by Don McCullin
Paul, trying to do his best, struggled to reconcile love and death. He would move the wedding from his girl’s Australian home. He would give his mother the greatest pleasure he could before her time. He would have the wedding where his mother could attend, in England.
No one felt that the smallest gaiety could be raised at Bishop’s Stortford. My son asked if the wedding could be held at our beautiful Somerset village. It seemed the only solution.
I put the hardest of questions to Laraine—could we bring Christine here? Could we hold the wedding reception in our house and garden?
Laraine looked sad as she said generously, ‘Of course we can.’ She threw herself into organising marquees, getting the catering done. It was a most difficult situation that she was facing.
Christine was taken by Michael to buy a new outfit. She was holding on, and holding out for this wedding.
Two weeks before the day, she had another relapse. She was being eaten away by cancer. Her doctor said she couldn’t survive the journey or be moved. Frantically arrangements were cancelled and rearranged again. A small wedding would take place at Bishop’s Stortford. We would gather there in the living-room for the reception, so that she could be with her son on his wedding day.
Christine survived until the morning of the wedding but did not see her son married. The undertakers came to the house to collect her before we set off for the church. It was at this terrible moment that we decided to go ahead, to honour her, as if she was still with us.
Part Five
WARS AND PEACE
41. ALONE WITH THE GHOSTS
For a while I went through something like madness. I never quite went over the edge, probably because there were a few practical matters relating to my children that needed an element of sanity. After Christine’s funeral, Paul returned to Australia, but his younger sister and brother, Jessica and Alexander, opted to start their working lives in London. So I had to arrange the sale of their Hertfordshire home, using the proceeds to equip them with a large flat in Hampstead. The other urgent necessity at that time was for some repair work on my relationship with Laraine after her many months of being side-lined by Christine’s illness.
I failed utterly in that task. I think the combination of grief, guilt and introspection must have made me a hard—maybe impossible—person to live with. In any event, Laraine began to ask for what she described as ‘more space’ in our relationship. And when I proposed marriage, this only seemed to increase the distance between us. Eventually, after a few months, she said she wanted us to separate. She wanted no more of Somerset and proposed to live exclusively in London, with Claude, then aged two. I thought I’d been hit by a bus.
For the first time in my adult life, I felt truly alone. Although I had spent a large part of it travelling abroad, it had always been with the knowledge that there would be loving faces and arms to return to when I got back home. Now, it seemed, there would be just an emptiness. I was being driven back into myself. I felt as if all my nerve ends were jangling and hanging out. Totally vulnerable, I felt unfit for any human society, and for a long time I did not seek any.
I later learned that my old journalist mates in London took to describing me as ‘the hermit’. They were right in a way, but it was not quite the whole story. As it turned out, this period of acute loneliness had beneficial side effects.
I spent many long days in the dark room and with my archive of 5,000 prints and 60,000 negatives. I felt protected in this environment, and with classical music—usually Bach or Beethoven—piped in there was a kind of tranquillity. However, in going through my filing cabinets there was always an attendant risk of the ghosts rising up. And sometimes they would do just that. I’d see them like those men marching through the mist in All Quiet on the Western Front. Dead men I knew would emerge from a mist and come out and join me. Friends and colleagues like Nick Tomalin, David Blundy, David Holden and Gilles Caron. The fragile albino Biafran boy. Scenes of destruction and desolation and death that I had known, and could not forget. At such times, it was hard not to wish for some more life-enhancing content in my archive, something that would at least mitigate the horrors.
I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice and now, I realised, I had the chance to prove it, almost on my doorstep.
My first move was to build an extension to the old privy round the back of the house. A few extra bricks rendered it almost perfect as a studio for still-life studies. It was also handily close to the hedgerows that provided its flow of raw materials.
My main preoccupation, however, was with landscape. Previously, I had looked on landscape photography as a pleasant kind of hobby, occasional light relief from my regular assignments. But now I really wanted to make a go of it, and bring to the task the intensity and discipline that I’d had to show in war zones. I was resolved that there could be nothing chocolate-boxy about a McCullin landscape. Nearly all of them were shot in winter when the trees were like skeletons and the clouds gathered in great Wagnerian clusters.
Dew pond, Somerset, 1988
I would choose my sites carefully, going out long before dawn and waiting heron-like for the right conjunction of light and cloud cover. In general, the fouler the weather, the better. I just loved the experience, even on the days that seemed unproductive. One morning, as I was standing near a dyke, an otter popped up with an eel wriggling in its mouth. It gave me a cheeky look before scuttling away. I didn’t get a decent picture all that day, but it still seemed a great day. Truly, to be free and alone and on the edge of an unfolding landscape is a therapeutic, possibly even spiritual, experience.
People told me that, after the double bereavement of Christine’s death and Laraine’s departure, I should have sought the help of a psychiatrist. But I’m convinced that I found a better healer in the English landscape. And, to my great delight, it seemed there was an audience for my non-war pictures. The publisher Jonathan Cape liked my landscapes and still-life studies and brought them out under the title Open Skies. The novelist John Fowles, who wrote the introduction to the book, spoke of the ‘scars’ of my war experiences emerging in my landscapes, which was entirely possible, probably unavoidable. It could be what gave them their distinctive quality.
The war years were certainly uppermost in my mind when I was engaged on a follow-up book commission from Jonathan Cape. They asked me to take a stab at writing my autobiography, which I did. With my hermit phase receding, I was quite often up in London doing advertising work but also seeing old mates capable of refreshing my memory of times, places and key events. Work on the autobiography also constituted a kind of healing. It gave some much-needed coherence to my life at war and also, as I then thought, sealed its closure. Readers were informed that those days were well behind me.
Soon after finishing the original version of this book (published in 1991), I was sitting at home in Batcombe vaguely wandering what to do next when the phone rang. ‘Oh, Don,’ said the voice, ‘it’s Charlie, Charlie Glass, here. I was just wondering whether you’d like to go to the war.’
As it happened, among the people I would most like to go to a war with—that is, if I was to go to a war—would be Charles Glass, who then rejoiced in the title of Chief Middle East Correspondent for ABC News in New York, but had an English wife and spent much of his time living in London. Since we had first accompanied one another on camels galumphing across the Eritrean desert, we had established a firm Anglo-American friendship. And the war to which he was now inviting me, namely the revolt of the Iraqi Kurds against their country’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, also seemed hard to resist.
Like most newspapermen, I was fascinated by the Kurds, who had been among the losers in an international carve-up back in the early 1920s, which followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Denied a homeland of their own, the K
urds found themselves reluctantly rebranded as citizens of Turkey, Iran and Iraq, mostly Iraq. It was the beginning of a long series of risings and repressions culminating, in the case of Iraq, in the Saddam regime’s gas attacks on Halabja, which killed 5,000 civilian Kurds in 1988. But by March 1991 a radically different picture seemed to be emerging. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait had been thrown back by force of American arms, and the Iraqi military appeared to be in complete disarray. An American pilot described the experience of strafing Iraqi soldiers as they fled back towards Basra as being ‘like a turkey shoot’. The American president George Bush then loudly invited the minority populations in Iraq to rise up against Saddam. In response to this call, Kurdish fighters, known as the Peshmerga (‘those who confront death’), had taken over most of the towns and cities in the north of the country, and were even said to be advancing on the biggest prize of all—the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
I had to be interested in such a war. I couldn’t help myself. But I explained to Charlie when he called, ‘I haven’t got a newspaper any more. I’ve got no outlet, no one to back me. I can’t just go without backing.’ It was my last feeble attempt at an excuse for not going, but Charlie was ready for it. ‘Try the Independent,’ he said.
At that time the Independent’s magazine section was edited by Alexander Chancellor, who was known to have a soft spot for the diaspora of old Sunday Times hands created out of a shared aversion to Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil. Indeed, one of Chancellor’s favourite writers was the legendary Murray Sayle whom I had worked with, as a Sunday Times colleague, in Vietnam and the Middle East. A brief call to Chancellor’s office established that I could cover the war on the magazine’s behalf. I had the necessary backing. No more excuses, I had to go.
Charlie and I met in Damascus and made it across the border into northern Iraq with comparatively little difficulty. At the first town we came to, Dihok, it was fairly obvious which side had the whip hand. We saw about a hundred cowering Iraqi soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Kurds. They did not give the appearance of men expecting a full range of POW privileges. We thought they could well be for the chop, but decided not to hang around as witnesses of their fate. Kirkuk had to be our prime objective.
We did make a detour along the way, but only to look around a hospital that had previously been occupied by the Iraqis. Its patients included a number of wounded Peshmerga fighters. One ward was full of children, some of them bearing wounds caused by barrel bombs dropped from Iraqi helicopters. It was the most pitiful kind of collateral damage.
The sight of those burned and injured children reminded me of how relieved I had been to retire from war in the first place. It appeared that the Americans had successfully imposed a ban on Saddam’s use of fixed-wing aircraft, but there had been nothing to impede his lethal deployment of helicopters.
Our arrival in Kirkuk was almost perfectly timed. It was the morning of the day the Kurds took the city. I was able to photograph an amazing battle at the railway station, and there were images to be taken of the debris left behind by the fleeing Iraqi soldiers—broken vehicles, crumpled weapons and equipment and even, bizarrely, discarded uniforms. And, of course, there were many graphic scenes of exultant Kurds, wild with jubilation. We heard one of the fighters say: ‘We will spill our blood for oil, because it’s our oil.’ They truly felt that they had it made, that Kurdish independence was finally on the verge of being achieved.
That evening, Charlie and I stood high up on a hotel balcony taking in the miracle of a Kurdish-held Kirkuk. Then the gunfire started. Thousands of tracer bullets came streaming in. These great armadas of deadly incoming lighted steel were the clearest possible announcement that the Iraqi army had not gone very far. Charlie turned to me and said, ‘Time to go.’
As we drove north that night, towards Erbil, we realised that the Iraqis were not only bombarding Kirkuk, but also trying to execute a pincer movement in an effort to cut off the main road out of the city. We presumed that this was with the intention of halting people who might—like us—take flight. We narrowly avoided the closing of the pincer and reached the comparative security of Erbil.
On the next day, the Iraqi army retook Kirkuk. Its ‘liberation’ by the Peshmerga had lasted a fraction over twenty-four hours.
We learned later that three young correspondents we had befriended in Kirkuk had been taken prisoner by the Iraqi soldiers. One was shot on the spot; the other two were driven blindfolded to Baghdad, and beaten up before they were allowed to go.
With a battle still raging around the pincered section of the Kirkuk–Erbil highway, I joined up with a group of about thirty Kurdish fighters in a tank bunker which had originally belonged to the Iraqi army, who had vacated it. When the firing died down, I wandered a couple of hundred yards down the road to talk with another fighter. As we were chatting, a direct hit landed on the bunker, killing four of its occupants outright.
It was becoming clear that Charlie and I now had an entirely different story to document, with the repression starting to gather momentum almost as rapidly as the uprising had done. With the Shiite rebellion in the south of the country almost quelled, Saddam was able to commit many more troops to the north. And while his army might have been no match for the American military, it was eminently capable of killing a lot of Kurds. In the meantime, President Bush, who had originally beaten the drum for the uprising, was showing no inclination to assist with its continuation. The Kurds were on their own again.
Confident that the West would not intervene, the Iraqi troops took back most of the Kurdish territorial gains in double-quick time. In this new situation Charlie and I made several forays out of Erbil to villages and small towns still held by the Kurds, but we were acutely conscious of things fast deteriorating all around us. We heard in Erbil that a squad of Iraqi soldiers had taken the hospital we had visited earlier, and had celebrated this achievement by marching all the wounded Peshmerga fighters up to the roof before hurling them onto the asphalt below. You really did not want to get caught by an Iraqi army, especially one bent on revenge.
Ironically, given where our sympathies lay, our closest brush with death came from a Kurdish direction. On the outskirts of the small town of Karahanjir, Charlie and I, accompanied by Kassem Dergham, a Lebanese sound engineer, were going about our business in a reasonably confident fashion when we were stopped, roughed up and effectively arrested by a gang of armed Kurds.
It appeared that they had mistaken us for Iranian members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an opposition group that had lost out in the Iranian revolution and then set up in Iraq, under Saddam’s protection. It also appeared that irregulars from this particular group had, out of loyalty to Saddam, shot up the town centre only a few hours earlier. The local Kurds who detained us were looking for payback opportunities.
At one point it did look as if we were going to be summarily executed. But a small crowd gathered around us and one of the onlookers came forward to say that he had seen Charlie at the battle of Kirkuk a few days earlier, and that he was what he said was—a journalist just doing his job. This intervention saved our bacon, and a frightening incident dissolved into handshakes all round.
As the Iraqi soldiers advanced, it became obvious that a large part of the population was on the move, heading for points north and over the Turkish border. They came streaming past us on our way back to Erbil. ‘Things are not looking good,’ said Charlie. ‘Even the Peshmerga commanders are doing a runner. Look. You can see them stuffing their maps into the backs of their cars.’
We decided it was time to join the exodus, avoiding as far as possible the main roads which, like much else, were coming under heavy barrel-bomb attack from Saddam’s fleet of helicopters. The last stage of our journey into Turkey was made on foot through the mountains with my camera bags clunking against the sides of a wonderfully patient mule.
On our return to England, the Independent magazine did us proud with six pages o
f my pictures and Charlie’s words, topped with the headline: ‘The Great Betrayal’. Charlie wrote: ‘They [the Kurds] welcomed us as no foreigner had been welcomed before, seeing in us the Western support they believed their struggle was enjoying. When we left . . . they cursed us, seeing in us the final betrayal of an outside world that has broken every promise to them it has ever made.’
The seriously good news when I got back home was that Roger Cooper, my wonderfully entertaining companion on assignments in Afghanistan and Iran, had just been released after spending five years, three months and twenty-five days in Iran’s fearsome Evin jail. Long after his absurd espionage trial by the Khomeini regime, Roger had been told that his sentence was ‘Death plus ten years’. Asking ‘Which comes first?’ he was informed that he would be held for ten years, then hanged. He replied, ‘Thank you, but please, don’t make it the other way around.’
Although ill-treated at the outset, Roger became something of a star at Evin jail, popular with the guards and fellow prisoners alike, before leaving with his sense of fun still amazingly intact. ‘Anyone who has been to a British boarding school,’ he said, ‘is well able to handle an Iranian prison.’ He would later write a witty memoir called, naturally, Death Plus Ten Years.
42. FLYING HIGH AND LOW
As I emerged from my hermit phase, I felt the inclination to trade in my old Rover and replace it with an almost equally clapped-out Jaguar XJ, one of the slinky, low-slung varieties. I was parking this fresh acquisition outside my house in Batcombe, when a neighbour came by: Camilla Carter, a very dignified and refined lady who also happened to be a magistrate. ‘Hello, Donald,’ she said with her best cut-glass intonation, ‘I see you’ve got your bird-puller then, that car.’