Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  There's been a change of seating. Murli has found a confrère and crossed the aisle. Next to me now is Jonathan, aged three, driving a Dinky toy abstractedly up and down my left forearm. 'Jonathan, he's bigger than you and might bash you,' his mother says. There's some truth in this. Jonathan, I discover, is going to visit Granny Pink (as opposed to Granny Cigarettes) who lives on the Charf in Tangier. His soft toy is a much patched creature called Foxy, one of whose eyes is suspended on a thread like some horrible example of Arab justice half accomplished. Jonathan and the maimed Foxy are strapped in together. We land with precision at Gibraltar. Its runway begins and ends in the sea.

  Gibraltar is a mixture of Spanish courtesy and British phlegm. There is too that peculiar cohesion of any besieged community.

  In A.D. 710 the Moors swept into southern Spain, extending their empire steadily northwards. The following year Tariq-ibn-Zeid took possession of the natural rock fortress, naming it Djibl-Tariq, or Tariq's Hill, which was subsequently corrupted by the British to Gibraltar. But for seven and a half centuries before it was captured for Britain in 1704 by Sir George Rooke (with Dutch assistance) the Rock remained a Moorish stronghold, its natural limestone caves being fortified progressively, and with increasing sophistication to become the mysterious NATO storerooms of the present day. The Rock forms one of two massive promontories known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules and left, as legend has it, when the hero wrenched Europe and Africa apart. The other, the Djibl-Moussa, stands to the east of Tangier; and sailors used to believe that the narrow Strait formed a protective bottle-neck that saved the familiar Mediterranean from being overwhelmed by the unknown Western Ocean, or Atlantic.

  The Rock's utility, particularly to the English living in Tangier, is unchanging. 'Next the talk turned upon Gibraltar, that inevitable topic; the great Gibraltar, centre of attraction for all Europeans scattered along those [North African] coasts, where their sons are educated and where they themselves go to buy their clothes, order furniture, hear the opera, and inhale a mouthful of European air.' So writes the Italian Edmondo de Amicis in 1879, setting out for Fes as official chronicler of a small embassy sent by Victor Emmanuel to the Sultan Moulay Hassan, and studiously conscious when selecting a docile mule for the journey that: 'From henceforth until our return all the hopes of Italian literature in Morocco were pinned to that saddle.'

  But the Gibraltarian utility de Amicis reasonably neglects to mention is the Sterling Area and its low-tariff imports. Main Street boasts virtually any portable luxury in the world. It's a raven's hoard and glitters, precedence going to cameras, watches, jewellery, and a veritable insanity of electronic equipment. One could comfortably shop for the moon on Main Street; or equip one's terrestrial home with everything from baby-cry alarms to closed-circuit television and video tapes. Her shopkeepers are well used to customers strapping on their new Omega, or breast-pocketing a battery of Sheaffer pens, while ruefully declining their presentation boxes.

  My own commercial occasion on the Rock was innocent in the extreme. For years I'd travelled with a battered Olivetti, paying excess in aircraft, rather than buy a second typewriter to live in Tangier. Next morning accordingly saw me on Main Street. 'I want to buy a typewriter, but pay with a cheque on London.' A large store immediately said yes; but neither of their models was familiar. Rejoicing that I could have some sort of typewriter and be in Morocco before my bank noticed, I went on my way. I was to have lunch with a delightful Gibraltarian family who had befriended me for some years. Arriving at midday, I raised the question of my search. After some telephoning, my host assured me that the Olivetti concession was held by the Supermilk Company. This arrangement struck me as more Moroccan than Gibraltarian, However I found my way to the dark vaults of the Supermilk Company where, sure enough, if after a moment's reflection, a raffish gentleman recalled that he was indeed Olivetti.

  'Only I'm afraid we don't have one of the things, old boy. Nothing at all'

  'I see. Are any of the shops likely to?'

  ' 'Fraid not, old boy. There's not one on the Rock.'

  I asked him which of the unfamiliar models I'd been offered might be the better buy. In as many words he really hadn't a clue; but some more moustache manipulation recalled to him that, 'Beddles have a whassit, old boy - an Emperor?'

  'An Imperial!'

  'That's it, old chap! Stupid of me!'

  'Not a bit,' I said; thanking him, and dashing off to buy my Japanese-built Leicester-licensed Imperial 2000. I was assured it was the only Imperial 2000 on the Rock, and felt duly proud. The following day, fluttering some old labels and bearing arabesques of my own invention drawn with a piece of chalk I happened to find in a gutter, it entered Tangier, with myself, and the happy cry of 'touriste!'

  I met a retired Scots couple, holidaying for a fortnight. He had been in shipping, and his Glaswegian accent was so remorseless that I could sometimes scarcely follow it. Inevitably it became an occasion when the disjunction of my own accent and name made me a suspicious character. But I 'passed' on the three tartans I'm entitled to wear (the subject was not of my raising), and after that we got on swimmingly. Yes, they'd been across to Tangier but had 'no laiked it at a' '. The food was good at the Rif hotel where they'd spent a week, and taken all their meals. But it was full of Americans, and the drinks were 'sae expensive a mon wodna' believe it'. Here Hamish, who was severely suited with a starched collar, signalled for more Gibraltar-priced Fundador with some satisfaction: his wife, who wore a hat, could put it away too.

  'But I tell you, Angus, that's a bonny ship. We enjoyed the crossing.'

  'Clyde-built,' I confirmed, thinking of the familiar Mons Calpe I was due to board the following evening. I asked whether she'd bought anything nice, and the answer was 'only leather'. Canny and wise.

  There is something both noble and sad about the laisser-aller Portsmouth with its warships, incorrigible Lipton's, its shop-door lounging Indian traders, its Moroccan workforce observing the letter of alien laws, its ambulatory black bundles of Spanish grandmothers in shiny lace-ups, its Marks and Spencer concession beneath another name, its no-pistol British bobbies, its passionate local politics, its beautiful cross-blooded tan women, its vast networks of military tunnelling beneath the soaring limestone, its huge area of near-vertical concrete which catches drinking water from the sky, its limitless supplies of Union Jacks and red, white and blue paint, its schoolgirls in bottle-green tunics and little boys in Persil shirts with striped ties. Over them all there often hangs a greyish pile of cloud currently described as God's proof of the Rock being rightfully British, or more correctly Gibraltarian appropriately blessed, Gibraltar is no paradise. With the Spanish frontier closed its people, particularly adolescents, easily develop claustrophobia. You often see a group, or loner among these naturally bilingual, commodity-spoiled children, gazing wistfully at the physical exits: the civil cum military airstrip; and waterport.

  'We have a boat - of sorts,' a Gibraltarian told me. 'Otherwise we'd just go mad. In the old days we used to picnic two or three times a week in the cork forests,' He jerked his head sadly towards Andalucia. I looked up at the towering, barren Rock, rough with olive scrub like the nap on an army blanket, and realized how the loss of cork forests could hit one quite as numbingly as it hit Ferdinand the Bull after the bee had caused his retiring nature to be misinterpreted. The Scots couple had had a good crossing to Tangier. I had never had a bad one myself. This troubled me, because no nineteenth-century traveller appears ever to have had it smooth. Not only was disembarkation at Tangier difficult, there having been no mole since Lord Dartmouth, Admiral of the Fleet, attended by Samuel Pepys as special counsellor, conscientiously blew it up with the British evacuation of 1684, but the departure of steamers from Gibraltar was arbitrarily dependent upon the state of the weather and the sobriety of skippers. De Amicis' crossing was uneventful; but he made his landfall in the classic manner:

  When we were still about twenty feet from shore the entire rabble fell
upon us, and screaming in Arabic and Spanish, until we finally understood that, the water being too shallow to take the boats in any further, we were expected to effect a landing upon theirs backs; news which while it quietest our fears of losing any of our belongings, aroused no less lively ones of acquiring some of theirs in the form of vermin. The ladies were taken off in chairs, in a sort of triumphal procession, while I made my entry into Africa astride of an old mulatto, my chin resting on the crown of his head and my toes trailing through the water.

  The astonishing Amelia Perrier, whose caustic and delightful book puts to rout de Amicis, that representative of 'Italian literature', beating him soundly about the ears with a parasol perhaps, had a similar disembarkation. First the transfer from steamer to long-boat, and then:

  Suddenly I was alarmed by a hideous yelling and screaming close at hand, which was responded to by the boatmen. We stopped, and with some difficulty the boat was turned stern-on to the land, which was, however, not yet visible. Then I perceived that we were surrounded by a swarm of brown half-naked monsters, of the wildest aspect, who clung to the boat, shouting and yelling in the most frightful mariner. These proved to be amphibious Moors and Jews, who make it their employment to walk out through the surf to the boats, and carry ashore the goods and passengers, boats not being able to approach, sometimes in bad weather, within a hundred yards of the shore. Two of these, with frantic cries and gesticulations, held aloft a chair, into which I was informed I was to entrust myself to be carried ashore. It was an almost exact repetition of the getting from the steamer to the boat. In the rolling surf it was impossible to keep the boat steady for an instant, so I had to stand on the gunwale held by my fellow-passengers, and wait until the boat rolled to within sufficient proximity of the chair, when there was a general shout, I was let go, and dropped backwards into it. The bearers of the chair then turned, and waded through the surf to the shore, They were stalwart fellows (Jews — Moors will only carry good and True Believers), but still the waves rushed in with such violence, that it was with difficulty they kept their footing: and though they held the chair high above their shoulders. I enjoyed a cold foot bath all the way. . . . At last we reached

  the beach, up which they ran, and deposited me beyond the reach of the waves: then they seized she chair again, rushed back into the sea, and disappeared in the darkness.

  Tangier today has a small modern harbour, though until very recently the largest cruise liners still anchored off in the bay. Entry is effected simply down an orthodox gangplank, and the Moors who swarm on board a docking ship are nothing more romantic than brass-badged porters.

  I found a taxi in Gibraltar's Main Street rank, collected my baggage, and drove to the waterport. It was a curious experience. I had distinctly the impression that the old Gibraltarian who drove me shouldn't have been doing so and was really some species of parking attendant pensioner. He entered the cab with a sort of surreptitious glee, was uncertain of the gears, turned into one-way streets, and executed an elaborate three-point turn in Main Street, which is only a few metres wide. However we arrived at the ferry, my driver crouched with furious concentration over the wheel of the vast Mercedes, and with an ecstatic, almost drugged, grin on his face.

  Already in possession of a ticket, I had timed my arrival before that of the Moroccan police. No one may board the ferry until he has first been inspected by the Moroccans Ob Gibraltar's quay. I queued perspiring at the relevant desk, my immigration card neatly typed, passport opened at the right page, ready to deferentially remove my sun-glasses and answer the maddest questions. There are two decades when a passport stays embarrassingly young. My second still said 'schoolboy' when I was twenty. This current one has 'undergraduate' Foreign Office amended to 'author'. With the fourth I shall opt unshakably for 'admiral'. Who knows but the fifth may not simply be a computer card.

  The policeman has arrived. He's not going to remove his dark glasses. I hand him the papers with a French greeting. 'Touriste,' I say brightly.

  He looks up. 'Acteur?'

  'Non—auteur.' I mumble. 'Ecrivain.'

  'Undergraduate finished?' In English, insulting my French.

  'Undergraduate finished,' I agree.

  For which newspapers do you write?' French again.

  'I don't write for newspapers,'

  'Just books?'

  'Yes.'

  'About Morocco?'

  'Non, non. Je suis en vacances." I manage that strained little laugh the British have inbuilt But foreigners, and especially Moroccans, produce neither alarm nor condescension in me.

  'Then you are a tourist,' the policeman announces, as though it were I who had initiated a tiresome inquisition.

  'Yes,' I say brightly.

  He slams shut and shoves me my passport, with that finest innuendo of insult one does best to ignore. Most often Moroccan immigration is charming.

  The Scot was right, and the Mons Calpe is 'a lovely wee thing'. The comforts of leather armchairs and iced drinks were not available when the intrepid Miss Perrier made her crossing, spreadeagled for purchase on a hatch-cover of the Wolf, and surrounded by 'Moors and Jews . . . most of them apparently of the lowest class, and indescribably filthy and wretched in their aspect'. But the weather was more kind to me as well. It was a still, golden evening, and the Mediterranean shone piercingly. Even God's British cloud had evaporated. Although we should dock at Tangier in darkness, an advantage of the evening crossing was that the Rock was lit at its most striking, from the sea. One could see the finely tiled roofs of the little town shining in the sun, where it huddled at the base of the soaring grey massif. This particular quay lies parallel with, and only some twenty-five metres distant from the end of the airstrip. A commercial jet dropped down on to it, its every aligning manoeuvre fascinatingly close, and braked with a bellow of reverse thrust. Offshore lay a couple of Russian tankers. There was a flotilla of NATO destroyers in the naval dock, and the tiny, bright yellow submarine, alongside its French mother frigate, that was Commander Cousteau's latest, and deepest-diving bathyscaphe. But then Gibraltar, and more so Tangier, is rather like one of those self-conscious pictures pinned to the blackboard to instruct young children in languages, 'Where is the yellow submarine . . .? 'What is the aeroplane doing . . .? Everything is brightly, busily there. On the boatdeck there was being enacted something superb. As Gibraltar stood sunlit astern, a Moroccan in a white djellaba was slipping bright yellow barboosh from his feet and preparing to pray. The image of East meeting West was too splendid for niceties. I brought up my camera and shot shamelessly with chattering teeth.

  As the friends with whom I was going temporarily to stay had young children and ate at midday, I decided to have something to eat. Taking the meal slowly in the near-deserted saloon, I noticed only that the captain and three of his officers had also sat down to eat. The captain was a very large man in white ducks. Suddenly there was a blare of Moroccan music, Munching steadily as I watched the hypnotic sunlight on the Mediterranean, I thought no more than that we were to be treated to canned mood music, and that some fault in the earsplitting speaker system would at once be corrected, Not so, I looked up. The source of the sound was the transistor radio of two rather hairy hippies sprawled on the other side of the salon beyond the captain's table, and wearing not very clean Moroccan djellabas.

  'Turn that thing off!' snapped the captain.

  The volume dropped, but the captain was unsatisfied, and simultaneously the head hippie was on his feet and ambling towards him.

  'Listen,' he addressed the captain. 'I paid seven dollars to ride on this crummy boat, and nobody's going to tell me what to do.'

  I stiffened straight as Miss Amelia Perrier.

  'Turn it off at once!' said the very stout captain.

  'I'm not a British citizen and you can't order me,' said the hippie. 'So don't you throw your weight around.'

  That did it. The word 'weight' had been subtly loaded. Very quietly the captain said: 'I am the Master of this ship, sir, an
d aboard her I am the law, and can have you arrested.' For a second his face registered self-annoyance as it occurred to him that the American hippie might not understand this particularly English usage of the word 'sir'.

  'I'm not a British citizen,' the hippie said again. His companion had turned off the radio; and the captain was on his feet. He said something to a steward. As the man hesitated a second, I supposed he must have been sent for a revolver and irons. In fact it proved to be the Moroccan policeman. I made a gesture. Nervous lest the Moroccan policeman saw me in conference with the hippies, I gazed out of a window near them and muttered aside: 'The captain can. How well do you know Morocco?'

  'Second trip,'

  'Don't aggravate the Moroccan police. It's not worth it.' Feeling melodramatic and foolish, I sidled off. The Moroccan policeman arrived and took the hippies' passports. I didn't feel happy for them. The group moved off to conference in the purser's office, Later I met the chief hippie in the gents, He was having some difficulty with his djellaba, which is a garment designed to facilitate urination only in the orthodox squatting position. 'What happened? Have you got your passports back okay?' He smiled, charming and relaxed. 'Sure! I went along an' apologized. It's all fine,'

  The Mons Calpe steamed on imperturbably towards Tangier.

  In July of 1969, 98000 miles distant from Earth, an Apollo astronaut depressed the release of a modified Hasselblad camera to produce another sample of what for some years had been a rapidly developing and dramatic new science, The result is a colour photograph which shows the entire continent of Africa with, to the east, the whole of Arabia; to the north, the Mediterranean, Italy and the Aegean; to the west, the Spanish peninsula. Obscured only by cloud are northern Europe and the British Isles. Night had fallen over Tibet; and the beginnings of Mongolia, hidden by the globe's curve.