"Thinking is the Best Way to Travel"

When I was growing up, in a small village somewhere far removed from the place that has become known as ‘civilisation’, we had geography lessons.

This was mandatory. Our head teacher insisted on it.

‘Head Teacher’ is, perhaps, a little grandiose for such a school. The ‘Senior of the Two Teachers’ may be a more apposite title.

She was known to us as the ‘Head Teacher’. And thus it remains.

There were lots of pupils split into two groups. There were those that were junior and went to one room and those that were senior—the ‘big’ people, that went to another room. Both rooms were large to us although they looked quite small when I went back a few years ago.

One wonders, now, how two teachers coped with two disparate groups. Not only were we different in terms of ages but also we were also quite varied in our abilities.

Jeannie, for example, was good at numbers. It was her that got me through the arithmetic required for the Eleven-Plus Exam that I took when I was ten years old.

I took it early because of my birth date and not because I was thought to be particularly gifted.

I had a bit of a crush on Jeannie. Sally, too, was someone I thought of as a bit special. Sixty years on there are the occasional thoughts of what they might be doing now.

Geography.

We had to learn all about other countries. We learnt about them partly because it would broaden our minds and partly because the State said so.

There were wonderful far-flung places that stirred the imagination.

The Gold Coast. A small boy’s mind would wander off into strange thoughts about beaches lined with glittering gold in the form of dust and nuggets just ripe for the picking.

It’s called Ghana now.

Then there was Burma. Deep jungles filled with Japanese soldiers waiting in ambush for Ord Wingate’s Chindits who would, heroically, rescue the local tribes people from the yoke of Nipponese oppression. A little boy could easily imagine himself creeping fearlessly through the damp, humid and moss-filled forests that were continually abuzz with the noise of insects and monkeys.

Now, of course, it is Myanmar.

One day we were treated to a visit from a man who represented ‘Ceylon Tea’. He came from the city so he was very posh and exciting.

He told us that the tea was Singhalese because that was the name of the people who grew it.

There were photos of exotic buildings and towns; one was called Colombo. He told us that there was a large industry there devoted to producing gemstones.

Then we had the tea. It was superb. It was mostly superb because we were there, in Ceylon, drinking it—in our mind’s eye. I’m sure that most of us could almost feel the heat on our skins.

It is, of course, not Ceylon now, it is Sri Lanka.

They changed the name of Malaya, too.

I collected stamps as a result of these geography lessons. Not really a philatelist but more of a wanderer around the World using stamps as cues.

I had stamps from all sorts of places that would require me to go to the ‘World Atlas’ and the encyclopaedia to search out the location of these countries.

Some of the stamps from Yemen had overprinting on them on them saying ‘Aden’ or 'Aden Protectorate’.

This necessitated another trip to the library to find out what a ‘Protectorate’ was and, indeed, where ‘Aden’ might be.

Malaya used to have stamps for each State including the ‘Straits Settlements’.

Then Singapore joined the Federation of Malay States so the name changed to Malaysia. Singapore left the Federation but the name remained as Malaysia. Singapore seems so fickle, doesn’t it?

We, in Malaysia, say that Singapore is a ‘fine City’. They fine you for this and they fine you for that!

I had hundreds of stamps from all over the World. Hundreds. Where are they now? Scattered, lost. When I joined the Air Force my Mum spread most of my things out to sundry small boys around the neighbourhood on the grounds that I should no longer need them.

The memories are still there.

The stamps joined up with a need for books. I had stamps from Brazil. I knew about Brazil nuts in terms of trying to get the things out of their shells without smashing them into small fragments but it took quite a lot of effort to find out about where they grew and what they looked like on the tree.

Amazing to discover that a Brazil Nut tree is the centre of an entire ecosystem within the jungle. If Brazil Nut trees disappear so will most of the wildlife.

That led to books that told of epic journies; books like ‘The Rivers Ran East’ by Leonard Clark that enthralled the adventurous spirit in a small body like mine.

There were stories of Scott and the Antarctic; Dr. Livingstone in Africa when there were places like Rhodesia named after Sir Cecil Rhodes; Nyasaland, Tanganyika were all countries in Africa then.

We learned of searches for the North-West passage, the Klondike Gold Rush, the Cowboys of the Argentine Pampas and many more.

We learnt from school and from stamps. From atlases and encyclopaedias. But, mostly, we learnt from books. Some seemed unlikely. For example, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame had a son called Adrian who wrote about hunting the Tiger Shark in "Lone Dhow".

Stirring stuff.

Such are the words that stir the imagination of a small boy and now? A boy that is not quite so small.

There is still excitement in books. There is still that stirring of the soul that comes from reading about adventures in far off lands.

But now those far off lands are the stuff of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Anson Heinlein.

Places that exist only in the imagination.

Places that don’t have their names changed to confuse us elderly boys!