by Mark Colvin
There was a pool, and a beach, and I got sunstroke and retreated into my room. There I discovered that someone had left an enormous collection of science fiction, time-honoured retreat of the tongue-tied, shoe-gazing geek. So that was the summer I discovered Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, to the soundtrack of the only record in the place I thought worth listening to, an album of Nat King Cole.
Roll on those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.
* * *
My father was unquestionably a man of enormous physical courage, but he had been brought up in a hard school, and much as he undoubtedly loved his children, he didn’t always have the sense that that love had to be consistently expressed by actually being with them—after all, his own parents had sailed to Australia when he was fourteen, leaving him at Dartmouth for the next five years. The holiday in the Algarve sun was the last time we were going to be seeing him for a while. He had accepted a new posting, and, his memoir Twice around the World later revealed, he had accepted it over a lunch a full year before.
My father was going to be the British ‘consul-general’ in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, a country then under heavy bombardment by the USA, and one to which no-one else in his family could possibly go. It was not only dangerous and unhealthy in every way: there could, from the point of view of a teenager who read about Vietnam in the papers every day, be no possible guarantee that he would survive it and return to be our dad again. Quoted in an academic paper about the consulate-general, one retired holder of the post wrote to the academic Simon Kear in 1996 that ‘it was known in the office as the worst post in the world at least ten years before I got there (that is in terms of acute discomfort, health risks, limitations, isolation and general beastliness)’.
If my feelings about my father’s actions at this time may seem a little jaundiced, it’s because his memoir contains a number of what are too easy to interpret as references to the delight with which he left his family behind. When offered the job, he ‘hesitated for no more than 24 hours: the factors [of fascination with the job itself] described earlier—and some regard for married colleagues—made agreement inevitable. The decision became a liberating one’. And, he wrote, ‘As usual, “with the first turn of the screw, all debts are paid”, the sailor’s adage here referring less to financial than sentimental dues, to commitments joylessly and for too long endured.’
It was hard not to feel, reading that years later, that his children were those joylessly endured commitments, and that he left, in other words, without a backward glance, no doubt as he and his father and his father’s father, servants of Empire all, had been trained to do—as I suppose I was being trained to do, although the Empire-builder treatment wasn’t really working in my case. My sister Zoë, however, once bearded him about this passage, and says that he was genuinely shocked when he realised how it read to us.
What was worst about Hanoi in practice, though, from the perspective of those he left behind, was that for more than a year, we would never be quite sure if he was safe and well, or a victim of a stray American bomb (not unusual) or a misfiring Vietnamese surface-to-air missile (also far more common than the North liked to admit). Letters were limited to once a month: any reply I sent might be received up to three months after his original missive had been dispatched. From having two loving—albeit separated—parents, Zoë and I were, suddenly and without much warning, virtually the children of a one-parent family. That was hard on us, and hard on my mother, but Dad was up and away.
Chapter 13
Faux Diplomacy
DESPITE THE UBIQUITY of the Vietnam War in the media, my sister and I could only really guess at the dangers Dad was undergoing in Hanoi. His letters were descriptive but jocular, and gave little hint of the reality of life in a city under massive, and more or less continuous, bomber attack. It wasn’t till the publication of his memoir, years later, that I read this vivid description of one raid in the US operation known as ‘Rolling Thunder’:
The air-raid sirens sounded, and we walked out onto the balcony. As we stood there seven or eight United States Thunderchief jet fighter-bombers, flying at scarcely more than roof-top height and no more, it seemed, than 100 yards away, shot across our vision at what appeared—so tight was the space in which the whole incident was framed between houses and sky—enormous speed. They had come on us suddenly out of nowhere, the hard, grey, sleek aircraft, in superb formation at 600 mph, disappearing for an instant behind the trees and buildings that lay between us and the thermal power plant less than one mile to the south, and then quickly climbing clear and away. As they had hurtled past, so close it seemed we could almost touch them or call to the pilots, we had seen the rockets fired from the pods under their wings. Almost simultaneously, such lights as were on in the apartment went out, the fan stopped turning, and a column of dust, smoke and flame rose from the direction of the power station. (As the planes had penetrated the city’s defences by coming in under the radar screen, the first anti-aircraft batteries opened up only when the raiders had not only departed but were probably twenty miles away.) As we were shortly to observe, the performance of this squadron disposed of every Communist or other illusion about the laxity of American bombing or the imprecision of U.S. bombing techniques.
The all-clear wailed: stillness descended. The apartment, without the touch of air from the revolving fan, was already crushingly hot. ‘I wonder what the strong-room will feel like in mid-August? A bit warm, I should think.’ ‘Not very nice. I hope you’ve got your Right Guard, Geoffrey.’
Although I didn’t know until the mid-1970s that my father was a member of MI6, I was never under any illusion in the late 1960s that his duties as consul-general in Hanoi were actually consular. Consuls and consuls-general occupy themselves with the issuing of visas and matters of trade. During the Vietnam War, very few North Vietnamese travelled to the UK, and vice versa, so the traffic in visas and the job of looking after expats in trouble was minuscule, and trade was similarly negligible. What I was told was that, having had a series of jobs with the title of third, then second, then first secretary (political) in the Foreign Office, he would now be doing a similar job of political reporting from Hanoi. Even years later, after he told me of his real affiliation, he maintained that it was only because of the particular conditions of the war, especially the intensified bombing of the North, that an SIS officer had been appointed to the post. Now, however, even this has emerged as a cover story.
In his biography of Daphne Park, Queen of Spies, one of my father’s successors in the post, Paddy Hayes, puts it baldly.
The British consulate-general in Hanoi was no ordinary diplomatic outpost. Though described as a consulate-general, it was in fact an SIS spy station. Described even more accurately, it was an intelligence outpost concealed inside a barely functioning faux diplomatic mission in the capital city of a country at war.
From the very beginning of its operation, the SIS paid for half the mission’s budget, and at least one member of the two-person consulate was a trained full-time spy. But what could such a person achieve in a city where he was not even permitted to ride a bicycle, and where his ability to go on foot was heavily circumscribed? Because of Britain’s non-recognition of North Vietnam, my father’s position as consul-general was not formally recognised by the host country. ‘The post was not accredited to anyone,’ my father wrote in his memoir. ‘Even the Mayor of Hanoi would refuse to receive me if I attempted to arrange a meeting; my predecessor had never had official dealings with him during his stay in Hanoi.’
Back in London, in my second year at Westminster, I received letters from Dad, sent from Hanoi through the diplomatic bag, but even these were necessarily infrequent. Indeed, the very first of them made clear why the correspondence would be so sparse. It described how my father, along with the diplomatic bag itself, had entered the country in an ancient and battered 1930s Stratoliner run by the International Control Commission, an organisation that was the one link between North Viet
nam and the West. He spared me some of the details, such as that one previous flight had been shot down ‘in error’ by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire, while another had crashed, killing all on board. What he did mention was the presence in the cabin of a large live goose named Alice, which was being flown in for the French ambassador’s Christmas dinner. His letter also laid out the route to Saigon, with stops in Cambodia and Laos, but omitted the story of how the ICC flight, deprived of fuel because of a coup attempt in Vientiane, had sat on the tarmac under threat of attack if it didn’t take off within three hours.
It’s a story he told later, with characteristic dry wit, in print:
The air crew, gallant but hysterical, reminded their audience of occasions on which they had been forced to land at Hanoi in the middle of American air raids or subjected to direct DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the North] surface-to-air missiles or, once, forced down by United States aircraft, dangers now increased by the temporary restriction of the beacon to three, not fifteen minutes. One would have preferred, as so often, ignorance, but the audience was captive. As we lolled among the bushes ten yards from the aircraft, a co-passenger, elegant in white silk suit, pointed in immaculate French to the dangers of our position: ‘We should sit in the airport building’. ‘What airport building?’ ‘There, of course’, he replied, indicating a rattan hut gaping with holes and leaning to one side. ‘But what dangers do you fear?’ ‘Dangers! My dear, there are communists’, the word spoken with fear and loathing, ‘on the other side of that hedge’. My interlocutor was, it emerged, a senior Polish delegate of the commission.
Poland, need I add, was a member of the Soviet Bloc, and thus a communist country, at the time.
It was no doubt considerate of my father to spare his teenage son the worst of the details, but there was no escaping a constant nagging sense of fear. The Vietnam War was almost inescapable, from newspapers and TV bulletins and discussion shows, to the pop charts. This was the time when ‘escalation’ became a buzzword, as the American troop presence in the country went from 185 000 to 385 000 over the course of 1966. What had been a team of US ‘advisers’ under President Kennedy was now a full-scale war-fighting army under President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Vietnam had seemed a small cloud on the horizon during my first year at Westminster School, where I arrived in the autumn of 1965, but it was already growing closer and darker by the summer of 1966, even before Dad told us he was going to Hanoi. It was the year of Country Joe’s ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag’ and Donovan’s ‘Universal Soldier’. But even the pop charts battlefield was contested. On the other side of the argument, to the disgust of the anti-war movement, the dirge-like ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’, by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, a hymn to US militarism, managed five weeks at number one in the USA.
There were no British troops in Vietnam, but Britain was still a nuclear-armed superpower, in its own eyes at least. The threat of nuclear war was still ever-present in the culture, in the form, to take one of many examples, of Barry McGuire’s bleak and strident song ‘Eve of Destruction’. At the end of 1965, during my first term at Westminster School, the BBC banned a film it had commissioned from the director Peter Watkins, The War Game, a drama made to look like a quasi-documentary about the UK in the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear strike. It was the classic censorship own-goal, drawing far more attention to the issue than it might otherwise have received, and ensuring that the film, which was a justifiably frightening piece of work, would for decades be a sought-after rarity at film clubs and festivals overseas. (It would not actually be shown on the BBC until 1985.)
At school, the tolling of Big Ben every quarter of an hour, just a couple of hundred metres away, day and night, could seem a macabre reminder: maps of where a nuclear holocaust might strike in London always put the Houses of Parliament at ground zero. I’d be exaggerating to suggest it was a constant preoccupation, but in a school where debate and engagement with current affairs were encouraged from the moment you arrived, it had a tendency to lurk in your mind.
Still, life went on, and I could already feel that my next five years were bound to be happier than my last.
* * *
Westminster was such a reprieve, after Summer Fields, that the relative privations of being a new boy had been easy to take. The overriding feeling at the beginning was simple relief that I would never be beaten again. I might conceivably be expelled, but never beaten. Westminster had abolished all corporal punishment several years before, along with its archaic top-hat-and-tails uniform—you wore a grey suit, a white or pale-blue shirt, and a black or blue tie: anonymous enough, in an area which housed many Civil Service departments as well as the parliament, to prevent you from standing out. Many other major schools still practised corporal punishment at the time. Some of them still let seventeen- and eighteen-year old boys, as well as masters, carry it out. When I saw Lindsay Anderson’s If… in 1968, with its depiction of just such a place, at which armed revolt breaks out against its gross sadism and the enforcement of absolute discipline, I knew people at other Great Public Schools for whom it was practically a documentary.
Westminster, under the laissez-faire and amiably distant leadership of headmaster John Carleton, was, for its time, probably the most liberal and free-thinking of the major public schools of the 1960s. There was technically something called ‘fagging’, but it was nothing like the licensed abuses practised elsewhere. At other schools, a first-year would ‘fag’—run errands, make tea or coffee, toast crumpets over the fire—for a boy in his last year, a role which could also, depending on the senior boy, involve floggings for stepping out of line; some senior boys were also reputed to sexually abuse their fags. This kind of individual fagging had been abolished at Westminster in favour of a collective system: manning the toasters for your school house at mealtimes for a week, washing up the milk bottles, or being on wake-up duty, which just meant going round the dormitories and studies in the morning rousing people out of their beds.
There was a compulsory Combined Cadet Corps, the prospect of entering which in my second year I frankly dreaded. Boys serving in it seemed to spend all their free time blacking their boots or applying pipe-clay to their belts. I also, with my broken arm getting more deformed as I grew, feared a repeat of the humiliations of gym class at Summer Fields. But my timing was lucky: before that could happen, ‘Corps’ became voluntary, and was eventually phased out altogether.
I was placed in a house called Liddell’s, named after the father of Alice Liddell, she of Alice in Wonderland. Before becoming dean of Christ Church at Oxford, where Lewis Carroll (who used the pen-name CL Dodgson) taught mathematics and had a photographic studio, Liddell had been headmaster of Westminster. The house named after him, however, had only been founded in 1956. It was put together as an afterthought out of existing school property, rather than being purpose-built, so that physically it was not so much a house as a higgledy-piggledy collection of houses, full of awkward little staircases, tiny, almost secret rooms, and narrow passageways. In its centre was the arch by which you entered Little Dean’s Yard, the school’s quadrangle, from Dean’s Yard proper, the administrative centre of the great medieval abbey in whose shadow we all lived, worked and studied. Our daily lives were mostly lived within the Westminster Abbey grounds, and we walked to morning service in the abbey’s South Transept through its ancient cloisters. Before my voice broke, I sang in the abbey, just one small treble somewhere up the back in a Westminster Choral Society performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
Meals were taken in College Hall, a medieval refectory which had once belonged to the abbot of Westminster. ‘Up School’ was where assemblies were held, the film society screened movies, and plays were staged. The ‘School’ of ‘Up School’ was a long, high-ceilinged building which had been the monks’ dormitory as far back as the eleventh century, and, more recently, had been restored after German incendiary bombing in the Blitz. It was here, acting in school plays, that I was
taught to ‘project’ my voice: if the director, standing at the back wall of this vast room, couldn’t hear you, you weren’t doing it right. Later, elocution, emphasis and projection were skills I didn’t really have to learn as a broadcast journalist: acting and poetry readings had prepared me from an early age.
The housemaster at Liddell’s, Charles Keeley, was, like my father, a man in his mid-forties, but he seemed much older. He smoked a pipe almost constantly, and perhaps because of the effect of smoke on his vocal chords, spoke in a near-whisper. He was certainly not a harsh man, though I had my run-ins with him over time, but compared to his predecessor, Stephen Lushington, he was regarded by some of the older boys in Liddell’s as almost tyrannical. This was because Lushington had had a reputation as being astonishingly lax. In this all-male school, he was rumoured to have walked into a boy’s study to find him having sex with a girl. Lushington quietly withdrew, saying only ‘Lock the door next time.’ During his tenure, Liddell’s had also acquired a reputation for marijuana use.
Charles Keeley was made of slightly sterner stuff, in that he did at least try to impose some discipline, but he was an ineffectual man, and besides, it was a difficult time and place to be a disciplinarian. This was, after all, in the middle of London at the beginning of the youth revolution.