He had been six and his brother eight when they turned up for their first day at Tasisiya, which contained some English boys but also Iraqi lads of upper-class parents.
By then, there had already been one coup d’état in Iraq. The boy king and Nuri as Said had been slaughtered and the nee-Communist General Kassem had taken absolute power. Though the two young English boys were unaware of it all, their parents and the English community were becoming worried.
Favoring the Iraq Communist Party, Kassem was carrying out a vicious pogrom against the nationalist Ba’ath Party members, who in turn tried to assassinate the general. One of those in the group that failed to machine-gun the dictator was a young firebrand called Saddam Hussein.
On his first day at school Terry had found himself surrounded by a group of Iraqi boys.
“He’s a grub,” said one. Terry began to cry.
“I’m not a grub,” he sniffled.
“Yes, you are,” said the tallest boy. “You’re fat and white, with funny hair. You look like a grub. Grub, grub, grub.”
Then they all took up the chant. Mike appeared from behind him. Of course, they were all talking Arabic.
“Do not call my brother a grub,” he warned.
“Your brother? He doesn’t look like your brother. But he does look like a grub.”
The use of the clenched fist is not part of Arab culture. In fact, it is alien to most cultures, except in certain parts of the Far East. Even south of the Sahara the closed fist is not a traditional weapon. Black men from Africa and their descendants had to be taught to bunch the fist and throw a punch; then they became the best in the world at it. The closed-fist punch is very much a western Mediterranean and particularly Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Mike Martin’s right-hand punch landed full on the jaw of the chief Terry-baiter and knocked him flat.
The boy was not so much hurt as surprised. But no one ever called Terry a grub again.
Surprisingly, Mike and the Iraqi boy then became the best of friends. Throughout their prep school years, they were inseparable. The tall boy’s name was Hassan Rahmani. The third member of Mike’s gang was Abdelkarim Badri, who had a younger brother, Osman, the same age as Terry. So Terry and Osman became friends as well, which was useful because Badri Senior was often to be found at their parents’ house. He was a doctor, and the Martins were happy to have him as their family physician. It was he who helped Mike and Terry Martin through the usual childhood ailments of measles, mumps, and chicken pox.
Abdelkarim, the older Badri boy, Terry recalled, was fascinated by poetry, his head always buried in a book of the English poets, and he won prizes for poetry reading even when he was up against the English boys. Osman, the younger one, was good at mathematics and said he wanted to be an engineer or an architect one day and build beautiful things. Terry sat in his pew on that warm evening in 1990 and wondered what had happened to them all.
While they studied at Tasisiya, things around them in Iraq were changing. Four years after he came to power by murdering the King, Kassem himself was toppled and butchered by an Army that had become worried by his flirtation with Communism. There followed eleven months of rule shared between the Army and the Ba’ath Party, during which the Ba’athists took savage revenge on their former persecutors, the Communists.
Then the Army ousted the Ba’ath, pushing its members once again into exile, and ruled alone until 1968.
But in 1966, at the age of thirteen, Mike had been sent to complete his education at an English public school called Haileybury. Terry duly followed in 1968. In late June that summer, his parents took him over to England so they could all spend the long vacation together there before Terry joined Mike at school. That way they missed by chance the two coups, on July 14 and 30, that toppled the Army and swept the Ba’ath Party to power under President Bakr, with a vice-president called Saddam Hussein.
Nigel Martin had suspected something was coming and had made his plans. He left the IPC and joined a British-based oil company called Burmah Oil, and after packing up the family’s affairs in Baghdad, he settled the family outside Hertford, from where he could commute daily to London and his new job.
Nigel Martin became a keen golfer, and on weekends his sons would often act as caddies when he played with a fellow executive from Burmah Oil, a certain Mr. Denis Thatcher, whose wife was quite interested in politics.
Terry loved Haileybury, which was then under the head-mastership of William Stewart; both boys were in Melvill House, whose housemaster then was Richard Rhodes-James. Predictably, Terry turned out to be the scholar and Mike the athlete. Scorning having a go at a place in university, Mike announced early that he wanted to make a career in the Army. It was a decision with which Mr. Rhodes-James was happy to agree. If Mike’s protective attitude toward his shorter and chubbier brother had begun at Mr.
Hartley’s school in Baghdad, it was confirmed at Haileybury, as was the younger boy’s adoration of his sibling.
Terry Martin left the darkened church when the choir practice ended, walked across Trafalgar Square, and caught a bus to Bayswater, where he and Hilary shared a flat. As he passed up Park Lane, he thought back to the school years with Mike. And now, by being stupid when he should have kept his mouth shut, he had caused his brother to be sent into occupied Kuwait. He felt close to tears with worry and frustration.
He left the bus and scurried down Chepstow Gardens. Hilary, who had been away for three days on business, should be back. He hoped so; he needed to be comforted. When he let himself in, he called out and heard with joy the answering voice from the sitting room.
He entered the room and blurted out the stupid thing he had done. Then he felt himself enfolded in the warm, comforting embrace of the kind, gentle stockbroker with whom he shared his life.
Mike Martin had spent two days with the Head of Station in Riyadh, a station that had now been beefed up with the addition of two more men from Century.
The Riyadh station normally works out of the embassy, and since Saudi Arabia is regarded, as a most friendly country to British interests, it has never been regarded as a “hard” posting, requiring a large staff and complex facilities. But the ten-day-old crisis in the Gulf had change
d things.
The newly created Coalition of Western and Arab nations adamantly opposed to Iraq’s continued occupation of Kuwait already had two appointed co-commanders-in-chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf of the United States and Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a forty-four-year-old professional soldier, trained in the States and at Sandhurst in England, a nephew of the King, and son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan.
Prince Khaled, in response to the British request, had been as gracious as usual, and with remarkable speed a large detached villa had been acquired on the outskirts of the city for the British embassy to rent.