Hand Grenade

Sometimes, when you're hitch-hiking, you get stuck. It's an occupational hazard, it's something you have to learn to accommodate, and one of the ways of coping with it is to find distraction.

Hitch-hiking in the deserts of Libya in 1964, we often passed the time by throwing stones across the half-melted tarmac at objects on the far side of the road. There were plenty of targets: the second world war may have ended almost twenty years before but the debris of the North Africa campaign littered the place.

This was one of the targets, a British hand grenade, and after we'd knocked it out of the sand where it was embedded - and hence were sure it wasn't still live - I picked it up and kept it. It reminds me of the longest wait for a lift I have ever experienced, over twenty-four hours in the heat of the desert highway west of Tobruk.

A hand grenade is a horrible piece of machinery, designed to splinter into shards of searing shrapnel when it explodes. I have often wondered who pulled the pin on this grenade, the circumstances in which it was thrown, who it was thrown at, and whether it did injury.

We had given up on lifts and were asleep when, at ten that night, we heard the sound of an approaching truck. Between then and eight the next evening, in four lifts, we travelled over a thousand kilometres, 750 miles. That's hitch-hiking.