers, lines of demarcation.

In my career as a professional cricketer, I have been fortunate enough to play in some extraordinary places, in countries that I would not normally have visited, to say nothing of the many different cricket grounds in this country, the length and breadth of the land.

Pakistan was one such place. I had been selected to go on an English schoolboy tour and in our ranks was the future England fast bowler, Bob Willis. Opposing us in one match was the future Pakistan fast bowler, captain and prime minister, Imran Khan, now languishing in solitary confinement in prison… but that is another story. As captain, I presented Bob Willis with the new ball at the beginning of one match. Hello, we all remarked to each other, Bob is pacing out an inordinately long run-up this morning. On and on he marched, up the pavilion steps, into the dressing room and straight into the toilet. He had fallen foul of the sudden earthquake in the bowels that had struck us all at one stage or another in our tour. It was my unhappy lot as captain to go and fetch the new ball that he still had in his hand. Apparently, it was the only new ball the ground authorities could locate.

Bob Willis is top lef;, John Rice is next to him. Lonsdale Skinner is kneeling in front of Willis. Yours truly is bottom right. Graham Barlow is missing from the photo. He was in hospital with a broken hand.

Bob Willis bowling for England

But this anecdote is not about Bob Willis (though to his dying day, he was convinced that his immune system had been wrecked by contracting dysentery on this tour of Pakistan, which robbed him of the necessary armoury to fight back against the cancer that finally killed him). In the itinerary that we had perused prior to the tour, we had noticed a welcome day off following the match in Peshawar, the most northerly stop-off point of our travels. Time for a bit of relaxation with a beer in our hand beside the pool. How naïve of us. There was no pool. There wasn’t even a hotel; we were billeted in a dormitory of some Army barracks. And Pakistan is a Muslim country. We did not even sniff alcohol in all the three weeks we were there.

After breakfast (curry as usual – every meal was curry – that is why I stuck to a diet of eggs and. … little else), we presented ourselves as instructed in tour blazers and ties to be collected by two gaily decorated but distinctly ramshackle minibuses.

 All their minibuses were a bit like this, though none of us was forced to sit on the roof.

Our destination? Our tour manager was tight-lipped. It was a long, hot and uncomfortable journey, up winding, dusty, vertiginous roads – more like dirt tracks in places – into the mountainous region of north Pakistan. Those with a little knowledge of geography – and there were not many of those in our party – guessed that we were headed for the mountainous border separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, the legendary Khyber Pass. Once we had passed on this snippet of observation to our team-mates, the temptation became irresistible. Loud and boisterous references to Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in the film, Carry on up the Khyber, amused us for the remainder of the journey. What our driver thought of us, God alone knew. At the top of the pass (some 3,500 feet above sea level), we were stopped by a posse of armed horsemen.

Yes, they looked like this.

At once the air was rent with gunfire. To a man, we ducked down and cowered on the floor of the van. Our guide was convulsed with mirth. “They are welcoming us in the traditional manner,” he told us. “They are firing their rifles into the air.” That may well be, we argued with ourselves. But what about all those bullets? What goes up must come down. Should we take cover?

 A traditional Pakistani welcome.

We were persuaded that all was safe and dandy to emerge from our buses and were led to the look-out post that afforded views of barren, hostile cliffs of shale and limestone, scarred with impenetrable gorges and ravines. I could well understand why these tribal chiefs ruled the roost and were disinclined to hand over control of their dominion to any foreign power. I had more than a passing knowledge of history. The pass straddles the mountain range that separates the road from Peshawar in Pakistan to Kabul in Afghanistan. It serves as vital trade route from East Asia and the Indian subcontinent to Central Asia and Europe and is known as the Silk Road. For centuries it has been a strategic gateway for empires and has been the focal point of armed struggle, from the Macedonians to the Parthians to Genghis Khan to the Moghuls. The inhospitable terrain has defeated even the strongest and best equipped armies, from antiquity to modern times. Alexander the Great could not tame the region. The British had no more success in the Afghan Wars of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In more recent years, both the Russians and the Americans have been forced to retreat ignominiously from the region. As I gazed out over the fierce landscape, I could perfectly understand why. A motley bunch of English schoolboy cricketers dressed in blazers were unlikely to fare any better.

Time for lunch. Normally, hungry schoolboys would look forward to a meal break after a long and tiring journey, but too often on our travels in the country, the unrelieved diet of spicy curry had failed to live up to expectations. We entered a huge tent, colourfully adorned, and what met our eyes took the breath away. An enormous table was laden with dishes of all descriptions; it was a veritable feast the like of any laid on for a visiting potentate. The trouble was that none of the dishes was in any way recognisable to us. A few of us picked unenthusiastically at one or two. Most of us chose discretion over valour and stuck to the pitchers of cold juice. Our lack of appetite in no way discomfited our hosts. They descended like greedy gannets on the food and chomped and slurped away with evident relish.

About ten times bigger than this.

There was a lot of speech making, which even our guide seemed to have difficulty understanding. For an uncomfortable moment, I thought I might be asked to say a few words but thankfully our manager stepped up to the plate and uttered a few gracious words of appreciation. Actually, it was word-for-word an exact replica of a speech he had made at every function on the tour, but it was met with such an enthusiastic acclamation from our hosts that you would have thought he had declaimed Henry V’s speech before the Battle of Agincourt.

Time to go. We were escorted back to our minibuses and as we leant out of the windows to wave goodbye, we were met with another volley of gunfire. This time, we did not cower on the floor but none of us truthfully felt entirely at ease and one or two visibly flinched. We still expected the spent bullets to rain down on the roofs of the vans, but it never happened. It was a long journey back to Karachi with plenty of time to mull over what had been an incredible experience. Nowadays, you would not get anywhere near the place. Heavily fortified and controlled by the Pakistani army, it is a strictly militarised area, and all government agencies advise strongly against non-essential or tourist travel to the region, because of frequent violent clashes between the warlords and their tribes.

Carry on up the Khyber was filmed, not in the North-West Frontier of the sub-continent, but in Snowdonia. Eat your heart out, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey et al; we have been to the real Khyber Pass. Though, to be honest, we would have preferred a cold beer by the pool, had it been on offer.

Carry on up the Khyber……well, up Snowdonia, actually.