Leslie Frost's life reads like a diary of a nobody: left school at 16 without much of an education; joined a Colombian railway company aged 21 but returned to England six years later; married Peggy Langston; did a stint in Sudan, running an estate office before returning with Peggy to England; fathered a daughter (mother of the author); got a job with the Dorado Railway Company in Colombia; returned to England in 1955, pension more or less worthless; died in 1966.
Leslie and Peggy's world was that of the lower middle-class living in the Middle England of its day, a world of v-neck pullovers, Brylcreem and centre-partings. After Leslie's death, Peggy worked in a postoffice situated in a suburban parade of shops. And there a dull story might have ended had not Leslie been saved from anonymity by his Channel 4 reporter grandson, Stephen Smith, who decided to go to Colombia in search of his uncle, who was the result of a mid-life fling with a local woman by his grandfather.
Colombia: land of cattle and cocaine, where, in a five-month period in 1997, 700 murders and 18 kidnappings took place; where so many drive-by motorcycle murders were committed that crash-helmets are now banned, the easier to identify the gunman; where a footballer was shot dead after he had scored an own-goal in a World Cup match; where the author had to be fingerprinted before the bank would allow him to change his money.
A journalist first and foremost, Stephen Smith recounts the history of drug baron Pablo Escobar's infamous career and the various attempts - by Colombia and the US - to destroy him and his empire. (He was finally shot dead by the police in Medellin, in 1993, on the run from the prison he had opted for in Colombia in preference to extradition to the US).
The author rumbles from town to town in his search for his uncle, retelling, as he goes, the history of the railway. It's an erratic journey: "There are no timetables," he says, "only rumours." He watches masked men ride by on the roof of the last carriage - the dreaded los narcos - and discovers the romance of the locomotive: "The sun was buffing the rails, the eight-cylinder loco was humming: I couldn't wait to get on board. It was the effect of Colombia: in that drug-addled country, the strongest intoxicant was turning out to be the country herself." Which is probably what his grandfather thought, too, for, having packed his wife back to England, Leslie, at 55, took on the 18-year-old Beatriz Forero, who bore him two sons. The younger son died without ever seeing his father, for Leslie had returned to England, to the unsuspecting bosom of his family. (It was a chance letter from Beatriz that alerted Peggy to the liaison and its consequences.)
In the small Colombian town of Honda, however, a faded photo of Leslie hangs in the Forero homestead. Beatriz is dead, as are Leslie and Peggy, their small story eclipsed by that of Colombia where, only last week, a pick-up truck packed with 220 lbs of dynamite exploded, killing 10 people in Medellin.
Stephen Smith has tried to end his book on an up-beat note, but what with cocaine and car-bombs, that's not an easy thing to do.
Mary Russell is a travel writer