Listening to the echoes of a travelling life

'What can you say about a girl who's dead? That she loved Beethoven and Bach, the Beatles, and me?'

They're the opening words of Love Story, of course, and as a child in the Sixties I used to repeat them in a deep bass voice, half solemn and half giggling, unsure of what they meant. I once intoned them to a bus conductor, who nearly threw me off.

But the question itself has stayed with me, along with the uncertainty, and I'd like to pursue it here: not in terms of a girl who's dead, but of a suddenly departed friend - a remarkable traveller, fellow writer and force for good in these troubled times.

You won't know his name. He didn't write for long enough to be famous - he'd only just started out. But what a start: his autobiography attracted the film-maker Ken Loach, his reports from war-torn Palestine reached websites around the world, and his journeys in that battered land interested a parliamentary subcommittee. Not bad, for a businessman who'd dumped his corporate suit in a dustbin at the age of 49 and taken to the road.

I mean that literally. Like Reggie Perrin (another childhood echo), Nick Pretzlik was a corporate man who abandoned his conventional life on a beach. And his life had been conventional: schooled at Eton, cricket for Hampshire, house in Kensington, skiing at Klosters. But his job as a Chief Exec began to burn him out, and one night on the motorway driving home he blacked out - three times.

More sensibly than dear old Reggie, Nick drove home and talked to his wife. And finally he drove to a beach in Pembrokeshire, dropped his business suit in a car-park rubbish bin, and started walking.

He rambled through Wales - 'to exorcise my ghosts' - but it wasn't enough. Then he hiked 3,000 miles across Patagonia, a wild land of mountains and pampas. He slept beneath the stars, or sheltered with local people - solitary gauchos, migrant workers, peasant farmers. People of immense poverty took him in and shared what little they had, disdaining all payment. And Nick the thrusting businessman began to change. His journeys, like all good travels, changed his values. As he wrote, 'I began to relate to people in a different light.'

Returning to England, he found a cause: the Palestinian people. He was not a political person, but he had a very English sense of decency, which was outraged by what he saw in the refugee camps and run-down towns of Gaza and the West Bank.

By things like this:

'In April last year, Hassan's 10-year-old sister was shot by an Israeli sniper as she stood in the window of their home. She bled to death on the living room floor. The sniper then killed the doctor who was running from the nearby hospital to help her. In Jenin, terrible things happen all the time.'

Hassan was an 11-year-old paraplegic who could not get medical treatment because he lived on the wrong side of an Israeli security line. Nick took him across, carrying the boy in his arms over rubble and through Israeli checkpoints, where once he was seconds away from being shot.

He got Hassan to a hospital in the Christian Palestinian village of Beit Jallah. Then he came home and raised thousands of pounds for the hospital, to fund treatment there. And he wrote about the things that he'd seen and heard, on his website, www.nickpretzlik.com. From there his reports were quoted by journalists worldwide.

All this Nick did as a private citizen, with no organisation or protection behind him. It was a simple act of Christian witness. For he truly believed that the individual could - and should - make a difference.

He also believed that the question of Palestine is crucial for global stability. And he saw it as a moral challenge to get involved: it is, he argued, like the Spanish Civil War for an earlier generation.

This was probably his undoing. All summer he'd trained for a sponsored cycle ride from London to Jerusalem, to raise funds and awareness. The Peace Ride starts this month. But he won't be there. The training schedule - 'demonic' he called it - may have proved too much. At 59, just 10 years after Patagonia, just four weeks ago, his heart gave way.

What can you say? I went to the funeral. On a bright July day, at a pretty Saxon church among half-timbered cottages in Hampshire, there was a wondrous gathering of English eccentrics in Panama hats and fusty suits, drinking Bolly.

This was the world Nick had come from - a world away from the bombsites and bulldozed housing of the West Bank. How far he must have travelled. 'It took me 50 years,' he wrote, 'to feel comfortable in my own skin.'

In the church a guitarist played a protest song by Bob Dylan. It was another Sixties echo, as the mourners softly keened the words: How many times must a man look up / Before he can see the sky? / Yes, and how many ears must one man have / Before he can hear people cry? / Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows / That too many people have died?

They were haunting questions that Nick, perhaps, had answered for himself. But they hung in the air for the rest of us, and I thought of them all the way home, through the sleek countryside - thought of the suffering that Nick had seen and tried to stop, and the people who do not see or try. And it seemed to me that now more than ever, from Gaza to Guantanamo, from Beit Jallah to Baghdad, we need answers to those questions.

But the answers, like the echoes of our friendship, are just blowing in the wind.

Jonathan Lorie Traveller magazine Autumn 2004