by Miriam Moss
We’re in.
“What did you say to him?” I ask.
“I said that you had heard of the polo club and had come all the way from England to see it.”
I’m smiling. “You’re a genius,” I say.
He shrugs matter-of-factly. “Well, you have to lie sometimes.”
We drive along a narrow road bordered by newly planted trees and park next to a long, low white building with high windows. A solemn young man in fatigues emerges from the building and greets us.
We are shown around, first through the long, white stable block, empty but for a couple of polo ponies. It’s cool inside, almost gloomy, with just a brilliant patch of sun at the far end, where the other open door is. It smells wonderfully of horses, and sawdust and hay. We walk slowly down the length of the building, asking questions about the horses. Salah acts as our interpreter. I go over to talk to a beautiful chestnut that hangs its head outside the stable door and whinnies. I ask if it has a name, and I am told it is called Gazelle. Tears well up behind my sunglasses. It is what, in the quiet of my mind, I call my eldest daughter.
My husband asks questions while I compose myself. Then I ask if I can take photos on my phone. I can. We are joined by another stable hand—a Pakistani with intense eyes and thick black hair. He’s open and patient, answering our questions about the polo ponies with pride. There are ninety Thoroughbred Arab polo ponies, he says, for use by the military and the police, and several others stabled privately, some for the king of Jordan.
We pass outside, into the light. I can see the low, white buildings in the military zone next door that looked like silos on Google Earth. To our right are a number of pens and paddocks, one the whole length of the stable block, full of mares and young foals. The mothers crop the green hay off the beaten-earth floor. The little ones suckle. Occasionally one of them is spooked, bucking and cantering to another part of the paddock. They are beautiful. Their flanks shine; their bodies are lean and well-muscled, their manes clipped short. Tails swish. The continuous sound of cropping ponies fills the air.
I take pictures, but I feel disoriented, worried that the polo ponies will distract me, that I won’t be able to hold on to why I’m here. We come to a white wall at the end of the track with a solid gate we cannot see through. The gate is pulled back, and we pass inside. This paddock, we are told, holds the ones bred from English polo ponies. They have to be kept separate from the Arabs. They don’t get along well together. They probably don’t speak the same language, I say, unthinking. Salah interprets, and the men laugh. The ponies, the man in fatigues says, are left out in the paddocks throughout the winter to make them strong for the game. He puts his hand to his heart when he says strong. They play four to a team in the beating sun.
I walk in among the polo ponies, right into the middle—and suddenly I see my hills. I know them. I cannot believe I am here. These are my hills, this is my place. I feel amazement and disbelief. I feel exhilarated and disembodied. This is the place where I sat in the plane for four days while the deadline ticked away. This is where I walked in front of hundreds of reporters to have my picture taken, here, under the nose cone of the VC10. In this valley, between the running hills to the south and the sharper incline to the north, three huge passenger airlines sat in the heat of the desert trussed with explosives. For four days, this was the epicenter of the world’s tension.
And there is no trace. No twisted debris, just the quiet ponies and the low talk of the men behind me. And as I stand there under the huge blue dome of the sky, a small whirlwind starts up. Approaching from the east, it grows, twisting into a funnel, gathering momentum, and swirling in through the open paddocks toward us. The ponies seem unconcerned as the whirlwind stirs up the sand about them, blowing itself out before it reaches us.
I study the landscape. The ground is hard, impacted sand with scrub and scattered rocks. A good place to land a plane. I remember the faint ghost of the airstrip running across the Google Earth map, and I know it really was here that I came in that VC10, out of the sky to the east, to land amid the rising red dust and to taxi into the plane’s last position.
They ask if we would like to see the polo field, and we walk in hot sunshine along the avenue of paddocks parallel to the airstrip, stopping occasionally to stroke a stud horse, to take its picture. I lag behind, taking film of the hills, panoramas of the place that had enclosed me, that I had looked out on from within.
The polo field, the new grass one, is irrigated with water every night, they say. And the grass is luscious: a huge, wide, flat expanse of it, a lawn on my airstrip. There are hedges, a pavilion with bougainvillea climbing up it; birds chirrup in the lines of newly planted olive and palm trees and in among the shrubs. It is fecund. There’s an enclosure for tethering polo ponies, a shady pergola for the riders to wait in, and grass . . . so much grass. Did you have to bring new earth in order to plant this grass? I ask, needing to know if my footprints are still under there. Yes, they say, we did.
I leave the men talking and walk out into the middle of the polo field. Did I walk here then, across this space? Perhaps to get to the line of minibuses that finally took us away, into Amman, to be released to the InterContinental Hotel? Were they parked here, on this spot? Or is this where we had our photo taken with the guerrillas?
Suddenly, as I stand in that flat space, two minarets on the far hillside begin their call to prayer. The song of it washes across the land, the two voices pausing in turn, as if waiting for the other to sing the next phrase. They were not here all those years ago but have come to claim the land as theirs. The sound of the eternal Arabic words is perfect. The final touch.
Slowly we retrace our steps back to the stable block, where white plastic chairs have been put out and tea has been poured into glasses. Three more stable hands join us. It’s the famous Jordanian hospitality: solemn, respectful, polite, and full of humor. We drink our tea and are asked to stay for lunch, but sadly we have to move on.
Before I go, I stand watching a beautiful white stallion drink delicately from a trough. He lifts his head, and water droplets fall from his soft muzzle. The heat haze shimmers under the midday sun, and little black beetles climb in and out of pockets of sand at my feet. I had no idea that all these years later I would stand here and feel so held by these hills. The benevolent landscape seems to accept me, in peace this time. And the fear that I felt, called to the surface and out into the open air, seems to have lost its power.
I could be wrong, but I think I left it behind on that Revolutionary Airstrip, the one that lies just below the surface of the Jordanian polo club.
// Postscript //
While this story is a work of fiction, it is grounded in a real, life-defining hijack that I experienced when I was fifteen. I was there in the Jordanian desert, sitting in a hijacked plane trussed with explosives, for four days, while the deadline approached. I really did travel alone back to boarding school, get my belt caught on a grenade, search through trays, looking for food, and have my picture taken by the press in the desert.
But for years I never wrote about it. It was only when my publisher encouraged me to try that I started to believe that perhaps it was the right time. I began by researching, realizing that I needed to place my story in the historical framework of the real event. So I read about the hijackings, looked online, visited the VC10 plane at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, and eventually returned to Jordan.
When I began to write, I remembered a great deal and was overtaken by powerful feelings and strong images, but there were still gaps. Try writing in detail about four days that happened a very long time ago: where and who everyone was, what they were wearing, how they moved and behaved. It’s hard recalling conversations that took place last month, never mind more than forty years ago, so the conversations and characters in my story are imagined. For example, there was no Maria who might have been assaulted, although there were rumblings, which we “children” were not allowed to know about, that something u
ntoward might have happened with one of the hijackers. Nor was there a drunken Mr. and Mrs. Newton, though some of the passengers did have too much to drink when the duty-free was being given out to anyone who wanted it. There was a boy with a terrapin, but I never spoke to him. I did sit next to an older boy at the beginning of the hijack, but he is not the fictional David. And so if anyone on the plane thinks they are being described in these pages, that really is not the case. Any inadvertent similarities are entirely coincidental. I also altered other details for dramatic purposes to enhance the story. This is a work of fiction.
There were many other people on that plane in 1970. They will have their own stories to tell. This one is mine.
// Acknowledgments //
With thanks to Charlie Sheppard, Chloe Sackur, Alison MacLeod, and Robert Hull; also to Honoria, Marian, Caroline, and Deborah, and to the wonderful friends and family who offered invaluable advice and insight. My special thanks, though, go to Stephen, for his unwavering love and support.
// A Q&A with Miriam Moss //
At what point did you feel the most frightened during the hijack?
I felt most frightened when the hijacker came through the curtain at the beginning, waving a gun. I had never had a gun pointed at me before, and the fact that his hand was shaking and he looked so nervous and highly strung made me feel certain that I was going to die. I was also very frightened when I heard there was a bomb on board that could be detonated at any time.
What was the most difficult part of the entire ordeal?
The most difficult part of the whole ordeal was not being able to tell my parents that I was alive. (I couldn’t bear the thought of my family suffering unnecessarily, thinking I was dead when I wasn’t.) It was also very hard not knowing where they were, and whether anyone was going to meet me off the plane in London after I was released.
Did you actually talk to any of the hijackers? Did you ever feel empathy with any of them?
Yes, I did talk to a few of the hijackers. Their stories of suffering and homelessness touched me, made me really think what it might be like to have nothing: no home, no possessions, no country, and no prospect of any of these things in the near future. I couldn’t feel empathy with them for putting so many people’s lives at risk, but I could feel empathy for their situation as refugees.
What did you do when you got back to the UK—did you go right back to school?
When I got back to the UK, my mother took me down to her family’s farm in Cornwall, where she grew up. We stayed there for a few days while she checked to see how I was. But I was missing crucial schoolwork and had exams to take, so I was soon returned to school.
Did you keep in touch with any of the other passengers after the hijacking?
We exchanged a few letters, but then lost touch. But since the book was published in the UK, I’ve been contacted by quite a few people involved in the original hijacking.
What made you decide to write this book after forty-five years?
It felt like the right time to write this book. I had gone from writing nonfiction (before my three children were at school full time) to picture books (while they were growing up) to short stories (as they began to leave home for university). At this stage, with more space and time for writing, a longer novel felt possible. But it was very hard to begin with, digging up all that fear and reliving it again in order to write convincingly.
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// About the Author //
MIRIAM MOSS was born in England but grew up in Africa, China, and the Middle East. She is the award-winning author of more than seventy children’s books. She now lives in East Sussex, England, with her family.