Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  * * *

  That blizzard winter of 1947–8 father faced the possibility of deportment, separation, trial and imprisonment. High-placed friends, made in London during the war, came to his aid. In February a letter with hand-written amendments, dated the 23rd, arrived from the Aliens Department of the Home Office in High Holborn granting him permission to stay in Britain until ‘such date as may hereafter be specified by the Secretary of State’ and ‘free to take up employment’.

  Work was unforthcoming. But for a while he did the round of Embassy receptions, and accompanied a Turkish trade delegation to Newport and Cardiff in May 1949. Every April I’d go with him to the grand Turkish Consulate building in Rutland Gardens, where he would queue uneasily to have his Certificate of Nationality stamped (1948–59).

  Home for three-and-a-half years was a small fourth-floor front room with one window rented for £3 10s. a week at 35 Inverness Terrace, a boarding house run by a wiry Greek ship owner, Ferentinos, and his ample, fur-coated wife. A naked 40-watt bulb, the aroma of cheap cigarettes, stale perfume, Mediterranean beans simmering away in the basement. To tangos of love and lust lacing the rhythms of darkness, I’d go to sleep in a corner with my rag-dolls. Occasionally I’d be farmed out to a child-minder, whose husband Wally was a fireman on the old livery ‘Great Westerns’ out of Paddington. They lived a long way away – Willesden I think. Bayswater and Queensway then, as now, was a cosmopolitan haunt for emigrés and refugees, prostitutes and fugitives. A place scented by the smells of the East … dominated by Bertorelli’s and Péchon’s Patisserie Française (since gone) … crowded out by shopkeepers and pavement cafés … overwhelmed by the late-Edwardian extravagance that was Whiteleys. To Costas’s tiny barber shop at the Turkish Baths end – where hot towels, warm hair, musty damp and dead mice left a strange cocktail in the nose – father would go for a short-back-and-sides. Here the world was debated and purveyed, from Cyprus, Makarios and current affairs to cologne and condoms, liquid-eyed girls of modest décolletage manicuring coffee-drinking patriarchs with time on their hands.

  At No 35 father wrote Portrait, introduced me to Kensington Gardens … and began to understand that while he was still seen to be the head of the family (to whom his brother and sister would refer in the event of important decisions), it was going to be my mother who’d be the bread-winner from now on. Psychologically, he could never quite accustom himself to this idea. It questioned his manhood. It had a lot to do with the depression of his later years.

  How wise father had been to flee Turkey in 1947 came home to roost twenty months later. On Monday 12 September 1949 in the Third Law Court of First Instance in Ankara he was prosecuted in absentia by the Turkish Treasury in the name of the Ministry of National Defence, identified as İrfan Urga (sic) of Ankara. The plaintiff’s case centred on a Complaint Petition registered on 13 October 1947. ‘From a perusal of the Council of Ministers Decree dated 21 December 1946, No 2776 […] it has become an established fact that Captain İrfan Urga who was sent to England to study aviation has lived with a foreign woman during his period of study and thereupon with the application of Article XII of the Military and Civilian Retirement Law No 1682 he [is] considered as having resigned his commission and with the application of Article XXIII of Law No 1076 he has been dismissed [“effective as of 15 January 1946, the date on which the decision for considering the defendant having resigned was ratified”].’ The judge found in favour of the plaintiff; and father was fined 45,904 liras 42 kuruş plus interest and costs (£125,000 in today’s money). For more than ten years he contested this finding – in the event unsuccessfully, despite long letters of pleading; and despite, after the 1960 coup d’état, making contact again with such close old friends from the Harbiye days as İrfan Tansel (1909–99), the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish Air Force. To no avail, mother appealed to the Turkish President, Celâl Bayar, and the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes. To Menderes (21 August 1956) she disputed the ‘so-called “facts”’ of the Plaintiff ’s case, and asked for compassion:

  ‘The Defendant was at no time studying aviation (or any subject) in England or elsewhere. He was sent to England by the Turkish Air Ministry as the senior officer in charge of 45 junior officers who were to complete their training in England. At the end of one year [July 1943] he was placed in full charge of all Turkish officers […] training in England and carried out these duties from […] the Turkish Embassy in London [his “official status” being advised to the British Air Ministry] […] see the pity of it that a man of your own people should be forced to remain in exile in a country which at best can be regarded by him as a substitute for home. To repay the debt is out of the question; we have no money. A writer […] is poor in any country; he is only rich in spirit and in the satisfaction of having concluded an intellectual feat. In my husband’s case it is Turkey that benefits from his writings [“he is one of your most useful and most potent assets”] – for he makes her known and recognised even to the foreign man in the street’.

  To recall the muezzin, to sway with the waves that had carried him as a child. To see İstanbul’s ‘dim, haze-hidden face’, to drink in the twin-towered profile of Kuleli throwing ‘its white reflection to the blue waters’. To catch again the whiff and smoke of grilling fish on a Black Sea wind. Simply, brutally, a mirage …

  * * *

  I was brought up very much within a ‘Turkish’ environment. We survived by being a self-contained, insular trio, each working for and supporting the other. Strangers were unwelcome. I was instructed to keep anyone Turkish away from father for fear of their motives or what they might try to do (only once, in 1957, was this relaxed when two former students of his, by now high-ranking officers, rang the door-bell and persuaded me to convince him of their trustworthiness and brotherly good intent: the encounter was emotional). We kept our own identity, our foreignness, our pride. No one knew anything about who we were or our situation. If fictions sometimes had to be created to support the fabric of our existence, then they were. Meeting my parents’ fugitive-like disposition to hide or run, to live behind masks, the occasional folly helped pre-empt awkward questions.

  At home we spoke a mixture of Turkish and English, me with a stutter so bad that at times my only means of communication was through a sing-song patter. I was never to go to school because it was felt that I would be corrupted and anglicised and would have to wear a ‘Christian cap’. Mother, any way, favoured private rather than state education (typically somewhere like Ampleforth), for which, clearly, there was no money (at best she was then earning five or six pounds a week, while father couldn’t even find employment as a hospital orderly or Christmas relief postman).

  When I was six years old, it was decided I should be taken in hand. For the next ten years, father gave me a solid education. He encouraged me to study for myself, and within our solitude we made astonishing progress. Lessons were strict and daily, from 9 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, followed by an hour or so of exercise and play in the park up the road (comfortingly watched over but never obstructed). Homework was expected each evening, and exams, devised by both my parents, would round off each term. I was given long ‘private school’ summer holidays. Annual pilgrimages to Foyles ensured I had the latest textbooks. With father I covered reading, writing (later touch-typing), arithmetic, algebra, geometrical drawing (plus a little Euclid), geography, Turkish language, Turkish history, and, towards the end, music theory and piano (which he taught himself so as to help me). With mother I studied English and French. BBC school programmes and trips to museums (where heating and learning came free) fostered other insights. This made me self-sufficient from a very early formative stage. I absorbed a lot, I was allowed to develop and dream at my own pace, and I was free to read whatever I wanted: by the age of thirteen I knew no Shakespeare or Dickens but my familiarity with Homer and Herodotus, mythology and Arthur Ransome, with the Napoleonic Wars and the Comte de Ségur, was prodigious. Learning about life was also on the cur
riculum. How to understand oneself, how to respect women and their differences, how to spot girls of the night. (Prostitutes had a place in father’s heart. Maybe in his youth, off the gas-lit lanes of Tünel down the former Grand Rue de Pera, his encounters had taken in friendship, love.) Peer contact was restricted to children I’d meet in the park during the week (we never went there on Saturdays or Sundays because mother thought it ‘common’) – a small price to pay for the adventures of mind and imagination otherwise opened up by those amazing days.

  The Turkishness of my upbringing was underlined in many ways. We ate predominantly Turkish food, supplemented by the odd sausage but almost never by Christian pork. Our Bush valve radio alternated between the BBC Home Service and the short-wave crackle of Ankara or Voice of America. Turkish news and music (of both the traditional and casino variety, mellow chanteurs like İbrahim Özgür to the fore) were always part of our evening listening. Turkish papers including Cumhuriyet, Vatan and Hürriyet were posted weekly by Mehmet. For years he and Muazzez’s first husband, Ali, writing in old Ottoman (Arabic) script, would send letters to father, keeping him abreast of events.

  Then there was marriage, the arranged marriage. Unexpectedly, for a man of his liberated behaviour, father quite warmed to the idea: throughout my childhood it was tacitly understood that I was intended for my pretty older cousin, Oya (Mehmet’s and Bedia’s daughter). Later he compromised his ideas. Contact with anyone English was dissuaded, but he did not object to my burgeoning love for a plaited Slovak beauty from Bratislava, nor my later stirrings for a dark Polish madonna, Sion girls both. Father could never rid himself of an irrational fear that, were I one day to marry someone English, he would be banished from my house and left to starve. Mother, who in her arrogant, dismissive, cutting manner, felt the English to be somehow inferior specimens of the human race, only helped fuel this insecurity. I married an English girl, Josephine, not yet twenty-one, who in her gently understanding way would have shown how unfounded was his trepidation. Had he lived, our children, Chloë and Alexander, would have been a wonderful companionship for his old age. Francesca too (from my second marriage, to Ruth in Cambridge). And little Guillaume (from the Anglo-French years with Isabelle).

  My father believed himself to be cursed, to be dogged by ill-luck. Whenever things looked up, especially financially, disaster would strike. Mother, inevitably, unwittingly, seems always to have been at the centre of these calamities: they happened because of her. Within two months of their marriage she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, in those days a serious, even fatal, condition. She had to go to hospital where father would visit her, and where I, dutifully, would wait outside. Contact between myself and her was kept to a minimum and I was only ever allowed to drink out of a cup put aside especially for me – a habit I was to remain conditioned by for the next quarter-of-a-century. By June 1951 she was better, though her consultant at the Paddington and Kensington Chest Clinic considered that she should still be kept ‘under periodic supervision for the next three to five years’.

  At the end of 1958, she went down with such a complete nervous breakdown that she was to be incapacitated for a year, unable to walk. Flat on her back, with her spine out of alignment and agonising pain in her legs, heavily sedated, moody and vicious in temper during her more lucid moments, puffy yet haggard, she attributed her recovery to a mixture of self-therapy (she painted bottles and glass with abstract designs) and visits to a faith-healer off Baker Street – through whose laying-on of hands she found herself in the care of a physician from ancient Egypt called Hemput who would bathe her body in waves of blue light and glowing heat. Physically, father survived these shocks. Emotionally, they took their toll. He began to age visibly, his hair thinned and whitened. He resorted to nerve tonics.

  * * *

  On the morning of Wednesday 4 July 1951 we left Euston by train, heading for Holyhead and Ireland. Though father’s stay in Ireland was limited officially to six months, his intention in going there was to make it our home. The idea especially appealed to mother, a woman as full of Southern Irish spirit as she was of family pride and history. (That no mementoes of her childhood or parents, no photographs, have survived has to has to be one the stranger anomalies of her story. She used to maintain she destroyed everything when her father died before the War. Or was it simply that her possessions had been abandoned in her first marital home?)

  Our belongings – all my father’s uniforms, books and silk Sparta carpets – were packed in large, ribbed trunks; nothing was left in England. I never questioned the existence of those rich carpets, they were always around me. Looking back, pondering the nature of father’s exit from Turkey, I wonder now how they ever got to be with us? Had they perhaps been left in storage in England during the War? Had they been secreted out at some time? Where are they today?

  In Ireland we took up residence in Blackrock along the coast between Dún Laoghaire and Dublin – at 82 George’s Avenue, a quietly splendid double-fronted detached house dating from some time before Victoria. It was occupied by a widow called Mooney whose husband had been in the horse-racing world and was once connected with the Irish Independent. She’d lived in the place for forty years, and let us have some rooms at a rent of £12 a month.

  The Blackrock days were at first full of hope. Most evenings we used to walk out to sea across the sand flats. Father would write. We would take the sun at Howth and Killiney. We would go for lunches and teas in wealthy houses owned by people I didn’t know (but mother did). Then, with cold nights on the wing, things began to change. We waited for offers, we got rejection slips. That Celtic summer we had thought the world ours. That autumn we knew it wasn’t. It had all been a fantasy. Fire was the idée fixe of father’s life. Portrait tells us so. When I was born he gave me the name ‘Ateş’ – Turkish for ‘fire’. One night at George’s Avenue the flames came again for him. I set the house ablaze. He managed to put it out, but not before burning his leg with a kettle of boiling water provided, absent-mindedly, by one of the Mooney daughters. In considerable pain, he was taken to hospital in Dún Laoghaire. He stayed there for some time, apprehensive of the Catholic nuns, visited daily by me and my mother. At night the sirens of the ships wailed like the forgotten foghorns of another waterway. In the steamed-up, neon-bright café on the corner, My Truly, Truly Fair spun for ever on the jukebox. The frosts came. He left under a cloud: there was no money to pay the bill.

  We had embarked for Ireland by First Class. By Third, four months later, we were to leave, penniless and possessionless save for a Turkish dictionary and a ceremonial sword. Everything else we left behind. My parents promised to return for them one day. They never did. Darkly, the boat-train brought us back to England, St Cecilia’s Day. Blackly, the underground returned us to Inverness Terrace.

  Ireland behind, the euphoria over, Portrait as spent as a supernova, life in London was grim and grey. It was a time of rationing and under-the-counter deals (a portion of chocolate could ‘buy’ a lot), of choking yellow smogs, of bomb-sites, jagged scars of the Blitz, lit by gas lamps, of coal smoke on the wind and bonfires in the park. In winter we were so cold that father would seal the window cracks with paper and flour paste; so hungry he would go down Portobello Road to rustle what he could from the barrow boys. Warm clothes were not easy to come by: wrapping ourselves with newspaper, especially our feet, helped, but not much. I always had chapped hands and scabbed ears. Food parcels from Mehmet and Ali gave us essentials like rice and beans, sucuk (spicy Turkish sausage) and olive oil, but little else. Perhaps sometimes there was the luxury of silk stockings for my mother, intricately hidden from the Customs. Toys certainly never. Kind Mrs Ferentinos would stuff a pound or two in the hand. When that failed, we’d sell the odd book for a few pence. Then there was Davis the pawnbrokers by Bayswater station: it was here that father, one hopeless day, parted with his gold Longines.

  He no longer had the courage to go to his bank for fear of refusal. ‘Dik yürü’, he used to say to me.
‘Walk straight’. He didn’t. We had become part of London’s faceless tenement poverty. Life was about fights and arguments, stale left-overs and gnawing mice, about being kept awake by the people next door and trains rumbling through the night deep in the ground, about cabbage and a balloon for Christmas. It was never to be so bad again.

  * * *

  After a few years in a tiny room, No 8, at the back of 21 Inverness Terrace (where we’d gone in 1952), we moved to 7 Pembridge Square, where in time we acquired several furnished rooms. Historically, Inverness Terrace (Lilly Langtry country) had always been red-light, Pembridge Square (old campaigners come home to pasture) retiring. Pembridge Square was upmarket,

  its grand early Victorian houses dating from the period of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Ramsey MacDonald (who married into the Square in 1896) wrote somewhere of their ‘calm dignity of pillared porticoes, bow-windows, broad steps and massive front doors’, of ‘that air of detached independence which surrounds the English middle-class home of substantial possessions’. When first built these were ‘upstairs-downstairs’ places of wealthy ownership. No 7, where only spinsters, divorcees and widows lived in our time, was elegant, and comfortable. To the back, there was the leafy invitation of a many-branched tree, full of dappled bowers and watchful owls (I mourned its felling, helpless to stop the psychotic jar of the chain-saws that one morning took its life away). To the front, flowering cherries, their glory as brief as a wedding day, veiling the ground each spring in perfumed petal-storms of rose-white and brown.

  We liked Pembridge Square. During the week, I’d join father on walks around Holland Park and Notting Hill, a nice backwater then. We’d set out across Kensington Gardens, braving gaggles of starched British nannies parading their prams like so many ships-of-the-line. By the Serpentine, I’d gather wild flowers for mother. We’d walk along Kensington Palace Gardens, wondering at the hammer-and-sickle fortress of the Soviet Embassy. We’d stroll down Kensington Church Street, past No 128 – 1 High Row, Kensington Gravel Pits – home once to the composer Clementi. Here young Mendelssohn from Berlin would visit the Horsley girls, taking time to sketch the place. Here, following father’s death, I would enjoy civilised evenings with the writer and publisher Tom Stacey, a friend of mother’s, playing Mozart duets and Field nocturnes to tremble the ghosts. On Sunday afternoons we’d go to Paddington Station to savour the wiff and steam of trains from Fishguard and Cheltenham, to catch the Cornish Riviera Express, brown, cream and titan-green, shuddering into Platform 8. In June, Trooping-the-Colour time, we’d trek as far as the Mall to watch the Queen ride side-saddle at the head of her soldiers on the way to Buckingham Palace. One year, hungry and anaemic, I fainted in the crowd.