In deference (I think) to our innocence, the leader began with some gentle barrel rolls and loops. Then the display began.
I heard him say, “Twinkle, twinkle, roll,” and the horizon went insane. A twinkle roll is fast, along the axis of the aircraft. The sky went one way, the horizon another, and for a split second Gloucestershire appeared above my head. Then we were back where we started. I looked right and left. The wingtips were still a few inches from my eyebrows.
It went on for about half an hour, then, somehow, we were on final approach, wheels down, flaps at the right setting, green grass flashing past, gentle bumps as the wheels met tarmac.
I had long lost the airfield, except twice, when it was above my head, but the leader had ensured that the whole team hardly left the circuit. That is the point of display flying. The audience has to be able to see it. So it never really leaves their vision. And all the time we had been airborne, the assessors had been watching with powerful field glasses to note any imperfection.
We were assisted out of the cockpits to the wings, then down to the ground. I went over to Peter. He had probably lost several pounds in sweat, but was otherwise impassive. He was probably more concerned for the health of his beloved camera than for himself. How he had taken the strain in the 6-G turns, I shall never know.
We had a “brew” with the Arrows, also soaked in sweat, said our good-byes, and motored back to Ally Pally. I was dying to see the rushes (films had to be developed in those days, then cut and edited).
The rushes were superb and the editors were pretty openmouthed. The camera never wavered, rock-steady, filming out through the Perspex hood as the world twisted and turned around us. And always the next red Gnat in perfect formation, so close one would think to lean out and touch it.
The feature was screened as a “special” to considerable public and professional acclaim.
That autumn I went back to Broadcasting House and lodged my application for the post of assistant diplomatic correspondent, still yearning to go back abroad. There were boards and interviews. I was twenty-eight and the job normally required someone two decades older.
I met Chris Serpell, the middle-aged diplomatic correspondent, whose deputy the job was all about. He seemed formal and distant, staid, and in all things more like one of the Foreign Office mandarins with whom he consorted daily than a journalist.
But amazingly they gave me the job, effective from the next February. Foolishly, I was elated, for I had no idea what I had stepped into.
There are times in life when you discover what is really going on, but too late. When you can say, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have acted completely differently.” Had I known the full level of incompetence of the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) and its sister the Foreign Office, and the level of slavishness the BBC foreign news mini-empire at Broadcasting House would dedicate to both ministries, I would have resigned at once, or never applied for the job in the first place. But awareness came later, too late.
A TASTE OF AFRICA
That spring of 1967, I joined the foreign news team, full of hopes that I would soon be sent abroad again to cover foreign news stories. What I did not know was that my presence on that team was absolutely undesired.
My new boss, foreign news editor Arthur Hutchinson, had been extremely upset that he had not been seated on the interview board that had given me the post. Had he been, I would never have got it, because he had a protégé of his own that he wished to bring on. As Tom Maltby explained to me months later, from the first my card was marked.
There is a permanent question in office politics: Does your face fit? This one emphatically did not. All that was needed was an excuse, and this I liberally provided.
To start with, my tasks included attending the regular morning briefings at the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office. These two ministries in the heart of Whitehall covered all British foreign affairs, the second one obviously concerning itself with the residue of the fast-dissolving empire and its successor, the Commonwealth.
It seemed to me the other diplomatic and Commonwealth correspondents had really “gone native” inasmuch as they were as close to mandarins in attitude and posture as the senior civil servants, languid and disdainful, who briefed them. I never recall a penetrating question or a hint of disagreement with what we were being told. The “received wisdom” was duly and obediently noted and thence reported to the public. But by midspring, a single issue was dominating all others: the Middle East. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was steadily preparing for war with Israel.
If the briefings at the two ministries, seated by the grave Chris Serpell, were boring, the growing crisis in the Middle East was absorbing much of the world’s attention. Nasser was no friend of Britain, nor vice versa. In 1956, we had invaded Egypt via Suez in collusion with the French and the Israelis. It had been a disaster and still rankled in Britain on the Center-Right.
Yet in the Foreign Office, the anti-Semitism was unmissable. I found this odd. On most issues, the senior mandarins reflected a lofty disdain of foreigners, yet made one exception, a preference for Arabs and Islam. This was mirrored in the left-wing media.
In his young manhood, as an impecunious provincial furrier, my father had been treated with great kindness by the fur houses of the East End of London, all run by Jews, many who had fled Hitler. My own views therefore were the other way.
By the time Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli and Israel-bound sea traffic, it had become hard to see how war was avoidable. I wanted to go out there on assignment, but was pinned to London. In frustration, I took my summer leave.
It was on leave that I watched the Six-Day War via the media. It was a war that shattered an awful lot of misconceptions and frustrated many prejudices. In early June, Israel took on four surrounding Arab armies and three air forces and crushed them all. The air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were destroyed on the ground before they even flew. With unchallenged control of the air above them, the Israeli ground forces raced across Sinai to the Suez Canal, roared east to take the holy city of Jerusalem and almost all land up to the Jordan River, and in the north stormed Syria’s Golan Heights.
In Britain, the Left had been practically salivating at the imminent destruction of the Jewish state and could only watch in slack-jawed amazement. Most of the British people just cheered. The hero of the hour across two continents, Europe and the United States, became the Israeli defense minister, a one-eyed veteran called Moshe Dayan.
There were three pools of influence in the UK that were not so enthused: the left-wing newspapers, the BBC, and the Foreign Office. In those environs, I was much in a minority when I returned from leave in mid-June. What nobody was paying any attention to at all was a brewing crisis in Nigeria that pitted the federal dictatorship and its own region of eastern Nigeria.
It was on July 6, forty days after the Eastern Region had declared unilateral secession from the federal state, that Nigeria invaded to end the insurrection. That day I was called into the office of Mr. Hutchinson’s deputy (he was on leave) and asked to go to Nigeria to cover the extremely short-lived campaign.
I protested that I knew nothing of Africa, could not care less, and did not want the assignment. It was pointed out that everyone else was either still “wrapping up” in the Middle East or on leave. I capitulated. There was a day of “jabs” from the resident medical officer and a minutely detailed briefing on what had led to the revolt, what I would find, and what would happen next. This came from a man from the BBC World Service West Africa of Bush House, the official voice of Britain. I recall it even now.
The issues, I was told, were quite simple. The east was the homeland overwhelmingly of the Ibo people who, on the spurious basis of some riots a year earlier and led by a self-serving rogue called Ojukwu, had declared secession from the very fine republic of Nigeria, the jewel in the crown of the British Commonwealth in Africa. Their collective character was long-term troublesome and their claims had no merit.
Even so, they had been unwillingly goaded into secession by the military governor of the region, a certain Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, and had unwisely agreed to follow him. The Nigerian head of state, the marvelous Colonel Yakubu Gowon, had no choice but to use the federal army to reconquer the east, which was styling itself as the Republic of Biafra.
The rebel army was a rabble