The price stabilised by 1974 at around $12.00 per barrel, but the pendulum had swung.76 The world had seen crude oil quadruple in a matter of eighteen months, and in economic terms, the 1970s were forever defined by it. By 23rd December 1973, Mohammed Reza had the swagger to stand before the world’s media and pronounce:
“The industrial world will have to realise that the era of their terrific progress and even more terrific income and wealth based on cheap oil is finished. They will have to tighten their belts. If you want to live as well now, you’ll have to work for it.”77
The irony is hard to miss for someone today. The 1973 oil shock ushered in an unimaginable bounty of easy money for many of the OPEC producers. Even if it eventually undid Iran, the children of Saudi, Kuwaiti and other Gulf families have spent the four decades since with holiday pads in Mayfair, Knightsbridge or Midtown Manhattan, and Lamborghinis or Ferraris, in no small thanks to the way money from the oil shock has worked for them. But back then, European nations in the midst of rationing and power cuts did not appreciate the Shah’s lecture; but there was little they could do. Iran’s annual oil revenue quadrupled, and the next obvious question arose – what to do with the money?
Iran was not ready for the question; in fact, no country probably can be. By 1973, the Iranian economy had enjoyed solid years of growth since 1964 and developed something a little worse than growing pains – it was totally warped. Money flooded in, which led to a sense of wealth but also shortages and price rises. All the while, few investments had been made to balance the economy – there were no steel beams or skilled contractors to build growing cities, nor farmers employed to grow more bread or meat.78
The British Ambassador Anthony Parsons later described that year as the most sensational in Iran’s recent history, certainly since the Shah’s re-establishment of power from Mossadegh in 1953.79 His advice to British business remained salient: “This is a Third World country, and there is no Third World country where a sudden change of regime should be a matter of surprise. If you do business here, you must accept that risk.”80
Some sensible things were done in 1974 with the proceeds of the oil bonanza. Iran paid off loans, bought stakes in companies overseas, built a skyscraper in Manhattan, and even extended a $1.2 billion loan to Britain, to the great delight of Iranians everywhere.81 But it didn’t matter that the Central Bank, the Economic Ministries and even the Shah all understood the problem of inflation – they still couldn’t resist flooding the nation with investment.
Bureaucrats through 1974 were fully aware of the dangers of high growth; demand spikes for electricity, bottlenecks in ports, and shortages of building materials were all foreseeable.82 But the Shah wrote in his diary of a chance [to] “not only reach the gates of the Great Civilisation in twelve years, but to pass through them.”83 The spending was unleashed, and so it began: clogged warehouses, ships being unable to dock at port, exploding land prices in major cities, and the few export industries other than oil (such as rug weaving) being unable to compete overseas with all their materials being so expensive domestically. Food imports rose as demand for new luxuries increased, while farmers and villagers sold their land for industrial development and left to find work in the bustling cities – making scarce food production even scarcer.
By 1975, the boom was over; however, major investments and lucrative opportunities in pockets of the country led to a continued “lag” wave of funds. With a shortage of skilled professionals, and an explosion in wages, Iran all of a sudden became appealing to something else like it never had been before – foreigners. They came in their tens of thousands: helicopter pilots, nurses, chemical engineers and mine managers. Two happened to be my parents.
A Letter On A Noticeboard
In the Australian desert heat of Christmas 1976, a young bell-bottomed engineering student named Mike Walsh walked past a university corridor noticeboard. A strange, tongue-in-cheek letter had been pinned to the board, talking about crazy drivers, goats eating vegetation to mark out the roads, and the chance to work in one of the strangest places in the world. The point of the eye-catching wording? You needed a sense of humour to work in Iran. The letter had been sent by an American named David Wilkie – and pinned up at the six best mining schools in the world.
David’s employer was Magcobar Iran, a joint venture between Iranian mining interests and the manufacturing and oilfield services group, Dresser Industries. The Iranian group was focused on their base metals projects, including a startlingly high-grade zinc mine (zinc is used in everything from plastics and paint to soap and cosmetics). Apart from cashing their half of the revenue cheques, the Iranians showed no interest in the joint venture. Wilkie and his team were left to run the mine as best they could.
At the time, oil-drilling activity all over the world was booming. Magcobar Iran’s core business was the mining and treatment of barite and bentonite, two key components in the process of drilling mud. The product was onsold to the oilfield services group who supplied the drilling mud service to the oil well drillers. In the simplest terms, these minerals allowed oil to be drilled, and Iran to feed a lot of the world’s petroleum needs.
The demand for the barite and bentonite products had increased to the point where old-fashioned mining methods couldn’t keep up. David embarked on a programme of introducing cutting-edge 1970s mining technology. This required the best and brightest students who knew nothing but the new ways. In truth, David was desperate for foreigners to run his Iranian mines. So, he got creative.
So did Mike Walsh, who first saw the note hanging in that university corridor. He came home one night after a few drinks and replied to the letter in a similarly tongue-in-cheek fashion, saying he was interested. A telex arrived around a month later from David Wilkie, saying: “you’re invited to Iran for a month-long interview trip. Call British Airways – they have a plane ticket waiting for you.”
Mike was due to begin a job in early 1977, on an iron ore mine in the Pilbara desert of Western Australia. He visited Iran for two weeks and had seen enough. It was dry, desolate and awful; but no more awful than the job he was due to take in remote Australia. Wilkie arranged for Mike to leave the country for the final two weeks while they arranged the visa paperwork. In a conversation just before he left, Wilkie asked, ‘Do you have any other friends who’ve just graduated and would be good engineers? If so, get them to send me a letter and I’ll hire them for the other mines I’ve got to staff. We need three or four.’
Mike paused for a moment, and then said, ‘I do know someone actually – his name is Leslie John Woolcock.’
Return From The Wild Years
From my father’s disappearance in 1966 to his resurfacing in 1973 for the first day of university at the Western Australian School of Mines, he had vanished – from family, friends and the changing world. He’d lived by billy cans and desert fires and drifted from outback job to cattle station hand, always taking work where they didn’t ask too many questions, and ideally not even caring to know his surname. He smoked and drank, and leant against log fires on a swag, staring up at the stars, listening to old bush men and their stories, and wandering on to the next faraway town. Australia is big – but in truth, it’s as big as anyone wishes to make it. Much of his lived experience is probably lost to history now, but this is the way most wayfarers wish it.
By the time he’d resurfaced, a new type of politics had visited Australia, led by a firebrand reformer named Gough Whitlam. As Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, he broke twenty-three years of conservative Liberal Party rule, swept to the Prime Ministership and, crucially, suspended the scheme of young Australian men being called up to the slow-dying fire of the Vietnam War. Late 1972 turned into 1973, with the oil shocks and global downturn an unforeseeable event in the distance. At the School of Mines registration office in Kalgoorlie, a tall, long-haired man arrived for his orientation, having been accepted on the back of a few glowing references from mine s
ites in remote Australia. His high school science and maths marks were also more than adequate to be accepted. Les would remain forever loyal to the politician who liberated his prospects of conscription, even when Gough Whitlam’s idealistic vision for Australia proved impossible to finance through the upheaval of the global oil shock (he was dismissed from government in the Constitutional Crisis of November 1975).
His mind had grown tired in the long Australian bush nights. At 26 years of age, and with a second chance of higher learning, he wouldn’t make the same mistake. Les threw himself into his studies and was elected Class President in 1976. He still partied and drank at a rate few could match. Somewhere along the way in his term as President, he organised the 1970s Australian rock band Sherbet to play on campus, only for a group of thirty young girls to arrive at the front door and him let them in without any tickets. The gig ended in empty alcohol kegs, a riot, and a lost bond for the Student Union. But he’d found his calling in mining, and the deep fascination that came with reading the story of the Earth for mineral deposits of wealth and beauty.
A winter travelling around the United States in the Australian summer of 1976–77 took him to the Deep South, and the nightlife of New Orleans, before a few weeks on the drilling sites west of Dallas. As his twenties drew to a close, my father fell in love with everything about foreign women – their accents, temperament and sense of poise. The world felt big and unexplored; differences felt fascinating. After returning to Australia in mid-1977, he took a call from his classmate Mike Walsh to apply for a manager’s role in Iran, and jumped at the chance.
*
My mother finally reached America in the spring of 1976, now a graduated nurse, and just a few months ahead of her future husband. On the 22nd April 1976, a twenty-one-year-old Joan spent her first night across the Atlantic over a bowl of seafood chowder, with relatives in Jamaica Plains, Boston. She’d travelled with Gwyneth, a close girlfriend out of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and always with her in the top two students of the class. For the past few months, they’d saved money by living above a venereal disease clinic, in simple medical residence rooms opposite the hospital.
‘Sign in, be back by 10:00pm,’ the grouchy receptionist used to say.
Gwyneth was not a traveller, and not so impressed with America. Joan was in love with anything in the world that felt different to Scotland.
The two of them returned to Glasgow after just a fortnight off work in New England. Then after a few months, as the Scottish winter of 1976–77 set in, my mother waited in the Castle Street travel agent to discuss new destinations on her own. A load of pins sat in a stationery holder on the desk while the staff member went to receive a telex. Joan saw a laminated map across the travel agent’s desk and decided to play a game of dropping three pins from an arm’s length above the table. She held her arm straight and watched the first brass tack tumble like an umbrella to the surface; it bounced once, jumped back, and settled on a blue country in the centre of the map. Joan leant in to read the fine print – Iran (Persia).
She gave that moment of chance little thought after; until a few weeks later when she saw a documentary on the BBC about Iran’s hospitals. Suddenly it occurred to her – Iran was a place she could not only visit, but also work in. Always a believer in the strange workings of the universe, Joan felt it was an instinct worth exploring, and booked a flight to Tehran for a holiday, but with plans to find a job and resign from the Glasgow Infirmary if she found something better. My mother said goodbye to her roommate, and with two small bags, in September 1977, boarded a flight for Glasgow, to London, to Frankfurt and then Tehran. It would be the most dramatic fifteen months of her life.
Tehran, 1977
To someone raised in the quiet places of the world, landing in the streets of Tehran felt like an earthquake. The throttle of traffic, the hollering voices along the pavements and the cassette music from every shop windowsill hit my mother in the first cab ride from the airport. Through a fortunate connection, a Scottish mine manager named Glen had agreed to host Joan. On a late arrival, his children had gone to sleep, and the manager’s wife met my mother at the door with the strangest greeting: ‘Hello, hello! Come in, we’ve no extra food after dinner I’m afraid, you’ll have to have Caspian Sea caviar and biscuits.’ My mother had never eaten caviar before. She stared at it for ten minutes, wondering what to say.
The next morning, she moved into a pension hostel, and for two days she walked every hour of daylight, smelling the mix of cigarettes, kerosene and spices, and running her hands through the air of Iranian life. People smiled and nodded; their dark, tired faces brightened for a moment by someone different and excited to visit their country. Most of all, she was spellbound by the jewellery: gemstones inlaid with filigree wires, Farsi names or Persian stars etched in curling gold, feather-shaped earrings that dangled and swayed, and all the tiled and mosaic brooches, rings and bracelets of a culture that felt like a long-lost world. Even the men adorned quality gold necklaces, something she seldom saw in Scotland.
In every shop, market and car yard, there was one enduring feature – a framed picture of the Shah. Many shops would use more ornate frames, to demonstrate their loyalty, and show off a little prestige to the business. In every home, the Shah and Farah adorned the walls like they were any other family members who’d soon be around for special occasions.
On the first day of job searching, Joan simply found an address for a hospital and turned up with her typed CV. The HR staffer gave a tour, but my mother had to stop four times and hold back the vomit. Patients laid across the floor in their own clothes and no gowns, blocking corridors and moaning in agony. The acrid smell of limbs and urine hung through every wing, with no breeze or circulation. Men and women were muddled in no order, and families waited without any point of contact. All the signs were in Farsi. She left disheartened. The next day, she found another hospital, but it was just as bad.
Joan went around for dinner again with Glen and his Scottish family from her first night, disheartened and wondering if she’d based too much on a documentary.
‘Have you tried the American Hospital on Elizabeth Boulevard, Joan?’ he asked. Immediately my mother’s mood improved. An American hospital. Her cousin Ernie had been a registered nurse in Boston at a hospital not far from Harvard. She’d given Joan a tour in that spring visit of 1976, and my mother had loved every part of it.
The next day she organised a visit. The hospital had been built three years earlier on a solid loan from Chase Manhattan – part of the post-1973 investment wave – and it immediately felt better. The halls were cleaner, disinfected, and every ward had a proper roster and communication system. English and Farsi signs dotted the building, which helped her language skills. My mother was met by Chris Sheedy – a sharp, efficient American nurse, who helped with a formal application and, by chance, had a spare room in a ground-floor apartment of a white squared block. Within a day Joan had a job, a crisp white nursing uniform that sat neatly on the knee line, and a place to live.
The picture changed as time went on. Even with the improved conditions of the American Hospital, every aspect of nursing felt a world away from the training and standards Joan had received in Birmingham. On one manic night, she was placed in charge of the entire hospital – at 23 years of age.
The local Iranian nurses had habits and superstitions foreign to my mother. They hated the patient ventilators, the beeps, and the whirring noises of modern medical equipment. They would disappear for long stretches if a patient died, repeatedly showering and cleansing themselves but leaving the floor and the rest of their patient list unvisited for upwards of an hour or two. The corridors felt oddly quiet, with anxious local staff shuffling from room to room. Dozens of American nurses had come, signed on big contracts, and gone. Now in the twilight of 1977, there were the locals, a Filipino, Chris as the last American, three women from Northern Ireland, and my mother.
The three wome
n from Northern Ireland were introduced to my mother by Chris, and they adopted her in an instant – Philomena and Kay in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU), and Maureen in Theatre. The four of them felt like “Celts” together, with a similar distance from home and a want to be young and know new things. My mother’s first hundred days living in Iran were a whirlwind, with long working hours in Accident & Emergency (A&E) and big loving meals of early winter porridge, hot beetroots or kebabs with the Irish girls as they partied late into the city night.
Each of them loved Dolmeh Felfel (a green, red or yellow pepper stuffed with ingredients), a labour-of-love Persian dish that took half a day to make, and just moments to devour. Amid the neon light and noise of the evenings, Joan and the Irish girls would stop at a street seller and eat Dolmeh Felfel on their nightly walks to a local restaurant.
In the restaurant strip of Apadana Town in West Tehran, the four girls would walk past their favourite half-dozen restaurants and listen for the warm laughter of strangers. Iranian families took their children out to eat most evenings in the expat suburbs the girls lived in. Once seated, and amid the best atmosphere, they ordered canned imported beer and big sharing plates – to drink, laugh, and eventually sing Irish and Scottish rebellion songs to the other patrons in their favourite restaurant. The heavy, bearded owner of the eatery would smile, walk through the crowded tables clapping in time, and bring the whole restaurant to their feet to applaud, before the locals chose a Farsi folk song to reply with, and twenty or so tables would join in. Neither side understood what the others were singing about.
Mother Father Revolution Page 6