You’ll have to take this with a sprinkling of salt — or several fistfuls if you’re the sort who needs receipts for everything. To be frank, I don’t much care if you believe me or not. I know what I’ve lived, and that’s quite enough for me.
Tall tales of derring-do from the journals of Ashey De Pfeffel Worth-Saying MC, adventurer, diplomat, inventor, secret agent, quarter-Gypsy diaryist and gentleman. Now returned to his native Debatable Lands, Mr Worth-Saying drives a sports car, reads at church, applies for part-time work in supermarkets and reflects upon a previous life more interesting in a world not then gone mad.
It was the summer of eighty-something, and I was at ground in the most anonymous small town tucked within Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle. The kind of place only a gentleman in a frantic hurry can find at short notice. Let’s just call it a two-street poblacion in Laos – that most Laotians would struggle to know of let alone point to on a map. Imagine a hamlet in the Cairngorms well from the tourist trail and covered in jungle.
Why? A North African affair I thought long past had taken a turn for the operatic. Regular readers will be aware of a girl with a moustache in a Tangier Docks house of ill repute. I accidentally lodged there while tracking a particular type of wintering upper-class Englishman who might fall prey to a bit of well-deserved blackmail.
Turned out she had an angry and monied grandfather with a fast camel and a worrying reach. As a fat lady Madame began to clear her throat and arrange her music, I had no interest in becoming a bullet-riddled accompaniment. Laos it had to be. The jungle terraces offered relative peace. Assuming you kept out of the local trade in strong-smelling sticky brown gum flown incognito across borders in return for clandestine sacks of high-denomination oblong papery stuff printed in green.
There were other fish to fry, or rather people to pluck, amongst the sweltering heat, and tropical fruits so luscious you’d consider marrying one. After finding my feet, I fell into the habit of frequenting a tea shop run by a woman called Wong who had eyes like twin moons and an attitude suggesting she could kill with a single chopstick blow to the jugular.
Now, my business back then was a shifting sort of thing. I dabbled in what you might call journalism and in research that blurred into espionage with a small ‘e’. As a sideline, that spot of blackmail and the kind of logistics done on behalf of Her Majesty which, all the same, you’d never talk about over drinks on one of Her embassy’s lawns. An occasional side bet on upcoming events that a gentleman of the clandestine world might have a bit of influence on oiled the wheels of personal finance. As did spending less than the daily subsistence forwarded by Mrs Thatcher.
On this particular Tuesday, I was nursing a tepid tea and considering a future in buying cheap rice in the countryside and selling expensive rice in the city, when a wiry man the right age to be my uncle slid into the chair opposite. Introducing himself as Lucien, after a few syllables I detected a cartoon cut-out colon of the old school looking like a sketch of a weasel wearing aviators.
‘I might ‘ave a job for you,’ he said in an accent born in sleepy central France, honed in one of the bigger cities, finished in the back streets of Marseille and fine-tuned in the port’s infamous Les Baumettes prison before being corrupted in a Gallic Indo-Chinese colony or two. As he spoke, he rolled a cigarette in the exaggerated flair of a man who had nothing but time, and with the fingers of one trained in the cathedrals of crime.
‘Of course, you might,’ I replied.
‘What do you know of the Princess Khambai?’
One thing I’ve learned in a life of adventure is never to confess ignorance to a Frenchman in a street café in rural Laos. He waited for my reaction. I gave him my best inscrutable stare, the one I’d honed everywhere from the back alleys of Karachi to the difficult side of the Iron Curtain.
‘Every inch of her,’ I bluffed.
He smiled a smile only a diet of mountain rice and the finest colonel’s mess dentist in the Foreign Legion can produce.
‘You will know the Princess is at present, ‘ow you say, a guest of the Fighting Monks of Phou Sombat. Those notorious hoarders of all that is beautiful. Perhaps ‘ostage would be a better word.’
He sniggered.
‘But a ransom is to be paid. Modest, on account of a fall from grace of an under-abbot, corrupted by temptation. He will look the other way at the vital moment as events take their course. But the precious one needs a chaperone from Phou Sombat to safety over the border at Mong Tung. Money no object, a five-figure sum. Not the easiest of routes, there will be the aid of a dogsbody, a poor soul one takes pity on who will do anything for a thousand bucks – to fetch and carry and perhaps take a bullet for the success of the enterprise.’
Although I had to feign knowledge of the Princess, I knew of Mong Tung. Across the frontier in Burma, a boom town of everything notorious, hewn from the jungle in months rather than years, and a light aircraft’s tankful of gas from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Laos, Thailand and Communist China. Dozens rather than hundreds of weeks earlier, no more than a platelayer’s hut on a railway line built by prisoners of war, it was now a veritable clearing house of crime and a staging post for sin.
‘You have a passport, Mr Worth?’
‘Several.’
‘In which case, with your permission, may I share ze plan?’
Game on.
***
Business complete, I drained the last of my chai as Mrs Wong tidied the table and straightened M. Lucien’s empty chair.
‘Anything else?’ she enquired.
I pushed my cup towards her.
‘A telling of the future.’
She wrinkled her brow and narrowed her eyes as she stared at the minute leaves dotted about the mysterious watercolour insides of a Wong Café bone china cup.
‘I see travel, danger, deception, fear, greed, a beautiful woman. And the need for a pilot, a Cessna and a parachute.’
‘Do it,’ I instructed Mrs Wong.
One of the Kowloon City Wongs, the tea shop proprietor had more than a taste of the Triads about her, more than a scent of the Snakeheads. Can Mrs Wong arrange a plane, pilot and chute in what little is left of a Tuesday morning after a retired ex-convict Foreign Legion Colonel’s business meeting with a Worth-Saying? Does the Walled City of her Hong Kong childhood look like a wall?
An hour later I took off from an abandoned airstrip under a sky blushing with tropical light. Strapped into a harness last inspected during the Nixon administration, I stared out over the jungle canopy, wondering how my life had reached this point. Then again, there are worse places to be than boots on the dust after being flung from a plane over the lawless hills of Laos in anticipation of a rendezvous with a Princess being held by fighting monks. Then again, maybe not.
Mrs Wong’s idea of a your-life-in-his-hands low-flying taxi driver was an alcoholic Australian named Midge who flew the Cessna as though high altitude and straight lines were war crimes. Though at first meeting I wouldn’t trust him with a penknife, let alone a joystick, he turned out to be absurdly useful in the air.
By mid-afternoon, we were looking down on a vibrant palm canopy while tree-hopping in the vague direction of Phou Sombat. They say your life flashes before you as you’re about to die. On anticipating a jump out of a dangerous tin can into an even more perilous jungle, my own passed afore me. Pumping adrenaline thinned my habitual mild exaggeration and slight embellishment to stark reality.
I may have been overheard mentioning — while holding court at a Tarot table in a sleazy Antwerp docks bar, or in the roughest Mahjong den in Davao City — the time Mrs Thatcher sent me on the parachute course. The candid truth, now that I’m this close to death, is that just because I turned up and tried my best, doesn’t mean I passed.
A tap on the shoulder and a shouted conversation changed Midge’s instructions from ‘open a door and kick me out’ to ‘find a cosy landing strip and invite me to disembark’. And here’s an extra 50 dollars if such a manoeuvre uses up yet more aeroplane petrol.
The advantage of being the first white man seen by locals at a tribal clearing — just barely usable as a landing strip — is that they’re open to bartering for an unused parachute while the European turns his reserve chute into a backpack.
In another stroke of good fortune, despite the lost tribe being dressed in loincloths, carrying spears and communicating only in clicks, they had their own tuk-tuk. As a swap for an unused chute, it was this contraption that rattled and clattered me along an ancient headhunter’s trail to the public market in Phou Sombat.
With not much other to do than loaf about until nightfall, I spent the rest of the daylight dodging pickpockets, avoiding Fighting Monks and buying little knick-knacks that might ingratiate me to a Princess.
Suffice it to say, later in the day, if curiosity did overcome the inscrutable Phou Sombatese, a bamboo slit twitcher with a bedroom adjoining the alley next to the monastery wall nearest to the jungle might have spotted this white devil waiting under a street lantern beside a drainpipe.
With patience, they would have also noticed a gal in grey pyjamas shinnying down the guttering at 2 a.m. See but not hear, as the escape was as silent as a Parson’s monkey — capable of holding its breath for three hours — hiding from one of the few remaining forest tigers.
Although I whispered, they may have heard me introduce myself in the local dialect, which I’d picked up while haggling in the marketplace. As one should when meeting royalty, I began, ‘I’m Mr Worth-Saying. How is the Princess?’
She smiled and rubbed her tummy. Perhaps a greeting in these parts?
‘Very pleased to meet you, Princess, I’m your chaperone to Mong Tung.’
Puzzled and barefoot, she replied, ‘What?’
In the native lingo, I repeated my greeting and added that we seemed to be missing the dogsbody.
‘Speak English,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t understand.’
The accent was clipped. Even an ignoramus could place it to the Michaelmas-only Saturday afternoon extra English class available at The Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
‘The dogsbody? Shall we give him ten minutes? I could do with a hand to carry this damned reserve chute.’
‘What? Time!’ she said, adding, ‘Quick, quick!’
We sprinted to just beyond the fringe of the jungle, and crouched far enough inside the impenetrable humid mass for even the most determined of bamboo slit twitchers not to be able to see us.
I tried again, ‘Your Imperial Highness, it’s with the greatest pleasure.’
She interrupted, pulling the face a Southeast Asian girl makes toward a foreign gentleman when she’s about to vomit on him.
‘Call me MuMu,’ she insisted, adding, ‘the clothes?’ She rubbed her tummy again.
I addressed my emergency chute. Another good reason for not jumping out of Midge’s Cessna was that the space where my reserve should have been held a different kind of silk. The type Mrs Wong thought an escaping lady aristocrat might wear while hacking through a jungle. With acres of stylish sinh wrapped around her pjs, and a stout pair of sensible ‘walks’ about her size zero feet, all thought of a now delighted Miss MuMu throwing up evaporated. But she retained the annoying habit of touching her tum.
I began to worry about what was happening inside the elfin frame. With child? Deflowered by a fallen under-abbot, thence easily blackmailed into aiding an escape? Stomach trouble? Not uncommon in these latitudes, more so, one assumes, on a monastery prison diet. Not for the first time, was I going to spend all night listening to a beautiful young woman having diarrhoea?
‘Mr Worth,’ she whispered, ‘The plan? The maps? The compass? We must head further into the mountains, yes? Perhaps three days of hard hiking? Quick, quick!’
Hiking across mountains? Can’t be bothered with that.
‘We’re going on the train.’
She made the ‘Oooo’ noise. As with the vomit face, this is peculiar to ladies in Southeast Asia. Grammatically, it is known as the ‘female inquisitive exasperate’ and translates to ‘Are we now? Is it wise?’
‘If we head west, we’re bound to reach the railway line as hereabouts the iron road runs north to south,’ I assured her.
‘Mr Worth, the jungle is dense and hilly. We will be lost. On the night air the last of the mountain tigers can smell fear,’ she opened a palm and held it towards me, ‘especially that of the white devil, from twenty miles.’
‘It’s not far. We can navigate by the stars.’
She averted her hand from myself to the impenetrable canopy of branches we crouched beneath.
‘There will be clearings, Miss MuMu, and if you can climb down a monastery drainpipe, I’m sure you can manage up a tree.’
She made a ‘humpf’ noise. Universal of the opposite sex, it means ‘Men!’
‘One final thing, Mr Worth, on the trail, assuming we survive, the frontier may as well not be there. But by train. The guards? The checks? The fences? The border posts?’
‘You underestimate me, Miss MuMu.’ It was my turn to do some tummy tapping. ‘Literally, your passport to freedom is tucked inside a poacher’s pocket beneath my belt.’
After a few shinnies up trees (as expected, she was expert) and despite numerous pauses to ensure we weren’t being followed by an angry Fighting Monk or a hungry forest tiger, sooner than providence might be obliged to provide, we found ourselves beside the railway line. Of the narrow gauge and made from the sweat and blood of prisoners of war, it wound along tortuous curves aside perilous drops on its way to the border.
Travelling slowly, the overnight service was amenable to request stops. With no need to hurry to a station, we ambled over lines and sleepers part overtaken by nature. From time to time, I knelt to press an ear to the track. I assured Miss MuMu that a seasoned travelling gentleman can perceive a singing in the rails from dozens of miles distant.
‘We haven’t missed it. Heading towards us. About an hour away.’
A slight break in the jungle allowed a glimpse of the infinite night sky above. The pair of us stared upwards to distant planets and stars. Time stood still. All too soon, the clock began to tick again as a vibration about the tracks which even Miss MuMu could hear was followed soon after by the humph humph of an engine labouring towards us.
As it rounded a bend, the drawbar lights of a puffing billy – meant to warn the driver of a fallen tree or a loitering pygmy boar – revealed myself and Miss MuMu with our arms raised to request a stop.
With all the skill of an experienced driver and the well-honed eye of the time-served engineer, an artisan’s skilful twist of the regulator and tug of the brake not only stopped the train, but brought it to a halt just as myself and my companion were opposite to door to coach 5467R – first-class sleeping for Mong Tung.
Thanks to a similar wealth of experience, the guard was already standing there to help us aboard, take our fare, and show us to an empty compartment – all teak and inlay and crisp white sheets. As a gentleman chaperone should, I took the upper bunk and Miss MuMu the lower. My hopes of being indecently quick to sleep were dashed when my lady companion felt obliged to speak.
‘Mr Worth,’ she began, ‘the Princess is vulnerable. Perhaps a sharing of a bunk?’
Wary of that bad stomach and the kind of temptress that might corrupt an under-abbot, and having been vomited on by one too many Asian girls in the past, I ignored her and rolled over while pretending to snore.
I hoped for a deep, deserved and uninterrupted somnolence all the way to the border. I was disappointed. I dreamed of the dogsbody. Poor soul. Did he even reach Phou Sombat? Caught by the monks and tortured? Perished in the jungle and eaten? Not to worry, looking on the bright side, one assumed his fee would be going spare.
‘Mr Worth, Mr Worth,’ I was being shaken awake, ‘A noise in the corridor. I chanced a peep, a Fighting Monk comes this way, cabin to cabin. The Princess is in great danger.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Hmm, bald, clothed in orange, a scar below the right side of the mouth, a bulge about the right breast concealing a Beretta. Dark eyes. Dark, dark, all-seeing eyes. Mr Worth, I am so frightened.’
I wondered if that’s what had happened to the dogsbody? Caught by a Fighting Monk panhandling public transport in anticipation of a heist. But a note of caution nagged from the back of my mind.
‘Mr Worth, the Fighting Monk, footsteps!’
We crept to the door, slid it open a little and peered through the resulting slit.
‘A Fighting Monk, you say,’ I whispered, as she stood behind me armed with an unplugged Vientiane & Up Country Joint Railway standard-issue bunkside lamp, sans, because of a shortage of such things in these parts, a light bulb.
‘Nothing to worry about, Miss MuMu.’
I pulled the door open to its widest extent and stepped into the corridor. A figure approached me. Blocking the way, a giant of a man stood wrapped in an orange garment, sure enough with a bulge about the chest. Moonlight showed a scar on the right side of the chin. Just as I suspected.
He spoke.
‘Tickets, please.’
For the bulge did not define a Beretta but the outline of the full 497-page V&UCJR train timetable.
‘Miss MuMu, may I introduce the legendary Sergeant Ko Aung U Hlaing, of the Vientiane & Up Country excess fares department. A master of disguise, Sgt Hlaing uses his great skill to creep up on suspected fare dodgers. And may I remind you, officer, you remain well regarded far from these shores, especially to subscribers of the Railway Gazette International, who, as you know, read monthly of your serialised exploits.’
The sergeant blushed.
‘But I must say,’ I added, ‘I’m a bit disappointed such a thing as hiding from the ticket collector exists amongst the clientele of first-class sleeping.’
‘Things aren’t what they used to be, Mr Worth. A problem exists in Mong Tung with, what you would call in English, ‘les nouveau riche’.’
Myself and Sergeant Hlaing pulled the same disparaging face. Realising he knew me by name, I raised an eyebrow and said in surprise, ‘Have we been introduced?’
‘Excuse me,’ he replied, ‘I am not a vain man but the articles of my exploits are forwarded to me by a well-meaning aunt. I feel obliged. I recognise yourself from a feature about the rails around Murmansk during a midwinter recce of the submarine bunkers thereabouts.’
‘Messy business, Sgt Hlaig, I prefer not to be reminded.’
Back in our bunks and following another lurid dream featuring the missing dogsbody, I was woken again by Miss MuMu, this time in an alarmed state and with her sinh over her head. Although the girl was shaking the train was not, for we had stopped.
‘The border, Mr Worth, the guards, where must I hide? The Princess is in great peril.’
‘Hide in plain sight, My Heart,’ I replied (for I was beginning to feel an affection for her), ‘Lie on the floor and curl yourself into a ball.’
Seconds later, a border guard filled our doorway. Bereft of scar, with a full head of hair and in black uniform rather than orange robe, he was no Fighting Monk or disguised ticket collector. With a real Beretta held where a more welcoming official might hold an excess fares book, he bellowed, ‘Name, occupation, passport?’
‘Ashley De Pfeffel Worth-Saying MC,’ I slipped my hand inside my poacher’s pocket and, withdrawing, continued, ‘Queen’s Messenger,’ while thrusting my crimson diplomat’s passport towards him.
He hesitated. Would he be fooled by my ‘luggage’?
‘And the lady?’
He wasn’t.
Although her head was covered, even an eye inexperienced in the artistry of frontier ruses would have spied feet sticking out from a bundle of exotic silks. Not to worry.
‘That’s no lady, that’s diplomatic baggage. Now go away.’
Back in our bunks, and just as I was hoping to fall back to sleep, Miss MuMu became curious about my decoration.
‘The Military Cross, Mr Worth?’ she purred, ‘A girl can find a big award most attractive.’
‘Not quite,’ I replied. ‘The Mothers of the Crucifix award a medal to those who save the Pope’s life. Another difficult day at the office. Moro terrorists dressed as priests trying to kick off a civil war with an assassination during a Papal visit. Disguised as a Philippino schoolgirl, I saved His Holiness’s life. If or when he eventually dies in his sleep, the nuns promise to send a bar.’
‘Why as a schoolgirl, Mr Worth? Ah, I understand. You happened to have the uniform in your travelling gentleman’s luggage. You really are the epitome of a middle-middle-class public school Englishman. Mr Worth MC, it is a privilege to lie on the bunk beneath you.’
Just as I thought she would roll over and fall asleep, she burst into the third person again.
‘But Mr Worth, the Princess is vulnerable during sleep. Perhaps if we shared?’
Shocked, I tell you. Standards amongst the royal families of Southeast Asia have dropped. As for The Cheltenham Ladies’ College, won’t catch me sending a daughter of mine to that hellhole of depravity. Recalling a solemn oath made to Mrs Worth-Saying on our wedding day, I changed the subject.
‘Did you know, the Parsons monkey isn’t named after ordained clergy in the English countryside, but an actual person? Aluithous Parsons, two years ahead of my father at the Royal School of Military Engineering. A good egg, he fell across a number of new species as he made his up-country from Rangoon to a cannibal’s cooking pot on the unfashionable side of Putao.’
Never fails. She made her humph noise (and the sound one hears when a tummy is being rubbed) for one last, irritating time before going to sleep. Joining her in the realer world of dreams, more gruesome images of the dogsbody revealed themselves to me. He dangled lifeless from a tree, his chute tangled in the upper branches as fighting monks threw buffalo dung at his corpse. And all for the promise of $1,000. There but for the grace of God …
***
The rising sun brought, as it often does, a change of fortune. We breakfasted in the dining car. Silver service. Immaculately dressed stewards. Numerous small courses of tropical wares fresh from the jungle. All partaken while watched over by the stuffed head of a mountain tiger. However, Mong Tung is one of those awful places where the environs not only spread forever but within them the railway line runs along main roads and narrow streets at slow speed. This allows city dwellers to press their noses against the restaurant car window, stare at you while you eat, and dribble down the glass.
Miss MuMu and I, her composure restored after letting herself and her old college down during the previous night’s embarrassment, pretended it wasn’t happening. In doing so, we took a leaf from The Queen’s African Hussars who, famously, continued with small talk at table while a Khartoum dining-in night was shelled by the Mufti.
With there never being a grand terminus in a boom town, a taxi took us from a jumble of improvised platforms and tin sheds to our rendezvous at the Mong Tung branch of the Golden Triangle Banana Growers Bank.
A hideous concrete stump, its one redeeming feature was the tasteful office of a German banker called Stultz. Within walls hung with nostalgic faded prints of the Weimar Republic and beneath a loitering ceiling fan, a big Bavarian in an ill-fitting white suit talked of markets and exchanges while a wallah arranged sweet tea and pastries for the three of us.
When a second wallah arrived, presumably from the bowels of the bank, the mood changed. For he brought with him a carton from a safety deposit box. Herr Stultz addressed the carton’s combination lock to expose a tight packing of high-denomination used American currency – obviously valued well into the tens of thousands of dollars. I tried not to salivate down my chin.
It is a poor show to talk about money, but there was something I had to say regarding the missing party in our adventure, and Herr Stultz was providing me with an obvious and polite opportunity to speak my mind.
‘About the dogsbody’s remuneration.’
I was wary of the petty jealousies in village life after $1,000 is forwarded to a grieving widow in a dirt-poor barangay in the middle of nowhere. I must do all in my power to protect the vulnerable Mrs Dogsbody, wherever and whoever she may be.
‘Didn’t do a lot, to put it mildly. Perhaps it would be fair to share the fee between myself and Miss MuMu?’
Herr Stultz looked puzzled.
‘That’s very generous of you, Mr Worth. Perhaps the English sense of understatement?’
Strange. Was this sarcasm? Or perhaps the German sense of humour?
The three of us sat in silence.
‘The monies?’ I ventured, nodding towards the cash on Herr Stultz’s desk.
‘But Mr Worth,’ he replied, as it became my turn to be puzzled, ‘I have yet to see the Princess.’
I turned to Miss MuMu.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘One becomes attached to one’s charge.’
She placed her hand upon her troublesome tummy for one final time and moved her slim fingers inside her clothes. A surprising further twist of the wrist told of the unexpected presence of her own poacher’s pocket. Returning her hand to daylight, she held an upturned fist to Herr Stultz. Opening it revealed her palm to be covered by the biggest and most irresistible rock this side of a jolly good day at Kimberley.
‘The Princess Khambai diamond, Herr Stultz, all 300 carats of her. If I may relieve you of my chaperone’s fee, sir, I shall be on my way. $40,000 if I recall correctly. Oh, and don’t forget to add the five hundred kindly donated by Mr Worth from his own body-of-the-dog’s remuneration.’
All images generated using GROK AI
© Always Worth Saying 2025
