Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 4

The first paragraph is crucial, because it is said to be ambiguous. Interpretations of it by scholars, lawyers and historians, together with ever more subtle interpretations of other paragraphs of the ma.s.sively formal doc.u.ment, have led to the perpetuation of arguments between Britain and Spain over just who actually owns the peninsula-and not over just who ought, by rights and tradition, to own it. The claims have led to not a little violence, but more often to acts and decisions of sheer lunacy. One recent example is said to have befallen a Spanish painter who was applying green gloss to the gates on his side of the frontier. He dropped the brush, and it fell through the gate and into Gibraltar. According to the tale, which I suspect to be apocryphal, he was told that to retrieve it he would have to travel via Tangier, just as I had done. It is difficult to imagine that he supposed the brush worth the time and money, or that he didn't just search out a convenient coathanger, and pluck the brush back to safety.

The supposedly ambiguous first paragraph of Article X reads as follows:

The catholic King does hereby, for himself, his heirs and successors, yield to the Crown of Great Britain, the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right forever, without any impediment or exception whatsoever.

The lawyers argue that, watertight though the paragraph may seem, the use of the word 'propriety' is ambiguous, and does not necessarily const.i.tute complete t.i.tle to Gibraltar. The Treaty is wheeled out on almost every public dispute over the matter: it has been suggested, for instance, that by placing soldiers on the peninsula Britain was violating one of the Treaty's cardinal provisions. Since there is no other reason for Britain being in Gibraltar-the civilians of Gibraltar have always been thought of by the colonists as second-cla.s.s, tiresome types who get under the feet of the soldiers and the matelots-this particular grumble was, certainly in the heyday of Empire, met with a weary and sardonic shrug of the Imperial shoulders.

The Treaty came after the Spaniards had tried to prise the British off the Rock by laying siege; they failed then, and failed twice more, once in the spring of 1727, and again-for three years and seven months-beginning on 11th July 1779. This latter, the Great Siege, was from the Spanish point of view a monumental waste of time and money.

In one six-week period in 1781, for example, the Spanish artillerymen hurled 56,000 shot and 20,000 sh.e.l.l into the fortress, but managed to kill only seventy men. The following year they held a contest for the best way of subduing the British on the Rock, and came up with the superb folly of the floating batteries, great stripped-down s.h.i.+ps roofed with nets and hides and crammed with guns of the heaviest gauge. Dozens of them were hauled out into the bay, and began firing a wild cannonade at the British forces on the west flank from a range of half a mile. The British were serenely undismayed, and fired down at the batteries with red-hot cannonb.a.l.l.s, which set the juggernauts on fire, sinking them and drowning 1,500 crew.

When it was all over someone calculated that one ball in 2,000 killed a Briton, and scarcely an excavation made in Gibraltar today fails to come up with at least one of the tens of thousands that failed to connect. The Spanish-and actually the besiegers were a mongrel army, with three Walloon battalions, one from Switzerland, some from Flanders, Ireland and Savoy-never tried again. Diplomacy, tempered by occasional excursions into mild forms of violence, has dominated the argument ever since.

The Great Siege has left many legacies-not least the indomitable spirit, or obtuse cussedness, of the Gibraltarian, and his professed loathing for the Spaniard. 'There are two kinds of apes on the Rock,' remarked a taxi driver, a Mr Ferrary, as his old Ford Prefect laboured up the hill to the place where he promised I would be able to see the famous monkeys. 'Yes, two kinds-the animals, and the Spaniards.'

It left more practical memorials as well. One emerged from the simple difficulty the British artillerymen experienced in defending their fortress. What would happen, one of them mused, if a cannon perched high on the cliff were fired horizontally, its ball going out into s.p.a.ce? Ballistics was evidently then an imperfect discipline, since the conventional a.s.sumption had it that the ball would proceed outwards in a straight line until the force pus.h.i.+ng it diminished to nothing, whence it would plummet, suddenly, like a stone. No truck with parabolas in those days: a cannonball would be like a waterfall, going straight out and straight down, its course impossible to aim, its consequences impossible to predict.

Naive-and plain wrong-though such wisdom was, it set the gunners' brains to work. One of their number, a Lieutenant Koehler, found the answer: the gun should be pointed downwards so that it could be aimed at the enemy below, and a clever device (which Koehler patented) would stop the ball rolling out before the powder charge went off. Moreover, a cunning recoil system had to be devised so that the gun wouldn't rupture itself every time it was fired in this highly unnatural position. Koehler came up with the recoil mechanism too, and the two devices became standard equipment on British heavy guns for generations to come.

To get the guns into position-specifically, up to a projection known as the Knotch, from where a blind spot on the Mediterranean side could be covered-required still more imagination; this was provided by another of the Rock's favourite sons, a Sergeant-Major Ince of the Military Artificers. He, and fifty stone-cutters, masons, miners and lime-burners, drove a tunnel behind the Rock's northern face, along which the cannon could, it was thought, be trundled. On their way they punched a number of fresh-air vents through the face itself, and then made the discovery that they could poke the cannon through these portholes, and command huge fields of fire while remaining more or less invulnerable. And so the frustrated Spanish Army-including the Walloons (and Maltese cavalrymen, who occasionally charged towards the British lines)-watched while great black holes opened in the white cliffs, gun barrels were thrust out, and withering fusillades of shot flew down at them.

The tunnels-galleries, as they came to be called-were the first of a vast subterranean network. Today there are more than thirty miles of them, some carrying roads, thirteen specially designed as cavernous reservoirs to hold drinking water, some protected by steel blast doors and containing secret communications equipment and, by reliable though unconfirmed accounts, atomic bombs, and some put to even stranger uses. An entire Northern Irish village was built in one very big tunnel; it had a Roman Catholic church (St Malachy's), a pub (the Hope and Anchor) and a fish-and-chip shop (Tom's). British soldiers, some kitted out as IRA men, others as Irish civilians and still others in their usual battledress, would make war on each other, practising for Ballymurphy and the Bogside. It made a fine irony, I thought, for the interior of one British colony to be used to learn how to subdue the post-Imperial wrangling in what some regard as, strictly speaking, another.

By 1784, British rule in Gibraltar was unquestioned, and the Rock had become, in Britain and across much of the world, a monument to tenacity, grace under pressure and bulldoggishness in general. Before the siege there had been many plans to dispose of the colony, or to use it as a diplomatic bargaining chip. Lord Stanhope had offered Gibraltar back to Spain if Madrid would relinquish her claims in Italy; the French had offered Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean if Spain could be given back Gibraltar; and there were other trading schemes advanced besides. But after 1784, after the failure of the Great Siege, it was clear the British public would have none of it. 'Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar' was the phrase invented at the time, and variants of that most thunderous Imperial a.s.sertion have determined British policy towards the Rock ever since.

It was a squalid possession in those early days. The garrison was largely composed of ne'er-do-wells, drunkards and smugglers; the civil population, ignored and despised by the military establishment, was Genoese, Maltese, Moorish, Portuguese, British and-despite a specific provision of the Treaty of Utrecht barring them from settlement-Jewish. (Spain points to that provision, coupled with a ban on Moors living in the colony as well, as yet another indication that her cession of the peninsula was temporary and conditional.) And while the Genoese and the Maltese attended to the more mundane duties of urban life-though the Genoese fished, grew vegetables on the neutral ground between La Linea and the Rock's north face, and dealt in tobacco, as they still do today-the Sephardic Jews attended to the essentials of Empire-they lent money, opened trading houses and warehouses, had no overweening pride to prevent them from the vulgar business of trade, and thus managed swiftly to dominate the colony's commerce. The result was their early prominence among the successful-if not social-elite of the colony, and their continuing power today. 'Gibraltar is full of Jews,' people will tell you as you step on to the plane at Gatwick; well, it is not, but occasionally it feels as though it might be, or might once have been. Spain rather likes to note how the British have pointedly ignored the Treaty of Utrecht's ban on Jews and Arabs by occasionally, and mischievously, reminding the world of the name of the present, and seemingly indomitable Prime Minister of Gibraltar. It is Sir Joshua Ha.s.san.

The social elite-the Governor and his entourage, the senior soldiery and admiralty, the British nabobs-generally kept aloof from the noisome and mongrel crew down in the town. To them, Gibraltar town was dirty and smelly, ill-constructed and primitive, cursed with disease and vagabondage, and they rarely ventured from their elegant mansions up on the hillside, or from behind their barrack walls. Except, that is, in matters of sport: the elite and the more skilled of the native Gibraltarians played polo, and the British and the Spanish, whatever their politically inspired loathing for each other, rode to hounds.

The Calpe Hunt, one of the Empire's oldest and oddest, still exists, or at least is revived from time to time, and gentlemen in hunting pink can still be seen driving through the boundary gates for a rendezvous with their hounds. But no one is quite sure how it all began: some say, a little improbably, that a foxhound couple was actually kept on the Rock, and that foxes were to be found on the scrub on the slopes of Mount Misery and Middle Hill, scurrying among the apes.

Others say the first hounds were kept in San Roque under the masters.h.i.+p of one Reverend Mackareth, and that more hounds from the Duke of Wellington's pack, stationed near his great estates around Cadiz, were brought down in 1817, given to the interested officers of the 29th Regiment, and named after Gibraltar's cla.s.sical t.i.tle. By the end of the nineteenth century Colonel Gilbard was able to say that the hunt was 'the' great inst.i.tution on the Rock, 'and a well-conducted establishment at the North Front gives accommodation to the huntsmen, hounds and their attendants'. The hunting was no longer confined to the peninsula's slopes, but had extended to the hills and meadows of neighbouring Andalucia, with the local landowners gladly allowing the Englishmen to ride their 'little coa.r.s.e-bred Spanish horses' in pursuit of the exceptionally cunning native foxes.

The colonel saw his sport as an antidote to diplomatic disharmony. Were the Spaniards themselves to follow the pack 'this would wonderfully smooth the difficulties which occasionally crop up and threaten to spoil sport, and the members of the hunt would gladly welcome the Spanish officers, gentry and farmers joining in the sport in friendly rivalry'. Which is exactly what happened; and grandees of both English and Andalucian parentage rode together and once went over to Tangier 'where a wolf gave an excellent run of over forty minutes and a distance of nine miles'.

The garrison's elite may have rid the Rock of its foxes, and there may well now be fewer hares and rabbits on the upper slopes; but the Rock apes are still there, and in abundance. As well they might be: Spanish legend holds that when the apes go, then the British will surely follow, and British Governments and Imperial representatives have striven mightily-and seriously-to ensure that the animals remain healthy and numerous to this day. The serenity and fecundity of the apes is of great moment to both the Convent and, as a symbol, to Downing Street.

The little gang of Rock apes-Macacus inuus-are the only monkeys to be found in Europe. Theories about their having swum across from Africa, or having arrived drenched, clinging to Moroccan logs, have long been discounted; zoologists believe these are the relict clan of a great tribe of Macaques which once frolicked in Germany and France, and came as far north as Aylesbury. The last Ice Age forced them steadily southwards: Gibraltar was their final peninsular refuge, the closest they ever would come to their native home. Had the blizzards and hailstorms swept through Spain they might have been driven into the Straits, and drowned.

But here they still sit, begging for food on the Monkey's Alameda, swinging from wall to tree to tourist shoulder, spitting, lunging, hawking, puking and displaying their unpleasant and oddly tail-less backsides to the daily busloads of the curious. They are truly loathsome creatures, in a state of permanent distemper, ogrous packages of green and grey fur, all teeth, stale fruit and urine. How little these true barbarians know of the solicitous tendresse tendresse to which they are subject, or of the colonial telegrams that have pa.s.sed to and from the Gibraltar cable station, attesting to their contentment, or their decline. to which they are subject, or of the colonial telegrams that have pa.s.sed to and from the Gibraltar cable station, attesting to their contentment, or their decline.

Decline, strangely portentous, does seem to have been invariably linked with periods of British misfortune. In 1910 there were 200 apes, so many that they split up into two gangs, battled bloodily with each other-and by 1913 only three female apes were left. The war that began the following summer was thus not unexpected by the ever-superst.i.tious Spaniards.

London was alarmed. It told the Royal Regiment of Artillery to look after the remainder, and offered a grant to buy them olives, locust beans and green figs (though not loquats, which make them vomit). For a while, under the paternal invigilation of the gunners, the apes went forth and multiplied; but by 1931-the start of the Great Depression-they had fought so much and so wildly with each other (they like to bite each other's spines, which can be disabling and fatal if the bite is deep enough) that only ten remained.

The Colonial Government, earnest and determined, stepped in. The Governor, Sir Alexander G.o.dley, a man who had commanded the western defences at Mafeking, had been staff officer to BadenPowell and had raised an army in New Zealand, was put in overall charge of this crucial Imperial task. He imported two male apes from Morocco, and then five more. But they refused to breed, and murder and mayhem kept the numbers down. At the outbreak of the Second World War only eleven were left, and by 1943, just seven.

The crisis needed a solution of Churchillian dimensions, and it was the Prime Minister himself who issued the order that finally turned the tide. More apes, hand-picked for their fertility and energetic application to their conjugal duties, were flown in from North Africa-and, to the blessed relief of all concerned, they bred, the numbers increased, and the base of today's tribe of fifty-three of the dreadful animals was laid.

Sergeant Alfred Holmes, who was deputed to look after the apes' welfare in 1962-and who sends them for treatment in the Gibraltar naval hospital should they fall seriously ill-reported during my last visit that the colony (of apes, that is) was very healthy indeed. Eleven had been born during 1984, and one had been named after Princess Alexandra. (Tradition has it that apes are named after prominent Rock politicians; the one called Joshua Ha.s.san dropped dead in 1964, and Lady Ha.s.san sensibly refused to have anything to do with the beasts, which is presumably why the royal princess came to be so dubiously honoured.) Fecundity and serenity thus a.s.sured for some while to come, superst.i.tious fears about the future of this tiny colony have, for the time being, been allayed.

A short while before I arrived on the Rock a young man named Allen Bula had created a small sensation by leaping over the steel border fence, into Spain. He was arrested by the Policia Nacional, and taken (via Tangier, naturally) back to his colonial home. Someone asked him what had prompted the gesture, and he replied, in tones of profound misery, that he was simply 'tired of seeing the same faces, and always having to walk the same streets'. A faint rumble of mute sympathy could be heard from every corner of the colony, for few would take issue with the heresy that Gibraltar has become-perhaps always has been-a prison, comfortable enough in a dingy sort of way, but its charms rendered utterly disagreeable in a matter of a very few days.

And it does have charm, especially to the British. It has a suitably reliquary appearance and feel to it. Where other than in a British colony could one find, peeking from behind orange trees and palm fronds, Mess House Lane, London Pride Way and Drumhead Court? What sweet relief, after all the bullfight posters and the cheap white wine and the guards in their silly tricorn hats, to see discreet notices advertising Wally Parker's XI versus the Garrison B Side (weather permitting) after lunch on Sunday, cups of Typhoo and s.h.i.+ppams-and-Sunblest sandwiches on the terrace of the Rock Hotel, and policemen in dark blue serge who will gladly tell you the time, in English, and the directions to the Angry Friar, where they have Ba.s.s and Whitbreads and Tia Maria and onion-flavoured crisps, and where one of the customers is sure to know the latest plots of The Archers or Coronation Street The Archers or Coronation Street. You can buy the News of the World News of the World in Gibraltar late on a Sunday afternoon, and all its tales of cheerful scandals back in Britain will be common currency in the colony's buses the next morning as they grind up and down the slopes in clouds of diesel smoke, and dirty rain. in Gibraltar late on a Sunday afternoon, and all its tales of cheerful scandals back in Britain will be common currency in the colony's buses the next morning as they grind up and down the slopes in clouds of diesel smoke, and dirty rain.

It rains a lot in Gibraltar, particularly when the due easterly wind, known as the Levanter, is blowing, as it does one day in two. Wet Mediterranean air is hoisted up over the colony's summit, forming a plume of cloud which hangs heavily and damply over the western side of the Rock. In the town below it is smotheringly hot, humid, dull, and there are fitful showers.

The streets are choked with people-army wives from Aldershot and Catterick in cotton tee-s.h.i.+rts and jeans and high-heeled shoes, pus.h.i.+ng prams and getting in each other's way; old Spanish women in black, shuffling along slowly and silently, looking unhappy; women from Morocco, appropriately veiled, who look away from any male glance; Indians stretching and scratching and spitting into the gutters; swarthy traders of Genoese or Maltese cast beckoning you into their little shops to buy curios and postcards and fizzy drinks.

Outside the Convent a troop of British soldiery, glittering and crisp in their bra.s.s and white duck summer uniforms, stand guard for Her Majesty's Governor; and each Monday morning the prams and shopping carts make way for a parade, all screamed commands and polished toecaps, and over which the Governor and Her Ladys.h.i.+p preside, beaming, from the balcony of their residence. And inside the Convent the splendour of Empire gently rea.s.serts itself; thick red carpets, a leather-bound visitors' book with an embossed crown, portraits and flags and banners, polished oak dining tables, a private chapel (with a soldier-organist practising a fugue for a concert the following week), smooth young diplomats and ADCs, white-coated servants, tea from Fortnums, Bath Olivers and Tiptree jam. There is even a pretty indoor garden, with jacarandas and roses and lilies; and the Governor keeps a cow in his orchard-the only cow permitted in Gibraltar, which provides properly English milk for the gubernatorial Weetabix.

But the Imperial splendour here is all illusion. True, the Gibraltar Conservation Society makes an almighty fuss whenever a new block of army flats or a multi-storey car park threatens some of the magnificently immense fortifications-the great gates and bastions and casemates and galleries, the mighty limestone blocks and rusty iron stanchions, bolts, hasps, anchors, cannonports, naval guns and sea walls-which are undeniably grand reminders of such splendour. The fortress and all its remnant bits and pieces tell of Trafalgar and Cape St Vincent and the wartime convoys, of heroism and valour and tragedy, and there is the whiff of convict s.h.i.+p and merchant venturer, the memory of sail and steam and majesty and power.

And true, there is a flouris.h.i.+ng democracy here, though of recent invention, and of limited democratic ability. Until the Thirties the only form of local government was the Sanitary Commission, run by a cabal of traders and lawyers, and which was set up in 1865 after an epidemic of plague which killed nearly 600 people. The commissioners had powers that extended well beyond a purely sanitary remit; in 1920 they were able to report that a poor law was unnecessary in the colony, and there was no one to suggest they should stick to the study of tuberculosis (which was then raging) rather than poverty. The Legislative a.s.sembly, which gave a semblance of power to the Gibraltarians, was opened in 1950 by the Duke of Edinburgh; it became an even more powerful House of a.s.sembly in 1969, though the Governor-who is also Fortress Commander-still has very considerable powers.

But the glorious ruins of yesterday and the laudable inst.i.tutions of today cannot disguise the fact that Gibraltar is, above all, a garrison town, with all that implies. Its function is precisely that of a Tidworth or a Fort Bragg-it supports and supplies a military function, and its civilian servants exist only in a symbiosis with the forces, with no real function other than to service the machinery of war.

During the Falklands War Gibraltar was of major importance-a fact that nearly led to one of the more daring undercover operations of the century. A team of Argentine frogmen arrived in Spain with plans to swim over to the Rock and blow up the Royal Naval s.h.i.+ps in the dockyard, and then lay charges inside the more important of the tunnels, and blow the entire Rock up, too. But the Spanish police, tipped off by British intelligence, arrested the quartet at San Roque, just a few miles from the border. The Spanish Government, which despite its antipathy to Britain wanted members.h.i.+p of the Common Market and had good reason to want to stay friendly, deported the men and sent them back to Buenos Aires. I was told the story in Hong Kong, which was ordered to keep on guard in case the plucky Argentines tried to pull a similar stunt there. People on the Rock knew nothing at the time; on the day the men were detected a parson friend of mine was sailing back from a day's shopping in Tangier, and remembers 'sitting on the boat as we rounded Europa Point, sh.e.l.ling Moroccan peas so they were ready for the deep-freeze the moment I stepped ash.o.r.e'.

Today the Rock draws its military significance wholly from its members.h.i.+p of NATO (of which Spain is a member, too). America, in particular, regards Gibraltar as crucial, for though her own submariners use the port of Rota, just a few miles westwards, for their nuclear patrol boats, there is inevitable doubt about Spanish stability, and thus no long-term certainty inside the Pentagon that Rota will be perpetually available, unlike Gibraltar, which will so long as it remains British. Was.h.i.+ngton regards the defence of the Rock with almost as much pa.s.sion as do the politicians in London. The Pentagon counts the apes as well.

No garrison town holds many attractions, and Gibraltar is not an exception. Though geologically interesting and thus topographically unforgettable, it remains, as Jan Morris noted in 1968, 'only a fly-blown, dingy and smelly barracks town, haunted by urchins fraudulently claiming to be Cook's guides, or Spanish hawkers wandering from door to door with straggly flocks of turkeys'.

It was grander once. You could, on a day when the fleets were in, stand under a palm tree on the terrace of the Rock Hotel and gaze down with wonder and amazement at the glittering array of grey steel and holystoned decking, at the signal flags and the jolly-boats, at the jackstaff ensigns waving lazily in the air, arrogantly proclaiming raw and unchallengeable British power. But now there is no Orient route that needs guarding, nor any fleets of substance with which to do it. Gibraltar, so far as the British are concerned, is a pointless sort of place: we hang on because the Gibraltarians want us to, because we have a certain haughty pride about the Rock's impregnability, and because the Supreme Commanders of the North Atlantic like us to act as proxy for them in this convenient corner of a geopolitically important inland sea.

Britain has offered a special gift to those whom we regard as of such special military significance-even if we have no further grand wars to fight, and even if the natives of the Rock are mere supporters, not partic.i.p.ants. In grat.i.tude for all their help the British Government has made the Gibraltarians, unlike most of their colonial colleagues, full-blown British subjects, able to come and live in Britain with no restrictions at all. They were given the privilege in 1981, when the House of Lords voted that they should not be treated like Bermudians, the Pitcairners, or the Hong Kong Chinese, who would no longer be allowed to enjoy full citizens.h.i.+p of the motherland. (The Falkland Islanders were not given citizens.h.i.+p either on this occasion, though after the war the Government changed its mind. The Gibraltarians and the Falklanders are thus unique in two respects-unlike all other British colonial citizens they can come and live in Britain at any time they wish; and unlike all other British colonial populations, they are overwhelmingly coloured white. Any connection between the two is not, as one might suppose, rigorously denied. The British Nationality Act, the basis of all this complicated regulation, was specifically designed to minimise racial disharmony by keeping the number of yellow and black colonials out, while letting whites of British ancestry come home if they wished. The Genoese and the Sephardim of Gibraltar have much to be thankful for.) And, like the apes, so the British Gibraltarians cling on. At the last count, just forty-four of them thought it a good idea to join back with Spain. Twelve thousand voted for Gibraltar to remain a member of the Empire. So every night the fortress keys-cast iron, weighing ten pounds, and kept by some of the more nervous governors under their pillows, it is said-are handed into safe keeping by the sentries who still yell out the Imperial formulae of three centuries continual use:

Halt! Who goes there?

The Keys Whose Keys?

Queen Elizabeth's Keys Pa.s.s, Queen Elizabeth's Keys. All's Well.

All illusion, though. From the Rock Hotel, with no fleet in view, and no reliable kippers available, and Brown Windsor soup and rolls served at nearly every meal, and the same faces pa.s.sing along the same streets, the same soldiers inviting you to the same drinks parties, the same films on at the same cinemas, and the same awful weather and the same awful apes, I, too, felt like Mr Bula, trapped and claustrophobic, wanting to get off to the apparent freedom of Algeciras, whose lights twinkled invitingly from across the bay.

The terminal was crowded with servicemen bound for home leave; few Gibraltarians were planning to desert the peninsula this particular Sat.u.r.day. I sat on the right side of the aircraft, and watched with a mixture of awe and some relief as we rose beside the mighty white cliff, dotted with its cannonports, topped with artillery and radio aerial and the Union flag, and headed back home to England. As a structure, it had been an impressive place, all right; but when a soldier caught my eye and grinned and said how glad he was to be getting away, I knew exactly how he felt. The Rock, he remarked, as he tucked into his first beer of the holiday, was also the name they gave to Alcatraz.

5.

Ascension Island

One of the more eccentric practices of the Empire was to decide that certain of the more remote island colonies were not really countries at all, but s.h.i.+ps.

There was, for example, a tiny morsel of granite in the Grenadines that was taken over by the Royal Navy in Victorian times and commissioned as HMS Diamond Rock Diamond Rock; then again, during the Second World War the Navy possessed a craft called HMS Atlantic Isle Atlantic Isle, which in more peaceful times was the four-island group of Tristan da Cunha. And in 1816 a Mr Cuppage, a post-captain of the Cape Squadron, took command of a brand-new 'stone frigate', as the Lords of the Admiralty liked to call it: the thirty-five-square-mile, oyster-sh.e.l.l-shaped accretion of volcanic rubbish that was a.s.sumed into the service of the Crown under the t.i.tle of HMS Ascension Ascension.

I first saw the vessel-'a huge s.h.i.+p kept in first-rate order', Darwin had recorded-from the flight deck of a Royal Air Force VC-10, one steaming day in late July. We had flown from a base in Oxfords.h.i.+re to Senegal, and I had become rather bored by the curious Air Force practice of putting its pa.s.sengers facing backwards. (They say it's safer.) So I asked to sit behind the pilot for the next leg; and as we reached the equator, and summer became technical winter and in a million bathrooms below the water began to swirl down plugs the other way, so the loadmaster called me forward, unlocked the door to the c.o.c.kpit, made a series of perfunctory introductions to the crew, asked me to avoid sudden movements and unnecessary conversation, and strapped me into the jump seat.

Ascension Island came up on the radar a few moments later. A tiny pale green dot, lozenge-shaped and utterly alone-it might well have been a s.h.i.+p adrift in the sea below. We started to go down for the approach. The orange numerals of the satellite navigator showed our position six times a minute. We were at fourteen degrees west of Greenwich, seven degrees south of the equator, somewhere in the hot emptiness of the sea well below the bulge of West Africa. The dot on the radar was bigger now, and we were low enough to see the white curlers on the swell.

And then the pilot muttered softly into his microphone, 'Island in sight. Ahead fifty miles. Plume of cloud.' And on the curved line of horizon a patch of cloud appeared, like a ball of cotton wool on a gla.s.s ledge. Beneath it, and speeding nearer at six miles a minute, was a patch of reddish-brown land, tinged with dark green and ringed by a ragged line of surf. 'Wideawake Airfield in sight, sir,' sang the co-pilot-and there, on the southern side of the island was the aerodrome, its straight runway undulating over the contours like the final run on a roller-coaster. A smooth American voice came on the line. 'Ascot Two zero one niner-good day, sir. Welcome to Ascension Island. Wind eight knots. Clear skies at the field. No traffic. Come right on in, and have yourselves a nice day!' And so we slid down the glidepath to this loneliest of ocean way-stations, until with a b.u.mp and puff of iron-red cinder-dust we touched down on board and I, who alone in the c.o.c.kpit had never been here before, thought we had landed on the surface of the moon.

Ascension is indeed an eerie place. It is a volcano, placed on the very crest of an abyssal suture line, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is in consequence very new. (St Helena, which lies some miles off the ridge, but is one of its products, is one of the oldest oceanic islands known. Geologists explain it by asking one to imagine a mid-Atlantic conveyor-belt moving islands out and away from the ridge. Those on it-Tristan, Iceland, Ascension-are still being formed; those away from it-the Azores, Jan Mayen, the Canaries-are old, and have drifted miles since their formation.) Ascension looks as though it should still be smouldering. 'h.e.l.l with the fire put out,' someone called it-and it looks rather like a gigantic slag-heap, with runs of ashy rubble, piles of cinders, and fantastically shaped flows of frozen lava. Nothing-at least, not among the peaks and plains I saw as I drove from the airport-had been carved by weather, nor has anything had its outline smoothed by millions of years of erosion. Ascension is the earth in its raw state, unlovely and harsh, and grudging in its att.i.tude to the life that clings to it. It gives uncomfortable seismal shudders from time to time, and lets out puffs of sulphur gas and gurgles of hot water and mud, as if to warn those who have dared make this a colony of the British Crown that the lease is far from permanent, and the t.i.tanic forces beneath the rocky skin are merely slumbering, biding their time.

Ascension-which is very much an island of the s.p.a.ce age today, festooned with aerials and chattering with computers and radar domes-was cla.s.sified as a s.h.i.+p for rather more than a century. The Navy took it over in 1815 once it had been decided to exile Napoleon on St Helena, 700 miles to the south-east, and the Admiralty feared the French might try to take Ascension and use it as a staging base for helping the Emperor escape. (A garrison was established on Tristan da Cunha for the same reason.) It became a s.h.i.+p of the line a year later, with those few who lived aboard subject to the same rigours of 'rum, sodomy and the lash' as on any of Her Majesty's vessels. One captain was sent a report to the effect that a member of his crew-a lady-had given birth to an infant. With mirthless propriety he jotted one word on the announcement-'Approved'-and added his initials. (For years afterwards any children born on Ascension were officially deemed to have been born at sea, and registered according to custom in the London parish of Wapping.) The Crown took charge of the island in 1922, and made her what she is now-a dependency of St Helena. There is an Administrator, who lives in what was once the sanatorium high up among the clouds on Green Mountain; and there is no permanent native population. There is, however-and has been for many years-a very considerable clutch of transients-people whose nationalities and trades vary according to the use to which Ascension is being put at any one moment. At the time I arrived, in the aftermath of the Falklands operations, the island was crawling with Royal Air Force men and their planes, and all the paraphernalia needed for keeping the garrison in the far South Atlantic equipped with all it needs; but there have been at one time and another a bewildering variety of 'users' of Ascension. (The place is essentially run by a body known as the London Users Committee, who, since there is no native to inconvenience, do with the island more or less as they like, so long as they all agree it will do the users some good.) There have been missile-testing engineers, satellite trackers, radio broadcasters, spies (there are still lots of this particular breed) and those most indomitable guardians of the distant rocks, the men of the cable terminals.

Ascension Island was one of the great cable stations of the Imperial universe. The Eastern Telegraph Company arrived in 1899, bringing the free end of a cable that its s.h.i.+ps had laid from Table Bay to Jamestown, in St Helena. Within weeks, after the repeaters and amplifiers had been built on Ascension, and a staff left behind to maintain them in working order, so the line was extended-up to the Cape Verde Islands, and then on to England. More cables were fed into the sea-one from Ascension to Sierra Leone, so the Governor in Freetown could send messages to Whitehall without having to wait if a camel had munched its way through the line across the Sahara. A fourth was sunk to St Vincent, a fifth to Rio, and another to Buenos Aires. By the time of the Great War Ascension sat in mid-ocean like a great telegraphic clearing house, the hum of generators and the clack of the morse repeaters echoing across the silence of the sea. (Ascension had always had a.s.sociations with communication. As soon as Alphonse d'Albuquerque discovered it, on Ascension Day, 1501, sailors travelling past in one direction started a custom of leaving letters there, for collection and onward transmission by s.h.i.+ps sailing in the other. There still is a letter-box where pa.s.sing vessels may drop notes; when someone looked in it recently there was a note dating from 1913.) Lonely places, cable stations. Islands like Fanning, in mid-Pacific, notable only because 'it was annexed by Britain in 1888 as the site for a trans-Pacific cable relay station' or Direction Island, on Cocos-Keeling, 'administered by Britain for a cable relay point for the Indian Ocean' or Ascension. The British saw cables as the vital synapses of the Imperial nervous system. They had to be utterly reliable. They had to be secure. And they had, all of them, to be British. (To ill.u.s.trate the point it is worth noting that when the time came to construct a cable from Hong Kong to Shanghai the cable engineers built a relay station on a hulk in the middle of the Min River, rather than risk placing so critically important an Imperial nerve-ending on Chinese soil, where anything might happen to it.) The ultimate purpose of the cables was, of course, the unity, and thus the una.s.sailability of the Empire, a theme Kipling was quick to recognise: Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sunHus.h.!.+ Men talk today o'er the waste of the ultimate slimeAnd a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'

And so between them the sailors and the cable men built a society on Ascension, and a tiny Imperial city, which they called Georgetown (though it was always known as Garrison). A tradition grew up that every sailor-and later every cable man-brought something to render the moon-scape a little more like home. The Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, who from time to time were also posted aboard HMS Ascension Ascension, carried in scores of tons of earth and thousands of sapling trees (yews from South Africa, firs from Scotland, blue gums from New South Wales, castor-oil bushes from the West Indies); marines built a farm and brought a herd of cows (the milking shed, robustly Victorian and made from stone, has a crest and the letters 'RM', which the lowing herds blithely ignore); sailors dug a pond at the very top of Green Mountain, and stocked it with goldfish and frogs; and they built greenhouses and a home garden, and grew bananas and paw-paws, grapefruit, grenadillas and tomatoes, roses and carnations and all the familiar vegetables of an English Sunday luncheon.

Over the years the colonists have tried so very hard to impose the contented ways of a London suburb on this monstrously ugly pile of clinker and baked ash. There was probably no place on earth that can have seemed less like home, no atoll or hill station or desert oasis that can have been less sympathetic to the peculiar needs of the wandering Englishman and his family. But, like the good colonist that he was, he did eventually manage to fas.h.i.+on the place into an approximation of Surrey-in-the-Sea. The little houses each have a neat garden and tiny patch of lawn, most of them with a round plastic swimming pool, a child's swing and a snoring dog ('we inherited the old boy from the Parker-Bruces, you know. Eats us out of house and home. Can't think why he doesn't roast, with all that hair. Goodness knows what will happen when we go. He's getting on a bit. I suppose he'll just go to whoever takes our place. Poor old devil. Lucy's quite attached to him now. But then she was positively transfixed by that old mutt we had in the Seych.e.l.les. Got over him in time, of course. But it can be tough on the kids...'). There is a library and a hairdresser for the wives, and there are drinks parties most evenings-a lot of drinks parties, a lot of drinks, and the usual alcoholic haze of tropical solitude.

The Islander Islander newspaper has been coming out each week, thanks to the labours of any number of Our Lovely Wives, since 1971. Take a riffle through the pages of one recent March issue. There's old Brian presenting a teak tray and a couple of tankards to Margot and Dennis, who have just left after their two-year stint; Pearl Robertson has won the whist compet.i.tion up at Two Boats, yet again! (The road up to Green Mountain has sawn-off gigs stuck into the clinker to act as milestones-One Boat is lower down, Two Boats is up at the 700-foot mark-and small communities, and telephone exchanges, have grown beside them. The boats act as splendid shelter from the occasional violent rainstorms.) Now, what else? Margaret Lee will give a manicure demonstration on Wednesday at the Two Boats Club. Suzanne will host a Tupperware patio sale in Georgetown on Sat.u.r.day. Communion will be at nine thirty this Sunday at St Mary's. Novice bridge players are welcome at the Exiles Club library every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Irene Robinson wrote to say she was leaving the island and would miss the Church, the Scouts, the Gardening Club and the Tennis Club. A vote of thanks had been organised for Ernie Riddough, who was also leaving: his term as public health officer had been a great success, and 'the island had not suffered from plague and pestilence'. The Messmen would play the Supremes in the island darts league on Tuesday, and there would be a soccer match, Georgetown versus the Forces, the day after. And-best news of all-the Ascension Cricket a.s.sociation has just received two dozen b.a.l.l.s from St Helena, the cricket league can now get under way, and a meeting would be held on Tuesday night beside the Volcano Radio Station to discuss the season's fixtures. newspaper has been coming out each week, thanks to the labours of any number of Our Lovely Wives, since 1971. Take a riffle through the pages of one recent March issue. There's old Brian presenting a teak tray and a couple of tankards to Margot and Dennis, who have just left after their two-year stint; Pearl Robertson has won the whist compet.i.tion up at Two Boats, yet again! (The road up to Green Mountain has sawn-off gigs stuck into the clinker to act as milestones-One Boat is lower down, Two Boats is up at the 700-foot mark-and small communities, and telephone exchanges, have grown beside them. The boats act as splendid shelter from the occasional violent rainstorms.) Now, what else? Margaret Lee will give a manicure demonstration on Wednesday at the Two Boats Club. Suzanne will host a Tupperware patio sale in Georgetown on Sat.u.r.day. Communion will be at nine thirty this Sunday at St Mary's. Novice bridge players are welcome at the Exiles Club library every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Irene Robinson wrote to say she was leaving the island and would miss the Church, the Scouts, the Gardening Club and the Tennis Club. A vote of thanks had been organised for Ernie Riddough, who was also leaving: his term as public health officer had been a great success, and 'the island had not suffered from plague and pestilence'. The Messmen would play the Supremes in the island darts league on Tuesday, and there would be a soccer match, Georgetown versus the Forces, the day after. And-best news of all-the Ascension Cricket a.s.sociation has just received two dozen b.a.l.l.s from St Helena, the cricket league can now get under way, and a meeting would be held on Tuesday night beside the Volcano Radio Station to discuss the season's fixtures.

There is no hotel on the island. Visitors are not encouraged-the lack of hotel room being the official excuse. I have stayed in a variety of places. The Americans have huts they call 'concertinas' they are s.h.i.+pped over quite flat, like sandwiches, and then the ends are pulled apart and a fully-equipped room appears, with mirrors on walls, lights in ceilings, tables clipped to floors. Each time I slept in Concertina City-which was difficult anyway, because of the heat-I started to wonder if the whole room might revert in the night, and I would be flattened out of all recognition, as though I had been trapped in the boot of a car sent to the crushers.

My happiest nights were spent at the old Zymotic Hospital. It had been built by the Navy more than a century ago, perched on a cliff of slag, facing west; it has thick stone walls, and gently turning fans, and the windows and the doors are always open. It is perfectly cool, and I would sit there with the crews of the transport planes, sipping whisky and watching the sunsets, and listening to stories of airborne exploits in every Imperial corner of the world. I found one pilot whom I had known at school; another who had once given me a lift during the rescue operations following a hurricane, from British Honduras to Costa Rica; and a third who had been a member of the Queen's Flight and had spent the last summer shuttling the Queen Mother back and forth from Windsor to Glamis.

One day I flew with my schoolfriend to the Falkland Islands. He was the pilot of a Hercules carrying several tons of freight and fifty Fusiliers down to Stanley. We rose at three-it was still hot, and a warm wind stirred the ash beside the roads-and had breakfast in a tent by the runway. There were innumerable briefings, weather checks, radio messages, orders. At five, while it was still dark, we clambered up into the aircraft.

Two Victor jet bombers, old-fas.h.i.+oned, strangely shaped monsters, zoomed into the air a few moments later; and when they were safely airborne we lumbered off and into the twinkling dawn. The bombers were the first of our refuelling tankers. They met us out in mid-ocean, after we had been going for three hours. One fuelled us, the other fuelled him, and both then turned away for home. Six hours further south, when we were well down in the lat.i.tudes, and the sea below was covered by low storm clouds, the bombers met us again-three of them this time, one for us, one for him, and the third to top up the second. Then they wheeled away and back up to their cinder-topped base, and we trundled wearily on to Stanley. It took nearly fourteen miserable hours to get us and our cargo from Ascension to the Falkland Islands; five refuelling tankers had been needed, and a small army of logistics men and planners; and had the British not been able to use Ascension the operation would not have been possible at all. I was not entirely convinced the effort on this occasion had been entirely worthwhile: one of the objects we were carrying was a fan for the desk of an army officer-a man who might have thought he was being sent out to deal with an insurrection in the Sudan, but was in fact stationed in one of the coolest, and windiest, parts of the Empire ever known.

Since the Falklands War the island has become furiously busy. Planes howl in and out every day, at any hour. The mess at the American base serves gigantic meals-steaks, jello, milk, instant potatoes-to pilots and technicians all day and all night. Generators rattle, bored soldiers s.h.i.+ne machine-guns, wars.h.i.+ps slip in and out of harbour, replenishment vessels come and lie at anchor two miles offsh.o.r.e, and let a litter of smaller craft suck hungrily at their nozzles of petrol, or water, or aviation spirit. Up on the volcano-sides radar dishes and strangely shaped aerials whir and nod; and wherever the clinker is nearly flat there are graders and bulldozers levelling it still further to make way for yet more new housing, new headquarters buildings, new mess centres. There has never been anything like it-except that there is no one who has lived on Ascension long enough to be able to compare the daily rounds of 1984 with those of the time before April 1982, when the colony underwent the greatest sea-change of its short career.

Away from the military operations centres, though, much is unchanged. The cable operators still have an office on Ascension, though they run the world's conversations through satellites today, and the dozens of men who were needed to maintain the circuits of old and keep each other company have dwindled to a very few. In their place there are the men with the very ordinary names-Mr Dunne, Mr Turner, Mr Evans, Mr Davies, Mr Little-who have a very extraordinary job: they work for what is called the Composite Signals Organisation, a secret British Government organisation that makes it its business to find out what other interesting traffic is pa.s.sing through the satellites and around the ether, and which may be of some use to the West. Messrs Dunne, Turner, Evans and their scores of colleagues, who maintain a polite but scrupulous guard on everything they say, are electronic spies, and Ascension is full of them. There are American spies too, working for a much bigger organisation called the National Security Agency. But while the existence of the British CSO staff is officially acknowledged, the American technicians are not admitted to being on the island, not by anyone.

I toured around the island by helicopter one day-buzzing the lush slopes of Green Mountain, the satellite station on Donkey Plain, the tracking station on the Devil's Ashpit, the strange volcanic rings of the Devil's Riding School. We arrived above a cl.u.s.ter of white aerials on the eastern side of the island, near a cliff called Hummock Point. I pointed down, and asked the pilot what they were-and he started, and whirled his craft away, and we roared back to the north of Ascension, leaving the aerials to their secrets. It is said-but then it is always said-that there are vast underground bunkers, crammed with electronic code-breaking machines, and staffed by pale-skinned troglodytes who rarely surface into the sun. All that can be said with certainty is that Ascension is an important little island, and that it derives its importance for more than being a convenient staging post, halfway between the training grounds of Salisbury Plain and the fighting grounds of East Falkland. It is manifestly not an island that Britain-or America, for that matter-would abandon without a struggle. Happily no one-least of all the island population, which comes on short-term and highly lucrative contracts-wants Ascension to break away from the motherland. (Some of the more radical St Helenians, however, wonder why Britain cannot persuade the Americans to pay rent for their bases on Ascension, and thus help the crippled St Helena economy. Britain refuses even to discuss the matter.) But HMS Ascension Ascension is not all wars.h.i.+p. It is a floating radio programme, too. On the northern tip, beside one of the few bays that is protected from the man-eating sharks that roam the coastal waters, is a smart white office building with a tall white warehouse next door. This is the Atlantic Relay Station of the BBC; the office teems with administrators, the warehouse with transmitters, and the men sent out to keep them running. There are six short-wave transmitters which broadcast the World Service and the various foreign languages of the oceanside countries (Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America, Hausa, French and Swahili for Africa). I had expected the transmitters to be compact, rather unimpressive machines, all solid-state and disc-driven; instead there were six monstrous grey cabinets, which looked like refugees from a Victorian power station, and which opened to reveal a ma.s.s of hot, humming valveware, with long and curiously shaped horns that snap in and out depending upon which frequency band the Corporation wishes to use for transmissions that day. Some of the valves are two feet tall, weigh a hundred kilogrammes, cost thousands of pounds each and put out showers of vivid blue sparks and flames while they are busying themselves with getting the is not all wars.h.i.+p. It is a floating radio programme, too. On the northern tip, beside one of the few bays that is protected from the man-eating sharks that roam the coastal waters, is a smart white office building with a tall white warehouse next door. This is the Atlantic Relay Station of the BBC; the office teems with administrators, the warehouse with transmitters, and the men sent out to keep them running. There are six short-wave transmitters which broadcast the World Service and the various foreign languages of the oceanside countries (Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America, Hausa, French and Swahili for Africa). I had expected the transmitters to be compact, rather unimpressive machines, all solid-state and disc-driven; instead there were six monstrous grey cabinets, which looked like refugees from a Victorian power station, and which opened to reveal a ma.s.s of hot, humming valveware, with long and curiously shaped horns that snap in and out depending upon which frequency band the Corporation wishes to use for transmissions that day. Some of the valves are two feet tall, weigh a hundred kilogrammes, cost thousands of pounds each and put out showers of vivid blue sparks and flames while they are busying themselves with getting the News in Swahili News in Swahili to the far side of Africa, or sending to the far side of Africa, or sending Calling the Falklands Calling the Falklands to the sister colony halfway down the same cold ocean. to the sister colony halfway down the same cold ocean.

The last time I arrived in Ascension I came by boat. A school of dolphins had joined us two hours before, and had played joyously under the bows as we ploughed ponderously towards the small speck of Imperial volcano. We dropped anchor in eight fathoms, a mile off the Georgetown jetty; for fully five minutes I stood enthralled at this strange sight-this ma.s.s of reddish-brown rock, rising abruptly from the ocean, its peaks festooned with delicate filigrees of radio masts, with globes and radar dishes and odder, inexplicable devices for talking and listening to the outer reaches of the cosmos. The additions had made the island look unreal, as though it were an outlandishly shaped submarine that had briefly come to the surface to take on air, and would soon sink into the depths once more and sidle off on some mysterious mission.

But I went ash.o.r.e-nearly drowning myself as I leapt for the rope at the bottom of the Tartar Steps, missed, and slipped on the slime-and took a car to the Residency, up on the slopes of Green Mountain. (It was not always so easy. The wife of a resident naval officer once arrived at the same jetty and haughtily demanded of a rating where on earth Government House might be, and where was the carriage she had expected would be awaiting her pleasure. 'There's the captain's cottage, ma'am,' returned the sailor, 'and this here is the island cart.') The Residency here was once the Mountain Hospital, for as soon as Napoleon had died Ascension was turned into a huge sanatorium, dotted with hospitals and sick bays where men of the West Africa Squadron could be taken if they fell sick while on anti-slaving duties off the Guinea Coast. It was used as a coaling station, too-yellow-fever and coal being the princ.i.p.al colonial 'industries' until the cables came at the end of the century. To get to the Residency involves a long climb-I went past One Boat, past Two Boats, past a water tank called 'G.o.d-Be-Thanked' and up a helter-skelter of ramps and slopes and hairpins more fearsome than any this side of the Alps.

It would be idle to pretend that the man who fetches up as tenant of the Residency, Ascension, is likely to be a figure on the cutting edge of British diplomacy. It was always one of the least favoured posts in the remit of the Colonial Office, and remains as unpopular today. The Administrator himself has very little to do. He looks after the police force, sets the weekly exchange rate for the St Helena pound, and issues instructions about road closures and sittings of the magistrate's court. Meanwhile the civil administration of the island is now actually carried out by the BBC; the Royal Air Force and the various American agencies run the military side.

But a.s.suming he is able to cast off his memories of ambition, the Ascension Administrator can savour a place of unusual loveliness. His house is more beautifully sited than any other in the remaining Empire: its gardens sweep down to cliffs from which most of the island can be seen, and the ocean stretches to the horizon on every side. At night the sky is ablaze with stars, and the island below p.r.i.c.ked with the golden oases of light among the black volcanic shadows. There are wonderful vegetables and exotic fruits; and up here, on the high slopes, the weather is pleasant all the year round.

I walked up from the Residency one afternoon, through the groves of trees the sailors and the cable men had brought-eucalyptus, juniper, monkey-puzzle, acacia, Port Jackson willows. Then, as the road wound higher, so the hedges became as tall and as fragrant as any in Devon in summertime. The old farm, with its stables and milking halls and clock tower (where the naval rum was issued), came into view-a granite testament to the amazing energies of the Victorian sailors and marines. The very thought of building a Suss.e.x farmhouse, with a clock, 2,000 feet up the side of a volcano in the middle of the equatorial Atlantic!

Up here was a world quite different from the harsh clinker desert below, where there was no gra.s.s, and just a wretched collection of beasts that included spitting wild cats, land crabs, goats and donkeys, and ma.s.sive Brazilian turtles clambering wearily on to the blazing beaches to lay eggs. Up here there were palm groves and banana clumps, gardens with raspberries and ginger, and fields of gra.s.s and gorse. The trade winds, cool at this alt.i.tude, swept in across meadows where dairy cattle (administered by an official of the BBC in London, no less!) grazed contentedly. I climbed a stile, and headed on upwards into bamboo forest, where it was dark and cool, and the path was thick and slippery with clean brown mud. I took off my shoes and socks, and waded ever upwards, to the summit of Green Mountain.

At the top, in the tiny old crater, was the dew pond-made by the Navy to catch water, stocked by the Navy to be beautiful. There were blue lilies in flower the day I was there and large goldfish swam lazily through the dappled waters. The remains of an old anchor-chain lay beside the pond, and I had read somewhere that it was the custom to hold it, close your eyes, and wish...

At the far end of the pool, on the topmost point of the island, 2,817 feet above the sea, was a wooden box, with a visitors' book inside, and I signed it: the last climber had been a wing commander, from Northumberland. Most, indeed, had been military men: two years before the entries were by young soldiers trying to keep themselves fit for war; now they were officers, curious, and with time on their hands. They had come striding up stick in hand, pipe clenched between teeth; in 1982 the men had come running and puffing, with a drill sergeant in hot pursuit, and no doubt they hated the summit, and cursed the slime and the knife-edges of the bamboo leaves, and the crazy accidents of creation that put such ghastly hills out here in the tranquil flatness of the sea.

But this afternoon no one else was in sight. I had Green Mountain all to myself. The only sound was the sighing of the trade winds through the bamboos, and the occasional quiet chatter of canaries down in the meadows. Truly, I found myself thinking, of all the forgotten corners of the Empire this was both the most lovely, and the most strange. Below me was all the machinery and technology of war, and the encrypted chatter of half the world's spymasters. Down there-and I could glimpse the wastes of lava, and catch the glint of a radar dome-was that h.e.l.l with the fire put out; up here, where the sailors of Admiral Fisher's grand Imperial Navy had built a farm and a water supply, and had planted some trees, was something close to heaven. This, these few forgotten acres of hillside, showed to me what the Empire really could be when it tried-Rosebery's great and secular force for good, which left memorials behind of which everyone could be proud, and for which everyone could be thankful.

6.

St Helena

It had been another blazing day on the limitless wastes of the South Atlantic Ocean. The rusty little freighter was three days out from Ascension Island, heading to the south-east. The sun, harsh and bra.s.sy and hot, glared down from a brilliant sky. The trade winds, always like the breath of a furnace, always from the south-east quadrant coming at us from over the port bow, wafted by at their customarily languid six knots. The sea looked like hammered silver, and we rolled almost imperceptibly on a long swell. Once in a while a bird appeared from nowhere and hovered and arched in the eddies round our masts and our rigging; once I saw a plastic bag and a beer bottle float past; and the night before a s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed by on the starboard side, but no amount of calling her on the radio could win a friendly response.

'This is the Royal Mail vessel Aragonite Aragonite' we would chant over the long-range radio, and the little VHF. But the s.h.i.+p never answered. We watched her slip past, her stern light winking and fading in the night haze, the faint throb of her motor a m.u.f.fled beat across the sea. She was northbound, and she was probably Royal Navy: her radio silence suggested that, our radio operator said.

Once she was gone I stood at the taffrail gazing over the empty immensity of the sea. The night was starlit. This seemed just then such a lonely place. The Admiralty's Ocean Pa.s.sages for the World Ocean Pa.s.sages for the World had a thin red line etched on the map, heading south-east from Ascension, and claiming to be the s.h.i.+pping route from New York to Cape Town. But it must have been a very minor route, or else it lay many miles to the side of us; we saw nothing, except the silent and nameless warrior-s.h.i.+p sliding by on our starboard flank. (The Farrel Line used to take Canadian flour to St Helena. But then the Government found another source a farthing a pound cheaper-and the Farrel Line lost the contract.) had a thin red line etched on the map, heading south-east from Ascension, and claiming to be the s.h.i.+pping route from New York to Cape Town. But it must have been a very minor route, or else it lay many miles to the side of us; we saw nothing, except the silent and nameless warrior-s.h.i.+p sliding by on our starboard flank. (The Farrel Line used to take Canadian flour to St Helena. But then the Government found another source a farthing a pound cheaper-and the Farrel Line lost the contract.) But that was the night before. Now, with the sun going down on the third day, we were expecting a landfall. All the officers-only three, the Aragonite Aragonite being such a tiny tub-were on the bridge, and the purser was on the forepeak, and such pa.s.sengers as were well enough (there had been a depressing degree of being such a tiny tub-were on the bridge, and the purser was on the forepeak, and such pa.s.sengers as were well enough (there had been a depressing degree of mal de mer mal de mer) were standing up on deck, straining their eyes for land. You could smell it, or you thought you could. The breeze came from almost ahead, and once in a while, especially if you were near enough the bow to escape the diesel-and-cooking-oil-and-tar smells of the s.h.i.+p, there was a momentary wafting of some familiar smell of land. Pine trees, perhaps, or seaweed, or gra.s.s. It might have been memory playing tricks; but noses become very sensitive at sea. I knew of a cat that, after three months on an ocean pa.s.sage, would stand