Exclusion Zone

by Exclusion Zone (retail) (epub)

  ‘You’ll have to go a lot further than Stanley for that,’ Shark said, leaning round the back of her seat. ‘Though I can probably arrange some serious excitement for you right here on the base.’

  Jane laughed. ‘What, in your room? I doubt it, Shark. Mild amusement maybe. I suspect the only way you could seriously excite me would be to fly in Brad Pitt for the weekend.’

  * * *

  The Stanley Road looped around the southern perimeter of the base, then struck north towards the hills, following the curving line where the foothills met the plain. The road to the capital was punctuated with shacks and rusting shipping containers, as if dumped by some freak wave and beached miles from the ocean. The door to one hung ajar and I could see it filled to the roof with winter fodder for the sheep.

  We passed a handful of settlements, most of them invisible from the road and betrayed only by the rough hand-lettered signs pointing the way along narrow tracks winding down towards the sea. In the whole journey we met only one other vehicle, a battered Land Rover heading up towards the hills.

  As we dropped down Sapper Hill into Stanley, I could see the cruise ship negotiating the narrows from Port Williams into the inner harbour.

  Stanley had the air of a genteel English seaside town, permanently out of season. A couple of fishing boats were tied up at the jetty and neat rows of houses ascended the hillside from the harbour. There were small patches of parkland and more trees than I had seen anywhere else in the Falklands, with evergreens forming thick clumps in some of the more sheltered parts of the town.

  We parked near the jetty and then began wandering through the streets. A double arch almost as tall as a nearby house stood on the open ground in front of the cathedral. Jane read the brass plate aloud. ‘This arch was made from the jawbones of two blue whales and presented to the Government by the Falkland Islands Company to commemorate the Centenary of the Colony as a British Possession, 1833–1933.’

  She produced a camera from her bag. ‘Okay, Sean, get under the arch and say “Cheese”.’

  ‘If you’re going to behave like a tourist, I’m going home,’ I said, but I obediently stood in place while she took the photograph. She glanced upwards and then burst out laughing. ‘You won’t believe this, even the cathedral’s got a tin roof.’

  I followed her gaze. The tower of the cathedral was capped with a squat spire, faced with brown-painted corrugated metal sheets. We went inside. The walls were lined with plaques commemorating the dead in a score of different conflicts, some dating back over a century.

  Jane frowned. ‘There’s no escaping the past here, is there? Or the dead.’

  ‘Or the wind,’ I said as we went back outside. A painstakingly hand-lettered sign reading “Open Air Museum” led us up a side street on the edge of town. Halfway up the street, there was a small shop selling handmade leather goods. The museum faced it across the road, the way barred by a gate set in a wooden fence. A sign on the gate asked us to ‘“Pay in the shop, price £1. If shut, put money in tin’.

  I dropped a couple of pound coins in the tin nailed to the gatepost and opened the gate. The open air museum proved to be nothing more than a field in which an assortment of elderly surplus military equipment was slowly rusting away. It took us about two minutes to exhaust its possibilities.

  ‘I went to a museum like this in Papua New Guinea once,’ Jane said. ‘In the middle of nowhere, at the side of a road outside Rabaul, there was a sign saying “Museum of the Japanese Occupation”. I followed a track through the jungle for about a mile. At the end of it there was a guy sitting on a tree root, next to a tunnel leading into the hillside. I must have been the first person to walk down that track in weeks, but the guy was still there ready to sell me a ticket.

  ‘I paid him one Kina, he gave me a cloakroom ticket from a roll he had on the tree root beside him and I went into the tunnel. It opened into a Japanese bunker from the Second World War. There were no exhibits as such, no labels or glass cases or anything; it was just the bunker as the Japanese had left it. There was some rusty wireless equipment, an anti-aircraft gun poking its barrels out through a slit in the hillside that was smothered in vegetation, some camp beds, a table and some chairs. That was it. It was a bit like an underground Marie Celeste.’

  We walked up the hill to the next cross street and then turned back towards the town. Jane pointed down the street, her shoulders shaking with laughter. ‘I’d definitely have paid a pound to see this.’

  It was an ordinary-looking suburban street, a row of a dozen or so modest, two-storey houses, each with a patch of front garden, perhaps five yards wide by three yards deep. It could have been a street in almost any English town, except that farm animals were grazing in half the gardens. We counted five sheep, two goats and one rough-coated horse as we travelled the length of the street, pausing every few yards for a photograph.

  We stopped at the end to watch a few kids kicking a football around in the street. ‘If you did that in England, you’d be run over inside five minutes,’ I said. ‘And there are some other things about this place you can’t knock.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘No pollution, no crime.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure.’

  I pointed to the houses. ‘Notice anything about the doors?’

  ‘Apart from the tasteful colours, you mean? Shit, no locks.’

  ‘Exactly. I can’t think of anywhere else in the world where you’d see that.’

  ‘You’ve obviously never been to Guneela.’

  ‘Nor have you since 1980.’

  We turned down the hill to the road facing the harbour and followed it back into the town centre. A zebra crossing marked the heart of Stanley’s commercial district. ‘This must be a status symbol,’ I said. ‘There can’t be more than one car an hour through here.’

  ‘Guneela had a traffic light. In twenty-four hours you wouldn’t see more than a dozen utes, six cars and a couple of trucks, but the next town didn’t have one and that was reason enough.’

  ‘And don’t tell me, when you were stuck for something to do on a Saturday night you could always head down to Main Street and watch the traffic light change colour.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not thinking of Kerry?’

  ‘No, we never had one. We just had a sheepdog chained up at the side of the road. Every time the sheep came down the road off the mountain he’d bare his teeth, bark his head off and send them back up again. It worked on me too. I was scared stiff of him.’

  We walked past the handful of shops selling a bizarre mixture of tinned food, wellingtons, outdoor clothing and tourist souvenirs. There were china penguins made in England, soft toys made in China and plaques and metal ashtrays embossed with the Falklands crest, made in Japan. Jane pointed to a display of sweaters. ‘They probably even buy those from Taiwan.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they? Everyone else does. Anyway, don’t blame the Taiwanese for those; they have the unmistakeable air of hand-knitting about them. My mother used to knit sweaters like that for me when I was a kid. They were always much too large, in horrendous colour combinations and they itched like hell. I’d wear them once around the house to please her and then hide them at the back of a drawer.’

  She pulled a face as we passed yet another window.

  ‘Perhaps Shark’s offer wasn’t such a bad one after all,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, please. I’d rather join the Stanley hand-knitting circle.’

  At the bottom of the street was a tall telegraph pole festooned with a jumbled mass of signs pointing in every direction. ‘You wouldn’t think there were that many places in the Falklands, would you?’ Jane said.

  ‘There aren’t. They’re all pointing the way home for people stuck down here.’

  The signs measured the distance to places all over the world. Many were to great cities – London, New York, Sydney, San Francisco – but the majority counted the miles to much more humble but even more deeply missed destinations. We stood side by s
ide reading them. ‘The Garth Inn, Maesteg, Wales, 8,540 miles. The Blue Bell, Kirby Hill, 8,756 miles.’ Jane nudged me in the ribs. ‘Shit, they’ve even got The Rose up there.’ I followed her gaze. ‘The White Rose, Highgate, 8,551 miles.’

  It was our local back in London, a low-ceilinged warren of panelled rooms. In winter the three of us – Geoff, Jane and I – often sat talking for hours, warming ourselves in the glow of the huge open fire. In summer we sprawled on the grass outside, listening to the birdsong. It was only a couple of minutes’ walk from the centre of Highgate village, but as peaceful as any remote country pub.

  Both of us fell silent, our thoughts far away. I felt a lump in my throat. Nothing had brought home to me the vast distance separating me from home like that crudely lettered signpost.

  After a few minutes, Jane slipped an arm through mine. ‘That’s enough sightseeing. Come and buy me a coffee before you go off to refight the war.’

  We drank a cup of weak instant coffee in a cafe. The only other customers were two tables full of Japanese trawlermen. ‘Great,’ Jane said. ‘They get the fish, the Falklands get metal ashtrays.’

  ‘And twenty million quid a year for the fishing rights. You can buy a hell of a lot of ashtrays with that.’

  ‘You’d think they could spare a couple of quid for a few coffee beans then, wouldn’t you?’ she said, staring at the contents of her cup.

  ‘And you have the nerve to talk about whingeing Poms.’ She kicked my shin under the table. ‘Remember that comment when you phone to ask for a lift back this evening.’

  ‘That’s what I like about Aussies, they never hold grudges. Don’t buy too many designer outfits, will you?’ I stood up and blew her a kiss.

  ‘Wait here a minute.’ She hurried out of the door and disappeared into the shop across the street. She was back two minutes later, holding a battered-looking bouquet of white chrysanthemums. ‘I won’t come with you, but lay those on the war memorial, will you?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course I will.’

  She smiled and kissed me, then, embarrassed, she pushed me towards the door. ‘Better get moving or the tour’ll leave without you.’

  I walked down to the jetty. The liner was tied up next to the huge floating pontoon used by the oil exploration vessels. Convoys of Land Rovers were ferrying the cruise passengers away. Some were driven off to visit sea lion and penguin colonies along the coast; others made the shorter journey to the Falkland shops.

  I joined a third group of just half a dozen people, forming a respectful circle around the man leading the tour. He was in civilian clothes and the craggy, wind-burned features below his grey-streaked black hair could have marked him as a farmer, but he had the bearing of a soldier and the manner of a man used to being obeyed. As he turned towards me, I recognised him from the briefing on our first morning.

  I shook his hand. ‘Jack Stubbs, isn’t it? Sean Riever, I’m with 1435 Flight. Hope you don’t mind me tagging along with you today.’

  His face clouded for a second and there was a faint hesitation before he spoke. ‘No, I don’t mind at all.’ He glanced round the rest of the group and dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘And to be honest, you look likely to be the only one fit enough to finish the tour anyway.’

  ‘You fought in the war yourself?’

  He nodded. ‘I was in the Paras, a Lance Corporal back then. I’m a Staff Sergeant now – not exactly a meteoric rise in fifteen or so years, is it? I’m a Forward Air Controller and a survival and weapons instructor.’

  ‘Which battalion were you with?’

  ‘5 Para.’

  ‘You’d have known my brother, then, Mike Riever?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I knew him. I was in his platoon. You look very like him.’

  ‘Were you with him when?’ He glanced at his watch and I took the hint. ‘I’m sorry, you’re busy now, I know. Maybe we could have a pint and a chat later.’

  ‘Sure.’ He raised his voice. ‘I think we’re all here who want to be. I’ve just a couple of points before we set off. We’ll be visiting war memorials here in Port Stanley and the cemeteries and memorials at San Carlos, Darwin and Goose Green. We’ll also be overflying the main battle sites and visiting the battlefields at Goose Green and Black Mountain.

  ‘Goose Green is relatively flat, though the going underfoot is rough, but Black Mountain is a stiff climb. It’s the last place we shall visit and though I’ll be leading a party up there, anyone who feels they would prefer to pass on that section of the tour will be helicoptered straight back to Stanley. The others will be picked up later from the top of Black Mountain.’ He glanced around the small circle of faces. ‘And one note of caution. The route we’re taking today is perfectly safe, but we are crossing battle sites, and where you’ve had a battle, you always have battlefield debris. That may mean harmless bits of metal but it could also mean unexploded bombs, missiles or mines. Do not pick up anything from the battlefields, no matter how much you might like a souvenir. Do not even touch anything.’

  ‘What about minefields?’ The questioner was a crew-cut, middle-aged man with an American accent.

  ‘All minefields and other danger areas are marked and fenced off. Don’t enter them. There is also a very slim possibility of finding a mine that has been washed out of a marked minefield on to a beach or riverbank. It’s a very remote chance, but it has happened. As before, if in doubt, don’t touch.’ He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a few photographs. ‘In case you’re in any doubt about the reason, these may help you.’ He passed them around. An old couple looked at the first one together, shuddered and handed them to me without looking at the rest. They were photographs of the mangled bodies of animals.

  ‘The sheep were blown apart after straying into minefields,’ Jack said. ‘The sea lion was unlucky enough to flop on top of a mine that had been washed up on the beach.’ He glanced around. ‘I’m sorry, but I like to make sure the message has got home.’

  I passed them on to the American. He studied them for a moment. ‘Why don’t you just clear the mines?’

  Jack’s smile became a few degrees less friendly. ‘We have removed a lot of them, and we have an ongoing programme to make areas safe, but there are tens of thousands of mines to be cleared. In most cases we don’t know where they are, because the Argentinians who laid them either won’t or can’t tell us. Even for an expert, clearing a minefield is a very dangerous business. There are men out there every day risking their lives to make the place safer. We have a much easier task today; all we have to do is use a bit of common sense.’

  The American looked sceptical.

  ‘It wasn’t like invading Panama,’ Jack said, giving me a ghost of a wink. ‘Sometimes you have to do a bit more than stroll up the beach and pose for the TV cameras. The Argentinians here were fighting back with guns, bombs, missiles and mines. It takes a very long time to clear up after a conflict like that… and even longer to forget.’ He resumed his previous brisk tone. ‘Right, anyone who wants to change their mind about the trip is very welcome to do so, but I really wouldn’t worry. We must have done at least five hundred battlefield tours over the last fifteen years and we’ve never had a casualty yet.’

  The American joined us as we clambered into a long-wheelbase Land Rover and drove east along Ross Road. ‘We’ll visit the Liberation Monument shortly,’ Jack said, ‘but before we stop there, I want to show you one other memorial. Nearly three hundred British troops laid down their lives in the Falklands War, but the Falklanders have done their share of fighting for us too.’ He stopped on the eastern edge of the town, by a huge stone cross facing out across the harbour. ‘This is the Cross of Sacrifice. There are forty-three names inscribed on it, native-born Falklanders who died fighting in two World Wars. Out of a population of just two thousand, that’s the equivalent of a million Britons or’ – he gave the crew-cut American a sideways glance – ‘about five million Americans. The Falklanders don’t owe us any favours.’

  He turned the
Land Rover around in the shadow of the cross and began to drive back into Stanley. A sudden squall blew up, blotting out the harbour behind a curtain of rain. The streets of Stanley had emptied of people. A few dispirited-looking cruise passengers huddled in shop doorways, waiting out the shower; others were dimly visible through the steamy windows of the handful of pubs and cafes.

  Liberation Monument stood on the far side of town, a tall column inscribed with the names of every unit that had fought in the war. It was topped by a bronze figure of Britannia triumphant, staring out over the grey waters of the harbour. Her face bore an odd resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, and there was another echo in the nearby road sign, Thatcher Road.

  A long, crescent-shaped wall behind the monument carried the names of the war dead, engraved on a row of marble panels. The rain had eased to a faint drizzle, but water still ran down the face of the memorial, sliding from name to name and adding a further lustre to the sheen of the marble.

  The high, curving wings of the memorial acted as a windbreak and as I walked towards it, searching the columns of names, I stepped out of the endless buffeting of the wind into an area of silence, stillness and calm.

  The names of the dead were ranged alphabetically under their regiments, units or ships. There were long columns of names under HMS Ardent, Coventry, Glamorgan and Sheffield and longer ones still for the SAS, Royal Marines and Welsh Guards. The longest of all was for the Parachute Regiment, with almost equal numbers from the Second, Third and Fifth Battalions. Two-thirds of the way down the list for 5 Para was the inscription: ‘Lieutenant Michael Riever, MC.’

  I laid the bouquet of white chrysanthemums at the foot of the wall, among a score of poppy wreaths, some still crimson, others faded to a dull brick red.

  As I turned away from the wall, I found myself almost face to face with Jack. He must have stood in front of the memorial countless times before, but his face was a grim, expressionless mask as he faced it again. He stared past me, his lips moving slowly as he murmured the familiar names to himself.