by Mark Colvin
If our movements during the school day were largely confined to the abbey grounds, weekends and the late afternoon and early evening were pretty free. Among my more salubrious pursuits, I spent a lot of time browsing in Charing Cross Road bookshops, looking at pictures in the Tate and National Galleries, and, when I could get Keeley’s permission, which was generally not hard, going to Sadler’s Wells to see if I liked operas (I found after three or four visits that I didn’t), and to the Royal Court and National theatres, both of which sold extremely cheap tickets to school students. There was also a lot of sitting and talking about poetry, politics and sex with friends over cappuccinos in a grubby Italian café in Tothill Street.
Further away there was a café in Strutton Ground, but boys with slightly feminine looks, as I had at the time, tended to avoid that because ‘everybody knew’ that a couple of men there were in the habit of trying to pick up Westminster boys. There’s an old joke about the London Tube—‘Is this Cockfosters?’ ‘No, it’s mine’—which reflected an unpleasant reality. Being felt up by older men on the Underground was a regular hazard. I am never particularly surprised by stories in the British papers about 1960s paedophile rings in Dolphin Square, because I knew a couple of boys who were lured back there for a coffee, only to beat a hasty retreat when presented with a pile of pornographic magazines.
When I went to see The Graduate at a fairly empty afternoon showing in a cinema in Victoria, aged fifteen, I moved seats because a middle-aged man had sat down next to me and was running his hand up my thigh. I moved again, twice, and each time he followed me and did it again. I was about to tell him loudly to leave me alone when an usher, alerted by my movements around the theatre, came over and demanded to see my ticket. I went through my pockets but couldn’t find it. The usher took me out to the foyer to see the manager, who threatened to call the police. In a cold sweat, I tried repeatedly to explain what had happened, to stony disbelief: failure to produce the ticket had convinced the manager that I must be lying. After several panicky minutes, a final check yielded the crucial ticket stub among schoolboy pocket-detritus, and only then was I off the hook. By now I had missed a good quarter of an hour of the movie, so their offer to let me back in (not a hint of an apology or a free ticket to another showing) seemed paltry.
To make matters worse, they demanded I go back in with them to identify the molester. By now, in addition to the cold sweat, I was shaking—I suppose I was in mild shock, from the real fear, before I found the ticket, that the police would be called. The last thing I wanted was further confrontation. The manager was insistent, saying he needed to know who the man was to stop him doing it again, but I refused and fled. It was a small enough incident, but I think of it whenever I hear of a woman being blamed for not reporting sexual abuse, or not reporting it soon enough.
My friends and I worked out fairly quickly which pubs to avoid because masters drank there, and which pubs outside that radius would turn a blind eye to the fact that we were blatantly under-age. If you were desperate for a pint out of hours (most pubs in those days had to shut for a few hours in the afternoon), there was even a bar on the westbound platform of Sloane Square Tube station which not only asked no questions about your age but had an all-day licence. This usually involved a double misdemeanour: under-age drinking and fare evasion.
In the evenings, in prep time, there was also the trick of getting Keeley’s permission to go and see a play, but going to see Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton instead. For all my transgressions, I did not, however, start smoking cigarettes until I was sixteen (still horribly early, and something I’ll always regret), and I never got offered either grass or hash, let alone anything stronger, until well after I’d left Westminster, so in that regard presumably the school would have counted Charles Keeley a success.
My passion at the school, and the area in which I excelled, was English. I had not one but two inspiring English masters: Jim Cogan and John Field. They could hardly have been more different.
Jim Cogan was calm and uncompromising, a phlegmatic man who had picked up the habit, while teaching at the University of Kingston, Jamaica, of calling you ‘man’ while critiquing your work. Asked whether he thought The Lord of the Rings could be classified as literature, he replied, ‘I’ve got no time for whimsy, man,’ which indicated clearly how uninterested he was in ingratiating himself with a bunch of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, but which somehow seemed to increase our respect for him. Almost everyone Jim taught tended to be infected with the ‘man’ virus, somewhat in the way that the word ‘dude’ spread through youth culture in the 1990s and early 2000s. But he was highly analytical and extremely rigorous, particularly about Shakespeare. By insisting we read aloud, constantly taking each line apart and explicating archaic words, he brought the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras alive in the high, book-lined library/classroom in which he taught us through the second half of the 1960s.
John Field, by contrast, was energised and full of enthusiasm, whether for Classicists like Milton or Romantics like Keats, always pushing, pushing, pushing to find the emotion and sensibility behind a poem or a piece of prose. One of the most inspiring hours of my school life was spent discussing one of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: ‘The Sick Rose’.
O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Interrogating us each around the table, Field questioned not only every line but every word of this deceptively simple poem. By the end, there was an ambiguity in every line: was the worm the devil? Original sin? Sex? Was the rose a flower? A girl? The barmaid at The Rose and Crown (as Germaine Greer once jokingly suggested)? What does the end of the poem mean? That the inevitable end of childhood brings with it the inevitability of death itself? That sexuality is both ‘crimson joy’ and destruction? These questions and so many more opened the poem out, appropriately enough, like a flower.
There were some boys who walked out of that class thinking that Field was over-interpreting, that the whole thing was self-indulgent. For me, it was a brain explosion, almost psychedelic in the way it opened up every great poem I read from then on. It was the moment that I first saw the point of literary criticism, and decided that English literature was the subject I wanted to pursue: to university and, if necessary, beyond. I began by immersing myself in Blake, but soon discovered that the way of thinking I had just learned was applicable to anyone from Andrew Marvell to TS Eliot, for that was the year I also first read ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’. It would be a year or two before I got to ‘The Waste Land’, and realised what a mass of Western and Eastern culture I would have to absorb before I understood even half of it, but in retrospect, I can see that I was on my way.
John Field was also the driving force behind the school’s drama productions. I had no sporting abilities, but I did like acting, and acting was important at Westminster. The sons of Richard Attenborough and Jack Hawkins were both there, and I recall spotting their fathers’ faces, so familiar from films like The League of Gentlemen and Guns at Batasi, beyond the footlights during a performance of—was it Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers, or Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fayre? I was in both, as well as Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and a play called The Happiest Days of Your Life, in which I was given the part played by Margaret Rutherford in the film. I enjoyed it all up to a point, but I was late to puberty, and by 1968, when my slightly girlish features and still half-unbroken voice meant I was getting only female parts, I think I was getting sick of it. This expressed itself in increasing attacks of stage fright which eventually made up my mind to stop auditioning. I was prone to this fear for the next thirty or more years, though oddly never on radio: only on stage or on camera with a live audience. Then, some time around my fiftieth birthday, for no appa
rent reason, it just stopped. I do public speaking engagements and TV talk shows now without a qualm or even a raised heartbeat. After decades of anxiety, the quality of not giving a damn, after so many years, is strangely liberating.
* * *
Almost throughout 1967, Dad was in Hanoi. At that time, even in Britain, which was giving the USA tacit support but making it clear there was no question of sending troops, opposition to the war was growing. Our elders saw us as a generation who felt more kinship with our age group—particularly in the USA—than with our own nationality, and maybe they were right.
Personally, I felt divided about Vietnam. Plenty of my contemporaries had anti-war and even pro-Viet Cong posters on their walls, but I had heard far too much, from my own reading and from my father’s table talk, to have any illusions about Ho Chi Minh and his government in Hanoi. On the other hand, I didn’t think much of the government in the South, and enough had already been revealed about American involvement in the 1963 coup against President Diem to make me doubt any US claims of supporting democracy and the rule of law. It seemed far too much like a war between one kind of dictatorship and another. My father wasn’t there for me to argue these questions with. He was being bombed, or watching others being bombed, every day. Would he come back? Or would one of those rockets go astray, leaving him to be buried in a foreign field? On one level, I just wished the war would be over, almost regardless of how.
The occasional letter from my father didn’t always help. One of the early ones described how he’d been walking back to his residence one day when the air-raid sirens sounded. He had heeded the instructions of a Vietnamese air-raid warden and jumped into an ‘air-raid shelter’. This, in his description, consisted of a cylinder set just over a metre deep into the ground. As he was 185 centimetres tall, this required considerably more contortions than for Vietnamese men at this impoverished time, who were on average a good 30 centimetres shorter. Once you were in the shelter, Dad wrote, the warden would cover it with a heavy concrete lid, and you were stuck. There was usually water in the bottom of the cylinders, they were frequently infested with frogs and mosquitoes, and there was an occasional snake. That one time Dad obeyed the order to get in, the warden failed to return on his rounds and remove the lid until an hour or more after the all-clear had sounded. There and then, my father told me, he resolved to react to air-raid sirens by ignoring all instructions and walking home as fast as possible. In practical terms, his residence was probably not really any safer than the street, because the North Vietnamese had refused the British permission to erect their own air-raid shelter, but he was determined never to get into one of those holes again.
I knew also that he had had severe dental problems, and had been unable to go to Saigon to get them fixed, so he ended up having the work done in difficult circumstances in Hanoi. I didn’t know until much later that this involved the removal of two abscessed teeth without anaesthetic—all anaesthetics were reserved for the war effort. He described the process in his memoir:
I took a bottle of Haig Gold Label whisky from the reserves and, seated in the squalid gloom of the dining room, began gradually from a tumbler to reduce its level until, at 11 o’clock, about three-quarters—or such was my misty estimate—had been consumed. Arms on the shoulders of Dong and the blind gardener, I was then escorted, feet somewhat at the trail, to the Ford Escort, the driver’s mouth agape. The pain of the subsequent proceedings must have been sensibly diminished by this measure. It did not seem so at the time, and the aftermath was even worse than recovery from the older type of general anaesthetic. But the business was, after all, over.
Hanoi was a city of bicycles, but my father was denied permission to import or buy a bicycle. His movements, and those of most diplomats, were constrained to walking, except on the monthly visits to the airport, for which the consulate’s Ford Escort was allowed just enough of a petrol ration for the return journey, sometimes hardly even that. In a secret despatch in late 1966, he wrote that the consulate was down to its last 18 litres of petrol, and that neither he nor the French (normally in a better position) had any immediate prospect of a refill.
How does a spy operate within these extremely tight constraints? Dad’s memoir, tightly vetted as it was by the SIS, nowhere acknowledges that spying was his business, but it gives quite a few clues to how he worked. His diplomatic status was anomalous and officially non-existent as far as the Vietnamese were concerned, but access was not entirely blocked: ‘At the DRV National Day celebrations, we were customarily accorded the status of foreign journalists, in parallel with that of the two DRV journalists in London, although included with ambassadors, Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo at the top table.’
Thus, he not only saw, but occasionally had short conversations with, ‘Uncle Ho’. In one letter, he entertained me with an account of a reception for the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man into space. There were so many toasts and counter-toasts, he said, that Ho Chi Minh ended up drunkenly sitting on Titov’s knee, fondling his face. This part of the story didn’t make it into the memoir, but even the version Dad set down over two decades later was entertaining enough:
Ho’s eyes, under the weight of boastful technicalities, closed, opened, intermittently flickered shut but, before he drifted off entirely, caught mine and saw me smiling. He laughed gently and shook himself. ‘Who is that man’, inquired Titov, ‘who is laughing at me?’ ‘He is not laughing at you’, the leader said. ‘That is the British Consul-General. He is the only man who smiles in Hanoi, and he smiles all the time.’
But these opportunities for first-hand observation were rare, and communication with the Vietnamese Government mostly very hard. Paddy Hayes’ biography of Daphne Park recounts one story I’d never heard which illustrates the difficulty:
Colvin was directed by London to hand a particularly important message directly to the Foreign Ministry. Unfortunately the DRVN Foreign Ministry refused all contact with the consulate. Colvin’s solution was to approach the rear of the ministry building which boasted a fine garden tended by a gardener. Colvin attracted the man’s attention, then stuck his arm through the barred gate and handed the startled gardener the missive from London, scarpering before the amazed man could do anything about it.
As an aside, ‘scarpering’ was certainly one of my father’s words, along with ‘trousering’ instead of ‘pocketing’. His language ranged from the abstruse—he would dazzle opponents in debate by talking about things like ‘irredentism’ and ‘revanchism’, and debate the finer points of Marxism with ‘Marxists’ who then proved never actually to have read Marx—to the full range of British sailors’ swearwords, possibly the richest source of foul language in the world.
So where was intelligence to be found? One answer lay in pure observation. One of the disciplines taught in the SIS tradecraft training centres, my father told me, was a version of what was known as Kim’s Game, a series of memory exercises based around the game the young spy is taught in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. He was good at it: here’s his account of a stroll around The State Department store in Hanoi, which, like all department stores in communist countries at the time, had a stock which could politely be described as minimalist:
The goods available in November 1966 included footballs, enamelled basins and chamberpots in immense quantity, a guitar or two, Bulgarian watches, Soviet and Chinese radios, hundreds of Chinese thermos flasks, two Czech bicycles and accessories, shelf upon shelf of torch batteries, one pair of Zeiss field-glasses, two crowded counters of foreign drugs (Caffeine, Nivalin, Ematin, Philophran, Adrenaline, Progesterone), soap dishes, two or three showcases of local scent and soap, a few lipsticks, tin pots of face cream, one brand of tooth-paste, Soviet tinned and Chinese powdered milk, gumboots and poor-quality shoes, monocolour gabardine and other cloth, skimpy shirts and vests, face-flannels by the thousand, light-weight trousers.
In circumstances where taking a photograph or writing in a notebook would have attracted instant hostile attent
ion, this is a considerable feat of memory.
But there was also human intelligence, because even without formal access to the Vietnamese Government, the British consul-general was treated as a full colleague by most of the rest of the Diplomatic Corps, including those of the many communist and socialist countries who represented Vietnam’s allies and supporters in the war. That said, an exception was a Red Guard chargé d’affaires who, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, used the opportunity of a reception to spit directly into my father’s face, addressing him (because of his ambiguous diplomatic/non-diplomatic status) as ‘Mister British journalist’. ‘To have replied, in these circumstances,’ wrote my father in his memoir, ‘with a backhander across the chops, would have carried no national consequences. The chargé was, however, surrounded by five beefy colleagues, and retaliation would also have led to unsuccessful brawling.’
The French and Canadian embassies were particularly helpful both socially and regarding material restrictions on a colleague who was denied the normal privileges of diplomatic status, but there also seems to have been a remarkable amount of contact with the Soviets, who were not always happy with the way the Vietnamese treated their aid and advice and sometimes played them off against China. There was also the ‘all in it together’ factor, because neither supporters nor opponents of the Hanoi government were immune to the endless bombing. My father illustrated it thus:
One of [the Soviet] senior officials converted from straight vodka to gin and tonic in the course of repeated visits to my house … Another, with previous service in London, laid maddening emphasis on his acquaintance with [former Conservative minister] Reggie Maudling, pronounced by him ‘Moddling’. A Soviet military attaché, in the time he could spare from complaining about DRV mismanagement of SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] or from chasing Tonkinese waitresses, recounted interminable dirty stories in an English which few could grasp.
