Spooked by The Serpent

Over the past few weeks veterans of the Hippie Trail, a rite of passage for thousands of Western dropouts in the 1960s and 70s, have been forced to re-live, and perhaps re-evaluate, their youthful exploits. 

The Serpent, an eight-part BBC drama attracting huge audiences on Netflix, makes disturbing viewing for those, like me, who wandered across Asia in search of spiritual enlightenment – a journey that bristled with exoticism and danger. 

Charles Sobhraj, a con man, fantasist and serial killer later nicknamed The Serpent, plied his grim trade in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Thailand – all favoured destinations for young, naïve, truth-seeking travellers of the Woodstock generation.

 

The son of an Indian father and Vietnamese mother, Sobhraj spent his teenage years in France where he developed a taste for burglary, car theft, gambling and various criminal scams.

 

By the time he returned to Asia in 1970, the smooth-talking sociopath had developed a violent hatred of young, privileged, European travellers (or “long hairs”) whom he charmed, exploited, poisoned and, when he felt like it, slaughtered.

 

Flitting between Bangkok, Mumbai, Kabul, Calcutta and Kathmandu on passports stolen from his victims, Sobhraj embarked on killing spree that would claim the lives of at least 20 young people, including 14 during his stint at Thailand.

 

Sobhraj was eventually cornered by Indian police in July 1976 after a botched attempt to drug a group of French academics – an episode brilliantly re-told in The Serpent – and sent to jail.

 

By the time I arrived in New Delhi in late 1977, having travelled overland from London via Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sobhraj was just beginning his long prison sentence at the city’s salubrious Tihar Jail.

 

Exhausted, friendless and with dwindling funds, I was exactly the type of Westerner that Sobhraj and his partner Marie-Andrée Leclerc targeted. Watching The Serpent unearthed memories that had lain undisturbed for over 40 years. That lost chapter of my life returned in vivid detail.

 

What has disturbed my sleep over the past few days is the not the thought that I could have fallen into the murderous clutches of Sobhraj and Leclerc, but the inescapable truth is that my entire Hippie Trail adventure had been shadowed by danger.

 

My trek from Istanbul to New Delhi was punctuated by small acts of violence and intimidation. Held at knifepoint by an irate bus driver in Turkey, harassed by on the streets of Tehran and fleeced of my valuables in Kabul I had no illusions about the dangers I faced on the road to enlightenment.

 

At the age of 21 I was already battle-hardened, having picked fruit in Queensland, lugged bricks in Perth and worked as a day labourer on the Auckland Docks to fund my travels. I reached Europe as a deckhand onboard a German tramp steamer.

 

By the time I boarded the ferry at Dover I had long discarded the garb of a 70s hippie. In the King’s Road I bought cavalry twill trousers, button down shirts and a tweedy jacket (all second-hand, of course). My flowing locks were shorn and my tatty backpack replaced by a compact, pig-skin suitcase.

 

Instead of Kerouac and the Beat Poets, my literary heroes were Evelyn Waugh, Rupert Brooke and Philip Larkin.

 

While there is much to admire in The Serpent, the series does reinforce many of the ridiculous stereotypes about life on the Hippie Trail – images that trivialise what was for many of us a pivotal and liberating experience in our young lives.

 

Drug addled hippies dancing to Jefferson Airplane might make amusing TV fodder, but I failed to spot any such gatherings as I travelled across the dry wastes of Afghanistan, marvelling at the sight of its nomadic Kochi people, the vibrant night markets and the imperious mountain ranges that touched the sky.

 

Clutching copies of the Bhagavad Gita, we were escaping the stuffy conformism of home in search a more cosmopolitan, tolerant and spiritual place. Some were searching for an Indian guru, others were simply addicted to life on the road with its instant camaraderie and hilarious unpredictability.

 

My travelling companions were earnest, peace-loving and almost entirely male – there were no bikini-clad girls in Kabul in 1977 – but not stupid. Before CNN and the Internet, the only way to really learn about the poor, war-ravaged and desperate parts of the globe was to get on a bus or train and go there.

 

The Hippie Trail was an astonishing, fleeting and imperfect social experiment. Its sights and smells, passing friendships, periods of despair and moments of innocent delight remain with me. Even a sordid killer like Charles Sobhraj, still rotting in jail, cannot poison those golden days my vanished youth.

 

A Child of the 60s

Something has changed in our household. Our five-year-old son is a schoolboy. He is now a veteran of two weeks in the classroom. As I wander home from the school drop-off, I reflect  on the massive gulf that separates our boyish lives.

 

Myles goes to a cosmopolitan, inclusive and thoroughly PC Sydney primary school. The parents are mostly young professionals – the mums in leggings and trainers and the dads in rumpled shorts and designer stubble. The teachers are attentive and approachable, the atmosphere laid-back.

 

At Myles’ age I was attending a Victorian-era village school in Devon, south-west England. The austere building stood on the top of a hill overlooking farms and cottages. The nearby church of St John The Baptist dated from 1460. The village had a sweet shop, a pub and a lumpy playing field.

 

The school was divided into two large classrooms. I sat at the back and watched the clouds through a huge gothic window, yearning to be back on the farm with the pigs (my father was a pig farmer), Lassie my border collie and our obese pet donkey. 

 

When I was eight my parents sent me to a posh independent school in town where the teachers were shocked to discover that I was illiterate. By contrast Myles has been reading for two years. Thanks to his iPad and learning apps he has already acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the solar system, dinosaurs and the inner workings of the human body. 

 

Prior to COVID-19 our inquisitive little boy had travelled to New Zealand, the UK and the Gold Coast. At five years old my entire world was a picturesque valley on the edge of Dartmoor, a storm-lashed wilderness famous for its small ponies and fearsome prison. Eamon de Valera, Jack "The Hat" McVitie and the Aussie bushranger Moondyne Joe were all inmates.

My days were spent doing farm chores, building mud dams in our brook, picking wild strawberries or climbing up to the old Martello tower overlooking our farm; the tower was built, it was said, during the Napoleonic wars. In summer we swam on the pebble beaches of south Devon or tramped across Dartmoor in unsuitable clothes. We shivered through winters, nursing chilblains and waiting for the soft benediction of snow on our slate roof. It always snowed on Christmas Eve.

 

In 1962, life in this corner of rural England had not changed much for 500 years. Before the arrival of the motorway London was impossibly far away – our longest journey was to the livestock market in Newton Abbot, about five miles away. 

 

This all sounds very Thomas Hardy and I suppose it was. When I revisited our old farm (now a luxury country retreat) a few years ago the new owners told me that we were the last family to actually farm the property – the end of an unbroken 800-year-old farming tradition. At the pub in Marldon I was greeted like a celebrity or perhaps a ghostly apparition.

 

“Oi, Trevor come over here,” said the barmaid in thick West Country. “There’s a man who went to the old village school up the hill. Yes, of course, I’m serious.” 

I asked if Marldon still hosted its annual Apple Pie Fair (very Doc Martin). It did. As a schoolboy I’d been chosen to be the Apple Pie Queen’s page boy. We sat proudly on a float while a horse walked us around that lumpy field. 

 

By the 1960s small holdings like ours were uneconomic and my father became a property developer, renovating cottages for Londoners seeking a rural idyll in deepest Devon. Eventually we sold the farm and moved into Torbay – which later became infamous thanks to madcap antics of a certain Basil Fawlty.

 

Compared to Myles I had few luxuries. My entertainment was the farm, the woods where we found a WW2 ammo case, the apple orchard, the hay sheds, the water meadows. I have memories of moving a neighbour’s sheep down the narrow Devon laneways and hay-carting in the burning summer sun.

 

I don’t remember ever watching television or listening to a wireless although my mother must have tuned into Women’s Hour to keep her company as she prepared yet another family meal or baked giant slab of chocolate cake. Myles can access the digital universe by swiping a screen, but my window to the world was my brother’s copy of Look And Learn, although I preferred The Hotspur, a much racier comic.

 

Myles is a thoroughly urban kid with access to galleries, interactive museums, great sporting venues and a wonderful diversity of human beings. By comparison, my young childhood was narrow, white and unexciting. And yet I wonder whether he will ever feel the thrill of dancing around a giant bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, holding a newborn piglet on a winter's morning or gazing lovingly into the eyes of a teenage Apple Pie Queen.

Yes, I was, to quote Dylan Thomas, as happy as the grass was green.