So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  Once the designs were completed I went there to present them, again accompanied by the ambassador. I had to wait for days for the verdict of President Ahidjo, whose fine portrait was on each of them. Apart from waiting, and writing my novel to fill in time, I enjoyed the absur-dity of seeing a John Wayne movie, dubbed into French. There he was at his crudest, shouting: ‘Alors, je vais te casser la gueule!’ But alas, my banknote efforts, despite the glorious designs and the ambassador’s stalwart assistance, were unsuccessful. The conseillers techniqueshad won.

  Togo and Benin made little impression on me. The other two territo-ries were Liberia and Sierra Leone, both set up originally as homes for released Caribbean slaves who wished to return to Africa, hence the name Liberia and of the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown. The difference between them was marked. The freed Afro-Americans set about colonising the native Liberians as best they could on their own, with overtones of America’s Deep South, and hardly any guidance. The Executive Mansion was a sort of awkward Victorian US pile, the inte-rior common parts hung with portraits of Liberian presidents, some of them dressed as admirals complete with brass telescopes. The speech patterns were a degraded version of the black patois of Louisiana: far from distinct and impossible to reproduce in writing. They used the US dollar for banknotes.

  Sierra Leone’s ex-slaves had been colonised by the British which gave them a better start. Parts of Freetown were almost replicas of Trinidad, even the street names, and certainly the accents. They were about to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their Central Bank, to be attended by about thirty African central bankers and ourselves. They were launch-ing a new high value we had printed to mark the occasion: the twenty leone.

  For the celebrations I was joined by David Rowe-Beddoe, now my managing director, and other colleagues. We went to the Presidency and were ushered into his office. On each side of the desk a stuffed leopard sat on its haunches. Pharaonic memorabilia filled the room. Siaka Stevens entered and sat, looking at us quizzically, a rubbery black face and a long neck bulging between a series of deep concentric creases. He burbled that this was a proud occasion for his country and the people, and expressed appreciation for all we had done.

  After a couple of days’ conference on banking matters, a couple of Trilander light aircraft flew us all in relays to a new branch of the Central Bank at Kenema, the centre of the diamond trade. The Star of Sierra Leone, at almost one thousand carats, remains one of the largest ever mined. The De Beers organisation was working an immense dragline in a grey sludge field of kimberlite the size of a football pitch. Its bucket was as big as a garage. The skilled African driver swung it far out, then gingerly retrieved it, scraping the surface and dumping the goo into a massive truck. The kimberlite was fed into a separation process in a factory. The sludge was culled and in the far end appeared the diamonds, almost all of them tiny grains, fit only for industrial applications.

  Nearby, all round this major activity, were illicit diamond miners, digging in hope, knee deep in soggy holes. Gem quality was extremely rare. When they struck lucky they took the stones to De Beers for appraisal and immediate payment in orange two leone banknotes. When the civil war came it was financed by blood diamonds which they had found and not submitted for cash, evading official appraisal.

  During the conference and the expedition to Kenema the differences between the Africans were highlighted, even though most of them had met before at similar bankers’ meetings. The Ghanaians and Nigerians looked down on their hosts as descendants of slaves. The Liberians were even more frowned upon for their self-importance and excruciat-ing articulation, and their continuing use of US dollars bills for their national currency. History was far from being a neutral topic of conver-sation. They resented their colonial past to varying extents, some appreciative of much that was achieved, the law and order, start of education and infrastructure, but almost all of them embarrassed by the strains of their early years of independence, the human failings in untested institutions.

  In England that summer we rented a windmill. It was a five-storey high tower windmill on the north coast of Norfolk, Cley next the Sea.

  We went for a weekend with Larry and Joan. They too were increas-ingly strained. I remembered when their children were infants how rapturously happy they had been together. I think those years, given to him by Joan, were the happiest in his life, the family fulfilment of a man, nearly sixty, who at last had a loving wife and family and nothing to feel any guilt about, at the peak of his powers as an actor, the summit of his life as Director of the National. That was now past, and his health destroyed.

  He and I discussed how, once babydom is past, husbands and wives so often grow cold on each other. It had happened to him and was now beginning to happen again to me. At that stage we did not discuss his rumoured affairs with actresses. The effect of that on Joan was devas-tating, as she later wrote in her memoir And That’s Not All. She gath-ered their children round her and they ganged up against him: their loss as well as his. They looked at him with hard expressions. The atmos-phere was so changed that many of his friends, close enough to me, said they could not for the life of them understand what had drawn him to her in the first place. She was the wrong tribe. I said that it was Mother Earth, obviously, but in his case something even more powerful. He had needed a change of direction in his career, to move beyond drawing room comedy and the classics, and embrace the chancy and untested growth of present-day playwrights, almost symbolised by Joan’s wonderful performances in some of them, and later his own. That no one can deny.

  Sixteen

  The news from De La Rue was excellent. I was to take over from Charles Cardiff as regional manager for South-East and South Asia, with a house in Singapore. Julian Wethered would soldier on in the Philippines, with Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea, the Pacific and Australasia. This had been my greatest hope, with Indonesia still my favourite foreign country in all the world. The pennies at home had become tight and this overseas posting ended my money worries. Rent-ing our house would more than pay for the mortgage and its other costs, in Singapore I would live in a house with a garden rent free, with Tristan’s prep school fees at Cottesmore two-thirds paid for by the company. Riddelle was excited at the prospect of life in the tropics again, overseas allowances, a servant or two, and simpler conversation.

  I flew out to Singapore. Fifteen years had overwhelmed much that was historic. Even the Raffles Hotel was under threat, though there was a campaign, eventually successful, to preserve it. The new skyscrapers were majestic and the city gleamed with prosperity. Charles and his wife Angela had a mean little flat, not much to De La Rue’s credit, so I stayed at the Goodwood Hotel, old-fashioned and family-oriented.

  We took a taxi downtown and Charles introduced me to the Currency Board, one officer a Eurasian the other Chinese, both rather bland, and their impressive Chinese boss who was quite a banking authority in the island.

  Then to Djakarta on a Garuda Airlines 707. In 1959 I had been the only one to get off the plane, a Qantas DC4 en route to Sydney. This was different. The first class air hostesses were elegant Javanese in their kain and kebaya ,beauties with high cheekbones, languid brown eyes and lovely smiles. The men too were handsome. On the ground the capital, once so soggy with indecision, was energy-charged, a mass of new highways and hideous nationalistic monuments bequeathed by Sukarno. The most memorable symbolised freedom from colonisation: a monstrous statue of a man breaking the chains of servitude from his upraised wrists in a bionic outward thrust. The usual international hotels had sprouted on all sides, department stores, traffic lights everywhere, buses and taxis galore, the rickshaws now motorised. These bursts of activity from developments were led by the oil giant Pertamina, and the takeover by President Suharto. We stayed in the huge Borobudur Hotel, a splendid place with views beyond the Pun-chak of the volcanoes and surroundings of Bandung. Here we were in the southern hemisphere and the sun went from right to left, giving a completely new feeling to each day.

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p; We drove through the smart suburb of Kebayoran, with its solid houses and pretty gardens, to the State Printing Works. The Chief Exec-utive was General Hayono, in uniform, accompanied by several direc-tors, all charming and fluent in English. I told them about my book and how much I loved Indonesia. In it I had not been entirely deferential towards President Sukarno, which won their smiles of approval, and every copy I had sent to my friends in Indonesia had been burnt. This had been done under the orders of Ganis Harsono, my friend, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Cultural Department. He had written me a letter. He did not mention the book’s destruction, but did say how much it had moved him. This surprised him because he had always supposed the English to be unemotional. General Hayono sensed my joy at returning to their country. The head of production showed us round the banknote factory, equipped throughout with De La Rue Giori printing presses, just like Gateshead, except that it was built round a large courtyard, with flowerbeds and traveller’s trees.

  Travelling with Charles was a great pleasure. Introductions in Viet-nam and Laos were brief, little more than a handshake, with problems to follow in a few weeks. Thailand was also a brief visit and I was dying to look up so many friends there. Charles was clearly in love with Nepal. It meant as much to him and Angela as Indonesia did to me. The refreshing thing about all these places was that they were sufficiently close to Singapore for me to be home every weekend.

  Back in London I put our house on the market for rent. Almost immediately a French couple made the offer we wanted, but they needed to move in at once. Luckily our close friends Robin and Jane Mills lent us their house two doors down while they stayed in Gloucestershire.

  I left Riddelle and the children in the Mills’s house while I went to find a place in Singapore. Charles had heard of a large modern house with two kitchens, one for the servants, and a garden large enough to set up a cricket net for Tristan. It was part furnished. I obtained De La Rue’s and the owner’s agreement on terms and bought a beautiful teak dining table and dining chairs. Before I moved in the owner repainted the outside, so I stayed on at the Goodwood Hotel. Charles and Angela left me in charge of my new region and he went on to manage De La Rue’s small banknote factory in Dublin.

  Riddelle and the children came flying out to me and our new lives. They arrived very jet-lagged after the long flight. She looked ill. The journey was made worse by the plane bursting with noisy kids return-ing to their parents at the end of school term. We took a day off at the Goodwood Hotel, lolling by the pool, dozing in the shade with ice creams. Next day we went to a garage and the children helped choose our car, a silver Ford Cortina. Then we drove all round Singapore and they were amazed at the skyscrapers, wonderful parks and gardens. We took the lift to the top of the Mandarin Hotel and they gasped at the view between skyscrapers to the sea.

  I showed them round the house, the master bedroom with bathroom en suite, a family bedroom which was huge and could be partitioned so that each of the children could have their own bedroom/study, and the two drawing rooms. The man next door would love us to use his swim-ming pool. The children all thought it was wonderful. It was ideal for our family in every way. All of them, that is, except for Riddelle.

  That night she said she did not love me any more, that she was not prepared to live in Singapore, that she wanted another baby, but not with me as the father. No, she had not met anyone she was interested in. There was nobody else. I explained that I, more than anyone, knew the importance to chil-dren of having a father in situ. I had never really had a father like that, and for me nothing equalled the importance of actually being one. That was the problem. She wanted them all to herself, and to have another baby, entirely hers. There was nothing I could do or say to change her mind. She looked forward to becoming a free spirit, she said. I did not telephone her parents because she had little respect for either of them, so we had a few days staying in the hotel for the sake of calm.

  Then Riddelle upped and went, taking our children away with her. I then telephoned her parents. They said she must be mad. They knew how much I adored them all. They put a call through to well-ordered Changi Airport and got through to her. It made no difference. That was 31 March 1975.

  I wrote to Pat Turner, the field sales manager, who had recruited me, to tell him what had happened, but chiefly to emphasise my deter-mination to continue where I was as regional manager, so that I could fulfil my responsibilities to the company and to my family for schooling.

  I handed the bunch of house keys back to the owner. He was kind enough simply to take them and shake me by the hand in sympathy. Then I spent a few days finding a suitable apartment: Cavanagh House, a high-rise block with a swimming pool. I went to see our High Commissioner, Peter Tripp. I intended it to be just a courtesy visit as a new British resident representing De La Rue, printers of the local currency and security print. I could sense his divining my emotional turmoil, so I told him. He asked me to have lunch on Saturday at his residency, Eden Hall, with his wife Rosemary. He and she became my link to any kind of emotional sanity.

  It is hopeless and self-pitying to describe or share the acute and deep-est sorrow I have ever known. The full horror of my loss hit me most the first time I went, on my own, to a supermarket to buy everything for self-catering. I had plenty of friends in Singapore from my previous experiences there in 1960, but now I wished to see no one I knew. I couldn’t have faced them.

  For musical catharsis I went to the Soviet shop. When my mother was going through her equivalent terrible time after Larry had left her for Vivien, she had found comfort only in the harsh music of Stravin-sky. I started to put myself together with Scriabin’s music: I needed its carnal spirituality, and with those records I worked slowly through Faubion Bowers’s masterful biography of the man and his works.

  Luckily my job provided plenty of challenges. Vietnam needed immediate attention. We had to redesign their banknotes every six months because that was the length of time it took People’s China to counterfeit them. Our constant replacement of Vietnam’s banknotes prevented China from causing it total economic paralysis, with mass forgeries of their circulating banknotes. It also meant that Vietnam accounted for a significant percentage of our turnover.

  The war in Vietnam had gone from bad to worse ever since the French rout at Dien Bien Phu in 1958. By 1975, after Nixon had been elected President by forty-nine of the fifty US states, two million Viet-cong had been killed, and 58,000 Americans. The bombing, before Nixon’s resignation in 1974, had amounted to 200,000 tons a week, equivalent to one Hiroshima atomic bomb. When Gerald Ford took over he scaled it right back, and the crucial US air cover was with-drawn. The effect on every Allied soldier, American, Vietnamese or the many other participants, was hugely demoralising.

  In Saigon I checked into the Continental Hotel, a French colonial relic where Graham Greene had stayed. It featured in The Quiet Amer-ican. On the terrace downstairs at breakfast time there was a fat Amer-ican colonel, rows of medals on his uniform, with a local teenage tart. Spring was in the air and the birds were cheeping. Frangipani flowers were on every table, heavy with fragrance, and in the street the women all wore their national oudzais,with separate panels from their waists to their knees, hanging down front and back. Their pale silken trousers shimmered loosely round their legs, tight around the hips, gloriously elegant. The atmosphere was benign, with the buzz of flower sellers, the markets and moneychangers, anything for a dollar, and the sated relax-ation among Europeans and Vietnamese, smoking outside the cafés. The sense of harmoniousness was unjustified. The street hustled with motor rickshaws; how many of them were being driven by enemy Viet-cong, nobody knew. The absence of warplanes flying overhead gave the misplaced semblance of peace. A few days earlier the Ben Hoa ammu-nition warehouses had been blown up not so far away.

  In the daytime American troops were not much in evidence. Once twilight fell the nightclubs were full of them, black and white, in uniform, well-built boys uneasy together. The spaces between them
were laced with divinely feminine tarts. ‘Let’s go back to your hotel.’ One of the girls said to me in French, ‘We could play backgammon in the nude.’ I wondered what the soldiers were like and chatted with two of them over Johnny Walker Black Label whisky which they had not tried before. They liked it. A change from beer or rye. One of them described an altercation he had had with his lieutenant. The man’s vocabulary carried a familiar choice of words but the loathing was something else. So what did I think of that? I said that I had only been a peacetime soldier, a platoon commander, who had never had to fight a war of any kind, least of all so deadly a one as ‘Nam’. He said he had heard of the Guards so I proceeded. I said that if one of my men, no matter what the circumstances, had spoken to me the way he had to his platoon commander I would have had him put under arrest.

  The American grunted. He said if that had happened in ‘Nam’ I would have woken up to a hand grenade killing me in bed. I accepted a return drink from him and he spelled out many experiences of the kind the world knew so well and had been horrified by. In the movies I think the best line ever written about these soldiers’ despair was delivered by Sylvester Stallone. His muscle-puffed character had said, with studied slowness: ‘All we want – is for our country – to love us – as much as we – love it.’ The tragedy was: it didn’t.

  De La Rue had a remarkable Vietnamese agent. He had contacts everywhere, not to be pried into, which enabled him to distribute mass tonnages of rice harvested in the extreme south of the Mekhong Delta, despite its being occupied by enemy Vietcong. He invited me to his house for dinner with his wife. We spoke French. They served Puligny Montrachet. I said the wine reminded me of Larry, which pleased them. Then we listened to the BBC World Service on the radio and the whole atmosphere changed. The gaiety of the day, the flowers and pretty girls, all were shrouded by the accelerating news of South Vietnam’s losses, deaths and shrivelling hopes.