Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  American airlines were the most modern and the most exciting, but I had a special affection for BOAC, the great British Overseas Airways Corporation, which connected Tehran with London and brought Michael out for the summer holidays. BOAC did not yet have DC-6s or Constellations but it did have its own unique plane. The Argonaut, I knew from my reading, had the body of a DC-4, the predecessor and smaller version of the DC-6. But it also had something special. It did not have the normal Pratt & Whitney engines, but Rolls-Royce Merlins, which were the best in the world. Rolls-Royce Merlins had powered the Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain.

  The fourth thing that I dreamed about were trains. The New Yorker advertisements were for long-distance American routes. They had romantic names: the Super Chief, the Santa Fe, the Cannonball, the Zephyr. I knew that some trains had sleeping and dining cars. I remembered overnight trips on Indian trains, but the cabins on those had been equipped as if you were going on a camping trip and everything was green or khaki. I did not remember corridors between carriages. If you wanted to go to the dining car you would have to wait till the train stopped, sometimes between stations, get off and walk a few carriages, and then, when you had finished your lunch, you would have to wait until the train stopped again before you went back to your compartment.

  American trains were not like that. They were peopled with the same impossibly glamorous beings who went on TWA Constellations and parked 1951 Buicks on their gravel driveways. Everything in a sleeping compartment on the Super Chief was aluminium and streamlined, and the colours were the colours of the future, reds, blues, yellows, not the army colours of Indian Railways. Black attendants in resplendent uniforms with funny caps brought you cocktails while your bed was being made up, or you sat eating long meals at restaurant-style tables with little shaded lights on them while the prairies thundered past your window. Best of all was the observation car. American trains, or at least the ones in the New Yorker, had special carriages with domed glass roofs, where you could sit sipping a drink as the train glided past mountains, lakes and trees turning improbable shades of gold and red.

  11

  On the Argonaut

  It was April 1952, and our time in Iran was at an end, as was my freedom. I was eight. It was time to join Michael at Stubbington. The three of us, Ma, Michael and I, made our way to Tehran Airport. I was excited at the thought of the long flight to England, which would be on one of the famous BOAC Argonauts.

  Three days after the Argonaut landed at Heathrow, then a small collection of temporary shacks just off the A4, I was at Stubbington for the summer term. Ma drove Michael and me down to the school, said a quick goodbye and left, with both of us fighting back tears but determined not to show them. Eleven years of boarding school had begun. The only pools of light in the darkness of those years were the holidays. I would start counting the days to freedom from the day term began.

  For our family 1952 was a watershed year. Ma and Franco had parted; she and JRC were once more living together. I asked her what had happened.

  ‘Oh well, we drove back from Tehran together in Franco’s car, all the way to Italy. It was an amazing trip, particularly when we were going through Yugoslavia. What a beautiful country.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, Franco had to go off to be ambassador in Tokyo. That was a big job.’

  ‘But. You and he?’

  ‘Mileso. It was one of those things. I’ve got you two to look after. Franco and I had very different ideas on how you should be brought up.’

  ‘Why? Franco and I always got on so well. He used to treat me like a grown-up. I’m sure he liked me.’

  ‘Yes, I know he did. He was very fond of you. But he didn’t believe in English boarding schools and I’m not sure he wanted to take on two children that weren’t his. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

  JRC had to leave Tehran shortly after we flew to England. The temporary overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of the Mossadegh regime had made Tehran unsuitable for the regional headquarters of a British business. At first he relocated to Beirut, and it was there that Michael and I went for my first Christmas holiday from Stubbington.

  My Beirut memories are less vivid than the Iran ones but I well remember our journey there. The BOAC plane to Beirut was delayed by twenty-four hours because of fog in London. In the pre-jet era flying to Beirut required a refuelling stop in Rome and another in Athens and took fourteen hours compared with the five non-stop hours it takes today. Our plane was further delayed in Rome by a technical fault, which was going to keep us on the ground for five or six hours.

  BOAC rounded up the Beirut passengers in the transit lounge, apologised for the delay and announced that they would take us on a bus tour of Rome. It is difficult today to conceive of a time when airlines as a matter of routine would take delayed passengers off on sightseeing tours to pass away the wait. We saw the Pantheon and St Peter’s, and stopped at the Colosseum to eat the packed lunch which BOAC had provided. The lunch included Chianti in a traditional-style half-bottle half-encased in straw. I didn’t like wine, but Ma and JRC did so I stuffed it into the pocket of my Stubbington Burberry raincoat to give to them when we arrived. Eight hours later, after a stop in Athens, we landed in Beirut at 10 p.m. I was nervous that I would be apprehended for smuggling in the Chianti. I asked Michael whether I should declare it.

  ‘Don’t be so wet,’ he said. ‘They’ll never find it as long as you don’t look suspicious.’

  I sauntered out of the plane as unsuspiciously as I could. I had my Burberry open so the outline of the bottle in my pocket would not be apparent. As a result I knocked the pocket of my nonchalantly flapping raincoat against the plane door. Despite the straw protection around the bottom of the bottle, it shattered. I could feel liquid running down my leg. My trousers soon had a spreading stain, and red liquid was leaving a trail on the floor behind me. It looked as if I were the victim of a botched murder attempt.

  The customs were bound to see. Would I be arrested for attempted smuggling? Was that as bad as real smuggling?

  ‘Michael, I’ve broken the wine bottle in my pocket. What should I do?’

  ‘Christ, you’re an idiot. Just keep walking. Say nothing.’

  Michael didn’t have a wine bottle. He had drunk his Chianti at the Colosseum.

  We got through customs and immigration without arrest and burst out into the arrivals hall to meet Ma and JRC. It was 10.30 p.m. They were not there. We searched everywhere. Not a sign of them. We were now alone with ten shillings in English money between us in an emptying airport in a Middle Eastern country where we had never been before and knew no one. I began to cry. Michael was made of sterner stuff. After three years of Stubbington tears were out of the question for him but he did look rattled.

  Possibly because of the noise I was making we were approached by one of the BOAC ground staff. We explained our plight to her. No, we didn’t have a telephone number. No, no address. We were going to be picked up, that was all we knew.

  Miss BOAC disappeared, telling us not to move and that she would be back very soon. Ten minutes later we were in a car on our way to a hotel forty-five minutes away in central Beirut. I was still crying. We later discovered that our car passed that of Ma and JRC on their way out to the airport. They had been told by BOAC that our much-delayed plane was arriving an hour later. Michael and I, I still snivelling, were checked in and told by Miss BOAC, who had accompanied us from the airport, not to worry; our parents would be along soon to pick us up. As BOAC had no telephone number or address for them this seemed unlikely. I was going to spend the rest of my life as an orphan in Beirut.

  An hour later Ma and JRC turned up. They had gone to the airport and been told that two un-met children, one of them bawling, had been sent off to a hotel in downtown Beirut.

  The rest of the Christmas holiday was a celebration of freedom. It was so wonderful not to be at school, to eat good food, to go to bed at 9 p.m. not 6.30, to be able to get up when I wanted
and do what I wanted without being trammelled by rules, rules and rules. We were peegeeing with some friends of JRC’s in a house on the outskirts of Beirut. Our block was made up of neat modern houses which could have been in an American suburb, but around us was scrubby wasteland. The city had not yet expanded this far. It was not a good place for exploring or going for walks. Within half a mile of the house was a giant refugee camp, where Palestinians who had been squeezed out of what had become Israel were eking out a miserable existence in tents and shacks. If they saw anyone who appeared to be European or American they hurled stones and shouted insults.

  Michael and I had fun exploring central Beirut with its tangle of alleys, shops and stalls; mosques and churches stood side by side. Unlike in Tehran, where many of the people we came into contact with spoke English, here few did. French was the universal language of commerce.

  I had my ninth-birthday party in the St-Georges Hotel on the corniche. While not a big hotel it was the place to go. It was a fancy-dress party. I have a photograph of me with dozens of other children in fancy dress. As I knew no one in Beirut and Ma and JRC knew only a few adults it is a mystery who the other children were or where they had come from.

  Michael was given an air rifle for Christmas. We spent hours on the flat roof of the house trying to shoot pigeons. Michael killed one when a lucky shot hit the bird in the eye. I shot none. Our next game was to shoot out the light bulbs in the street lamps. That stopped after a visit from the gendarmes. A couple of weeks later the holidays were over and we were once more at the airport for the flight back to London and Stubbington. There had been two big thrills over the Christmas holidays.

  On Christmas Eve we, and the rest of Beirut, hurried down to the beach near the airport. Four hundred yards offshore the Champollion, a French luxury liner that plied the Marseille to Beirut route, had struck a reef, broached and been pushed over on its side by a midwinter storm of a suddenness and violence that one sees only in the Mediterranean. It was lying at a forty-five-degree angle in surf so powerful that when the waves broke over the liner the whole boat was submerged in green and white foam. The Lebanese army, fire service and police force had set up encampments on the beach. It was too rough to get a rescue boat out to the ship. I could see what remained of a wrecked lifeboat, which had been swept on to the beach. A few passengers had tried to swim ashore. They were the first dead bodies I ever saw. They were covered in black oil from the ship’s tanks.

  At lunchtime a cry went up from the watchers on shore as the Champollion split in two. More bodies fell into the sea to be washed up later. The Lebanese air force had planes circling overhead dropping orange rubber dinghies. Most missed, but no one was foolish enough to use any of the ones that landed on the boat to get ashore. That would have been suicide. We watched till teatime. On the beach there was a party atmosphere. People had brought folding chairs, picnics and bottles of wine. Vendors patrolled up and down with Lebanese pastries. Men with binoculars gave authoritative commentaries.

  We went home and returned again on Christmas morning. The storm had subsided, and although the sea was still rough the wind had gone down, so that the liner was no longer submerged in surf. At 10 a.m. a speedboat driven – so said the crowd on the beach – by a dashing Beirut playboy got close enough to the listing ship to take off some passengers. This was announced by the men with binoculars, JRC now one of them, and a great cheer went up. Soon a procession of fishing and pleasure boats was nosing its way up to the Champollion to take off survivors. The fun was over. We went home to eat our Christmas lunch.

  Of the 230 passengers, 38 were killed and about 100 injured. No one ever seemed to quite know what had happened. There was talk that the storm had been so strong that it had overpowered the liner’s engines and forced it on to the reef. The story taken up by the newspapers was that the captain, who was known to be what Ma referred to as a plucky drinker, had mistaken the bright new airport lights for the harbour beacon and had attempted to dock the Champollion at the airport.

  The other thrill came at Beirut Airport. After we had been checked in Michael and I went into the departure lounge, which overlooked the apron where the aircraft parked. As we entered the lounge we noticed an intense whining sound unlike anything I had heard before. Usually the planes on the apron would make coughing and growling noises as their great piston-fired engines roared into life. The sound we could hear was quite unlike that; it was a high-pitched but immensely powerful-sounding whine. There, in front of us and scarcely more than 200 feet from the airport window, was the most beautiful piece of machinery I had ever seen, the de Havilland Comet. I knew all about the Comet from my magazines. It was the world’s first jet passenger aircraft. It went into service in the colours of BOAC in 1952, a moment of pride for Britain. At that time the first American passenger jet, the Boeing 707, was merely a doodle on a drawing board.

  I had never heard a jet engine before. I was electrified by its unique sound, somewhere between a scream and a roar. The Comet was taxiing gently into a parking place on the apron, its long silver fuselage gleaming in the airport lights. Next to the DC-6s and Super-Constellations with their huge clunky piston engines, it looked like an eel among alligators.

  At first sight the Comet appeared to have no engines at all. When you looked more closely you saw that there were two elegant oval openings a third of the way along the wings on either side. The de Havilland Ghost engines were actually embedded in the wings. I watched transfixed, admiring the aircraft’s elegant lines, the smart dark-blue BOAC livery, the upright tail and the large square windows, so much bigger than the windows in the Qantas Super-Constellation standing next to it, which was to take us to London.

  How I longed to go in the Comet. Although I was to do a lot of travelling in the next few years back and forth to the Middle East for the holidays, I never did. I may have been lucky. Two years later, in January 1954, one blew up over Elba twenty minutes after leaving Rome Ciampino Airport. Six weeks after that another Comet blew up over the Mediterranean near Naples. The Comet was grounded worldwide, never to fly again. Eventually the navy dredged up the wreckage of both aircraft, which was painstakingly jigsawed together at Farnborough. Meanwhile several other aircraft were pressure-tested to destruction in water tanks. The pressure testing showed that after about 1,000 flights a hitherto unknown phenomenon, metal fatigue, resulted in a fatal weakness appearing at the corners of the big square windows; the window would rupture, and the plane would go through explosive depressurisation, as a result of which it would literally disintegrate in mid-air.

  De Havilland were unlucky. Whoever developed the first passenger jet would almost certainly have had the metal fatigue problem. It was four years before jets next began flying passengers. De Havilland’s improved Comet 4, with a stronger skin, was in a race with Boeing’s 707 to be the first to offer transatlantic service in the autumn of 1958. Some British pride was salvaged when the Comet 4 beat the 707 into service by three weeks, but the triumph was a temporary one. The Comet was considered an unlucky aeroplane and did not sell well; the Boeing 707 became the world’s best-selling plane in the 1960s. But I still remember that moment of magic at Beirut Airport in January 1953 when I first saw the eel among the alligators.

  That was our only holiday in Beirut. Flying was expensive, and during our next holiday Michael and I were billeted with Mr Williams, the French master at Stubbington. He and his wife took in boys as paying guests during the holidays. We used to tell stories about the part Mr Williams had played in the French resistance; some said he had been dropped into occupied France. Many of the boys at Stubbington had parents dotted about bits of the British empire who could not afford to fly them out for the holidays. Most had uncles and aunts they went to stay with. Michael and I had our father and Alice, but we did not stay with them for the holidays. I was relieved. Offered a choice between Mr Williams, a kindly man who had probably never been nearer to France than Brighton, and my stepmother, Mr Williams was the better choice.


  In Ma’s words, ‘Alice used to treat the boys like the servants’ children.’ That was how I felt when I visited them.

  12

  Baghdad Days

  When we next went home for the holidays it was not to Beirut but to the one city in the Middle East that was going to be permanently safe for Westerners. The one country on which we could depend was Iraq. The Baghdad Pact was the keystone of the alliance between the West and Iraq. Feisal II, Iraq’s boy-king, guided by his uncle Abdul-Illah, the regent, had been educated at Harrow and knew better than to argue with Britain and America, his sponsors in the turbulent Middle East, a region which the USSR was doing its best to subvert. Baghdad was the West’s bulwark against communism.

  JRC relocated his business to Baghdad, and in 1953 Michael and I flew out there for the eight-week summer holidays. As always, Ma and JRC had found someone to peegee with. In this case it was Tom Walters.

  Tom had learned to fly before the war, much of which he had spent in different parts of Africa flying for the RAF. When the war ended he was looking for something interesting to do and signed up with BOAC, which had just been given a contract by the Iraqi government to set up and manage its new airline, Iraqi Airways. Tom went out to Baghdad as part of the BOAC team; he had responsibility for the flying side of the airline. He needed to find and train Iraqis to fly modern planes and to work with the financial staff, also provided by BOAC. The airline had been set up as a subsidiary of Iraqi Railways.

  Tom had a big airy house on the road to the airport in the Railway Compound, a mini-village in which senior airline and railway staff, many of them expatriates, lived; the village was centred on the Railway Club with its tennis courts, croquet lawn and swimming pool. Although Iraq was not part of the British empire, the expatriates behaved as if it were. The club could have been in any one of a hundred towns in India in the days of the Raj. Tom’s house was set in a large garden of palm trees, eucalyptus, bougainvillea and roses; it could have been in Poona.