The full list of Foreign Office overseas allowances was breathtaking. As minister resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan once complained that the two very distinguished diplomats advising him, Harold Caccia and Roger Makins, seemed obsessed by allowances and car entitlements. ‘Why do diplomats never discuss anything except houses, furniture, motorcars, food, wine and money?’ he wrote.* Reading the list one could see why allowances mattered so much to members of the Diplomatic Service, and to their spouses.
First, and most important for someone whose main means of transport in 1978 was a Honda 50cc motorcycle, was the interest-free Car Loan. Provided you bought British, you were entitled to order a car tax-free and at a discount for diplomats, usually 15 per cent, and to run it in Britain for six months before taking it abroad. A complication for those posted to the Middle East was that makes such as Ford were subject to the Arab boycott, on the grounds that they were sold in Israel. But I wanted something racier than the Hillman Avengers which most young British diplomats then posted to the Arab world seemed to run. I opted for what I thought of as a Mini Cooper, even though, as my brother woundingly pointed out, the British Leyland Mini 1275 GT of 1978 was far from the original Cooper creation. The only colour available in the time in which I needed my car was what the British Leyland catalogue described as ‘Reynard Metallic’ – a sort of liquid light brown. When eventually I arrived in Shemlan, the MECAS Director immediately and cruelly described my beloved first motor as ‘diarrhoea colour’. I was glad when my Mini was covered in the dust and dirt of Middle Eastern motoring.
Also of interest was the Climatic Clothing Allowance. In those days, diplomats posted to especially hot or cold countries were entitled to extra clothing allowances. Based on his experience travelling up and down the Gulf, Michael Hodge of the Republic of Ireland Department had recommended that I buy a set of washable nylon suits that could be worn after a night on a hanger in a hotel bathroom. I thought that, as a fast-stream officer, I was entitled to something grander. I ordered a lightweight sand-coloured suit from the tropical outfitters Airey & Wheeler of Savile Row. The suit turned out to be an expensive sartorial folly. It showed every mark, and I soon learned that Arabs expect any serious Westerner to wear a dark suit. But sporting my Airey & Wheeler extravagance in England that rainy summer I thought I looked the part of the young diplomat en route to the Middle East.
Even more welcome for an ex-student with little more than a kettle and some chipped mugs in the way of household goods was money for equipping my future Middle Eastern residence for representational purposes. The list of favoured suppliers issued by the Overseas Allowances Section of the Personnel Services Department recommended Thomas Goode of South Audley Street, W1, as a shop (if that is the right word for such an emporium) which offered good discounts for diplomatic orders. So there I went, in search of glasses and china, and found that, even at discounted Thomas Goode prices, my budget stretched only to half a dozen crystal tumblers and a remaindered, and incomplete, dinner service. I would have been better off at Habitat. I went round London discovering that, as the Treasury must have known, the reality of what the allowances would buy was much less than the promise. I remembered Trevor Mound’s cautionary tale, of the first grammar school boy to have joined the Foreign Service fast stream, just after the war. In order to keep up appearances, and encouraged by some who should have known better, he had almost ruined himself by ordering a Lagonda for his first posting, to Buenos Aires, only to arrive in Argentina and find that all the supposed toffs in the Chancery were running around in Ford Populars.
Most of the ‘representational’ stuff I acquired that summer went straight into storage, to await shipping to my first substantive posting, somewhere – I didn’t yet know where – in the Middle East, once MECAS was over.
The next task was actually getting yourself to post. Until only a few years ago, Diplomatic Service Regulations offered those travelling out to or back from postings a choice between what was called the Approved Route, and one or more Optional Routes. In 1978, the Approved Route for MECAS was by Middle East Airlines to Beirut, with an allowance for taxis at both ends. The Optional Routes were more exciting, providing, incredibly even in 1978, for train and sea travel. With two friends and colleagues who were also starting at MECAS in September, I decided that it would be fun to drive from London to Beirut. We would make our own ways to Turkey, and rendezvous in late August on top of the ancient citadel of Pergamon – now Bergama – on the Aegean coast north of Smyrna – now Izmir. With my brother as co-driver, I would travel via Paris (where we would meet friends) down to the heel of Italy. From there we would take the ferry from Brindisi to Patras (reliving my schoolboy classicist’s journey eight years earlier) and drive up through Greece, before crossing the Bosphorus at Istanbul.
The Mini needed some mechanical attention to equip it for Arabia. I had not realised that poor-quality fuel in much of the Middle East meant that the famous 1275cc engine would have to be converted from high to low compression, by boring out the cylinders, very expensively. At the insistence of my worried mother, the garage also fitted a massive sump guard, to protect the underside of the low-slung transverse engine against bumps in the road. More powerful shock absorbers were installed. The car now looked ready for the Middle East equivalent of the Monte Carlo rally. In reality, the super-heavy sump guard dragged the car even lower, making for jarring encounters with even relatively small obstacles of the kind then found on most roads east of Trieste.
The journey out to Pergamon went smoothly enough. As a condition of our driving to Beirut, the Foreign Office had insisted that we call in at each British embassy en route to check that the deteriorating situation in Lebanon had not become so bad as to oblige us to turn back. I therefore dropped in at our embassies in Paris, Rome and Athens, obtaining glimpses of a grandeur I was to encounter later in my career. But no problem was reported. Passing through Greece the short-wave radio I had installed in the Mini relayed the signature of the Camp David accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, but not between Israel and the Palestinians or its other Arab neighbours. I little guessed how they would dominate much of my diplomatic career.
The three cars met at Pergamon, exactly as planned. From there, we raced across Asia Minor in convoy, full of excited anticipation. My brother flew back from Antalya. The rest of us crossed into Syria, and went straight to Damascus, our first encounter with one of the greatest of Middle Eastern metropolises. After checking with the Embassy there, we headed almost due west up over the hills to the Lebanese frontier. Entering and leaving Syria, and entering Lebanon, we used what seemed like relics of a bygone age of international motoring, the huge orange customs Carnets de Passage obtained from the AA in London, guaranteeing that our cars would be re-exported. Frontier formalities took ages, a succession of guichets and tickets and stamps and fees, all resulting in passports proudly adorned with more stamps (with postage stamps affixed) than they had gathered traversing the whole of western Europe.
Once over the border, in Lebanon, the atmosphere changed. The roads were lined with Syrian Army vehicles, Soviet Bloc equipment of every variety, wheeled and tracked, armed and unarmed, armoured and soft-skinned. Sitting and squatting in, on and under them were hordes of feckless Arab conscripts, the ballast of a Middle Eastern army, thirsty, hungry, bored and occasionally frightened. We remembered the advice of our Embassy in Damascus: never ever look Arab soldiers or policemen in the eye. Descending into the Beka’a Valley (the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley), and then climbing the winding road back up the eastern slopes of Mount Lebanon, we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint, manned by Syrian soldiers and military police, and, more sinisterly, the goons of Assad’s intelligence service, the much feared mukhabarat in their trademark cheap safari suits.
And then, over the top of the mountains, with the Mediterranean glistening before us, and Beirut below, we swung left and south off the main road which led down to the city, and took the route along the ridge, through the little town of Suq al-Gharb (or ‘market of the west’) to the village of Shemlan. There, in the centre of the village, a great white sign proclaimed, in English and Arabic, ‘Middle East Centre for Arab Studies’.
MECAS was neither a school nor a university, but it had elements of both. Its Director was one of the shyest, and cleverest, of Foreign Office Arabists, who would go on to become ambassador to Yemen and then to Qatar. Julian Walker’s place in the