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In 1971, at the age of 56, my grandfather attempted to motorcycle through much of East Africa, following some of the routes he had taken 30 years earlier while working as a British intelligence officer in World War II's East Africa Campaign. So unreliable were many of the roads in 1941 that even the famously robust Ariel had to have its competition frame leveraged. Already a keen motorcycling enthusiast before the war, his skills and experience served him well, helping him avoid a motorbike crash despite the many thousands of treacherous miles he covered during the conflict.
From an intelligence perspective, his skills as a linguist had served him well, enabling him to gather intelligence from both the invading Italian forces and the local populations, while his dark Irish complexion gave him crucial racial ambiguity, affording him a useful level of flexibility and identity camouflage.
Although this time he was not on his beloved 1940 Ariel 350cc with its cool, sparse chrome plating, twin tool boxes and custom-made leather pannier, he set out expectantly, perhaps hoping that the adventure would palliate some of the grief and guilt he felt following the unexpected death of his estranged wife.
For a man who was so sober and considered in his professional and military lives, my grandfather had a tendency to volatility in his personal life. Like many men of his age, it probably had much to do with an inability to express his emotions.
For his wife and children this often meant that he would become distant and occupy himself with some kind of "manly" enterprise when confronted with any form of emotional disturbance.
My aunt, and I must issue the proviso that her enthusiasm as an amateur psychologist has caused many a family rift, refers to it as "Boy's Own Adventure Regression Disorder", characterising it as a habit of reversing to childhood-like play in an effort to repress emotions. I'm not so sure that this isn't new-age therapy speak, and am myself inclined to belief that the adventure was in itself a form of therapy - although, being a man's man he would never have conceived of it thus, however unconsciously.
For, in a way, it can be said that is precisely what the trip turned out be. It may have taken a near-death experience, serious personal injury and a transformative out-of-body experience, but he would eventually return a more spiritually calm and substantial man.
Only two years previously there had been a coup d'tat and the nation's president had been assasinated, but my grandfather had no qualms about motorcycling alone through Somalia.
Already exhausted by grief and only several days into his sojourn my grandfather lost control of his motorcycle while negotiating a bend in the road not far from the southern city of Kismaayo.
All I know of what happened next comes from letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother's younger sister while he was recovering in a Kenyan hospital. Hattie passed away only last year and the letters have been a revelation to my family.
"Dear Hattie, " he wrote. "First, you must know I am in no grave danger. The doctor here is a good and capable fellow and tells me I will be home before spring. But you must know that, however strange a thing it may be to claim, my accident has caused in me the most remarkable epiphany.
"It was evening. I felt directionless. Nothing like the war when, even though I was often lost, my purpose and the greater good gave me fortitude and courage to face whatever should arise. No, this time, if anything, although it was not within my reason to realise it, I was motivated by what I can only describe as suicidal courage.
"As a result I had spent the best part of two whole days riding and had slept only very few hours over the preceeding few weeks.
"Strangely, I remember practically nothing of the accident, although Dr Fischer tells me this is amnesia brought on by the shock of the blow to my head.
"The memory of my epiphany though I recollect as vividly as any past experience. Suddenly it was if I had just woken; painlessly, placidly. As serene as the most reposed and clement of days. But I was hanging there, Hattie, just suspended in the sky, looking down at myself, a lifeless heap of defeated Englishman alone on a dusky African road.
"Suddenly I was aware of an unpaired common nightingale hovering not far from me, out there, as I was, wintering in Africa. Then, I was gone, yet strangely there, as if my spirit had just witnessed the death of all my earthly corporeality.
"Waking again, I found myself in a kind of structure, half room, half cave. It is then I saw her. There she was standing at a window with her back to me. Even without seeing her face, I was struck by her beauty, the grace of soul in her comportment.
"At the moment I realised what a fool I had been, how abominably consumed with self-pity. Immediately, I knew what I had to say. Placing my hand at the base of her cool neck, I simply uttered the words, It is all right.' She then turned, smiled with all her old warmth, and showing no sign of reproach or bitterness, walked away from me, suffusing as one, with divine light.
"I woke again, on the road beside me, the same nightingale, foraging for its next meal.
"Never before have I woken in so many different places as I did the day of that accident"