PART TWO: The Beginning
Starting from birth, eighty-six years ago, will be a pointless exercise and so I will begin with a time when, too often, I frequented the Feathers public house in Mayfair.
But, let me make it quite clear, I do not associate the Feathers with cozy, after works drinks with colleagues but with an ex British Army Major called Alex Donaldson.
Donaldson was a man I was very content to believe was long dead.
But I can still see Donaldson in his crumpled white shirt sat alongside his crony sidekick Jack Woodward on those red leather stools at the bar.
I can still smell the stale Bass beer and see the Red Triangles on the soggy beer mats even now, nearly sixty years later. I can also still smell Donaldson’s stinking Craven A cigarettes and see him deliberately puffing the smoke down the dark and cavernous cleavage of Betty the barmaid. Sophistication was never Donaldson’s style.
The room was always filled with an acrid blue haze, sticky with heat from the coal fire in the black grate with its brass scuttle, poker, dirty brush and small shovel. I can still feel the sticky warmth on my face as I sat there trying to be part of this ugly scene whilst all the time thinking I would be far better off at home with Sarah sat by our own fireside.
I can see Betty, as she then was, standing behind her bar, tolerating Donaldson’s grotesque rudeness whilst cleaning her squeaking beer glasses with a cloth and winking at customers whenever their eyes rose from her cleavage.
I have had far too many dreams about this pub because I had been there too often in the past. But instead of diminishing over time, the dreams have increased. Perhaps it is because, unlike many of the others who visited the Feathers, I never went there to be sociable but with what I now see as a misplaced sense of patriotism and duty to King and Country left over from the war.
Those meetings were often arranged by a phone call to my Croydon office from Jack Woodward. Beaty, who was my office manager, typist and telephonist would take the call before handing the phone to me to decide. And it bothers me now how easy it had been for me to be persuaded to meet. But I was younger then and the young are much greater opportunity seekers.
As we sat at the bar, Jack Woodward would gorge on dishes of shellfish and when I came in through the door, both of them would already be there, hunched over their drinks as though they had been there for hours already discussing what to say to me or how best to persuade me to do the next job.
But it was my fault.
In the early days, I was far too easy going and had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Jack, being the politer one, would always see me first and stand up as though slightly embarrassed by what they had been discussing. Donaldson would continue facing the bar and Betty until I had sat down on the next stool. Then he would turn and nod at me. No smile, just a nod. Donaldson always wore the same grey gabardine mackintosh over his suit and tie and only after he nodded might he then decide to join Jack in shaking my hand. But I was always reluctant to touch Donaldson because I knew my hands would smell of stale cigarettes for hours as a result of that fleeting but disgusting contact.
Jack would order the drinks and cockles and was always the one to pay Betty.
“Two and six, please, luv. Ta, luv,” in her broad east London accent. Then Betty would slide over a tiny white dish that always held three small, sharp wooden sticks and the cockles that glistened with vinegar.
Before and since my dear wife, Sarah, died I have dreamed about the Feathers too often. Mostly they are colorful nightmares with accompanying stereophonic sound effects and smells included and I often wake up in a sweat because the nightmares spiraled out of control onto other things. The nightmares are almost always linked to Donaldson.
When I awake in the middle of the night or the very early morning with my lap soaked in whisky from the glass that had fallen from my hand I often wonder if I am actually suffering from some sort of new and unnamed form of senile dementia.
I fear I may have a new type of Alzheimer’s disease distinguished by a vivid imagination and an uncanny ability to dredge up memories that are best forgotten. But I often amuse myself by thinking it should, perhaps, be called Thomas’s Disease after its first recorded victim. I have even dreamed of seeing a definition of it in medical textbooks or copies of the British Medical Journal.
“Thomas’s Disease: A condition of the mind characterized by symptoms that include an uncontrollable desire to analyze the past through dreams so that the sufferer finds it easy to pinpoint his past mistakes and weaknesses. And finally decides to wake up and do something about them.”
It is, I acknowledge, a long-winded definition but I feel it is accurate. But I often wondered if, perhaps, I was no longer remembering facts but embellishing things to make them more interesting. Perhaps, I just have an overactive brain that is long past its sell by date.
But I also have a theory that Alzheimer’s disease is not really a disease but a useful and highly evolved mechanism for protecting the old and decrepit from realizing their predicament.
I have often thought how much nicer that would be because Thomas’s Disease is far worse. It is a punishing and painful disease that is all too apparent to its victims.
What is certain is that the nightmares I experienced up until the moment I decided to do something about the cause had been a mixture of historic fact and vivid imagination.
But couple that with a mind-blowing ability to suddenly realize what had been going on beneath my nose and behind my back for fifty years and perhaps you will begin to understand why I need to deal with it.
Writing this is part of that process.
I still can’t accurately pinpoint exactly when it all started or when I suddenly saw the light. It was like the slow arrival of dawn when you can’t sleep. You lie there waiting until you can stand it no longer and finally get up, go to the window and draw the curtains. But, in my case, I didn’t see the rising sun. I saw that a dark and rainy day had already begun, that the time was far later than I had thought and I wished I had got up much earlier.
For me, late dawning has happened too often and there is only so much cloud and rain a man can stand.
The final awakening began when Sarah became ill although even then it was not so much a sudden switching on of the light but gradual, like a dimmer switch being turned.
I had been feeling very lonely which didn’t help. I was certainly bored.
Sarah was sick and a nurse had been calling daily. She had become bedridden, as they once called it, and spent her days upstairs.
I, on the other hand, spent my days and often my nights, downstairs sitting in the chair by Sarah’s favorite log effect gas fire but with trips up and down the stairs with cups of tea for Sarah followed by other daytime trips to the supermarket for the newspaper and a few more bottles of Bell’s whisky for myself.
I know I had been sitting around far too much but what else is an old man expected to do? But, to keep my brain occupied, I had also, mistakenly, started rummaging through an old box of papers and other things that had been gathering dust for twenty-five years in a cupboard upstairs.
Oh dear, what a mistake that was.
But then there were the nightmares, the main features of Thomas’s Disease. I would wake up in the early hours or the late hours or even the daytime hours feeling uncomfortable, hot and sweaty and with an all too familiar taste of stale whisky in the back of my throat and an intense heat in my stomach like a gastric version of heartburn.
But what really used to wake me up was the uncontrollable and frantic tossing and sweating in the chair by Sarah’s gas fire as I dreamed. I would hear voices. And Jack Woodward’s voice – he of the Feathers public house in Mayfair – was one.
And Jack might not even have been talking in English. It had been a habit sixty years ago, for ex forces chaps to speak “in tongues” as we humorously called it. Arabic was one such language. Speaking in an accent supposedly to resemble that of President Nasser of Egypt was Jack’s little hab
it. Mixed up with conversations that included “bints” and “kazis”, it had all become rather predictable but in one of my whisky fuelled dreams I clearly saw him.
“Sabbah el kheir, kaif hallak?” Jack was saying, his voice seemingly coming directly from the empty whisky glass I was holding to my ear like a phone.
“Good day” and “how are you” are easy enough Arabic words, but, having spent a while in Cairo, Jack was almost fluent and so his Nasser accent was quite realistic. My Arabic isn’t bad though, having been picked up from many visits to North Africa and the Middle East and I can easily distinguish between Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian or Egyptian accents. I had a smattering of other languages too or, at least, enough to direct various nationalities of taxi drivers to wherever I was heading.
I had even picked up some occasionally useful Russian words during a few lessons run by a Polish immigrant working out of a room in an office block off Whitehall. That was also sixty years ago but I still harbor memories of a dark room with dusty bookshelves, hard chairs, a stained wooden table and a single, dim light bulb that hung from the ceiling. It had felt like the Eastern Bloc in miniature.
But Jack, who also had the remnants of an English public school accent to go with his Arabic, had not risen very far after the war. He became Donaldson’s errand boy. He was the one who would phone me with a job to do and, stupidly as I now see it, I would agree.
Donaldson and Jack had been old but distant acquaintances of mine at the time and we met, by sheer coincidence, at another pub in Victoria and it had all started as a few odd jobs that relied on a few years of RAF experience.
But, before I knew it, I was up to my neck in things. Not that I didn’t find some of it exciting at the time. After all, I was young, enthusiastic, and motivated by the need to find opportunities and ideas for my new business. So, any chance to go abroad to mix with unusual characters of different nationalities looked like pure fun with the added potential of earning a shilling or two.
Actually, I was a natural and very good at it.
Did I have time, Jack asked me, to fly off with a camera that they’d provide to photograph a few buildings near an airport somewhere in northern Finland? That was in the very early days, one of my first assignments just after the war. It was the Cold War and it was very, very cold two hundred miles north of Helsinki in January.
“It’ll only take a few days – in and out in no time,” Jack had said, although the words he used were probably what he had been told to say by Donaldson. And, of course, driven by the excitement, I went.
Another phrase Jack often used was, “Come over, this afternoon, Ollie. We want you to meet someone.” And my reply was usually framed by an excuse such as, “But I’ve got a Letter of Credit that I need to lodge before the bank shuts”. This was often true as I was probably surrounded by paper on my desk and due to fly off somewhere warmer like Lebanon next day.
But so began long years of evening meetings in the Feathers with two men, one of whom, Jack, was just tolerable, the other, Donaldson, a serious but sinister man who in the early days I never fully understood.
And, from my small office in Croydon, Beaty, my newly found office assistant, would have been fussing around in her usual way but listening all the while. Beaty rapidly became indispensable to me but there was more to Beaty than I first realized.
But that’s how it was in the beginning.
It was a creeping process made easy by my new business – a small venture that taxed the mind but offered endless opportunities for foreign travel whilst enabling me to mix legitimacy with the sort of antics that Donaldson and his crony Jack tempted me to pursue.
I didn’t mind. No job was ever the same and, inevitably, I would meet someone who became a new customer or might lead to one.
But the assignments, as Donaldson always described them, gradually got more frequent. Business wasn’t easy and I wasn’t making much money after paying my overheads and Beaty’s salary and I soon
realized the assignments were impinging on my business.
Meanwhile, at home, Sarah was busy looking after the new baby and our young son, Robert. There was not much saving going on. What little was coming in, was going straight out.
But Beaty would take the calls from Jack and, yet again, I would find myself catching the five thirty train and then a taxi to go to the Feathers. And all at my expense and when it would have been far better and sensible to go home to be with Sarah and the children and eat cottage pie and apple crumble.
And so, of course, Sarah got used to the loneliness.
She accepted it as part of my business but, looking back, I regret it so much now that it brings a lump to my throat just to write this. I should have understood things better so many years ago.
Suffering from Thomas’s Disease, you see, has caused me to reflect on past errors of judgment. But in the weeks and months up until the day Sarah died I often woke up to find myself sobbing like a child.
And why, since Sarah died, do I still sit with lumps in my throat and tears in my eyes?
Because, in the weeks before Sarah passed away, whilst she was lying, gravely sick upstairs in bed, I was downstairs, drunk as a skunk and perhaps speaking to a voice from maybe sixty years ago, coming out of an empty whisky glass clamped to my right ear.
In fact, I have been known to be so far gone that the whisky glass would transform itself into my old black office telephone receiver with its twisted cable that I would waste hours trying to unravel, until Beaty came to my aid.
“Tut, tut,” Beaty would say, “leave it to me.”
And I would say to her something like, “Here, you sort the blasted wire, Beat. I’ve got to run. See what you can do to finish these quotes off.”
And I would push a pile of papers and price lists towards her as Beaty said, “Are you sure, Mr Thomas?”
And then I’d be gone like some stupid boy summoned by the headmaster.
But, I was also driven by a sense of duty and patriotism. The assignments were for the good of the country, or so I believed. And if they could also be used to enhance my business, why not?
But my motivations were gradually driven by an added element of fear. And this was nothing to do with early onset Thomas’s Disease.
This was a genuine fear for myself and my family and fear of other repercussions for failing to co-operate. Looking back, I can see that Beaty was also worried but, at the time, I was too blind to see it and so Beaty also forms a key part of this tale.
I sometimes still dream about Beaty, but please don’t misunderstand me.
Dreams about Beaty are never erotic. She was my age but always at least fifteen years behind the fashions of the day and I usually see her dressed in a pink twin set with her Imperial typewriter noticeably hesitating in its clatter as she listened to me on the phone. She would then glance furtively toward me over her horn-rimmed glasses, before looking quickly back to her work. Then the machine would ping back into action again as she hit the return.
But, Thomas’s Disease has enabled me to remember the look on Beaty’s face whenever Jack Woodward phoned my office to invite me to another meeting.
Beaty’s expression was particularly exaggerated on the rarer occasions that Donaldson rang.
I would put the big black phone with its tangled cable back on the receiver and glance at Beaty who quickly looked away. “How’s it all coming along, Beat?” I would ask with diplomacy and just a little humor, in order to quell Beaty’s far too easy embarrassment at being caught watching and listening. In fact, I see now that she treated all phone calls from Jack and Donaldson as if she was nervous. She seemed to dislike the intrusions as if she was an unwilling witness to an extramarital affair and would cough, unnecessarily, nervously and say something like, “Nearly finished, Mr Thomas. But should we copy the text in the credit exactly? You see they have typed dollar wrong. They have put doller – with an ‘e’.”
“Oh dear. Yes. Better had, Beat. I’ll speak to the bank when I present th
e documents. We don’t want to have to request an amendment at this stage. We should have noticed it before.”
“Sorry, Mr Thomas.”
I had appointed poor old Beaty because she seemed to be a lonely spinster but she was very good at her job. She came with a very good set of references although I have to admit that one of them was from Donaldson. Lonely Beaty was, in fact, indispensable but I now know she also lived in some sort of fear.
So the few jobs I found myself doing for King and Country or, afterwards, for Queen and Country gradually became more and more frequent to the detriment of my business.
And the plans for them were nearly always laid while drinking pints of draft Bass bitter and slurping bowls of cockles at the Feathers.
And it was in the Feathers that I started to dislike Donaldson although the feeling was undoubtedly mutual.
For some years, Donaldson had a thick moustache on his upper lip. One day it disappeared without warning although we never discussed such personal things. But it was then that I grew to notice and hate the white spittle that often appeared on his lips if he got angry.
And Donaldson could get very angry.
But I also disliked his eyes. They were furtive and he used to look out of their corners so that he didn’t have to move his thick neck. He would not read a newspaper but use it as a screen for his face while he watched others. But in the Feathers his eyes usually looked down into his beer or down the front of Betty’s blouse and he would congratulate me on my latest assignment. His speech would often start to slur towards closing time although the words were always fairly predictable and invariably interspersed with public school, army-trained “old chap” and “dear boy”. And there was also a remnant of a Scottish accent which I never questioned at the time.
“Brilliant job, Ollie, old chap. Brilliant. Best man we’ve got for that type of job. Tripoli and Benghazi, huh? Not much in the way of beer there these days I understand. Tough assignment, dear boy, brilliantly executed.”
And Donaldson would then swig the last of his beer and move on to a further examination of Betty’s cleavage or a description of the next job he had planned for me.
Sometimes we would move away from the bar stools and find a quieter corner, but the jobs were always explained as being for the good of the country with the full backing of the few in Government circles that needed to know. And they were always sold to me as small tasks that I could easily fit around my legitimate business whether it was Libya or any other part of the Middle East, West Africa or wherever else I went.
But Major Alex Donaldson was mostly office based. Where he lived, I had no idea as we never ever discussed personal matters. It was the same with Jack, whose private life was a mystery that I had no reason to ask about.
Donaldson had certainly never been to Libya.
As far as I knew, he had never traveled very far at all although Cairo had been his home for a few months once, which is where he had probably encountered Jack Woodward.
He went to Jordan and Beirut a few times during and after the war but the numbers of times he went were nothing compared to me. He also seemed to visit Italy regularly on holiday. Again, I never questioned where exactly he stayed as it was not my business.
“D’s just flown to Italy, Ollie for a few days’ break,” Jack would say. “But he’s left a message for you.”
“He seems to like Italy, Jack,” I remember saying to Jack one day. “Has he got an Italian girlfriend?”
But Donaldson clearly still retained a few overseas military connections and I was eventually to discover one reason why he visited Jordan.
But let us not beat about the bush. Major Alex Donaldson and, by default, Jack, were connected to British Intelligence somehow, hence the constant tapping of forefingers on noses.
“Need to know basis, old chap, don’t worry. All in hand.”
But Donaldson seemed to spend most of his time not around Whitehall where one might have expected him to be, but at a bare and dingy office with no files or other paraphernalia. This cold, cigarette-smelling place was located on the second floor of a block in Regent Street.
Not that I ever questioned it, especially in the early days, as I had no idea how these Government things worked.
Also, I suppose it was my working-class upbringing and the constant nose tapping from people I felt I should treat as superiors because of their far greater inside knowledge and authority.
But Major Alex Donaldson was only very loosely connected to British Intelligence as you will see and my more recent affliction with Thomas’s Disease has slowly helped to confirm my suspicions and understand things clearly for the very first time.
And Donaldson had another less well known office hidden in a dark, granite block in Morningside in Edinburgh which I visited once or twice. I have never forgotten the very last time I was there. That was when I had been shown some photographs of myself. Sarah would not have liked those pictures.
It was all a long time ago, but if you read what follows, I think you will agree I had every reason to do what I did.
After all, It is never too late.
Cockroaches
By the late sixties, Thomas Import Export Ltd already held a number of agencies for small British companies that often required me to get to know the holders of purse strings in the Libyan hierarchy. But then, in the name of freedom, socialism and unity, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi ousted the King and relabeled the country the Libyan Arab Republic. That whole area of North Africa featured rather highly in my life around that time, although it was, by no means, the only part of the world.
By the early seventies, politics had changed radically but I was still able to travel there although some of my old friends had already disappeared. Neither was I still earning much money for the business due to the distractions.
But on one occasion I decided to try to convince the Libyan People’s Public Health Authority to buy bulk insecticides for their heavy cockroach infestations.
In reality though, driven by my sense of adventure, I was also fulfilling my part-time, unpaid job for Queen and Country by trying to make friends with Gadaffi’s cronies and making the acquaintances of some of his less prominent enemies to add them to a growing list of possible informers.
I was not being forced to do it and even Donaldson knew very little about what I did and how I did it. But Donaldson soon realized that the little fish he had hooked some years earlier was quite adept at this sort of work and proving to be rather well connected.
I enjoyed the intrigue and the risk but it all got out of hand and I became very vulnerable. But as a result, I was making friends of people I actually mistrusted and shaking hands with those whose palms were already well greased.
Mohammed Saleh was one such.
We would meet regularly in quiet spots behind walls near the port in Tripoli or next to the National Pharmaceutical Company and Ministry of Health. Saleh was often impossible to see at first glance as his grubby beige suit blended with the dust and sand. He had also camouflaged himself rather well within Gadaffi’s circles and had become a very useful contact. Saleh was very reliable and always turned up on time.
My mistake was in mentioning him to Donaldson.
Saleh behaved as though the only way to squeeze a small commission out of a visiting Englishman was to look identical by donning similar dust-stained attire. He wore a respectable small moustache like a dark brown, dishevelled, Arabic version of David Niven and was always keen to escape from the watching eyes and the whispering voices of Tripoli, for a bottle or two of Black Label, even if it meant crossing the water to Valletta.
He visited London occasionally and he and I often ate at Tiddy Doll’s in Mayfair, around the corner from the Feathers.
I rarely took Sarah with me to meet my many foreign contacts but on one occasion she did join me because Saleh seemed to doubt my description of myself as a happily married man. But Saleh, feeling free of his Libyan shackles misbehaved himself and seduced the red haired, Iris
h waitress from Cork.
Sarah was impressed, not by the food, but at how easy it had been for the Libyan – fresh off the Libyan Arab Airlines flight – to carry out his seduction.
“Good gracious, dear. Is that how all those Arab friends of yours behave? Who’d have thought it?”
But Sarah, bless her, never knew about the meeting the next morning between Saleh and myself in Regent Street at which Saleh received some expenses in cash from Jack and then the fare for a taxi ride to Credit Suisse.
All Saleh had done for this was to provide a list of possible dissidents and their addresses which I had then passed to Donaldson in all innocence, expecting them to be handed on to the Secret Intelligence Services or some other Government body.
At the time, you see, I didn’t really care who received the intelligence because I was convinced it was going somewhere official and so being put to good use.
But Saleh’s bedding of the Irish waitress was perhaps the most innocuous part of Libyan-Irish relationships that I was later involved with.
I used to stay at the Libya Palace Hotel in Tripoli and often thought that if there was ever a need for an example of a den of spies, mistrust and suspicion all of it under the watchful eye of secret police then this was it. The Libya Palace, though, was convenient in that it was just around the corner from Abdul Wahid’s office. Abdul had been my more official agent and his concrete block office was in a dingy, rubble-laden side street where the fat, brown American cockroaches scurried, too slowly, out of the way and were crunched underfoot on the pavement at night. This was the excellent legitimate market that I had spotted in my usual entrepreneurial fashion.
Abdul Wahid’s office featured highly in some of my whisky-fuelled nightmares when Sarah had been sick and the dreams often started with a smell like dust in my nostrils. You see, Thomas’s Disease often provides an olfactory dimension to nightmares and this one was like a dream within a dream, a sleep within a sleep. I was well aware of the perversity and would watch myself clamber off the bed clad only in my underpants. And where was I? After a moment’s searching within the mists of my dream, behold, I would find I was in the Libya Palace Hotel in a room along a dark corridor with a threadbare carpet where I could hear the ceiling fan squeaking, slowly, round and round. But everywhere was that smell of dust. It would be caked inside my nostrils and the skin of my face would feel dirty and stretched taught. The room was dark except for a small crack of light between the closed window shutters and in my dream, I would shuffle across the dusty floor in bare feet feeling the grit between my toes. Then I would lean over to open the shutters with their flaking, light blue paint.
I am fairly convinced that this really did happen to me once, many years ago, but, for some reason of nocturnal fantasy, the dream found me using my walking stick. And when I opened the shutters the vivid scene that met my eyes was not one that was common to Gloucester where I now live. For all I was able to see was a swirling grey dust, with paper and litter flying left to right. Piles of fine, grey sand had squeezed through to form small dunes accumulating on the peeling, wooden ledge between the shutters and the closed window and I used my finger to write something in the dust.
In this recurring dream, I wrote “SARAH”.
I feel sure I had also written “SARAH” fifty years ago, but it was so long ago that I can no longer be totally certain. But the dream was enough. Writing “SARAH” in Saharan dust seems fitting enough.
But, outside, the neighboring buildings were just dark grey outlines and the morning sun was just visible as a faint, red, disk like a Japanese flag, low above the flat roofs, disappearing and reappearing as the flying dust passed before it in thick clouds. The sand storm was like a hot, violent, London smog of stinging particles of sand.
But I usually awoke from these dreams to find myself sitting by Sarah’s log effect gas fire in the sitting room in Gloucester with an empty whisky glass falling from my hand and with such a dryness in my throat and nose that I would find himself blowing my nose into the whisky glass to clear it.
And, whilst it might have been the heat from the gas fire on my face, I still felt it as though I was standing facing the hot wind coming straight up from Kufra.
But, because I was half awake and probably also half drunk, the dry heat would suddenly change to a humid, coal smoke heat and I would find myself back in the bar at the Feathers again with Alex Donaldson and Jack Woodward with Donaldson making all sorts of suggestions about how else they might be able to use Mohammed Saleh and other contacts I had made over the years.
And through the dreams and nightmares I can now also remember what I said to Donaldson after Saleh had returned to Libya after that night at Tiddy Doll’s.
“But my business is suffering because of all this nonsense.”
“Rubbish!” said Donaldson. “You’re the one talking nonsense old chap. In your prime. My goodness. Best man we’ve got for those sorts of jobs. Mixing it with your business.
What more could you want, dear fellow? Good expenses.
Fifteen quid a day subsistence paid in cash and no asking for vouchers. On top of what you make on the business. Flights sometimes paid for or arranged.”
“I’ve had enough,” I said.
“Nonsense, old chap. You need a break. Take a few days off. Go away with that young family of yours. The seaside – Brighton, Bournemouth, Blackpool. There’s an idea. Get a bit of clear English air in your lungs, dear fellow, instead of all that hot bloody sand.”
But then my own voice had risen in anger at Donaldson’s insensitivity.
“But the children are at school. And, anyway, it’s the middle of winter.”
“Ah, yes. Never mind old chap – go another time.”
“But I’m nearly forty,” I had said, “I need to concentrate on the business.”
“Forty is not old, dear fellow. Heavens above. I’m just as old. Feel like twenty. Just looking at Betty over there gives me evil ideas.”
You see, I was already starting to regret my involvement and feeling that I had been sucked into something outside of my control.
Already, the early excitement had run thin and I knew I needed my business to start to earn some real money for my growing family, not waste time on errands for other people that only offered nominal expenses in return. I wanted to pull back because I felt I had already given up too many of my rights by allowing myself to be sucked in on a wave of lingering adolescence.
But I didn’t pull out, partly because I really did believe I was doing something for the good of the country.
Later I didn’t pull out for fear of the effects on me and my family.
But I was also from a generation where it was not right for the adult male to be seen to be in any doubt at any times. At all times, there must be certainty and boldness.
“Go on, you can do it, you stupid fool. Stop whining. What are you – man or mouse?”
It was the very essence of manliness. Never mind if you were shot out of the sky last night. I felt it was my duty to get back into the cockpit and to stop whinging.
The Algerian Parrot
But let me explain the type of thing I was doing.
Yousef was my agent in Algeria.
Whenever I visited, Yousef would sit in a squeaking, swivelling chair high up behind his large desk looking down on visitors. There might be half a dozen of us sitting or standing around trying to catch his attention as he held overlapping discussions with everyone and flapped at buzzing flies from the abattoir next door. As the only foreigner, I would be granted pride of place in a sagging chair looking up at him whilst I struggled to sell him tractor parts or cans of insecticide in poor Arabic and French. I was an old hand at Arabic ways and well used to this form of selling but add in the regular interruptions from Yousef’s parrot and you will see why I am cynical about the skill sets of current sales and marketing consultants.
You see, Yousef kept an old, green and red parrot called Pierre in a bottomless cage on the coffee ta
ble that all of Yousef’s visitors shared to place their cups. The table, itself, was inlaid with fine, polished marquetry and Pierre would sit there and listen all day long to Youssef’s business deals and the traffic noise that wafted in through the open window along with the meat flies from the butcher’s shop on the street below.
Youssef employed an elderly and crippled assistant, Mohammad, who would be summoned to bring pots of thick, sweet Arabic coffee or mint tea at frequent intervals. But the parrot’s call was louder and clearer than Youssef’s and he spoke far better Arabic.
“Mohammad, Mohammad. Gahwa, Gahwa,” he would call.
The parrot would call every few minutes and Mohammed would appear, breathless from waiting downstairs, unsure if he was being summoned by Youssef or by Pierre. But, anxious as ever to please, Mohammad would bring the same dirty, damp cloth with him and, whether the summons was from bird or man, use the opportunity to lift the cage and wipe the table top clean of fresh parrot droppings. Pierre always made sure there was something fresh to clear and patiently watched the messy proceedings from his perch with his head on one side, white eyelids blinking in astonishment at the stupidity of man, before breaking into his repertoire of car and motor bike sounds from the street below.
“Beep, beep. Vroom, vroom. Bzzzzzzzzz.”
But I am writing this, not so much for entertainment, but in order to put Algeria into context and to point out that I told Sarah about the parrot more than once to cheer her up. It didn’t work the last time because she fell asleep in the middle of my story but it was near the end. Sarah was sleeping a lot towards the end. But, in the past, when I told her she would always say, “Well I never,” and then smile.
But describing what I did in Algeria and other places like Syria and Jordan gives you an idea of what I had become involved in.
My problem was that I mostly did as I was told, especially by those who were older or more experienced or for whom I felt I should show respect. Donaldson held a higher rank than me, you see. Rank doesn’t make a better, or more decent, person but that is how it started. I still behaved like the good little boy I had been when grandma asked me to fetch something from the grocer. I was far too willing to do jobs for others with less likeable traits and my respect was often misplaced. I really should have learned a lot more from the things my mother said.
“Mrs Ricketts tells me you took three bottles of milk at school today, Oliver. That’s very naughty, you know.”
“Sorry, Mummy, but Ronald told me to.”
“But you should know better than to listen to that nasty boy Ronald, Oliver.”
“But he said his sister was sick and needed building up.”
“You really believe that silly story, Oliver?
“Well . . .!”
You see, I found it hard to rid myself of this over willing habit when I grew up and joined the RAF. I would nod politely to Donaldson telling me that I was the best person for a job. In fact, I asked far too few questions.
Back in 1956 when I was still fairly new to Donaldson’s games my business with Youssef in Algiers was just starting. But it was also a time of troubles in and around the Mediterranean from Cyprus to Algeria and Morocco. In Algeria there was guerilla warfare with Arab nationalists and, on one trip, little did I know that the French Premier Guy Mollet was also in town.
But Donaldson clearly did.
This time the Feathers pub was where I took delivery of a small package to take to Algiers. Donaldson had also scribbled an address on a scrap of paper in his usual untidy scrawl.
“Easy job, old chap. Just drop it off at the address here. After midnight, would be best. Someone will take it off your hands. Everything done and dusted. No questions asked.”
“What is it?” I asked, looking at a light, cylindrical object wrapped in brown paper.
“Just rolls of film, apparently, old chap. Nothing important so I’m told. Need to know basis. Safe as houses but just don’t lose it, old chap or we’ll all be in the shit.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t know, old chap. It’s on a need to know basis. Top brass. Mum’s the word and all that. Don’t worry. It’s for our fresh young Queen and the good of her loyal citizens, bless her cotton socks and sparkling crown.”
I let those derogatory words pass, bit my tongue and said, “The address. It’s a house?”
“A villa, apparently,” said Donaldson as though this meant it was superior.
“Who does it belong to?”
“Fuck sake, man. Why do you need to know that? Just hand the bloody thing over at the bloody door and fuck off back to your hotel or wherever you are staying.” A blob of white spit appeared on Donaldson’s lower lip and another blob landed on the table top next to my beer. Donaldson was getting mad.
“Just wondered,” I said, “is the drop to be made to a Frenchman or an Algerian? Just so I don’t give it to the wrong man.”
“For your information, it’ll be an Arab, a bloody Algerian,” Donaldson said and swigged his beer. Jack looked embarrassed.
“Thanks,” I said, reluctantly. But then I decided to ask for a bit more.
“Big villa?”
“Bloody hell, man. Why the questions? Fucking big villa I expect. It belongs to the French Government – the bloody Governor General, himself.”
“Oh, I see. So, will the Governor be there?”
“How the fuck should I know. He never answers the bloody door anyway, whether it’s morning, noon or night so after midnight you’ll get welcomed by his fucking night servant I expect. Just hand it over, old chap. Then you just fucking disappear.”
That was it.
Three days later I was in Algiers and after my meeting with Youssef and landing a small order for fan belts and spark plugs I returned to my hotel. Then, come midnight, and this is where I realize I may be
opening a can of worms that the current Foreign Office and the French equivalent may like to know about, I crept out again to find a taxi.
It was a very dark night, warm but cloudy and the streets were empty and silent but an old Peugeot taxi was parked outside and I got in, gave the driver the address on Donaldson’s scrap of paper and we drove off. All the while, I could sense the taxi driver’s wariness of me.
All I was carrying was the small parcel of what I thought was film. The object wasn’t heavy and, in order to get through customs, I had concealed it in a piece of copper tube that I had labelled as a commercial sample for Youssef. It was my usual practice.
So, on my way to the Governor’s place and in the darkness of the back seat of a taxi with the package now out of its copper tube, I could feel that the glue holding the brown paper covering had worked loose and in the fleeting light from passing street lamps, I caught a glimpse of a small, round, black object like a miniature fire extinguisher with a length of red wire attached to it. This clearly was not photographic film and I began to feel uneasy. But because I really did not want to know what it was and being still sat in the darkness I tried to cover up the gap with the rustling noise obviously upsetting the taxi driver even more. But then the package completely ripped and as the black object rolled onto the seat and then onto the floor by my feet, the taxi stopped at what looked like our destination – a manned gatepost leading to a row of private villas. The suspicious taxi driver, hearing the thing fall, turned around. With the troubles in Algiers at the time I think he thought I was carrying a small bomb. He was not far wrong.
He switched on the dim interior light of the ancient Peugeot taxi.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, Monsieur? Qu’est-ce qui a fait ce bruit?”
My French is not so good but I knew he was asking me what I was carrying and why it had made a noise. Although I couldn’t see his eyes, I could sense he was very nervous.
“C’est un extincteur,” I said, hoping I had used the right French-Algerian word for a fire extinguisher though in fact I had no idea what it was. I was groping under his seat where the thing had rolled and I knew he was th
inking about jumping out of his cab.
I also said something about it being “tres petit” but by then the night-time gate keeper appeared at the window of the taxi. They exchanged a few words in Arabic, the driver flicking his thumb backwards in my direction and the gatekeeper peered in at me in the darkness. But we were allowed through and a minute later the taxi stopped at the gate to a big villa. I was expecting the driver to wait for me but he was clearly too nervous and asked for his fare. Not sure how I would get back but not wanting to cause any more fuss I paid him anyway and he reversed and disappeared back to the gatehouse in a cloud of exhaust smoke leaving me holding the object barely concealed in its brown packaging.
I pulled a brass handle on the gate and heard a bell ring somewhere in the darkness. A dog barked and a light came on and I could then see a courtyard and someone carrying a torch came out from behind a black Citroen car. He came up to the gate and shone the light into my face through the metal bars. “Je m’appelle Thomas,” I said trying some French rather than Arabic. I could just make out the dark face of a younger man, shorter than myself, wearing a long white shirt which reflected the light from his torch.
“Monsieur Thomas? Mr Oliver?” “Oui,” I said.
“You have something?” The young man clearly spoke English and I was grateful because I needed to use a word that I couldn’t recall the French or Arabic word for. ‘Leaking’ is not a word that often needs to be translated.
“Yes,” I said, “but there is a problem. I think it’s leaking.”
Indeed, it was, for as I held it, my hands felt as though they were holding a large, dripping pebble with a strand of thin seaweed hanging from it – a cylindrical, pebble, smooth and shiny, but still wrapped in the remnants of its packaging.
The boy, for he was hardly more than a teenager, opened the squeaky gate but, instead of coming in, I knelt down and placed the object in the dust on the ground. The boy shone his torch onto it and also knelt down. We both looked at it. I carefully removed the last of the packaging and without speaking we both stared at it. I smelt my hands. They smelled of a mixture of petrol or acetone. I wiped them on my trousers and then bent down to look at the object. It was, indeed like a black, miniature fire extinguisher without its handle but with a red wire instead of a nozzle and a wet-looking screw top.
“It’s OK,” the young man said, confidently, and he picked it up and shone his torch on it. I joined him, towering above him by more than a foot.
“I see before. No problem. We fix. Explosive mixture different this time that all. No worry. Not explode. No battery.
We fix. Fucking French.”
Thinking he meant to abuse the manufacturer I said, “No, it’s English”.
The boy grinned up at me, a good-looking lad of about seventeen with black, shiny eyes and a moustache sprouting above his upper lip.
“Fucking French mean dead French.”
“What is it?” I asked this clearly far more experienced youth.
“Fucking parcel bomb for fucking French Governor. You not know? We must kill.”
“Ah,” I said, “I thought this was the Governor’s villa.” “Oui, c’est ca. A demain. Insh’allah. Fucking French Governor. We sort, no problem. Merci, Monsieur.”
“Ah,“ I said, still sniffing my hands. “So I can go now?”
“Oui, d’accord. Merci.”
“But I have no taxi.”
“OK, I take you in Governor’s car. He not here. With girlfriend.”
“Is that the Governor’s car?” I asked, pointing at the black Citroen.
“Oui, c’est ca. I get key.”
“What about the bomb?”
“No problem, I leave by tree. Aziz fix later. Wait.”
An hour later, I was back in my hotel having been on a wild drive with many wrong turnings in a car stolen from the French Governor General and driven by a multilingual Algerian teenager who didn’t stop talking about a local hero called Ben Bella and the Melbourne Olympic games.
The Governor survived because I read about him in a paper a few weeks later.
They eventually won their independence but, oh yes, Algeria was in a frightful mess at the time with Moslem fanatics and killings and the French doing some very unseemly things which never really came to light. But if anyone who reads this wants to know more, please ask.
And who, from the safe haven of a dingy Regent Street office was in a position to pick up threads of official intelligence and seize an opportunity to try to make some money out of this by using an innocent English courier who wrongly thought he was actually doing something approved by the British Government? Why, Donaldson of course and it was not the first or only time.
But it was only just dawning on me that Donaldson had some methods and motives that, to me, didn’t seem to match what the British Government might normally endorse. I should have pulled out there and then and put up with the flak from Donaldson.
But I didn’t, and then it became impossible.
But why, you might ask, was I so naïve at the time? I have been asking myself that for years and even more so during the last year. But the only answer is that, at the time, I never really believed that someone in a highly placed, salaried and pensionable civil servant position could live with so few principles without any sense of duty and pride in their country. I assumed that that was the way it worked. But it became clearer and clearer that Donaldson was looking on every conceivable opportunity that came in his direction as a way to make money for himself.
But I made and lost several friends along the way as a result of what I did and it hurts me now if they thought it was me who failed them.
One had been a naïve, well meaning, but misused Moroccan student to whom I subsequently discovered I had been giving deliberately false information to pass on to another contact in Casablanca. Looking back I now know it was me who was the naïve one. I passed the student’s own information back to someone from the French Embassy, all with some form of connivance with Donaldson. It really was all very complicated and I had not fully understood what I was doing.
The problem was that, to some extent, I enjoyed the secrecy and the risk and preferred not to know too much. I still enjoy my memories about my ride in the Governor’s Citroen.
But everything increasingly impinged on my legitimate business.
And I was, by that time, developing a very clear sense of what was really wrong with the world and that I may not really be helping anyone other than Donaldson. It certainly wasn’t helping my business.
But, mixed up as it was with my business, the so-called assignments seemed to blend in well and some jobs were little more than delivering notes, reports, rolls of film or cash inside brown envelopes or rolls of newspaper. To me, it was antiquated, old style intelligence gathering and delivering.
I left Algeria on one occasion just before an earthquake hit killing hundreds of people. Sarah heard about the tragedy but it was a week before I managed to get a telephone call through to Beaty from Amman to say where I was. Those, you see, were the days of poor or non-existent international phone connections and of cables, before the telex and long before the facsimile machine and e-mail. Sarah had been so cross with me when I returned home. I remember her crying.
But whatever I was doing and wherever I was, she was never far from my mind.
I would haggle in dusty, back street souks to buy a few small silver trinkets and charms for Sarah’s bracelet that still lies in a drawer with other jewellery. Over the years, it became heavy with tiny pieces I bought whenever I was away and had the time to wander, like a tourist, through narrow streets.
There were tiny coffee-pots from Syria, crosses and stars from Israel, an antelope from Kenya, cow bells from Switzerland and Austria, a bunch of tiny keys, a tiny Voortrecker wagon from South Africa and a scarab beetle inlaid with malachite from Cairo. But on that memorable occasion in Amman after the earthquake I found a tiny, nativity scene, in silver, complete with Mary, Joseph, a crib with an ove
rlarge baby and three sheep.
“Well I never! Silver Christmas carols.” That was how Sarah had described them.