Is Anything Happening? Read online

  Mrs Bhandari was said to have been the first woman in Amritsar to own and drive a car, and the first to run her own business. Her first husband was a Hindu, whom she insisted on marrying against the wishes of her family; one of Amritsar’s best-known road bridges, the Bhandari Bridge, is named after him. In her younger days, she was known as the ‘spitfire’ because of her often abusive language, especially when aimed at young men attracted to her three daughters. By the time of her death in 2007 at the age of 101, she was believed to be the last remaining Parsi living in Amritsar.

  During my time as a Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem, my home from home was the American Colony Hotel, as it was for dozens of foreign correspondents who came to regard it as a blessedly peaceful oasis and an invaluable place to pick up stories and gossip. Its origins were as a community of devout American Christians brought together in the 1880s by the Spafford family of Chicago after their four daughters had drowned in a shipwreck. Their grandson, Horatio, and his English wife Val were still very much around when I first arrived in Jerusalem, and after Horatio’s death, Val could be found having breakfast every morning in the hotel restaurant, keeping a motherly eye on any British correspondents whose names she had spotted on the hotel register.

  The hotel was originally a rather grand, stone villa built for a nineteenth-century Turkish pasha, and it owes its enduring popularity with journalists, diplomats, businesspeople and spies to the fact that it occupies the closest thing in Jerusalem to a neutral space. It is located in the eastern, Arab part of town that had been ruled by Jordan until 1967 but close to the now invisible line that used to divide the Arab and Jewish sections of this supposedly holy city. It is still owned by the descendants of the Spaffords, although it is managed these days by a Swiss hotel group. Its staff are mainly Palestinians, and in my day we became good friends with George Qumsieh, the Bethlehem-born doorman who had been working there since 1948, knew everything that was worth knowing and was always able to lay his hands on a couple of extra cookies for our young children when we showed up for a couple of hours’ lazing by the swimming pool on a Saturday.

  On one occasion, after we had moved back to London, I was visiting Jerusalem to make a radio documentary for the BBC, and George had the difficult task of interrupting my lunch to whisper that my rental car had just been firebombed in the hotel car park. I had made the mistake of renting from a Jewish-run agency at Ben Gurion airport rather than from a Palestinian-run agency closer to the hotel, and the local car rental people apparently wanted to let me know of their displeasure. George was hugely embarrassed and apologetic, but he knew I would understand.

  As did the staff on the hotel switchboard when I had to ask them not to be too specific about my precise whereabouts when they put calls through to me from the office in London. The words ‘One moment, please, he’s by the pool’ would not, I feared, have conveyed the right impression.

  In the dimly lit basement bar, Ibrahim the barman knew every regular’s favourite tipple and could always be relied upon to be the soul of discretion. The bar’s ill-lit alcoves were ideal for illicit liaisons of all descriptions, both personal and political, and often served as a hidden meeting place for unofficial Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. (Just round the corner was Orient House, which for many years was the unofficial, and illegal, Jerusalem headquarters of the PLO.) The American Colony was one of the very few places in Jerusalem were both Jews and Palestinians could feel comfortable, although the Israeli security people at the airport were always deeply suspicious of it as a destination address on my landing card.

  ‘Why are you staying in the Arab part of Jerusalem? Why don’t you stay in the Jewish part?’ I used to tell them the American Colony was by far the best hotel in town, but they were rarely convinced.

  Oasis it may have been, but in Jerusalem you are never far from trouble. On a return visit to the city in the late ’90s, I was eating lunch in the hotel’s beautiful courtyard, sitting at one of the characteristic brightly tiled tables with a young BBC producer, when we heard a huge explosion. It was obviously a bomb, so we set off towards where the blast had come from, weaving our way on foot through the back streets to avoid the inevitable road closures. As we approached the Jewish ultra-religious area of Mea Shearim, I suggested that we should skirt round it, as my female colleague was wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless top, and would certainly be regarded as improperly dressed by the area’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m an Australian girl, and I regard being properly dressed as wearing both parts of my bikini.’ Her name was Kylie Morris and she went on to become an award-winning TV correspondent, first for the BBC in Gaza, Kabul, Bangkok and Iraq, and later for Channel 4 News in Bangkok and Washington DC.

  I am not a great fan of international business hotels (is anyone?), even if I recognise that they do usually provide all the services that a hard-pressed reporter is likely to need. So, since the introduction of online hotel booking sites, I regarded it as my task, while a producer was fixing interviews, researching stories and generally committing journalism, to track down a nice-sounding hotel which offered all the basic services (Wi-Fi, shower, food) and then something extra, all at a price that was likely to be acceptable to the people in the BBC expenses department.

  In normal times, Dwarika’s Hotel in Kathmandu would certainly fail the last of those tests. But, in May 2006, Nepal was in the throes of revolution and visitors were thin on the ground. Dwarika’s was more than happy to negotiate a special cut rate for the intrepid BBC team – producer Catherine Miller and myself – who were prepared to risk a few days of revolutionary fervour. It was, and is, a welcome sanctuary amid the unceasing clamour of Nepali life.

  Dwarika’s is built almost entirely of wood, featuring the intricately carved timbers that are characteristic of the Newar culture of the Kathmandu valley. It was established by the hotel’s founder, Dwarika Das Shrestha, after he spotted workmen feeding ancient carvings into a fire as they renovated an old royal palace. He resolved to devote his life to the preservation of the ancient carvings and of the skills that enable modern craftsmen to continue the tradition.

  The rooms at Dwarika’s are enormous. The bathrooms alone are about three times the size of a New York hotel room. But my favourite memory is the warning sign placed on the desk in my room: ‘Please be sure to close all windows before leaving your room. Otherwise monkeys from the temple will enter.’

  One of the most shameful episodes in my career of hotel-hopping took place in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, which is one of those fake cities built in the middle of nowhere simply in order to be a national capital. (Brasília and Naypyidaw, in Myanmar/Burma, are two others.) It took over from Lagos as the national capital in 1991, so there has not been much time yet for any traditions to take hold. There is not a lot of ancient carved timber in Abuja.

  There are, however, the usual international business hotels, and it was at one of these that I was forced to confront my own prejudices about Nigeria and Nigerians. (As it happens, I am very fond of the country and of its people, who have an infectious can-do energy that always reminds me of New York.)

  It was election time, and a sizeable BBC team was in town, because Nigerians are by far the biggest single audience for the BBC World Service, which broadcasts to several million Nigerian listeners in both English and Hausa. When it was time for us all to leave, the senior BBC field producer arranged to pay the entire BBC bill before he checked out, so that those of us who were staying a little longer would simply pay any charges that we had incurred after his departure.

  So I was not amused when I was presented with a bill that included everything for my entire stay. ‘No,’ I protested. ‘Most of this has already been paid by my colleague.’ The cashiers disagreed and, to my shame, I have to admit that my head filled with tales of Nigerian fraudsters and scammers. But I kept my cool and made no accusations. It was obviously a simple mistake – that, at least, is what I said. It was no
t what I thought.

  Eventually, I phoned my senior colleague who had already returned home. I asked him to confirm to the hotel that he had indeed paid the bulk of the bill. ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I left in such a rush, I never got round to paying for everyone.’ Humble pie? I grovelled. And then I grovelled some more. And I will never ever again even think that I am being defrauded unless I have irrefutable evidence. Let the record show: I was not cheated in Nigeria.

  On the contrary. Some of my happiest reporting memories are from Nigeria, a country where everything is possible and nothing ever works. Where else could I have interviewed a self-confessed vote-buyer, a man hired by a major political party to loiter outside polling stations on election day and offer cash bribes to voters in return for their support? He even demonstrated how he could slip a banknote into my hand without anyone noticing. But vote-buying, he told me, was a precarious living: he had to finance the bribes out of his own pocket, and had not been reimbursed because the candidate on whose behalf he was doing the bribing still failed to win.

  I also spent an unforgettable couple of hours at The Shrine nightclub in Lagos, home of the leading Nigerian musician Femi Kuti, whose father Fela Kuti had been one of Africa’s most revered musical pioneers and human rights activists. When we asked him to play a few notes on his saxophone for the benefit of the BBC’s listeners, Femi immediately started an impromptu jam session with a few friends, stripped off his shirt and treated us, especially my female colleague, to an unexpectedly exciting recording experience.

  Have I mentioned food yet? I should have done, because one of the first pieces of advice I received as a very young reporter was nothing to do with how to get a story or how to beat the competition. It came from a grizzled old hack who had obviously been around for quite a while. ‘Never forget,’ he said. ‘Eat and pee whenever you have the opportunity. You never know when you’ll get another chance.’ I took his advice and, for the past forty-five years, I have eaten and peed whenever I had the opportunity.

  My BBC sound engineer colleague Lee Chaundy could not have paid me a nicer compliment when I finally hung up my microphone for the last time: ‘Your ability always to plan at least two meals ahead will be much missed.’ It is true: I have always found that I work much better if I know when and where my next meal is coming from.

  So I fondly remember a superb Japanese restaurant in Beirut, as well as a more than adequate spaghetti house in the same city; a very decent Lebanese restaurant in Kano, in northern Nigeria, and an unexpectedly tasty pizza place in Kinshasa. I choose not to remember the countless club sandwiches I have eaten late at night in hotel rooms, washed down either with warm Coca-Cola (you should never add ice to drinks in hot and dusty countries) or truly disgusting coffee. And I definitely choose not to remember the too many occasions when my stomach has violently objected to my choice of career.

  Sometimes I have been required to eat a specific food at a specific time solely in the interest of journalistic integrity. Once was in Ukraine, when a very clever BBC producer, David Edmonds, who in his other life is a widely respected philosopher, decided that in order to illustrate some profound truth about the nature of Ukrainian democracy, I was required to eat (noisily) a bowl of Ukrainian borscht, or beetroot soup.

  He even found a Ukrainian journalist who was prepared to stand up his thesis. ‘There are at least twenty-six recipes for borscht,’ he told us. ‘Everyone has their own recipe. So it’s like democracy. People in Ukraine have one kind of democracy; people in the US have another kind.’15

  The second occasion was when another bright BBC producer, Leana Hosea, wanted me to cover a report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on the subject of entomophagy, or the consumption of insects by humans, which the FAO suggested was to be greatly encouraged. You can imagine my delight when she announced that she had found a restaurant16 in London where they happily offered insects on the menu – and that the only possible way to report the story adequately was to drag me along and record me feasting on some of their delicacies.

  ‘Yum, yum,’ I obediently reported. ‘Scorpions dipped in chocolate. And oh look, I must try the love-bug salad with deep-fried locusts and crickets.’ (The truth? I quite liked them. Crunchy, slightly salty, not unlike prawns.)

  It was not the only occasion when I reflected that BBC licence fee-payers ought to be much more appreciative of the efforts that I made to report world events for their benefit.

  * McCarthy was held for more than five years and freed in August 1991. The Church of England envoy Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate his release, was himself kidnapped in 1987 and held until November 1991.

  CHAPTER 6

  A SUBURBAN CHILDHOOD

  I am a big boy now, and I want to know everything.

  ME, AGED THREE

  THERE IS A PARTICULAR type of interview that is often favoured by radio news editors when a new story breaks in an unfamiliar part of the world – it is known as the ‘how did we get here?’ interview, and its purpose is to fill in some of the background and context to whatever is dominating the headlines. The interviewer’s first words are usually along the lines of: ‘So, fill in some of the background for us…’

  Here is some of the background.

  I was born on 30 August 1948, by Caesarean section, at the Bearsted Memorial Hospital in Stoke Newington, north London. My parents were both refugees from Nazi Germany: my father had arrived in the UK in April 1939; my mother in July of the same year. They met during the Second World War, when both were working in a top-secret unit of British military intelligence, and they married in 1945. I was the first of their two sons; my younger brother, Stephen, was born three years later.

  We 1948ers are said to have been born in the best year ever. Among our number we count Prince Charles; the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks; the singer Lulu; and the former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. What we have in common is that we have all been able to benefit from the National Health Service, free education up to and including university level, a booming property market and state pensions at a much younger age than our children will enjoy. By the time we reached adolescence, the contraceptive pill had become widely available, which did wonders for our sex lives. (How many of these benefits the Prince of Wales has taken advantage of I cannot say, but the principle holds good even for him.)

  My father, Fritz, was the youngest of four children in a typically middle-class Berlin family. They were of Jewish origin, but had abandoned any overt religious identity – his own father had been brought up in a totally non-religious household, and my father, like his three siblings, was baptised in a Lutheran church and attended Christian religious instruction lessons at school. Like many secular German Jews at the time, his parents believed that by adopting a Christian religious identity, they would be more readily accepted as ‘real’ Germans. It was not, in the circumstances of the time, an unreasonable assumption – until the Nazis came to power in 1933.

  Remarkably, given that throughout his entire adult life my father never had any time at all for religion (I often referred to him as a ‘fundamentalist secularist’), he never forgot the biblical text that he chose for his confirmation at the age of fourteen. It was Corinthians Chapter 13, the one that ends: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’

  In his memoirs, my father wrote:

  My confirmation proved to be a milestone, but not in the expected sense. Having got it behind me I found that there was no longer any need to pretend anything, either to myself or to others, and I felt free to admit that in fact I did not ‘believe’ in anything. I became an agnostic overnight, so to speak, and have never entered a church for worship since – only to admire, or dislike, its architecture, or play music in it; and I have not said a prayer either.

  His decision to leave Germany came after the horrors of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on 9 November 1938, when thousands of synagogues and o
ther Jewish targets throughout Germany were attacked and set alight and more than thirty thousand Jews were arrested. My father and grandfather both had to go into hiding for a few days to escape arrest, sheltering in the home of a non-Jewish family friend.

  In order to get out of Germany, he enlisted the help of an English family with whom he had stayed on a visit as a schoolboy in 1936. Reg and Elsie Francis, of Letchworth, Hertfordshire, helped him to obtain a ‘trainee visa’ which would allow him into the UK on condition that he learned a trade and then left again within twelve months for either Australia or New Zealand. Relatives in Cambridge arranged for him to be apprenticed to a local builder, but his parents were anxious that, as a gifted young cellist who they hoped might one day become a professional musician, he should not take up work that risked damaging his hands.

  The response from the relatives in Cambridge was not sympathetic: what exactly was the priority? To get him safely out of Germany, or to preserve his precious hands?

  The answer was obvious, so, on 13 April 1939, two weeks after his twentieth birthday, my father set sail from Hamburg on board the SS President Roosevelt. His parents came with him to the quayside, and his mother told him later that, as they waved goodbye, she was convinced that she would never see him again. Two days later, he was in Southampton.

  My mother was born Susanne Cohn in what was then the German city of Breslau, and is now the Polish city of Wrocław (pronounced Vrots-woff). She had no brothers or sisters; her father had been a cavalry officer in the German army in the First World War and had suffered a shoulder injury that left him without the use of his left arm. Her mother’s family had been relatively prosperous – her maternal grandfather had been a successful cattle dealer – but her father was a much less successful businessman.