THE WRATH OF THE THIRD MRS STEINBECK

I think it was a complaint that Mrs Steinbeck was making when she spoke to me. We were standing on the pavement outside my offices in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, from whence I had been summoned by her tour guide. Mr Steinbeck had delegated his wife to reprimand me whilst he remained in the back seat of his limousine. I think it was sometime in 1967.

The eminent author and his wife had been staying in Lae on the northern coast of New Guinea and had hired my travel company to guide them around its hinterland. The lady who ran the local office undertook the task. She had telephoned to warn me that the Steinbecks would be seeking me out to express their considerable dissatisfaction with her efforts. She, like many Australians, was not notably deferential when addressing important folk. It might have improved her attitude towards them had they not insisted he was John Steinbeck’s brother.

I believe Mr and Mrs Steinbeck had hoped for a period of rest and reflection in Papua New Guinea following a visit to the ill-fated war in Vietnam. He was said to have betrayed his principles by writing favourable reports about US engagement in the region. His wife was later to suggest that his experience in the war zone had led to a change of mind. He may have begun to question both its legitimacy and its execution whilst he was in Papua New Guinea.

The lady from Lae told me that Mr. Steinbeck had been very angry with her whilst she was driving him and the third Mrs Steinbeck to see the remains of the abandoned gold fields at Bulolo, some two and a half hours by road out of town. She told me that Mr Steinbeck had complained about back pain. The road from Lae to the gold fields was very rough indeed in those days and the off-road performance of contemporary motor vehicles was poor. He would have been shaken about somewhat. It is not surprising that he complained. Later, whilst in Japan on his way home, he was found to have two or three collapsed vertebrae. He underwent an operation in the USA to relive the paralysing pain this unfortunate condition causes. He died in December 1968 of heart disease exacerbated by heavy smoking.

I had not trained my Lae branch manager well enough in the business of tour guiding. She was a feisty lady who was prone to make dismissive remarks about native Papua New Guineans. Her attitude would have upset Mr Steinbeck who may have found parallels in the events in his own country where Martin Luther King was at the height of his powers. He may also have reflected on the sad history of Native Americans. To be fair, it took both Canada and New Zealand a long time to legislate for, and begin to effect, a more enlightened policy towards Native Canadians and Maoris. Such polices need concerted and determined action by governments. This was a not a benefit available to Native Papua New Guineans at the time.

The gold fields at Bulolo had played an important role in the relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea though the wealth they generated was of little benefit to the latter. They were also notable because in the 1930s, in the absence of roads, eight 3,000-ton aero-portable gold dredges were flown into them from the port of Lae in one of the first major air lift operations in history.

The tourist industry was in its adolescence when the Steinbecks visited Papua New Guinea. The commercialisation of sacred ritual and custom was one of the dilemmas it faced then and still faces now. It is exemplified in the vicinity of Bulolo by the Anga tribe’s custom of preserving the corpses of their dead by smoking them slowly and ceremonially in a Spirit House. The dried human remains were smeared in red mud and left sitting on bamboo platforms on the mountain side overlooking their native villages. At least one of the sacred sites where some of these fragile remains are to be found is now included in tour itineraries. I believe the custom of smoke curing ceremonies has been resurrected recently. Christian missionaries had attempted to stop it in the early years of the twentieth century by offering the Anga supplies of salt with which to cure the corpses. They may have reasoned that it would reduce the ritual which attended the smoking method.

By the time I was summoned to speak to them the Steinbecks were spending a few days in Port Moresby before flying home to the USA, probably via Hong Kong and Japan. I do not recall much of the conversation with Mrs Steinbeck. I do remember the famous Noble Laurate glowering at me from the back seat of a limousine.

HOT FOOT TO HEAVEN OR HELL

I was in the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Fiji for a good while. I had been severely injured in an accident and, I am told, near death at one time. I survived the immediate trauma and embarked on the long business of mending my body in what was called the Male Paying Ward because we who occupied it could afford the modest fees for our operations and care. The Fijian nurses set about mending my mind with unfailing humour.

My fellow patients came and went, some I fear to their respective heaven or hell depending on their religious preference. In which case the smiling nurses would cut the toenails of the corpses because they continue to grow a while. Sometimes relatives argued across the remains of their late kinsmen about unresolved family matters.

It was inevitable that we patients should talk about death in the circumstances. One of my Fijian neighbours in the ward had an interesting slant on the subject. He was from the island of Bega (pronounced Benga) where members of some families occasionally displayed their immunity to burns by psyching themselves up and dancing on very hot stones. Sadly, some canny folk realised that this might be a profitable tourist attraction so watching the Fire Walkers of Bega found its way onto ‘bucket lists’ along with swimming with dolphins and watching the wildebeest migration on the Serengeti.

My ward neighbour had walked barefooted for most of his life. When he was confined to a hospital bed for a long time the thick skin on his feet began to crack into deep and painful fissures. The famous Bega Fire Walkers may benefit from the extensive callouses on their feet.

He told me the story of the serpent god who lived in a cave in the Nakavada mountains in the interior of Viti Levu, the largest of Fiji’s numerous islands. When you die, he said, your soul journeys into the afterlife via the serpent’s cave where the scaly deity decides if it goes to heaven or hell. He was unable to tell me the criteria the serpent applied when making its decisions. Some modern religions offer more help in this regard by guaranteeing exclusive access to eternal paradise in return for obedience on earth.

TIME TO SELL THE CHILDREN

When drought hits the people of Northern Niger they often say, ‘it is time to sell the children’. Sometimes they do just that. It is little wonder that so many people of the Sahel now set out on the long and dangerous journey to Europe where the streets seem to be paved with gold. Many of them travel the old trans-Saharan slave trafficking routes through Libya.

There are few people writing about Libyan people trafficking with real experience of living there. Without that experience it is difficult for observers to understand the great distances and physical hazards migrants must overcome to reach the Mediterranean shore and embark on the hazardous sea crossing. Libya is a very large country much of which is inhospitable. I lived and worked there for more than eight years and drove my less than reliable British motor car over its roads. It was in the middle of the last century admittedly. Libya was just then emerging from being one of the poorest countries in the world into oil rich nationhood and Gaddafi was still training in the Royal Libyan Military Academy. Tribes still migrated with their flocks and telephone communication was sparse and intermittent. King Idris was still nominally in charge, but he was a reluctant monarch who attempted to abdicate at least twice whilst I was there.

I have not driven but have flown over some of the other countries the migrants traverse such as Chad and Niger. From the air the Libyan Desert and the Sahara look forbidding enough but the view through an aircraft widow is a privileged one and not shared by an impoverished migrant riding the roads and tracks in an overloaded Toyota half truck. We have no real data about the number who die on the land leg of their journey, but I suspect there are many. The simplest of the long road trips I made regularly was from Tripoli to Tobruk along the old military road constructed by the Italians when they occupied Libya. They built rest stations along the way but in my day, these had been abandoned. The last remnant of the Italian colonial way stations was Mamma Rosa’s bar at Ben Juade. Mamma Rosa’s daughter had acquired somewhat overrated popularity born of long periods of life without women amongst those who drove supplies to the oilrigs deep in the hinterland. At Mamma Rosa’s one could purchase a cold drink, admire her daughter, and watch camels replenish their capacious water storage organs at the drinking troughs.

The distance by road from Tripoli to Tobruk via Misrata, Sirte, Ajadabia, Benghazi and Derna is approximately 1,460 kilometres and the journey should take around 19 hours if you drive without stopping at Libya speeds. Few would attempt to do so, even today. The road was not in good repair in the middle years of the last century when I was travelling around Libya. On one notable occasion I was met and summarily forced off the road a few kilometres west of Ajadabia by a motor convoy conveying King Idris from Tripoli to Tobruk. The poor king, who was not in robust health, was so shaken up by the numerous potholes in the road that he caused them to be repaired by a Greek construction company. The Greeks succeeded in replacing the potholes with lumps which were almost as destructive. Land travel in Libya is hazardous for several reasons. Libyan drivers are rather reckless and are not keen on being overtaken. Wrecked cars are not uncommon, even on long strait roads.

Also, it gets very hot indeed during the day in the summer but the temperature dips steeply at night. High winds can make life very difficult. I drove through a gale whilst near Marsa Brega when the sand blast raised by the wind was so severe it stripped paint off the front of my car and polished its sump to a high shine. Water is not readily available, and dehydration can be lethal. Vehicles which overheat are not recommended. A real, but fortunately infrequent, hazard is the hot wind which rolls up from the deep south. These winds are known as Khamsins in Egypt. In Libya they are called Ghiblis, and they are formidable. The sight of a Ghibli as it approached me over the Red Plane west of Benghazi frightened me a great deal. These awful sandstorms suffocate one in dust. There is only one thing to do and that is to stop and sit it out in the hope that one does not dehydrate and that the motor engine will not have seized up with sand when the storm has passed.

I knew the city of Ajadabia well enough. I would stop there on my regular journeys from Benghazi to the developing oil ports on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte. I often ate a late breakfast in one of its cafes of a boiled egg and a cup of very strong and very sweet coffee, known in Libya as ‘Ghid Ghid’. So strong and addictive is ‘Ghid Ghid’ that it may account for the lack of harmony which besets Libya today! It is an interesting town. It has strategic value today because it is here that members of two major Libyan tribes, Al Magharba and Al Zuweya, live in a wary coexistence. The Magharba now exercises a great deal of influence over the oil terminals on the shores of the Gulf of Sirte and the Zuweya tribe’s homeland includes a major section of Libya’s oilfields. It is at Ajadabia that the coastal road from Tripoli now branches in three directions, one branch goes north east across the white and red plains to Benghazi, a second strikes out eastwards across the southern foothills of the Jebel Akhdar, roughly following the old Trig al Abd camel track to Tobruk, and a third takes the hazardous route going SSE in the direction of Kufra and, even further south, to the Jebal Uweinat.

This is one of the main roads for people trafficking. The distances are enormous. For example, the Jebal Uweinat is around 1,200 kilometres from Ajadabia. Ajadabia is now one of the northern hubs on the people trafficking routs from East Africa and the Horn of Africa via Khartoum and Dongola in the Sudan and Kufra in Libya’s Deep South. From Ajadabia traffickers often take their human cargo westwards to Tripoli to find the fragile and unstable boats in which they are packed to hazard the Mediterranean crossing to Lampedusa, Malta, Sicily, and mainland Italy. Kufra is an oasis town which is now Libya’s the southeastern hub for people trafficking. The route through Kufra to Ajadabia is favoured by refugees from Eritrea and Somalia. Data from the International Organization for Migration shows that these two countries are large contributors to the tide of human migration into Southern Europe.

Many of the young migrants from Eritrea appear to be escaping military conscription and Somalia has long been a failed state, a veritable model of anarchy. Recently a number of refugees from Syria have been using this route. They are escaping the Syrian misery and finding their way to Turkey from whence they fly to Khartoum and travel thence by land to Kufra. That would be complicated enough but they still have to get to the Mediterranean coast from Kufra and then make the parlous crossing to a European shore. It is a demonstration of the lengths human beings will go to find a future for themselves and their progeny. It is also a demonstration of the firestorm of warfare, religious intolerance, corruption, grinding poverty and racial hatred which blights a great swathe of the Middle East and Africa.

For those who make it as far as Kufra the journey to Europe would be hard enough, but Libya is a divided state and corruption is rampant. The people traffickers have growing ever more callous and brazen

Some Sudanese traffickers are taking their clients on a new route westward from Dongola and Khartoum to Quatrun and Sebha in the Libya’s Fezzan. Here the migrants from East Africa join those from the Sahel and West Africa who trek eastwards via Bamako in Mali and Naimy, Agadez and Dirku in Niger. This is the route followed by drug smugglers carrying their lethal mind-altering chemicals shipped into corrupt West African states by the South American drug cartels. A substantial number of the ‘western’ migrants originate in Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and the Gambia. Once in Quatrun the migrants face a 1057-kilometre road trip to Tripoli before they embark on the sea crossing to Lampedusa, Malta, Sicily or mainland Italy.

Libya is shouldering the blame for the tide of economic migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean. There is no doubt that unscrupulous people traffickers are making money out of human misery. The migrants are following tracks made by their ancestors who were sold into slavery by unscrupulous Sultans in Darfur, Wadai and Kano and trafficked across the Sahara. Even today they may see the skeletons of those who were left to die for the desert is slow to recycle bones. The trans Saharan slave trade was still functioning until 1911.

It is time to question the resounding silence of the Heads of States from whose lands the tides of migrants have their origin. The present conflict in neighbouring Sudan has pushed large numbers of refugees to try to cross the border into Libya. Neither the Sudanese nor the Libyan authorities know how many have died attempting the journey, and many of those who survived are now trapped in limbo.

As long as it remains divided, Libya will be ill-equipped to cope with these sudden and unexpected migrant arrivals.

Today Libya hosts 40,540 refugees and asylum-seekers who are registered with UNHCR’

AUSTER AND MEDUSA

My office door in Benghazi was propped open by a good-sized piece of petrified wood. It got there because of a strange event concerning an aircraft which was stranded on the ground a good way south of Benghazi. I can’t recall why it had been there in the first place. Another aircraft had gone to collect the pilot and had also got stuck in the rough terrain when attempting to take-off. Both aircraft were abandoned and subject to an insurance claim.

An Englishman who ran an engineering company in Benghazi wanted to salvage the aircraft and sell off the parts. He needed to see if it was possible to do so profitably. He owned and flew an Auster, a type of light aircraft previously used by the British Army as a spotter or reconnaissance plane. It was designed with excellent short take-off and landing characteristics. He decided to fly over the abandoned aircraft and scout a route which his trucks might take to reach them. He took me with him as I had played a small part in his negotiations with the insurance companies. They would be relieved of some of the costs if he purchased the aircraft for scrap.

We had been flying around for a while when he experienced an embarrassing bladder problem, so he landed the aircraft and got out to urinate. He did not stop the Auster’s engine and thus risk restarting it – a task which would have required me to turn the propeller by hand whilst he sat inside pressing switches and shouting orders in the hope that the engine fired. The propeller would then have spun very quickly, and I might well have lost a hand. I was not in favour of that option. He left the propeller turning whilst I too got out and held on to a wing strut to stop the Auster from joining the other two aircraft.

Some weeks later a member of his staff brought the piece of petrified wood which he dumped on my office floor and left without a word. It made a good door stop. There are petrified forests in the Libyan Desert. Perhaps that was why it was known in antiquity as the homeland of the Greek goddess Medusa whose very glance turned people to stone.

BARNY

He came from New Mexico and said that he was part Native American. His features bore this out as he had a touch of Aztec about his eyes. He wore cowboy boots, jeans and a sweatshirt most of the time and often a Stetson hat. It was said that he only had one pair of boots and when they were in for repair he would take to his bed. He was, at the time, unmarried and he lived as he pleased.

He had first come to Libya with one of the America oil drilling companies as a tool pusher or rough neck or the like. It was said that he was the best Kelly drillers around. He had drifted from job to job and ended up in Benghazi running a company drilling for water out where the wildcatting oil rigs set up in the desert.

He said he had been a bomb aimer with the United Sates Army Air Force during the war against the Nazis. That may have been so. At least he wore his leather flying jacket when it was cold, and it had the right look about it. In a town where there were people left over from both sides in that war the story was not unusual and excited little interest.

As his water drilling company grew, he employed more Americans to help him. He sent to the USA for his mother and her current husband, and they set up house amongst us and entertained friends for meals. She was a good cook and the family talked well at the table about their life in New Mexico. Stories of marital disputes settled with guns were not unusual in their repertoire.

They would show their family photographs around after supper. One was of a large group dressed up for a wedding or a funeral. It was the last family picture with aunt so and so they would say. They would point out the aunt and add that she was dead before they could get the photographer out to take the picture. They had dressed her up in her best frock and an uncle held her corps up from behind as the family stood in a row before the camera.

FRUIT TREES

It is early April in England as I write. The two apple trees are beginning to flower in our modest garden near the Devil’s Highway. They have been pruned this year to keep them from over growing and shedding apples onto our neighbour’s property. I like to watch them go through their seasonal changes from flowering to fruiting. I watch the apples grow and ripen and pick them one at a time for cooking purposes. Blackbirds and Thrushes feed on the windfalls. When the cold weather grinds us down a squadron of Fieldfares appears under the tree and feeds voraciously and briefly on the remains. One tree is of the Bramley variety and the other a Golden Delicious. They are rooted together in a perpetual cross-pollinating partnership.

When my sister and I were very young there were two fruit trees on our family farm, cannily planted together as cross pollinators. One of the variety known as Victoria, bore rich purple fruit and the other, a Greengage tree, bore green fruit touched with gold. Their summer ripened fruits were picked by our father and preserved by our mother in sealed jars which she stored in the cool pantry. Throughout the winter, the jars were opened one by one and we ate the preserved plums made more palatable by glutinous blobs of sweet custard. We would place the plums stones around the rim of our dish and try to foretell our future by counting them to the familiar chant; ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’.

Years later I had an office near the docks in Benghazi. One of the city’s date palm trees stood outside the window. Once a year a man parked his bicycle against the office wall, climbed the palm tree and dabbed about in its fronds with what appeared to be a piece of vegetation. Out of politeness he did not stare at me as I worked nor I at him. He was Benghazi’s official palm tree pollinator.

Like willow and cannabis, date palms are dioecious; that is there are separate male and female trees. The male trees produce copious pollen in male flowers. The female trees grow flowers which need pollinating before they develop into edible fruit. Left to their own devices date palms would make do with the chancy process of wind pollination. This is clearly unproductive in Libya which is dry and sandy and where dates are a dietary staple. It would mean growing many male trees whose brief and explosive moment of importance would not justify their long use of precious water. Therefore, humans intervene and grow one male tree for every fifty or so female trees. That is why the man parked his ancient bicycle outside my office window, detached a cluster of male flowers from the handlebars, discarded his sandals, clambered up the palm tree and brushed fertilising pollen onto its female flowers. I was too young and impatient to watch the fruit clusters grow.

Long ago, before the Toyota motor car company put camels out of the desert travel and warfare business, a human could survive for a very long time on strong tea, camel’s milk and dried dates.

For a while June and I and our daughter, Nikki, lived in a second-floor apartment near Port Moresby in Papua. The crown of a mango tree grew outside our bedroom windows. There were two reasons to regret this. The first was a vocal and insomniac tree frog which was only interrupted by the arrival of the flying foxes. That would have been a welcome relief were it not for the noises flying foxes make.

Flying foxes are very large bats and their wings are made of black skin stretched over bones. When the flap them, and they do so often to keep cool, they make an obscene noise, especially so if you are trying to sleep a yard or so away from their roost. When we lived in that benighted place the mango fruit ripened. Flying foxes eat mango fruit greedily and slobber when they do so. June soon found us a villa with a view of the sea and no mango trees in the garden.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE.

Syrian children have been subjected to “unspeakable” suffering in the nearly three years of civil war, with the Government and allied militia responsible for countless killings, maiming and torture, and the opposition for recruiting youngsters for combat and using terror tactics in civilian areas, according to the first United Nations report on the issue.’ UN News Centre, 4^th February 2014.’

In 1961 I was a briefly suspected by the Libyan police of stealing a consignment of golden ‘bijouterie’ which had arrived by air from Italy and stored awaiting collection in one of my warehouse at Tripoli’s international airport. I was arrested and interrogated by a polite and well trained police lieutenant and, it transpires, followed by competent detectives for some time.

Some members of my Libyan staff who also came under suspicion were treated with less consideration. On them the police used an interrogation technique known as the bastinado. I had not heard of this painful process until I asked one of them why walking caused him such pain. He told me that during his interview in the airport police post he was forced to lie on a bedstead whilst someone thrashed the soles of his feet with a stick.

It took two years for an insurance agent to work out that a near bankrupt Tripoli jeweller had arranged an insurance scam in which a box of worthless costume jewellery was shipped to him by air from an accomplice in Naples. It was insured for a considerable sum as ‘golden bijouterie’ and marked as a valuable consignment on the air waybill and cargo manifest. He arranged for other accomplices in Tripoli to steal it from my freight warehouse so that he might claim its fictitious value in gold from his insurers. His scam, his insurance claim and his business failed.

My failure to protest about the brutal interrogation of my staff is amongst my bad memories but I may have been conditioned by my own education to accept it as normal. In the late 1940s I attended a boarding school in the English county of Cornwall where beatings of younger boys by their elders were common and vicious. Initiation ceremonies in such establishments were both physically and psychologically violent and were perpetrated by boys who are now pillars of society. Violence, habitually committed, leads to a point where it loses its significance. Put simply, savagery begets savagery.

When moral leadership, law and order and civic society is absent people tend to seek mutual security by bonding in groups which may be religious, racial, political, tribal, gang or clan. When this happens individual identity merges with the ‘group self’ and loathing for other groups is increased. Groups with strong internal identities, especially religious and political groups, can become capable of inhuman savagery. Eventually people will do savage things if their leaders tell them it is acceptable once they have renounced their individuality and merged with the group self. Examples of this are found in the Red Terror, the Pol Pot extermination of 25% of the Cambodian population and the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion today. When religion is infused into the ‘group self’ it seems to heighten hatred for those who hold incompatible values. The fate of Christians in the Middle East is a notable example. Salafist-Jihadists have begun to see themselves as the sole arbiters of Islam. They persuade their foot-soldiers that ‘their hands are prepared to do the blessed act’ of beheading their enemies.

Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part in perpetuating the savagery. The Bedouin tribal concept of ‘Amara dam – ‘those who have agreed on the blood’ – means a group of close male tribal relatives who are bound to revenge a killing of one of their number or to pay blood money should one of their number kill a member of another tribe. This is a manifestation of group behaviour sanctioned by tradition and which grew up in the lawless and nomadic tribal life of true Arabs to reduce the homicide rate.

I suggest that this was what made the killing reported in the Libya Herald dated 30^th August 2014; ‘The Shura Council of Islamic Youth in Derna has killed an Egyptian man it accused of murder in what is reportedly the second public execution carried out by the group in the town……..The execution was the second such public killing in Derna. On 27 July, Islamic Youth put to death two men, one Egyptian and another Libyan, for an alleged murder. This most recent killing has received wide-spread attention after a video of the proceedings was uploaded to the internet. The veracity of the video has been confirmed and shows one man…… killed by a single gunshot to the head. He is surrounded by around 40 members of the Islamic Youth most of whom carry Kalashnikov rifles and wear face masks and military fatigues of one kind or another. One member holds the black flag of Al-Qaeda at the centre of proceedings. There are a large number of spectators present in the stands at the football ground but they cannot be seen in the video. The execution is met with the sounds of chanting and applause.’ Sources in Derna say that the man who pulled the trigger was the murder victim’s brother.

In a paper entitled ‘Kitchener’s Lost Boys’ published in The Evacuee and War Child Journal, volume 1, number 7 and dated 2012, I attempted to show that juvenile adventure and war stories played a major role in recruiting adolescent volunteers to fight for Kitchener’s New Armies in the early years of World War I. I argued that the effect was magnified because of the neuro-physiological changes which take place in the frontal lobes of the human brain between the ages of 12 and 19. This is a period, which might be called the early formative years, when synaptic connections are forged in the frontal lobes in response to experiences. The frontal lobes influence conformity in adults and the connections formed therein during adolescence are said to exert a profound influence over subsequent moral behaviour.

Educators will point out that adolescence is a period when the tendency to form groups is at its strongest. In this case it is often a defence against perceived injustice or for self protection. The group self becomes very strong and is bolstered by a hierarchy, conformity in dress and language and dislike of out-groups. This tendency is exploited by military trainers to focus loyalty onto ‘the cause’ and to reduce individuality in favour of group loyalty.

As James Walvin wrote in a study of English childhood between 1800 and 1914; “It is reasonable to assume that the adults who displayed such fierce nationalism in the early years of the century had learned their jingoistic lines and acquired their sense of national superiority in their early formative years, when thumbing through their books, comics, magazines and yarns.” We might remind ourselves that Walvin refers to a period when the first Information Technology revolution took place fuelled by improvements in papermaking, printing, book binding and by the coming of railways offering rapid distribution of what became the mass print media.

Those of us who are against censorship in any form may have to consider our convictions with greater care in the case of our own IT revolution and in particular the ‘Social Media’. Perhaps we might take the view that the social media is a ‘virtual’ country where law and order, moral leadership and civic society are largely absent. People tend to use it to form virtual groups some of which develop strong group identities. Vulnerable adolescents are particularly prone to this effect and may isolate themselves with their laptops and games consoles from real society and begin to abdicate their identity to a ‘group self’. In this way Jihadist propagandists adjust the inner personal narrative of their target audience so that their recruiters find ready volunteers.

In particular we might consider the effect of violent videos depicting public executions and savagery on adolescent development. I argue that these videos are the ‘flight simulators’ for brutalising the minds of young recruits to the Islamist militias.

A future James Walvin might well write; “It is reasonable to assume that the adults who displayed such fierce Jihadist zeal in the early years of the 21^st century had learnt their murderous ways and acquired their sense of religious superiority in their early formative years, when watching videos and playing violent games on their laptops and games consoles.”

THE HISTORY EXAM

Near the end of my teaching career, I was invigilating a history exam. Whilst it was in progress, I looked at the exam paper. One of the questions required the candidates to comment about a photograph of a member of the British Royal Family in the tropical dress uniform of an admiral surrounded by a group of smartly dressed notables. They had, the candidates were informed, been lowering the flag on British colonial rule somewhere in Africa. It was time I retired. In my early career, I had played a very small part in the aftermath of the event.

Sometime in December 1962 I was watching at Benghazi’s international airport as an East Africa Airways aircraft in transit from Nairobi to London aborted its start-up procedure. One of its engines was broken and we could not fix it in Benghazi. The aircraft would have to be flown back to base using three of its four engines. The passengers were disembarked and parked in the airport lounge. They were stranded in Benghazi until we could find another aircraft to take them onwards. That was not a simple matter.

My staff removed the baggage from the aircraft, found transport to take the passengers to town and accommodation for them in the aged remnant of Italy’s colonial architecture, the Berenice Hotel. There was also the matter of emigration and customs to sort out. Whilst all this was exercising my mind the cabin crew told me that the ex-Governor General of Tanganyika and his wife were amongst the passengers. It was the time when the British Empire was on its last legs. Tanganyika had just become a republic and he had become redundant as the Head of State.

By this time, the passengers were showing signs of discontent. I decided to follow them to the Berenice Hotel and do what I could to make their lives easier. I identified a distinguished looking gentleman as the Governor General and offered to take him and his lady wife to town in my car. I was a little concerned that they had two young daughters. Governor Generals, in my limited experience of such personages, were unlikely be encumbered by progeny. We arrived at the hotel before the other passengers and I arranged for the distinguished gentleman and his family to have the VIP suite. It would allow them to unwind from the rigours of high office in tranquillity, or so I reasoned. There was much to do, and I forgot about the matter until the next morning.

There was, in those days, a certain type of English woman who could dominate a hotel lobby or any other public space for that matter. It was such a woman that I found in the early morning addressing the hotel receptionists in the manner of a Governor General’s wife. She was complaining that she and her husband had not slept well as their very small room was immediately over the night club. No doubt the orchestra’s limited repertoire would have tested their patience.

I had identified the wrong person to have the VIP suite. The gentleman I had selected for the privilege had just sold his farm in Kenya and was on his way to England to start a new career. The exchange that followed between me and the ex-Governor General’s lady would not have found a place in a history exam.

THE QUEEN’S DOCTOR

For some years, our home was in a suburb of Benghazi. Our near neighbour was a Sicilian doctor who lived much of his life on the edge. He was a government doctor who also treated private patients. Amongst them was the Queen of Libya. He was living with a beautiful Belgian lady who had just left her husband. He augmented his income by embalming expatriates whose mortal remains had to go home for burial and by attempting to beat the roulette wheels in the casino. He liked to hunt and kept the badly cured skin of a cheetah which he had shot in the desert. He had a pet gazelle in his back garden and was upset when it was bitten by a scorpion.

He often needed rescuing from himself, sometimes by me. He was good enough to reciprocate. His influence was invaluable, for example, when our daughter had bitten off the end of a mercury thermometer and we thought she had swallowed it.

I asked no questions when he appeared at our door and instructed me to dash to the pharmacy in town and collect some saline drips. I did as he asked under the impression that one of his patients had turned up at his house in need of urgent attention.

I met him sometime later and asked him if his patient had recovered. He explained that the supplies I had collected from the pharmacy were not for a patient but for the Belgian lady. He and she had had a fierce difference of opinion. She had become very angry indeed and locked herself in the bathroom. To persuade her to come out he decided to frighten her by firing his pistol. He reasoned that if he shot downwards into the wooden bathroom door the bullet would embed itself therein, but the noise of the shot would persuade her to stop arguing and come out. He fired into the door, but the bullet penetrated it and ricocheted around the bathroom. She had been sitting on the water closet which was shattered by the bullet, depositing her on the broken shards. She was deeply shocked.

On another occasion, he turned up at our door looking somewhat worse for wear. He asked me to drive him to the hospital with great care as he thought he had broken a shoulder blade. He was in too much pain to explain in detail, but he and his lady had been out in the desert in a government Landrover ambulance in which he had topped a sand dune at speed and rolled down the steep side. He had landed heavily but the Belgian lady had only minor injuries. I left him at the hospital entrance.

He had indeed broken a shoulder blade and one of his colleagues fixed the pieces together with a wire and encased his chest in plaster of Paris. There was a piece of the wire sticking out of the plaster so that it could be removed later, leaving the plaster cast in place.

The full story emerged soon enough. He and his Belgian lady were in a government Landrover ambulance but not on official business. They were hunting gazelles. They had spotted a herd and given chase, topped a dune at speed and rolled down the other side. He was accused by the government of using the ambulance for private purposes but offered the implausible, but apparently acceptable, excuse that he had received a report of a typhus outbreak and had gone to investigate.

He held a party in his house when he decided to have the wire removed from his shoulder blade, to which he invited June and me and several doctors. They gleefully insisted that I removed the wire using a pair of pliers from the garage tool kit.

GUILT AND GALLANTRY

I have ordered a book about David Drummond who was awarded the George Medal for gallantry during his service with the Kenya police. I want to read it because I met him long ago.

He oversaw security for East African Airways when I met him in Benghazi. He came to find out if air crew were smuggling diamonds. It was not improbable. A young co-pilot working for another airline told me that he lived in fear of arrest because he had been paid to smuggle African diamonds. A rich Swiss passenger who had broken his journey home from Ruanda offered me money to go there and bribe government officials to produce certificates of origin for blood diamonds. He had, he said, been hunting gorillas in Ruanda. He was a sinister character. The money would have been welcome. It would have eased my conscience but not guarantee my safety.

David Drummond won the George Medal during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya. The Mau Mau emergency was essentially a war between fighters from the Kikuyu people and the British settlers who had taken tribal land for their farms. The Mau Mau were also known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. It was also about the about independence – Uhuru in Swahili. The British military were engaged in the war and many young white colonialists were drafted into the King’s African Rifles and the Kenya police. Mau Mau fighters were recruited from the Kikuyu and took an oath which was said to be powerful, binding and terrifying. It was also used to prevent betrayal by the wider Kikuyu population. Both men and women took the oath. It was one of the most influential factors in the battle for independence in Kenya.

Mau Mau campaign lasted from 1952 to 1960 and was to haunt the British who conducted it with ungentlemanly ruthlessness and disregard for the truth. Despite their efforts Kenya became independent. It was argued at the time that harsh measures were necessary to match the ruthlessness of the Mau Mau.

Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya’s first prime minister and then president. He had been imprisoned by the colonial power, wrongly so many believe, for his role in the agitation which finally led to independence. Kenyatta was suspected of supporting the Mau Mau. Some say he was the most powerful administrator of the oath which members of the Mau Mau were required to take. This was probably false, but many colonialists believed it. I met Kenyatta when his aircraft staged through Benina on his way to meet the Queen in London and go on to the United Nations in New York.

David Drummond, who spoke fluent Swahili and was a skilled hunter, had joined the Kenya police in 1952, He killed around 40 terrorists. He was awarded a George Medal for conspicuous gallantry against the Mau Mau gangs in the Aberdare region. I see from his obituaries that died at the age of 74 having come to regret taking so many lives.

Whilst we sat on the terrace of the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi, David Drummond told me that he had been to Buckingham Palace and received his gallantry medal from the Queen. Whilst he was in the UK, he took the precaution of visiting the famous Lloyds of London and buying an insurance policy to cover his future life. He explained that as he had killed 40 Mau Mau he constituted an unusual risk. Lloyds of London is still a specialised insurance broker. It gained some notoriety for insuring lady film stars legs and the hairs on the chest of a famous Welsh singer.

He also told me an ironic story.

There was a great deal of tension amongst white residents in Kenya in the early days of independence. Many believed that Kenyatta was dangerous. Drummond had earned a reputation as a ruthless killer of Mau Mau gang members. He told me how surprised he was to receive a summons to meet Kenyatta. He told friends that if he attended and did not return, they should report his demise to the British High Commission.

Drummond kept his appointment. Kenyatta offered him the job as his personal bodyguard. He politely refused the privilege.