On the second morning of the hottest month of the year (which in the Gulf is really saying something) I awoke naked at seven o'clock in that clinically clean and cold cube in which I dwelt. Blanking out the thump of the airconditioning, I rolled the dial on my bedside shortwave radio, craving my first BBC fix of the morning.
At 2 am GMT, the newsreader intoned, Iraqi forces had invaded Kuwait and hand-to-hand fighting was reported in Kuwait City, the fiercest of it centred on the Emir's Palace.
When I reached the office, at the usual time, the excitement was palpable. After all, this is the type of occasion a journalist lives for. Editorially, the paper played it low-key. The tone was âdeplore' rather than âcondemn'. To foreigners, Arabs may be just Arabs but national consciousness cuts across ethnic lines everywhere in the modern world and Bahrainis, truth be told, regarded Kuwaitis with a mixture of envy and contempt because of their wealth and penchant for flaunting it.
While none of this altered the attitude of my fault-finding immediate superior, and I remained on notice that my work must improve or I would be for the high jump, those days did engender a greater feeling among the staff of âwe're all in this together' and that fed into a heightened sense of our work's importance. I think each of us knew that these were defining days for Bahrain, the Gulf and the whole Middle East. Cliché though it is, we were living through history.
But this was one story you couldn't confine to a box or leave at work. Outside, everyone was talking about it constantly, in tones of subdued fear. I recall more than one dinner spoilt that month by hearing restaurant staff, Indians who invariably had other sideline businesses to run (video shops, often enough), bemoan the invasion's ruinous impact on their livelihoods.
What did the locals fear might happen? That Kuwait might be just the opening skirmish in a rolling campaign that would proceed, like some unstoppable machine, wiping out more emirates as it gathered pace. At work we had a map on the wall, and anyone could see Bahrain was the next object in the juggernaut's path.
There was an element of overreaction in this, certainly, but the fear was regularly fed by Saddam's broadcasts from Baghdad which called on the Shia populations (70 per cent of Bahrainis are Shia) to rise up and overthrow their âeffete rulers', as Saddam termed them, in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It was a fear that we who worked at the newspaper knew had the Bahraini authorities worried. Within a week of the invasion, the Ministry of Information had installed censors in our offices, and every scrap of copy had to be vetted to ensure it gave Saddam no pretext for extending his destructive war to this tiny island.
Our cocoon of invulnerability to the events that made up our daily news diet had been violated. The outside came streaming in, and no one could ignore for long the fact that our neighbourhood was now the focus of an anxious world's attention.
Ever since my schooldays I had thought of myself as lacking in physical courage. Schoolyard fights fascinated me, but only as an onlooker: the idea of participation and, yes, fear of the pain of being punched senseless were repugnant to me. I would run a mile.
Here and now, for the first time in my life, fleeing offended my sense of moral courage and even my sense of professional duty. After all, whatever passed, my winding road had brought me to the brink of events that had a mesmerising effect on the mind, an irresistible attraction for the inquisitive intellect. The thought dawned only slowly that sitting this close to the fire of history might singe me, might cost me life itself.
For the first few days after the invasion, the tension between staying and doing my professional duty (strained as relations with the increasingly distant and preoccupied management were) and fleeing was no contest at all. Staying won hands down.
This was the first all-consuming emergency of my life. I can see that now; all I knew then was that, instead of disengaging myself from an obvious source of rising anxiety, I was indulging my inner ânews junkie', watching and listening to developments from all the available media eighteen hours a day. The obsessive seemed rational: the more one knew, the better protected one would be against irrational fear, I told myself. What I failed to take into account was rational fear, what must follow when the mind could no longer pretend this was happening only to others. I was being brought face to face with the prospect that I might be caught up in the drama myself, with all that could mean: invading and merciless troops, violence, capture, enslavement. My mind began to race, like an overheated car radiator, and I found that in these most abnormal of times the cost of being a loner is that just when you most need a support network no one is there.
Staying still seemed the right thing to do long before it seemed the choiceless fate of a powerless pawn. But I vividly remember the turning points, when an extra weight was dropped on the scales and fleeing became desirable in the exact proportion as the possibility of it receded. One such turning point was a phone call from home about five days after the invasion. Usually, conversation with my parents was a mixture of family news and the odd snippet of Australian politics. This time there was no small talk. Dad informed me that the Victorian Premier, John Cain, had resigned; and handed the phone to Mum, whoâunderstandably but unnervinglyâurged me to leave, saying that, from the TV news every night, she could tell how much danger I was in.
To hear from home that things sounded as dire as they looked to others across the sub-editing table rocked my complacency that all would turn out well in the end. My sense of peril was heightened, but I felt able to cope for as long as I could thrive on the adrenaline boost. So long as I could think of myself as a journalist in the midst of an exciting story rather than as an individual caught up in events that could change his life irrevocably, I could hold my worst fears at bay and keep a grip on reality.
The first essential was to remain busy. At work this wasn't a problem: there was no shortage of news and, with the censors now in-house, long-familiar procedures took twice as long. Outside, keeping my journalistic upper lip stiff, I saw a golden opportunity to maintain my standing with old contacts at Reuters and the
Observer
in London when I heard that the first survivors of the Kuwaiti invasion had made it overland to Bahrain and taken shelter in the Kuwaiti Embassy.
It must have been around 10 August, under a broiling summer sun, that I stood outside the embassy gates, eyeing a wary guard until the moment came when, taking refuge in close-packed numbers, I could enter the embassy reception room without arousing suspicions. At this of all times, you might be wondering how I could gain entry to such a sensitive area without being noticed by the guard and turned back. That was easy enough: I had taken care to dress myself in a traditional Kuwaiti outfit: red-and-white check
kaffiyeh
and snow-white
dishdasha
so that, in the confusion of milling Kuwaitis at the gates, desperate to meet their fellow nationals and, at least in some cases, missing relatives, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut.
Clutching my notebook and pen in the folds of the garment, I passed into a large, airy room where I saw three dozen or so Kuwaiti menâI noticed no women or children thereâhuddled together, conversing in agitated whispers. Seating myself at the end of a bench, I turned to the dignified gentleman on my right, asked whether he spoke English and, on receiving a nod, introduced myself as someone who could tell the world of his and others' reaction to the invasion of their homeland. Tentatively at first, and then like an unstoppable wave, word spread of my role. Admiring the effectiveness of my disguise, and still seeking an outlet for horribly pent-up emotions, the world's richest refugees spilled their stories with increasing lack of restraint, until in the end the only inhibition that clung to some was an unwillingness to let their names be quoted. With this I could not quibble: several told me their families remained behind, in houses where anonymity would be all that stood between them and murder by a troop of Iraqi soldiers.
The attitude of the
Observer
backbench when I filed the story the following Sunday showed how happy my sub-editing colleagues from the previous winter were with my feat. But, if they were happy, my superiors back at the
News
were incensed. Four months earlier I had clutched at a straw in the desert wind; now, the acting editor told me, this was the last straw. I was sacked.
This was not the only time I have been sacked, and serving out notice in such circumstances is always devastating. But, on those other occasions, there was time to pick up the threads and, frankly, money enough to go travelling and seek balm for the battered soul. Here and now, with so much turmoil around me, this quietly delivered order to remove myself had the effect of a bomb going off close to my troubled mind.
It provoked a terrible reaction in me which, nearly a decade and a half on, I can analyse with a wisdom denied me at the time. The tension between staying and going, which the invasion of Kuwait had generated, was suddenly heightened, as I had to serve out my time in a place where I was not wanted, where the choice of staying or going had been wrested from my hands and replaced with an ultimatum: stay, then go. Whether through my decision or others', it feltâjust as my sense of physical cowardice had been tested and I was discovering a moral courage superior to itâthat leaving just then was cowardly, nothing less than abandoning my colleagues in time of peril. They weren't there for me; but an old religion that I had formally abandoned but which still provided my ethical bearings told me I should not just wash my hands of their fate.
Now I look back on that combination of stressful events and say that, under the tension I then felt, it was probably a matter of time before I would have skedaddled anyway. But the decision only pulled one more tile of certainty from beneath my feet. I was discovering the weakness of a philosophy by which I had steered my life in the six years since leaving Australia, rooted in the conviction that by making a plan and following it you can always achieve what you set out to achieve, through sheer willpower.
Adherence to a plan will indeed bring success 99 times out of 100. But the world is not entirely predictable and there comes a time when a plan, rather than being a life raft, is ballast that will drag you down to the depths unless you throw it overboard. As ever, I was learning the hard way.
Extreme anxiety triggered by the August invasion and its aftermath now combined with shame that I had been branded a professional failure, to produce a lethal psychological cocktail.
There was nothing for me to do but hang on grimly and see what would happen. By day, this meant going to the bank at al-Adliya and waiting an hour while other distressed expatriates jostled and shoved their way to the front before opening suitcases on the counter and angrily demanding their funds in cash. Tellers, frightened by their scowls, retreated into the manager's office under a barrage of threatening fists. The central bank, to prevent the loss of all its reserves, had ordered a freeze on foreign-currency transactions, and overnight the wealth of expatriates who had come to the Gulf to make their living was annihilated, worthless. They, too, were trapped.
I tried to humour myself,
Well, at least now I know what the Great Depression must have been like. I've seen what a ârun on the economy' really means
. Telling myself that this was some sort of privilegeâthat all experience must confer an advantage of some kindâwas my way of reacting to the suffering of others, and nothing to be proud of, I can see now. But besides that I see from the perspective of distance that my struggle was to remain an observer, not a participant. If I thought all this loss were happening to me rather than about me, by God, what would I have left to cling to?
By night, unable to sleep more than a few hours while the mounting confusion of fears, dread and appalling news swirled through the tumble-dryer of my mind, a snatch of warning came back to me. In what I jocularly refer to as my Cambridge days, in late 1986, on the occasional Wednesday night after work I would relax with a colleague at a pool hall, a club where my colleague's father was a member. It must have been just before I went to Oman, my first sub-editing job in the Gulf. As a young professional with rising prospects expecting to hear nothing but words of warm cheer, especially when my colleague's father told me he had been to the region, I was taken aback when his face clouded over in a most uncharacteristic frown.
I can see him hunched over the table as, just before potting the black, he looked me in the eye and said, âThe Middle East will find out who you really are.' Now, adrift in a sea of unceasing thought, I wished to God I had asked that wise man to explain what he meant.
These apocalyptic days kept my mind's eye trained on multiple âreality checks'. The first were the televised newscasts which told what was over the horizon, in more senses than one. They grew ever grimmer and more surreal. Having learnt in the morning that Iraq had taken Western aid workers hostageâthe term âhuman shields' entered the language around that timeâI watched and listened at regular intervals for the rest of the day, and then weeks, as the sub-plot thickened, to learn their fate. News fixes as addictive as regular heroin injections proved every bit as dangerous to my sense of balance.
What the Germans call
Weltschmerz
âabsorption in the woes of the worldâkept upsetting that balance. On and on the news reports came, the airwaves of gloom swamping my boat and threatening to scuttle it altogether.
The other âreality checks' occurred in the streets around me. They were deserted most of the dayâwith temperatures in the mid-forties this was not exactly surprisingâbut in the evening I found myself with too much time on my hands. Wandering the streets, I would be drawn again and again to a few ports of call: my favourite Syrian-run restaurant, where the talk was all of ⦠well, guess what; and the English-run fish restaurant, whose owners were now thinking of getting out while there was yet time.