Our lunches were always popular. Only one veered near to catastro-phe. When Idi Amin was deporting the Asians from Uganda we had his High Commissioner down to Basingstoke. He was important to us because of his country’s appetite for banknotes. Don Ring, as Banknote Sales Manager, was in the chair, careful not to reveal his fluent Swahili and background as a colonial police officer in Kenya. Also present were Dennis Paravicini, General Manager of Minting and Metals, Edwin Eggins, a tall sleek grey-haired ex-ambassador, and me.
As we sat at table, Don Ring tried to make conversation. He drew the High Commissioner’s attention to our place mats. They showed the Bayeux Tapestry’s depiction of the Battle of Hastings. By way of expla-nation he said that was the last time we had been invaded. Dennis, who was also chairman of the Basingstoke Conservative Association, added a rejoinder: ‘Oh I don’t know. What about the Ugandan Asians?’
The High Commissioner did not understand.
Edwin cut in immediately: ‘Well, it was the last armed invasion.’
Luckily the High Commissioner was so dreary this flew past him. In retrospect, of course, the arrival in the United Kingdom of the Ugandan Asians transformed our country for the better, keeping shops open at times when working people could actually buy things, outside the tradi-tional British hours of nine to five.
To avoid seeing people I knew on British Airways flights I took to South African Airways. They had four 747s and because of apartheid were forbidden from flying over black Africa. They went south-west round Mauritania, sometimes landing in the Cape Verde Islands, then over South-West Africa, a flight of fourteen hours to Johannesburg, perfect for an excellent cocktail, dinner, full night’s sleep and a leisurely time to get up and have a proper breakfast.
They pronounced my name as if it were Dutch. ‘Meinheer Ooliffyiear, what would you like to drink?’ This was after the cham-pagne before take-off, and once we were settled in the air. I asked for a vodka dry martini. They had never heard of it. Word obviously got around. On my return journey when I asked for one the steward exclaimed: ‘You must be meinheer Ooliffyieer!’ They had the right kind of vodka and the Noilly Prat. A superb airline.
One time at Jan Smuts Airport on my way home I read in the London Times that Larry had been smitten with dermatomyositis and was in Brighton Hospital. My neighbour on the plane was a consultant physician. I showed him the article and asked what it meant. He drew a deep breath and prepared me for the worst. It was a rare and horren-dous illness; every cell of muscle and skin gets inflamed in a state of uproar. It could have been brought on by a lifetime of exhausting phys-ical and mental demands denying the requirements for rest. It could induce periods of raving insanity. He said that to judge from the report it was likely to be fatal within six months.
In the hospital, Larry was exactly as the man had said, if not worse. He was scarlet-faced, features swollen almost beyond recognition, and raving. I met the lady consultant. We sat together in a shiny white room. I started by saying it might be easier if I told her what I had found out about dermatomyositis. She agreed. She heard me out, then said that he would probably live no longer than six weeks.
A fortnight later the SAA flight flew directly over Brighton. From that height I could see the hospital far below. I felt all the love in my heart surging down to the tile roof and into his room. Quite a catharsis.
Further UN sanctions against South Africa led to oil and fuel short-ages. Internal flights became permanently filled to capacity, so I had to rent a car and drive everywhere, to Mbabane, to Maseru, than across to Gaberones. I loved it, even if the speed limit was only 40 m.p.h. I gave lifts, mainly to working-class Africans as the others had their own cars. Their knowledge of the status quo was detailed. They knew when it was safe to drive at 80 m.p.h., when the police at a particular dorp spent their time playing dominoes, and when I had to slow down, because the police always waited behind that poplar tree in their pursuit car. We never discussed politics. They were much more inter-ested in the Springboks rugby football, especially when playing against the British Lions. This was true of all races. When I was strolling in Bloemfontein I was stopped by an elderly white woman. The Spring-boks had lost. She said it was ‘Tirrible. That man Bennet. Virry virry strong. Our forward was in the air with the ball, going down over the British line and Bennet caught him. He held him mid air and turned him round. Virry virry strong.’ I said I was English and thanked her for the news. She laughed and patted my shoulder. When international sport was later subjected to sanctions that really upset all of them.
It has to be said that the application of sanctions had the opposite political and economic effects to the ones desired. South Africa, under strong leadership and with an able workforce, set about becoming self-sufficient in manufacturing its needs. As for oil, they had converted mass tonnages of their own coal into a fuel they called ‘sassol’, which they stored in exhausted coalmines. They then refined it.
With Swazi and Botswana’s banknotes being engraved after obtain-ing confirmation of their order, we were secure, but not yet in Lesotho. There I had had designs prepared. They were among the most beautiful, with the edges ablaze with flowering red-hot pokers. Ted Waddington sat on them while he looked for a suitable successor to himself. If their currency progressed he knew that he, like the other two permanent secretaries, would most likely become governor of the issuing authority. ‘A pleasingly select club’ was how he described that, but he had dire forebodings about his government’s combination of incompetence and greed.
Larry was still alive. His body was a wreck, his skin covered with purple smears, but he was sitting up and his eyes did have a twinkle. I was amazed. All those close to him had insisted he would rise up and be well again. They had not heard the consultant’s prognosis which I could not very well repeat to them. I had found their optimism jarring. But they were right. I asked him why he looked so happy.
‘Because they have given Peter Hall that fucking National. All power to him. Being Artistic Director should suit him fine. I, of course, had to combine that with those huge roles I played, which I had to do for chrissake because I’m an actor. Oh the relief!’
His recovery against all expectation showed he really was tapped into some source.
At home our new drawing room was complete with piano, Balinese painting, cupboards and soft furnishing. For the bedroom I was putting together the big four-poster bed we had had in Jamaica. It was majestic but needed a canopy. I designed a softwood frame to carry the fabric. Tristan was seven years old and I showed him how to use an electric drill. Meanwhile Isis was becoming adept at drawing. Clavelle was being weaned and Riddelle was becoming restless, even though we both felt that my being home only half the time gave us both a break. She loved all the banknote and coin designs I showed her and she loved my homecomings.
Fifteen
Francophone Africa’s fourteen countries were mainly our customers for passports and security print such as cheques and stamps. For years we had tried to prise away the banknote business, but the French Central Bank had tied their former African colonies except for Guinea-Conakry to themselves, creating the CFA franc. This was linked to the French franc to ensure stability. France had also established a Basic Law, which was a feather-light touch on the laws of the newly independent coun-tries, all with representation in the French Senate. This was to avoid the obscene and inflationary dictatorship of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the ‘Redeemer’.
Abidjan, then the capital of the Ivory Coast, was well developed. Conversations with its civil servants and bankers were articulate and literate. They had attractive French accents and the intonation of African voices. The French genius for maquillagehad created the most attractive women, disturbingly so some of them, with their high-arsed arrogant walk, lovely headdresses and satin black skin, much the best colour for diamonds. The Hôtel Ivoire had a slim skyscraper for all the bedrooms, centred round central lifts; enormous public areas, all along-side a swimming pool with islands in it, overhung with exotic
trees and orchids. It also had an ice-skating rink. This belle époqueput any Anglophone country in the shade.
French is a language which takes control of the speaker’s body as well as the mind: the Gallic shrug, the particularity of accompanying gestures, the pursing of lips and different eye-language. I drifted back into all of these from my times in France, in particular with Jenny, and the years in Berne where I had been working in French. It seemed perfectly natural, until I returned home and my children were asking in astonishment: ‘Daddy, what on earth is the matter?’
I replied in English, but still in my French mode: ‘Nothing,’ I said with a marked shrug, palms held upwards.
Thinking is also profoundly affected by the language. Pronunciation is a challenge for even the most fluent speakers, and the lashings of grammar produce a demand for precision beyond normal intent. English vagueness resists distillation into French. Voltaire said: ‘Tout ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français.’ This is constricting. I liken the effect to the differences in our school notebooks. English ones have horizontal lines, all open-ended. Only for arithmetic do we have verti-cal lines to create squares for each figure. The French use square-ruled notebooks for everything, even for essays. That to my mind symbolises what I would call their comparative inflexibility: grid thinking. ‘Il faut l’accepter. C’est comme ça.’ It leads to point scoring, rather than an even-handed democratic exchange.
One of the years I was going there the whole of sub-Saharan Africa was afflicted with the worst drought ever. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger, all passport customers, the dried up countryside was a never-ending scene of horror, with the corpses of starved cattle, rivers a frac-tion their normal depth, easily fordable, as if in death throes of their own. More than a million people, families with children were dragging themselves over the parched land for hundreds of miles in search of food and water. I met one of the leaders of the American Peace Corps, hollow-eyed and frustrated by lack of response to his appeals and direc-tions. He said that the most terrible irony was that people had portable radios and listened to the news, then reporting Nixon’s problems with Watergate. That last name had been literally translated into Arabic, and they had the impression that water was round the corner, somehow to be flown in from America.
When in the Senegalese capital of Dakar I heard that neighbouring Mauritania was going through a phase of disenchantment with the French. I rented a Peugeot 404 and drove north. The start of the jour-ney was tumbled over with thick green trees, vines splaying down, the people with negroid African features. The vegetation became sparser along the road side, the sun overhead no longer shaded. With the advent of palm trees human activity thinned out. Then there were the great baobabs, my favourite trees in all the world, standing apart like sentinels. They showed the end of what the poet President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, called ‘la négritude’. Then the last tree, the onset of thorn bushes, and finally the River Senegal: the border. On the coast overlooking the sea to the west was the small town of St Louis. Ahead, on the far side of the river was a ferry, a rusting hulk the size of a squash court. The only nearby human was a teenage boy fishing, his canoe pulled up on shore.
He spoke a little French. We agreed a fee for him to take me across and introduce me to the ferry driver who lived over there in a village of whitewashed houses. I locked my briefcase in the car boot. He paddled me over the slack river and made fast beside the ferry. He led me between corrugated iron gates and whitewashed walls, the soft sand making it heavy going. He pushed open a resistant gate and there, under a rattan awning, sitting on a rattan mat in a dazzling white robe and turban, was the ferry driver with his family.
He looked so like Larry as Othello that my jaw dropped, the negroid lips, trimmed beard and moustache, the fine well-bred nose and daunting eyes. They had an air of unspoken menace, for the belit-tlement of lesser men. The pale outstretched palm was to show how harmless he was, welcoming. He was a Maure, a Moor, a different species from Nègre. I wondered how Larry, who had never been anywhere in black Africa, could have so perfectly recreated the appearance and character of such a man. The voice had the same bass resonance. The Arabic he spoke to the boy who had guided me was euphonious and deep.
I had to stop standing and staring. He sensed that there was some-thing about him that I recognised. I sat down. One of his brightly robed wives, a woman of understated beauty, held a tiny cup in one hand, the coffee pot two feet above it, and poured the thinnest and most accurate of streams. She handed me the cup and saucer. He did speak French, was intrigued when I said I had an appointment with the Governor of the Central Bank and he wondered why. I said, as a cover, that I was a financier. In those days that term attracted respect.
I followed him along the path. His white sandals covered only the front of his feet. His walk was not like that of a man, plodding labori-ously like me in the soft sand. He moved with the grace of a stallion. We reached the ferry and climbed up the ladder to the driving platform. He took his denim overalls from a hook. Even when stuffing his robes into them he moved his hands with the self-love Larry had used as Othello, the Moor. He accepted my payment as if the sight of money were beneath him.
The engine started first time; we set off leaving the boy with his canoe. The other side I drove the car on to the ferry. On our return we were met by a few men wanting a lift the 120 miles to Nouakchott, the capital. I took my leave of the ferry driver, draped again in his resplen-dent robes. He raised his head and looked down at me with a compas-sionate look in his eyes and touched his heart. We never shook hands.
After a few miles we were stopped at the border post, not much bigger than a telephone booth, by an officious little Arab, typical of the country’s civil servants. He asked a series of irrelevant questions, pretended that my visa was out of date and eventually my passengers, eager to continue, told him to stop being such an ass and let us all go. I think he was after a bribe. There were many times I was glad to be giving lifts to people.
The sun lowered. We proceeded down the well-kept, dead-straight road, and it was encroached upon by sausage-sized James Bond beetles, impossible to avoid. The thorn bushes grew further apart until we left behind the last one, and the last beetle. The purity of the desert. Minarets appeared on the horizon. Pretty soon I was in the restaurant of a little three-star hotel where everything was scattered with sand.
My negotiations were unmemorable, the creative process normal and the outcome successful after a number of visits. I enjoyed going to the telex building. The machines were operated by attractive young men and women, all Moors, full of banter and horseplay, and no over-tones of sex. They were free and unaffected within established limits. The Mauritanian jewellery was distinctive, threads of silver, wound in arabesques and all kinds of shapes, pressed into necklaces and bracelets made from dark wood. Riddelle loved them.
Sometimes I went from Dakar to Nouakchott by plane, but the DC4 really was on its last legs. It had no air-conditioning. Instead, along the rack for hand luggage were rubber-bladed fans. When the engines outside were all started up and howling these tiny fans whizzed on and I felt they ought to be outside on the wings, helping.
On the coinage front the United States had started a major change. They wanted to reduce the intrinsic metal value of their coins so that it would be well below their face value. The difference is called seignior-age. Some decades earlier even the well-ordered Swiss had had a prob-lem when their white metal coins were made of silver and the London Daily Price of silver shot up, causing negative seigniorage. The intrinsic value was worth more than anything the coins would buy, so the coins disappeared into melting pots to be sold off as silver. The Swiss solved the problem by replacing them with the white metal alloy cupro-nickel. The Americans had done that already. They wanted to go even further. For the copper one cent they created a sandwich coin with a zinc core, clad with the traditional copper alloy, top and bottom, the zinc show-ing at the sides. For the white metal coins they used a core of copper. T
he process required immense pressure and stunningly clean surfaces for the un-struck strips of metal to adhere. Texas Instruments agreed that we, on behalf of the Royal Mint, could offer this technology to our customers worldwide.
On my way to Bangladesh I went to Bombay to see the Deputy Governor of the Bank of India, a most respected man, Mr Sheshadri. He immediately saw the economic attractions of reducing the need for expensive copper and nickel, using a zinc core and saving millions of pounds. He said that responsibility for coinage lay with the Treasury, as in England. So I went to New Delhi and introduced myself to the agents of De La Rue Giori who had provided the country’s banknote printing presses, just like our own, and indeed throughout the world with one single exception: France. He was a grand old man called Kohli, head of a dynasty of businesses. He was delighted I knew something of his country’s people and their history, and that one of my great-uncles, Sydney Olivier, had been Secretary of State for India, reported to by the Viceroy.
We were chauffeur-driven in one of his many Ambassador cars: Indian-made Morris Oxfords. We went along the main thoroughfare between the Lutyens-designed Senate, the House of Representatives, and to the top of the hill crowned on one side by the Treasury. The Deputy Permanent Secretary and his assistant were head-waggling, wrist-bending and articulate, with all-knowing interjections and deli-cate waving of slim hands. I felt like a supine orchestra which they were conducting. This was not a meeting at all but a prelude to prolonged background deals done out of each other’s sight. They were very well disposed to De La Rue because we had originated and engraved their present issue of banknotes. I gained the impression that they were ‘untouchable’, but in safety at the top. In fact the problem was that Texas Instruments would only supply blanks ready for striking, and not rolled strip for blanking, and this would have put hundreds of Indians out of work.
So Who's Your Mother Page 24