by Don McCullin
Landing, showing my passport and crossing through East Beirut to the West was a tense business. But the Christian Falange had, it seemed, forgotten or lost track of my offence in Quarantina. They let me through. I went to the Commodore, where I found my old friend from New Guinea days, Tony Clifton, covering the Israeli advance for Newsweek. I was there when the Israelis arrived.
What they did to that sad city was really quite unbelievable. They bombed it and shelled it with phosphorous shells. Children were burned, people were maimed. The civilian population of West Beirut came under a rain of fire. It was very hard to stomach.
Darting round, trying to work under this assault, was a daily gamble. One day Clifton and I set off for his office as a great cluster of shells and rockets started exploding in front of us. We ditched the car and ran for the shelter of a nearby building. We took cover under the alcove of the stairs. Emerging during a pause in the shelling, we saw women and children running among a host of burned-out and broken cars. We ran back to the Commodore hugging whatever cover was available.
‘It’s a miracle you turned back before you reached the Newsweek building,’ a journalist told us. ‘It’s taken two direct shells. One of them hasn’t exploded. It’s still lying there in Tony’s office.’
The Israelis’ main objective was presumed to be the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shattila. The aim was to destroy at least Arafat’s power-base, and if possible the man himself, but from the widespread nature of the shelling it seemed as if they were intent on reducing the whole of West Beirut, if not to complete ruins, then at least to the maximum of tears. There were strange rumours of new types of bomb being used, bombs that could suck up air and collapse concrete buildings at one blast. There was no mystery about what the phosphorous shells could do. They could reduce people to shrivelled burned husks.
A small but pressing concern for newspapermen as they covered such wretched sights was that they worked under threat of kidnapping. Kidnappings which were not all political. Beirut was more than ever a lawless city, a lair for bandits, spivs and thugs. The Commodore was full of such types, profiteering from the media, running film to Damascus at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the local driver of a British TV team was killed in the shelling, his brother came to the hotel and took the TV reporter and his cameraman away at the point of a Kalashnikov, to hold them hostage for ransom, by way of compensation. Their station came through eventually with £22,000. The brother bought, it was said, a Mercedes with the money.
Yet these risks paled to insignificance beside the suffering of the population. The consequences of bombing a mental hospital are something it is hard to wrap the mind round, but this is what I saw one day.
I was taken to a half-ruined building in the Sabra area at least half a mile from any PLO post. It had been attacked with artillery, rockets, and naval gunfire, despite the flags on the roof—one white, the other bearing the Red Cross. Shells had rained down on that hospital, decapitating people who were sitting in their beds, killing them with blast debris, slicing into them with glass shards. Most of the staff had fled the bombing, except two of the most courageous. Now the wounded insane were tending the insane. They were to do so without relief for five days, cut off by the battle. An insane woman kept coming up to me, thinking I was a French doctor from the old days. She was carrying a spastic child. She kept saying, ‘Where shall I go, Sir? Sir, what shall I do?’
In the wards children had been tethered to their beds, pushed into the middle of the room for protection from blast and debris. Now they lay in pools of their own urine and excreta, which were covered in flies, while the sisters desperately tried to get round. There were hundreds of patients, and only two staff.
Child tied to bed in a mental hospital, which was under Israeli shell fire for five days, Sabra, Beirut, 1982
One of the sisters took me to the most helpless and uncomprehending of their children. They had put them in the safest place in the hospital, a windowless small internal room. The sight was appalling, as of two or three litters of new-born rats on the floor. They were children with severe congenital defects. They were blind, incontinent, deformed, sometimes mongoloid, writhing in their own secretions.
‘When the bombing came,’ said the sister, ‘to put them in here was all we could do.’
I took more pictures in the geriatric wards. One elderly and dignified patient came up to me and said, ‘How did this happen? Have the sane no conscience?’
Twenty-six patients and staff had been killed and seriously wounded in the shelling. The sight of that hospital will never leave me.
Not long after the mental hospital bombing, I was present when a huge modern apartment block took a direct hit. It was an expensive block for the very rich. It was one event in a sequence of endless horrors in Beirut but, like the mental hospital, it scarred my brain.
All the press corps had turned out after the huge explosion. It was close to the Commodore Hotel. The Israelis were bombing here, it was assumed, because of Arafat. He had a number of ‘safe’ houses in the city and it was suspected this could be one of them. He would travel unpredictably between the locations, often with heavy security guard. The Israelis tried to follow him around with their firepower.
They had many spies in West Beirut, posing as vendors and janitors. A seemingly simple-minded old man who had sold hard-boiled eggs on street corners turned out to have been their forward control officer. These people, it later emerged, helped co-ordinate the Israeli assaults.
When we reached the site of the explosion, there was total devastation. The whole building had collapsed. People were tearing at the concrete. There was a man half-hanging out of what was left of this building, still alive. He was dragged out. Then we stood, not knowing what to do.
Suddenly there was a scuffling and a spine-chilling screaming and wailing. A large buxom woman came round the corner in an uninhibited paroxysm of grief. Men were trying to comfort her, to restrain her without touching her. You cannot touch another man’s wife in the Middle East. My mind was slow and stupefied with horror. I did what I rarely do—clumsily I snatched a shot of her. The woman charged at me in hysterical outraged anger as a Palestinian with a 9mm pistol tried to wrench the camera from my wounded arm. Then the woman piled into me. She hurled herself at me and battered and pounded me about. For a moment I became and felt like all the evils that had ever beset this city. I felt for every reason or unreason in the world that somehow I deserved this punishment.
A few hours later a journalist approached me at the Commodore. He said, ‘That woman . . .’
‘Don’t talk about it,’ I said, ‘Don’t tell me.’
He told me first of her circumstances, the reasons for her anguish. Other journalists had asked her about her fight with me. She had told them of her grief—how her whole family had been exterminated in that bombed building.
Then he told me the rest. ‘As she was telling her story, a car bomb went off just where they were standing. They were unscathed. She was killed outright.’
Back in England I became absorbed in another wretchedness of my own making. I did the most painful thing of all in a painful life. I think now it was also one of the wickedest things I ever did, and it hurt me almost as much as seeing my father die. I left home and began to live with Laraine.
It was a situation in which no one could be happy. I had to choose to give up Laraine or give up my family. But I felt there was no choice, even with my wife and children crying at the door of our house. I drove to London in the darkness, down the M11, trying not to look back.
In time I bought a house in Somerset, and Laraine and I threw ourselves into doing it up and working the garden. We travelled all over the world together, and when we were in London the phone never stopped ringing with invitations to exciting events. We talked of having a child. It seemed like a perfect time, but I was dogged by a shadow of conscience, even though my wife and childr
en became forgiving.
I took some time off work, not with the thought of giving up but to let the upheaval in my life settle down. When I returned it was to another assignment with Norman Lewis, and just the prospect of it was enough to restore the light to my professional world. I had such fond memories of our times together in Latin America when, the day’s work done, Norman would lie in his hammock, looking out over the Venezuelan savannah, and I would add some lime (which I had scrounged from the Indians) to his glass of vodka. I would watch him quietly and contentedly sipping his drink in this beautiful and lonely place, and was as happy then as I have ever been.
The sequel was to be bitterly disappointing. The Vietnamese were gearing up for their tenth anniversary celebrations as a united country but there was little prospect of Western journalists being allowed in. Norman felt sure, however, that they would make a few exceptions. His credential was a long record of support for a united Vietnam, whatever the political colour; mine was the distinction of having been thrown out by the expiring South Vietnam regime.
The Vietnamese refused to issue us with visas. It was not a rejection on the Falklands scale but it was a rejection none the less, and it hurt. As in earlier times of stress I went back to the Lebanon, where war was still raging. That turned into a farce.
The Druze was being hammered by 17-inch shells from an American battleship that had recently been taken out of mothballs, while the Christian Lebanese army was also engaging them in a spirited battle in the Chouf mountains. From the roof of the Alexandria Hotel David Blundy and I watched this million-dollar fireworks display, ducking behind the concrete lift-shafts whenever we saw tracer bullets coming in our direction.
Before going into the Chouf we received a private briefing by the Lebanese General Aoun, during which David’s eye settled on a clockwork toy on the general’s desk. It was irresistible. David’s obsession for wind-up toys knew no bounds. His long arm snaked out and, without taking his eyes off the general, he began absently winding it up. It then shot out of his grasp and started leaping furiously all over the briefing table. Like some huge cat, David was trying frenziedly to pounce on it and stop it. The general droned on as if nothing were happening.
In the mountains our escorting officer steered us clear of the front, though David never did lose his obsession with clockwork toys or dangerous places. One of them was El Salvador, where he was killed some years later.
38. THE NASTIEST PLACE ON EARTH
The rumblings since Rupert Murdoch’s arrival at the Sunday Times became much more ominous towards the end of 1983 when there was a change of editor. Frank Giles, a survivor of the old regime, was edged into early retirement to make way for a man little more than half his age.
Andrew Neil, then thirty-four, although he looked much older, was said to be Murdoch’s first choice as editor. He was appointed, it was said, to shake up the newspaper, to get those staff who would serve the new Murdoch purpose hopping in fear of their lives, and those who would not on the road. The idea was, in business parlance, to emerge with a leaner, fitter and more profitable enterprise, stripped of all unserviceable assets. It was a sign of the Thatcher times.
I didn’t have much chance to appreciate Neil’s early impact because the magazine had mercifully sent me off to ‘the nastiest place on earth’.
The plan was for Simon Winchester and me to identify and then go and explore the place that best fitted that description. It obviously had to be one of those African republics where the leader always had a fresh supply of blood in the fridge, but the problem was deciding which one. In the end we homed in on the island of Fernando Po in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea where, as Simon later put it, independence had ‘transformed purgatory into utter hell’.
The country had not long since got rid of its Amin-figure. Macias Nguena Bioko, the deranged leader of a tribe known as the Fang, had led the revolt against Spanish rule. As president of Equatorial Guinea, he ruled by terror, superstition and arbitrary edict, killing off countless subjects and twelve of his own ministers. The church was banned. When his wife Monica ran off, he issued a decree forbidding any child to be named Monica. Life after Macias had scarcely improved. A United Nations report on the country described it simply, and accurately, as ‘decomposed’. On the island of Fernando Po plantations were overgrown and the cocoa crop lay rotting and unharvested while people starved in the streets. Poverty and demoralisation were all around. Simon and I spent most of our fortnight there sleeping on warehouse floors and dining on bananas and stewed rat.
It was a relief to get back to civilisation, though soon after reaching London, at a dinner party with Laraine, I started feeling very strange, very sick and—after one glass of wine—very drunk. She took me to the local hospital, where they diagnosed a stomach upset and sent me home. It was only due to Laraine’s persistence I didn’t die from cerebral malaria. Eventually she got me into the Tropical Diseases Hospital, where they diagnosed and treated the real condition. At the same time Simon Winchester was in the isolation wing of a hospital in Oxford, suffering from the same revenge of Fernando Po.
When I was well enough to get my bearings again, Andrew Neil was in the fourth month of his reign at the Sunday Times. Distinct parallels with Equatorial Guinea were emerging. Demoralisation was widespread. Heads rolled. Reporters complained of their copy being axed, or rewritten; political lines were enforced; photographers moaned about cut-backs.
Redundancies were on offer and many rushed to take them as a retreat from what they saw as a bullying regime. Each day would see another person clearing his desk. It was obvious that Neil had an open cheque to clear out the old Harry Evans hierarchy and replace it with his own loyalists, more amenable to Murdoch’s way of thinking.
I had no personal quarrel with the editor. I saw a lot of people I’d worked with closely departing even before Neil’s pogrom. James Fox and Francis Wyndham had left to write books, Phil Jacobson and David King had gone freelance, Alex Mitchell departed to become the cutting edge of British Trotskyism, while Murray Sayle had gone to Tokyo to start a family at the age of fifty. I was well used to people going while I stayed in the same place. Yet I was also of an earlier era which the new management seemed to find abhorrent. And I was not what you might call a Company man. On the whole I do my own thing, which previously had been the paper’s own thing also, in a very committed—some would say over-committed—way. Hitherto I’d been seen as an advantage to the paper. I didn’t see why that should change. I didn’t see myself as a threat to Neil, or why he should so view me. Running the newspaper wasn’t my job, though like all newspapermen of my length of experience I would put in a word if things went badly astray. But the new order was really not interested in anything the old had to say.
For a while the polite forms were preserved between us. Neil and I would exchange strained rictuses in the corridor. I did not find him an attractive character but I never thought that was a necessary quality in an editor. It did not count for much if the man was running a great newspaper. But I began to have my doubts on that score, particularly in my own area. Great events would be taking place around the world and I would not be sent. I put up ideas of my own—to cover the famine in Ethiopia, the turmoil in South Africa—and again I would not be sent.
The work did not dry up by accident. At an early stage Neil gathered the magazine staff around him to describe the way ahead. A friend who was at the meeting summed up its message for me when I returned from abroad: no more starving Third World babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues. And that was the direction things took.
When I began as a photographer, I believed that my work would suffer if I allowed it to become political. In the event it turned out to be nothing but political for I consistently took the side of the underdog and the under-privileged. It had now become so political that I found myself having to fight merely to be allowed to take my pictures—and I was losing that fight.
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br /> I grew deeply unhappy. I was not doing the work for which I was known and which I had the ability to do. I was just drifting round the office, loitering without intent, very fed up.
One night I met up with a friend of mine, an American called Bill Buford who ran Cambridge University’s magazine, Granta. We found ourselves in a little Italian restaurant in Soho, sloshing back pasta and glasses of rough red wine. He wanted to run an interview with me, and a lot of my pictures.
I unloaded my feelings about the Sunday Times. I told him that I thought my working life was finished. They were going exclusively for a Leisure and Lifestyles magazine. All I was doing now was standing around in a safari jacket while the safari itself never took place.
In due course the following appeared:
I still work for the Sunday Times, but they don’t use me. I stand around in the office, and don’t know why I’m there. The paper has completely changed: it’s not a newspaper, it’s a consumer magazine, really no different from a mail-order catalogue. And what do I do, model safari suits? Cover some Women’s Institute reception? Someone in the office said recently that I should think up new approaches to my work: ‘You ought to learn how to use strobe lighting, because we don’t want to use any more of those photos of . . .’ People are starting to reject, or at least turn their backs on, my sort. They seem happy with the way the press is developing. They certainly don’t need me to show them nasty pictures. I should wise up: what is the point of killing yourself for a newspaper proprietor who wouldn’t bat an eyelid on hearing you’d died?
A few days after Granta came out, the story about my disenchantment was picked up by the Guardian diary column. Michael Rand phoned me in Somerset.
‘I think you should get on the train and come up. Neil’s seen that piece, and he’s hopping mad.’
‘Do you think it’s curtains?’ I asked.