River Of Time by Jon Swain

Author:Jon Swain [Swain, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781407072807
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

Hanoi

On the days

there is no mail from you

I sit quietly

in my room and reread

what I have . . .

because I love you

I am alone

for the first time

in my life . . .

For weeks I felt empty, overweighed by a sense of weariness and lost happiness. An epoch had ended in Indo-China. That much I knew, and I needed time to be alone, to think. My life was changed for ever. My sorrow at leaving Cambodia and Vietnam was deepened by the knowledge that I might never return. I was tormented by the beloved and poignant face of Jacqueline, whom I had deserted in Saigon at her darkest hour and from whom there was now only a ghostly silence.

But there was little time for brooding. The days flew breathlessly by. I had to be patient, and writing helped. I wrote the story of the fall of Phnom Penh for the Sunday Times and was invited to join the staff on the strength of it. The newspaper recognised that I had no desire to work in London; it was agreed I should base myself in Bangkok. I soon found myself a little Thai-style house near Samsen railway station on the main line to Chiang Mai and the north of Thailand. There I tried to begin life anew.

In those days, Bangkok was an agreeable place – not so much pollution, not so many roaring Hondas and cars clogging its streets, a softer, less brash nightlife. It was full of comrades – ‘old Indo-China hands’ – rootless souls like myself searching for a new beginning and a definition to life after our raison d’être had been torn away. We met each Saturday for a buffet lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in an old wing, long since pulled down, of the Oriental Hotel; talked over old times and drowned our sorrows in beer and red wine. Spooks and diplomats on the fringes of the press corps liked to live vicariously through our outrageous stories of sexual adventures and derring-do, but they were outsiders; our stories and our laughter were really for our own benefit: the tightknit community linked by the common bond of comradeship and the hopeless courage of Indo-China. Our outward joviality and lack of moderation covered up, if we were honest, our sense of melancholia and gloom. Life seemed pointless. Nostalgia for Indo-China gnawed at our hearts; at least, it did at mine. The French call it Le Mal Jaune.

There would, no doubt, be other stories, other wars. Journalists who covered Indo-China were resilient if nothing else and in due course some drifted off to Lebanon and Angola, which were just heating up, in search of other wars to make them feel alive. I was convinced that for me there would never be another Indo-China, where everything had fused magically together as one perfect piece: the place, the war, the story, the woman I loved; making it the happiest and most romantic of places to be for a young man still flush with the optimism and raw idealism of youth.

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