‘It’s all gone now,’ said Thesiger wearily, interrupting my reverie. ‘That world has vanished, completely ruined by oil. The people I travelled and explored with in the forties and fifties now live in villas and towns. They have lost all connection with their desert past. People there today know nothing of the hardship and nobility of those times.’
I was not fully convinced. ‘But surely there must still be some places worth visiting?’ I ventured.
It was as if I had pressed a button; Thesiger went into full flow. He had apparently just come back from a disastrous trip to the Gulf, where the quaint, mud-walled villages and forts he had known in the fifties had morphed into prosperous modern cities, where his bête noire, the ‘motor car’, was everywhere. He did his best to persuade me to forget about the Arab world; East Africa with the Samburu tribe, he said, was the place to be.
I was completely unperturbed. Although I had never been to the Middle East and had yet to read any books by the celebrated explorers Burton, Doughty and Freya Stark, I had a curiosity about the Arab world that was part romantic, part hard-nosed pragmatism. I had seen posters in a travel agent’s of Jordan’s camel-mounted border guards patrolling the red sands of Wadi Rumm, and I’d listened in awe to my schoolfriend Alex recounting what it had been like to live in Amman, where his father worked for the UN, during the recent 1973 Yom Kippur War. On the practical side, the Arabs had oil, and it was likely to last well beyond my lifetime, so it seemed to me that there was always going to be a job for someone who spoke their language and knew about their culture. Arabic was the lingua franca in twenty countries from North Africa to the Indian Ocean. It was yet to be taught at secondary-school level in Britain, but when term time came round again in the sixth form at Marlborough College I enrolled in an extracurricular course on Islam and the Middle East. It was run by an English literature teacher, John Osborne, who had fallen in love with Iran and its exquisite Islamic architecture. His enthusiasm soon rubbed off on our small class and we sat rapt at his slide shows of the mosques, caravanserais and bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz. I found myself doodling Arabic and Persian calligraphy during history lectures when I should have been paying attention to how Pitt the Younger formed his cabinet. By the time I took my A-levels I was determined to read Arabic at university.
My parents had mixed feelings about this. They were not overjoyed at the prospect of their only child making a career in a part of the world that had just fought two major wars in the space of six years. Neither of them had any first-hand knowledge of the Middle East beyond brief port stops at Aden and Port Said on a voyage back from Singapore; the Middle East was an intractable mystery to them and neither had any affinity with the region or its culture. But as career diplomats they harboured hopes that I would one day follow in their footsteps and apply to join the Foreign Office, where Arabic would obviously be an advantage. Already I had inherited their love of languages. My father Neil had learned German while living with a family in the Sudetenland in 1938 and he would recount watching Nazi parades in the cobbled streets as the Second World War loomed. Soon after D-Day he was putting his German to use in Normandy, where his unit was tasked with questioning recently captured German POWs. My mother Grace had read modern languages at Cambridge and had a voracious appetite for French novels. As only the third woman to get into the Diplomatic Service she was asked what her preferences were for an overseas posting. ‘Anywhere but behind the Iron Curtain,’ she replied, so they sent her to Budapest. Hungary was going through a brutal period of Stalinist repression in the fifties but my mother quickly picked up Hungarian and made several lifelong friends, although some were dragged off in the middle of the night by the secret police, accused of ‘anti-communist’ activities and incarcerated for years. Back in 1958, when my parents married, the Foreign Office expected its few female diplomats to resign when they married. This absurd rule was not rescinded until much later, but my mother got round it by working for them part-time.
My memories of being a small child in London in the 1960s are of the family crowding round the transistor radio to listen to the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and hearing the announcement of Sir Winston Churchill’s death. I always seemed to be having my hair severely combed for children’s parties and being told ‘Don’t forget to say thank-you when you leave.’ There were piano lessons at school with a woman called Mrs Lloyd Webber (the mother of Andrew; sadly their family talents never rubbed off on me), and I can remember getting the gamut of children’s illnesses – mumps, measles and chicken pox – and my devoted gran peeling grapes at my bedside. To toughen me up I was taken weekly to Mr Sturgess’s gym in South Kensington, where the no-nonsense Mr Sturgess would make us jump up and swing from the monkey bars at the age of five. Once I got into a fight with a boy behind me, who I thought was trying to queue-barge in front of me, which ended with my biting his hair and us having to be separated. My mother was appalled. ‘Do you know who that boy is?’ she hissed. ‘It’s Prince Andrew.’ When I learned this I was genuinely frightened; apparently I replied, ‘Does that mean I’m going to go to prison?’
When I was six my father was posted to the British Embassy in The Hague, where we lived for the next three years. My earliest memory of foreign travel is of our little family boarding the overnight ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and waking up beside a porthole, through which I could see a gas flare burning beside the shores of the North Sea. This seemed the height of exoticism at the time. One of the first towns we drove through on the Continent was called Monster, which made it even more of an adventure. Holland may be almost next door to Britain on the map, but to me it was a strange and exciting place: there were wild boar roaming in the dark woods, seals on the beaches, and in winter it was cold enough to skate along the canals beside the windmills then warm up afterwards with hot pancakes in a seventeenth-century farmhouse. The Dutch had their own version of Christmas called St Nicholas, when friends and neighbours would deliver anonymous presents of glazed patisserie to our door, ringing the bell then vanishing before we opened it. At the international school my best friend was Dutch and I made a stab at learning his guttural language – some consonants are not dissimilar to Arabic – although this was quite pointless as the Dutch all seemed to speak perfect English. Two years later I was sent to boarding school in Kent, travelling unaccompanied on the flight from Rotterdam to Gatwick. Flying home to Holland for Christmas at the end of my first term I was horribly airsick, then the plane was diverted by snow to Amsterdam and for much of the night my parents drove frantically around the Lowlands trying to locate me, while I was happily ensconced in a waiting room with a stewardess, playing with model aeroplanes. As an only child I had learned to amuse myself and I don’t remember ever being bored or lonely. I did, though, resent the large number of diplomatic parties my parents were expected to go to in the evenings in The Hague, and they did their best to get out of them without giving offence.
At prep school I was something of a goodie-two-shoes: head prefect, scholar, captain of shooting, victor ludorum in athletics, winner of obscure prizes like Chess and Reading. I left with an Exhibition (a minor scholarship) to Marlborough, but then my academic prowess took a nosedive. Suddenly there seemed to be so many distractions, especially drama which I threw myself into. Since I seemed to be good at shooting and running, the school contacted the British biathlon Olympic ski team and over two winters I trained hard with the Army in the Austrian Alps before deciding I did not fancy dedicating the next eight years of my life to a sport which was always dominated by Nordic and East European countries. Anyway, I was an average rather than exceptional biathlon skier and the Olympic team needed supermen.
Almost my sole achievement was to become captain of shooting (again) and win a place on the British cadet rifle team to Canada, which included a summer canoe trip in the woods and lakes of upstate Quebec with the Canadian army. The night before we were due to return to civilization I had a nightmare that my long-awaited A-level results had been drea
dful: a C and two Ds. The next day I duly rang home and there was a long pause. ‘It’s not good news,’ said my mother. ‘You got a C and two Ds.’
Amazingly, this was no barrier to my pursuing my ambition to learn Arabic. I found out that of the few British universities to offer a degree course in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Exeter actually sent its students off to Cairo for a whole year instead of expecting you to fix up something yourself in the summer holidays. I took a train down to Devon to see the head of department, the Egyptian Professor Shaban. Either Shaban was a shrewd judge of a student’s potential or he was simply desperate to boost numbers on the course, which at the time were only just nudging double figures. It must be said that he was very odd to look at: almost bald, but retaining a few silky wisps that cascaded down the back of his head, all neatly combed into a ducktail, giving him the appearance of a well-groomed Pekinese. His white moustache was out of control, with several rogue hairs escaping up into his nostrils, causing him to snuffle uncontrollably at the end of each sentence. Most confusing of all, he would often make a statement that ended with a sort of chortle. Out of politeness, I would laugh too, noticing too late that his eyes were not smiling, but were in fact angry at my impertinence. But right then I could have kissed him because he gave me a place on the course. I had walked into his office with a dim view of my chances and walked out an undergraduate with a future.
I now had several months left of the fabled gap year between school and university and resolved to get myself out to the Middle East. I applied for menial jobs in several hotels around the Arab world and to work on a kibbutz in the Negev desert in Israel. While I waited for replies I got work wherever I could find it, including stacking bricks at a factory in Hampshire (£54 a week, less tax, less board and lodging at my parents). The Arab hotels and Israeli kibbutz people all sent letters politely declining my services, so when I had scraped together enough to go travelling I went up to London to buy a cheap InterRail pass that would take me by train to both Morocco and Istanbul.
It was a warm day in May and walking through Hyde Park I stopped to investigate what was going on in Prince’s Gate. The whole street appeared to have been closed off to traffic and there were police and cordons everywhere. Hundreds of Iranian Muslims had taken over the road outside the Albert Hall and were squatting on the tarmac, holding collective prayers. Out of sight, a few yards away, a group of Arabic-speaking terrorists from the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan had seized control of the Iranian embassy in Prince’s Gate, taking everyone inside hostage at gunpoint. While the police opened negotiations, the Army’s Special Air Service (SAS) Counter-Terrorist Unit was preparing for the possibility that its soldiers might have to retake the embassy by storm. The SAS team leader on the spot was Major Peter de la Billiere. Descendant of a French Huguenot family and known as ‘DLB’, he was already a veteran of counter-insurgency operations in Malaya, Oman and Aden. I was eighteen at the time and had no idea that twelve years later we would both be investment bankers, attending meetings together with Gulf rulers.
The Iranian embassy siege ended abruptly and violently a few days after it began. As soon as shots were heard from inside the building it was obvious the gunmen had started to execute their hostages. The time for talking was over. Black-clad SAS troopers abseiled down from the roof, lobbed stun grenades through the windows, shot the terrorists and freed the hostages. It was a seminal moment in more ways than one. This was the first most people had heard of the secretive crack unit called the SAS, and the regiment soon found itself subject to a lot of unwanted attention. But the incident also brought Middle Eastern terrorism home to Britain. Londoners had grown used to the threat of IRA bombings, but few expected the complex feuds of the Islamic world to spill over to these shores. Suddenly counter-terrorism was the new buzzword and the Thatcher government determined to make Britain too hard a target for foreign terrorists to tackle. Looking back now, twenty-five years later, those were easy days in counter-terrorism compared with the challenges now facing the security forces. Who could have predicted then that Britain would be targeted by an elusive transnational force called Al-Qaeda, or that some of its followers would turn out to be British citizens hiding unnoticed amidst the rest of the population?
But thoughts of terrorism were far from my mind as I set off by rail with a rucksack for Morocco in the summer of 1980. Most of my friends had either started their first jobs or had already taken off on their own gap years, so I was initially alone on this trip. My parents bore this well. I suppose they could hardly complain since they had done so much travelling themselves, but it is only now I am a parent myself that I can begin to appreciate the anxieties they must have suffered over the years each time I was out of contact for a while, anxieties which of course were realized in the summer of 2004.
On a backpacker’s budget I wound my way slowly down through the stunted spring vineyards of Andalucia to the port of Algeciras and the ferry for Tangier. As the wind whipped round the Straits of Gibraltar I stood on the deck, clustered together with other wary-looking Europeans, watching the coastline of Europe recede and the shores of North Africa draw closer. As the boat nosed into Tangier harbour we glimpsed white-walled houses climbing up the gentle hillside. Here and there stood the square, crenellated minarets of mosques, and for the first time I heard the haunting sound of the call to prayer. It drifted out from the town and across the water to reach us where we stood on the deck. We were certainly in another world from the one we had left behind in Spain, and the difference jumped out at us as soon as we passed through Customs.
‘Psst! Chef! Hashish? Tu veux acheter le keefi?’ The first drug-peddler latched on to our little group of European backpackers before we were even off the jetty. Dressed in crotch-hugging flares, stack-heeled shoes and an open shirt complete with medallion, he was the archetypal seventies-revival man. Except that we were only just out of the seventies and people really did dress like that. This one looked like trouble, though. His eyes darted shiftily above pockmarked cheeks and his face bore a scar that looked like a slash from a knife. I had read about the drugs industry here: ‘keefi’ was the local Moroccan word for hashish. Grown extensively up in the Rif mountains, it was illegal, but it was widely smoked. Unfortunately for Western backpackers, a lucrative income was to be had by informing on tourists, then claiming a reward. And an even more lucrative income could be made by persuading terrified tourists, once caught, to bribe their way out of trouble.
Together with a young Dutch couple and a roll-up-smoking German, I ignored him but he followed us past the French-built pavement cafés that lined the harbour, psst-ing and chef-ing all the way, like something out of Thomas the Tank Engine. When we turned left up into the kasbah, the old quarter, he turned left as well. Of course it was his city and he knew every backstreet, so there was no shaking him off, but he was starting to ruin the place for us. The Dutch couple decided to buy him off; this was a mistake. They did not get arrested, but as soon as they had parted with their money and bought themselves an unwanted packet of weed other peddlers swarmed around them, attracted by the sight of hard Western currency. We had to take refuge for almost the entire afternoon in an upmarket café overlooking the bay, and suddenly our fortunes changed. The café staff were friendly and welcoming and we ordered glass after glass of delicious mint tea, poured sweet and steaming at some height from a brass teapot with a long curved spout into thin cracked glasses. We lay back on plump cushions and listened to the strange halftones and quavers of Arab music coming from a radio somewhere. We had all of Morocco to explore if we wanted, and life at that moment seemed pretty good.
In fact I saw only a small fraction of the country, preferring to visit first the capital Rabat, with its spectacular Mosque of Mohammed V and its guard of costumed Arab lancers, then Meknès, a former royal capital rich in historic architecture. I liked nothing better than to sit there at a street café, listening to the strange, abrasive North African accents all around me, savouring the scent of the j
asmine-sellers and gazing abstractedly at those mysterious keyhole-shaped doorways through which beggars, donkeys and a dozen veiled women seemed to pass in the blinking of an eye. I liked the leisurely Moroccan lifestyle, their habit of going home at lunchtime for a big meal and a decent siesta, then staying up late to mingle and gossip in the covered souk. Not all the Moroccans I encountered were after my meagre backpacker’s savings. Many were genuinely hospitable, eager to show me their city for free, or inviting me to meet their families and share a dish of steaming tagine. One man’s sister still wrote to me months later – though we exchanged little more than a glance as she brought in the meal – ending her letters with the poetic French words: ‘Je te quitte avec mon stylo mais pas avec mon coeur!’, ‘I leave you with my biro but not with my heart.’ I knew that what little I had seen of Morocco was far from typical of the rest of the Arab world, that it was only one of over twenty Arab countries. But that taste was enough to reassure me that I had made the right decision. I wanted more than ever to get to know the Arab world, its language, its culture, its religion and its history.
By the time term started at Exeter University in September 1980 I had a smattering of Arabic vocabulary, I could recognize the shapes of some of the letters and I felt I had reaffirmed my commitment to study what was then still considered to be an obscure language. By now the Iran–Iraq War had broken out and there was a buzz of excitement in the Faculty of Arabic and Islamic Studies. A lot of the postgraduate students in our building were Iraqi, some of whom were later reported to be agents of Saddam’s regime, tasked to spy on the Iraqi community in Britain for any signs of anti-Saddam behaviour. By invading Iran in the summer, Saddam Hussein had reckoned he could redress in his favour the border treaty he had made five years earlier with Iran’s now-deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Iranian military, once the best-run and best-equipped in the Gulf, was in turmoil following the purges of the Islamic Revolution. Many of the most competent officers had been executed, while others had found themselves promoted on the basis of their revolutionary zeal rather than any martial skills. Iran also had an equipment crisis; under the Shah the ‘imperial’ forces had looked to America and Britain to supply their hardware, but Ayatollah Khomeini had declared America ‘the Great Satan’ and relations with Britain were hardly any better, so even in peacetime spare parts were going to be a problem, let alone when fighting a full-scale war against a large, well-equipped army like Iraq’s. It was hardly surprising Saddam thought he could bring Iran to its knees by the end of the year.
Blood and Sand Page 3
