Emails from the Edge (2 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
Chapter 3
STRAWS IN THE DESERT WIND
AFEZ, FROM THE
D
IVAN OF
H
AFEZ
1990
Early that year I was in London, scratching along as a freelance journalist in what was still known as Fleet Street, even though the term had been wrested from its physical domain years before by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black.
Rewind a few years. As happens with most people, I suppose, life had begun to take shapeâto form a patternâbefore I departed my energetic twenties for the let's-do-it-easier-now thirties.
With a sidelong glance, I recognised those who had overweening ambition to climb the office ladder and recognised that I wasn't one of them. Anyway, I felt the pull of a larger world. While working at the Melbourne offices of the
Age
, my secret dream was that one of my superiors would pluck me out of my generational pool and say, âBoy, you're foreign correspondent material.' In the early 1980s I made my mark elsewhere, reporting politics in Canberra. But even in two years I started to see the same stories, the same rhetorical spittle, swirling round and round again. Self-mockingly, we journalists sometimes speak of the âmedia circus': to me, it was more like a laundrette. The political cycle was becoming too predictable; I ached for novelty.
On one of my journeys back to Melbourne, early in 1984, I went for a drink with the news editor and asked him whether he could foresee the day when the paper would give me an overseas posting. My destination of choice would have been Beijing, its extreme otherness tantalising my curiosity, but Washington, London or Ouagadougou would have been equally acceptable. âNo' was his reply.
At least I was under no illusions: a short time later, I approached the editor and asked for a year's leave without pay. This wasn't a possibility just then, he said. So reluctantly, but with a pretence of fatalistic acceptance, I quit.
The editor must have sensed my unease for he said, âDon't worry, there will always be a job for you at the
Age.'
He didn't add âso long as I'm here' and I was too green to realise that such promises cannot outlast the tenure of the person who makes them. Still, his words warmed me.
Years later, only half joking, I would tell people I had retired at 30. But a new thought followed this, stemming from the action I had taken: âIf they won't turn me into a foreign correspondent, there's nothing to stop me becoming one on my own.' The âplan' of my life, as it then unfolded, was to indulge two great passions, which can be summed up simply enough: to see the world, and to tell people what I saw.
In practical terms, combining those two passions meant alternating long periods of travel with equally long periods of intensive workâ only it didn't feel like work, because previous travels had already taught me that in the absence of any other distraction I would write: obsessively, joyfully, cathartically. I'd lived long enough to discover that your vocation is what you choose to do when you don't really have to do anything.
To see the world certainly didn't mean endless sunbaking (my energy still needed channelling) but I would visit each country on my route thoroughlyâa crossover trait from journalism. When money was running low, I found that sub-editing appealed more than reporting. To become a freelance writer would require staying in one place and building up contacts, which didn't sort well with the travel. Also, as I soon found, sub-editing suited my temperament and exacting approach to language. The craft had four great advantages: it was portable, profitable, always in demand and could be practised every day. âThey pay us to play with words,' I wrote home to a friendâand meant it.
In between my journeys throughout the late 1980s I learnt this craft, first in Athens, then in Oman, then in England (Cambridge); and now, in 1990, after an east-west crossing of Africa, I had finally âgraduated' to Fleet Street. This was a professional summit: some of the best newspapers in the world wanted my servicesâthe
Times
, the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
, to name three. Even now, if pressed for a career highlight, I would say that working on the
Times
foreign desk in the closing months of 1989 and early months of 1990â editing page-one stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Christmas Day massacre of the Ceausescus and the triumphal release of Nelson Mandelaâstands out as an imperishable memory.
Looking back, I can see how much I owed to luck: not only was I 35, seasoned yet still keen, but the economy was buoyant, near the end of the long 1980s bull run, so jobs for casual sub-editors were there for the asking. When applying to the foreign desk, it also helped that I could not only spell the names of far-off places but, by then, had actually visited many of them.
However, a pressingly practical reasonâmy visa statusâdictated that, much as I felt at home in England, I could not stay there beyond April 1990.
Every Thursday a glossy weekly magazine,
UK Press Gazette
, appeared. The Omani job had been advertised in its pages. Now, right on cue, I saw the words, âWanted: Sub-editor,
Gulf Daily News
, Bahrain'.
There was an interview, conducted by an employment agency, in Croydon, on London's southern fringe. Within the space of a day I received offers, confirmed in writing, from Bahrain and Hong Kong.
Choices, how I hate them: you always make the wrong one or, rather, if you make one that doesn't turn out to be right you wonder whether the one you didn't make would have been better. Out came the feint-ruled foolscap, bisected with a dramatic vertical stroke of the biro: pros to the left, cons to the right. Every aspect was assigned points, the decision weighted according to the relative importance of urban amenity, social atmosphere, job satisfaction ⦠and everything came out line-ball.
In the end it was the lucre that lured me in. According to my calculations I could save twice as much by fulfilling a two-year contract in Bahrain as I could in Hong Kong and, since my aim was to work furiously until I had enough money to hit the road again for some more long-distance travelling, this tipped the balance.
Going out to the Gulf for a second time was an advantage, I felt. Cautions from a colleagueâone who had worked closely with me on the
Oman Daily Observer
âI privately discounted. Knowing that he had split up with his girlfriend while working at the paper that now wanted me, I told myself, wouldn't that necessarily have coloured his view of the place?
It hadn't; the rationale behind his warning was twofold: Bahrain is a money-fixated city-state where the sense of social isolation can be very strong, andâhe underlined this pointâthese were dangerous times. âJust look at what has been happening to our stringer.'
I myself had been a stringer, or freelance correspondent, for Reuters during 1987â88, my time in Oman. For us newsgatherers the IranâIraq War was always just over the horizon, but the stories Reuters wanted from us tended to be about frankincense and camels. Farzad Bazoft was a stringer, too, for the
Observer
, but filed exclusively and far more regularly from the main theatre of action.
It was one of those pieces, involving acts of daring and daredevilry seemingly more at home in an Ian Fleming plot than the real world, that my colleague was using as a cautionary tale. Bazoft, who had befriended an Iraqi nurse, got her to drive him to the site of an alleged nuclear plant and scooped the soil outside it into a bottle. His idea was to test it later for radioactivity: no one in those days doubted that Saddam was striving after weapons of mass destruction. But Iraqi security saw Bazoft in the act, confiscated the bottle, arrested him andâby the time I was thinking of going to the regionâhad ignored pleas from the highest levels of the British Government to spare his life.
Yes, I agreed, these are dangerous times. But Iraq is not Bahrain. The war against Iran had finished eighteen months earlier and there was no imminent or obvious danger. So, all else being equal, I made up my mind to go.
A couple of weeks before my flight left Britain bound for the Gulf, Bazoftâconvicted spyâwas hanged. My colleague, normally a hearty well-wisher, fell silent.
So you couldn't say I wasn't warned. There were straws aplenty in the desert wind. I drew the short one.
On 10 April 1990, exactly thirteen years before Saddam's statue would be toppled in central Baghdad, a British Airways plane carrying me and my luggage touched down at Bahrain International Airport, Muharraq. It disgorged me but not my luggage which, due to a check-in error at Gatwick, flew on to Hong Kong without me. After an anxious 24-hour wait we would be reunited, but it was not an auspicious beginning.
In early April temperatures in the Gulf states begin the dramatic rise to their dizzy summer heights. No longer are people sunbathing in 30°C: they begin to absorb its merciless rays for ever shorter periods and avoid going out into the noonday furnace altogether.
A worker cannot see through a traveller's eyes. This time the bazaar was not a place to amble through but an obstruction to be hurried past on the way to the daily minibus that took us newspaper staff out to the publishing offices, halfway across the island in a designated industrial area. We would arrive hot and dusty. Of course there was airconditioning but the building itself was isolated from the commercial amenities that make office life in many cities bearable.
Isolation can be geographical or social: it took just a couple of days to discover that, working in Bahrain, I was in for the double whammy. Nothing in a workplace is more upsetting than being out of the loop. Since the job title for which I was explicitly being groomed was that of deputy chief sub-editor, it was naturally of the highest importance that I get on well with the person currently holding down that position. For whatever reason, we didn't click.
Perhaps I was too determined to experiment with my own ideas, perhaps he was right to consider me disinclined to learn the paper's established ways. It is, after all, a criticism made of me on some other newspapers where I have worked, so there must be something to it. For my part, I felt that unless I was seen to duplicate his way of doing things he was going to give me a âbad report card', which is indeed what eventuated.
After all these years it amazes me how little I know myself. Even now I couldn't say for sure whether confessing to a lack of ambition is confronting the truth or avoiding it. At other times, when my self-esteem is battered, my thoughts go something like this: someone of my abilities should have been given more responsibilityâeven if I didn't seek it outâand the chance to show I had at least as much skill in people management as they tell me I have on the technical side of my craft.
So from the outset I was battling uphill: having to prove my worth to the incumbent deputy chief sub-editor, someone who was always hovering over my shoulder and who carried an immovable residue of disappointment that I had not measured up as his ideal successor. Small newspapers are like families, and here was someone a couple of years older than I, and actually less experienced in journalism, being called upon to exercise judgments that would affect not only my place in this clan but how long I could hope to retain it.
Journalists are often insecure creatures who mask their personal vulnerability by training the spotlight on others. Any office is a vacuum waiting to be filled by egos that establish a more or less settled pecking order. In my view, these facts taken together account for why newspaper offices are often hotbeds of jealousy, conspiracy, whispers and power struggles rather than co-operative endeavours bringing out the best in human nature. Add to this that one of the best assets a thrusting reporter can possessâa scepticism that extends to not being overawed by the high and mightyâbecomes a liability when respect for authority is demanded by the office hierarchy itself, and anyone could see that Bahrain's overheated atmosphere extended to the office.
Adding to the volatility, the staff on this newspaperâas with all English-speaking media in countries where English isn't the native tongueâwere an exotic mix. The subs' desk comprised two Englishmen, myself and half a dozen Indians, chosen partly because they would do equivalent work for far less than it cost to hire a Westerner, yet for amounts that appeared to them maharajahs' fortunes. Their vision was more in the nature of a mathematical equation than a mirage: a few years' unrelenting work in the Gulf would yield a relatively carefree life back home.
Somehow I always got on better with the Indians than with those in the driving seat, and before long this began to alienate me from management. Outside the office I didn't have time to develop any friendships. I was like a worm that has wandered out of the garden and finds itself inching across the tiled floor of a house, inexplicably cut off from the rich nutrients of its natural environment and condemned to a slow death.
My flat, in the inner Manama suburb of al-Adliya, was palatial but barren. It was a sprawling suite of rooms in a tower block where every neighbour was a stranger. A shopping centre was nearby, and my idea of radical good fun was to make a beeline for the Western food counter at the back of it, buy obscene amounts of ham (available only to the likes of us in this Muslim society) and take them back to the airconditioned fortress of the apartment, there to create and consume a modest mountain of ham sandwiches. From time to time I would breast the bar at the Londoner, an English pub on the edge of the city. But doing that every night never appealed, and I lived for the most part in a degree of social isolation that supplied ample scope for my office-based anxieties to fester.
So, almost four months into my second period of employment in the Middle East, my
Observer
colleague's forecast of unhappy times was being borne out. My futureâinsofar as it involved working in Bahrainâwas on the line, and then one night at the beginning of August my worldâand that of everyone I knew thereâwas turned upside down.
STRAWS IN THE DESERT WIND
Hafez! Thou sawest that chatter of the strutting partridge;
Careless of the grasp of the falcon of Fate, he was
.
HCareless of the grasp of the falcon of Fate, he was
.
AFEZ, FROM THE
D
IVAN OF
H
AFEZ
1990
Early that year I was in London, scratching along as a freelance journalist in what was still known as Fleet Street, even though the term had been wrested from its physical domain years before by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black.
Rewind a few years. As happens with most people, I suppose, life had begun to take shapeâto form a patternâbefore I departed my energetic twenties for the let's-do-it-easier-now thirties.
With a sidelong glance, I recognised those who had overweening ambition to climb the office ladder and recognised that I wasn't one of them. Anyway, I felt the pull of a larger world. While working at the Melbourne offices of the
Age
, my secret dream was that one of my superiors would pluck me out of my generational pool and say, âBoy, you're foreign correspondent material.' In the early 1980s I made my mark elsewhere, reporting politics in Canberra. But even in two years I started to see the same stories, the same rhetorical spittle, swirling round and round again. Self-mockingly, we journalists sometimes speak of the âmedia circus': to me, it was more like a laundrette. The political cycle was becoming too predictable; I ached for novelty.
On one of my journeys back to Melbourne, early in 1984, I went for a drink with the news editor and asked him whether he could foresee the day when the paper would give me an overseas posting. My destination of choice would have been Beijing, its extreme otherness tantalising my curiosity, but Washington, London or Ouagadougou would have been equally acceptable. âNo' was his reply.
At least I was under no illusions: a short time later, I approached the editor and asked for a year's leave without pay. This wasn't a possibility just then, he said. So reluctantly, but with a pretence of fatalistic acceptance, I quit.
The editor must have sensed my unease for he said, âDon't worry, there will always be a job for you at the
Age.'
He didn't add âso long as I'm here' and I was too green to realise that such promises cannot outlast the tenure of the person who makes them. Still, his words warmed me.
Years later, only half joking, I would tell people I had retired at 30. But a new thought followed this, stemming from the action I had taken: âIf they won't turn me into a foreign correspondent, there's nothing to stop me becoming one on my own.' The âplan' of my life, as it then unfolded, was to indulge two great passions, which can be summed up simply enough: to see the world, and to tell people what I saw.
In practical terms, combining those two passions meant alternating long periods of travel with equally long periods of intensive workâ only it didn't feel like work, because previous travels had already taught me that in the absence of any other distraction I would write: obsessively, joyfully, cathartically. I'd lived long enough to discover that your vocation is what you choose to do when you don't really have to do anything.
To see the world certainly didn't mean endless sunbaking (my energy still needed channelling) but I would visit each country on my route thoroughlyâa crossover trait from journalism. When money was running low, I found that sub-editing appealed more than reporting. To become a freelance writer would require staying in one place and building up contacts, which didn't sort well with the travel. Also, as I soon found, sub-editing suited my temperament and exacting approach to language. The craft had four great advantages: it was portable, profitable, always in demand and could be practised every day. âThey pay us to play with words,' I wrote home to a friendâand meant it.
In between my journeys throughout the late 1980s I learnt this craft, first in Athens, then in Oman, then in England (Cambridge); and now, in 1990, after an east-west crossing of Africa, I had finally âgraduated' to Fleet Street. This was a professional summit: some of the best newspapers in the world wanted my servicesâthe
Times
, the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
, to name three. Even now, if pressed for a career highlight, I would say that working on the
Times
foreign desk in the closing months of 1989 and early months of 1990â editing page-one stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Christmas Day massacre of the Ceausescus and the triumphal release of Nelson Mandelaâstands out as an imperishable memory.
Looking back, I can see how much I owed to luck: not only was I 35, seasoned yet still keen, but the economy was buoyant, near the end of the long 1980s bull run, so jobs for casual sub-editors were there for the asking. When applying to the foreign desk, it also helped that I could not only spell the names of far-off places but, by then, had actually visited many of them.
However, a pressingly practical reasonâmy visa statusâdictated that, much as I felt at home in England, I could not stay there beyond April 1990.
Every Thursday a glossy weekly magazine,
UK Press Gazette
, appeared. The Omani job had been advertised in its pages. Now, right on cue, I saw the words, âWanted: Sub-editor,
Gulf Daily News
, Bahrain'.
There was an interview, conducted by an employment agency, in Croydon, on London's southern fringe. Within the space of a day I received offers, confirmed in writing, from Bahrain and Hong Kong.
Choices, how I hate them: you always make the wrong one or, rather, if you make one that doesn't turn out to be right you wonder whether the one you didn't make would have been better. Out came the feint-ruled foolscap, bisected with a dramatic vertical stroke of the biro: pros to the left, cons to the right. Every aspect was assigned points, the decision weighted according to the relative importance of urban amenity, social atmosphere, job satisfaction ⦠and everything came out line-ball.
In the end it was the lucre that lured me in. According to my calculations I could save twice as much by fulfilling a two-year contract in Bahrain as I could in Hong Kong and, since my aim was to work furiously until I had enough money to hit the road again for some more long-distance travelling, this tipped the balance.
Going out to the Gulf for a second time was an advantage, I felt. Cautions from a colleagueâone who had worked closely with me on the
Oman Daily Observer
âI privately discounted. Knowing that he had split up with his girlfriend while working at the paper that now wanted me, I told myself, wouldn't that necessarily have coloured his view of the place?
It hadn't; the rationale behind his warning was twofold: Bahrain is a money-fixated city-state where the sense of social isolation can be very strong, andâhe underlined this pointâthese were dangerous times. âJust look at what has been happening to our stringer.'
I myself had been a stringer, or freelance correspondent, for Reuters during 1987â88, my time in Oman. For us newsgatherers the IranâIraq War was always just over the horizon, but the stories Reuters wanted from us tended to be about frankincense and camels. Farzad Bazoft was a stringer, too, for the
Observer
, but filed exclusively and far more regularly from the main theatre of action.
It was one of those pieces, involving acts of daring and daredevilry seemingly more at home in an Ian Fleming plot than the real world, that my colleague was using as a cautionary tale. Bazoft, who had befriended an Iraqi nurse, got her to drive him to the site of an alleged nuclear plant and scooped the soil outside it into a bottle. His idea was to test it later for radioactivity: no one in those days doubted that Saddam was striving after weapons of mass destruction. But Iraqi security saw Bazoft in the act, confiscated the bottle, arrested him andâby the time I was thinking of going to the regionâhad ignored pleas from the highest levels of the British Government to spare his life.
Yes, I agreed, these are dangerous times. But Iraq is not Bahrain. The war against Iran had finished eighteen months earlier and there was no imminent or obvious danger. So, all else being equal, I made up my mind to go.
A couple of weeks before my flight left Britain bound for the Gulf, Bazoftâconvicted spyâwas hanged. My colleague, normally a hearty well-wisher, fell silent.
So you couldn't say I wasn't warned. There were straws aplenty in the desert wind. I drew the short one.
On 10 April 1990, exactly thirteen years before Saddam's statue would be toppled in central Baghdad, a British Airways plane carrying me and my luggage touched down at Bahrain International Airport, Muharraq. It disgorged me but not my luggage which, due to a check-in error at Gatwick, flew on to Hong Kong without me. After an anxious 24-hour wait we would be reunited, but it was not an auspicious beginning.
In early April temperatures in the Gulf states begin the dramatic rise to their dizzy summer heights. No longer are people sunbathing in 30°C: they begin to absorb its merciless rays for ever shorter periods and avoid going out into the noonday furnace altogether.
A worker cannot see through a traveller's eyes. This time the bazaar was not a place to amble through but an obstruction to be hurried past on the way to the daily minibus that took us newspaper staff out to the publishing offices, halfway across the island in a designated industrial area. We would arrive hot and dusty. Of course there was airconditioning but the building itself was isolated from the commercial amenities that make office life in many cities bearable.
Isolation can be geographical or social: it took just a couple of days to discover that, working in Bahrain, I was in for the double whammy. Nothing in a workplace is more upsetting than being out of the loop. Since the job title for which I was explicitly being groomed was that of deputy chief sub-editor, it was naturally of the highest importance that I get on well with the person currently holding down that position. For whatever reason, we didn't click.
Perhaps I was too determined to experiment with my own ideas, perhaps he was right to consider me disinclined to learn the paper's established ways. It is, after all, a criticism made of me on some other newspapers where I have worked, so there must be something to it. For my part, I felt that unless I was seen to duplicate his way of doing things he was going to give me a âbad report card', which is indeed what eventuated.
After all these years it amazes me how little I know myself. Even now I couldn't say for sure whether confessing to a lack of ambition is confronting the truth or avoiding it. At other times, when my self-esteem is battered, my thoughts go something like this: someone of my abilities should have been given more responsibilityâeven if I didn't seek it outâand the chance to show I had at least as much skill in people management as they tell me I have on the technical side of my craft.
So from the outset I was battling uphill: having to prove my worth to the incumbent deputy chief sub-editor, someone who was always hovering over my shoulder and who carried an immovable residue of disappointment that I had not measured up as his ideal successor. Small newspapers are like families, and here was someone a couple of years older than I, and actually less experienced in journalism, being called upon to exercise judgments that would affect not only my place in this clan but how long I could hope to retain it.
Journalists are often insecure creatures who mask their personal vulnerability by training the spotlight on others. Any office is a vacuum waiting to be filled by egos that establish a more or less settled pecking order. In my view, these facts taken together account for why newspaper offices are often hotbeds of jealousy, conspiracy, whispers and power struggles rather than co-operative endeavours bringing out the best in human nature. Add to this that one of the best assets a thrusting reporter can possessâa scepticism that extends to not being overawed by the high and mightyâbecomes a liability when respect for authority is demanded by the office hierarchy itself, and anyone could see that Bahrain's overheated atmosphere extended to the office.
Adding to the volatility, the staff on this newspaperâas with all English-speaking media in countries where English isn't the native tongueâwere an exotic mix. The subs' desk comprised two Englishmen, myself and half a dozen Indians, chosen partly because they would do equivalent work for far less than it cost to hire a Westerner, yet for amounts that appeared to them maharajahs' fortunes. Their vision was more in the nature of a mathematical equation than a mirage: a few years' unrelenting work in the Gulf would yield a relatively carefree life back home.
Somehow I always got on better with the Indians than with those in the driving seat, and before long this began to alienate me from management. Outside the office I didn't have time to develop any friendships. I was like a worm that has wandered out of the garden and finds itself inching across the tiled floor of a house, inexplicably cut off from the rich nutrients of its natural environment and condemned to a slow death.
My flat, in the inner Manama suburb of al-Adliya, was palatial but barren. It was a sprawling suite of rooms in a tower block where every neighbour was a stranger. A shopping centre was nearby, and my idea of radical good fun was to make a beeline for the Western food counter at the back of it, buy obscene amounts of ham (available only to the likes of us in this Muslim society) and take them back to the airconditioned fortress of the apartment, there to create and consume a modest mountain of ham sandwiches. From time to time I would breast the bar at the Londoner, an English pub on the edge of the city. But doing that every night never appealed, and I lived for the most part in a degree of social isolation that supplied ample scope for my office-based anxieties to fester.
So, almost four months into my second period of employment in the Middle East, my
Observer
colleague's forecast of unhappy times was being borne out. My futureâinsofar as it involved working in Bahrainâwas on the line, and then one night at the beginning of August my worldâand that of everyone I knew thereâwas turned upside down.
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