by Don McCullin
The idea for my next, and I think best, book was entirely my own, which may explain why it took thirty years to incubate. The seed was planted by my friend Bruce Chatwin way back in the 1970s when, on Sunday Times duty, we went to Marseille to take a close look at the local hoodlums machine-gunning the unfortunate immigrants from Algeria. Bruce was a sensitive soul, and I could tell the assignment was not entirely to his liking. Aside from being a journalist, he was also an art historian of some distinction. We therefore completed our business with the Marseille hoodlums as fast as we could and took off on a ferry across the Mediterranean to Algeria.
Bruce said he wanted to show me something more uplifting, which proved to be a collection of Roman ruins shimmering in the Algerian hinterland. And the image of those ruins stayed with me long after Bruce’s early and untimely death.
Moving on twenty years, I caught another intriguing glimpse of Roman influence on the Mediterranean world when I met up with Charlie Glass in Damascus. In Damascus itself the entrance to the old souk featured genuine Roman Corinthian columns, propping up the corrugated-iron roof, which had been customised to some degree. When the French left Syria, they had machine-gunned the souk roof as a parting gesture. Looking up at the roof in the darkness, I could see the bullet holes, but they looked exactly like twinkling stars. Magical really. But perhaps not quite as authentic as Palmyra, Syria’s great ruined Roman city out in the desert, which Charlie and I saw in the distance while driving out to the Kurdish uprising in Iraq.
I put these slim first impressions of Roman influence together with some basic research and realised there was a treasure trove of potential photographic material. The Romans hadn’t simply influenced the Mediterranean. They had dominated most of it for long periods. In Syria alone they had ruled for seven centuries, and evidence of their authority, albeit in ruins, was still accessible to me.
I put it to Jonathan Cape that there was a photographic book in this material. I can’t say that the idea was met with great enthusiasm. But they did agree to pay me an advance, which was comfortably the smallest I had ever been offered.
I didn’t mind. The commission was enough. I felt as if I had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and what’s more it turned out to be a golden rabbit. I worked on the project for three years, which were among the most enjoyable years of my working life. Catherine, with her unique travel expertise, planned my journeys, managing to get the best discount deals, which helped to offset the infinitesimal nature of my publisher’s advance. She travelled with me on some of my trips, as did my son Claude. My mother-in-law, Maria, who had visited some of the sites years before, was our cheerleader throughout. So there was a strong family aspect to the enterprise. Friends helped too. Brigit Keenan, with whom I worked on both the Observer and the Sunday Times, and who later became a near-neighbour of mine in Somerset, introduced me to the man who became my inspirational guide and amusing travelling companion through the southern frontiers of the Roman empire. He was Barnaby Rogerson, a publisher with a clutch of scholarly books about North Africa to his credit. And Barnaby would later write the introduction to mine.
I made six expeditions to the different sites, taking in the North African countries, Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and Libya, where I photographed the awesome ruins of Leptis Magna; and the Levant for the ruins of Baalbeck (Lebanon), Jirash (Jordan) and, of course, Palmyra in Syria. Access to the sites was not always easy. They were often prowled by ‘cultural police’ who seemed to get paid for being as obstructive as possible. In Morocco a guard rushed up to stop me at work because I had ‘a professional camera’. When I arrived in Algeria my cameras were promptly confiscated by a suspicious border guard; it took four days to get them delivered back to me.
Part of the problem was my working day. In the Middle East and North Africa with the sun bouncing off crystal and stone surfaces, the light is too hot to handle for many of the daylight hours. I would do my work before the sun was up at around half past eight. Then I would rest until around three o’clock before heading back to the site for another session. Then when the sun was going down at around four or five in the afternoon and the light was just right again, I’d be told ‘No’, as the ‘cultural police’ began officiously shooing visitors out of the area.
However, it’s only fair to record that the most serious disruption to my work was wholly self-inflicted. While photographing the Roman ruins in the Great Sanctuary of Bel in Palmyra, I lost my footing and had a bad fall. I woke up in hospital the next morning with a broken rib, a collapsed lung, and four burly Syrian policemen at the foot of my bed, flanked by the rather comely interpreter from my hotel.
As Syria was then a renowned police state, I feared the worse. But the interpreter hastened to reassure me. She told me not to be alarmed; the police had my interests at heart. They hadn’t come to arrest me; they just wanted to know if my injuries were the result of an assault. Did I fall, or was I pushed, in other words? I confessed to a fall, which seemed to disappoint the policemen, who were perhaps looking forward to having a few fresh suspects to knock about that day.
My injuries healed fairly quickly, although I did reflect that I had managed to traverse quite a few war zones with far less damaging consequences. The thought that nowhere is entirely safe naturally crossed my mind. It’s possible to live dangerously, but living safely never seems to be really on.
Another thought that never left me was that the magnificence and splendour I was photographing were all built on a solid underpinning of slavery, starvation and brutality. As you take in the sheer mass of the stones, you realise people were crushed with this weight in the normal course of construction. The slaves, it appears, were chained together in the quarries, which were the worst places to be. Life in them was guaranteed to be nasty, brutish and short. As I was working I really felt as if I could hear echoes of the anguished cries of the people who had built these incredible structures so many centuries ago.
I was conscious of being influenced by my august nineteenth-century predecessors like the Scottish artist David Roberts and the photographer Francis Frith, with their representations of the far corners of the Roman world. But I felt a need to bring something of my own style and way of looking at things as well. In particular, I was resolved that my photography should convey not just the might and majesty of Rome, but also its dreadful darkness. And I was pleased to have achieved this at least to Barnaby Rogerson’s fastidious satisfaction. In his introduction to Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire, Barnaby wrote:
If you are looking for a full summary of the glory of Roman art and architecture, for coloured photographs of gorgeous mosaic floors surrounded by spring flowers, for chiselled columns set against brilliantly lit frescoes, for deities at dusk viewed through olive groves, go elsewhere and go quickly.
This collection of photographs remembers the hobnailed boot, the public execution of prisoners in the bowls of amphitheatres, slave-built victory monuments, altars dripping with gore, temple courtyards filled with the acid smoke of grilled meat being offered up to unseen gods.
Of the twenty-six photographic books I have authored in my career, Southern Frontiers was far and away my favourite. It gave me knowledge, it gave me the will to learn, which I don’t think I ever truly had before, and, above all, it gave me the purest photographic pleasure without my having to be a direct eyewitness of other people’s suffering. I read on the Internet somewhere that the book was something of a disappointment to what was described as ‘McCullin’s usual fan base’, but I know, for a fact, that Bruce Chatwin would have just loved it.
I was on a bit of an old-timer’s high after Southern Frontiers was published in March 2010. The folk at Jonathan Cape, swallowing their original doubts, had produced a handsome volume. And while it did not set the Thames ablaze, everybody made a tidy bit of money out of the enterprise. My family was happy. I was happy which, I’m bound to say, should have been a warning sign. If I’ve learned an
ything over the years, it is that being too happy is the thing that courts disaster.
One afternoon, still in the flush of success, Catherine, Max and I boarded the train at Paddington to go back to Somerset. As the train pulled out of the station, I said, ‘Ooh, my mouth,’ and, a bit later, ‘Ooh, my hand.’ ‘You’re all right,’ said Catherine, with wifely insight and a hint of impatience. ‘You’re just tired. Now read your paper.’ But this time the standard marital joshing response didn’t work. I wasn’t nursing a hangover, I really was having a stroke, and that was just for starters.
Once in Somerset, I was bounced around the National Health Service, finally winding up at a big hospital in Taunton where they stuck a rod up my groin which practically sent me spiralling over the ozone layer. From this, and various other excruciating procedures, they came back with the diagnosis: ‘All your arteries are blocked.’ And the remedy: ‘Go home, and take these pills,’ which I translated, I think accurately, as: Shove off and die.
Fortunately, Catherine was having none of it.
46. THE ROAD TO ALEPPO
I had nothing that a quadruple heart bypass operation couldn’t fix. Armed with this knowledge, Catherine, who had a BUPA arrangement and knew her way around the medical establishment, explored all the resources of private medicine for the best place to get the operation done. This proved to be the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, no more than a hard ball’s throw from Lord’s Cricket Ground.
I was told it was a serious, possibly life-threatening, operation, but I cannot say that I was too alarmed by its prospect. If I didn’t have it, I knew I was a goner; and if it killed me, I wouldn’t know about it anyway. I was more apprehensive at the possibility of waking up while the operation was still in progress. The likelihood of this happening, I was assured, was almost infinitesimal; I was wrong to worry myself on that score.
It was my assumption that my condition had been caused by the stresses of my war-going life. I was convinced that I was finally getting my just deserts for too much unreasonable behaviour, and probably not before time. Wrong again, apparently. The more likely culprit had been my lifelong inability to walk past a cake shop. I used to be known as the cream-bun kid.
In the run-up to the operation, I did not encourage hospital visits from outside my immediate family, but Charlie Glass and Mark Shand could not be prevented from dropping by. Charlie, I must say, exhibited an immaculate bedside manner. He even refrained from inviting me to accompany him to a war zone, a sure indication of massive restraint on his part. I cannot speak quite so highly of Mark Shand, though he did make a strong impression.
Mark came in soon after I had experienced my first full-body shave, a procedure which I knew would intrigue him with his insatiable appetite for human oddities. So I gave him the full scrape-by-scrape up, down and under details, but all he could say in response was ‘What did you do with the clippings? Where are they?’ So I had to say I really didn’t know and anyway why should anybody remotely care? ‘I care,’ said Mark, in a mock-distraught tone of voice, indicating his small bald patch which could have been repopulated with my hair clippings, had I not so tragically, and thoughtlessly, let them go.
It was my last belly laugh before the operation, but there was no shortage of happy feelings after that event as the morphine seeped into my system. Later on, as the tables and chairs began to bounce up and down and dance around the room, and the CCTV cameras transformed themselves into glowering night owls, I realised I was probably ingesting too much of a good thing.
The business of recuperating from the operation was a slow, but by no means dispiriting, process. For the most part, I could feel myself getting a bit stronger every day. I always had a sense of progress. There were no significant work pressures, though I had to exercise some degree of alertness for a documentary film that was being made about me by Jacqui and David Morris, with the backing of Thomson-Reuters. It was mostly familiar material about my days on the Observer and the Sunday Times, so very little research was required, at least by me. Harry Evans, my favourite editor, provided the linking commentary.
The documentary had its first screening, with the title McCullin, in the spring of 2012 at the Thomson-Reuters building in Canary Wharf, where I was agreeably engulfed by a mob of old mates from both newspapers. The film later went on release and picked up two Bafta nominations, which was entirely down to the skill of Jacqui and David Morris. I was just one of many talking heads.
By now I was feeling physically ready for a real challenge, without being quite sure what it should be. There seemed to be no point in having a life-saving operation without doing something worthwhile with the actual life extension. Life seemed ever more precious especially as, that summer, spending a lot of time with my brother-in-law Richard Beeston, foreign editor of The Times, I could see it dwindling slowly out of him. Rick was an amazing human being, a gentle man in every sense, yet determined and strong as an ox, and we spent hours enjoyably exchanging tales of our wars gone by. But Rick was also a very sick man with a body ravaged by cancer, often unable to go into the office because of his condition. He and I would amble around my garden together, and sometimes a bit beyond, like a couple of wobbly old codgers. The tragic irony being that I was getting gradually better, while he, much the younger man, was getting progressively weaker.
Although Richard was very highly educated, a great linguist like the rest of the family, with a wide range of interests, his two great passions were fishing and the Middle East. As these areas featured high on my own roster of enthusiasms, I like to think we got on well. One day, as we were talking about the Arab Spring, of which I had only an imperfect understanding, having been ill or in hospital through its most dramatic phases, Richard asked if I ever felt the urge to go out and cover the Middle East again. I said I quite often did and that, on reflection, I thought I probably still could. He asked if I was being serious and I found myself saying: ‘Yes, I would like to have one last crack at it.’
The next thing I knew was that Richard had contacted his editor, James Harding, with a view to exploring the idea further. I was then summoned up to London for a mega-lunch at a fish restaurant in St James’s where Harding and other senior Times staff members outlined the conditions that could persuade them to let a seventy-seven-year-old photographer represent their newspaper’s interest in war-torn foreign parts.
It would have to be a short assignment, say no more than six days; I would have to accept training in how to tie a tourniquet (a skill that somehow eluded me up to that point); I would have to wear a reinforced flak jacket in any potential combat situations (which I had not done since Vietnam); and I should accept the guidance of Anthony Loyd, the newspaper’s chief foreign correspondent. I had no great problem with any of these conditions. Although I did not know Anthony Loyd personally, I had the greatest respect for his writing not only in The Times but also in his book My War Gone By, I Miss it So, which related his experiences as a correspondent in Bosnia and Chechnya, both wars that I had personally missed out on.
By December, with my emergency tourniquet training behind me, we were all set to go. Catherine thought I was stark raving mad. But I think she was mildly reassured by the fact that The Times was protectively involved and by the prediction that it should all be over within a week.
We decided to go to Aleppo in northern Syria, where its Arab Spring had effectively escalated into a civil war. Aleppo was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between the rebels and President Assad’s army. Anthony had been there before on several occasions and had already established connections that could prove useful. As it happened, I had been there too but in more peaceful times. I had spent a few days in Aleppo back in October 2006 while roaming Syria on my quest for Roman remains. I noted in my journal, soon after arriving there:
I think I am going to like Aleppo. It has lots of energy but along with it comes the noise. The streets are packed with mostly males, hundreds of sold
iers looking quite tough and well turned out in their smart and tidy uniforms. I have encountered absolutely no bother at all from anyone.
As we arrived in Aleppo this time, by way of the Turkish border which was becoming my natural route into and out of hostilities, we could hear no end of bother being caused by the ‘boom, boom, boom’ of heavy artillery. It was probably the point at which I should have said to myself, Are you wise to be doing this? But, in reality, I was just excited; elated to have made it into what was obviously a real war zone. The adrenalin rush was already kicking in.
We drove to what the rebels called their press centre, and it was a mess. It had clearly once been quite an elegant, modernist-type building. Inside the entrance there was a fine marble floor and a broad staircase, but there was water cascading Niagara-like down the stairs. An incoming shell had just taken out the water tank on the roof. So, in the absence of a plumber, the water was still being fed up to the roof and making its own uninhibited way down.
The press officer said there were some vacant rooms in the building, and we should go upstairs and find somewhere to stay. We waded up through the Niagara and came across a small apartment equipped with a brimming toilet and some blankets which a dozen or more people must have slept under in the recent past. It had a couple of rooms and a pokey little kitchen. Anthony opted for one of the rooms, which suited me just fine. To my mind, the kitchen, which had no windows, had to be the most shell-proof part of the building. So I bedded down that night on the kitchen floor, hauled on one of the noxious blankets, and quickly dozed off to the sound of more shell fire.