Contains strong language and adult content that some readers may find upsetting

i KIREJI

Here’s the thing. By 2001 I was living in a Cotswold farmhouse, halfway between Oddington and Adlestrop, with two acres of gardens and nine acres of pasture. I lived with my partner Jim and our two children Lizzie and Thomas. Tom was four and Lizzie was eight. It was then and is now the simple and unvarnished truth that no man ever had more beautiful more gifted or more loving children than me. The local brewery made some of the best beer in the country, I had a soft-top Saab Aero, a house in France, a skinny mistress in London, a collection of fine single Malts and a half-finished novel with a working title that changed every six months.

I didn’t know how to stop and I couldn’t think of a single reason why I should. I bought a dog, a honey-and-tan Lakeland terrier. We named him King Arfer. I built a greenhouse and planted tomatoes, peppers and chillies. I cleared most of the exhausted trees from the old orchard and planted twenty Brown Russets. I made jam and fruit cake, paid to have the Beech hedges cut once a year and honestly thought it would go on forever.

Chatham House Farm was owned by Margaret, Jim’s mother. She and Hadley her second husband lived across the farmyard in an old stone barn that they had converted to a house when the old Farmhouse became too much for them to manage.

Margaret allowed Martin Canning, the farmer whose land adjoined hers, to have the grazing of the nine-acre pasture free of charge. In return we had the pleasure of watching the playful, innocent, gambolling lambs being fattened outside our windows and, from time to time, the much greater pleasure of eating one of them. Twice a year Canning would appear at the door with a lamb, butchered, jointed, cling-film wrapped and ready for the freezer.

Tuesday 11 September 2001 was a day much like any other. It was warm. An Indian summer in north Oxfordshire. We had friends to lunch, John and Penny Turton. We had laid a table in the orchard. My sister Fran who had come to stay, uninvited, on a short visit more than six months earlier and had never gone home had put in an appearance at lunch and more or less behaved herself.

Tom who had started to go to school five mornings a week was asleep upstairs and the Turton’s and Jim were still out in the orchard slowly emptying another bottle of wine. I was fifty-one years old.

Fran was sitting in the Television room, chain smoking and waiting for her life to get better. While she waited she was watching the TV with the sound turned down. She had opened the Crittal French-windows that gave onto the stoney “valley” that Margaret’s garden designer had planted up with Alpines and was blowing the tell-tale smoke out through the open window.

I was in my study hiding from the guests. Penny Turton was a plump ash-blond. She was pretty, sweet natured and duller than ditch-water. John, who was overshadowed by his more famous brother Nestor, the Erdington fauvist, was as tiresome as only a club-footed, ham-fisted, moon-faced failed actor can be. I opened the window of my study and lay on the sofa and thought about doing some writing. I was awash with most of a bottle of Burgundy which had been preceded by a large, over-strength, Tanqueray gin. I tried to remember the title of my book and drifted towards sleep.

As I dozed I thought I might forget about the book I wasn’t writing and not write another book. My idea for the new book was simple and in my post lunch stupor it seemed wonderfully witty and clever. I was an avid reader of the Economist, a weekly newspaper. Each week they published a single, full page, obituary as the last editorial page in that week’s edition. I kept a stack of Economists in the downstairs lavatory, which conveniently for me was just across the wide, stone-flagged, hallway from my study. I would, I thought, select four recently terminated lives from the 2001 Economist obituaries and collide the four in real time but in fictional circumstances.

My characters would be four real people, all very different, but who would in real life have shared the same global events, lived through the same social changes and so on. Because of the self-consciously eclectic selection-criteria adopted by the Economist obituaries editor I was certain I could easily find a varied and interesting quartet with strikingly different backgrounds, politics, life choices and so on.

I would push these four people up against each other so that their emotions and their loins were stirred, or their stomachs churned and heaved with revulsion. In the final chapters, I would have to somehow get them out of my fictional world and re-integrate them into the real one. It would be a challenge but I did not doubt my ability to pull it off. I even had a title for this new opus, Breakfast in Samarra. I spent a lot of time working on my titles and I was particularly pleased with this one. I had a preliminary list of the four departed avatars I would force into intimacy. William Hanna, Douglas Adams, RK Narayan and Anne Morrow Linberg would find themselves forced to share a breakfast table in the dining room of the Samarra Hotel.

I could hear George Slade the gardener cursing as he struggled to start the 2-stroke engine of the big, green, Allen mower. I had asked him to cut the grass in the paddock next to the orchard so that Tom and I could kick a ball around. George referred to the Allen mower as “the fucking bastard”.

“We need more petrol for that there fucking bastard Mr Tibbetts” he would say, pressing a fat, scarred thumb, ingrained with dirt, to one nostril of his large and pitted nose and snorting a neat stream of snot onto the nearest flower bed.

I sank deeper into the pool of sleep. George renewed his attack on the fucking bastard. I heard him heave on the toggle-ended starter cord. The motor struck, coughed and died. George cursed and tried again. Again the motor struck and coughed and died. The sound of George’s struggles faded until it was nothing more than the humming of a honeybee on a summer’s afternoon and for that minute a blackbird sang close by, and round him, mistier, farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Adelstrop, the poem, written in 1917 is Thomas’s valediction to a world that, even as he wrote, was being swept away forever by the War To End All Wars. The poem frames a moment of transcendent calm and beauty. Outside the frame a global cataclysm is unfolding the effects of which would still echo in our daily lives more than a hundred years on.

Traditional Japanese poetry is meant to be spoken aloud.  Some Japanese poetry includes Kireji a “cutting” word, spoken aloud when reciting the poem. It is a sort of spoken punctuation mark that serves to create two distinct parts in the poem and instructs the listener to think about the differences and resonances that come before and after the break. In English poetry, a similar effect is achieved by using a colon, a long dash, or an ellipsis to juxtapose two contrasting images or ideas. 

In Adelstrop the kireji would come halfway through the poem between the second and third stanza. In the first two stanzas the language is prosaic and hum-drum, and the tone is casual and conversational and after the cut it is lyrical, emotional, the tone elevated and poetic. Before the cut in Adelstrop we see and hear a huge machine, steaming and panting at the empty platform. After the cut we see and hear a blackbird singing, fields, flowers and a wide summer sky with a few small clouds and all the song birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

 “You fucking cunt” I heard George say as the starter-cord toggle of the Allen mower slipped from his hand, whipped back and smashed the arthritic knuckles on his right hand. Fran my sister ran into the big hall at the front of the house, the forbidden cigarette still in her hand, burst into my study and shouted

“Come quick ……..something’s happening….. in America…it’s on the telly.”

There was a thrill of almost sexual excitement in her voice and at the same time a sob of misery and fear broke in her throat. I woke up with a start.

ii LEST WE FORGET

It was morning in America and a total of nineteen al-Qaeda sponsored terrorists had hijacked four passenger airliners outbound from north-eastern US airports. All were heading for the west coast.

American Airlines Flight 11, heading for Los Angeles with seventy-six passengers and eleven crew on-board, left Boston’s Logan Airport at 07.59 Eastern Standard Time. Five hijackers took control of the plane and forty-seven minutes later flew it straight as an arrow into the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York City.

A few minutes later United Airlines Flight 175 also out of Logan and headed for Los Angeles International Airport with a crew of nine and fifty-one passengers sliced into the south face of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre.

Earlier that morning at 08:20 Eastern Standard Time, American Airlines Flight 77 left Washington Dulles also heading for Los Angeles with fifty-nine passengers and crew and five hijackers on-board. Seventy-seven minutes later the hijackers one of whom was a trained pilot ~ flying at maximum throttle and in level flight so close to the ground that the wings of the huge plane were clipping the tops off street lamps ~ breached the western wall of the Pentagon before evaporating in a high-octane fireball.

A fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93 left Newark International at 08:42 heading for San Francisco, with thirty-three passengers, four hijackers and seven crew on board. The passengers, some of whom called their families on their cellphones and so learned of the suicidal endings of the other hijacked planes, attempted in desperation to win back control of the aircraft. It crashed in a field in Pennsylvania at 10.30am killing everyone on board.

iii TAMERLANE 

Fran, who had been smoking by the window, her back to the television, had turned from contemplating the small rewards and tranquillity of the Alpine garden just in time to see those early shots of the first plane going in. The images, captured in the corner of some tourist’s holiday video, are so fleeting that in early showings a voice on the soundtrack exclaims “What was that”.

Now we are all sitting in front of the television watching in disbelief as the planes slice into the towers again and again. More clips of film have been found. Captured by “ordinary” people who just happened to be filming in the direction of the Twin Towers at the moments of impact.

The soundtracks are also there, some people shout and swear others start to cry. In some the people in the foreground flinch and hold on to their companions seeking reassurance. We continue to watch mesmerised by repetition, unable to stop.

The hours pass. Penny Turton sits weeping. John sits beside her with an arm around her shoulders. I give all the adults a whisky. Not the Malt of course. Fran lights one cigarette from another and before that one is finished lights another. Every channel is now showing the same footage. Over and over the arrowheads, shockingly swift in flight, slide into the glass and steel curtain-wall resolving, by some weird special-effect, into a vast and boiling fire-ball that bursts the far side of the building, beyond belief, beyond rational explanation, beyond hope.

After a while ~ the Turton's have gone home ~ I try to stand-up, to have a pee, to get myself another whisky, to straighten my legs, to unlock my joints, but I cannot straighten my legs and stand. A living statue, imobile, finished, Fallen Man. Now, looking back, as I prepare to leave the room, I see everything in the highest of high-definition. A tableau vivant, a frame permanently imprinted in my memory until I am gone and the hard-copy softens and merciful time dissolves the past.

Tom has woken from his afternoon nap and found his way downstairs climbing into my lap, sleepy, hot and lovely. I kiss him on the top of his head and then blow a raspberry at the junction between his plump shoulder and the developing muscles of his neck. He squirms and wails in delight and annoyance.

LillietheCzech, our au-pair, is back from collecting Lizzie our daughter from school. I don’t remember them arriving or coming to join us but, when I inspect the picture in my head there they both are, caught in time. Lizzie has inexplicably grown two or three inches while I was dozing in my study. Her lovely face is set in sympathy and concern for the suffering that she is surely too young to comprehend? A glimpse into the future to the fiercely caring woman she will become.

Now we are watching falling men and women. Quite soon ~ but not soon enough ~ the TV Directors calling the shots on the images that will reach our TV screens understand that they must protect us from the horror of reality. Their new job is to turn the cameras away from life.

We watch in stunned silence as those who have chosen to jump rather than watch their flesh catch fire and melt, take to the air and crash into the street below. Like children called home at the end of the day they are at first reluctant to leave the playground, slowly tumbling and waving, pedalling playfully in the clear blue sky and then, at the last, they turn in a rush to fling themselves into the arms of the mothers and fathers waiting to welcome them home.

Now I see that LillietheCzech has started to weep and Jim is comforting her and if I peer more closely at the image I see that Jim too is weeping. This last observable fact makes the whole unbelievable scene seem even more unlikely for Jim, as we all know, does not cry.

Thomas wriggles off my lap and standing on the floor between my legs, a brave little man, comprehending the incomprehensible, grips my knees and gazes at the screen of the television. When he speaks his four years old voice is oddly mature, quiet and confiding. 

“The planes aren’t going to come to get us are they Daddy?”

 “No, of course not, we’re safe here” I say, lying to them all, not for the first time nor the last.

In total, including the people in the planes, the people on the ground and the people in the target buildings, two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six people were killed and over six thousand were injured. It is certain that hundreds, perhaps thousands more will die from diseases caused or triggered by breathing in the toxic dust that filled the air when the two towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed.

A few days later, watching a BBC Television News report I saw a film of a large group of women, in Iran I think it was. They were mostly late middle-aged with their faces exposed but otherwise clothed head to toe in black. On hearing the news of the collapse of the two towers their faces light up, seeming to swell and grow. They throw up their arms and their backs arch in an extended spasm of pleasure.

One woman, plump and elderly, some child’s favourite granny, throws her head back, her fat throat and dewlaps stretched taught, and begins a triumphant ululation, exulting over the death of thousands. I am embarrassed and ashamed, for her and for myself.  I turn off the small TV I have installed in my study and look out of the window at the low hill behind the house and the two rows of Horse Chestnuts that flank the drive and think again about Farmer Canning our neighbour. Like a man testing a wobbly tooth I just cannot stop worrying away at the memory of Martin Canning

The morning after the towers collapsed Canning had appeared at the front door unannounced. He rang the bell and I answered. On seeing me he looked confused and said nothing. It was clear that he had forgotten that Margaret, Jim’s mother, no longer lived in the main house. He had a cardboard tray of jointed lamb in his arms, which was strange as he had already paid the traditional tithe for the use of the pasture for that year.

Eventually he seemed to wake up and said “Lady Margaret out?”

“She is but she’ll be back soon. Come in Martin. I’ll fix us both a drink. It’s a bit early but …… ”

It was more than a “bit” early, it was nine-thirty in the morning. The children were still in bed. There would be no school that day. Jim was having a slow start. LillietheCzech was making coffee. I was contemplating a long day which almost certainly would end in tears.

“Will I take that? I could put it in the freezer?” Canning held on to the box of meat. “I’ll make sure that Margaret gets it.”

Reluctantly he surrendered the box, his excuse for being there at our front door so early in the day. I steered him into my study, took the lamb to the kitchen, returned with a couple of clean glasses and poured him a very large Malt. I looked at it for a moment and then added another shot for good measure.

I didn’t like Canning and he, I’m fairly sure, didn’t like me. He was short and thickset, his bulk made more so by his heavy trousers and tweed jackets. His strong thick fingers were all the same length. He wore the best quality clothes and shoes. Harris Tweed jackets and Churches’ brogues which were, like the man, made to last.

There seemed not the tiniest pinch of self-doubt in his nature and he never felt the need to question any of his beliefs which matched his father’s beliefs and the beliefs of his father’s father before him. He was a “wogs begin at Calais” racist, a little Englander, a stupid man but cunning like a fox. A fox with rabies.

Normally when Canning came calling he took half an hour to finish his drink while we chatted. This time however he downed the huge whisky in a single gulp and as I still had the bottle in my hand, I poured him another. He took half of the second drink in a second gulp and then sat in silence. I filled my own glass and sat opposite him. After a while he began to talk about the “the events in America” in a low, expressionless voice.

He had a two-year old pedigree bull. A red and white Frisian with a Tintin quiff and a ring through his nose. The bull had won a prize at Earl’s Court. He was called Tamerlane. Tamerlane lived in a purpose-built stall, close to the farmhouse. Each morning Canning himself would lead the bull, by a chain passed through his nose-ring, to a small fenced pasture.

Tamerlane was a business. He was being pampered with a view to a few more prizes and thousands of off-spring. He was very big for his age, a two-ton sex worker and Martin Canning was his pimp.

On the previous afternoon Canning had been bringing Tamerlane back from the field when Martha his wife had run into the farmyard and told him to come at once and listen to the news on the radio. He chained the bull to a heavy iron ring deeply embedded in the solid stone wall of the farmhouse. Once inside the house Canning had turned on the television and got stuck in front of it for a couple of hours. When at last he remembered Tamerlane he returned to the yard to find that the bull had fallen and in so doing had somehow got the chain around his neck and hanged himself.

“I loved that bull” Canning said producing a large, red and white spotty handkerchief. He threw it over the lower half of his face before grabbing his well blossomed nose with both hands and trumpeting into the bright red folds.

For a moment I thought Canning might start to weep. I felt no urge to comfort him. I pitied and despised him, the aged and enduring John Bull at the heart of middle England, who only had thought for his own, petty loss and who only had me (me for fuck’s sake!) to whom he could unburden his breaking heart.

iv THE NUCLEAR OPTION

After Martin Canning had left I poured myself another drink. It was still only 10.30 in the morning and already I was drunk on top of my hangover from the day before. I sat and puzzled over the new world order. I knew, as Edward Thomas had known when he wrote Adelstrop, that tectonic structures were in motion. The world would never be the same again.

I am neither more nor less prescient than the next man. We all have flashes of foresight and tend to remember the times we were right while conveniently forgetting the times we were wrong. This time, however, I had a great deal more “context” and of a far better quality than usual to inform my speculations.

By 9:30 pm on September 11, the CIA's Counterterrorism Centre had already informed President Bush and other senior officials that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Two years before I had sat in Subramanian Swamy’s house in what we now call Chennai while he told me all about Osama bin Laden, who he was, what drove him, where he was, what sort of threat he posed, what he was planning and what the solution was.

We will come back to Subramanian Swamy later on in this book but for now here is a whistle-stop tour. Swamy had been President, for which read “supreme leader”, of the Janata party for ten years and would remain so for another twelve. He got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Delhi when he was very young and took his master's degree in Statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute. On the personal recommendation of Hendrik S Houthakker ~ Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University ~ he got a full Rockefeller scholarship to Harvard.

His doctoral thesis Economic Growth and Income Distribution in a Developing Nation was much admired. During the time he was working on his PhD at Harvard he was also registered as a student at MIT and, from 1963, working as an Assistant Economics Affairs Officer at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

Swamy was the ablest man of an able cohort, a phenomenon, handsome, charming, articulate, with a brain as big as a planet. He was only 24 when he was awarded his doctorate from Harvard. Challenged by Houthakker to learn Chinese in a year ~ Houthakker wanted company on a planned trip to China ~ Swamy did it in three months. One of those men who promised much, did a lot, but who has never quite achieved what he might have done.

At this, our first meeting, he charmed me, was generous with his time and scared me in a way that I have rarely been scared before or since. I asked him his opinion on the Osama bin Laden problem. At the time bin Laden was thought to be a guest of the Taliban and holed up in the Tora Bora cave system high in the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Swamy said “I know where he is. Everybody knows where he is. CIA? Ptharrp” and he blew what the men and women at Langley would have called a Bronx Cheer.

“Can he be got to?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Swamy, “but at what cost? He is being protected by the Taliban, this is their home, these are the people that defeated the Russians. You could lose a regiment of special forces getting in there just to find that bin Laden has disappeared.

“Then what?” I said

“Nuke him” said Swamy “you only need two small bombs”.

I wondered aloud if nuking bin Laden might end with us all being consumed in a fire ball. I had spent nearly three decades in countries where large crowds gathered regularly in front of American Embassies and tore up the cobbles to throw at the Marines guarding Uncle Sam’s real-estate. I had experience of how unstable the region could be and I knew exactly how quickly a shooting war could kick off.

Move by move Swamy explained to me how we would avoid becoming collateral damage. (See Surrealpolitik in South India for a full description of this meeting.) As he spoke it became clear that he was deadly serious and that he was not the only policy maker in the largest democracy on earth thinking seriously of the nuclear option.

Now, two years on, as America mourned and girded its loins for what would become known as The War on Terror I wondered if perhaps Subramanian Swamy had been the sane one and I had been criminally complacent.

Strangely the morning after 9/11 felt like the morning after a big Charlotte Street launch party. The hangover was terrible but there was a feeling of relief that something we all had been waiting for and working towards had, at last, begun.

I heard the children talking in the kitchen, I went to make their breakfast and see if I could scrounge a cup of LillietheCzech’s notoriously strong coffee. The telephone in the hall rang as I passed it ~ yes we still had landlines in 2001 ~ and in an unguarded moment I picked it up. The response to the attacks on what were then described as the western liberal democracies was already swinging into action. A week later I was in the Philippines, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world some of whom were already actively engaged in terrorist activities. But that’s another story. (See Cock Fighting in Manilla)  

As I poured a second cup of coffee the Martlands’ lorry passed the kitchen window taking Tamerlane, now nothing more than two tons of condemned meat, bone and marrow, to his final rendering. It was no longer legal for farmers to bury dead animals on their farm or cook them up and feed them to the dogs. Tamerlane’s last rights would be managed by a system codified in bureaucratic bullshit. Martlands made a good business in collecting and disposing of what were euphemistically called “fallen stock”. Reducing poor Tamerlane’s demise to nothing more tragic than a failed investment.

As my head throbbed and I wondered if another drink might help, I thought how heavily larded with irony and how strangely personal this whole tangled web of stupidity had become. The attack on The World Trade Centre was a tragic disaster for a few thousand capitalists and their friends and families but meant little or nothing to capitalism the construct. It was an attack as criminally misguided as any of the similarly misguided attacks perpetrated by the western capitalists that the terrorists were now seeking to punish. The work of reconstruction after the attack would become an opportunity to make yet more money. The attack was a provocation to make war and war itself was an engine of profit.

Tamerlane and his pizzle, of course, were both tools of the capitalist conspiracy. Tamerlane the sex worker had but one purpose in life, to make profits for his shareholders. His death was a joke, beyond a joke, a whole stand-up routine. A worker denied control of the means of reproduction. The product of his labours milked out of him by machine so that he was denied even the transitory pleasure of humping a few cows. Osama bin Laden and Subramanian Swamy really were two sides of the same coin. Both thought they could bomb the other out of existence and both were wrong.

v BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

I sat at the breakfast table drinking coffee and listening to the kids talking to LillytheCzech about the events of the previous day. I had my face hidden in my hands trying to hide my misery from all three of them. The day was threatening to start, rather than end, in tears. I thought about my father, The Poacher with his dog; and his father sacrificed by the careless capitalists in their Race to the North. And mercifully a joke that The Poacher had once told me more than thirty years before rose to the surface of my deep memory.

There were two bulls in a field. A young bull and an old bull.

”Hey Dad, look” said the young bull to the old bull “the farmer has left open the gate into the cow’s field. Let’s run down there and shag a couple of them.”

“No” said the old bull after a pause “let’s walk down there and shag the lot”

I was fifteen years old when Dad produced this old chestnut. Old enough to flirt with airline cabin staff and chat confidently with the Secretary General of the United Nations, nevertheless I was slightly scandalised. It was unlike my father to tell jokes at all and this was the only “rude” joke I ever heard him tell. He was a true stoic and somehow his stoicism was connected in my mind with his not telling jokes. He had a sense of humour and often laughed, but life was too serious a business to joke about and he knew just how harsh it could be.

It did not occur to me for many years that Dad’s intention in telling me the Two Bulls joke was not to make me laugh. At fifteen I was already a couple of inches taller than him and a horribly bumptious, not so little, prick. This was his quietly loving way of telling me it’s OK to grow-up but not to make the mistake of thinking that your elders had not been there before you.

Years later I made up my own version of the Two Bulls joke.

There were three bulls in a field. A young bull, an old bull and a very old bull.

”Hey look” said the young bull to the other two bulls “the farmer has left open the gate into the cow’s field. Let’s run down there and shag a couple of them.”

“No” said the old bull “let’s walk down there and shag the lot”

There was a pause and then the very old bull said “And while you’re down there tell that frisky young Friesian with the big udders to trott up here and give me a hoof job.”

I began to laugh at the memory of Dad laughing.

“Something is funny?” said LillietheCzech.

For a moment, one of those moments where my position on the spectrum might have fatally clouded my judgement, I considered telling her the whole story and then I realised how impossible it would be to make her understand and just how much trouble I might get into while trying to do so. Lillie already had a low opinion of me, some parts of which I had earned. And so I resisted the temptation to tell her exactly what was making me laugh. The world was pulling itself to pieces and a great and tragic roll-call of young Americans ~ by some measures the brightest and the best ~ were falling from the sky to crash into the street. LillytheCzech was right to tick me off. It was no laughing matter.