I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 to promote Mondadori's Malian edition of Warday, I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random.

I ended up in Strasbourg, where I saw the cathedral, then suddenly rushed to the station and grabbed another train, a local, that crept across France, ending in Port Bou on the Spanish border. There I took a Spanish train to Barcelona. I was broke, so I holed up in a back room in a hotel on the Ramblas. I can remember nights of terror, being afraid to put out the light, wanting to keep the window and the door locked, living like a fugitive, never wanting to be alone, haunting the Ramblers, grateful for the unceasing crowds. The rest of the memory is a jumbled mess. I am just not certain what happened, except that I lost weeks of time. I remember something about being on a noisy, smelly airplane with someone who called himself a coach, and something about taking a course at an ancient university. I also recall seeing little adobe huts, and expressing surprise to somebody that their houses were so simple I returned to London in an odd way, weeks later than I had planned, with no way to explain those weeks. I cannot say how I got back. What I do know is that I found myself outside a hotel at about six in the morning. I went in and booked a room, then slept until noon. After lunch I went to my lodgings and found that my room had been let and my belongings stored in a trunk in the basement. The management was quite put out. They told me that I had said I would be gone for no more than two weeks and had disappeared for much longer. Since I had not kept a my rent, my room had been given to another student on their long waiting list.

At the time, I simply accepted all this, stayed with a friend for a while, then found a fiat on Westmoreland terrace in Pimlico, where I lived until December 1968. If such incidents were a frequent occurrence in my life, I might suspect some sort of trance or fugue state.