The restaurant was not large, perhaps fifteen tables, and entirely populated by Chinese diners. Not a single “round-eye” in sight. I was not surprised; they could not have found the place.
The serving staff appeared to be two young men, alike enough to be brothers (which they were) and both strapping six-footers with black buzz-cut hair. Out of the kitchen came the proprietor and chef, evidently the father, also over six feet with am iron-gray buzz cut. He greeted Johnny as a friend.
There were no menus. Johnny ordered for both of us, and what he asked for was met with beaming approval. When we were alone, I asked, “They are pretty big for Chinese.”
“They are Manchu,” said Johnny. “They grow big up there.”
“And the language?”
“Mandarin.”
The meal was beyond excellent, probably the best I have ever had. I commented on the warmth with which he had been greeted.
“Well, they are colleagues in a way.”
“Working for London?”
“Good Lord, no, they are Beijing’s intelligence branch down here.”
I was getting a bit confused.
“I thought they were the enemy.”
“Good heavens, no, the Russians are the enemy. The KGB. Beijing can’t stand them, so they keep us up to speed on everything the Sovs get up to, and they always know first.”
Now the old perceptions were really spinning.
“So we get along with the Chinese, although we are supposed to be on different sides?”
“Absolutely. Except for the Nationalists, the residue of the old Kuomintang. They are a pain in the arse.”
“I thought the Nationalists were anti-Beijing.”
“They are. That’s why they are a pain. They have a colony several bays along the coast. They scrimp and save until they have enough to buy some illegal guns, then they set off in a sampan or two to invade Mainland China.”
“What happens to them?”
“Oh, I tip off my friend here”—he nodded toward the kitchen—“and the idiots are intercepted as they land.”
“Aren’t they executed?”
“Oh, no, we have an arrangement. They just disarm them and send them back. Then they have to scrimp and save for another year to buy some more guns, then it happens again. Look, the People’s Liberation Army could take this place before breakfast if they wanted. We are very much guests here.
“A peaceable Hong Kong suits both sides. For Beijing, it is a valuable income stream and a meeting point where we can talk unobserved. Their new man, Deng Xiaoping, is more of a pragmatist than a dogmatist. For us it is a trading center and a listening post. Anything that threatens to disturb that cozy relationship is a menace. That includes the Kuomintang for us and the KGB for them. All we have to do is keep Beijing sweet and the Russkies inside their box.”
As he settled up and we were bowed out the door, I realized that I had just learned over superb chow mein that what the Western newspaper-reading public had been told for years was complete bunkum.
The car was untouched, though in many alleys of the world it would have been stripped. But no one had laid a finger on it. They wouldn’t dare.
The next day, the RAF unit tucked away behind Kai Tak gave me a ride around the colony in one of their helicopters. I think it was a Skeeter, but anyway it was extremely small, just a Perspex bubble under a noisy fan. The cabin had no doors, so on the steep banks one was held only by the straps to keep from plunging two thousand feet to the ground.
From this vantage point, one could see the Gurkhas patrolling the heather hills of the New Territories, looking for the refugees who came over in a constant stream, seeking a new life away from Communism. But the colony was far too small. So they were picked up, escorted to a camp on Lantau Island (now the new airport), and then sent back.
There was another cozy agreement, so that they were not punished; just told not to do it again and resettled a long way away. That evening I was asked to address the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I did so completely sober, to be congratulated, as the previous guest, comedian Dave Allen, had fallen face-forward into the soup.
The last day, Jardine Matheson asked me to fire the ceremonial Noon Day Gun, and then it was off to Kai Tak for the flight to Brisbane.
After Australia and New Zealand and the same interview questions another hundred times, my flight west from Perth passed right over the island of Mauritius. Hutchinson, my publishers, who were paying for this tour, suggested that as there was nothing for me in Jo’burg until the Monday, I take a rest break on this lovely resort island. I was lodged at the Saint Géran Hotel, still one of my world favorites to this day, thirty-five years later.
While there for only sixty hours, I fell in love—twice. There was a dive shop and a resort course. A few hours of instruction in the pool permitted two real scuba dives over the nearby reefs. And I was smitten by the silence and the beauty of this underwater world. I have been diving ever since.
And there was a game-fishing boat, the Chico, which was booked. But one of the pair who had reserved it cried off and the general manager, Paul Jones, who remains a friend to this day, was looking for a stand-in. As a boy in Kent, I had fished for bream and rudd in the Hythe Canal, but this was different—eight hours on the vast and rolling Indian Ocean with lines streamed for marlin, sailfish, kingfish, wahoo, tuna, and bonito.
I forget what we caught, but it was over a dozen, without the marlin or sailfish, and when we tied up at the dock in the late afternoon I was smitten again. I later based the story “The Emperor” on that day at sea. Then it was a car to the airport and the flight to Jo’burg. I was decanted at Heathrow ten days later, feeling like a wrung-out dishcloth.
But since then I have dived the reefs from Lizard Island, Queensland, west to the corals of the Baja Peninsula on the Sea of Cortés; swum with shark and manta ray among the atolls of the Maldives and the Amirantes; hooked marlin, sailfish, and amberjack (always returned to the ocean), and wahoo and kings (for the dinner table).
My only drugs are silence and solitude, and in an increasingly noisy, frantic, and crowded world, on or under the sea is where I find them.
FIVE YEARS IN IRELAND
There was not the slightest reason why Irish politician Charles Haughey and I would get on, but we did. To his political enemies, he was relentless, and vengeful for any slight or ill turn. When relaxed over a dinner table, I found him an amusing rogue. And he was certainly a rogue.
As a passionate republican, he had little time for the English or anything British, but seemed to make an exception for me, perhaps because he realized I had quickly seen through him.
My wife and I had left the UK for Spain in January 1974 to escape the electoral victory of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson and the tax policies of Dennis Healey, who raised income tax to an eye-watering 83 percent when he came to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in April. The year in Spain was to avoid the possibility that most of the earnings from the first three novels would disappear, perhaps never to be repeated. But it was never intended that we should settle in Spain. It was the statutory “year of absence.”
By Christmas 1974, we were in Dublin (outside mainland UK and therefore outside the tax net), looking for a house to buy, and settled in the village of Enniskerry, County Wicklow, just south of Dublin. Years earlier, when his party, Fianna Fáil, had been in office and he was finance minister, it was Charlie Haughey who had introduced a Finance Act with a little paragraph at the bottom that hardly anyone noticed. It made all creative artists, including writers, exempt from income tax.
I must have been the only immigrant who did not even know that (I may have mentioned that I am not very good with money). When I revealed my ignorance of the law, I was met with local amazement and then approbation. At least I had come because I liked the place.
To make friends in Ireland is
the easiest thing in the world, because they are so friendly to start with. Add to that a terrific sense of humor. In the north, the guerrilla campaign of the IRA against the Belfast government and the British armed forces posted there was at its height, but in the south, the Republic of Ireland, all was quiet and immensely sociable. There were tales of Brits who had to leave because they could not take the partygoing, so they took their damaged livers back home.
It was shortly after settling there that my wife and I met Charlie Haughey socially, but through the offices of his longtime girlfriend. It was a relationship that everybody knew about, but nobody mentioned, and the entire media practiced auto-censorship. Those days are long gone.
The lady gave small, intimate dinner parties around the pine table in her basement kitchen, and that was where we could converse with the other Charlie Haughey—shirtsleeved, affable, and humorous. Like Harold King in the Reuters’s Paris office, he first tried to intimidate, and if that did not work, relaxed and let the Irish charm come through.
I enormously enjoyed my five years in Ireland and recall with affection the innumerable and uproarious dinner parties. Before going to Spain, in an act of pure madness, I had bought a Rolls-Royce. It was far from new and far from the top of the price range. It was a classic that I had restored at a specialist’s in London. Once it was restored, I had it resprayed from black to white. It had the old-style vertical Greek-temple grille with the winged lady flying above the bonnet. This monster was driven all the way to the Costa Blanca and a year later shipped to Ireland. In both a Spanish village and Enniskerry, it was—how shall I put it?—rather noticeable. But I liked it and might have kept it longer but for the trip north to County Antrim to visit my in-laws.
We drove sedately up through Dublin, past the airport at Swords, and on to the IRA hot spot of Dundalk. North of that, the road was largely empty until we reached the border post and the start of County Armagh, the first of the six counties that make up British-owned Northern Ireland.
The Irish border post was hardly manned at all. The barrier pole was up and a hand behind the glass window of a booth beside the road waved us on. At the British control, the pole was down, so we stopped. Out of the undergrowth came a strange Caliban-type figure.
He was in camouflage fatigues, wearing a tam-o’-shanter with a red bobble on top, and clutched a submachine carbine. Apparently one of Her Majesty’s soldiers, but not one I had ever seen before. He scampered up to the driver’s-side window, peered through, and gesticulated that I should wind it down.
It was electric, and when it hummed downward, he jumped in surprise and addressed me. I could not understand a word he said, but from the accent, which I had heard in Tangier, I knew it must be Glasgow. When I failed to respond to whatever he asked, he became agitated and the barrel of the submachine gun appeared under my nose.
At this point, a quite different figure came out of the bushes: very tall, gangly, and clearly an officer. He, too, approached and spoke, but in a laid-back drawl.
“Awfully sorry, old chap, he’s asking to see your papers.”
The captain took over and scanned my passport. From his flashes, I realized these were the Cameronians, who had established a fine reputation when based in Germany as the Poison Dwarfs.
The pair reminded me of the White Russian officer commanding Oriental troops outside Magdeburg fifteen years earlier. The captain dismissed the soldier with a stream of the same incomprehensible dialect.
“Are you the writer fellow?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good show. Nice car.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think it is wise to drive it right through Bandit Country?”
I recognized the media term for South Armagh, which I still had to cross.
“Perhaps you should,” he drawled. “Anyway, on you go. And take care.”
With this encouraging farewell I let in the clutch and the white beast purred forward into County Armagh and its silent and hostile hedges. A week later, it was the same going back to the south—a very quiet drive both outside the car and inside. After that, I sold the Rolls and bought a nice anonymous Austin Montego estate car.
About that time, the Cosgrave government fell and Fianna Fáil came back to office, with Charlie Haughey appointed minister of health under prime minister Jack Lynch, with whom he had feuded until he finally toppled his own premier and took over in 1979.
Hardly had he got the top slot when Ireland received Pope John Paul II on a state visit. Over the pine kitchen table, Charlie put to me a pretty odd request. He said he needed a monograph to present to the cabinet on security—he was terrified of an attempt being made on the pontiff while he was in Dublin.
I suggested it was out of the question for His Holiness to be in mortal danger in Dublin of all places, and that the British government had a dozen security experts with years of experience. He countered that he would not turn to London, but that the Irish Garda had had no experience with this sort of thing. He needed the techniques that had kept de Gaulle alive. There was nothing for it but to do what he wanted.
I thought back to all that de Gaulle’s bodyguards had let slip when chatting with the French media in 1962 and put together a paper stressing the difference between close-up protection against the madman and the hazard of the long-range sniper.
I never knew whether he put this paper to the cabinet as his own work or mine, or as that of some anonymous ace known only to him. Probably the last. Anyway, the three-day visit of the pope went off without a hitch, though I noticed a few snipers from the Irish Army perched on the rooftops, scanning all the windows opposite.
Both our sons were born in Dublin: Stuart in 1977 and Shane in 1979. But in the autumn of 1979, my wife developed an all-consuming fear that something might happen to our two babies.
In the case of Ireland in 1979, such a fear was far from illogical. IRA renegades had already kidnapped the Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema, who was rescued unharmed after a nationwide manhunt, and others had more recently visited the Outwood home of my friend the Canadian tycoon Galen Weston. Neither he nor his wife, Hilary, were in residence but they terrified his personal assistant.
By the early spring, the condition was serious. One friend in Dublin remarked to me: “You’re not the most famous man in Ireland, you’re not the richest man in Ireland, and you’re not the only Brit in Ireland. But you’re probably the most famous, richest Brit.”
So a kidnap attempt on one of the babies was not a complete fantasy at all. It was time to go, and it was my Irish-born wife who was the more adamant for a departure back to England. It seemed courteous to inform our friend the prime minister. Without explaining why, I asked for an interview at his office in Kildare Street.
He greeted me warmly, but somewhat puzzled. When the door was closed, I explained that we were leaving and why. He was horrified and asked me to stay. I made clear the decision was made.
He could not offer me Irish citizenship. As the firstborn son of a firstborn son of a man from Youghal, County Cork, I had that right, anyway. So he offered to make me a senator of Ireland. Apparently, the Senate is part-elected, but a few seats can be nominated. I thanked him, but declined.
Accepting the reality, he led me out of his office and then down the length of the long hall to the street door, his arm around my shoulders. Doors popped open as openmouthed senior civil servants looked out to see their premier draped round a Britisher, never seen before or since.
A few days later, I had one last call from him. It was to give me his word that not a single IRA man in the country would dare raise his hand against me or my family. The only way he could have known that was if he had given a flat order to the Army Council of the IRA. Not many men could do that.
On April 7, 1980, loaded to the roof and with more luggage on the roof rack, the Montego rolled onto the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Fishguard.
br /> Margaret Thatcher had won the 1979 election and the maximum income tax rate had tumbled from 83 percent to 60 percent, which, though high, was acceptable. We arrived in London just in time to see on television the interruption of the World Snooker Championship in the final frame as the SAS stormed the terrorist-occupied Iranian embassy.
Since then, I have lived in Surrey, St. John’s Wood, Hertfordshire, and Buckinghamshire. But I have never emigrated and never will.
A NEAT TRICK
By the summer of 1982, my physical situation had become extremely comfortable—boringly so. I was on the threshold of forty-four, eight years married, the father of two growing boys of three and five, living in a large white house at Tilford, a village in the county of Surrey, and had realized that I could apparently make a comfortable living writing novels. No wonder I was bored.
There is a passage in the John Buchan novel John McNab, where the hero is in a similar state and goes to his doctor. This shrewd man, after a complete examination, advises his patient: “As your doctor I can do nothing for you, but as your friend let me offer you advice. Go and steal a horse—in a country where horse stealing is punished by hanging.”
I did not feel the need to go that far, but I had to do something more interesting than sitting on the terrace reading the papers and drinking coffee.
It happens that though I do not suffer from acrophobia—the panic-stricken fear of heights—I do not really like them. In an apartment on the thirtieth floor of a skyscraper, I would prefer not to go to the balcony and lean over. In truth, I would prefer to be back inside behind the plate-glass doors.