‘What would you do if I decided to pass away?’ the woman enquired. Joan noticed a thumb-marked Bible on the bedside stand.
‘I would hold your hand and sing the 23rd Psalm, as I have done before on such occasions.’ The old lady fell back slowly into her pillow, with her eyes closed and her mind at ease.
‘You’ll do fine,’ she said, indicating to her daughter across the room that a friend had been found.
Their friendship blossomed. Each saw the world – and their time in it – through completely different timeframes, and perhaps through that, they taught each other something. With the bracing fresh air from the Atlantic Ocean on their doorsteps, and the simple diet of potato, brose and oatcakes, Joan listened to the old woman of Portree on many an evening, as she retold stories of her youth to a new audience. Her library tapered through every shelf in the cottage, and Joan read long and liberally, silently soaking up the stories from a whole reservoir of words and ideas.
Anyone who has met my mother is immediately gripped by her eyes. They are the most effervescent bright blue – a deep, full shape, cut in a wonderful angle such that the light and warmth of her gaze moves around the room. I imagine her now, nearly a neat half-century in the past, curled in her small frame on a couch by a silvery tray and a lampshade, oblivious to the harbour boats of the west coast drifting over the cove waves, pushing her hair back over an ear while she reads. Like a separate self, she is trapped in this crucible of fiction, waiting for the call of the old lady; and for the lady to watch her enter, and hit upon her smile, and those eyes.
Not long after, the old lady of Portree died, in neither panic nor nightmare. She made it known that her last days were better for the presence of young Joan.
A Teenage Wedding
My mother’s journey continued on, eventually returning home in late 1972 to the Highlands for a time, when a young man named David from further down the Dornoch Firth asked for her hand in marriage. Joan was barely eighteen – no wiser or more aware of the world than my father had been on the night of the Birthday Ballot.
David was a year older, and for a time her high-school sweetheart; a kind-hearted boy from the nearby town of Tain, who used to hold my mother’s hand on their walks to school. As much as any teenagers can know each other, they knew each other well. He was a quiet man, big on numbers and short on conversation. The women of the world were a mystery to him – but not my mother; she was safe, and the soft hand of reassurance he had always known.
Feeling the excitement and attention from the town and her family, she accepted his proposal; all the while feeling something was amiss. With the wedding date set for the summer of 1973, and the preparations underway, Joan attended a funeral in the wild north. The Scottish have a peculiar sense of occasion for death: a great funeral is spoken of as fondly as fairies. No one dies in the Highlands, they merely “pass away” at a stage, and the world continues.
In a tiny white church nestled amid the high grass, the space packed with a low, rumbling chorus and the minister used a full room to chastise his captive audience with the guilty truth that they should come more often than at Christmas and funerals. Bagpipes rang out, and tartaned pipers marched along the cemetery driveway. The Highland wind blew fiercely, and the rain lashed the burial site, reminding the attendees that the next life may not be such a sorry place.
Then came the dinner. Seldom-seen cousins vied for seating spots, while maiden aunts skirted the table, laden with homemade cakes and fresh pots of coffee. All the while, the whisky glasses were constantly filled and refilled. A wintry, shadow-casting sun left the valley, and the music drowned the room.
Joan’s father leant across and told her of a story of an old lady up the glen, long since gone, who lived alone in a small cottage in the wild, rocky and barren landscape between Dingwall and Ullapool. With her nearest neighbour a fair distance away, a traveller stopped unexpectedly for a quick visit. He found her busy in the kitchen, with tables and shelves full of freshly baked pancakes, rock cakes and fruit cakes.
‘Expecting an army?’ he jokingly asked.
‘Not at all,’ she smiled, ‘but before the week is out they may be needed.’
She passed away peacefully in her sleep that very night – and sure enough, all the prepared food was eaten at her funeral.
*
In the slow walk home from the funeral, my mother took the twin reckonings of the lady in Portree and her father’s story of the woman in the glen, and quietly began to ask herself what she was doing with her life. Soon after, an American cousin named Ernie visited from Boston, and stood in awe of the Carbisdale Castle down the glen, forever in the family’s daily view. Yet Joan was in awe of something much bigger and more elusive: her cousin’s America. She loved the promise and optimism of the new Americana – the music of Elvis, the big cities, and the movie stars.
But America’s big reputation was just another imagined thing beyond the auburn hills; nothing in those dreams helped in the practical steps of running away. Joan had no mentors, and no immediate family to guide her in exploring the world. And most important of all – she had a husband in waiting.
For a long winter and a stunted spring, my mother sat on a deep instinct, until it became impossible to lie to herself any longer. And so, she did the same thing as my father on that desert dirt road a few years earlier – she ran. In the summer of 1973, on the cusp of her nineteenth birthday, and with six weeks until her wedding, she fled the story and circumstances she was about to live out – which, for all its safety, felt like surrender.
Joan told her mother she couldn’t marry so young, and with tears in her eyes, her mother accepted her daughter was destined for something other than the Highland life. She walked along a strip of old stores in Glasgow’s West End with David, her fiancé, and broke the news that she would leave soon, and never see him again. He erupted.
The tailwind blew hard. My mother fled to Spain that weekend with a girlfriend, and afterwards, threw herself into studies in Birmingham. After nearly three years, and plenty of isolation from her family, she graduated at twenty-one from the first trauma hospital in the world.
It is difficult to overstate this achievement. Following instinct in youth is hard enough, but no one in the Cameron Clan had walked her road or acted as a guiding light. As the first professional in her family, and from the challenges of a modest rural Scottish education, she turned away from the Highlands with great self-belief, and followed her dreams for America.
*
The actions of two nineteen-year olds on opposite sides of the world set in motion a chain of events no one could have predicted. At the moment my father dodged Australia’s Vietnam War draft in 1966, and my mother ran out on a Scottish Highland wedding in 1973, they probably weren’t even able to pin Iran on a map. It would’ve seemed to them as it seems to most of us: nothing more than an earthly apparition, a place we know the outline of, but little else.
By the early winter of 1978, death was no more certain than survival. With cars burning in the alleys, and shredded documents floating from office windows in the cooling sunlight, my father would grip two plane tickets in his hand, and run across a street of gunfire, while my mother threw together two small bags of belongings, leaving local friends and a house full of memories behind. When is it right to run? Do any of us ever truly know? That belief in instinct, which they had developed so bravely in their youth, would come back to save them.
The Influence Of Outsiders
The Iranian universe my parents entered in the summer months of 1977 was a layer cake of tradition, pride, riches and bloodshed. The story of how that layer cake was built up to a point where such a historic corner of the world found itself on the brink of revolution is extraordinary, and still largely unknown to outsiders.
Every history has a beginning – but no nation or people anywhere in the human story have a beginning like the Persians. The Achaemenid Empire
(550–330 BCE) was the world’s first true empire, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia. At its peak in 480 BCE, it comprised an astonishing 40% of the global population, a percentage unrivalled by anything in the world before or since.4
For someone today, the very word “Persian” conjures images of great battles with Sparta or Rome, unbroken literary traditions and the beginnings of so many reservoirs of ancient knowledge. But the ties between Ancient Persia and the twentieth-century Iranians who connect themselves to that storied past are tenuous. Once the epicentre of great conquests, the land of modern-day Iran has been conquered many times over – by the Mongols, Ottomans, Greeks and Arabs. In the early nineteenth century, European power took their first serious interest in this part of the world, and in truth, it has probably never recovered.
The Napoleonic struggles between France, Britain and Russia caused a bidding war for the Crown Prince Abbas Mirza’s affections. After defeat in the Caucasus in 1828, Mirza agreed to pay Russia reparations on the condition they recognised the Crown Prince’s own Qajar throne as the legitimate ruler. Trade opened up, and imported goods like tea and sugar began to reach the most remote villages. The region’s uncomfortable relationship with the comforts of the outside world began.
For centuries, the life of a Persian city-dweller or villager had been relatively unchanged. Trackless bends and valley passes linked up settlements and hamlets across the mountains and deserts. Pack animals carried virtually every good. The nation had only one navigable river. Markets were a mess of wool, meat and textile crafts, much of which was beautiful but not made to any single standard. The life and language of one village might be completely different to one just over a snow-capped mountain range.
Iran’s lack of rainfall made any other existence difficult. With most parts of the country averaging under ten inches of rain each year, subsistence and inefficiency were a part of life. More than once in the nineteenth century, a ruler or “Shah” in the Qajar dynasty looked to the change afoot in Istanbul and Cairo – and wondered what might become of his own people if they were dragged into the future by a visionary leader. When North America and Europe were surging ahead with the elevator, battery and undersea telegraph cable, remote herdsmen in the Qajar Kingdom were learning of sugar for the first time.5
Each Shah knew they were behind the pack. Just like leaders of the developing world have done for centuries, they schemed to leapfrog the pecking order and give their people the quality of life they deserved. They yearned for a flagship industry. They wanted a robust army. They dreamed of a happy equilibrium between the bureaucracy, the business classes and the clergy. But the Qajars needed outside help. They needed money.
*
Necessity became the mother of action, if not invention. A severe famine crippled the country in 1872, and the next Shah, Nassereddin, signed a deal with the European media titan Baron Julius de Reuter (of Reuters News Agency). The ‘Reuter Concession’ began the handing over of entire industries to foreign investors, chief among them a planned rail line between Tehran and Enzeli on the Caspian Sea.
Both parties hoped this would morph into an artery of commerce and open up Iran to the world. Locals were outraged. When the rail tracks did not arrive on time, Nassereddin cancelled the concession, bursting the credit bubble he hoped for and igniting a sovereign risk in European capital markets that would continue to hang over Iran in different guises for a hundred years.
The people’s knee-jerk response and the Shah’s erratic deal-making were not out of character. The business of Qajar administration for much of the nineteenth century had been rash and impulsive. Like the economy Nassereddin and his ancestors ruled, much of government decision-making was makeshift. Local positions and titles were often sold for the highest price.
Land was exchanged when salaries couldn’t be paid. Merchants were regularly authorised to collect taxes and skim a margin for themselves. The men of the bazaar and the clergy wielded enormous power – and Nassereddin incurred their wrath the moment the Reuter Concession was announced. Much of their resistance verged on a medieval opposition to modernity, something the twentieth century would see time and again.
Nassereddin had a deep desire to reform his country and persisted for another twenty years until a tobacco monopoly was promised in 1892, and after rabid civil unrest, withdrawn. His ancestor Crown Prince Mirza had learned a lesson from the Russians in 1828, which Nassereddin and future leaders were doomed to repeat – invite the Western power in, but do not expect the result you intended. Investors demanded a £500,000 indemnity for the cancelled arrangement,6 which began Iran’s official foreign debt, and was converted into the starting capital for the British Imperial Bank of Persia, the sole entity authorised to print banknotes. The nineteenth century drew to a close with Europe’s stranglehold on Iranian progress tighter than ever.
Australian Goldfield,
Iranian Oilfield
A new page turned for Iran in 1900 – more than anyone could have imagined. In the early months of the twentieth century, an Englishman named William Knox D’Arcy agreed to fund the search for oil and minerals in Persia. Like my father seventy-five years later, D’Arcy came to the remote wilderness of Persia via an unlikely place: the equally arid inland deserts of Australia. Unlike the case of my father’s arrival in 1977, D’Arcy was already an old (and wealthy) man, striking it rich in the Queensland goldfields in the 1880s.7 With a recently deceased wife, and much of his fortune seemingly well invested back in England, D’Arcy set off; staying true to the irrational faith in all mining prospectors that some unique ability exists in them to find minerals in the most unlikely places.
D’Arcy’s adversary in negotiation was Mozaffar ad-Din, Shah Nassereddin Qajar’s son and a man wholly unprepared for the burdens of state. By May of 1901, an agreement had been reached between D’Arcy and Mozaffar that would haunt Iran for much of the twentieth century, on terms that are scarcely believable today. The D’Arcy Concession granted a 51-year-old Englishman oil rights to the entire nation, excluding only five provinces in Northern Iran. In effect, the concession covered 480,000 square miles, or an area the size of France and Ukraine combined. In return, D’Arcy needed to provide just 16% of his company’s annual profits as a royalty.8
Mozaffar and D’Arcy could not have known the inextricable link between oil and the story of the twentieth century. In fact, history could have been so different. Project financing went close to bankrupting D’Arcy many times. After sending explorer George Reynolds to traipse around the country for seven fruitless years, all money had been exhausted; D’Arcy faced losing his country manors and Grosvenor Square mansion in London, and despite extra investment along the way, the end seemed nigh in the spring of 1908.
As the legend has it, staff in the local office were already being dismissed when Reynolds received a cable with final instructions from London – drill to 1,500 feet on your last-chance well and go no further. At 4:00am, on 26th May 1908, liquid petroleum was found in a drill site by an ancient ruin (fittingly) called ‘Solomon’s Mosque’, at Masjid-i-Suleiman in southwestern Iran. The depth? 1,108 feet. The gusher shot 75 feet in the air,9 the smothered crew shouted with delight, and the smell of sulphur and gas hung over the treeless terrain. The Middle East had changed forever.
D’Arcy’s enterprise had been bailed out in 1904 by the Burmah Oil Company, and in 1909, both parties reorganised their holdings to form the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, one of its several future incarnations. With a capital requirement of £2 million, the initial public offering in London sold out in just 30 minutes.10 Today, we know the modern version of this entity by a simple two-letter acronym: BP.
A 140-mile pipeline linked the original site of Masjid-i-Suleiman with the coast on the Persian Gulf, and a modest square mile of land was leased on the small alluvial island of Abidan. The future in store for the town included oil riches, production crises, civil insurrection, coups and the small
matter of a cinema inferno – but in 1909, it was just a small commercial town on a flat salty plain near the sea, and a sensible place for a refinery.
Anglo-Persian found the going tough for quite a few years. Oil production as we know it today was many decades in the distance. The products smelled awful, and unevaporated residue liquids like fuel oil were sold to Royal Dutch Shell, a rival at a technically superior stage. In early 1914, with much of its capital expended, D’Arcy and Anglo-Persian were again on the brink, when a new customer turned saviour: Winston Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had been at the helm of a vigorous reform agenda, improving the Royal Navy with heavier guns to combat Kaiser Wilhelm’s growing appetite for German sea power. But bigger guns were a problem for speed. There was an obvious, but controversial, solution: oil.
The obvious part was practical. Oil was more combustible, burned hotter, and produced steam faster than coal. This meant fewer boilers, fewer men required at sea, and incidentally fewer trails of smoke for the enemy to notice. The controversial part was strategic – Britain produced no oil. It had built an empire across the world on the back of coal, while all global oil reserves fell under some form of foreign control. Churchill was undeterred. Remarkably still in his thirties and about to command the Royal Navy on the brink of the First World War, he won Parliament’s agreement to make a seismic conversion of coal to oil for the British fleet.
Just one month before the ‘guns of August’ began their four-year cannonade of the First World War, Churchill (through the UK Treasury) secured a 51% majority voting interest for the British Crown in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company,11 with fuel oil to be supplied to the Royal Navy at 30 shillings a ton from Abidan. Britain’s interest in the Persian Gulf became a strategic obsession for the next half-century.
Mother Father Revolution Page 2