The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue Read online

  But such is the recovery of the young that within half an hour we were up and marching along the verge. By eight, as the sun set, we had found a farm with a friendly barn full of straw and hay. Despite being ravenously hungry, we collapsed in the bales and slept for ten hours.

  On the following day, we discovered as we marched, rigid thumbs erect for a lift, that the Union Jack did not work anymore. The Midi had never been occupied. It was part of Vichy France, notorious for its enthusiastic collaboration with the Germans. Even the Allied invasion of August 1944 was seen locally as an assault rather than a liberation. No cars stopped. We turned along the coast at Marseille, and for three weeks, thousands of cars, vans, and trucks sped by without stopping.

  We lived off crusty baguette bread and cheap cheese, slaking our thirst and filling our water bottles at the public drinking fountains in the villages. There was no Corniche Littorale motorway (where hitchhiking would have been forbidden, anyway), but just the shoreside road that wended through every village and hamlet as well as the great cities of Toulon, Nice, and Cannes.

  Marching along it, we found tiny non-tourist bays and creeks, where we could strip off and dunk our overheated bodies in crystal-clear cool water. We slept in the workers’ sheds in the olive groves and once on the cool marble of a mausoleum in a cemetery. We saw the grandeur of Monaco and Monte Carlo, where all the cars seemed to be Rolls-Royces and where I would many years later be the guest of Prince Albert. Finally, we came to the Italian border at Ventimiglia.

  Just to say we had been to Italy, we went across and trudged to San Remo. Then time and money ran out. We had just enough for two third-class tickets back to Marseille, and there we bought just one single ticket for Paris. We spent the whole journey in the lavatory. Three times, a ticket inspector came to the door and rapped. Each time, I opened a fraction, explained in French that I was not very well and had the ticket clipped. Each time, John stood on the lavatory seat behind the door and out of sight.

  We hitched back to Dieppe and used our return halves to get to Newhaven. No mobile phones back then, so we used a public phone booth and four one-penny coins to alert John’s aunt to our presence, and then waited to be collected.

  We were very brown and rock-hard. We had each grown an inch, and still, in old age, laugh at some of the tricks we got up to. The fifties were a good, carefree, and uncomplicated time to be a teenager, before drugs and worries and political correctness. Materially, we had infinitely less than what youngsters have today, but I think we were happier.

  A few years back, a friend from the same generation—one of the teenagers of National Service, who got by with very few rules and regulations, minimal bureaucracy, basic but healthy food, good manners, and masses of walking—remarked to me: “You know, we had the best of the last and the last of the best.” And that got it all in a single sentence.

  But it was mid-August and I wanted something badly. I wanted that private pilot’s license. So the day after my seventeenth birthday, I Vespa-ed back to Rochester Flying Club.

  And since that holiday, John Gordon has never been able to contemplate a melon, and I have never carried a blade.

  A SILLY REVENGE

  The flying test was almost a routine. Everything about it had already been covered during tuition.

  First came a triangular navigation exercise in which I had to give a running commentary to the instructor in the front cockpit, describing what I was doing and why. The technology for nav exercises in a Tiger Moth was basic and there were two. They were called eyeballs.

  A map had already been prepared, with the route marked in felt pen, folded, and strapped with elastic bands to my left thigh. Identification of where one was could be achieved by putting my head over the rim of the cockpit and looking down. Location and direction depended on recognizing main roads, railway lines, and above all rivers, with their distinctive curves. Towns and cities were identified by castle, cathedral, or other obvious features.

  There was one elderly member of the club who was so nearsighted that he used to swoop down to fly alongside railway trains and read the destination board on the side of the front carriage. One imagines commuters might be somewhat surprised to lift their gaze from the crossword to see a biplane outside the window and an old codger peering down at them. But no one seemed to mind. It was a rather carefree age.

  After the nav test, we repaired to the clubhouse for a sandwich lunch, then did the general competence hour. This involved the usual basic maneuvers—climb, dive, turn, wingover, sideslip, and several pretended emergencies. The routine was for the instructor to suddenly shut down the power and say, “You have a complete engine failure. What are you going to do?”

  The response was to look around for a large, flat green field away from woods, large trees, or buildings; with the landing field selected, assess wind direction and speed; glide down behind the idly turning propeller; line up as if for a real landing; and approach the unwary farmer’s best wheat crop. At the last minute, the instructor would ram the power back on and the Tiger Moth would surge upward and away.

  Landing back at Blue Bell Hill, I was told that I had passed and my license would be “in the bag.” The written test, a two-hour paper exam, I had completed before going to France. But I noticed that of my thirty hours of flying time so generously prepaid by the RAF, there were still forty-five minutes left. I asked for them as a last solo flight, and, with a shrug, was granted them. There was something else I wanted to do.

  Tonbridge town was easy to find by following the river Medway, which flows right through it. Short of the town, I dropped down into the shallow valley between the school playing fields and Hildenborough, through which I had pretended to jog so many times.

  I came up out of the valley and approached over the two playing fields known as Martins and Le Flemings. I think I was about six feet up. There was a quick blip to clear the line of elms between Le Flemings and the first X1 cricket pitch, the sacred turf of the Head. Then the school buildings were ahead of me: School House, where the headmaster lived, and Old Big School, the big assembly hall.

  The school was still on holiday and therefore empty of boys, or, at that hour on a summer afternoon, they would have been playing cricket on the Head. A face appeared at a window in School House, staring openmouthed at the approaching propeller. It might have been the headmaster, the kindly but ineffectual Reverend Laurence Waddy, but I was never later in a position to ask.

  The owner of the face threw himself to the floor as the Tiger Moth climbed the wall of the Old Big School, nearly clipped the roof, rolled to the north, missed the pepper pot on the chapel roof by a few feet, and climbed away into a clear blue sky.

  Having completed my asinine gesture to a place I was yearning to leave, I flew back to Rochester, hoping no sharp-eyed citizen of Tonbridge had noted my registration number and reported me, for then I would have been finished.

  School would reconvene in a fortnight, and to please my father I had agreed to complete the last term of the year and leave at Christmas. At the start of term, I half expected to be summoned to report to the headmaster, but no one said a thing.

  A fortnight later, my private pilot’s license arrived from the ministry at my parents’ home in Ashford. I mailed my flying kit back to RAF Kenley and have never flown a Tiger Moth since, until I was given a ride and the controls at the age of seventy-six at Lasherden airfield in Kent. And she is still a great little airplane.

  A GENTLEMAN OF CLARE

  When I returned to Tonbridge in early September 1955, I thought I faced a term of filling in time. The previous summer, I had fulfilled my wager with my father whereby if I could pass every exam they could throw at me, he would get me out of there. With great luck, I had managed my O Levels at fourteen and my A Levels at fifteen, about three years earlier than required. In this, my fluent French and German, provided by the prescience of my parents, had been invaluable.

  In
summer term 1955, I had at sixteen sat for a state scholarship, or S Level. I think I passed, but state scholarships were means-tested and it was judged that my parents could put me through university unaided by the state, so no scholarship was awarded. But Dad did not want to be the only shopkeeper on Ashford High Street whose son left school at sixteen, so he begged me to stay on the extra term and leave at seventeen. I agreed, but idleness was not exactly what Tonbridge had in mind.

  My obsession with warplanes and flying magazines brought nothing but frowns, and I was soon required to attend a long interview with a gentleman from the Public Schools Appointments Bureau, who came down for a day to look over the winter leavers. He was genial enough, a bit of a Colonel Blimp type, and he sought to interest me in becoming “something in the City.”

  Eyes alight with enthusiasm, he proposed an interview with Shell-BP or a major bank. There might even be an opening as a stockbroker. There was no point in protesting. I feigned enthusiasm, took his numerous career brochures, and slipped away. But I had fooled no one. Strings were pulled in the background, and I was secured an interview at Clare College, Cambridge. With the master, no less. For my schoolmasters, this was close to a visit to Parnassus.

  I was furnished with a rail warrant to London and another from London to Cambridge, return. I set off, crossed London by bus, arrived at Cambridge station, and walked to Clare College, nestling by the River Cam, and presented myself at the appointed hour. I was in school uniform, but without the absurd straw boater, which I had been allowed not to wear. A porter showed me up to the master’s study.

  The luminary behind the desk was studying a file. It appeared to be about me. He clucked several times, raised his head, and beamed.

  “Still sixteen,” he said. “Fluent in two languages and conversational in Russian. Sounds like the Foreign Office.”

  It was not a question, so I said nothing. Undeterred, his beam never faltered.

  “So, do you want to try for the Foreign Office, young man?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Ah, well, never mind. So why do you want to come to Clare?”

  There are times when dissimulation has no point and straight-up honesty is the best policy. I decided this was one.

  “Actually, Master, I don’t.”

  This time, the beam did falter. It was replaced not by anger but by an intrigued puzzlement.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Tonbridge sent me, Master.”

  “Yes, I see that.” He gestured at the file on his desk, which had clearly preceded me. “In that case, what do you want to do when you leave school?”

  “I am going to join the Air Force, Master. I want to be a fighter pilot.”

  He rose and came round the desk, the seraphic beam back in place. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and guided me back to the door, which he opened.

  “Then may I wish you the very best of good fortune. And thank you.”

  The good wishes were agreeable, but . . .

  “Why ‘thank you,’ Master?”

  “Because, young man, you have just given me the shortest and most honest interview I have ever had in this room.”

  I made my way back to the station, thence to London and on to Tonbridge. A week later, his report arrived, and I went under a very large and very black cloud. But tenacity is a rather British trait, and Tonbridge certainly had it. They sent for my father.

  I was not in the room, but he told me about it later. There were four of them: the headmaster (whose summer repose I had ruined), my housemaster, the head of studies, and the chaplain. He said it was like a summons to the high court. They were all in their scholastic robes, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The shopkeeper they confronted came from Chatham Dockyard and they knew it.

  The lecture was not hostile but deeply earnest. His son, they told him, was making a grievous mistake. Brilliant exam results stemming from an expensive education. The sort of background that could one day, after two more years at Tonbridge, result in an exhibition, possibly even an open major, to Oxford or Cambridge. A first-class degree could open the doors to the Civil Service. Why, his son might even be able to return as a junior master at Tonbridge, something they clearly regarded as the pinnacle of achievement.

  And in the face of all this, the lad had some weird dream of becoming little more than a mechanic. It was all very infra dignitatem—beneath one’s dignity, a Latin phrase my dad had never heard.

  In the raging snobbery of those days, it seemed that Dartmouth College (Royal Navy) or Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (Army, good regiment, of course) was just acceptable, but volunteering for boot camp, RAF, was distinctly bizarre. It was his (my father’s) clear duty to do everything in his power to dissuade his son from avoiding those last two years at school and inexplicably declining to go to Cambridge.

  My dad heard them out, one after the other. Then he spoke very briefly. He said, “Gentlemen, if my son wants to become a British fighter pilot, I intend to give him every conceivable support and encouragement of which I am able. Good day to you.”

  Then he left, drove back to Ashford, and reopened his shop. He was a great man. I left school that December, still under a cloud.

  LEARNING SPANISH

  Even over the Christmas break, my father had made plain that, at seventeen and three months, I would have no chance of getting into the Royal Air Force when the permissible age was eighteen. I would be wise to wait until I was at least seventeen and a half before trying.

  He also made plain he was not having me mooning about the house doing nothing. Some activity had to be found to fill in the first three months of 1956. We made a study of the terms of the scholarship I had won five years earlier to Tonbridge. Founded by the long-gone Mr. Knightly, the Knightly Scholarship involved a large sum of deposited money that, with sound investment, should (and did) generate enough to create one bursary per year. But if there was a surplus, it would be lodged in a separate fund.

  This extra fund could, with the permission of the governors, be used to allow a student to study an extra language during his last year at school. It did not insist that he must be at the school to do this. I made an application to be allowed to take a course in Spanish, with costs paid for by the fund.

  The bemused governors, who had never received such an application, found the fund was brimming from so many years of non-use and needed depleting. A little more research disclosed that Granada University in Andalusia, in southern Spain, offered a three-month spring course for foreigners to study Spanish language and culture. Again, the governors conceded the point and paid the course fee, plus a personal allowance of six pounds per week while away from home. In early January, I left for Spain.

  The course was not actually held in Granada, but at Málaga, on the coast. Back then the sprawling city of modern Málaga was just a seaside town famous for two things. Before the war (the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that still consumed Spain), the matador Carlos Arruza had performed in the Málaga ring, while suffering from flu and a raging temperature, a corrida so spectacular that he had been awarded two ears, the tail, and one hoof from the dead bull, a feat never matched since.

  And Pablo Picasso, who was still alive and painting, but in exile in France after bitterly opposing Franco and painting Guernica, had been born there. If it had an airport, it must have been a small municipal field and not on any international route. I flew to Gibraltar, hefted my suitcase across the border on foot, and took the wheezing old coastal bus from La Linea to Málaga. In Gibraltar, I exchanged all the sterling pounds I had into pesetas at the remarkable rate of two hundred to one pound. I did not know enough to realize that I had become a wealthy young man by Spanish standards.

  What today is the sprawling Costa del Sol chain of tourist resorts did not exist. Between Málaga and La Linea were four small fishing villages: Torremolinos, Fuengirola, Marbella, and Estepona. T
oday’s huge motorway was a narrow track, with one lane on each side. But as the verges were very pitted, every driver rode the center line, swerving at the last minute with much hooting, shouting, and gestures. I was entering a very different and fascinating new culture.

  At Málaga, I reported to the local branch of Granada University and met the course director, Don Andres Oliva. He was truly cultivated, a real traditional caballero, a gent. I quickly learned that the fifty or so students on the course were all to be lodged in one communal hostel. It became also rapidly plain that as they were Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, Danes, Swedes, and others, they would all have one common language—English. And that was what would be used in the hostel. But that was not what I had come for. I wanted to lodge with a Spanish family that spoke no English, and took my problem to Don Andres.

  He considered it with quiet but surprised approval, remarked that no one had ever requested this before, but promised to ask around. Twenty-four hours later, he told me he had found a family content to take in a paying guest.

  The lady concerned was Doña Concha Lamotte, Viuda de Morales. When deciphered, that meant Madame Concepcion (or Conchita or Concha) Lamotte, Viuda (widow) of the late Señor Morales. It transpired she was French by birth but in the thirties had married Señor Morales. He had been executed by the Communists during the civil war, and his widow had raised her two children alone.

  Not surprisingly, she loathed the Communists and adored General Franco, who in 1936 had landed with his Moroccan troops just down the coast to start the civil war as the Republic fell into Communist hands. Franco, of course, was by 1956 dictator of Spain, running a pretty extreme right-wing government.