Only a moment’s respite…then it was back to the metropolitan jungle, the media jungle, and the barrage of flashbulbs.
PRISON
So there I am in prison, with this chap more or less permanently up a tree with his telephoto lens, and this other guy hiding in some clumps of long grass with another long lens. There were gains from this media attention…the prison community warmed to me because of it… ‘This guy’s just like the rest of us, he’s fucked up his life, doing his bird, and along come all these shits from the media’…especially after the first recorded instance of someone breaking into prison. I was approached one day by a prisoner who I hadn’t seen for a while…which, with hindsight, wasn’t surprising…he’d been released the month before, and had been paid by the Daily Mirror to break back into prison. Three accomplices on the third floor had also been paid, five grand, to winch him up to their window. He came over to me looking very uncomfortable…he was wearing his green prison overalls, but also, rather oddly because it was a hot day… um…a…um…a black woolly hat, and a bulky windcheater sort of thing, and he…um…came over to me… ‘Can we go over to that tree over there?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘How’s Lady Aitken?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘How are your daughters?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Is it true Margaret Thatcher’s coming to visit you soon?’…this rather mad dialogue. We went to the corner of the canteen, he didn’t eat his lunch, and I was beginning to think he might be on drugs, he was behaving distinctly oddly; then he said, ‘I must talk to you somewhere private, can we continue this conversation in your peter?’…that’s my cell… so we headed towards my cell…by then one of the accomplices had shouted his mouth off about the five grand, and the Irish boys rumbled what was going on, and we were just reaching my cell, with this guy saying, ‘Tell me about your problems’, when Mickey came running down the corridor… ‘Look out Jonno, this guy’s a wrong ‘un.’ I said, ‘We’re all wrong ‘uns in here Mickey.’ Big Jim shouted, ‘He’s got a camera stuffed up his front, and there are wires sticking out his back, he’s wired up for sound.’ This guy started to run…Big Jim unsuccessfully tried to rugby tackle him. Mickey said, ‘We’ve got to grass him up.’ We found Prison Officer Rook, who said, ‘What’s his description?’ Mickey said, ‘He’s got wires sticking out.’ I said, ‘He’s wearing a black hat.’ Rook thought I said, ‘He’s as black as your hat’ and with all the prison bells ringing and officers pouring out of everywhere, every black prisoner in the place was put up against the wall rather ferociously; meanwhile our friend was being lowered out of the third floor window with the Irish shouting, ‘He’s escaping, he’s escaping’…and one officer, the fattest in Stamford Hill waddled after this man who scaled the perimeter fence and sped off in a waiting car.
The spirit of the prison was entirely for me… ‘Jonno, this is a bleeding liberty.’ Black guys thought it was a terrific joke; one of them gave me the high fives cos he had drugs on him, but the officers were so busy looking for wires sticking out, they missed the drugs.
ELIZABETH: (60, head round door.) Jonathan?
JONATHAN: Yes?
ELIZABETH: We’re getting rather peckish. Are you going to be much longer?
JONATHAN: I’ll be with you any second.
ELIZABETH: Shall I start getting it ready?
JONATHAN: Yeah. I’ll do the eggs.
ELIZABETH: I’ll do the toast. (Goes.)
JONATHAN: (Calling after her.) Try not to be Queen Alfred. (Getting up.) Right at the end of my sentence I was in the office being searched and processed after Christmas leave, and I was asked to go upstairs to see the Deputy Governor, who said, ‘There’s been a serious plot against you. Three of the prisoners have been overheard making the arrangements.’ Apparently a well-known tabloid had offered them forty thousand quid to put a drug called Rohypnol in my tea, which leaves you awake but totally immobilised. They were going to put me in bed naked with another naked guy, take photographs and then run the story, ‘AITKEN TURNS GAY IN PRISON’.
There’s an art to scrambled eggs…the secret is to cook them slowly. You can’t hurry them.
5
HALA JABER
While we are on the subject of cooking, there can’t have been many more bizarre meals prepared than the one Hala Jaber cooked for the group of insurgents she was staying with during the second bombing of Fallujah, in Iraq.
This is a story which clearly demonstrates the difference between journalism and playwriting. As she was the only Western journalist in Fallujah that night, the Sunday Times accorded her the single honour of devoting both the first and second pages to her story. Yet in all that verbiage, there is no mention of the two key elements I chose from her interview when she came to talk to us in Max Stafford-Clark’s old office at The Royal Court Theatre. I suppose very roughly the Sunday Times concentrates on news, fact and opinion; I am more interested in the complexity of the human condition, self-knowledge through the experiences of others, and emotion.
Hala Jaber was exquisitely dressed for the interview...cashmere jumper, twill skirt, high leather boots…Max leant over to me and whispered… ‘Bang goes the costume budget.’
There was a post-script to the interview. The actress Catherine Russell who was playing Hala Jaber in Talking to Terrorists, went to see her three days later at her home, and Hala said that whereas she had been reasonably sanguine about the maelstrom of events she had been caught up in at the time, recalling the events to us at the interview had awoken a feeling that they had affected her more deeply than she realised.
THE FALL OF FALLUJAH
Hala (40) with a glass of red wine.
HALA: We stayed with some insurgents. It was Ramadan, and there was about half-an-hour before the end of fasting. They said, ‘You can stay as long as you cook for us.’ So I said, ‘Fine.’ The market was still open…I said, ‘Get some meat, get some vegetables’ and I walked into this kitchen, and it was the most disgusting thing…the cooker was…I don’t know…full of yuk. They had no salt, no herbs. And then these guys walked back with bagfuls of stuff, and they opened…there’s about 8 or 9 kilos of meat with fat like this and then you can see some red. There’s one small knife that hardly cuts anything, and the gas things are not functioning properly, and Iraqi food…I mean forget Ramadan…on a daily basis they must have like a rice and a stew, otherwise they feel hollow. I put some oil, rice and tomato paste…I had to get it right because these guys, I was going to spend the night with them, and I had to make sure they were happy with me, so they protect me at least if anything happens, otherwise they say, ‘She’s a bad cook, take her.’ So Ali…he’s my fixer…and I did a stew of God knows yuk, and I did potatoes and salad, and one guy fixed up a gas ring to a big cylinder of gas, and I despatched two other guys and they came back with black pepper and turmeric, and we put this in, and it became a sort of yellow stew of yuk, and the