Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  Anthony had told me that the next day we would meet his friend Hakim Anza, one of the rebel leaders, known as ‘The Commander’. Apparently, Hakim had been an accountant before Aleppo became a battlefield. But he was a very determined, even ruthless, fighter.

  To illustrate his ruthlessness, Anthony told me a story about the time Hakim had disciplined someone who had upset him, by giving him a good beating. He was then alleged to have said to his victim, ‘That’s it. I’m sparing your life. Just get in that car over there, and get out of here.’ The man did as he was told and Hakim, using a code on his mobile phone, detonated the car as it was pulling away. It was an intriguing story. But I couldn’t help thinking that with friends like Hakim, we might not need too many enemies.

  Next morning we went to a part of town that seemed to be completely devastated; it looked as Warsaw must have looked after the Germans had finished with it. But there were still a few apartment blocks standing and, though badly pockmarked and damaged, to some extent still habitable. Hakim and his men were in one of them. Hakim himself looked like a Hollywood matinee idol, very handsome and very smooth and, from our point of view, very helpful. He agreed to fix it for us to visit the front the next day.

  The front turned out to be a military base with the Syrian army still quartered inside. The rebels were sniping at them through holes in the perimeter walls. And there were all kinds of people involved, people from different tribes and with different affiliations. One group was entirely Kurdish. It was all very gung-ho—then there was the sound of a jet fighter overhead and you could see the fear kick in almost instantly. Most of the rebels ran off and we beat a hasty retreat of our own to go and check out the hospitals.

  Outside one hospital, a car came screaming up and we saw people dragging dead bodies out of it. One seemed to be a young boy, so I ran up close to take a picture. Then a truck roared in bearing an even bigger load of misery. It was really strange. There was a man sitting in the back, a really big guy, with black curly hair, blazing eyes, and an overcoat on because it was freezing, and he was sitting surrounded by dead people. And I said, ‘Why don’t you help to get these people off instead of just sitting there? What is the matter with you?’ And I got a bit closer, and realised that he was also dead, apparently killed by a shell that had landed outside the front of our press centre.

  Later we discovered that the hospital had refused to take the bodies, ordering them to be trucked back to where they came from. The hospital said that it needed every inch of the space it had for people who were still alive. It crossed my mind that I could be filling one of the hospital’s spare inches myself when I took a quick picture of a big, bearded Isis-type character in the street. He went raving mad, threatening me with all sorts, until our press officer, who, fortunately, carried a gun, persuaded him to go elsewhere.

  One day Anthony introduced me to the man who was said to be Aleppo’s oldest fighter. He was seventy, and he took to me in a slightly embarrassing way. ‘Like me,’ he said, ‘you are an old man; I’m very pleased you have risked your life to see our problem and our cause.’ He then invited me to the front. It was a bit like an invitation to dinner, certainly not polite to refuse.

  The front, in this instance, was inside the town and hard to locate, indeed I’m not sure if we ever did. In Aleppo fighters tend not to run down streets making themselves an easy target for the camera. Generally, they prefer to punch holes in the walls of houses and fight from the inside, bashing out more holes to fire their weapons through as and when required.

  However, near what was deemed to be the front, some of the streets were rigged with hessian, designed to impede the view of any snipers overhead. At one point, with bullets whistling above us, we had to cross a road where there was no hessian cover. As we surged across, Anthony gave me a comradely shove to speed me on my way. I very nearly sprawled on all fours. No serious damage was done, but I realised that we needed to work harder on synchronising our battle choreography.

  On another day, we checked out what was called the bread distribution centre. There was a huge queue stretching down the street and around the block. This was efficiently jumped by Hakim’s men who arrived fully armed and went straight to the front of the queue. They were away with their sackful of bread before any formal distribution to the less well-armed, hungry inhabitants of Aleppo could take place.

  I got on top of the roof of the bakery with the aim of getting a long shot, a kind of aerial shot, of the lines of people down below. Then I realised I had company. A gunman appeared on the roof beside me wanting to know what I was doing. It was not a friendly enquiry. You can’t operate in the Middle East without suspecting you might at any time be kidnapped by a stranger with a gun. And in this instance the alarm bells started to clang vigorously, especially when my gunman was joined by other gunmen, muttering about ‘spies’. Then, to my relief, even more gunmen arrived, Hakim’s men this time, who negotiated my prompt release.

  So I had this rather ambivalent relationship with Hakim and his men. They had been genuinely helpful on occasions, but I couldn’t feel comfortable in their presence. While we were with them, one of their pet schemes was setting a honeytrap for a rival rebel leader, who Hakim felt had crossed him. However, in this instance the intended victim sussed that the assignation was phoney, and Hakim’s planned ambush had to be cancelled.

  In fact, the level of trust between all the rebel groups did not appear to be of a very high order. Some clearly went more in fear of each other than they did of Assad’s army. Knowing who to trust was an abiding problem. Someone told me that the number of newsmen killed in Syria was well on the way to outstripping the numbers killed in Vietnam. I can’t say I was surprised.

  Aleppo made the Wild West seem like a holiday theme park. There was, as far as I could determine, nowhere you could feel truly safe. And nobody really knew what was going on. You had to go and find your own war—which always carries a risk. On an international danger scale, I would rate Aleppo as being behind Phnom Penh in the murderous heyday of the Khmer Rouge, but not by very much.

  I was reasonably content with my photography, though it was undoubtedly below my vintage best. It was too short an assignment to get the most out of either Anthony or me but, of course, our chances of survival might not have been great had we stayed much longer. In fact, my best picture was taken not in Aleppo but in a refugee camp just short of the Turkish border, where we stayed briefly before leaving Syria. In the early-morning light I saw about forty men with black bands round their heads on the crest of a ridge looking down on the camp below. Ominous was the only word for it.

  I watched them winding their way down towards the camp, clicking away as unobtrusively as I could, using my regular camera. Then one of them came up to me. ‘Show me your photograph,’ he said. I would like to claim some credit for cunning at this point. But I just had a stroke of pure luck. I showed him my digital camera, which I had only used occasionally, and the image on the screen happened to be an innocuous portrait of an old man I had taken in Aleppo but almost forgotten about. ‘No problem,’ said the man with the black headband before moving on.

  I got home relatively intact, aside from a torn ligament in my right leg. So what, if anything, had I got out of it? It had not been the world’s greatest newspaper assignment, but I wanted to go because I felt that the public were not sufficiently engaged with the conflict in Syria, preferring to look the other way. As for myself, I experienced one last time that amazing sustained burst of adrenalin at the beginning, followed later by the tremendous whoosh of relief that comes with the completion of any dangerous undertaking. In short, I felt very much more alive than I had done before.

  Sadly, Richard Beeston, the lovely man who reignited the joie de vivre in me and who had made this journey possible, died a few months later. He was just fifty years old. His courage and stoicism were inspiring to us all.

  47. A WALK AROUND THE VOLCANO

  My e
lation at getting back from Aleppo in one piece did not blind me to the fact that it was probably a bit rash of me to have gone there in the first place. My feet were too slow; my hands, already beginning to curl with arthritis, were too clumsy; and the twenty-pound reinforced flak jacket that I was required to wear had weighed on me like a ton. I got away with it, but I also had to acknowledge that the body I was living in was no longer truly fit for front-line purpose.

  However, I was fit enough to enjoy the flowering of spring in Somerset and to resume light duties pottering about my dark room and among my archives with plans for future publications. When the Sony Corporation got in touch with me and proposed that I should accept their ‘lifetime achievement award’, I rather huffily turned down their well-meaning offer, on the grounds that I hadn’t had a lifetime as yet. But I did say that they could come back to me when I had actually given up on trying to achieve, though I couldn’t foresee when that would be.

  As a general rule, I did accept awards, but mainly out of politeness and because they say, in a way, that I am worthwhile person. But they didn’t go to my head. And I am not inclined to treasure them, albeit with three exceptions—my first, the 1964 World Press Photo Award, which did open new doors for me, the Cornell Capa Award—a great honour from the man I admired who had created the International Center of Photograhy (ICP) in New York—and my CBE, which would have made my father proud. Most of the others wind up in my garden shed.

  Another area of initiative, well within my physical capacity, was seeing more of my own family, which had conveniently lost some of its centrifugal tendency. My brother Michael had finally returned home to England after serving out his thirty years in the French Foreign Legion, and my eldest son, Paul, who worked as a draughtsman, had also returned after two long stays in Australia, in Perth and Byron Bay. It was great to have Paul and his family settled in the pretty town of Budleigh Salterton, at the mouth of the River Otter on the coast of east Devon, with his sister Jessica and her architect husband as next-door neighbours. Paul’s two daughters would add lustre to the family name by becoming the first McCullins to gain admission to university.

  My second son, Alexander, after an early career in modelling, had moved out to Deal in Kent with his growing family, my adored little blonde granddaughters Lila and Kitty. Often, though, he was in London keeping an eye on his budding property empire, which included a studio in Dalston called ‘The Roost’, which he rented out for fashion shoots. Claude, my son by Laraine, was also London-based when his duties in the Territorial Army Marines did not take him to other places, one of them being Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Max, recently launched at a prep school near Batcombe, was showing signs of precocity by taking more than the occasional game of chess off his grandfather. My sister Marie lived not far away in Bristol.

  So we were not in each other’s pockets, but fairly easily in touch with one another. When Claude put his name down for the Territorials, I called my brother, who was living near Hull, and asked him whether we should perhaps try to discourage the boy’s interest in military matters, out of concern for his safety. And I remember Michael pointing out that, given the life choices Claude’s father and uncle had made in their own youth, we were perhaps among the last people able to give him persuasive advice on that score.

  It did occur to me sometimes that I was perhaps on better terms with my children than I deserved to be. All of their childhoods had been to some extent blighted by their father’s long absences. My photography had almost invariably come first. But the paradox is that without photography I would have been a lost soul. I would have been a total write-off and probably hopeless as a father or husband, because I couldn’t have taken any pride in myself. It was the photography that gave me recognition as a human being and with it the ability to relate, however imperfectly, to my extended family.

  Meanwhile, Catherine’s multi-talented, multilingual side of the family was being cruelly reduced by illness, losing both her beloved mother, Maria, dying from leukaemia at just sixty-seven, and her brother-in-law in a matter of months. Patrick, now on his own, came to live with us for a few years after selling the family home. Richard’s widow, Natasha, would become my literary agent. Both sisters determinedly worked their way through their bereavement, and Catherine would later move on to an even more demanding job as Travel Director of Porter, the global lifestyle glossy.

  One of the things we all had to be grateful for was the fact that we lived five hundred feet above sea level. When my adopted home county became national headline news with the torrential winter rainstorms of 2014 flooding the Somerset Levels, the residents of Batcombe were never threatened with having to join the refugee-like scramble from waterlogged homes. I was very well acquainted with the nearby Levels. It was where I had photographed many of my best studies of menacing Wagnerian skies but, thanks to our elevation, we only experienced the worst moments of the floods through our television sets. My one direct contribution to disaster relief was finding, stuck in the mud, a drenched kestrel which I carefully cleaned and dried off in the warmth of my car before releasing it for another day’s flying. That felt good.

  As a young man I’d had to get used to the idea of friends dying in battle. Even so, I found it was poor training for dealing with the death of friends in old age. I like to think I’m unsentimental about death, but I was knocked sideways by that of Mark Shand in April 2014 which, like much of his life, was fraught with incongruity. On the day after he had raised 1.7 million dollars in New York for the Elephant Family, his favourite conservation charity, he nipped outside for a cigarette, fell off the pavement and died in a Manhattan hospital a day later. He was just sixty-two, and I had always thought he would be delivering the speech at my memorial service. Instead of which I found myself delivering the speech at his, which was naturally graced by his sister Camilla and Prince Charles along with a cast of many hundreds.

  ‘The thing about Mark Shand,’ I began, ‘was that he never had any manners,’ and, from the roar I got back from the congregation, it appeared that everybody knew exactly what I meant. I now have a more continuous remembrance of Mark, as I trudge around and photograph my landscapes in his old wellington boots, clutching his Scottish walking stick, which his sister so generously passed on to me.

  When I first met Mark, thirty-odd years back, I thought he was a rather loud Sloaney type of character, but he turned out to be a brilliant travelling companion; determined, bullish and humorous. He became one of my very best friends: always generous and loyal despite the fact he would often drop out of your life for months. I wouldn’t say that I’m normally given to buddy-type relationships, but it was what I had, and most appreciated, with Mark. My wife would often say we were like an old married couple; that we were good apart, but better together. He also represented the last living link with my non-war travels to strange places and to living with strange peoples, Eric Newby and Norman Lewis having died previously, both relatively full of years. So, in a way, I was the last man in the dinghy. I had always looked on my times of travelling with them as being among my happiest. Indeed, if I had been granted the ability to live my life again, I would have cut out the wars completely and devoted myself exclusively to anthropological photography.

  Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be much point in having such an aspiration today. With the way things are going, even the remotest tribes on the planet will be discovered kitted out with lurid T-shirts and baseball caps, worn fashionably back to front.

  Less than a month after Mark’s death, I found myself grappling with information about another distressing event. In the fifteen months since Anthony Loyd and I had been to Aleppo, Anthony had gone back on several occasions, usually touching base with the charismatic rebel leader, Hakim Anza, who had made a slightly disturbing impression on me during our visit together. In May, Anthony, accompanied by the photographer Jack Hill, visited Hakim again. Part of the reason for his stopping by was to congratulate Hakim on the
recent birth of his daughter.

  Shortly after leaving Hakim’s residence, the two newsmen along with Hamza, their fixer, were ambushed, blindfolded, handcuffed and bundled into the boot of a car. There could be no doubt that they were being kidnapped, presumably with the intention of being sold on to Isis; the only question was by whom? Anthony, however, already had an excellent clue. He recognised one of his abductors as the man who had politely served his breakfast in Hakim’s home only a few hours earlier.

  When the car stopped and remained stationary for a while, Hill and Hamza managed to force the boot open, and Anthony made a run for it. Still impeded by the handcuffs, he was eventually chased down and subjected to a severe beating. Looking up, he saw Hakim, obviously in charge, arriving on the scene.

  ‘I thought you were my friend,’ said Anthony.

  ‘No friends,’ replied Hakim, who drew his pistol and proceeded to pump two bullets into Anthony’s ankle.

  Luckily, the commotion caused by Anthony’s attempted escape led to prompt intervention by the Islamic Front, the umbrella organisation for many of the rebel groups. Hakim was told to back off, and his three hostages, all requiring medical attention, were allowed to proceed over the border into Turkey.

  Aside from my immediate concern for Anthony, I couldn’t help seeing this episode as yet another of my lucky escapes. I mean, why should Anthony have taken Hakim’s bullets and not me? Why, as so often in the past, did I emerge virtually unscathed while others close to me were getting badly injured or even killed? Although such occasions, stretching back over half a century of going to the wars, were close to being beyond counting, they always had an unnerving effect, often even more in reflection than at the time.