On the old airforce base at Timbaki
I had taken to the post office a small parcel of drawings that I had made in the previous weeks. I filled in an elaborate customs declaration in old-fashioned diplomatic French and handed over my parcel.
Walking back from the Post Office a Jeep came to a sudden halt and 2 Greek soldiers in scruffy airforce uniforms grabbed me and stuffed me in the back of the open Jeep. With the two soldiers and a driver, we bounced with much dust up into the hills until we came to a derelict looking base. A guard let us through the perimeter fence. I was taken to one of the prefabricated huts where in a small room was a rather surprised American Intelligence Officer, Intelligence being a relative word. He had the packet – had it come with us or had it arrived before? I explained and he had some idea but no experience of modern art. He seemed to accept my explanation but was uncomfortable with the situation. On my part I was already aware, from a conversation with a Greek tug captain and my fanciful imagination, that something was “going on” to the south of us. I knew the tug and building work in a small cove on the southern tip of the island was also involved; I had read The Riddle of the Sands so was fully informed! I was not handed back my drawings neither were they ever sent on. I thought of Baden-Powell’s secret plans disguised as drawings of butterflies. At the time I was living on the old German airforce base at Tymbaki and working as a shepherd along with two ex-murderers who now worked for the enigmatic Jannis. It was through his Dutch girlfriend that I had acquired the job when I had been living in a cave at Matala a little further down the coast.
I had thought of the idea behind the drawings before I went to Crete: If I took two different linear marks made of a single or pair of lines I could find the intermediate marks that would develop one into the other, like the game that transforms one word into another via an intermediary word, If I had 4 intermediate marks then I could assign a number from 1 to 6 and then I could numerically manipulate a series of marks. It was all very rudimentary. I found my marks by rubbing out all but small areas on drawings I did of the southern coast line. When I eventually got back to England I did work out how I could get the marks to occupy a two dimensional space and make them revolve, cluster and vary in scale, and that to manipulate them with any facility a simple computer programme could be written. But of course this being 1966 I had no access to a computer so I could not be the pioneer of Computer art: instead I calculated by hand with the addition of a large book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates that was published by the Rand corporation, which I got from the American Embassy.
Sequel
The American embassy was one of many embassies I visited at that time: German, French but more significantly the Polish embassy, just off Harley Street, where I would be ushered in to a gloomy oak panelled room and kept waiting for a very long while, then an enigmatic but beautiful woman would appear and loan me 10″ recordings of the Warsaw Autumn Festival and give me beautifully designed magazines all of which I have subsequently lost. Whilst returning from one of these escapades I was stopped on Petts Wood Station: A robbery in a large house nearby had required the police to round me up as a suspect, I was whisked off to the scene of the crime where a lady emphatically shook her head and an Inspector explained that I had nothing in common with the burglar, however the contents of the Cretan nose bag, an object that I had borrowed from “My” donkey did arouse their suspicions. Why was there material from the Polish Embassy along with a gold watch? the latter a cheap Smiths watch I had been given for the 11+ and always carried and never wore.
