Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  The dreadful cycle of violence, born of Palestine, continued. Soon after I arrived back in the Lebanon, I heard that, in revenge for Quarantina, the Christians of Damour in southern Lebanon had been driven out, and Damour sacked. In return 30,000 Palestinians had been besieged in the fortress of Tal Al Zaater.

  I was in the country again soon after the Syrians marched in to exercise what was called a peace-keeping role. The Syrians, always regarded by the Israelis as their most formidable foe, had arrived initially by invitation of the Saudis, though the Syrians had their own interest in that they saw Lebanon as a part of Greater Syria. Like the other militias on the streets of Beirut, they did not much care for journalists. I was arrested for photographing a Syrian soldier who had perched himself on the bonnet of a car and was waving his pistol joyously in the air.

  Even with the ‘peace-keepers’ in town, hysterical militiamen of all varieties continued to fire wildly at the smallest excuse. You would still get the occasional incoming shell. And if it was sometimes quiet at weekends it would be because all the fighters were off in the mountains where they did their training and inhaled their deadly doctrines. The dictum of the Christian Guardians was: ‘It is the duty of every Lebanese to kill one Palestinian.’

  One day the sight of my camera got me arrested by a Palestinian militiaman. He seemed to be under the influence of drugs, and I had to think fast. I said I was a friend of Abu Ammar, which is Arafat’s nom de guerre.

  ‘You are really a friend of Abu Ammar?’ he asked.

  I replied that I was, and that I had been playing chess with him that very morning, and asked if he had seen the photograph in the newspaper. In fact, there was a picture that day of Arafat playing chess with a BBC friend of mine. I was asked, ‘How did our chairman play? Did he beat you?’ I replied that of course he did. He looked at me, smiled and put his arms around me and gave me a huge squeeze which the 9mm Russian pistol in his waistband made rather painful. He then held me back from him and looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I am very pleased. You can go.’

  There was a chilling aftermath to my Palestinian wanderings with Jonathan. I got involved with some of the Nazis who had done so much to create the Palestinian problem in the first place. It happened through my friend Tony Terry, with whom I had last worked in Biafra, where he arrived sweltering and resplendent in black suit and red sock suspenders post-haste from some north European conference. On that occasion he’d had to use his considerable astuteness to plumb the African politics he was encountering for the first time. On this occasion, in the autumn of 1977, I was being sent to meet him in West Germany, very much his home ground.

  We were going to see a group of extraordinary old Nazis, with whom Tony had ingratiated himself. They were the survivors of Hitler’s own personal SS guards, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. They included an enormous blond man, at least six-and-a-half feet tall, who was treated with much deference. He turned out to have been Hitler’s personal bodyguard.

  They were, unbelievably, trying to scrub up their image. They had produced a sentimentalised publication about their war efforts. From its glossy pages you would believe that the SS were into no more than genial comradeship and healthy living. As it happened Tony had been a commando in the raid on the German U-boat base at St Nazaire and held a prisoner of war for three years. He had thereafter worked in British Intelligence investigating atrocities committed by this very same unit. He was not at all impressed by their attempt to burnish a latter-day reputation as social workers, but he was a master at not showing his distaste. He’d talk politely to these appalling people, purse his lips when Adolf’s name was admiringly evoked, give a little smile and move on. He only let the emotion out when he sat at the typewriter.

  We wound up being invited to their reunion dinner held in Nassau, which had been their garrison town during the war. What went on inside the hall was in some ways more interesting than what went on with the old Nazis at their revels. There were a few anti-Nazi demonstrators about but the solid citizens seemed very solidly on the side of the SS.

  Among them was a reserve officer in the present West German army who told us, ‘If I had been asked to become a concentration camp guard I would have done so as a matter of course. But things are different nowadays.’ I hoped they were. I left with the queasy impression that it was not just in the Middle East that the old wheels were turning full circle.

  31. SHADOW OF DOUBT

  I had begun to wonder where home was for an old war-horse like me. While I was away in some dreadful hell-hole I yearned to be back with my family; when I was at home, tinkering around with the outhouses attached to my farmhouse in Hertfordshire, I itched to be away again in foreign parts. One thing had to be recognised—things were changing at the Sunday Times. Lifestyles rather than life were coming into fashion on the magazine.

  So much of my war reporting had involved watching national identities take shape that I began to ask myself who I was. What were the English and what did they represent? What for that matter did I represent? I decided to take to the road in my own country to find out. For the better part of two years I travelled round England, discovering it, taking pictures, sometimes for the paper but often at my own expense. I was searching not only for the English identity but for a key to something in myself that would enable me to turn a corner into a new world. What I found was that my eyes had grown accustomed to dark. All I saw seemed to echo my childhood and the scenes of deprivation, dereliction, death and disaster, smashed minds and broken bodies, that I had witnessed in other countries.

  I immersed myself in the industrial communities of the North and soaked up the desolate beauty of cities like Bradford. Though not myself down-and-out, I could not help identifying with the derelicts and outcasts of society. I went into the slums it was hard to believe still existed in England, where people brewed their children’s tea in old beer cans, where wallpaper hung in great furls from damp walls, where fungus grew around greasy stoves that occupied (as in my childhood) the centre of impoverished homes that boasted few other amenities or possessions.

  I ate and slept in a Salvation Army hostel, to breathe in its life. I spent weeks photographing in mental hospitals. One of my own fears has always been that I would lose my sanity, and that I too would be institutionalised. But the scenes I witnessed in the hostels and hospitals and on the road fed a social anger in me.

  There was a darkness in my own country that I reacted against, but there was also a darkness in me. When I photographed people at English seasides they looked unhappy. It crossed my mind that the unhappiness was not in them but in me. I was still seeing the dead bodies I had crawled past and touched in other people’s countries. Burning stubble at evening time in English fields reminded me of scorched-earth strategies, and that is how it came out in my photographs. Mallards rising in the mist from marshes looked like formations of B-52 bombers. In English woods rain drumming on the leaves transplanted me back to tense jungle patrols. I was happiest wandering like a lost soul on open moorlands with heavy rain clouds overhead. I longed for winter, for the abrasive struggle with the weather and the nakedness of the landscape. People told me it was a form of masochism.

  When I published my book on England, called Homecoming, it was described as over-sombre, a collection of war pictures taken in times of peace. At about that time Associated Television made a documentary about my war photographs in which I was asked about my attitude to war in the future. I had a ready answer. I wanted to photograph just one more war, do it well and say, finish. In reality life is rarely so tidy. War itself is never tidy.

  While on a dangerous job I would overcome the fear of leaving England by telling myself I worked for a great newspaper. The paper was as large a part of the identity of all its journalists and photographers as we were of it. Few of us realised how large until the Sunday Times closed in November 1978, and stayed closed for a whole year. It is always sad when a newspaper dies for lack of money.
When it closes for lack of common sense it makes you angry.

  The reason for the closure was a decision to move away from traditional hot metal printing methods and go for the new computer-based typesetting technology. The great Lord Thomson, whom I had accompanied to China, had died. His son Kenneth, whom I had also befriended, was eager to press ahead with modernising his inheritance. So was the Sunday Times management team. The print unions were all for standing still. No compromise meant no solution. The Times and the Sunday Times, which both sides were intent to preserve, disappeared from the streets.

  Journalists and photographers, who were not part of the dispute, were left stranded. Most of us continued to be paid, but newspapermen without a newspaper are pathetic creatures. Few are prepared for the demand of anonymity. I would go into the Gray’s Inn Road building and feel like a morgue attendant. People would drift about in ones and twos, like the inmates of a mental institution, giving one another suspicious looks of the kind you expect from the paranoid schizophrenic. Nobody really knew if we should or shouldn’t be there. Without the newspaper you could feel the erosion of loyalties and trust. For me, it was unbearable to think of the risks I had taken to produce this or that story for a newspaper that now had absolutely no value. It all seemed farcical.

  No one thought the closure would last for more than a few days. As it stretched into weeks, then months, until finally it seemed it would have no end, I found it hard to work up enthusiasm for anything. Like everyone else, I watched the Iranian Embassy siege on television. I wasn’t looking for danger for a newspaper that didn’t exist. If the management and the printers were not prepared to take any risks in negotiation, why should any journalist do so? Only when the Victoria and Albert Museum approached me to mount a retrospective exhibition of my work was I dragged out of the doldrums.

  Apart from Henri Cartier-Bresson, I could not remember another contemporary photographer being accorded the honour of a major exhibition at the V and A. I confess I felt uncertain as I printed up the pictures to be exhibited in the pigsty I had converted into a dark room. It is one thing to show pictures of horror and suffering in a newspaper whose function is to reflect what is going on in the world and quite another to put them up on gallery walls to be admired. In the event some 40,000 turned out to see them, most of them young.

  The exhibition led directly to a most agreeable meeting. My agent, Abner Stein, wanted me to produce a book of the V and A photographs under the Conradian title Hearts of Darkness and asked David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, to write an introduction to it. He agreed, so long as he could meet me. I felt a little overawed, and attempted to read one of his books by way of preparation. The Honourable Schoolboy was said to be based on some of the people I knew at the Sunday Times, but even the portrayal of our Far Eastern correspondent, Dick Hughes, thinly disguised as ‘Old Crow’, couldn’t keep me going. Dyslexia had impaired my concentration too much for the complexity of his plot and his prose. I put the book aside and made a mental note to avoid literary discussion.

  When David Cornwell arrived at my home, Christine fed him watercress soup, for which he thanked her very nicely. I showed him the chickens and he became the first person ever to be invited to cross the threshold of my dark room. In the cowshed we came upon my discarded copy of The Honourable Schoolboy trodden into the mud. He pretended not to notice. We got on well and talked on into the evening. As he was leaving I remember saying to him gravely and rather gauchely, ‘Maybe you can tell me where I’m going, whether life is just beginning or just over.’ What a question to be asked of anyone after only a few hours’ acquaintance!

  Of course he was unable to tell me, but he produced the sort of surgical operation on my psyche for the book that I am sure I did not deserve. Yet he helped me to put a painful, self-searching period behind me. He thought my work was ‘the product of a restless, slightly puritanical mind, deeply ill at ease with the world’s condition and his own’. He could say that again! Another passage made me feel more uncomfortable:

  ‘He has known all forms of fear, he’s an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experiences in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man—like myself, as a matter of fact—for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he’s testing his Maker’s indulgence. To survive is to be condoned and blessed again.’

  Could it be true? I can’t altogether deny it.

  We became friendly, and later I went with him to Beirut in search of locations for the film of his book The Little Drummer Girl. Sensibly the filming was moved to Jordan. We went looking for Salah Tamari and Dina while we were in the Lebanon and found their handsome villa locked up. We clambered over the wall but came away none the wiser as to where they had gone. Later I discovered that Salah was in an Israeli jail.

  32. EARTHQUAKE IN IRAN

  I went to Iran just before and just after the revolution and I can’t honestly say that I took to that country on either occasion, though I did very much take to a man I met there who the Ayatollah Khomeini later had imprisoned.

  Since he was jailed in 1986, Roger Cooper had been described in the British press variously as ‘an academic’ and ‘a businessman’, and by the Iranians as a spy. I knew him as a newspaperman and a very good one at that. He travelled round with me on both my tours in Iran.

  Roger is the nephew of the poet Robert Graves, which may partly explain the endearing eccentricity of his nature. He wore sandals and rode a bicycle, and carried all his gear—notes, knife, pepper-grinder and other vital equipment—around in an outsize woman’s hessian bag. He had lived in Tehrān for many years and spoke Farsi (and indeed many other languages) like a native. I liked this man at first count. There was a bit of sparkle about him.

  He was brilliant in traffic jams. A torrent of Farsi would emerge from Roger and the offenders would back off. He would tell them, ‘As Allah is my witness, you will be punished.’ Like Norman Lewis, he got enormous enjoyment out of the small things in life.

  I once stood in line to use a rudimentary but popular urinal in a railway station when the man in front of me turned round and started talking to me. I smiled weakly, not understanding a word he said. The man then had an exchange with Roger behind me, at which Roger broke into a bellowing laugh.

  ‘You’re not going to like this, Don,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘He wants to know why my friend is so rude that he doesn’t bother to answer when spoken to. When I told him you didn’t understand the language, he said, “Well, I spoke to him in Turkish, isn’t that good enough for him?” The funny thing is the Iranians consider the Turks to be thick.’

  When I first went to Tehrān, in the autumn of 1978, radical students were out on the streets shouting ‘Death to the Shah’ and were gunned down by the army. The official death toll was 100, but Roger wasn’t satisfied until he had counted the fresh graves in Tehrān’s main cemetery. He put the figure nearer 500, and he felt sure there would be more in other places. Only a short time before my arrival seventy theological students had been shot in a disturbance in Qom, one of Iran’s holiest cities.

  It was clear that we were witnessing the death throes of a regime. The Shah’s autocracy, underpinned by Savak, all-pervasive and much-feared secret police, was finally losing its grip. We were watching the beginning of a major revolution, with major international implications. Iran’s oil, and its proximity to Russia, made its political destiny of special interest to the major powers. Britain had substantial interests there, particularly in construction; Israel and South Africa depended on Iranian oil, but the interests of the United States, which had paved the way for the Shah by a CIA-engineered coup against his left-wing predecessor, Mossadeq, exceeded all others. Now, after years of sustaining the reliably anti-Communist Shah, and unloadi
ng huge defence contracts, the Americans were faced with a situation in which the only predictable thing was an end to the Shah.

  In those early days, I don’t think anyone could tell which of the Shah’s many enemies would emerge triumphant. Most of the noise was being made by radical students bent on social revolution but a more solid opposition was emerging from conservative Muslims led by the mullahs, worried at the pace of Westernisation. Suddenly the political disaster that Iran had become gave place to a natural one.

  An earthquake in the desert flattened the oasis town of Tabas in thirty seconds. It was said that 20,000 people had died. Roger and I managed to fly in on a military aeroplane. While we were there, sleeping under canvas, there was a second tremor which I count as one of the most unnerving experiences I’ve ever had.

  I thought I could handle most disaster situations but nothing quite prepared me for the scale of the dying that comes with an earthquake, or the sight of bulldozers burying hundreds of bodies. The bodies had to be buried fast to prevent an outbreak of disease, but when you see men laying their shrouded dead babies in the path of the bulldozer, it becomes hard to hold a camera. While I was in Tabas, the Shah flew in and I took a photograph of the King of Kings coming down the steps of the aeroplane. The whole story of all the political and natural disasters was written on his ravaged face.

  It was impossible to keep politics out of anything, even disaster relief. The mullahs were there with their field kitchens and many people remarked to Roger on how much they were achieving compared to the government’s feeble effort. There was also a group of young medical students from Mashhad University who were inoculating against typhus. They dismissed the clergy’s efforts as ‘propaganda’.

  We went on to Mashhad, where a most exquisite mosque with a turquoise dome was surrounded by tanks. Roger had an appointment with a mullah who told us—‘for our own safety’—to turn round and go back to Tehrān before the airport was closed by the army. Seeing our reluctance, he went off briefly and came back with two little boxes, planting one in Roger’s palm, the other in mine. They contained two of the most beautiful turquoise stones.