It was the first truly poor place I had ever visited and I was shocked to see how close to the brink of chaos people can survive, and frightened to see how fragile a veneer civilisation actually is.
The Comedians ends with one of the departing characters throwing a handful of coins from a car window, causing a dangerous riot amongst the scrabbling horde of street children – an image which we would later see magnified and repeated nightly on the news after the island was repeatedly hit by natural disasters.
‘When people come to Haiti,’ Aubelin Jolicoeur told me in the hotel bar as the tropical night-rains crashed down on the roof of the veranda outside, ‘they always try to make the story funny. They never take it seriously. All through the centuries we have been ostracised by the world because we were the first black republic. Always we are misunderstood and misinterpreted. There is a bad spell on Haiti.’
Tyrants and other interesting monsters
I have to confess that the first (and sometimes only) criterion that I apply when deciding whether I want to do a book is whether I find the author and the story ‘interesting’. The most ‘interesting’ people, however, are not always the ones you would trust to care for your children, your grandmother or even your favourite puppy.
The people who are interesting are the ones who, at the time you come across them, inhabit a world you know nothing about and who know things that you want to find out. Sometimes those things can dwell on the darker, more secretive side of life.
Even before I tipped into my teenage years and became entranced by dark and complex characters like Lord Byron and the occultist, Aleister Crowley, I was intrigued by the horrific and indefensible. On a holiday to Spain with my parents I read Ernest Hemingway and became obsessed for a while with the glamour and horror of bullfighting and the matadors who seemed to me as dashing as real-life Scarlet Pimpernels. I nagged my parents into taking me to see El Cordobés (who was to bullfighting at the time what Elvis Presley was to popular music) and others fighting, and collected their autographs afterwards as if they were rock stars.
Before that Russell Thorndike’s series of books following the adventures of Dr Syn (alias ‘The Scarecrow’) made being a smuggler on the Romney Marshes seem like the most romantic pastime possible. Before that I dare say I formed my strong attachment to the sharp tang of marmalade thanks to the influence of Paddington Bear, who seemed to me more interesting and complex than Pooh Bear, who lusted after honey and lived close to where I was born. The familiar scenery of Ashdown Forest in Sussex could not compete in my imagination with Paddington’s mysterious past in ‘Darkest Peru’.
These days I guess it might be Grand Theft Auto or internet porn that first introduces impressionable young boys to the other side of good.
To me, ‘interesting’ still means people the like of which I have not come across before, or people who have lived lives that I do not yet know anything about.
Had a charismatic young German leader contacted me in the twenties and asked me to help with a book he was planning, tentatively entitled Mein Kampf, I might well have skipped over as naively as a Mitford sister to see what the fuss was all about. Lord knows how long it would have been before the penny dropped and I realised the full horror of what this strange little man was actually talking about and I would then have ended up as deep in the soup as the unfortunate P. G. Wodehouse. I might have been equally tempted by a ticket to China to volunteer to help Chairman Mao knock his thoughts into shape for the infamous Little Red Book.
Extremes of evil are as interesting as extremes of goodness. Extremes of wealth are as interesting as extremes of poverty. Without the bad guys there would be virtually no drama and no storylines strong enough to hold anyone’s attention, no vampires or zombies or serial killers. Life is indeed a bitch.
Imelda Marcos was the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the President of the Philippines, but she had a vacuous glamour all of her own, which was shored up by a glossy public relations machine designed to distract attention from the fact that she and her husband were allegedly fleecing their already poor country of record-breaking sums of money.
She arrived for lunch at one of Manila’s showiest restaurants in a swirl of media attention, immaculately groomed and empty behind the eyes. Just the fact that she was taking lunch in public would be enough to ensure that all the local news programmes would carry the story. One of the many titles she had been awarded by her husband was Governor of Metropolitan Manila (along with Minister of Human Settlement, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary). Her husband’s health was known to be failing and it was said that she was effectively the acting President. There was also speculation at that time that if he were to die, she and her husband’s trusted military adviser would seize power together.
The organisers of the lunch, and indeed of the whole trip, had been a little vague about what they hoped would come from this meeting. Their brief seemed to be to promote the Philippines as a destination and the first couple as glorious, benevolent rulers.
During the lunch, with every spoonful of food being filmed for the edification of the hungry viewing public, she said absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever and it was entirely unclear whether anyone had actually managed to make her understand that they were thinking of asking her to write a book. Her face was as devoid of expression as it was of wrinkles or blemishes. It was like sitting opposite a lovingly carved and polished religious icon, reverentially draped in designer clothes.
The Marcos family were overthrown a few years later and although it was found that they had stolen many billions of dollars from the people it was the discovery of Imelda’s collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes which stuck most vividly in people’s minds, an almost comic illustration of the superficiality of those who seek power and wealth for its own sake.
Afternoon tea with Mrs Mubarak
The man from the embassy insisted that it would be worth my while coming to London to meet his Minister of Information. He wouldn’t tell me which embassy he was from or why this minister wanted to talk to me, but he managed to make me curious to find out more. The Minister was going to be staying at the Grosvenor House, one of the biggest and grandest hotels in Park Lane. I was scheduled to join him in the lounge for morning coffee.
The Minister and his officials were holding court around a large coffee table in front of a flaming log fire. His children, who were also staying as part of the entourage, drifted back and forth behind the sofas with family messages from the rooms upstairs as he cautiously revealed details of his mission. He had two books that he wanted written: the autobiography of President Hosni Mubarak and the autobiography of Mrs Mubarak, who had been at the President’s side throughout his years in power as well as his time before that as Egypt’s Air Chief Marshal and then Vice President.
I had a number of projects on the go at the time and didn’t think that I would have the capacity to take on the President’s life story with all the political sensitivities and complications that would be bound to bog everything down. I was also pretty sure that he and I would find it hard to form a good working relationship. I didn’t know all that much about him personally at that stage but I knew enough about military rulers in general to be able to guess that we would not have much in common. I did think, however, that Mrs Mubarak’s view on life in power would be interesting. She was half Welsh and half Egyptian, her parents having met while her father was a medical student in Wales, where her mother was a nurse. She had been with her husband on the podium in 1981 when President Sadat was assassinated beside them, at which moment she was catapulted into the role of First Lady