COINCIDENTALLY

When is a fact not a fact?  The blog post last month about Red Colour News Soldier touched on that.  Now I find myself unexpectedly revisiting it through two recent events connected to my life four decades ago.

British Embassy, Kabul, 1979. In fact, this bit was the Ambassador’s Residence, believe it or not.

It started with an obituary.  Obituaries always seems unsatisfactory when they are of someone you once knew, even if only slightly: a life summarised in a few hundred words somehow cannot do justice to the personal memory.  This obituary was of the journalist Robert Fisk and it immediately sent my mind scurrying back to a brief acquaintance I had had with him in Afghanistan some forty years before.

After the Soviet occupation in 1979, the crowd of western journalists reporting on events, would do the rounds of embassies in Kabul to pick up information.  I was a junior diplomat in the British Embassy and so they came to my office and listened and made notes and asked questions and left again.  I enjoyed chatting to them because they were new faces and intelligent people.  I think that I had vaguely heard of Robert Fisk from his reporting in Northern Ireland. One morning my office door crashed open and in he walked.  He sat down, started talking, and didn’t stop for about an hour, telling me exactly what was going on and how I was wrong about almost everything.  I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but he was very entertaining and I took to him. 

Shortly after that he filed a report which The Times published about a trip he had made north of Kabul, up the Salang road.  He either went in a Soviet troop carrier or was picked up by one, I can’t remember which.  Anyway, they had come under fire, according to the report, and he had been given a gun by the Russian soldiers and told to defend himself.  I discussed this report with other journalists and eyebrows were raised very high.  I had no idea whether that was professional jealousy or seasoned judgement. 

I was eating a meal with him in a local restaurant shortly after and I thought I would mention this report.  Maybe I didn’t show sufficient respect, but he was very, very touchy about it.  His brow darkened.  “You can go too far, you know.” he said and there was an awkward silence for a few moments.  I saw him a few more times but the report was never mentioned again.

What actually happened?  Does a report in a western newspaper of repute establish authenticity?  It’s those slippery facts again – the ones that Li Zhensheng and Zhan Xianliang wrestled with.  Our lives are underpinned by certain suppositions but outside of a courtroom – and maybe not even there - very little is established beyond reasonable doubt.

The second coincidence stemmed from a doppelganger who has made odd appearances in my life.  Someone whom I had known in Kabul and who now edits an academic journal on Afghan affairs contacted me a couple of months ago to say that I figured in a piece that had just been published in his journal about the history of the British Institute of Afghan Studies (BIAS) in Kabul.  He sent me a copy and I found it very odd.  It was well researched, meticulously annotated and it did indeed refer to my name and my job title and it quoted a couple of memos with my name at the bottom.  To understand why it was odd we have to take a step back.

When I first arrived in Kabul I met an older, very cultivated, man, Ralph Pinder-Wilson, who was head of the BIAS.  I became good friends with him: he had a great influence on me and I learnt a lot from him about attitude and conduct.  One day in 1982 he was suddenly arrested by the Afghan authorities on very unlikely charges.  It turned serious when after a brief trial he was condemned to death.

I was a bit distressed by the article in this academic journal because the memos quoted and the account of these events suggested that I had more or less left Ralph to stew in his own juice; no one from the Embassy had visited him in jail, it said, and the memos cited were not very sympathetic to his plight.  But here’s the thing.  This all happened in 1982 and I had left Afghanistan in 1981.  The trial, the sentence, the memos: all of that happened a year after I had resigned from my position and gone back to the UK.  I certainly didn’t write those memos: when Ralph was in jail I was thousands of miles away in the UK, my short diplomatic career just a memory.  Who then was this other shadowy Peter Barker still operating in my absence? He certainly seemed to have written the memos and was active in advising various government departments and committees.  What was going on?  I pointed out this apparent rent in the fabric of reality to the editor of the journal but he knew no more than I and neither of us could explain the curious sequence of events. Doppelganger? Coincidence? Spooks?

In the end, Ralph was released from prison shortly after his trial and put on a flight back to London so all was well.  It must have been a frightening ordeal but he turned it into a polished and very funny anecdote which always amused me when I heard him tell it in later years.

But still. When our own lives become a playground for unruly factoids spilling through from some other shadow realm what is left for us to depend on?

Here are some photos from those times. They seem much less complicated.

I was just a poor northern boy……I’d never seen so many melons in my life before. He was selling them. Well, obviously.

Uncombed cotton. You could buy it and fill old grain sacks with it to make great floor cushions. We had some in our house for many years.

Look at the colouring of the little girl on the left. You saw many Afghans with straw coloured hair and blue or green eyes. They were said to be the genetic descendants of Alexander The Great’s armies. That’s romantic enough to be worth believing, I think.

These children will be in their fifties now and it is hard to imagine the lives they will have led in their unhappy country over the last forty years.

Embed Block

Add an embed URL or code. Learn more

THE PASSING OF THE DAYS

The recent death of an old friend of mine from my Afghan days sent me rushing to my small photo archive to pull out some pictures of him. To my astonishment I had none. I was deeply saddened. So instead of any images of the friend himself I had to make do with the photographs below - which at least helped smoke a few memories out of the back of my brain. They are some forty years old now. I had never owned a camera before but I bought a little Pentax SLR, taught myself the basics and got cracking. I can vaguely remember taking most of these images but I destroyed the negatives long ago so they are scans of prints originally made by local photo shops in the backstreets of Kabul, using who knows what chemicals. The first and second images have always made me think that if you could time travel back to medieval England with a camera you might bring back to the present images like these. Looking back all those years I remember the Afghans as being both dignified and friendly people and I think that maybe you can see some of that in these images.

The lesson I’ve learnt: take photos of your friends and keep them somewhere safe because they mark out the days of your life and provide something to hold onto when the friends themselves are gone.

A teashop, I think.

Firewood sellers.

Preparing firewood.

Guard outside the British embassy. A lovely young man who always waved rather than saluting.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND MY WARDROBE

 Getting Some Perspective

When I was a young chap and had pretensions to elegance I one day bought myself a very fine suit. It had half-lined trousers which I always thought was a mark of distinction. Though I say it myself, it drew admiring glances and comments and so, when I went to live in Afghanistan in the late 1970s I took it with me.

A funny thing about Kabul in those days, perhaps even now, I don’t know, was that you could buy Harris Tweed and other very good cloths there.  They seemed to be roll ends that had been sent for clearance.  So what you did was to buy a length of your cloth of choice and then take it to one of the tailors in town.  You gave them a jacket and/or trousers to copy – which they did, by hand, to the millimetre.

The chap in the photo here was recommended to me and I started off with a sports jacket - which he made beautifully. Most of the sewing was done by young boys who sat cross-legged on a platform to one side of the shop (though I always assumed they must have some kind of a sewing machine somewhere).

 So then I decided to get a couple of suits made using my very fine one as a template.  I delivered suit and cloth to him one morning, he took some brief measurements (which he marked down in the book there) and told me to come back in a couple of weeks for a fitting.

This is where international history intervened.  A few days after my visit to the tailor the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan.  The sky was dark with Soviet transport planes, the Afghan army was neutralised and Soviet troops appeared on the streets of Kabul.  When I went back to for my fitting there was a Soviet tank backed right up to the frontage of the tailor’s shop. Both the tailor’s and all the other shops were shut and the street was deserted.  Calamity!  Not only had I lost my cloth – I had also lost my finest suit.  I trailed home, despondent at this tragic turn.

The Afghans, I had learnt through my reading, are no strangers to invasions, from the armies of Alexander the Great, to the Moghuls and the British.  The country has been incorporated into  various empires and has been and remains the home of numerous peoples.  All of this must give a certain perspective on life from which I should perhaps have learnt a lesson.   

I cruised past the shop once or twice in the following days but there was no change: Big Tank, No Tailor.  Several weeks later someone told me the shop was open again.  Down I went and it was true – the tank had disappeared and the tailor was back at work.  I went in and there was moment’s silence.  It’s not easy to ask someone how they feel about their country’s being invaded so I just said: “What happened?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “I took a rest” he said with a smile.

GETTING INTO TROUBLE

 

There Is Insensitivity With A Camera And There Is Stupidity

Although I have done it, I am very uneasy about turning a camera on a person who is unaware of my presence.  It may just be a natural disinclination to  voyeurism (based on exquisite taste, of course); but I think it is more likely a base instinct for self preservation – perhaps the result of a difficult photographic lesson I learnt many years ago.

In the late 1970s I lived in Kabul, Afghanistan.   A friend of mine was leaving the country and wanted to spend a day photographing a few memories for himself.   He asked me if I would drive him round and I agreed and took my own camera with me.

The Soviet Army had invaded a few months before but the city itself was pretty peaceful.  We had a fine time in peerless winter Afghan weather, strong sun and blue skies, driving south out of the city towards the Darulaman palace – then still standing.  We took a dusty track eastwards along the city’s perimeter and stopped to take in the view.  I then did a very stupid thing.  As we gazed, I noticed that there was a Soviet gun emplacement over to our left.  I had a little Pentax MX with a reasonably long telephoto lens on it – around 125mm maybe.  Out of idle curiosity I swung it round towards the emplacement.  I couldn’t see much but what I did see sent my heart racing.  Through the lens I saw a sentry turn, look, raise his rifle and take aim at me.

I think I probably froze for a second before dropping the camera away from my eye.  But still he was aiming.  All I could manage then was a sad parody of a John Wayne movie.  I raised my hands as high as I could.  I seemed to have stopped breathing.  The sentry lowered his rifle and came bounding across the snow towards the pair of us with several comrades.  They grabbed the cameras and us and pushed us through thigh high snow to their tents. 

Things then moved from high drama to soap.  The Soviet soldiers clustered round us both and started asking the questions that Soviet citizens always asked of westerners: how much do you earn, how much does your car cost, how much does a house cost and so on.  I did my best to answer in halting Russian in a naked attempt to build bridges.  Apart from the periodic appearance of their unfriendly sergeant to call me a spy and running dog it all went quite well, in fact.  As the afternoon wore on and the sun and the temperature dropped we moved into a large tent.  They placed our cameras gently on some sacking and laid strips of cloth over the lenses for protection.  They rolled me a cigarette which I accepted gratefully, even though I had stopped smoking over a decade before, and offered us compote – a watery drink with berries at the bottom which we sipped as though it were nectar. 

They were tall, impressive looking guys in shapkas and greatcoats some of which had deep red lapels.  Strong beams of sunlight raked through the darkened tent and the shadows slipped into blackness.  Several of the soldiers stood one booted foot forward with hands slipped inside their coats Napoleon-style. It was a timeless moment.  I suddenly thought of those great nineteenth century oil paintings of military campaigns where staff officers are gathered round in the commander’s tent and the artist engineers high contrast lighting in just this way.  It would have made a truly fabulous photograph but my sensitivity to such situations had, understandably I think, just been burned to its core. 

I can’t say that we all became bosom pals but the soldiers seemed to bear no ill-will at all towards us and by the time we parted I felt pretty well-disposed towards them as well.  But part we did.  It was many hours later.  The Army’s problem seemed to be finding someone senior enough to decide what to do with us.  Eventually they decided that turning us over to the Afghan secret police was the best move. 

When I saw where they were taking us, after a hair-raising ride in a jeep through the pot-holed streets of the Afghan capital with a rifle pointed at my head, my heart did another backflip.  The secret police headquarters!  I imagined pliers and bare electrodes.  But it was all benign.  We spent most of the time discussing the year our interrogator had spent in Southsea which he clearly remembered with great fondness.  I think I even claimed to have known his landlady in a further shameless attempt to ingratiate myself.  He said we would have to expose the film in our cameras but we said we hadn’t actually taken any photos and so they turned us out into the freezing Afghan evening and the compound gate clanged firmly shut behind us.

And that, I think, is why ever since I have never been happy squinting through a long lens at someone who, I imagine, is unaware of my presence.  For the rest of my time in Kabul I concentrated on Afghans whose permission I would carefully request before training my camera on them – like the three handsome chaps here.  Who knows what has become of them in the intervening 40 years of dreadful events in that now unhappy country?