The Rainbow Hunters

The Rainbow Hunters:

One Mother. Two Boys.  A trip around the world in search of seven colours, the first pigments, made by the first colour men, raising money for the charity War Child as they go.

(South Carolina, USA)

We are in the world of ghosts, where silver spun Spanish moss drapes from the branches of bowing Cypress trees, a world where the legacy of the past still brushes up against the present.  Middleton Place is an 18th Century plantation home in South Carolina, set amongst leaning cottonwood trees, that boasts the oldest landscape gardens in America. The boys and I walk through paths fringed with blazing azaleas, magnolias, and crepe myrtles, listening to the call of the white egret, as alligators sun themselves on the neatly cut grass banks beside the duckweed covered Rice Mill Pond.

We are here in search of indigo, once the most important dye in the world.  It made an empire, and later destroyed it.  To find it we must seek out the ghosts of the past, walk from the grand to the simple, from the rich to the poor, from the sweeping plantation home of the free, to the old stable yard of the enslaved.  For Indigo comes with a legacy.  A legacy of slavery and pain.  Still relevant today.  Nearby Charleston has had it’s fair share of recent racial upset. Only last week 21-year-old Dylann Roof shot dead nine African Americans while they were attending a Wednesday Church prayer meeting.

Today though, there are only two people working in the old slave yard.  Both volunteers.  In their early sixties.  Both white. They stand by a large metal vat, a caldron of mystery, stirring a blue black liquid that is the colour of the night sky. Indigo. It sings off the tongue as you say it, soft sounding and full of the exotic. Ancient Egyptians wrapped their mummies in indigo coloured cloth.  Central Asia carpeted their teak floors with it, while Nigerians and Persians marked their skin in blue black tattoos.

“Still grow it here,” John one of the volunteers tells us, nodding towards a rectangular patch of ground that is full of small leafy plants.

“Yup,” echoes Ralph.  “Still grow it.  Lot of memories in those stems.”

“We’ve come around the whole world for that,” Orly says.

“The whole world?”

“Yup,” echoes Dow. “The whole world.”

“You got a white ‘kerchief or something.  I’d be happy to dye it for you, Ma’am,” says John.

The only thing we have that is white are Dow’s grubby, sweaty socks.

“Yup, they’ll do,” says Ralph and, a little reluctantly, Dow takes off his shoes and peels his socks from his hot feet.

“You’ll need to bind it with some vinegar.  And if you’ve no vinegar….”

“Urine,” finishes off John, walking towards us.  “We’re not meant to do this,” he adds, “but since you’ve come round the whole world an’ all, you can take this.” And he pushes something into Dow’s hand – a small ball of crushed and dried indigo.  “Precious that,” he says.  “That colour comes with a history we don’t like to think about too much.”

We walk away, Dow bare-footed and clutching a piece of the precious night in the palm of his hand.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (warchild.org.uk) as they travel. War Child work in countries that have been devastated by armed conflict and help children suffering the worst effects of violence; child soldiers, victims of rape and abduction, disabled and street children. They provide vital care to a traumatised child and help them to rebuild their lost childhood. Their aim is a world in which the lives of children are no longer torn apart by war. If you would like to donate something please go to www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon.

Lindsay Hawdon’s debut novel, Jakob’s Colours, a story about a young gypsy boy during WWII, who uses a legacy of colour making, to survive, is out now with Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and with Quercus in the US.

The Rainbow Hunters:

One Mother. Two Boys.  A trip around the world in search of seven colours, the first pigments, made by the first colour men, raising money for the charity War Child as they go.

Uluru, Australia

It is dark and cold as we drive in the pre-dawn light towards the great mound of rock, that lies like some sleeping giant in the middle of Australia’s red hearted desert. We can see it silhouetted against the blue black sky, a dark hump, that blocks out the stars and the sinking full moon. We follow the road around to the north side, park the car, and follow the dust track, through the spinifex grasses, to stand and wait for the sun to rise against Uluru.
Three days ago we had found what we had come here for. We had set off west from Alice Springs towards the Mac Donald ranges on a long and empty road into a wilderness of burning orange, had done exactly what you shouldn’t do in the outback of Australia. Had left on the spur of new and momentary information for the red ochre pits. Had told no one where we heading. Had only a small bottle of water, no food. My mobile phone lost its signal five miles out of town. But we drove on, through a red desert of singing cicadas and scattered desert pines, their feathery leaves flickering in a hot wind. We passed the burnt out husks of abandoned cars, discarded tyres hanging from skeleton branches, the odd tin can, warped and bleached of colour, that caught the light and flickered like a false beckon on the parched ground. We passed no other vehicles. We were alone, completely, in the immenseness of Australia’s red centre. My heart pounded as we headed into the heat, further and further from civilisation.
And then 80 miles west of Alice Springs and 8 miles west of Serpent Gorge, in a dried out sandy creek of white and red gum trees we had found the red ochre pits of the MacDonald Ranges. Rusted colours that streaked from sky to ground down the cliff walls of a dried out riverbed; orange, yellow, white and a deep rich red, the colour we had come for. The land around felt ancient and eerie. For centuries these pits have been used by the Aborigines; for ceremonies, for medicine, for war weapons.
“I think we’re being watched,” Orly had whispered. And it had felt like that. A forgotten world of old ghosts, where aboriginal men had once come, like us, in search of the colour red.
And now, here we are at the foot of Uluru, the great rock that sits so silently in the endless surrounding desert, her cave walls painted and still painted to this day with that same red ochre we had found, pictures that depict the Anangu Aborigines throughout the history of time. Here we wait for the sun to rise. Already the horizon is pale. Already the stars have dimmed. And then finally the sun appears like a burning hot metal on the horizon. Uluru, the great sandstone ship of the desert, a sanctity of shade and water, is lit red, a bright shimmering red, the colour of fire.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (warchild.org.uk) as they travel. War Child work in countries that have been devastated by armed conflict and help children suffering the worst effects of violence; child soldiers, victims of rape and abduction, disabled and street children. They provide vital care to a traumatised child and help them to rebuild their lost childhood. Their aim is a world in which the lives of children are no longer torn apart by war.  If you would like to donate something please go to http://www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon.

Lindsay Hawdon’s debut novel, Jakob’s Colours, a story about a young gypsy boy during WWII, who uses a legacy of colour making, to survive, is out now with Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and with Quercus in the US.

The Rainbow Hunters:

One Mother. Two Boys.  A trip around the world in search of seven colours, the first pigments, made by the first colour men, raising money for the charity War Child as they go.

New Zealand

New Zealand is a green county, full of vast expanses of land, of snow crested mountains that hide in white clouds, of endless sandy shores and deserts of mallow and spinifex, of tropical wildernesses and deep glacial fjords. It is not a land with which you associate the colour that we are looking for, the colour violet, the last in the rainbow spectrum, the ending of the known and the beginning of the unknown.
We have come first to the lavender fields, small plantations dotted along North Island and South. We stand now amongst the trim, cultivated rows of bobbing purple flowers. Pacific Blues that sway in the rush of wind that comes down from the Blenheim hills, rolling down over brown parched grasses. The helicopter woke us up this morning, before the sun had come up. It flew low over the French Fields Farm House, hovered over the surrounding vineyards, warding off the frost by stirring up warm air with the whirr from its propellers. Now the sun is just up, lighting the lavender in swaying bands of white light and cloud cast shadows.
“Perhaps with a little lemon,” Ruth, the owner, tells us, “you might extract violet, but people grow lavender for its scented oil, not for its colour.”
Onwards then to the shore, to the rocky north coast of Able Tasman National Park, in search of a rock snail, the murex, the whelk, a sea snail that can weep violet tears. We swim out into deep icy waters of aqua and navy blue. A sting ray glides past, a snapper, green dots flickering on its scales. We dive down a metre and a half, our ears popping, aching, dig off the pale coiled whelks that stick to the undersides of the rocky shoreline. Back out in the open air, we squeeze them between our thumb and forefinger, and sure enough they secrete their violet tears, tears that do not fade, a pigment that grow brighter beneath a hot sun, even brighter against a gusty wind.
And still there is more violet to be found in this green land. We drive southwards, across valleys of yellow broom and purple swaying lupins, down to the very tip of New Zealand, to Midford Sounds, one of the wettest places on earth, where we stand on the bow of a white boat, tip back our heads as we glide beneath cascading waterfalls, drinking the clear icy waters, soaking our clothes and our faces. And it is here on the tree lined shores that we find a lichen, the sticta coronata, dried and leafy clumps of it that cling to silver birch and beech trunks, gold and autumnal tinted, before it is placed in a dye bath, soaked in vinegar and lemon, to extract colours of pale violet and deep purple. The last colour in the rainbow spectrum, the known and the unknown, which is apt, as we stand on the very edge of the world.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (warchild.org.uk) as they travel. War Child work in countries that have been devastated by armed conflict and help children suffering the worst effects of violence; child soldiers, victims of rape and abduction, disabled and street children. They provide vital care to a traumatised child and help them to rebuild their lost childhood. Their aim is a world in which the lives of children are no longer torn apart by war.
If you would like to donate something please go to http://www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon.

Lindsay Hawdon’s debut novel, Jakob’s Colours, a story about a young gypsy boy during WWII, who uses a legacy of colour making, to survive, is out now with Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and with Quercus in the US.

The Rainbow Hunters:

One Mother. Two Boys.  A trip around the world in search of seven colours, the first pigments, made by the first colour men, raising money for the charity War Child as they go.

(Guiyang Province, China)

We have come to China in search of celadon green, a mystical glaze that covered the porcelain of the Ming dynasty and Kao Lao the first “one pot” green that came from the buckthorn tree. But it’s a different green altogether that we find in the village of Baigao, a small Mao settlement that clings to the mountain slopes in a land of rain and cloud. There are two things going on in the village when we arrive in search of the embroider Miss Xu. There is the building of a new wooden house and the preparation of a day’s end feast that will be cooked by the roadside in thanks of free labour, and then there is the expectant death of a village elder. The men are gathered in the square, beside a maple tree of burning red. They are sharing a glass bong of tobacco which they draw down into their lungs, exhaling so deeply the smoke all but disappears inside of them. They wear plastic bags wrapped around their heads to ward of the drizzle, and wellies on their bare feet. “The Mao people,” Teddy our guide, tells us as we head down to Miss Xu’s house. “They find a maple tree first, then build a village. There is no village without this tree. When they have a child they plant him this tree. When he dies they make his coffin from it. Then they plant another so his soul will keep growing.” As we head down the steep cobbled steps we pass three men with large sacs flung over their shoulders that squirm and snort. “Pigs for the feast,” Teddy explains as simultaneously clanging bells sound from the water buffalo ploughing in the paddy terraces and Miss Xu pokes her smiling face from out of a nearby door, ushering us inside with rough exuberance. Proudly she displays the embroidery she has made for the soon to be widow of the village elder. A bird in flight. A fire bird, with wings spread wide. Coloured with natural dyes that took her a year to sew. It is the green that draws my eye, a vivid green, that looks far too bright to be natural. “But yes,” she explains. “It comes from the maple leaf.” If she boils it with alum, tea tree or yarrow, it makes this bright green. Then, as if to confirm her proud conviction, fire crackers sound from the slopes above. They crack the air, exploding in bursts like drilling gunfire. The boys look alarmed. “It is the old man,” says Teddy. “He has died.” We head back to the village square together, blinking in the pale green light. The three pigs have been killed, lie gutted and bloody by the side of the road, ready to be cooked and fed to the hungry house builders. The men have laid down their tools, are heading to the house of the deceased. There seems suddenly to be much death around us. “So they’ll cut down his maple tree?” Orly, my youngest son asks. “Yes,” I tell him. “But they’ll plant him another,” he says, looking at the surrounding slops as he does so. They are covered in cascades of changing maples, from red to yellow to brightest green.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (warchild.org.uk) as they travel. War Child work in countries that have been devastated by armed conflict and help children suffering the worst effects of violence; child soldiers, victims of rape and abduction, disabled and street children. They provide vital care to a traumatised child and help them to rebuild their lost childhood. Their aim is a world in which the lives of children are no longer torn apart by war. If you would like to donate something please go to http://www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon.

Lindsay Hawdon’s debut novel, Jakob’s Colours, a story about a young gypsy boy during WWII, who uses a legacy of colour making, to survive, is out now with Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and with Quercus in the US.

The Rainbow Hunters:

One Mother. Two Boys.  A trip around the world in search of seven colours, the first pigments, made by the first colour men, raising money for the charity War Child as they go.

(Kashmir, India)

At first sight Srinagar is a colourless mess of mud and silt. Six weeks after the floods that swept through the city, people still wade knee-high through stagnant pools of water trying to salvage what they can of their belongings. Houses have collapsed into piles of rubble. Debris hangs from the broken electrical wires. Cars languish abandoned beneath layers of dirt. Three hundred people lost their lives in these floods. Three thousand their homes, as winter hovers on the edges of the wind, a sharp sting in the breeze that blows down from the snow capped Himalayas.

It seems a hopeless place. A desolate place. Soldiers still line the streets, loaded rifles and grenades swinging from their belt buckles, alert to troubles on the Pakistan border and the fragile state of Kashmir. There are tanks and barricades and barbed wire coiled along the tops of walls and official buildings.
And then there is us. The only white faces in sight. Looking amid the grey, for of all things, the bright colour yellow.
“Yes, we will find your colour,” says Khursheed Butt beneath his green cap, the only person in all of Kashmir to answer my pleading emails all those months ago and to insist on showing us his land.
“Yes,” echoes Nazwa, a moon-faced Muslim man who’s house boat we are staying on and who, it turns out, by sheer coincidence, is a relative of Khursheed. “Certainly we will find you your colour. Kashmir is full of colour.” This from the man who has lost his whole hotel business to the floods, who was trapped for a week on the roof of a building waiting for the waters to subside. Who watched the bodies of two children float below him in the swell.

We move slowly through the silt stained streets, the traffic clogged and fume-filled in the drizzle that is falling from the sky, as the sound of the muezzin starts up, calling muslims to noon time prayers over the loud speaker. People wade through the mud, stand in the relief queues for their ration of food. We pass the hanging carcasses of two pigs and a sheep in a nearby butcher stall, chickens squashed and squawking in a cage, a cart piled high with apples. A soldier directs the traffic, shot gun in hand. The boys can’t decide whether to be frightened or overjoyed that all their imaginary war games have come alive in the streets around them. Their faces are full of a quiet disbelief that what they are seeing is real.  But then at the first check point their wooden slingshots and plastic army men are discovered.  There are stern mumblings.  Dark frowning exchanges. I hold my breath. But then these soldiers, weighed down with grenades and rifles, grin, squeeze the boys’ cheeks and set about building a toy fort.  For the next hour or so they play at make believe, firing M&M’s into a tin can with the slingshots.  There is a joyous absurdity to it all.

We head from one end of the city to the other, leaving behind the noise and the traffic and eventually the grey as we head out into the countryside to green hills and a sky of pale blue. Here there are groves of almond trees growing, silver leaves shimmering in the breeze, the air filled with the sound of bird song. There are fields of ploughed soil, dotted with the bent backs of harvesters in bright coloured saris and loose cotton shirts, a wicker basket swinging from their arm. A plough pulled by two oxen rounds the corner of a far field. A swallow flits across the sky.

Khursheed Butt finally pulls the car to a halt beside a rough track. He takes a deep laboured breath.
“Here, is your colour,” he says, faintly dramatic as he points across the brown earth.
And there we find them. Our first colour. A scattering of tiny saffron crocuses, their purple petals delicate and breeze-blown, stretching out into a hazy white distance. “The best saffron in the world,” he declares. “We have lost ninety percent of our crop to the floods. So these are a wonder. They are the fight against the odds.”
We clamber out across the soil and kneel down to look at one of the most expensive spices on earth. Three red stamens that sit in the centre of the flower, that once dried feel like strips of cut silk in the palm of your hand. They will flavour perfume, hot lasis, tea and sweets, and if you place them in a cup of warm water they will produce a sun beam of yellow pigment that will not fade with time. It has coloured the gowns of monks, the kilts of Irish pipers.
“Like the Kashmiri people,” Nazwa says softly behind us. “They fight to find the light.”

Lindsay Hawdon’s debut novel, Jakob’s Colours, a story about a young gypsy boy during WWII, who uses a legacy of colour making, to survive, is out now with Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and with Quercus in the US.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (warchild.org.uk) as they travel. War Child work in countries that have been devastated by armed conflict and help children suffering the worst effects of violence; child soldiers, victims of rape and abduction, disabled and street children. They provide vital care to a traumatised child and help them to rebuild their lost childhood. Their aim is a world in which the lives of children are no longer torn apart by war. If you would like to donate something please go to http://www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon.

Lindsay’s trip was supported in part by Inventing Futures, a global youth agency, based in Bath, that works with 9-24 year old who are at a transitional stage in their lives, giving them the chance to create a future full of opportunity.  If you would like to know more please visit:
http://www.inventingfutures.org

(Cochin, India)

He is there at the beginning of the day, on his hands and knees, marking out a giant square grid upon the dusty ground, on which he will begin his picture. Colours, made from rice flour, ground lime leaves, turmeric, and burnt paddy husks, lie in neat mounds in front of him. He is a small man, slender limbed and narrow boned, with a face that is slightly too elongated and thin. But his eyes are bright, olive coloured and striking amidst the crowds of brown eyed locals that pass him by. He kneels, mutters a short prayer and then he begins. He has no brush, no tools. He uses his forefingers and his thumb, applying the colours with slow deliberation, square by square, creating an image that grows outwards. He works silently. Even his movements are quiet, as if his work were some kind of meditation. For this is the ritual of Kalamezhuthu, an act of religious worshipping laid down for the Gods Devi, Naga and Sastha. The patterns, the minute details, dimensions and colours, are all mandatory, not arbitrary. Even the order of creation is laid down by Divine law.
In contrast to the quietness of his act, the world around him is loud and frantic. Behind him are the Chinese fishing nets, lined up along the shore, silhouetted against the bright sky like gargantuan insects lifting and bowing their heads into the waters. There are six to seven men manning each of them, working in the humidity, beneath the dabbled shade of the giant rain trees that loom high into the sky above them, and surrounded by a rowdy crowd who have gathered in the early hours to barter for the fish when the great nets are pulled up and out of the water. Then five men rush to the ropes, and heave in a unison of movement, the stone weights that hold the nets down, rising and hovering perilously above their heads. A fisherman who works on the Chinese fishing nets is an honest man, we have been told. He believes that were he not, the stones might fall to punish him.  The boys are transfixed.

“I want to be a fisherman,” say Orly as the great net in front of him is hoisted upwards, and two men scramble up the giant teak poles that span from one end of the structure to the other, balancing above the water to get there before circling birds can swoop down and steal their precious silver fish. The more frequently they can lower and lift these nets, the more they will catch in a day. Up down, up down, relentlessly, time and time again, as the hot sun moves across the sky.

The market runs along the shore line where they work. Fish are sold as soon as they are caught, carried straight away to waiting market sellers. There are trays of mud crabs, yellow snapper, tuna and pearl spot, all glistening in the sun, their gills still quivering, still fighting to suck in the air.
The day draws on. Loud and chaotic. There is much shouting. Much noise, as scooters rev and trucks honk past. Ladies walk by, shaded beneath umbrellas. Children, decorated in black, kohl around their eyes and brows, bracelets and necklaces weighted on their tiny limbs, in the belief that if they are made ugly the devil will not come to take them.
All this as the fishermen keep the ritual of heaving up and lowering down, just a dozen or so fish in every catch. And the artist keeps his ritual of creating, head bowed, silent still, his picture slowly forming before him, beautifully coloured, a green faced figure, white fanged and kohl eyed, staring out with a sardonic smile.
The sun begins its descent, a pale pink spreading across the horizon that deepens the lower it gets, melting eventually into the waters, like a liquid fire. The fishermen are packing up. The market stalls are being dismantled. The light is going.
The artist’s hand drops to his side. He sits up, rests upon his haunches. Finally the picture is finished. The boys and I stand behind it, taking in the lines and strokes that make up the image. There is only a moment, a short breath of time to look down at the mysticism of this day long creation, before the artist’s hand rises up once more and in a single movement, he swipes it through the entire picture. A cloud of colour rises and catches on the wind. It moves over the boys and I, dusts us in a film of powder, in reds, and greens, and yellows, before passing out across the waters, and dispersing into the distant dusky light.

The Rainbow Hunters are raising money for War Child (http://www.warchild.org.uk) as they travel to seven countries on a quest to collect the seven colours of the rainbow.
If you would like to donate please go to https://www.justgiving.com/Lindsay-Hawdon or text RABO77 and the amount you would like to give to 70070.

Lindsay’s trip was supported in part by Inventing Futures, a global youth agency, based in Bath, that works with 9-24 year old who are at a transitional stage in their lives, giving them the chance to create a future full of opportunity.  If you would like to know more please visit:
http://www.inventingfutures.org

Audley Travel (01883838200; audleytravel.com) offers tailor-made trips to India and specialised tours and home-stays to Kerala and Tamil Nadu.