Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  34. THE UNEASE OF CHANGE

  I was not surprised when the Sunday Times did not use my Afghanistan pictures. There wasn’t much mileage in the same old boring helicopter, the posing mujaheddin, and the static gun. When my Beirut pictures also flopped, few being used, I was uneasy. They were of a different order altogether—outstanding anywhere in the world. Finding a home for them was not difficult. Publishers were pressing; I planned a new ‘Beirut in Crisis’ book, but I was worried about what was happening at the newspaper.

  Although the Sunday Times had regained its readers, the Thomson family had lost its appetite for the fray. In the autumn of 1980 Ken Thomson put The Times and the Sunday Times on the market. He was exasperated by the long struggle with the printers.

  The best buyer in his view—though not in that of the ­journalists—was the Australian proprietor Rupert Murdoch. He was already well represented on Fleet Street through his ownership of the Sun and the News of the World.

  There were printers who thought that they had done everybody proud by seeing off the Thomson family, though this proved, to say the least, short-sighted. In industrial terms, Murdoch would soon butcher and knee-cap all his printers with his move to Wapping.

  Murdoch was deeply unpopular with Sunday Times journalists, who had tried to get his deal blocked by the Monopolies Commission, but his first moves as the new proprietor were cunning rather than inflammatory, beginning with a change of editor.

  Harry Evans (ill-advisedly as it turned out) left his firm power-base in the Sunday Times to become editor of The Times. On the Sunday Times he was succeeded by his deputy, Frank Giles, a well-respected journalist but without Harry’s fire.

  Through 1981 it appeared that Rupert Murdoch might content himself with just picking on the printers, but the journalists’ time would come. We were in a phoney war period, watching, waiting, as some of our structure began slowly to crumble beneath us. Some of the best journalists, feeling the first tremors, made a decision and left. We had yet to experience the full force of the landslide.

  In this time of unease I had much uneasiness of my own. Too many of my assignments were half-baked, or going off half-cocked. Either my timing, or the newspaper’s, or possibly each, was falling off.

  I got to Rhodesia when it was becoming Zimbabwe, but only after the guerrillas had already won and were handing in their weapons. I had to content myself with taking pictures of them with these arsenals, which were like a dream memory sequence of all the weapons in all the wars I’d ever known—from the old British Lee-Enfields and Stens of Cyprus through the guns of Vietnam to the present.

  I headed for the Tamil troubles in Sri Lanka with Ian Jack, but I failed to get around the army’s block on photographers going to the front. I felt really low about that. Though one can’t expect to win them all.

  I had more success in India, where I went with Simon Winchester. We did a story about police torture of suspected criminals in Bihar—the notorious Bhagalpur Blindings—but even there I was conscious of missing the picture. The most wanted criminal in Bihar at that time was a woman bandit leader called Phulan Devi, who was said to shoot her lovers when she tired of them. I never did get to photograph Phulan.

  Back in England there was frustration of a very different kind. I was subjected to a lengthy Press Council case.

  It had seemed a mundane magazine assignment: to photograph the Liverpool Police in action. Police treatment of suspects had become a hot topic. Controversial too were stop-and-search campaigns. I photographed, among much else in this connection, the routine searching in a police station of a poorly dressed old man who seemed much the worse for drink.

  Flak, the first of this sort in my long career, came from an unexpected quarter—not from the police, but from the old man’s solicitor. He took a complaint to the Press Council, asserting that I had invaded his client’s privacy. He was said to be particularly incensed because the searching officers were wearing gloves, giving the impression that his client was unclean. My fault was said to have been failing to ask the man’s permission before taking the photograph. These were moot points of course. I had been invited by the police to photograph events freely, both on the streets and in the station, so I assumed that there was a general clearance. In addition, the old man did not seem to have any objection at the time.

  I lost the case and was given a Press Council reprimand. I didn’t feel guilty, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth. If consistently pursued, the Press Council’s line would make photo-journalism and news television almost impossible. No film of any arrest, demonstration, disaster, riot or disorder, war or crime, would be possible if all those depicted had first to give permission.

  While this was rumbling on interminably in the office, other uneasiness was troubling the tranquillity of life at home. A coolness was imperceptibly pushing Christine and me apart. It was always her way to walk through troubles with her head held high, but our difficulties now were of a different kind. I think she sensed there was another woman though I had never hinted at it, and hadn’t really thought of it that way, for I still loved my wife.

  I had met Laraine Ashton at a high-life cocktail party at the Ritz—not part of my customary stamping ground. After my lonely prowl through the under-class of English society and the publication of Homecoming, the Sunday Times magazine had sent me on a lightweight jaunt in the opposite direction, to the Paris fashion shows. It was a stunt typical of those ambivalent days just before the closure—man of action in haunts of beauty sort of stuff. I enjoyed myself, believing I had earned a respite from stinking foxholes under constant bombardment, but at the same time I felt faintly corrupted by the exercise. Much as I admired the skills of my old friend David Bailey in this field, I didn’t feel it was mine. It was in Paris that I met Bailey again after a long absence since our capers in the Sixties. With the paper’s closure, and my future livelihood shaky, I began to see much more of him and to find my way around that glittering world in which he always seemed to shine. So it was that I found myself at the Ritz, with Bailey’s wife Marie Helvin introducing me to Laraine.

  We dined that evening at Langan’s Brasserie, where somehow Marie had arranged a separate table for Laraine and me away from the rest of the party. I felt relaxed and talkative as I gazed into those huge eyes under that great shock of blonde hair.

  A week later Laraine appeared at the Olympus Gallery with a copy of Homecoming and asked the receptionist if I would sign it for her. I signed it and a connection was made. By then I knew that Laraine was not only very beautiful but also a high-powered businesswoman who ran her own model agency. She invited me to her flat in Notting Hill, which seemed to me the most stylish apartment I had ever seen. We sat on the floor in front of the open fire and drank wine and talked in the flickering firelight. I stayed late, but not very late because I had to pick up my gear and be off before first light on an unromantic story about oil rigs in the North Sea.

  That was how the affair began. It had its fire and its fights, and a romance I yearned for. I was no longer the lonely outcast of the Homecoming book. I didn’t expect it to last, but it did. We were too strongly attached emotionally to bring the affair to an end.

  While Christine grew silent a change was taking place in me. I lost the avid energy that had propelled my career. I was less drawn to the thick of the action. I no longer wanted, if I ever had, to commit a long-drawn-out suicide in the pursuit of heroism. I wanted to live without testing my courage all the time. Yet war was still a part of me. It was important to me to know that I could still face it out there, still keep my head under fire, if I had to, and yet I also felt that this part of me was doomed. I couldn’t go on doing these things for much longer. I was looking for that one last war to express all I knew before walking away.

  35. WHITE TOWEL FROM THE CAMINO REAL

  When the chance came I had a premonition that all might not be well. It was a feeling that did not go away as I flew
off once again a few thousand miles across the world with a few rolls of film, a bag, and a knowledge of the violent course of revolution. In this case the revolution was another in the chain that started in the Caribbean with Castro, and it set off the usual avalanche of American arms and aid for the government side. El Salvador, declared President Reagan, would never become another Cuba.

  When I arrived in the small but strategically significant Central American state in the spring of 1982 I was not to know that this was where I would really come unstuck, nor that in a few days I would be sitting in a guerrilla camp eating red kidney beans and hearing over a crackling radio that four journalists had just been killed for attempting what I had succeeded in doing. All the same, I found a certain tension mounting in me.

  Part of me relished being in Latin America again, amid that decaying Spanish architecture and the tropical vegetation. Another part of me felt a certain unease in relating to the situation that I had read up. There were the nightly murders, adding up to 200 deaths a week. Most victims were kidnapped and shot in the back of the head. The bodies were deposited on rubbish dumps on the outskirts of the capital, San Salvador. A massacre had taken place on the steps of the cathedral just before my arrival. Extreme right-wing death squads dominated the towns while left-wing guerrillas operated from the hills.

  Elections were pending, to determine which political direction the small state took—a matter of great concern to the United States. The American networks were there in force to cover events, one news team having as many as thirty-five reporters. So frenzied was the buzz in the Hotel Camino Real that I even heard one TV man in the next cubicle in the lavatory communicating with his colleague in the dining room by walkie-talkie radio. In this mêlée I made contact with Philip Jacobson to plan an escape from the vociferous mob. He suggested teaming up quietly with a Newsweek photographer by the name of John Hoagland, who not only spoke Spanish but had a truck at his disposal and knew the lie of the land.

  Polling day dawned to a bloody sight before Hoagland arrived. The Left had spirited their people into the capital during the night, taking up positions near the polling booths to oversee what they called ‘corrupt elections’, and the army had been set against them. I ventured out early in the morning to track down the source of gunfire that had disturbed my sleep. In the hour at which most capitals have their water-carts out dousing the streets, I found soldiers dragging corpses by the heels through the accumulated rubbish and swinging them up on to open lorries. The guerrillas had been cut to pieces. It was not a good omen for an open ballot.

  Election over, I was free to penetrate the guerrilla strongholds, despite the government decree that anyone doing so would be counted an enemy and shot. I took this as merely intimidating propaganda. In Hoagland’s absence I teamed up with a French cameraman I knew who had made contact with the guerrillas and was trying to get his crew to one of their encampments.

  In true Hitchcock style, we met his mysterious contact in a downtown hamburger parlour. We had equipped ourselves with a Volkswagen camper from which all gear had been removed save the cameras and mikes. It didn’t do to look as if we were heading far up-country. After a long drive on rough dirt roads we arrived in the large square courtyard of an old hacienda in the hills. The camper was concealed in a barn and we slept until cock-crow. While we were still drinking coffee brewed by one of the women at the farmhouse, couriers arrived from the main guerrilla unit to conduct us to our destination. My spirits were rising. This could be the big scoop.

  There followed several hours of hard hill-walking, burdened down with video cameras and sound equipment. Great caution was needed to avoid an army ambush. We kept to hidden tracks and stole like ghosts across the main highway near the town of Berlin, so called by the ex-Nazis who settled there after the Second World War. In the villages we were greeted warmly by the peasants and felt among friends.

  Sore of foot, tired and hungry, we came at last upon the guerrillas’ outlying guard post. A loudhailer was broadcasting to the camp when we arrived. Women, children, whole families were running around like chickens. Armed men with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers lounged in hammocks. Many of the guerrillas seemed to be no more than sixteen or eighteen years of age. Joining a food line got us the camp issue—a bowl of red kidney beans—after which we slept on the ground in the open.

  The following morning camp routine was interrupted by a sudden tension as people clustered round the radio. Someone told us in a halting Spanish accent that four Dutch journalists had pleaded for their lives after being caught trying to make contact with guerrilla fighting units. They had been shot in the back while running away.

  In a state of some alarm, as soon as our work was done we set off on the long and wearying journey back to the vicinity of the Pan-American Highway—a dirt-road where a journalist had been killed in a car the previous week. We were striding out along a path when just ahead we saw a movement. It was an army patrol. Doubling back to avoid detection, we returned to the farmhouse by a circuitous route. By this time we were looking very rough—haggard, unshaven, and covered with dust.

  All was unnaturally quiet at the ranch, and the peasants appeared to have fled. When at last they emerged from their hiding places they were agitated and told us the army had been in the vicinity, searching for Western journalists. The man who had taken us there in the camper-van had since driven it away. We spent an uneasy night awaiting his return.

  The van and its driver were still absent the next morning, so we rolled out of the ranch at early light, with all of our equipment piled on a farmer’s creaking bullock cart. The peasants had offered to get us as far as the Highway, and that took courage on their part. There we waited by the roadside for one of those Third World mountain buses, packed with people going to market in the capital, their produce netted on the roof.

  There was no room inside and so we were loaded on to the roof. We swayed and lurched our way downwards until we reached a small town where a bridge had been blown by the guerrillas. Telegraph poles and telegraph wires were also down. By the bridge we ran into an army checkpoint. My heart started racing as they took all the males from inside the bus and made them turn round and put their hands behind their heads.

  Then they called up to us, ‘Come down, señor. Come down.’

  Our Spanish guide started talking to them, and there was much brandishing of our Salvadorean passes and our passports. Pandemonium broke out. A small boy of about eleven had been seized and was being picked up and pulled around. They had found wrapped round his waist like a cummerbund the revolutionary banner he was smuggling into town. They took him to an opening 200 yards or so down the road, a barracks or police post of some sort. I could hear his cries and wailing, and our guide said, ‘That little boy will probably die when it is dark. They run as couriers for the guerrillas, and the army knows that.’

  I thought wildly and briefly of making a fight for it. The French cameraman had a long scar down the side of his face and the look of a hard man. His sound engineer was built like a rugby forward. But then the small boy was returned with tears in his eyes, and they calmed me down.

  Now it was our turn. My instinct to fight immediately turned to one of flight as I sensed the soldiers’ level of aggression pumping up in that manner I had seen in Biafra and in Uganda. While our guide negotiated eloquently on our behalf, I was making plans to run. My heart pounded when the cameraman turned to me and said, ‘They want us to go with them in their truck.’

  As the truck lurched sharply away we were sitting knee to knee with escort guards festooned with ammunition. I envisaged at the very least a most disagreeable search and interrogation, and probably something much worse. I reached in my bag, as if rummaging normally, and dealt with what could immediately incriminate me. With my hands unseen, I exposed the easily developed black and white film. The colour film could not be developed before Philip Jacobson had time to raise an outcry about my disappearance. Barely
had I done this before the truck came to an abrupt stop.

  The lieutenant in front leapt out and took off his shirt. With care he draped round his muscular torso several bandoliers of ammunition, Rambo-style. He picked his way to a spot some fifteen yards down the road where another man stood with a gun. This is it, then, I thought.

  Still ideas of running raced through my head, though I knew it to be futile. Even if my legs would carry me, there was nowhere to run to.

  I could hardly believe it when the lieutenant came back and got back in the front of the truck. So we weren’t to be left as bodies in the ditch. It was not reassuring, however, to be taken on to an army barracks.

  In the event, we were simply held at this army complex for a few hours. We were not even interrogated hard. They chose to believe our story of being stranded without transport after filming in the villages near the highway. All the same I was shaking internally. From the ­township—called Usulután—we chartered a light plane back to San Salvador.

  A day or so later I was in shape to start my promised journeys with John Hoagland. We conceived the harebrained scheme of hunting for gunfights and guerrilla hideouts, and hanging out a white flag from his Dodge truck. We had an object for the purpose—a white towel from the Camino Real hotel.

  We found ourselves in trouble sooner than we thought. Entering a small country town held by Government forces, Hoagland prowled round the edge of it while I focused on the square and market place. Then, without warning, a staccato of gunfire erupted. I dived on to the floor in the covered market, feeling brave enough in time to photograph the peasants who were also cowering there. The sound of bullets hitting the corrugated iron roof was astonishing.

  I started shouting—‘John, where are you?’

  ‘Hello, I’m here, man,’ he called as bang, bing, ping, pong, pang, the bullets ricocheted and detonated off the roof. It was like a thunderstorm, this sudden outburst of fire. It came and quickly went. Our main concern then was getting ourselves safely out of that town.