The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

The car was untouched, though in many alleys of the world it would have been stripped. But no one had laid a finger on it. They wouldn’t dare.

The next day, the RAF unit tucked away behind Kai Tak gave me a ride around the colony in one of their helicopters. I think it was a Skeeter, but anyway it was extremely small, just a Perspex bubble under a noisy fan. The cabin had no doors, so on the steep banks one was held only by the straps to keep from plunging two thousand feet to the ground.

From this vantage point, one could see the Gurkhas patrolling the heather hills of the New Territories, looking for the refugees who came over in a constant stream, seeking a new life away from Communism. But the colony was far too small. So they were picked up, escorted to a camp on Lantau Island (now the new airport), and then sent back.

There was another cozy agreement, so that they were not punished; just told not to do it again and resettled a long way away. That evening I was asked to address the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I did so completely sober, to be congratulated, as the previous guest, comedian Dave Allen, had fallen face-forward into the soup.

The last day, Jardine Matheson asked me to fire the ceremonial Noon Day Gun, and then it was off to Kai Tak for the flight to Brisbane.

After Australia and New Zealand and the same interview questions another hundred times, my flight west from Perth passed right over the island of Mauritius. Hutchinson, my publishers, who were paying for this tour, suggested that as there was nothing for me in Jo’burg until the Monday, I take a rest break on this lovely resort island. I was lodged at the Saint Géran Hotel, still one of my world favorites to this day, thirty-five years later.

While there for only sixty hours, I fell in love—twice. There was a dive shop and a resort course. A few hours of instruction in the pool permitted two real scuba dives over the nearby reefs. And I was smitten by the silence and the beauty of this underwater world. I have been diving ever since.

And there was a game-fishing boat, the Chico, which was booked. But one of the pair who had reserved it cried off and the general manager, Paul Jones, who remains a friend to this day, was looking for a stand-in. As a boy in Kent, I had fished for bream and rudd in the Hythe Canal, but this was different—eight hours on the vast and rolling Indian Ocean with lines streamed for marlin, sailfish, kingfish, wahoo, tuna, and bonito.

I forget what we caught, but it was over a dozen, without the marlin or sailfish, and when we tied up at the dock in the late afternoon I was smitten again. I later based the story “The Emperor” on that day at sea. Then it was a car to the airport and the flight to Jo’burg. I was decanted at Heathrow ten days later, feeling like a wrung-out dishcloth.

But since then I have dived the reefs from Lizard Island, Queensland, west to the corals of the Baja Peninsula on the Sea of Cortés; swum with shark and manta ray among the atolls of the Maldives and the Amirantes; hooked marlin, sailfish, and amberjack (always returned to the ocean), and wahoo and kings (for the dinner table).

My only drugs are silence and solitude, and in an increasingly noisy, frantic, and crowded world, on or under the sea is where I find them.

FIVE YEARS IN IRELAND

There was not the slightest reason why Irish politician Charles Haughey and I would get on, but we did. To his political enemies, he was relentless, and vengeful for any slight or ill turn. When relaxed over a dinner table, I found him an amusing rogue. And he was certainly a rogue.

As a passionate republican, he had little time for the English or anything British, but seemed to make an exception for me, perhaps because he realized I had quickly seen through him.

My wife and I had left the UK for Spain in January 1974 to escape the electoral victory of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson and the tax policies of Dennis Healey, who raised income tax to an eye-watering 83 percent when he came to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in April. The year in Spain was to avoid the possibility that most of the earnings from the first three novels would disappear, perhaps never to be repeated. But it was never intended that we should settle in Spain. It was the statutory “year of absence.”

By Christmas 1974, we were in Dublin (outside mainland UK and therefore outside the tax net), looking for a house to buy, and settled in the village of Enniskerry, County Wicklow, just south of Dublin. Years earlier, when his party, Fianna Fáil, had been in office and he was finance minister, it was Charlie Haughey who had introduced a Finance Act with a little paragraph at the bottom that hardly anyone noticed. It made all creative artists, including writers, exempt from income tax.

I must have been the only immigrant who did not even know that (I may have mentioned that I am not very good with money). When I revealed my ignorance of the law, I was met with local amazement and then approbation. At least I had come because I liked the place.

To make friends in Ireland is

the easiest thing in the world, because they are so friendly to start with. Add to that a terrific sense of humor. In the north, the guerrilla campaign of the IRA against the Belfast government and the British armed forces posted there was at its height, but in the south, the Republic of Ireland, all was quiet and immensely sociable. There were tales of Brits who had to leave because they could not take the partygoing, so they took their damaged livers back home.

It was shortly after settling there that my wife and I met Charlie Haughey socially, but through the offices of his longtime girlfriend. It was a relationship that everybody knew about, but nobody mentioned, and the entire media practiced auto-censorship. Those days are long gone.

The lady gave small, intimate dinner parties around the pine table in her basement kitchen, and that was where we could converse with the other Charlie Haughey—shirtsleeved, affable, and humorous. Like Harold King in the Reuters’s Paris office, he first tried to intimidate, and if that did not work, relaxed and let the Irish charm come through.

I enormously enjoyed my five years in Ireland and recall with affection the innumerable and uproarious dinner parties. Before going to Spain, in an act of pure madness, I had bought a Rolls-Royce. It was far from new and far from the top of the price range. It was a classic that I had restored at a specialist’s in London. Once it was restored, I had it resprayed from black to white. It had the old-style vertical Greek-temple grille with the winged lady flying above the bonnet. This monster was driven all the way to the Costa Blanca and a year later shipped to Ireland. In both a Spanish village and Enniskerry, it was—how shall I put it?—rather noticeable. But I liked it and might have kept it longer but for the trip north to County Antrim to visit my in-laws.

We drove sedately up through Dublin, past the airport at Swords, and on to the IRA hot spot of Dundalk. North of that, the road was largely empty until we reached the border post and the start of County Armagh, the first of the six counties that make up British-owned Northern Ireland.

The Irish border post was hardly manned at all. The barrier pole was up and a hand behind the glass window of a booth beside the road waved us on. At the British control, the pole was down, so we stopped. Out of the undergrowth came a strange Caliban-type figure.

He was in camouflage fatigues, wearing a tam-o’-shanter with a red bobble on top, and clutched a submachine carbine. Apparently one of Her Majesty’s soldiers, but not one I had ever seen before. He scampered up to the driver’s-side window, peered through, and gesticulated that I should wind it down.

It was electric, and when it hummed downward, he jumped in surprise and addressed me. I could not understand a word he said, but from the accent, which I had heard in Tangier, I knew it must be Glasgow. When I failed to respond to whatever he asked, he became agitated and the barrel of the submachine gun appeared under my nose.

At this point, a quite different figure came out of the bushes: very tall, gangly, and clearly an officer. He, too, approached and spoke, but in a laid-back drawl.

“Awfully sorry, old chap, he’s asking to see your papers.”

The captain took over and scanned my passport. From his flashes, I realized these were the Cameronians, who had established a fine reputation when based in Germany as the Poison Dwarfs.

The pair reminded me of the White Russian officer commanding Oriental troops outside Magdeburg fifteen years earlier. The captain dismissed the soldier with a stream of the same incomprehensible dialect.