Outposts (38 page)

It was Tuesday, 30th March when I presented my ticket at Comodoro airport, and the political atmosphere had become electric. Two days before—the Sunday—the intelligence community had told the British Prime Minister that Argentina was probably going to take action against the Falkland Islands; three atomic-powered submarines had been ordered to proceed with all deliberate speed to the South Atlantic; one, HMS
Spartan
, was being loaded with live torpedoes in Gibraltar dockyard at the very moment I was walking up to the ticket counter.

I knew nothing about this, nor did I know that the Argentine authorities had decided to invade the islands—though the Comodoro aerodrome was filled with Hercules transport planes, and fighters were flying overhead for much of the day. My only inspiration had come the day before, via a chance remark from a
Royal Navy officer I had met at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires. I had asked him if, in his view, it was worth my while trying to get to Port Stanley—the BBC had said that no journalists were going to be allowed to go, and I would have to use some degree of subterfuge to get aboard the plane. The Argentine authorities might be rather annoyed if they found out—so, was it worth the risk? ‘Go,’ was all he said. ‘It should be worth it.’ (Some months later he told me that, having a fair idea of what was going to happen over the coming days, he had wondered guiltily how I ever planned to get back.)

But no complicated subterfuge was necessary. The little plane took off on time, and all the passengers who had queued were aboard. No matter that task forces and battle fleets were even at that moment assembling at the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean, and satellites were being interrogated hourly for information on troop movements and diplomatic messages, no matter that the world’s spying community was working overtime, and that presidents and prime ministers were engaging in urgent late-night telephone calls for advice and support—of all of these events that history now insists were taking place that day, the plane’s passengers were quite insensible. I had lengthy conversations with three men aboard who had come to the Falkland Islands to buy land. One was a minor Spanish count; one was a High Tory gentleman farmer from Shropshire; the third was a Scotsman who lived in Egypt. Each one had the fullest confidence in the ability of the mother-country to prevent any unpleasantness: no one in the plane was thinking of war, except perhaps the uniformed men in the cockpit, who may well have known what we did not. Only London was expecting trouble, and Buenos Aires was less than sixty hours away from delivering it.

I felt a thrill of excitement as the plane bumped its way downwards an hour later, and the seat-belt signs snapped on. There was a thick and dirty layer of cloud, and it was several minutes before I could see anything below through the Lockheed’s picture windows. But then, grey and heaving and white-veined in the gale, there was the sea. It had everything I expected of a Cape Horn sea. It was shallow—the South American continental shelf was only thirty
fathoms down—and the waves were short, and steep. The sea here had a vast emptiness, and a subdued fury to it—not at all like the North Sea, for instance, across which ships of all kinds are for ever making way. This was a deserted quarter of the ocean, and the clouds were very low, and ragged wisps blew down to the crests of the swell, where big seabirds—albatross, I imagined, or the southern ocean mollymauks—whirled lazily on the storm.

We were coming in north of the islands, and making a tight turn into the wind, landing from the east. The charts (‘Islands Surveyed by Captains R. Fitz Roy and B. J. Sulivan, RN, 1838–1945’) were not entirely helpful. Macbride Head, for which I looked in vain, had a notation beside it. ‘Reported to lie one mile further northward, 1953’. The cliffs around Cape Bougainville were said to be a mile and a half further south than depicted by the Victorian captains. And the interior of East Falkland, which they either never took time to see, or else found too intimidating to describe, was curtly dismissed as being crammed with ‘Rugged mountain Ranges and impassable Valleys’. I trusted that the Air Force men up front were using more accurate maps.

And as we turned for the final approach, so I spotted my first glimpse of this uttermost outpost of the old Empire. A chain of black rocks, streaked with white foam, surrounded by a tangled web of weed, heaved up from the seabed. There was a tiny beach, and on it the lumbering forms of seals, frantically racing into the comfort of the surf to escape our noisy approach. There were said to be four types of pinnipeds on the Falklands—the southern elephant, the southern sea lion, the South American fur, and the leopard. True seals walk by flexing their stomach muscles (unlike sea lions, which use their flippers) and furs are the most common Falkland seals, and as these below seemed to be both numerous and heaving themselves about on their bellies, I assumed these to be furs. But before I could be sure two more islands, these covered with tall bushes of tussac grass, flashed by and we bumped down on the most southerly governed dominion of the United Kingdom.

The rain lashed cruelly out of the rugged ranges and impassable valleys to the west, though it was not cold. Two bedraggled and
dejected baggage men waved us into the low block of the arrivals’ hall, where there was the smell of cigarette smoke and damp corduroy, and where a rather dated picture of the Queen and Prince Philip hung, steamed up, on a whitewashed wall. A small and cheerful man in blue oilskins welcomed us, said his name was Les Halliday, customs and immigration officer and harbour master, and could he have our passports? Much inspection, and questioning followed—how long was I staying, did I have enough funds to support myself, where was my return ticket, what was my business—before Mr Halliday felt confident that I was not an Argentine zero pilot out on the islands for a recce, and he chalked my dripping bags and stamped my passport.

A small oblong stamp in blue-black ink: ‘Immigration Department 30 March 1982 Falkland Islands’. Neither Les Halliday nor I knew that was to be the last mark he would put in a passport for a long while, and that the plane even then refuelling in the storm outside would be the last international civil flight into the Falklands for five years, at least. The next foreign aircraft to land at Stanley airfield would arrive in three days’ time; it would fly the blue-and-white flag of Argentina, all of its guns would be loaded with shells, and Mr Halliday would be under strict curfew, ordered to stay indoors and pay the arrival no official heed at all.

A clutch of mud-spattered Land Rovers stood outside, and a pleasant-faced girl took my bags and led me to one of them. Her voice sounded vaguely Australian, though she was rather shy, and clearly rather uneasy with the strangers who piled into the cab. She unbuttoned her anorak once the heater got going, and she was wearing a tee-shirt with a Union Jack, and the slogan ‘British and Proud of It’ over an outline of the islands. We lurched forward with a belch of diesel smoke and crunch of wet gravel, and set off for the colony’s capital.

A few weeks before I had been on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and the similarities were remarkable. No trees. Bare rocks, ever wet from the rain and salt spray. Endless stretches of green bogland, fading into the fog and the drifting squalls. Lines of black diggings, some with tiny figures in black plastic coats
moving slowly among the pools of inky water, stacking fuel for the coming winter. Gulls mewed and squawked as they wheeled in the eddies. Discarded cars lay rusting beside the road, which was either deeply rutted, or covered with thick patches of beach sand scattered by the last storm waves. And through the holes torn in the Land Rover’s canvas top, the sweet smell of peat smoke, and, as we rounded a bend and breasted a low rise, the sight of it blowing in blue streams from a hundred mean cottage rows in Port Stanley herself.

We passed a small forest of radio aerials: this was where the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company had set up its first transmitter in 1912, and had sent a message in morse to King George. The Admiralty built a second set of mighty aerials just before the Great War, in the mountains to the west of the capital; the first time they were tested some hapless matelot turned on too much power and miles of wiring burned out in a flash and a drizzle of sparks. A submarine cable laid to Montevideo snapped, twice. Then a set of rhombus aerials was built for a space-research team that came to the Falklands in the mid-Sixties, and a private circuit was established between the unlikely twin towns of Stanley and Darmstadt, in West Germany. But after seven years it closed, too—leaving behind, as seems the custom here, a cluster of odd-shaped radio masts. There may be no native trees on the Falklands, but the twentieth century’s sterling efforts to allow the colonists to talk to the outside world has left many rusting iron masts and rotting hawsers that, from a distance and in a mist, look much the same.

Up in the Caribbean, where the winds are from the east, colonial capitals were usually built on the western sides of the islands—protected by the lee of the land, accessible for sailing ships that used to bring and take the Imperial trade. Down in the Falklands, where the winds—and what winds!—are from the west, precisely the opposite is true. The eastern shores are those protected from the gales, and logic and prudence thus dictate that the trading vessels call and anchor there. The first township was at Port Louis, on the eastern side of East Falkland, but the approaches were shallow, and troublesome for the bigger ships of the day; and when the Royal
Navy surveyed the nearby waters and tested the anchorages and decided on another spot, it too was on the eastern side of the archipelago. The place they considered most fit was a tiny settlement named Port William at the southern side of an inlet called Jackson’s Harbour. To honour the peer who was then Under-Secretary for the Colonies, it was renamed Stanley, and formally designated capital ‘with a turf hut and a small wooden cottage in progress’ in 1844.

Like Bird’s custard and the shapeless cardigan, the design and structure of a British working-class town is quite unmistakable, utterly unexportable and—to the British, and only to the British—charming in a ghastly sort of way. As we bumped down the final hill into Stanley there could be no doubt that this was the creation of Britons, seeking familiarity and reassurance so far from home. It was a town that appeared to have paid no heed to its position so close to the Patagonian coast. (It is notable, though, that Stanley is at almost exactly the same latitude south—fifty-two degrees forty minutes—as Great Yarmouth, Stamford, Cannock, Oswestry and Barmouth are north, and it is similar to the poorer parts of all of those towns and has, in winter, a not dissimilar climate, too.) There is nothing like it anywhere in South America, though there are villages in the older parts of Australia and New Zealand that have the same ramshackle aspect—a blend of mining-town and fishing-port, Industrial Revolution and Prince Albert, memorial hall and cenotaph, red brick terrace and tiled roof, pebbledash and peeling paint, potting shed and allotment, conservatory and geranium and privet hedge. I was never to see another Imperial town quite like Stanley. The Caribbean capitals have more grandeur and permanence about them; the old garrison cities—Gibraltar, Hong Kong—have been subsumed by modern development, the mid-Atlantic colonies have in their capitals stone constructions that proclaim the might and main and dignity of Empire. But not poor Stanley. This is a truly forlorn and gimcrack little town, creaking and damp, and with the feel of impermanent permanence about it, as though it had been put up by a Ministry of Works to solve an immediate housing problem, and never removed. There used to be rows of what were called prefabs in some English towns, erected to ease the shortage
of housing after the Hitler war. They stayed for years—ugly, and yet not hated. Stanley seemed to me rather similar—a town that has suffered from too little money, too little confidence, too little care taken in its design and its maintenance. It does have a certain charm—but that tends to derive from its people, rather than from its appearance. No historian, surveying the architectures of Imperial power, would ever select the Falklands capital as an exemplar of what the world’s greatest Empire had done. The Imperial ties that bound Chowringhee and Pedder Street and Albert Road, Hong Kong, never extended as far south as Ross Road, Stanley.

Stanley was built on the northern flanks of a steep hill, its streets running down to the waters of Stanley Harbour. The light, in consequence, is intense—the sun always hanging in the northern skies and reflected back by the riffled and sparkling sea. As we turned down the hill the town suddenly became curiously luminous, everything bathed in the pastel brightness of a low sun and the sea. From here the town looked like a freshly painted water-colour of itself, shining with the damp. The rain had stopped, the sun had broken through and the gale had eased to a stiff breeze. There was washing flapping on the lines, the peat smoke rose half-vertically from a hundred chimneys, gulls were finding it possible to land on rooftops, and children, in oiled pullovers and Wellingtons, spilled out on to the streets, to play. This might have been a Scottish islands capital—Stornoway, perhaps, or Tobermory, on a brisk morning after a night of storms.

The Upland Goose Hotel, made famous by the events of that autumn, was rather less of a hostelry than would be found in a Scottish fishing town. It was more like a youth hostel—spartan, old-fashioned, worn out. The name comes from the wild goose that island sheep farmers loathe, regarding it as an absolute pest. They call it ‘Magellan’s grass-eater’, and claim that seven geese can wolf down as much grass each day as the average healthy sheep. There was a plan to slaughter 15,000 a year and offer a bounty of fifteen shillings for every hundred beaks, but the conservation lobby won the day, and the geese remain, to be shot for food, and served with redcurrant jelly and slices of orange.

I had a cup of instant coffee and sat in the conservatory, basked for a while in the afternoon sun and read old copies of
Weekend
and
Titbits
, and smelled the geraniums and the roses. Mutton, too: it was lamb for dinner at the Upland Goose, as it is so often that the islanders call the meat three-six-five (or so it is said; I never actually heard anyone call it anything but mutton).