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33 Arcady Street, Chombolu!

One morning just, as the mists of sleep were clearing, I found myself struggling to remember an address that figured in a dream. Although the dream itself evaded all my efforts at recall, I managed somehow to retain the address in my mind. As luck would have it, there was a pen and paper at the side of the bed. I hastily scribbled down the address, before it too disappeared behind the grey cloak of Morpheus. When I awoke properly I sat up and looked unbelievably at the words I'd written -

                                                 33, Arcady Street, Chombolu.

I stared at the words uncomprehendingly. What on earth was this? Why had this happened to me, the most cynical character alive?
I don't believe in dream analysis, luck, destiny or fortune telling. For me, the world is a place of cold reality. In my universe, events unfold as part of an insensate eternal dialectic, a never-ending interplay of thesis and antithesis. The universe I inhabit, is a synthesis, or natural outcome of those two conflicts: 'What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.'

Eliot's words sum up exactly how I feel about - 'The Unexplained!' Out of sheer curiosity, I decided that I would write a letter to this address, just to see if it actually existed. I'd the surplus Christmas cards didn't I? Yes! I would send one of the cards to its mysterious destination. But where in the world was Chombolu? Moreover, how did I know that I'd the correct spelling?  I'd written it down phonetically, as it would sound to an English speaker - but a Spaniard or a Frenchman, a Russian or a Finn would spell it quite differently.

I sat down and laboriously compiled a list of the possible ways that Chombolu could be spelled phonetically. I consulted foreign friends; I looked in the gazetteer at the back of my Times Atlas of the World. The list looked something like this:

Chombolu Schumbulu Szomboulou Szchumbooloo Schchumbylou

I looked up these various places in the gazetteer. Amazingly five of them appeared in the atlas.

Three were in Soviet Central Asia, as it was then.  Another two in Africa.  One of these was in Kenya, the other a thousand miles up the Congo River in Zaire!

It happened to be near to Christmas. I wrote out five Christmas cards. The message ran as follows:

Dear Friend,
Your address came to me in a dream! Although I am not a believer in the supernatural, I couldn't resist writing to you to satisfy my curiosity - to see if Arcady Street really exists in your town.  Please answer my message if you receive this card. Allow me to wish you a Happy Christmas and a successful New Year! Yours sincerely.   

Jud Evans

Three weeks later I received a letter from a Zaire. Ndaya Tupinmungi was a schoolteacher, he was married with two children and a resident of Eastern Zaire.  He lived in a 'kraal' and his address was 52 Arcady Street, Chombolu!  I was thunderstruck! What was the meaning of all this? Was I destined like Livingstone, to meet my fate 1000 miles up the Congo River in some isolated African village? I had to know all about the village. In my reply, I asked him to draw a map of his village. I wanted to know the African language he spoke. I wanted to see a local newspaper. Feverishly, I began to read history books about Zaire - about its geography - its topography - its climate...its politics. I wrote and told Ndaya all about myself. I told him about my life in Britain. I asked him if there was anything that I could send him. Perhaps he needed a dictionary or some other item? He replied with a list of items, which took up six pages of paper. He listed cameras, videos, radios, televisions, books, jewellery, watches, clothes, (he thoughtfully enclosed all his measurements) toys, tools, medicines, bedding, furniture, - the list went on and on and on! In conclusion, he requested that the assembled articles should be packed into a shipping container and sent to Chombolu accompanied by an armed guard in case thieves interfered with the contents.

Shortly afterwards I received another letter from Zaire. This time it was from the capital - Kinshasa. It was from another Zairean. The writer claimed that he'd a dream in which he'd visualised my address!  He considerately enclosed a similar list of requirements for my attention and action! He said that he'd dreamed that he was sitting alongside me in a bus going across the English Channel and I'd given him my address!  I thought it was about time that our African friends were made aware that I wasn't a one-man United Nations Development Agency.

I took all the correspondence to my friend Nicky Hancock, a expert in French and Quebecois literature. Together we composed a letter in exquisite French, the lingua franca of Zaire. We compiled a list, pages and pages long of exotic gifts that we wished them to send to us in Britain.
Our endless catalogue of requests included elephant tusks, tiger toenails, dried hyena scrotums and the like. We also pointed out that the English Channel is a body of water - therefore we must have been in a dream submarine and not a bus, when we made our dream-sequence acquaintance on route from France!

To the merry chinking of whiskey glasses and with mounting hilarity we finished our letter. We laughed until the lazy fingers of the silver dawn came scuffing at the windowpane. The next day the letter was popped into the post box. I never heard from Zaire again.

But why, dear reader, why the dream?