A Foreign Affair Read online

  A Foreign Affair

  Stella Russell

  © Stella Russell 2013

  Stella Russell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Extract from The Italian Affair by Helen Crossfield

  Prologue

  You may already know me or, at least, of me…

  Cast your mind back to 2007, to a tabloid tale of a ‘Princess Di-alike’ with ‘flashing sapphire eyes’ and ‘a ruddy nerve’, deported back from Yemen in handcuffs.

  In the end I got off lightly, could count myself lucky he wasn’t sentencing me to ten years in Holloway, was what the judge said. ‘Miss Flashman,’ he pronounced, ‘your case has provided an important object lesson for those of us who dream of blithely quitting these shores for foreign climes without prior knowledge of where we might go, or with what or whom we might involve ourselves. However,’ he sighed, ‘to punish you with the statutory 10-year custodial sentence for your offence would, in my opinion, be a wicked waste of over £400,000 of British taxpayers’ money.’

  Instead, he referred me to the Raddington to have my head examined for a fraction of that price, and there at the Raddington I was soon embarked on a course of writing therapy. What follows is the unexpurgated tale of the single week I spent in Yemen in the spring of 2007, a girl’s own adventure story for our times if ever there was one!

  Chapter One

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan - you are most heartily welcome, Madam!’

  The first Yemeni I’d ever encountered looked gratifyingly dazzled at the sight of me. Good, I thought; I’d carefully planned that in the dead white heat of an early Aden afternoon my gauzy Nile-green cotton tunic with sequin detailing at the neckline combined with a nimble handling of my transition from dinghy to jetty, would make a favourably strong impression on whoever awaited me ashore. Self-possession is nine-tenths of how you open doors, I always say.

  ‘Excuse me, but for one moment I believed you were that most beautiful and gracious of ladies, Princess Diana of Wales, until I remembered that dear lady’s passing away…’ he said, one hand on heart and his head humbly bowed, extending a hand to assist me with my silver wheelie case.

  He was sweating in his tangerine orange shirt, with what might have been an Indian tablecloth tucked around his large stomach like a bath-towel and a pair of grey ankle socks and pristine Nike trainers on his feet. After describing himself as an immigration officer, he pressed his Raybans into service as an Alice band, shrugged accommodatingly at my lack of a Yemeni visa while handling my passport with the utmost reverence, and declared: ‘Dear Madam, allow me to wish you a long and pleasant stay in Aden, which was the first jewel in the crown of your Queen Victoria’s empire, if you remember…

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes! You have forgotten, of course, but see how well we have remembered you British,’ he said, pointing up at a fresh-looking sign that read Prince of Wales Pier. ‘At my own suggestion the name was reinstated when this area of town was improved a few years ago!’

  ‘Wonderful!’ I said. I’d winced at his bizarre demonstration of nostalgia for an imperial past most Brits would prefer forgiven and forgotten, like some old snap of ourselves sporting a tank-top or shoulder pads. But then I recalled that the tone of the document responsible for my presence in Yemen in the first place - Sheikh al-Abrali’s recent letter to my employer, the editor of the Daily Register, about an imperial tidemark, the 50th anniversary of the British withdrawal from Aden – had been identical.

  Dear Sir, it had read

  My warmest greetings to the readers of your mighty organ and especially to those who are citizens of Brighton, where I learned your glorious tongue!

  I, the sheikh of the also mighty Abrali tribe of south Yemen, beg leave to remind you that exactly half a century has passed since your great Great Britain ceased to rule over its Crown Colony of Aden and surrounding East and West Aden protectorates.

  On this 50th anniversary of your departure from our shores, do you Great British remember the hundreds of noble public servants and brave servicemen who lived and died in the service of this small but once very precious corner of your glorious dominions? May I remind you and all your compatriots that here in Aden we are still tending not one, but two cemeteries filled with the holy bones of your heroes.

  The sleep of those dead is peaceful but not so the lives of the children and grandchildren of those you once ruled. Aden, all the south of Yemen, moans and groans under the brutal boot of northern tribesmen. Lawlessness and hunger and injustice and the twin scourges of al-Qaeda and Somali pirates stalk the area you once cared for like a good parent.

  Oh gracious, just Albion, will you be deaf to your southern Arabian foster children’s cries? Your duty is a moral and urgent one!

  Yours faithfully,

  Sheikh Ahmad bin Hussein bin Mustafa bin Hussein bin Mustafa bin Walid, bin Ahmad bin Mustafa bin Hussein al-Abrali.

  The immigration officer - Aziz, as I’d shortly learn to call him - continued in the same vein: ‘You will discover that the people of south Yemen, especially us Adenis, remember you British very, very, very kindly. You have nothing whatever to fear here!’

  ‘I didn’t think I had.’

  Was there any call for this majestic mode I’d somehow adopted, I asked myself, until it occurred to me that at this far remove from anyone and anything I knew I needn’t worry. I could relax, be whoever I liked and why not a female pillar of Queen Victoria’s British Empire for a change? I admit, playing that particular part flattered the Flashman genes I’ve always been enormously, some – my sister-in-law Fiona for one – might say inordinately proud of. ‘I never believe what I read in the papers about things like pirates and kidnappings and entire countries falling to al-Qaeda,’ I told him, drawing myself up to my full height and squaring my shoulders.

  ‘Ha!’ he chuckled, ‘You look and speak like a true British lady, Madam, a lady such as my uncles remember so well from the good old days. An Englishwoman is as courageous and noble as a lion they told me!’ With the delicate tip of his little finger he stroked first the lion and the unicorn and then the golden crown on the cover of my passport.

  I was tempted to giggle but, still in imperial mode, replied; ‘Now, would you be so kind as to recommend a hotel? I gather the Crescent’s the place to stay.’

  From a long afternoon spent listening to an ancient acquaintance of my brother Ralph’s, a senior member of his London club, describe his years as a magistrate in the last years of the Aden Colony before it ‘all went to pot’, I’d gleaned only two useful pointers. First, I must be sure to arrive to Aden by boat. Second, I must ‘put up’ at the Cres
cent Hotel.

  The atrocious heat I’d encountered in following his first instruction had already inclined to me to mistrust his injunctions. My descent of the Suez Canal and the best part of the Red Sea by Egyptian container ship, and by petrol tanker thence for the short hop to Aden from Djibouti, had been hellfire-ish. Only the certain knowledge that nothing good awaited me back home – whether with Ralph and Fiona at Widderton or in London – prevented me from abandoning ship and heading north again to the cool. By day I’d been dragged through boiling, soggy cotton wool while by night after night, incarcerated in the airless tin coffins of my cabins, I’d prayed for that daytime torture to begin all over again. Nevertheless, better all that than my sister-in-law’s ‘I told you so’ and the bailiffs at the door of my flat, but only just.

  My first view of Aden was no compensation for all that discomfort. I might just as well have touched down by plane at night for all the frisson of pleasure I got from the sight of its famous ‘black rocks’ cradling an off-white sprawl of buildings which I assumed to be ‘Crater’, the commercial heart of Aden according to Ralph’s old friend. The only other sights of note were a colourful fairground wheel, a slightly scaled-down replica of Big Ben on cliff, and a giant billboard displaying the face of a man with gleaming white teeth on one of the high-rises overlooking the harbour. All in all, I was more than prepared to ignore the old boy’s advice about the Crescent Hotel.

  ‘Yes, the Crescent! Yes…Yes,’ said Aziz, looking suddenly deflated, ‘I can confirm that in the good old days certainly the Crescent was a fine, clean lodging place. Your queen herself condescended to rest her freshly crowned head there when she visited Aden in 1954?’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I would not lie to you. But these days I am very sad to say that it is a centre of base vice, with a rear view of the city’s security headquarters.’ Eyeing my silver case gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine bathing the pier, he said ‘For you Madam, only our five-star Aden or Sheraton hotels will be suitable and it will be my pleasure, my honour indeed, to transport you to one of them.’

  ‘Please take me to the Aden Hotel then,’ I said, adding under my breath, ‘I haven’t travelled all this way in roasting sardine cans to stay in a Sheraton.’

  My word appeared to be Aziz’s command. He turned away to yell at one of the dozen or so youths – their nether parts similarly wrapped in bath-towels, futas, as I learned to call them - who were lounging on the nearly corniche wall under the meagre shade of a palm tree with their left cheeks distended like cartoon characters with toothaches. I gathered from Aziz that they’d been enjoying a post-prandial qat chew, the daily cure-all of the Yemeni male, involving hours spent masticating the small new leaves of a shrub that possessed powers akin to those of strong coffee. With a little pink plastic qat bag still dangling from his wrist and his teeth edged in a mossy residue, a skinny lad in flip-flops scampered along the pier towards us to obey an instruction to wheel my luggage to Aziz’s car. Then the three of us, in a two-one formation – my self-appointed boon companion Aziz and I, followed by the porter lad – made for Aziz’s car.

  A shiny top-of-the-range white Toyota LandCruiser, it was stuffed to the gunnels with furry mats and lace doilies, dangling prayer beads, a mini Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and a box of pink tissues, as well as the usual flight deck’s worth of illuminated gadgetry on its dashboard. For what I knew to be a very poor country indeed, Yemen paid its immigration officers surprisingly well, I thought. But what did I know or understand about the place at that stage? Nothing whatsoever. Possibly sensing my ignorance, Aziz turned on the air conditioning and set about remedying it with a guided tour of his city by luxury refrigerator on wheels.

  ‘This cool is heavenly! You won’t make me get out and look at anything, will you?’ I begged him.

  ‘As you wish Madam!’

  ‘Thank you, and please call me Roza’

  ‘You must not thank me, Madam Roza. It is I who must thank you,’ he replied ‘You must understand that for many years now, due to that cursed bin Laden and his bomb here in 2000, we have had no visitors to this port – no navy ships, no oil tankers, no cruise ships and certainly no British tourists. We have been forgotten by all the world -’

  ‘We’re still in Crater, aren’t we?’ I asked briskly, irked by his plaintive tone.

  ‘Yes, you are right, and you can recognise these British-style houses with two storeys, all in a line?’ he said, as we sped down a thronging terraced back-street that reminded me of some depressed Midlands town with a burgeoning Moslem population – Oldham or Burnley or Leicester, say – though built of stone instead of brick. ‘If you look hard you may also see some old 1960s graffiti from the time we fought you British – there, look, floozy.’

  I wondered whom he thought he was insulting until I realised that he was reading FLOSY in capital letters scrawled on the side of a building, FLOSY, he explained, had been one of the groups terrorising the British into abandoning their Aden Colony in the mid 1960s.

  ‘I was just a baby at that time,’ he continued, ‘but my uncles were all members of FLOSY and ran around town in the very early morning putting Tate & Lyle sugar in the petrol tanks of the British Land Rovers.’ He giggled and then sighed, ‘They behaved like naughty children then but they are wiser now. Now all south Yemenis, of every age, wish the British would return here. Not one of us is happy to be under the boot of those robber tribesmen from the north – better to live in a British colony than an independent Yemen when those barbarians are in control of everything! Look up there, you see that hooligan?’ He was pointing up at the giant billboard photograph of the grinning man I’d spotted while still at sea and taken for a toothpaste advert, ‘that’s our northern tribesman president – curses be upon the chief of all the robbers!’

  I was more interested in noting the number of women wearing the all-enveloping black rig – baltos as Aziz called them – than in his bellyaching about the northern Yemeni who’d apparently been making a poor fist of ruling united north and south Yemen for almost the past two decades. While taking in the sights of Aden on that first afternoon I was far less worried by the state of the Yemeni nation under that lord of misrule whose name I kept forgetting than by how I would get my hands on one. One might well come in handy as a useful disguise at some stage in my sojourn; I could certainly conceal a weapon or a valuable in its folds, I fantasised, idly wondering if my famously misadventuring ancestor had ever had recourse to one. How much could a balto to call my own cost?

  The more I saw of the old port city with its chipped custard-yellow post boxes and strange abundance of roundabouts, the harder I was finding it to sympathise with Aziz’s nostalgia for the British Empire. What bizarre things we Brits left behind us! Post boxes, random Big Bens, those thick yellow lines at the sides of the roads. None of it was very stylish or even particularly useful when one came to think about it, but our first destination that afternoon reassured me that we Brits were hardly the worst offenders in this respect.

  Although spotless and as deliciously cool as the interior of Aziz’s car, the Aden Hotel reeked of a ramshackle sleaze that harked back Aden’s brief incarnation as the capital of the Moscow-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, South Yemen. A solitary Arab cuckoo in the Communist nest for a quarter of a century after the British pull-out in1967, with this pig-ugly hotel as its Dorchester presumably, the PDRY had been ‘a bad joke’ according to Aziz.

  ‘Take me straight to the Sheraton, please,’ I said, as soon as we’d stepped into the Aden’s revolving door.

  Back in the sanctuary of the LandCruiser, we sped past a small park in the making – still strewn with paving stones and unplanted flower beds – in the middle of which was the dumpy form of the widowed Queen Victoria. ‘During all the black night of the Marxist years, Her Majesty the Empress of India was lying in the cellar of the old British consulate,’ Aziz told me, ‘but recently we resurrected her in memory of the happy one hundred and twenty-eight yea
rs we Adenis enjoyed under British rule, which every one of us prays will come again soon.’

  ‘Inshallah!’ I murmured politely, but I wasn’t really listening to him. I was recalling having read somewhere that Queen Victoria rejoiced in the luxury of a new pair of knickers every day of her life, and was therefore startled when Aziz swerved off the road suddenly and gently rammed the car into a lamp post, ‘Madam Roza, you really hope that the British will return to rule over Aden?’ he said, switching off the ignition.

  ‘Need you ask?’ I joked, ‘I’m expecting our redcoats here by sundown!’

  In all the fuss generated by the discovery that the LandCruiser wouldn’t start again and my threat to abandon Aziz by flagging down another vehicle to transport me safely on to the Sheraton, I failed to notice a pale, unmistakably English man wearing tomato red Crocs emerge from a nearby building. How far did one have to go these days to be shot of one’s fellow Brit?

  ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ this red-Croc inquired mildly, ‘I’m the vicar here at Holy Trinity…’

  An Anglican church in Yemen! Another vestige of the British empire, of about as much use as a human tonsil, I was thinking, until I learned that the Rev and his wife not only ran an eye-clinic but also a guesthouse, whose largest apartment he wasted no time in offering to me. Once having ascertained that it boasted overhead fans, I accepted an invitation to dine with them that evening. I’d be saving myself the cost of a 5* hotel, I calculated, while gaining a free background briefing on the lie of the land I’d landed myself in.