So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  While standing there with our baby we saw a lioness wandering across the other side. There was no vegetation, just rock and dried up earth. She was desperately thin, her belly as close to her spine as a grey-hound’s, and not like a lioness’s. She did not turn towards us and we were relieved.

  After fifteen months, despite the domestic bliss and Riddelle conceiv-ing again, leaving the estate was a relief. CDC set up an office in Dar es Salaam under a Representative for Tanzania, Arthur Lewis, who had been Minister of Finance of Zambia when it was still a colony. He, as Rep T, reported to Peter Wise and I worked as his executive assistant. The timing could not have been worse. The United Kingdom was having problems with Southern Rhodesia, which had made its Unilat-eral Declaration of Independence under the minority white leader Ian Smith. All talk was about NIBMAR – no independence before majority African rule. Tanzania’s President Nyerere broke off diplomatic rela-tions with Britain. The consequence for us was that CDC could not make any new investments in Tanzania. All I could do was study accountancy, keep the office books and portfolio manage our existing investments. Arthur made me alternate director for fourteen compa-nies. I attended their board meetings all over Tanzania, often flying over Kilimanjaro and seeing its two extinct black volcanic craters surrounded by snow. There were strained discussions with fellow ex-patriot businessmen whose companies were being scrutinised with a view to nationalisation. Arthur was bringing in an already approved commitment to invest in three game lodges in the Serengeti. We also had a commitment to Permanent Housing Corporation of Tanzania, overseen by Jack Lyle of the Treasury who was years later to feature significantly in my work.

  Our apartment belonged to the British High Commission, which was now the British Interests Section of the Canadian High Commission. There was no room for Germanus and his wife, so they had to find a place in one of the miserable, but new, National Housing Corporation estates. We took them to the sea which they had never seen. They were amazed, and laughed at the Indian women fully clad in saris wading far out towards the reef. Whenever an airplane flew overhead Tristan would point towards it and cry out ‘Am! Am!’ Germanus could not believe that a plane was big enough to carry us home so we took him to the airport. Really if only such a man with his mature and pleasant personality had been properly schooled he could have gone to univer-sity and had a fine career.

  That Easter Riddelle amazed me with a surprise present. She had created two straight line drawings in the style of Mondriane, with felt-tipped pen, and had them framed. This cheered us both. During lunch break we collected butterflies and her birth pains started while we were catching them. She gave birth to our daughter Isis. The Ocean Road Hospital had a top gynaecologist and a room for European mums. ‘A boy then a girl,’ the African nurses said. ‘How did you do it?’ Riddelle’s room was on the ground floor, no air-conditioning, with the doors and windows wide open for ventilation. It was clean but hardly sterile, overrun with chickens which went discreetly outside to lay their eggs.

  For Isis’s christening lunch our High Commissioner lent us the offi-cial silver plates and platters engraved with sovereign status. Twelve of us. All Europeans. It was the only time ever that I failed to make friends with the locals. Me, of all people. We invited them and they never showed up, some excuse about not being hungry. They never invited us. CDC did not matter to them because we had nothing further to offer during the embargo on investment and Nyerere’s absurdity in breaking off diplomatic relations. We were not wanted.

  As a breath of fresh air William Clark came for a few days for his Overseas Development Institute. He found my boss Arthur Lewis most enlightening. These two very different characters were at one in their developmental views: Arthur, with his CBE and membership of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, was a pallid little man of great knowledge who looked like a church mouse. William in contrast was booming with over-confidence, exposition after exposition, often mocked, but influential in high places. One morning he and I took baby Tristan into the sea and sat down in the shallows. A fish settled a couple of feet from our knees, It had a brown sausage-shaped patch towards its tail. ‘Oh dear,’ said William. ‘What has happened to breakfast? How one can tell what time of day it is.’

  Tristan’s baby laughter added to ours.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it a lovely day,’ said William. ‘Oh, good old God.’

  His Institute had appointed three young men to assist in various Tanzanian ministries. ‘I wonder’, he said, ‘what they are doing and if it’s wholly wise. Well, that’s what I came to see.’

  Then we heard of the unexpected death of Vivien. Larry had always insisted she have her incipient TB attended to. With Jack Merivale this had been overlooked and it killed her. Hers was a rare version of that disease which had been on the sidelines of her health for so long. Her manic depression was now under control thanks to the development of new drugs. The way was set for her to have a healthy old age with a quality of life she enjoyed. Her dying like that was shattering.

  Before we left I opened a bank passbook for Germanus with three extra months’ pay. ‘Mingi money,’ he said. And we gave him the baby clothes Tristan and Isis had grown out of. Six months after we had returned to London he sent a photograph of himself and his wife, and their baby boy wearing the floppy blue hat Riddelle had made for Tristan, whom he had called Bwana Simba: Mr Lion.

  The end of my first tour of duty was like leaving a limbo, so little achieved, save for the birth of our family. However, ten years later, after Kilombero had been taken over but still not paid for by the govern-ment, the IMF made a study. The company, still managed by HVA, was in profit. National consumption of sugar had doubled. World Bank finance more than doubled the company’s size. The Kilombero River was dammed up in the mountains, creating a lake to guarantee year-round irrigation and prevent any repetition of flooding. In retrospect at least there is the satisfaction of knowing we had played a part in keep-ing it going during its worst time, and that it had all led to success. We stayed for a week in CDC’s leave house in Hill Street Mews in London W1 and gave a party for friends. I was set on buying a house, determined never again to pay rent. Robin Mills said his brother Nicholas, my old room-mate at Christ Church, had a house on the market: 31 Queensdale Road, Holland Park, W11. It took six weeks to raise a mortgage and complete: a three-storeyed house in a terrace with a small south-facing garden. The neighbours were Robin Mills, Rudolph Agnew who became head of Consolidated Gold Fields, a BBC features writer, the deputy editor of Punch, and Peter Yates the film director. I paid £14,500 with £5,000 help from my mother. She called it a beastly little artisan’s house. I referred to it as ‘our little dump’. We were both wrong. It’s now worth more than a hundred times as much.

  CDC’s Head Office at 33 Hill Street, Mayfair; was made up of three Victorian terraced houses thrown together with misaligned corridors. The entrance had a uniformed commissionaire and the front-of-house rooms were high-ceilinged and made into stylish offices with velvet curtains. The other offices with linoleum floors were drab. My boss was Peter Meinertzhagen. He had been a Regional Controller and now had the grey-sounding title of Co-ordinator of Operations: Deputy General Manager by any other name. For eighteen months I reported to him as Acting Secretary of the Estimates Committee. ‘Acting’ because I was not qualified as an accountant. I had only passed ACWA Parts One and Two. I had to summarise the quarterly reports produced by all the CDC regional offices. More than one hundred companies. Where our invest-ment was only in debentures that was a brief exercise. Where we had shareholdings, management responsibility or wholly-owned direct projects I had to produce summary cash flows, highlight the weaknesses and suggest solutions to key points, all derived from the multifarious reports submitted by the regional offices.

  The CDC General Manager was William Rendell, known and even addressed as GM. He had been Controller of Finance during the era of Lord Reith who had rescued CDC from financial ruin caused by unwise investments and lack of sound procedures. It
was now extremely sound. He had iron-grey hair, thick brows and deep eyes, a retroussé nose, his mouth pursed but with generous full lips. He took in every-thing he saw as if seeking things out, as if looking for burglar alarms. If he rang any internal telephone the recipient received a definitive ring tone and the response was an automatic: ‘Hello, GM.’ His Executive Management Board sounded rather like the cabinet of President Lincoln. When eleven votes were cast against a motion, Lincoln raised his hand, the only one to do so, and said: ‘The ayes have it.’

  I liked Peter Meinertzhagen. He agreed that if we had been working together in the colonies we would be inviting each other home for dinner. He accepted our invitation. He arrived in a suit and his wife in a way-out lace top with flowing white sleeves. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Dido.’ ‘Hi, I’m Riddelle.’ She was lovely. We had a fine time and they invited us back.

  The other leading lights were the Head of Engineering and the Agri-cultural Adviser, both lively and experienced, their departments supporting plantations and industries all over the Commonwealth Caribbean, Africa and South-East Asia. The Controller of Finance, like them, was also enlightened and well-read. However it seemed that any indication of excitement was discouraged. They were referred to as H. Eng, Agr. A and C. Fin. In fact outsiders on being introduced called him ‘Mr Fin’. Head Office (always called HO) had three expert solici-tors. Mostly it was staffed by operations controllers and their dogsbody accountants: my constant associates. Few of them were comfortable in their own skin. Over lunch they were solemn. It was not appropriate to raise a laugh or be controversial. Enthusiasm was frowned upon. Where I would have liked to say a project was amazing, they would say it was not uninteresting. They loved the use of double negatives. Not inappropriately. They lacked freedom of spirit. With my constant crunching of numbers I felt my breadth of vision, which had narrowed in Dar while keeping the books, narrowed even further; but the strength and effectiveness of CDC was a constant inspiration. The looseness of overseas aid as a concept had never attracted me, with all the opportunities for corruption in the recipients’ hands. CDC imposed balance sheet disciplines with all the commercial disciplines of finance and management.

  The journey to work was pleasant enough, from Holland Park tube station to Marble Arch, then a quick walk down Park Lane, turning left at the Dorchester Hotel into Hill Street. Riddelle’s father gave us a big dining table and eight chairs which the British Institute of Management was throwing out. My mother gave us some red velvet curtains saved from Apple Porch. I bought a large Princess Bokhara carpet (more likely Princess Manchester) and our dining room looked baronial. Riddelle did everything well. It was a pleasure to sit at the head of table for our dinner parties which were all successful save for two. We had invited a Scottish friend I had known since California days, who had married a black Jamaican. His parents disowned both of them. She was beautiful and intelligent, and was assistant to the head of the Common-wealth Secretariat. She knew how the world wagged and the workings of the City. Our male guests were fascinated by her conversation and also her cleavage, modest, but her black flesh interested them. Their wives were also in evening dress but their minds were drab, and the world of business was not theirs, nor was the City. They sulked.

  The other disaster was when we had the writer and actor Emlyn Williams, a famous wit, and at the same time the journalist, night club owner and MP, a personality who did voice-overs for bloodhounds advertising dog food: Clement Freud. There were other actors there as well but the antagonism of those two, both renowned raconteurs, shut us all into icy courtesy. This was before pampers saved civilisation. Nappies governed the day. I helped when at home. The square yard of soft cloth you folded into a kite shape, then placed the baby in the middle of it on your knees, and fastened the three ends together with a huge safety pin, avoiding the wriggling flesh. Every evening we filled, used and emptied the wash-ing machine and hung the damn things the length of the bathroom. We shared the cleaning and other chores. Most evenings I was carpenter-ing. Bookcases, shelves, clothes cupboards full length or smaller, radiator covers, her dressing table, covered with a mirrored surface, food racks, a garden table, and a great deal of painting. Luckily Nicholas and Sue Mills had installed curtains in the drawing room and bedrooms and they were fine.

  Everyone thought we were fortunate with our lovely house and family, but Riddelle was restless. She did not like me giving the babies their baths and wanted to do everything herself, turning her back on me in many ways. Mother Nature’s balm had disappeared. Isis was no longer in babydom. I went to ask Larry’s advice. That was between acts when he was playing a French butler in the Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear. His costume was extraordinary, a square cut striped waistcoat, high collar and foulard, his face made up with hard lines to contrast the comedy of his role. I was stunned by his incongruous looks during our intimate conversation. He smoked his cigarette as if everything were normal, in that get up. He wondered if it would help if I pretended to have an affair. Perhaps a better compromise would be for her to take the children to stay with friends, to be joined by me later. The following year we tried that.

  Twelve

  In the summer of 1968 I was asked to do a feasibility study in Cyprus on behalf of Hallway Hotels, one of CDC’s subsidiaries. Its chief exec-utive was a colourful character called Eric Hall. He had set up and managed a hotel in Zambia which was the first to accommodate whites and blacks on equal terms. This had attracted CDC. He said he thought I would thrive in his hotel business, so I accompanied one of his accountants to Nicosia.

  Archbishop Makarios was President, always in Greek Orthodox robes. There was a truce between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots after years of war had divided them. From my bedroom window in the Ledra Palace Hotel I could see the Turkish Star and Crescent flying above sandbags and barbed wire. The Old City of Nicosia was mainly Turkish and so was the north, plus the wired off Turkish enclaves along the south coast. All the rest was under Greek Cypriots.

  The accountant took me to the Treasury and introduced me to Mr Solomides, the relevant authority for hotel development. The most interesting introduction was to an elderly English architect of repute, married to a twenty-year-old with a tiny baby. The accountant left me with them.

  The architect’s first chosen site was a very poor area on a hill over-looking Nicosia. This was ideal. The land was cheap, the householders dying to sell up and enjoy the cash. He was arrogant and theatrical with windswept golden hair and a big gold signet ring. I followed his Bentley in my hired car. He took me to Akrotiri, a valley overlooking the sea, with dried up little rivers and smooth pebbles of every colour, as if wait-ing to be broken up and placed into mosaics. This, his preferred site, was idyllic. It was also in the middle of the British Sovereign Base Area with a sign warning that when the red flag was up the land was being used as a firing range. I ruled that site right out. We went up Mount Troodos and sat under a vine trellis in one of the villages to have lunch. Then he left me on my own.

  I decided to drive all round the island. The first thing which struck me was how the beaches were cordoned off for the exclusive use of the Greek Cypriots. The Turks were forbidden. In fact their enclosures had security gates and watchmen. I asked several of them, at a number of such enclosures, what on earth was happening, what were they think-ing of doing. They all said ‘Nothing’, their eyes helpless and hopeless. Their fields were overgrazed, the hens wretchedly thin. I drove round to Paphos where St Paul had stayed two millennia before on his way to be tried in Rome, his right as a Roman citizen. It was ideal for a sizeable tourist hotel by the beach. Then on to the west-ern end there was a promontory called Vouni. Spread over the top of it were the remains of a Roman castle which had been occupied by Othello and Desdemona. I could imagine Larry and Vivien in the roles (if only she had been) – I could hear their voices, her preference for the south-west side with its vistas of little bays far below, while he would have preferred the view with the slopes of Troodos sweeping down into the g
reat valley, leading north-east all the way across to the Pentedacty-los range above Kyrenia: the land he ruled, the Mediterranean beyond.

  The tops of the Troodos range were grown with a forest of conifers, redolent of Big Bear in California. That timber could have made splen-did log cabins, with swimming pools for summer and the ski slopes for winter. On the north coast Kyrenia, with its fishing harbour overlooked by little restaurants, was crying out for development, sparingly done. I wrote up my ideas while still in Cyprus, my room overlooked by the Turkish Cypriot flag and sandbags. Being there was a constant reminder of the Greek passion for Enosis,union with Greece, and the Turkish rejection. I recommended a long delay before considering any investment.

  At Nicosia airport I carried bulky rolls of maps and plans. I bumped into my godfather Ralph Richardson, his trilby at a high angle.

  ‘Mah dear chap,’ he cried, ‘how splendid you are. Are all those scrolls scientific? Are they geographical? Are you planning an inva-sion?’

  He had heard that Cyprus had beautiful villages and beaches and wondered about buying a place. ‘Very pretty,’ he said, ‘but far away and I don’t think I would really like to live here.’

  He travelled first class and I was at the back of the plane. At Heathrow, in the cold of England, Ralph had flung a tweed cape round his shoulders. While waiting at the luggage carousel he made a riposte which only he could have delivered. We were chatting when a man minced towards him, wearing a suit of a fabric which could have been designed for Odeon cinema seats, and a bookie’s peaked cap.