Outposts (41 page)

That afternoon I made a brief attempt to get a ride to South Georgia, so that I could see exactly what was going on between the Royal Marines and the sailors on board
Drummond
and the
Granville
. There was history of a sort being written out there, and I felt I wanted to take a squint into the epicentre of the moment. A steel sloop had slipped into harbour overnight, sailed by a young Czech who was on a single-handed circumnavigation. He had left the Baltic a year ago, had wandered down the Atlantic to Montevideo, and was now crossing to Cape Town in the roaring forties, and had stopped in the Falklands for shelter from the storm, like thousands of sailors before him.

He said he would take me to Grytviken. It was on his way, and he was bored with his own company. So we sailed out into the harbour, and swung the compass for an hour or so, tacking back and forth along the length of the loch. Two others came for the ride—Raphael, the Argentine photographer, and a stray Polish seaman who had jumped ship a few days before, and wanted to give his fellow crewmen a wave as we cruised cheekily close to the factory vessel. I rather fancied that the Czech planned to go back home when his journey was over, and might not look too kindly at his Polish friend thumbing his nose at fellow Pact-members, but he was a relaxed sort of fellow, as most lone yachtsmen have to be, and seemed not to worry.

It was about five, and we were sailing close to the Narrows when, with a roar of exhaust and a plume of spray, three uniformed Royal Marines shot by in a rubber boat. I had seen them the night before, and I waved. They did not wave back, but sped ahead with a look of rather grim purpose. They landed at the westerly entrance, just by the tiny green navigation light, and began unloading weapons—a light machine-gun, and a pair of mortars. One marine remained behind, his colleagues sprang away again and unloaded more
weapons at the other side of the entrance. Something, I said to myself, was definitely up.

When we got back to the tiny dock by the Upland Goose there was a telegram waiting for me. My masters in London had decided that, in view of the deteriorating situation, I should remain in the Falklands, and I was asked not to sail on to see the scrap men 800 miles to the east. Then I spied Dick Baker, the Colonial Secretary, striding purposefully to his car, which took off in a screech of rubber towards Government House. A friend who had had an appointment with him followed: it had been cancelled, he said. There was something urgent afoot.

At five minutes to eight, while I was struggling through another of Mrs King’s ten thousand ways with mutton (though there was the promise of red mullet on the morrow) the Governor telephoned. He was calm, but in deep earnest.

He had requisitioned five minutes of radio time at eight fifteen, he said. Would I come round immediately afterwards, please? It was a matter of great urgency. He would not say what the matter was, other than there was trouble in the offing.

I put down the telephone. All of the King family stood around in silence, waiting for a word. They looked shrunken, and frightened. I told them all I knew, and went back to the dinner table, where one of the girls served me my ginger sponge, her hand shaking as she did so. ‘Balloon going up, I expect,’ bellowed the Shropshire farmer from across the room. ‘Nasty business. Had to come one day, I suppose.’

I felt, quite suddenly, gripped by a terrible sadness for these people. I could imagine a little of how they felt. Here I was, on the verge of becoming witness to a classic episode of Imperial history, excited, absorbed, all the instinctual routines of journalism swinging into their familiar actions; and here were the Kings, and their neighbours and their friends, who had come here to this bleak and windswept rock because they thought it would be safe, and peaceful, and because they loved the land and the wind and the kindred spirits, and because they wanted somewhere that was securely British, with all the essential decencies and protocols of an
England that was herself slipping away from the things they had come to love.

I once bought a house in an Oxfordshire village from a pair of elderly ladies who had decided to emigrate to New Zealand, because, they explained, ‘it is like England was in the Fifties, and that’s the time we liked so much. We don’t like England today. We want to find a place that’s like it used to be.’ And as with New Zealand, so with the Falkland Islands. What these people had wanted, when they or their fathers set out on the ship so long ago, was just what my old ladies wanted: a country with no crime, no television, no permissiveness, no coloured people, no disco music, no drugs…These were a people for whom Carnaby Street meant the beginning of the end, and for whom progress was a dirty word. And the land they had found, and for all its faults the world to which they clung so eagerly, was about to be desecrated. I remember thinking, as I spooned up the last morsels of sponge and custard and poured a cup of watery coffee from the cheap steel pot, that this would be the last night ever during which all those things for which these people had become colonists would survive. I was not quite sure exactly what was about to happen, but I knew, and I could see these people knew, that from this moment on, in just a matter of hours, or minutes from now, nothing on the Falkland Islands would ever be the same again. It made the fact of this particular reliquary of Empire, with all its reasons and its history, seem suddenly to have been a pathetic waste of time.

Events then moved swiftly, in a blur. The announcer at the radio station had not quite grasped the urgency of the moment, and tried for a ribald tone. ‘Lay your ears back, folks, for His Excellency the Governor!’ And Rex Masterman Hunt, the man who had taken down the flag on the British Embassy in Saigon and who thus knew some of the rules of diplomacy
in extremis
, was on the air, with every house in Stanley and every settlement in the Camp hanging on his every word. Not a sheep was shorn, not a word was said, until the news was delivered.

The islands were going to be invaded. (Dick Baker was to say
later that up until Thursday afternoon London insisted they would not be.) A battle group of Argentine warships—led by that former British carrier, the
Venerable
—was on its way. There were frantic discussions in the world’s interested capitals, but no one held out much hope. The first units of the force could probably be seen by the keeper at Cape Pembroke in two hours’ time. The first men might be ashore by dawn. The local Defence Force was being called up. There was no need for alarm.

Nor was there any. Stanley was stunned into silence. A curfew had been declared, and only soldiers were abroad. I walked the deserted streets, which were like any working-class English town during the screening of
Match of the Day
—every single person was inside. Everyone was awake. The Governor was back on the radio at four, declaring—as colonial governors have the perfect right to do—a state of emergency. All the Argentines staying at the Upland Goose were arrested and led away by marines, lest they try to give some help to their arriving colleagues.

But the colleagues had already arrived. The first party was ashore by four; the first shots were heard at eight minutes past six. By this time I was in the small frame building beside Government House, under a bed upstairs. Don Bonner’s foot was in my ear, and a tabby cat, terrified by the rattle and pounding of the guns, was huddled under a mess of candlewick bedspread. A small island nation was busily changing hands.

The surrender came three hours later; the Union flag came down, the blue-and-white banner of the Republic of Argentina went up in its place. The Falkland Islands were instantly transmuted into Las Islas Malvinas, Port Stanley became Puerto Argentina, the British colony, together with her dependencies and the Antarctic Territory were, in the minds of millions of jubilant Argentinians, part of the device that had for years been printed on all Spanish-language charts of the area: ‘Territorio National de la Tierra del Fuego Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur’. After a century and a half of argument, this windy quarter of the southern seas was now a province of Argentina.

The British Colonial Government was kicked out; Rex Hunt and his colleagues were on an Air Force plane to Montevideo by
sunset. As a final humiliation he had been ordered to take off his white Imperial uniform and dress instead in sober style. He had to change behind a curtain in the Stanley airport, while impatient and unamused soldiers fingered their trigger-guards, and muttered Spanish imprecations under their breath.

Next morning the islanders awoke to find new road signs being painted: from now on they would drive their Land Rovers on the right, said the commanders. They were, after all, a part of Argentina, and it did not behove them to be different, in any way. And Spanish lessons would be started in all the schools, with immediate effect.

I stayed around for two more days, until the Argentine officials on the island expressed their irritation and deported us, back to Comodoro Rivadavia on the mainland. The following day I was in Buenos Aires, one of the hundreds of reporters assigned to cover the story from the perspective of the jubilant Argentine capital, wondering, like half the world, how it would all turn out. And to judge from the sounds of outrage howling down from London, the Empire, after years when it had seemed well on the way to becoming a wholly moribund and insignificant institution, was coming very much to life once again.

This is not the place in which to recount the events of the early northern summer of 1982—the Falklands ‘war’ or ‘operation’ or ‘recovery’ has been well chronicled elsewhere, and for reasons I will explain in a few moments, I was not in the best position to report them. It will be sufficient to say that the Government in London responded with deliberate and brilliantly schemed ferocity, just as it might in times of earlier and more classically Imperial crises.

A massive battle fleet put out from Portsmouth, scores of civilian ships—liners, container vessels, tugboats, tankers—were requisitioned, soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen were brought from every corner of the world, arms and diplomatic assistance were sought and won from the Allies. And all with one single, uncomplicated end—to regain what had been so brusquely snatched from British hands. ‘The Empire’,
Newsweek
magazine perhaps inevitably wrote on its cover, ‘Strikes Back!’

The British troops, replaying the grand manoeuvres of
Normandy and Sicily and the Italian beaches, landed on East Falkland Island in mid-May. The next day one Falkland farm was liberated, and the Union flag flew on British soil once again. Some three weeks after that all of the island group was wholly dominated by the British forces.

The Argentine dream had lasted just seventy-four days and a little over sixteen hours. On 14th June, at 9 p.m., local time, the warring generals put their signatures to an Instrument of Surrender. Twelve minutes later a message was received in Whitehall, from Major-General Jeremy Moore. ‘In Port Stanley at 9 o’clock p.m. Falkland Islands time tonight 14 June 1982 Gen. Menendez surrendered to me all the Argentine armed forces in East and West Falklands together with their impedimenta. The Falkland Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants.’ It had taken thirteen hundred deaths to accomplish the ending of this Argentine dream and this Falklands nightmare.

But I was not to see any of that. A week after I had returned to Buenos Aires—long before the British forces had landed at the Falkland settlement of San Carlos—I travelled down to Tierra del Fuego, in company with two friends, both from a rival newspaper. We were arrested in southern Patagonia, charged with spying, and spent the better part of three months locked up in a tiny cell in gaol in the small town of Ushuaia, the most southerly town in the world.

But once the British victory was announced, and once enough bail money had been collected to satisfy the pride of the local magistracy, we were released and flown back to London. The war had happened without us. I had been there at the beginning, but had never been allowed to witness the end. I felt slightly cheated, as if a mission had been left incomplete, and the journey had no symmetry to it. The paper sensed this, and suggested I go back down to the islands as soon as possible, to see what the war had done to the place I had thought so very peaceful and so serene.

And it changed everything, of course, and for always. It was a month later when I returned, in a Hercules transport plane. The airport at Stanley had been shattered by bombing and shellfire. There was torn metal and oil and devastation on every side, and a
crush of soldiery with their tents and their radios and their portable latrines and all the other toys of military occupation. Stanley’s roads were pitted, fences had been knocked down, tank-tracks and minefields and depot flags spoiled every view, and the air was constantly filled with the whirring and chugging and buzzing of helicopters as they carried the new residents back and forth over the once-peaceful little town.

I flew out to the Camp. The helicopter pilot and the army public relations men and the foreign office news managers pointed out the famous battlesites, as though they were Blenheims and Trafalgars and the salient at Ypres. There was Mount Tumbledown, and there Wireless Ridge; that’s where Colonel ‘H’ Jones fell; that hut at Goose Green was where the bastards locked up the entire settlement; and that’s where they kept the napalm, evil sods!

We stopped at the settlement at San Carlos, and had a cup of Typhoo and a bacon sandwich in the farmhouse kitchen. Woollen socks were drying over the Raeburn, and a small child came in with peat for the fire. The family sheepdog lay curled up on the floor. There were copies of the
Daily Express
on the table, and a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar, and a box of Capstan cigarettes. The islanders who stood beside the range said they were thankful for what had been done, and would now like to be left in peace again. It had been a trying time, and still was.

I walked outside, into the sunshine and the wind. The field, beyond the gorse bush, was rutted with tyre marks, and the helicopter sat to one side, its rotors bouncing in the breeze. Up the hill a Nigerian gunnery sergeant was shouting abuse at a squaddie: there was a Rapier missile battery near the summit, and something had gone wrong with the tracking computer. The squaddie set off on a khaki-painted motorbike, to seek out a spare part.