by Alan Bristow
‘Stop! Don’t get in. There are goddam jaguar paw prints all over this beach here.’
Some of the men raced back up through the jungle in their trunks to fetch guns. Alan jumped back in the water and crawled back to us.
‘This is one dangerous place,’ he said. ‘From the prints, I reckon there must be half a dozen of them. This must be their meeting place.’
An engineer – appropriately, it was Neil Leppard – had decided to climb the rocks to the top of the waterfall, from where he had a bird’s-eye view of the deep, crystal clear waters below.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Look at all those little fish down there. Hundreds and hundreds of them.’
We had our suspicions immediately, and they were confirmed when we peered into the depths. Piranha. Shoals of them. We decided this was not a good place for a swim and trooped dejectedly back to camp, where we got hold of the Italian priest.
‘You should never go down there in the early evening,’ he cautioned. ‘That’s where the jaguar got the mission boy. Did you go swimming?’
‘Mr Green did.’
‘He is very lucky. With all those piranhas, if you’ve got the slightest cut on you, they’ll strip you in seconds.’ We put it to the test a few days later by throwing in some old horsemeat. The water boiled, and there was nothing left but a piece of white bone in a minute.
Nor was Alan Green the only near-victim of the wildlife. He and Jacques Castaigne had a love-hate relationship, and one day Green saw an opportunity to play a practical joke on Castaigne. The Frenchman was relaxing on a deluxe lilo in the middle of a fast-flowing river, the lilo being tethered to a tree with thirty feet of rope. This was too much of a temptation for Green, who undid the mooring line. Away floated Castaigne at speed, unaware that he had been cast adrift until he came to a jarring halt among the tree roots on the far side of the river and was thrown into the water. Alan Green laughed uproariously as Jacques Castaigne floundered about in the foliage.
‘What about the crocodiles?’ asked a voice.
Green stopped laughing. ‘What crocodiles?’
‘The river’s full of them. Vicious brutes. Jacques won’t last long over there.’
A serious rescue operation had to be mounted, with a chastened Alan Green driving everyone on. Native canoes were obtained, and with great difficulty Castaigne was extracted from the branches. The lilo was never seen again.
Alan Green himself went mad a few days later after spending too long in the sun. We were stuck out in the bush with a problem that had grounded one of the helicopters. A connecting turnbuckle in the control run to the tail rotor had somehow been lost, and Bill Petrie had gone back to camp to get something with which to fix it. It was a hot, hot day, and there was a small adobe building in which there was some sort of shelter. Alan propped himself up against the wall on the sunny side and fell asleep. I woke him up, but he insisted on being left where he was. When Petrie got back Green had severe sunstroke and was seeing hallucinations and vomiting. We had a terrible time with him for two or three days, but it amused Jacques Castaigne. Petrie had brought with him a wire coat-hanger with which to effect a temporary repair to the helicopter; I made the first tentative test flight with it, and it did the job. We flew for the best part of a week with Petrie’s Heath Robinson modification while new turnbuckles were freighted in, and you can rest assured that the bodge was examined minutely before every flight.
There was great camaraderie on the Bolivian job, not just among the Bristows people but with the geologists and surveyors. The pilots became quite experienced in collecting the right kind of rocks for the geologists to examine. I cannot imagine pilots today wading for six hours a day up and down stony riverbeds filling leather pouches with fragments of stone. Not my job, they’d say.
As we had confidently expected, word reached us of other oil company contracts to be had in Bolivia, and the first of these involved Amoseas – American Overseas Petroleum – who wanted to do a geophysical survey. I was invited into an office in La Paz where the local Amoseas manager had arranged the strangest bidding process I was ever involved in. All the helicopter company representatives were lined up around a table, and the Amoseas man simply went around them, starting from the left, asking what price they’d do the job for. Each man gave a figure – $150 an hour, $145 an hour or whatever – except for one man in the middle who said ‘No bid’. I was sitting on the extreme right, and was the last one to be asked.
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘it’s impossible to bid on this basis. You’ve given us no idea of the amount of flying you require. Nobody knows how much they’re going to have to fly. If you choose a bidder like this, the likelihood is that at some point they will have to ask you for more money or let you down. You’re introducing an unnecessary level of risk for yourself.’
‘How would you bid for it, then?’ came the retort.
‘I’d bid with a fixed monthly standing charge to cover establishment costs, and based on your statement of flying required on a daily and monthly basis, I’d quote a rate for flying per hour.’
The meeting was dismissed, but two days later I was called back. This time there were only two of us in the room – myself and the man who had said ‘no bid’. We were given an outline of what Amoseas were planning and asked to make our bids on the basis of the flying requirement we extrapolated from this information. I sat down with Alan Green and worked out our costings to the last penny, then prepared a draft contract based on them.
I was asked to fly to San Francisco to meet the President of Amoseas, a tall, elegant man called Robinson whose skyscraper office looked out over San Francisco Bay. Like many of the best chief executives he had come up the hard way and understood every little corner of his business. On his desk was a picture of a young fighter pilot about my own age, obviously proud of his uniform and his country. Robinson saw me looking at the picture.
‘That’s my son,’ he said. ‘He was killed in Korea.’
I presented my draft contract and we started to discuss the details. There was a young hotshot lawyer in the room, and he was obviously trying to make a name for himself by grinding me down on the contract, knocking out clauses here and there, and I wasn’t having it. Eventually Mr Robinson suggested we break for lunch.
‘I know a little bar where we can get a dry Martini and something to eat,’ he said.
We walked a little way along the street, then descended some steps into a bar that was as black as night. The old phobia about enclosed spaces came pressing in on me, but I tried to tough it out. I got the first dry Martini down, but Mr Robinson noticed I was sweating and ill at ease.
‘Are you okay, Mr Bristow?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry sir, but I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’ve suffered from claustrophobia ever since I was involved in an underground train accident.’
He was out of his seat in an instant. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I know a very nice café at ground level where you won’t have any problems.’
Gratefully I climbed back into the street and followed him to a wide open café with big windows onto the street.
‘You okay in here, son?’ Robinson asked solicitously.
I affirmed that all was well, and we finished our lunch before heading back to his office. This time, the hotshot lawyer shepherded us into an internal conference room that had no windows, and it wasn’t long before the dreadful feeling of confinement began to wash over me again. The lawyer was going in for the kill, attacking the warranty clauses, picking at the contract line by line, and I was sweating and squirming and making a poor job of defending my position. Suddenly, Mr Robinson spoke up.
‘Why don’t we go back into my office and do this thing,’ he said.
The lawyer looked crestfallen as we took our seats in Mr Robinson’s office, with its far distant views over the Bay to Oakland and beyond. I felt like a new man, and batted off the lawyer’s contractual complaints with ease. We ended up with an agreement that set down everything Bristow Helicopters needed to do the
job, and we gave Amoseas great service for the eight years the contract lasted. Every time I was in San Francisco thereafter I visited Mr Robinson in his home, and I came to think he saw me as a surrogate for his lost son; I don’t know what his motives were. All I know is that he was a thoroughly decent man for whom it was an honour to work.
Of all the competitor helicopter companies in Bolivia at that time, the one for whom I had most respect was Petroleum Helicopters Inc, run by Bob Suggs who was operating Bell helicopters and the Helio Courier, a remarkable short take-off fixed-wing aircraft. It could go most places a helicopter could go. Suggs and I struck a deal to share some of the work, splitting new business fifty-fifty, and if the oil companies ever found out about it they never let it be known. In effect the joint venture gave them a better service, and for several years Bristows and PHI aircraft, pilots and engineers were interchangeable. Suggs became a lifelong friend, and I came within an ace of buying his company, but he died after heads of agreement had been signed and his widow was unable to sell.
The Amoseas contract saw our people based in La Paz, one of the highest cities in the world, a place where some people have difficulty breathing even at rest and where altitude sickness is common among visitors. Exposure to the conditions had a strange depressing effect on a gentleman’s virility, and it was here that Alan Green instituted the Bristow High Altitude Cup. This trophy, which Green caused to be made up by a local silversmith, was to be awarded to the man who could achieve an act of sexual intercourse within twenty-four hours of arriving in La Paz having spent one week or more at sea level. There were strict conditions; witnesses were required to attest to the fact that the claimant had been at sea level in the previous week, you weren’t allowed to use oxygen, and the lady involved had to sign a declaration that the deed had been completed satisfactorily. For years, the Cup went unclaimed. Then one of our senior pilots, a man called Johnston, announced he was going for it. He lined up witnesses who confirmed that not only had he been at sea level for a week, but he had gone scuba diving. Working in the British Embassy in La Paz was a demure and petite young lady known as the Elephant’s Friend – so called because she kept company with a very large woman called the Elephant. The Elephant’s Friend and Johnston engaged in a tryst, and she signed his paper. Johnston waved it under Alan Green’s nose and claimed the Cup.
Green was suspicious, but could do nothing to disprove Johnston’s claim until there was a falling out between the pilot and the Elephant’s Friend. She let it be known that Johnston had taken a small oxygen bottle with him to bed. Worse still, it turned out that far from scuba diving during his holiday, Johnston had been visiting the Aztec ruins at an altitude of at least 8,000 feet. He was unmasked as a fraud and a cheat, and was stripped of the Cup. News went around the world like wildfire, and everywhere the disgraced Johnston went he was covered in opprobrium. I do not believe to this day that the Cup could ever have been claimed legitimately.
I had to make several trips from Bolivia to England during that period, a long and arduous journey by Constellation, Stratocruiser and DC-6. The first leg, out of the jungle, would be flown in a Dakota or a B17 carrying freshly slaughtered steers to La Paz. I’d climb aboard with a mixture of local labour, live chickens, pigs and sacks of flour. The airstrip was short, rough and steep. The plane would taxi to the top of the hill and take off down the slope, then claw its way up into the mountains. I crawled forward from my seat to stand between the pilots to watch them navigate through towering cumulus clouds. They were great professionals who knew the country intimately. A series of short flights in war surplus aircraft would take me to Lima, from where Pan American Grace Airlines operated a ‘milk run’ to the United States, stopping at half a dozen towns in Central America. The Lockheed Constellations they used were beautiful aircraft, the very pinnacle of piston airliner technology, but they vibrated like road drills and a day’s flying left you feeling like a dishrag. Hops were short, refuelling stops were long, and delays were endemic. Even in first class it was uncomfortable and wearing. Worse yet, Los Angeles was still two days from London – I had to stop off at the Sikorsky factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to do some business along the way.
On the ground in Panama I was joined by an American in his thirties who, like most Americans, wanted to strike up a conversation and learn my life story while unburdening himself of his own. I, like most Brits, wanted to be left alone in contrived solitude. I responded to his friendly overtures with noncommittal grunts, but true to type, he wasn’t put off. The stewardess had just served me my breakfast, so I couldn’t feign sleep. Mr Talkative tried again.
‘Say, where you from, fella?’
I explained, in as few words as possible, that I was a Brit on my way from Bolivia to Bridgeport. In a brief period of silence I tackled the terrible sizzled-up sausages they used to serve, with hash browns and a baked potato – all very greasy. The best and safest thing was the coffee and a roll. Soon, my travelling companion piped up again.
‘You know, I know a Brit. I live next door to one in Hollywood.’
With commendable restraint I did not tell him to go and screw himself.
‘You might know him,’ he persisted.
‘I doubt it. There’s quite a few of us.’
‘This guy writes for the movies. He’s called James Clavell.’
‘Never heard of him.’ I put the last of my jam on my roll, finished eating and stared pointedly out of the window. The name carried on going round in my head. James Clavell, James Clavell ... Jimmy Clavvle? I turned to my travelling buddy.
‘I know a Jimmy Clavvle.’
‘No, this guy’s name is Clavell. I tell you what, I’ll give you his phone number.’ I wrote the number on the back of an envelope with ‘Jimmy Clavvle?’ next to it. I had about an hour to kill in LA for a connection, so I rang the number.
‘James Clavell here.’
‘Is that the Portsmouth Grammar School Jimmy Clavvle?’
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Alan Bristow.’
‘Good god, Bristow! Where are you?’
‘I’m at the airport.’
‘I’ll come and get you.’
‘No, I’m only here for a few minutes, and I’m off to Chicago. What are you doing these days, selling newspapers on street corners?’
‘No, I’m a script writer for films. You must have heard of me?’
‘I don’t get to the pictures much.’
‘Well, did you see the film The Fly?’
‘I did.’
‘That was one of mine. I’m writing books now. What about you?’
‘I’ve got a very nice little helicopter company. Listen, I’ve got to go for my flight.’
‘We must keep in touch. Are you living in the States?’
‘No, I’m in England. But I get over a lot. I’ll call you when I’m back.’
And so almost twenty years after our last meeting we picked up the threads again, and we were to remain friends until his premature death from cancer in 1994. Jimmy had become a Captain in the Royal Artillery and had spent half the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, which gave him the material for his first best-selling novel, King Rat. He used to come to our house in Cranleigh to use the swimming pool, with his gorgeous wife April and their two daughters Michaela and Holly. Michaela became such a beautiful woman she was photographed for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and she played Miss Penelope Smallbone in the James Bond film Octopussy. Then she sensibly married a banker.
It wasn’t long before I got a message from Jimmy saying he was coming to England for an extended period to market King Rat. He wanted a base in the Home Counties, so I found him a big old rambling house near Dorking, which he loved. He perked the place up a bit, put in a tennis court, and played host to an endless stream of Hollywood guests. Roger Moore and David Niven came to stay, and Michael Caine was a close friend; he and his wife Shakira were often at Jimmy’s, and the evenings were full of film-industry chatter – not something I
could contribute to. Jimmy used to send me messages on his personal note-paper, which had a facsimilie of his signature on the top corner with some floral decoration. Underneath he’d scribble some message, and as always, his spelling was atrocious. ‘You should keep them,’ he told me. ‘They’ll be valuable one day.’ I should have taken his advice. But I never quite got the time to read any of his books. Just after Tai Pan came out he asked me if I’d read it.
‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Do you have a copy I could have?’
‘You can get them in the bookshops,’ said Jimmy.
‘How much do they cost?
He mentioned a figure.
‘Good lord. How much did you make out of King Rat?’
Jimmy mentioned another figure.
‘And how long is it?’
‘Oh, about 100,000 words.’
‘Incredible. That must be more than a dollar a word!’
‘It’s almost $1.50 a word,’ Jimmy said. ‘Including the definite article.’
‘Jimmy, for a chap who was in the C-stream at school and who still can’t spell, you haven’t done badly.’
‘I haven’t, have I?’
Jimmy was acutely tax-aware and never personally owned any of the houses he lived in. They were all registered to his companies, but as his books sold in the millions – Tai Pan was followed by Noble House, then Shogun – his property empire grew. He had a beautiful bijou house in the South of France with a small lighthouse affair on top where he did his writing, and the walls of his office were covered with complex diagrams that charted the relationships of all his characters. He had an author’s fascination for the lives of others, and was constantly asking questions about my business and how it ran. When in the 1970s I bought an American company and needed American directors, James volunteered – he had dual citizenship – and took an active part in the running of the company, attending Board meetings and making useful suggestions. When I was going to Iran on business Jimmy asked if he could come along, and at one of Princess Fatima’s soirees I introduced him to the Shah, who was again discoursing on his reform programme. Jimmy was by then internationally famous, and the Shah knew of him.
