Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  Father possessed a strong sense of historical moment. For VE Day, which in 1945 he and mother shared with the throngs in Trafalgar Square. For the passing of men, the insurrections of Europe, the rituals of ceremonial. He admired Douglas Bader, he followed Suez closely, he was appalled by Prague in 1968, he analysed Cuba, he grieved for Kennedy. Concerned, he watched developments in Russia, the old enemy. In February ’52, an ice wind blowing off the Thames, we went to the lying-in-state of George VI. In 1965 we watched Churchill’s funeral on a small black-and-white television, naval ratings drawing the coffin, sixty-two paces to the minute. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising took us to the Hungarian Embassy to see the communist star torn from the flag. The royal salutes of the King’s Troop in Hyde Park, Henry VIII’s hunting ground, became a pilgrimage. The sight, sound and sweat of black horses galloping and wheeling out of distant woodland, harnesses jingling, pulling their six battle-green 13-pounders from Gallipoli and the Somme, nearside riders in No 1 Dress, gold-frogged, and hussar-cut, the earth-pounding thunder of each ‘Fire!’ ricocheting off the walls of Park Lane, drowning out the voices of Speaker’s Corner – this, we imagined, was what it must have been like to witness a charge at Waterloo or Inkerman. Battle of Britain fly-pasts, Spitfires and Hurricanes leading heavy Wellingtons and Lancasters, were another highlight every September – the banshee wail of the All Clear, the high drone of Merlin engines, reminding father of first days with mother and flying with the RAF.

  Pembridge Square saw a change in our fortunes. Up to 1957 mother had had a good job working for Frank F. Pershke, a German printing machine company in Westminster Bridge Road, tarnished only by her being loved and courted there by a handsome Pole – making for a stressful atmosphere at home, whatever her protestations of innocence. Then at the end of June that year, Midsummer Day, she joined Secker & Warburg in Bloomsbury (the publishers of Mann, Orwell, Kafka, Gide, Moravia, Barzun, Colette, Angus Wilson, Malraux and Günter Grass), initially as a secretary, latterly as an editor. She was paid a salary of £14 10s a week. We felt ourselves rich, the more so since at the same time I was earning some money by keeping the post-book for a travel agency in The Courtyard off Queensway.

  For the only time during father’s life in England, we took a holiday, on one of those big trains of promise down to Totnes in Devon, to a farm called Blue Post. 7th–21st September. It was a good fortnight, us three striding out under open skies, taking in the sea at Paignton, waiting at Avonwick for tank-engines and a coach or two that never seemed to come for all the curling smoke in the valley, for once at one with each other and rurality.

  Parties at Fred and Pamela Warburg’s book-lined Regent’s Park flat in St Edmund’s Terrace that autumn led to father, charismatic as an exotic Turk of Ottoman childhood and Republican making, finding himself suddenly taken up, admired by a literary set who may have wondered at his less-than-fluent English, but said nothing, thinking it quaint and attractive instead. We returned the hospitality in our own style, bottles of Turkish wine and delicacies from Soho complementing father’s latest culinary triumphs, the main room hung with rugs. The charmed, brilliant Peterkiewiczs, Jerzy and Christine (Brooke-Rose), came to Pembridge Square. Lord Kinross too – later, in 1959, approaching father to provide the translations and Turkish source material used in his Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation. And, of course, the Warburgs – gravel-voiced, equine Fred, Jewish intellectual, sometime Royal Artillery officer, living proof that publishing was indeed ‘an occupation for gentlemen’.

  * * *

  All but two of father’s books were published in the 1950s. Many more, short stories as well, were sketched or completed, but they either remained in manuscript or typescript, or were destroyed. When Portrait appeared, a number of critics voiced astonishment at its command of English. Harold Nicolson in particular, in the Observer (13 August 1950), closed his generous appreciation with a note of surprise that someone who’d apparently not known a word of English ten years before (well, very little) ‘should now be able to handle the intricacies of our language as easily as if it were his native tongue’. A fortnight later Barbara Worsley-Gough, writing in the Spectator, likened father to ‘something of a masculine, Muslim George Eliot’.

  In their different ways these reviewers questioned and exposed the truth more acutely than they might have imagined. In the late ’40s father’s spoken command of English was fractured; by the late ’60s it was fluent but still quite limited in vocabulary and strong in accent (‘gowermund’ for ‘government’ being a particular mannerism). His understanding of the written word, on the other hand, was rich: he read widely and avidly, from Dostoevsky and Pasternak to Galsworthy, from Churchill to Eric Newby. When Atatürk was published by Michael Joseph in 1962 he insisted (against her will) that mother be credited as co-author. Justly so. He, after all, better than anyone, knew it was she who was the stylistic and linguistic force, the mentality sometimes, the persona often, behind all his work. Leaving a legacy of stories and novels, sometimes under assumed names, she’d always wanted to be an author in her own right.4 Only father, she said, had ‘crushed’ her talent.

  In writing his books father’s method, so far as I can remember, was to prepare a sketch in Ottoman Arabic, which he would then translate and expand into new Turkish Latin, followed by a basic draft in English. This he would hand over to mother who would absorb, interpret and discuss before fashioning a literary, poeticised metamorphosis suitable for publication. His story, her English. Later I would join in, too, reading each chapter, preparing indexes … and even, imagining myself cartographically inclined, drawing endpaper maps for The Caravan Moves On.

  Following Portrait his most significant efforts of the 50s were Phoenix Ascendant: the Rise of Modern Turkey (Robert Hale), dedicated to the memory of his parents; and The Caravan Moves On (Secker & Warburg), a Book Society Recommendation. Both appeared in 1958. The latter, about the Yürük nomads of Karadağ in the High Taurus, aroused interest. The Geographical Magazine thought it to have ‘ethnological importance’. Freya Stark, seasoned Anatolian trekker, enjoyed it. Kinross in the Daily Telegraph spoke of its illumination. The Times Literary Supplement, not always sympathetic in reviewing father’s work, found space to praise. To his surprise/discomfort (but pleasure) he found himself hailed variously as a poet, a traveller of the best sort, a master storyteller, a companionable fellow, a writer of brilliance.

  Easiest to compile were two British culinary ground-breakers taken up by André Deutsch: Cooking with Yoğurt (1956), pioneering ‘one of nature’s blessings to mankind’; and Turkish Cooking (1958). Both enjoyed financial return and stayed in print for many years. The astonishingly primitive way given by father for making yoğurt, complete with a ‘nest’ of cotton twill and feathers in the fireplace of our room, was a ritual I witnessed nightly in Pembridge Square. Prompted by a need to build mother’s strength after her tuberculosis, the result had a deliciousness and texture unlike anything then available. Even today nothing can compare. For father food was the focus of family life. Reflecting the spirit of the meals he created – culture-reminding ‘old family favourites’ of lavish sight and smell, each a nostalgic excuse for lamp-lit nights of coffee-and-tobacco aftermath, of reminiscences and stories – his cookery writing, framed by social custom and monarchist/republican history, imbued with the tastes and textures of a distant place and past, endures as a rare species of sensory autobiography.

  There were also a couple of educational diversions: The Young Traveller in Turkey, dedicated to me (Phoenix House 1957); and The Land and People of Turkey (A. & C. Black 1958). This last, sold outright for £75, circulated under a pseudonym, ‘Ali Riza’ – the name of Atatürk’s Albanian father. A nom de plume was wanted, the publishers said, to avoid clashing with The Young Traveller. They were also worried about saturating the market with too many titles under the Orga name. Father didn’t mind. He needed the money and was glad to have a chance to write something for his young nephews back in İstanbul, Kaya (Mehmet’s son) and
Erdal Arığtekin (Ali’s). Mother’s breakdown aside, 1958 was a good year for us.

  * * *

  In the late fifties/early sixties a new way of life began to take us over. We started to look for houses to rent, buy even. At weekends we would go to St Albans, to Pinner and Chesham, to Northwood Hills and Amersham. Metroland became our hunting ground. Occasionally we’d venture south: a Pullman tea on the old Brighton Belle is a happy memory. Then we put an advertisement in The Times and got one reply. We pondered, we saw, we fell in love.

  The white house on a hill foretold by a gypsy, Spike Island, belonging to the van Thals (Bertie – James Agate’s ‘sleek, well-groomed dormouse’ – was a seasoned anthologist and former publisher, Phyllis edited Vanity Fair), was a low-slung, late eighteenth-century, weather-boarded East Sussex cottage. In over an acre of isolated wilderness, of wooded, nightingaled, seclusion, it nestled by a rampant ancient hedge down a rutted, grassy lane just up from Wadhurst station. Kipling country. No more than an hour or so from Charing Cross, it was like nothing we’d ever seen. It was romantic and rustic, a haven within heaven. It wasn’t ideal, we kept telling ourselves (just two front rooms, bathroom and kitchen – which meant I’d have no bedroom of my own) … but was anything better likely to come up? After all, we’d had no other responses to our optimistic advertisement and we wanted to get away from London. We rented it for a song (5 guineas a week), moving in on 18 September 1961. Later, in March 1968, mother bought it for £5,500.

  Father loved Spike Island and its stillness. It was a place where humans and noise didn’t exist, where the garden spirits ruled everywhere. We were enveloped by Nature in all the overtures and cadences of its seasons – the damp-green smell of the earth, the scent of flowers, the waves of June yarrow, the rustle of animals, the majesty of oak and beech, the sway of birch, the wind. The blackness of the night unpolluted by city lights, ‘powdered with stars’, the galaxies of the Milky Way, bordered on mystical experience.

  In 1962 two contrasting books appeared: Cooking the Middle East Way (sold outright to Paul Hamlyn for £200); and Atatürk (against which Michael Joseph advanced us £500). Atatürk (anticipating Kinross’s study by two years) was a reworking of the second part of Phoenix Ascendant. The Turkish Embassy didn’t like it. ‘The portrait of Atatürk […] is a source of astonishment and indignation to Turkish people everywhere,’ wrote the press attaché to the Evening Standard (20 January). ‘I take the strongest exception to the words used to describe Atatürk’s character.’ Coincident with this criticism was a letter received from the Consulate requesting father to attend for an interview to answer (unspecified) questions. He didn’t, and never heard further. His Certificate of Nationality went unrenewed.

  Subsequently, father compiled a voluminous tome of rice recipes but no one wanted it. He contemplated a life of Muhammed but it was never more than an idea. With me he researched and wrote some chapters for a biography of Hayrettin Barbarossa, Süleyman’s admiral: had it been completed, it might have been his most definitive work. Fresh from Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif fancied filming Atatürk, with himself, an ideal cut of a man, in the title rôle. He paid us a handsome option fee (£1,500 [£24,000]). But this, too, came to nothing.

  Spike Island gave father comfort of mind. It was the next best thing to that boyhood dream of ending his days fishing by the Golden Horn. But it also gave him time to think. He saw almost nobody, visitors were few. He felt he had no status or authority nor class. Materially he was totally dependent on mother. His life in England, he would confide to me in a mixture of temper and tears, had long been celibate. Her flirtations, her falling for an RAF wing-commander, tortured him. By then in her mid-forties – perfumed, rouged and henna-haired, marcasite earrings and a slim black cigarette-holder deciding her fashion look – she was senior editor at W. H. Allen off the Strand, daily taking the late breakfast-car train to Cannon Street. Flighty and extravagant, she led a lifestyle coloured by literary lunches, cocktail parties, and – from what she would tell me – more than an innocent embrace or two. Rows, moods, hours, days of silence … Mother no longer used to walk out on us (as she had so often done in London). But she knew exactly how to punish father, even in his final hours. Our house may have resounded to our fun, but it trembled with our tension, too.

  Father’s regime revolved around gardening (which he’d acquired a taste for in Diyarbakır) and the kitchen, learning to live with footpath laws, and watching television (from The Forsyte Saga, The Prisoner and Here’s Harry to Saturday afternoon wrestling, Wimbledon and the 1966 World Cup. He liked nothing better than to grow artichokes and asparagus or tend to his grapes. He enjoyed bringing us eggs still warm from the Rhode Island Reds and White Sussexes clucking away in their coop in between sparring with İnci and Pamuk, our blue-eyed white-and-orange Van cats acquired from a wealthy acquaintance in London. On summer mornings he would collect the scented dew-washed pink petals of old-fashioned cottage-ramblers to make pots of sugary rose jam, diaphanously veined. Following the Great Freeze of 1962–3, when we were snowed in for a week and neither buses nor trains moved, we formed a literary agency, International Authors. We ran this from home. Father did the typing and filing, mother did the advising, and I went after contracts and commissions. Our stable was small but respectable, even occasionally newsworthy. None of us, I think, ever thought we really had the ‘middle man’ mentality, but it was a way of creating an occupation and bringing in some money.

  Music was increasingly important to father. Having once in Pembridge Square heatedly opposed my aspirations, only giving way on condition that I prove myself within two years, he did everything in the 60s (once I’d fulfilled my side of the bargain) to nurture me, to buy music and books, and (in my late teens, early twenties) to support my nascent steps into journalism and criticism. Occasionally he’d reminisce. Waking up as a cadet to réveillé and scratched 78s of Light Cavalry. Stumbling across a ruined organ, pipes and keys open to the elements. Falling for a slip of a girl playing the piano across a mulberried Bosphorus garden. Casino songs. Midnight tangos.

  Our concert-going in the 50s had been sparodic but not unknown. Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky evenings at the Royal Albert Hall, Shostakovich attending the Leningrad Philharmonic under Mravinsky. In the 60s we’d cross the park, past the Albert Memorial and its Parnassian frieze, to the Royal College of Music to hear their brightest and best students play every Wednesday evening at 5.30. The Goethe Institute nearby was another haunt, where we could get concerts, a reception and food, and a chance to chat informally with artists (Elly Ney, Friedrich Wührer, the Kontarsky brothers) – all for nothing. I even got to turn pages.

  Exchanging Bayswater for Wadhurst didn’t lessen baba’s desire to keep up our concert life. From the young Tamás Vásáry there was a 150th anniversary Liszt recital at the Royal Festival Hall, with five dazzling encores including the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody (the oriental rhetoric of which father found appealing). We savoured war-horse concertos given class by Rubinstein and Giulini (the old seigneur with an eye for mother). We discovered the Proms, we confronted the twentieth century no less than the past. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, Solti, Boulez, Copland, Ozawa, Penderecki, Xenakis, Havergal Brian, Horenstein, Ormandy, Oistrakh, Arrau, Barbirolli, Boult, Ashkenazy fresh from his win in the Tchaikovsky Competition, modern music at the ICA … Long after father’s death it seemed unimaginable to go to a concert without him. He taught me how to love and share music. He could never understand, he resented, the mentality, the attitude, the apparent disinterest and lack of respect he witnessed among so many professional critics. Why, he would ask? I had no answer. I still don’t.

  Father lived at Spike Island for nine years. He saw mother succeed but become remote. He saw me off on my own future. He saw himself with nothing to live for. I know of no one who cried for death to come more than he. One crisp November morning in 1970 a card dropped through the letter-box for an unplanned hospital visit. Walki
ng his garden, content to have been given a clean bill of health days earlier, he touched the trees he’d planted, pausing here to prune, there to commune with the queenly cherry veiling the kitchen window. Honouring the appointment, forgotten by a world he’d once fancied to command, speared by the arrows off mother’s tongue, he slipped away from us with a beatific smile, his brow at rest, his pallor no longer flushed by the heat of fever. That heart-attacked, gout-ridden, medicated summer had been one of pain, of blue eyes darkened with anxiety and sickness, War and Peace at his bedside. Not that night. Unconscious, he just wanted to go. Those moonless hours, the phone call from the Kent and Sussex, Ward 14, the walk home through the woods, branches dripping, mother never having had time to say goodbye, his faithful old labrador, Lâle, black as coal, howling in her loneliness, the aura of light trembling behind the trees, I have remembered all my life. Sunday the 29th, the first morning hour. Brought home for one last adieu, his coffin shrouded with a red Turkish flag crossed by his sword, that same sword we’d brought back from Ireland, he was, at his wish, cremated. A simple service. Some music – the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, Chopin’s Funeral March. Flames. His ashes we cast to the winds around the place he had come to love so much. A few I kept aside. I buried them with my mother.