necessity
I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
Shakespeare: Richard II (v.i)
Summer 1963; Profumo disgraced; Ward dead; The Beatles’ Please please me top album; Luther King having his dream; JFK fast approaching the end of his; the Cold War at its chilliest; the Wind of Change blowing ever more strongly through Colonial Africa, with its rising blasts already being felt across the Gate of Tears in British-controlled Aden.
But the threat of terrorist activity is not yet so great that an eleven-year-old English boy cannot enjoy his summer holiday there before returning to school.
There are restrictions, however. His diplomat father, aware of the growing threat from the National Liberation Front, no longer lets him roam free, but sets strict boundaries and insists he is always accompanied by Ahmed, a young Yemeni gardener cum handyman who has become very attached to the boy.
In Ahmed’s company he feels perfectly safe, so when a scarred and dusty Morris Oxford pulls up alongside them with its rear door invitingly open, he feels surprise but no alarm as his friend urges him inside.
There are already two people on the back seat. The boy finds himself crushed not too comfortably between Ahmed and a stout bald man who smells of sweat and cheap tobacco.
The car roars away. Soon they reach one of the boundaries laid down by his father. The boy looks at Ahmed queryingly, but already they are moving into one of the less salubrious areas of the city.
Oddly this isn’t his first visit. The previous year, in safer times, having overheard one of the British clerks refer smirkingly to its main thoroughfare as The Street of a Thousand Arseholes, he had persuaded Ahmed to bring him here. The street in question had been something of a disappointment, offering the boy little clue as to the origin of its entertaining name. Ahmed had responded to his questioning by saying with a grin, ‘Too young. Later maybe, when you are older!’
Now the Morris turns into this very street, slows down, and almost before it has come to a halt the boy finds himself bundled out by the bald man and pushed through a doorway.
But he is not yet so frightened that he does not observe the number 19 painted on the wall beside the door.
He is almost carried up some stairs and taken into a room empty of furniture but full of men. Here he is dumped on the floor in a corner. He tries to speak to Ahmed. The young man shakes his head impatiently, and after that will not meet his gaze.
After ten minutes or so a new man arrives, this one wearing a European suit and exuding authority. The others fall silent.
The newcomer stands over the boy and stoops to peer into his face.
‘So, boy,’ he says. ‘You are the son of the British spymaster.’
‘No, sir,’ he replies. ‘My father is the British commercial attaché.’
The man laughs.
‘When I was your age, I knew what my father was,’ he says. ‘Come, let us speak to him and see how much he values you.’
He is dragged to his feet by the bald man and marched into another room where there is a telephone.
The man in the suit dials a number, the boy hears him speak his father’s name, there is a pause, then the man says, ‘Say nothing. I speak for the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. We have your son. He will speak to you so that you know I do not lie.’
He makes a gesture and the boy is forced forward.
The man says, ‘Speak to your father so he may know it is you,’ and puts the phone to the boy’s mouth.
The