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          *               A trip to Istambul         *
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   G.C.Wraith 15/8/2010

   I have only once in my life taken the train from London
   to the continent. I was 21. It was the 10am from Victoria,
   on the 1-st of July in 1960. As I clambered aboard with my
   rucksack, my glasses got knocked to the floor; one of the
   lenses broke. I believed, at that time, that it was bad
   for one eye to use the correction of a lens and the other
   not; so, finding a discarded cigarette packet on the floor
   of the compartment I fashioned from it an eye-patch to
   replace the broken lens. I remember well the picture of
   a jaunty sailor seated on a bollard, and the curious name
   "Pattreioux". In retrospect, I must have looked a curious
   sight.

   My tutor on hearing about my plans to travel during the summer
   vacation had asked how far I had ever ventured from the shores
   of Britain.
   "To Paris", I had replied.
   "In that case," he said, "there is a relevant college
   benefaction to relieve your expenses. Just send me a postcard
   from Istambul and leave the rest to me".
   Thirty five pounds was a useful sum then. There was also a
   benefaction to provide married students with sherry, but I was
   not married and I was not very keen on sherry.

   At 9am I was to meet Hugh Mead in front of the Golden Arrow bar
   in Victoria. Then we were to register our baggage and join the
   Anglo-Austrian group boarding the train. Hugh was a Mah-Jongg
   partner, the nephew of an Anglican bishop, and a proponent of
   a neo-medievalist revolution. All I can remember of it is that
   bankers were to be paraded on Wednesdays in penitential clothes,
   to cries of "Make way! Make Way! Usurer! Usurer!".
   He gave an enjoyable party, with strawberries and Pimms No.1
   on the lawn by the river. Luminaries of church and college were present.
   Some years later I attended Hugh's wedding breakfast in Paddington
   station. I have forgotten which platform.

   The trip had been planned meticulously by Ben Haines, whom Hugh and
   I were to meet at St Pölten station before 10am the next day in
   Austria. Ben had separate business in Linz. I cannot remember how
   the idea for the trip had been born, but I suspect it must have come
   from Ben. Ben's father was Professor of Anatomy at Baghdad university.
   Ben had travelled back and forth to school in England many
   times, by train. He loved railways, and practically knew Cook's
   Continental Railway Timetable by heart. During the second world war,
   he told us, Germany had appropriated Cook's Wagon Lits and had used
   them, repainted, for Mitropa, a company formed for that purpose.
   Sure enough, later, we were to see carriages in the livery of
   Mitropa in a siding outside Istambul station. Ben was unusual.
   During the summer he sometimes wore lederhosen and a straw boater.
   I was explaining this to my uncle as we sat on the banks of the Cam;
   he had come to visit me in Cambridge.
   "You mean, like that!" he said, pointing to a figure vigorously
   punting down the river.
   It was indeed Ben, who stopped to introduce himself and to invite us
   aboard. Ben had typed out three copies of a detailed itinerary of
   the trip, one for each of us, in booklet form. Mine, which I have
   before me, bears the legend

   "If this booklet is lost, please return it to Gavin Wraith, at ... "

   It was an extraordinary document, showing every stop, the arrival
   and departure times, actions to be taken - "see woman on boat for
   landing card" - the availability of dining cars -  even when to
   reset our watches.
   Ben's soul was stirred by the romance of railway timetables and
   the majesty of administration. All this prefigured a distinguished,
   perhaps legendary, career with the British Council. Abroad Ben
   was a beacon of the enlightenment; he radiated energy; he was
   by no means the usual expat.

   Our trip was to encompass a week in Vienna and a month in Istambul.
   In more detail:

    July 1-st
     10.00 depart London Victoria - "This train has a buffet car"
     11.34 arrive Dover Marine
     15.50 arrive Ostend Quay
     We take up our couchettes in the Ostend-Vienna Express. -
     "There is a restaurant car on this train until 23.10 hours."
     17.11 arrive Bruges
     17.38 arrive Ghent
     18.12 arrive Brussels Midi
     18.24 arrive Brussels Nord
     19.32 arrive Liege
     20.11 arrive Verviers
     20.33 arrive Herbesthal - Belgian customs
     20.52 arrive Aachen - German customs
     22.00 arrive Cologne
     Couchettes made up for the night.
    July 2-nd
     05.30 arrive Regensburg
     06.51 arrive Passau
     German and Austrian customs. A restaurant car is added to the train.
     08.12 arrive Wels
     08.33 arrive Linz
     Couchettes are dismantled into seats.
     10.13 arrive St Pölten - we meet Ben. We quit the train and
     reverse our direction of travel, taking the slow diesel to Melk.
     11.10 arrive Melk. Here we leave the train to inspect the great
     Abbey of Melk. We continue our journey by a boat of the First
     Danube Steamship Company.
     15.50 depart Melk
     17.30 arrive Dürnstein, close by the castle where Richard I was
     held for ransom. We spend the night in a B-and-B. My first
     experience of a proper eiderdown.
    July 3-rd
     15.25 board the Donaubus down river.
     15.45 arrive Stein, where we debark and take the train from
     Krems und Stein to Vienna.

    We stayed a week in Vienna at the Studentenheim, Pfeilgasse 4-6,
    Wien VIII. It was in this institution that I first encountered
    those remarkable engines for producing mountains of grated carrot
    which seemed to be standard fare for students at that time.
    We spent most of the time in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,
    with a visit to the Schönbrunn palace. I can remember that we bought
    a very large bottle of cheap wine, to enliven the grated carrot.
    It broke when we boarded a tram. Ach, studenter! I had my first
    soft ice, my first sachertorte.

    July 12-th
     00.50 We depart Vienna in the Balkan Express
     We halt at Murzzuschlag, Bruck, Graz.
     06.20 arrive Spielfeld  - Austrian customs.
     07.03 arrive Maribor  - Jugoslav customs.
     10.40 arrive Zagreb
     We disembarked in Zagreb and spent the night there,
     giving us a day to look around.
   July 13-th
     11.05 depart Zagreb - a restaurant car is added to the train.
     13.09 arrive Slavonski Brod
     15.07 arrive Vinkovci
     17.16 arrive Belgrade
     Here the restaurant car and cars for Athens are detached; cars of
     the Yugoslavia Express from Munich and the Pannonia Express from
     Warsaw and Prague are added.
     22.14 arrive Crveni Krst. Here the train waits 20 minutes.
     Coffee may be had a few hundred yards down the road from the station.
   July 14-th
     01.00 arrive Dimitrovgrad - Jugoslav customs. Set watches forward an hour.
     03.30 arrive Dragoman - Bulgarian customs.
     05.10 arrive Sofia - the Pannonian Express is detached from the train.
     08.48 arrive Plovdiv
     11.15 arrive Svilengrad - Bulgarian customs.
     13.30 arrive Edirne
     We quit the train and trek down the road into Edirne to see the
     great mosque. Edirne, Adrianopolis, has been the site of too many
     world-shaking events simply to pass it by, quiet though it may be
     now. In the evening we resume our rail journey.
     20.10 depart Edirne
     21.00 arrive Pithion - Greek and Turkish customs.
     22.45 arrive Uzunköprü - Greek and Turkish customs.
   July 15-th
     07.30 arrive Istambul

  We were three rather disparate students, but I think we got on
  well. Each of us had different reasons for the trip. For Ben it was
  a chance to display his organizational skill, and he was very much
  in his element as a seasoned traveller. Hugh was fascinated by church
  history and architecture. At Melk we studied a picture of the abbey:
  expensive carriages, bearing the mistresses of its functionaries, in
  the foreground. In Vienna, at the museum of the Order of Teutonic
  Knights we saw a tapestry depicting the siege of Vienna, with the
  Turkish army encamped outside. In Istambul we visited dozens of mosques
  and churches. Byzantine history was one of Hugh's great enthusiasms.
  We visited Büyük Ada in the sea of Marmara, where an Iraqi friend of
  Ben's family lived in hiding from the Baath regime. It was all a
  big education for me.

  I had another reason for going to Istambul. I had relatives living
  there, whom I had never met. From early childhood I had heard many
  tales from my mother about her father's family. Her father, Joseph
  Darr, had arrived in the UK in 1903, and had become a British citizen
  in 1906. His father, Haim Darr, was a refugee from pogroms in Kiev
  who had settled in Istambul and had fathered lots of children.
  At the breakup of the Ottoman empire a Turkish passport was not
  a lot of use, so many of the children had dispersed and taken
  other nationalities. There was, for example,  Uncle Moritz,
  who had gone to Finland, earning the White Rose. He left millions
  of finmarks to my mother in his will, but exchange controls
  prevented her from acquiring them. Eventually inflation reduced
  them to nothing. My grandfather had attended a school in Istambul
  where the teaching was in German; his family spoke French
  at home. Turkish and Greek were spoken in the streets without.
  English he had already learned, so by the time he arrived in England
  he was already equipped with many languages. My mother was brought up
  in Birmingham, and Joseph was employed selling goods made there
  around the Levant. After the first world war, Joseph had
  taken his family abroad for the first time, to Paris, where they met
  some of his relatives. Among them were Josef Nahum, known as Fifi,
  and Richard Darr. My impressions of what my mother told me about the
  Darrs and Nahums are rather blurred, and maybe hers were too. I
  never really got straight who was who, or how they were related to me.
  By the time of my trip to Istambul I had already met Richard Darr,
  and his Russian wife, Anya, in Paris about five years previously.
  They had kindly taken me out to lunch in the Bois de Boulogne.

  In Istambul, in his office just across the Galata bridge, I met
  Alfred Nahum. Alfred and Josef (Fifi) Nahum were sons of Hector
  Nahum by Gilda Darr, my grandfather's sister. So Alfred was
  a cousin of my mother. He introduced himself as "head of the family".
  He said that he used to insure the Turkish navy but that its ships
  were too rusty for this any more. This might have been a joke, but
  I took it quite literally. Everything about the situation partook
  of the fabulous, so I hardly knew what was real. Safest to take
  everything at face value. After a glass of tea, we were driven to
  lunch at a restaurant on stilts out over the Bosphorus. The
  driver was a young Turkish man whom Alfred said he was training up
  to take over the business.
  Over lunch - swordfish in samphire - Alfred enquired about my mother
  and about Max Reinhardt (whose mother, Frieda, was a sister of
  Richard Darr, and so also a cousin of my mother). After lunch we
  drove to a sizeable patch of woodland in Yeni Köy, outside Istambul,
  where the family had built a colony of separate houses.
  I remember being introduced to Alfred's wife, Sophie, and their
  son, André, who was nine years old.

  I was invited to lunch there on another occasion, and taken on a tour
  up the Dardanelles to Rumeli Hisari, a fort built by Mehmet the Conqueror.
  I can remember André sitting astride a cannon, picking off Venetian galleys
  in his imagination. This opened my eyes to a different perspective.
  In the museum in Vienna the Venetians were the good guys and the
  Turks were the baddies. Now it was the other way round. A useful lesson.

  I also met at Yeni Köy Emil Darr, brother of the Richard Darr who had
  entertained me in Paris. Emil gave me a jar of rose-petal jam, a
  delicacy I had not encountered before, for my mother. Richard and Emil
  were sons of Nathan, a brother of my grandfather. There were lots of
  other people at lunch there, and I guess they were relatives too.
  What they made of me, a student still wet behind the ears and probably
  rather grubby from travelling, I shudder to think. Did I still have
  the piece of cigarette-packet in my spectacles? I cannot remember.
  Perhaps I had dealt with that in Vienna. Anyway, I was treated with
  great warmth and kindness, even though I must have seemed rather odd.

  Hugh, Ben and I were booked into the American Language School hostel
  at Aleman Caddesi 23, beside Ayia Sophia. The second evening there,
  in the showers, I heard the lusty tones of "Nunc Dimittis" above
  the sound of splashing water. It turned out to be ***, someone
  I knew at Magdalen College. He disappeared a few days later, taking
  with him one of my towels, but leaving half a bottle of whisky in
  its place. Of course, Ayia Sophia was one of the first buildings we
  visited. When the guide explained that the doors were bronze, a
  breathless American lady said "Gee, did they know how to make bronze
  in those days?". I was very impressed by the Blue Mosque, with its
  pillars like elephants' feet. I liked just to sit there feeling a
  faint susurrus, a vibration just beneath the threshhold of hearing.
  Too many prayers for the walls to contain? Earthquake? My own heart?

  Slow boats, fat women and sticky sweets abounded. What impressed
  me more than the architectural wonders of Istambul was the generosity
  of the inhabitants. People would not simply point out directions,
  they would stop what they were doing and take you. The poorer, the
  kinder, it seemed to me. I felt ashamed. There was some rude behaviour
  too, of course. Ben gave up his seat to an old woman in a bus, and, quick
  as a flash, a young man tried to sit down in it. A stern imperial wag of the
  finger from Ben did the trick, though. This was half a century ago.
  No doubt much has changed.

  We left Istambul at 10.00 on August the 11-th, on the Simplon-Orient
  express, four carriages and some cattle trucks; nothing to glamourize at
  all. The first-class carriages, which we had hoped to exploit for
  our greater comfort, were locked. We had been beaten to them by the
  guards, who sat spitting melon seeds onto the floor. We arrived in
  Sofia at 05.00 the next morning, weary and grimy. We found, even at that
  time of the morning, marvellous Turkish, or rather, Roman baths
  that were open. Just what we needed. We took a bus out into the mountains
  to inspect a small church, famous for its stained glass. In the evening
  we boarded the train again at 21.40. We arrived back in London on the
  morning of the 15-th. Hugh invited us to visit his parents in Southampton.
  They had plenty of accommodation, as his father was warden of a
  student hostel of the university. They had carbolic soap, too.