Starting from my birth, eighty-six years ago, will be a pointless exercise and so I will begin with a time when, too often, I frequented the Feathers public house in Mayfair.
But, let me make it clear, I do not associate the Feathers with cosy, after works drinks with colleagues but with an ex British Army Major called Alex Donaldson.
Donaldson was a man I was, for many years, content to believe was dead.
But, sixty years later, I can still see Donaldson in his crumpled white shirt sat alongside his crony sidekick Jack Woodward on those red leather stools at the bar. I can still smell the stale Bass beer and see the Red Triangles on the soggy beer mats even now. I can still smell Donaldson’s stinking Craven A cigarettes and see him deliberately puffing the smoke down the dark and cavernous cleavage of Betty the barmaid. Sophistication was never Donaldson’s style.
The Feathers was always filled with an acrid blue haze, sticky with heat from a coal fire in a black grate with matching brass scuttle, poker, dirty brush and small shovel. I can still feel the sticky warmth on my face as I sat there trying to be part of this ugly scene whilst all the time thinking I would be far better off at home with Sarah sat by our own fireside.
I can still see Betty, as she then was, standing behind her bar, tolerating Donaldson’s grotesque rudeness whilst cleaning her squeaking beer glasses with a cloth and winking at customers whenever their eyes rose from her cleavage.
I have had far too many dreams about this place because I was there far too often in the past. But instead of diminishing over time, the dreams have increased. Perhaps it is because, unlike many of the others who visited the Feathers, I never went there to be sociable but with what I now see as a misplaced sense of patriotism and duty to King and Country left over from the war.
Those meetings were usually arranged by a phone call to my Croydon office from Jack Woodward. Beatie, my office manager, typist and telephonist would take the call before handing the phone to me to decide. And it bothers me now how easy it had been for me to be persuaded to meet. But I was younger then and the young are much greater opportunity seekers.
Sitting on one of the red bar stools, Jack Woodward would gorge on little dishes of shrimps or cockles and when I came in, both of them, Jack and Donaldson, would already be there, hunched over their drinks as though they had been there for hours discussing what to say to me or how best to persuade me to do the next job. I would fight my way towards them through the crowd of smoking beer drinkers and Jack might get up but Donaldson wouldn’t.
But it was my fault.
In the early days, I was far too easy going and had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Jack, being the politer one would shake my hand and, invariably, his face would betray something as if they had been discussing me for hours. Donaldson would continue facing the bar and Betty until I sat down on the next stool. Then he might turn and nod at me. No smile, no words, just a nod. Donaldson always wore the same grey gabardine mackintosh over his suit and tie and only after he nodded might he decide to follow Jack and shake my hand. Perhaps he knew it but I was always reluctant to touch Donaldson because I knew my hands would smell of stale cigarettes for hours as a result of that fleeting but disgusting contact.
Jack would order the drinks and perhaps more cockles and was always the one to pay Betty.
“Two and six, please, luv. Ta, luv,” in her broad east London accent. Then Betty would slide over a tiny white dish that always held three small, sharp wooden sticks and the cockles that glistened with vinegar.
Before and since my dear wife, Sarah, died I have dreamed about the Feathers too often. Mostly they are colourful nightmares with accompanying stereophonic sound effects and smells included and I often wake up in a sweat because the nightmares spiralled out of control onto other things. The nightmares are almost always linked to Donaldson.
When I awake in the middle of the night or the very early morning with my lap soaked in whisky from the glass that had fallen from my hand I often wonder if I am actually suffering from some sort of new and unnamed form of senile dementia.
I fear I may have a new type of Alzheimer’s disease distinguished by a vivid imagination and an uncanny ability to dredge up memories that are best forgotten. But I often amuse myself by thinking it should, perhaps, be called Thomas’s Disease after its first recorded victim. I have even dreamed of seeing a definition of it in medical textbooks or copies of the British Medical Journal.
“Thomas’s Disease: A condition of the mind characterized by symptoms that include an uncontrollable desire to analyse the past through dreams so that the sufferer finds it easy to pinpoint his past mistakes and weaknesses. And finally decides to wake up and do something about them.”
It is, I acknowledge, a long-winded definition but I feel it is accurate. But I often wondered if, perhaps, I was no longer remembering facts but embellishing things to make them more interesting. Perhaps, I just have an overactive brain that is long past its sell by date.
But I also have a theory that Alzheimer’s disease is not really a disease but a useful and highly evolved mechanism for protecting the old and decrepit from realizing their predicament. I have often thought how much nicer that would be because Thomas’s Disease is far worse. It is a punishing and painful disease that is all too apparent to its victims.
What is certain is that the nightmares I experienced up until the moment I decided to do something about their cause had been a mixture of historic fact and vivid imagination. But couple that with a mind-blowing ability to suddenly realize what had been going on beneath my nose and behind my back for fifty years and perhaps you will begin to understand why I need to deal with it.
Writing this is part of that process.
I still can’t accurately pinpoint exactly when it all started or when I suddenly saw the light. It was like the slow arrival of dawn when you can’t sleep. You lie there waiting until you can stand it no longer and finally get up, go to the window and draw the curtains. But, in my case, I didn’t see the rising sun. I saw that a dark and rainy day had already begun, that the time was far later than I had thought and I wished I had got up much earlier. For me, late dawning has happened too often and there is only so much cloud and rain a man can stand.
The final awakening began when Sarah became ill although even then it was not so much a sudden switching on of the light but gradual, like a dimmer switch being turned.
I had been feeling lonely which didn’t help. I was certainly bored.
Sarah was sick and a nurse had been calling daily. She had become bedridden, as they once called it, and spent her days upstairs.
I, on the other hand, spent my days and often my nights, downstairs sitting in the chair by Sarah’s favourite log effect gas fire but with trips up and down the stairs with cups of tea for Sarah followed by other daytime trips to the Co-Op supermarket for the newspaper and a few more bottles of Bell’s whisky for myself.
I know I had been sitting around far too much but what else is an old man expected to do? But, to keep my brain occupied, I had also, mistakenly, started rummaging through an old box of papers and other things that had been gathering dust for twenty-five years in a cupboard upstairs.
Oh dear, what a mistake that was.
But then there were the nightmares, the main features of Thomas’s Disease. I would wake up in the early hours or the late hours or even the daytime hours feeling uncomfortable, hot and sweaty and with an all too familiar taste of stale whisky in the back of my throat and an intense heat in my stomach like a gastric version of heartburn.
But what really used to wake me up was the uncontrollable and frantic tossing and sweating in the chair by Sarah’s gas fire as I dreamed. I would hear voices. Jack Woodward’s voice – he of the Feathers public house in Mayfair – was one.
And Jack might not even have been talking in English. It had been a habit sixty years ago, for ex forces chaps to speak “in tongues” as we humorously called it. Arabic was one such language. Speaking in an accent supposedly to resemble that of President Nasser of Egypt was Jack’s little habit. Mixed up with conversations that included “bints” and “kazis”, it had all become rather predictable but in one of my whisky fuelled dreams I clearly saw him.
“Sabbah el kheir, kaif hallak?” Jack was saying, his voice seemingly coming directly from the empty whisky glass I was holding to my ear like a phone.
“Good day” and “how are you” are easy enough Arabic words, but, having spent a while in Cairo, Jack was almost fluent and so his Nasser accent was quite realistic. My Arabic isn’t bad though. It was picked up from many visits I made to North Africa and the Middle East and I can easily distinguish between Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian or Egyptian accents. I had a smattering of other languages too or, at least, enough to direct various nationalities of taxi drivers to wherever I was heading.
I had even picked up some occasionally useful Russian words during a few lessons run by a Polish immigrant working out of a room in an office block off Whitehall. That was also sixty years ago but I still harbour memories of a dark room with dusty bookshelves, hard chairs, a stained wooden table and a single, dim light bulb that hung from the ceiling. It had felt like the Eastern Bloc in miniature.
But Jack, who also had the remnants of an English public-school accent to go with his Arabic, had not risen very far after the war. He became Donaldson’s errand boy. He was the one who would phone me with a job to do and, stupidly as I now see it, I would agree.
Donaldson and Jack had been old but distant acquaintances at the time. We’d met, by sheer coincidence, at another pub in Victoria and it had all started as a few odd jobs that relied on a few years of RAF experience.
But, before I knew it, I was up to my neck in things. Not that I didn’t find some of it exciting at the time. After all, I was young, enthusiastic, and motivated by the need to find opportunities and ideas for my new business. So, any chance to go abroad to mix with unusual characters of different nationalities looked like pure fun with the added potential of earning a shilling or two.
Actually, I was a natural and very good at it.
“Come over, this afternoon, Ollie. We want you to meet someone,” Jack might say. And I might reply, “But I’ve got a Letter of Credit that I need to lodge before the bank shuts,” which was often true as I was usually surrounded by paper and often due to fly off somewhere like Beirut the next day.
But so, began long years of evening meetings in the Feathers with two men, one of whom, Jack, was just tolerable, the other, Donaldson, a serious but sinister man who in the early days I never fully understood and later grew to hate.
And, from my small office in Croydon, Beatie, my newly found office assistant, would have been fussing around in her usual way but listening all the while. Beatie rapidly became indispensable to me but there was more to Beatie than I first realized.
But that’s how it was in the beginning.
It was a creeping process made easy by my new business – a small venture that taxed the mind but offered endless opportunities for foreign travel whilst enabling me to mix legitimacy with the sort of antics that Donaldson and his crony Jack tempted me to pursue.
I didn’t mind. No job was ever the same and, inevitably, I would meet someone who became a new customer or might lead to one.
But the assignments, as Donaldson always described them, gradually got more frequent. Business wasn’t easy and I wasn’t making much money after paying my overheads and Beatie’s salary and I soon realized the assignments were impinging on my business.
Meanwhile, at home, Sarah was busy looking after the new baby and our young son, Robert. There was not much saving going on. What little was coming in, was going straight out.
But Beatie would take the calls and I would find myself catching the five thirty train and then a taxi to the Feathers. And all at my expense and when it would have been far better and sensible to go home to be with Sarah and Robert and eat cottage pie and apple crumble.
And so, of course, Sarah got used to the loneliness.
She accepted it as part of my business but, looking back, I regret it so much now that it brings a lump to my throat just to write this. I should have understood things better so many years ago.
Suffering from Thomas’s Disease, you see, has caused me to reflect on past errors of judgment. In the weeks and months up until the day Sarah died, I often woke up to find myself sobbing like a child.
And why, since Sarah died, do I still sit with lumps in my throat and tears in my eyes?
Because, in the weeks before Sarah passed away, whilst she was lying, gravely sick upstairs in bed, I was downstairs, drunk as a skunk and perhaps speaking to a voice from maybe sixty years ago, coming out of an empty whisky glass clamped to my right ear.
In fact, I have been known to be so far gone that the whisky glass would transform itself into my old black office telephone receiver with its twisted cable that I would waste hours trying to unravel, until Beatie came to my aid. “Tut, tut,” Beatie would say, “leave it to me.”
And I would say to her something like, “Here, you sort the blasted wire, Beat. I’ve got to run. See what you can do to finish these quotes off.”
And I would push a pile of papers and price lists towards her as Beatie said, “Are you sure, Mr Thomas?”
And then I’d be gone like some stupid boy summoned by the headmaster.
But I was also driven by a sense of duty and patriotism. The assignments were for the good of the country, or so I believed. And if they could also be used to enhance my business, why not?
But my motivations were gradually driven by an added element of fear. And this was nothing to do with early onset Thomas’s Disease.
This was a genuine fear for myself and my family and fear of other repercussions for failing to co-operate. Looking back, I can see that Beatie was also worried but, at the time, I was too blind to see it and so Beatie also forms a key part of this tale.
I sometimes still dream about Beatie, but please don’t misunderstand me. Dreams about Beatie are never erotic. She was my age but always at least fifteen years behind the fashions of the day and I usually see her dressed in a pink twin set with her Imperial typewriter noticeably hesitating in its clatter as she listened to me on the phone. She would then glance furtively toward me over her horn-rimmed glasses, before looking quickly back to her work. Then the machine would ping back into action again as she hit the return.
But Thomas’s Disease has enabled me to remember the look on Beatie’s face whenever Jack Woodward phoned my office to invite me to another meeting.
Beatie’s expression was particularly exaggerated on the rarer occasions that Donaldson rang.
I would put the big black phone with its tangled cable back on the receiver and glance at Beatie who quickly looked away. “How’s it all coming along, Beat?” I would ask with diplomacy and just a little humour, in order to quell Beatie’s far too easy embarrassment at being caught watching and listening. In fact, I see now that she treated all phone calls from Jack and Donaldson as if she was nervous. She seemed to dislike the intrusions as if she was an unwilling witness to an extramarital affair and would cough, unnecessarily, nervously and say something like, “Nearly finished, Mr Thomas. But should we copy the text in the credit exactly? You see they have typed dollar wrong. They have put doller – with an ‘e’.”
“Oh dear. Yes. Better had, Beat. I’ll speak to the bank when I present the documents. We don’t want to have to request an amendment at this stage. We should have noticed it before.”
“Sorry, Mr Thomas.”
I had appointed poor old Beatie because she seemed to be a lonely spinster but she was very good at her job. She came with a very good set of references although I have to admit that one of them was from Donaldson. Lonely Beatie was, in fact, indispensable but I now know she also lived in some sort of fear.
So, the few jobs I found myself doing for King and Country or, afterwards, for Queen and Country gradually became more and more frequent to the detriment of my business.
And the plans for them were nearly always laid while drinking pints of draft Bass bitter and slurping bowls of cockles at the Feathers.
I can see that bastard now. For some years, Donaldson had a thick moustache on his upper lip. One day it disappeared without warning although we never discussed such personal things. But it was then that I grew to notice and hate the white spittle that would appear on his lips when he got angry. And Donaldson could get very angry.
I can still see his eyes. They were furtive and he would look out of their corners so that he didn’t have to move his thick neck. He would never read a newspaper but use it as a screen for his face while he watched others. In the Feathers his eyes usually looked down into his beer or down the front of Betty’s blouse whilst congratulating me on my latest assignment.
I can still hear his voice. It would be accompanied by a spray of saliva especially towards closing time. The words themselves were predictable and invariably interspersed with public school, army-trained “old chap” and “dear boy”. And there was a remnant of a Scottish accent that also became more pronounced at closing time. But, as always, I never questioned it at the time.
“Brilliant job, Ollie, old chap. Brilliant. Best man we’ve got for that type of job. Tripoli and Benghazi, huh? Not much in the way of beer there these days I understand. Tough assignment, dear boy, brilliantly executed.”
And Donaldson would then swig the last of his beer and move on to a further examination of Betty’s cleavage.
Sometimes we would move away from the bar stools and find a quieter corner, but the jobs were always explained as being for the good of the country with the full backing of the few in Government circles that needed to know. And they were always sold to me as small tasks that I could easily fit around my legitimate business whether it was Libya or any other part of the Middle East, West Africa or wherever else I went.
Donaldson himself had never travelled far although he clearly had overseas connections. I was soon, for example, to discover his links in Jordan.
I knew he’d been to Cairo once because that’s where he probably met Jack but he was mostly office based. Where he lived, though, I had no idea. We never discussed private matters. It was the same with Jack, whose private life was also a mystery that I had no reason to ask about though I find I question it now.
In those days, not so long ago, a man’s private life was best kept a secret, but if Donaldson knew something then blackmail was a useful tool for keeping people tied down.
And Donaldson and, by default, Jack, were connected in some way to British Intelligence hence the constant tapping of forefingers on noses. “Need to know basis, old chap, don’t worry. All in hand.”
By the late sixties, Thomas Import Export Ltd already held a number of agencies that often required me to get to know the holders of purse strings in the Libyan hierarchy. But then, in the name of freedom, socialism and unity, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi ousted the King and relabelled the country the Libyan Arab Republic. That whole area of North Africa featured rather highly in my life around that time, although it was, by no means, the only part of the world.
By the early seventies, politics had changed radically but I was still able to travel there although some of my old friends had already disappeared. Neither was I still earning much money for the business due to the distractions.
But on one occasion I decided to convince the Libyan People’s Public Health Authority to buy bulk insecticides for their heavy cockroach infestations.
In reality though, driven by my sense of adventure, I was also fulfilling my part-time, unpaid job for Queen and Country by trying to make friends with Gadaffi’s cronies and making the acquaintances of some of his less prominent enemies to add them to a growing list of possible informers.
I was not being forced to do it and even Donaldson knew very little about what I did and how I did it. But Donaldson soon realized that the little fish he had hooked some years earlier was quite adept at this sort of work and proving to be rather well connected.
I enjoyed the intrigue and the risk but it all got out of hand and I became very vulnerable. But as a result, I was making friends of people I actually mistrusted and shaking hands with those whose palms were already well greased.
Mohammed Saleh was one such.
We would meet regularly in quiet spots behind walls near the port in Tripoli or next to the National Pharmaceutical Company and Ministry of Health. Saleh was often impossible to see at first glance as his grubby beige suit blended with the dust and sand. He had also camouflaged himself rather well within Gadaffi’s circles and had become a very useful contact. Saleh was very reliable and always turned up on time.
My mistake was in mentioning him to Donaldson.
Saleh behaved as though the only way to squeeze a small commission out of a visiting Englishman was to look identical by donning similar dust-stained attire. He wore a respectable small moustache like a dark brown, dishevelled, Arabic version of David Niven and was always keen to escape from the watching eyes and the whispering voices of Tripoli, for a bottle or two of Black Label, even if it meant crossing the water to Valletta.
He visited London occasionally and he and I often ate at Tiddy Doll’s in Mayfair, around the corner from the Feathers.
I rarely took Sarah with me to meet my many foreign contacts but on one occasion she did join me because Saleh seemed to doubt my description of myself as a happily married man. But Saleh, feeling free of his Libyan shackles misbehaved himself and seduced the red haired, Irish waitress from Cork.
Sarah was impressed, not by the food, but at how easy it had been for the Libyan – fresh off the Libyan Arab Airlines flight – to carry out his seduction.
“Good gracious, dear. Is that how all those Arab friends of yours behave? Who’d have thought it?”
But Sarah, bless her, never knew about the meeting the next morning between Saleh and myself in Regent Street at which Saleh received some expenses in cash from Jack and then the fare for a taxi ride to Credit Suisse.
All Saleh had done for this was to provide a list of possible dissidents and their addresses which I had then passed to Donaldson in all innocence, expecting them to be handed on to the Secret Intelligence Services or some other Government body.
At the time, you see, I didn’t really care who received the intelligence because I was convinced it was going somewhere official and so being put to good use.
But Saleh’s bedding of the Irish waitress was perhaps the most innocuous part of Libyan-Irish relationships that I was later involved with.
I used to stay at the Libya Palace Hotel in Tripoli and often thought that if there was ever a need for an example of a den of spies, mistrust and suspicion all of it under the watchful eye of secret police then this was it. The Libya Palace, though, was convenient in that it was just around the corner from Abdul Wahid’s office. Abdul had been my more official agent and his concrete block office was in a dingy, rubble-laden side street where the fat, brown American cockroaches scurried, too slowly, out of the way and were crunched underfoot on the pavement at night. This was the excellent legitimate market that I had spotted in my usual entrepreneurial fashion.
Abdul Wahid’s office featured highly in some of my whisky-fuelled nightmares when Sarah had been sick and the dreams often started with a smell like dust in my nostrils. You see, Thomas’s Disease often provides an olfactory dimension to nightmares and this one was like a dream within a dream, a sleep within a sleep. I was well aware of the perversity and would watch myself clamber off the bed clad only in my underpants. And, where was I? After a moment’s searching within the mists of my dream, behold, I would find I was in the Libya Palace Hotel in a room along a dark corridor with a threadbare carpet where I could hear the ceiling fan squeaking, slowly, round and round. But everywhere was that smell of dust. It would be caked inside my nostrils and the skin of my face would feel dirty and stretched taught. The room was dark except for a small crack of light between the closed window shutters and in my dream, I would shuffle across the dusty floor in bare feet feeling the grit between my toes. Then I would lean over to open the shutters with their flaking, light blue paint.
I am fairly convinced that this really did happen to me once, many years ago, but, for some reason of nocturnal fantasy, the dream found me using my walking stick. And when I opened the shutters the vivid scene that met my eyes was not one that was common to Gloucester where I now live. For all I was able to see was a swirling grey dust, with paper and litter flying left to right. Piles of fine, grey sand had squeezed through to form small dunes accumulating on the peeling, wooden ledge between the shutters and the closed window and I used my finger to write something in the dust.
In this recurring dream, I wrote “SARAH”.
I feel sure I had also written “SARAH” fifty years ago, but it was so long ago that I can no longer be totally certain. But the dream was enough. Writing “SARAH” in Saharan dust seems fitting enough.
But, outside, the neighbouring buildings were just dark grey outlines and the morning sun was just visible as a faint, red, disk like a Japanese flag, low above the flat roofs, disappearing and reappearing as the flying dust passed before it in thick clouds. The sand storm was like a hot, violent, London smog of stinging particles of sand.
But I usually awoke from these dreams to find myself sitting by Sarah’s log effect gas fire in the sitting room in Gloucester with an empty whisky glass falling from my hand and with such a dryness in my throat and nose that I would find himself blowing my nose into the whisky glass to clear it.
And, whilst it might have been the heat from the gas fire on my face, I still felt it as though I was standing facing the hot wind coming straight up from Kufra.
But, because I was half awake and probably also half drunk, the dry heat would suddenly change to a humid, coal smoke heat and I would find myself back in the bar at the Feathers again with Alex Donaldson and Jack Woodward with Donaldson making all sorts of suggestions about how else they might be able to use Mohammed Saleh and other contacts I had made over the years.
And through the dreams and nightmares I can now also remember what I said to Donaldson after Saleh had returned to Libya after that night at Tiddy Doll’s.
“But my business is suffering because of all this nonsense.”
“Rubbish!” said Donaldson. “You’re the one talking nonsense old chap. In your prime. My goodness. Best man we’ve got for those sorts of jobs. Mixing it with your business.
What more could you want, dear fellow? Good expenses.
Fifteen quid a day subsistence paid in cash and no asking for vouchers. On top of what you make on the business. Flights sometimes paid for or arranged.”
“I’ve had enough,” I said.
“Nonsense, old chap. You need a break. Take a few days off. Go away with that young family of yours. The seaside – Brighton, Bournemouth, Blackpool. There’s an idea. Get a bit of clear English air in your lungs, dear fellow, instead of all that hot bloody sand.”
But then my own voice had risen in anger at Donaldson’s insensitivity.
“But by boy’s at school. And, anyway, it’s the middle of winter.”
“Ah, yes. Never mind old chap – go another time.”
“But I’m nearly forty,” I had said, “I need to concentrate on the business.”
“Forty is not old, dear fellow. Heavens above. I’m just as old. Feel like twenty. Just looking at Betty over there gives me evil ideas.”
You see, I was already starting to regret my involvement and feeling that I had been sucked into something outside of my control.
Already, the early excitement had run thin and I knew I needed my business to start to earn some real money for my growing family, not waste time on errands for other people that only offered nominal expenses in return. I wanted to pull back because I felt I had already given up too many of my rights by allowing myself to be sucked in on a wave of lingering adolescence.
But I didn’t pull out, partly because I really did believe I was doing something for the good of the country.
Later I didn’t pull out for fear of the effects on me and my family.
But I was also from a generation where it was not right for the adult male to be seen to be in any doubt at any times. At all times, there must be certainty and boldness.
“Go on, you can do it, you stupid fool. Stop whining. What are you – man or mouse?”
It was the very essence of manliness. Never mind if you were shot out of the sky last night. I felt it was my duty to get back into the cockpit and to stop whinging.
Yousef was my agent in Algeria.