Hav (15 page)

Then Kinglake came of course, the then British Resident Harry Stormont having been at Eton with him; and Edward Lear painted some agreeable pictures of the castle and the Medina; and from time to time parliamentary commissions descended upon the Protectorate, as they did upon all such petty possessions, were well fed at the Residency, watched a smart parade of the 53rd Foot, and went home expressing the view that Her Majesty's interests on Hav were being diligently safeguarded. Frigates of the fleet put in sometimes. Garden parties were held on the Queen's birthday. An undistinguished succession of Residents came and went; the best known was perhaps Sir Joshua Remington, who having just escaped bankruptcy by the fortunate chance of his appointment by Lord Palmerston to the office, was lampooned by
Punch
:

So for half a century the Protectorate lived the familiar life of a British overseas possession. It was not the happiest on the roster, for nearly everyone loathed it (the mosquitoes were terrible then, the drinking-water was often brackish and the food was described by Napier as being ‘fit only for monkeys — if for them'). Old pictures, nevertheless, make life for the imperialists look quite bearable. We see the officers in their shakos, the ladies beneath their parasols, parading the quayside outside the Fondaco, admiring the view through telescopes from Katourian's Place, or enjoying
fêtes-champêtres
in the then empty western hills. Here in stilted sepia photographs Chinese women in wide coolie hats sell them silks and souvenirs (‘Buying keepsakes in the Protectorate'), and here a visiting cricket team, very stiff at the wicket, extremely alert in the field, plays the officers of the garrison on the green outside St George's Church.

Cricket continued to be played in Hav long after the end of the Protectorate; some of the Russians took it up, and as late as 1912 we read of a match between Prince Bronsky's XI and a team from Corfu. A few other British legacies died hard, too. The honorific ‘Dirleddy' has been inherited, I take it, from the etiquette of the Victorian empire-builders. The version of ‘
Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui sunt morz
' played by Missakian nowadays was arranged by a garrison bandmaster. Not only the cows and mongooses, but all the Indians one sees in Hav are migrants of the Pax Britannica — they came originally as servants and camp-followers. A few places have kept their British names — China Bay, The Hook, Pyramid Rock, the triangular rock which rises out of the sea off little Yalta — and a few reactionaries still like to call the Balad ‘Blacktown'.

Most of the meagre monuments of British Hav may still be identified. Westminster never put much money into the place, so that the buildings were mostly ferry-built and second-rate, but still in one form or another they have survived, their origins generally long forgotten. The Residency thrives still as the Agency — the name was adopted by agreement with the Russians in 1875, and British consuls in Hav have called themselves Agents ever since. The Anglican church however, its steeple knocked off, is now used for the storage of oil drums by the Greek fishermen, while the open space in front of it, where they used to play cricket, is now one of the market truck parks (and I have found no trace of the tombstone, mentioned in several imperial memoirs, of the officer who, ‘having recently achieved his Captaincy in the Royal Engineers, Left this Station to Report to the Commander of a yet greater Corps . . .').

If you look closely at the barrack block between the Palace and the old legations you will see that its southern wing was verandahed in the Anglo-Indian manner, until the Russians stripped it of its iron-work, and the former Admiralty House, at the southern end of the Lazaretto, is now the agreeable if decrepit restaurant of the pleasure-park. As for the ice-house which stood on the eastern quay, Count Kolchok turned it into a private retreat, in whose cool chambers, if we are to believe the gossip, he often enjoyed himself with the dancer Naratlova; but it was demolished when they built the promenade of New Hav.

And one British commercial concern, out of several which made their modest fortunes from the Hav connection, is active to this day. One morning I walked into the offices of Butterworth and Sons, World-Wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs, and asked if there was actually a Mr Butterworth. Certainly there was, they said, Mr Mitko Butterworth — would I care to meet him? And there he was, the last living representative, one might say, of the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment — a swarthy man in his thirties, shirtsleeved below his swirling electric fan, with large gold cuff-links and round wire spectacles. Yes, he said, he was the great-great-grandson, he thought, of the Oswald Butterworth who had, in 1823, followed the flag to Hav and set up his shipping agency in that very office within the Fondaco.

Oswald had hoped, he told me, to make Hav once more the great entrepôt for the whole of the Levant trade, perhaps even the Russian trade, as British contemporaries were even then making Hong Kong the chief outlet for the wealth of China. That had never happened, but still the Butterworths had moderately prospered, outlived their several competitors, and become so much a part of Hav life that they had successfully ridden out all subsequent ebbs and flows of political circumstance.

And did he feel himself, I wondered, to be British still? He shrugged and laughed. ‘When it suits me to feel British, I feel British, but it is very seldom. And rather hard. Work it out yourself. Oswald Butterworth married a Bulgarian, and there has been no new British blood in the Butterworth family since then. What am I — one thirty-secondth British?' And to my astonishment, for it seemed altogether out of character, he burst into loud song:

When Mr Thorne invited me to lunch, which he called tiffin, at the former Residency, I mentioned Mr Butterworth and his improbable command of Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘Yes, I've heard about him,' the Agent said without a smile, ‘but he's not a British subject. There are no British subjects here. There may be some Maltese, but they are no longer our responsibility. I have never met this Butterworth.'

‘Perhaps we should invite him out, darling?' said Rosa. ‘He sounds amusing.'

‘I think not,' replied the Agent.

We were sitting in considerable, but somehow dullened splendour. The house was recognizably an Anglo-Indian villa, translated here from the banks of the Hooghly, but had long lost its imperial panache. The big mahogany table was handsome, but scuffed here and there. The silver was handsome too, but might have been better polished. The Indian manservant who waited on us wore a white jacket not exactly dirty, but sort of grey-looking. We ate fish with Hav cabbage, and drank white wine which I suspect to have been Cypriot. I was the only guest. ‘How nice', said Rosa, ‘to see a new face. Isn't it nice, Ronald?'

‘Very nice,' said Mr Thorne.

Around us on the walls were portraits of the men who had presided over the Hav Protectorate from that house — florid, well-fed Britons every one, lavishly splayed with insignia of various orders, and sometimes in military uniform. The Agent identified them all for me — ‘General Ricks who made something of a fool of himself in the Crimea, Sir Joshua Remington who became Lord Remington of Hav — you may know the limerick, ‘Whatever we haven't we've Hav?' — Harry Stormont who was something of an artist, we have one of his paintings in the library in fact, and Sir Roland Triston, and Sir Henry Walton-Vere, the only Anglo-Indian of the lot, surprisingly enough, and Lord Hevington, and General Stockingham, and . . .'

I had hardly heard of any of them, and my mind wandered rather during this recital, concentrating instead on the fish, which was good but bony. What
were
we doing there, the Agent, his Rosa and I, eating mullet at the rubbed mahogany table from Calcutta, recalling the ineptitudes of General Ricks at Sebastopol, drinking wine we should not be drinking, in that queer little alien enclave above teeming and tumultuous Hav?

After lunch we sat on the verandah, among pots of flowering ferns, looking down to the harbour below us, where one of the salt-ships was just rounding the Hook, and the Electric Ferry was slowly crossing the gap between the Lazaretto and San Pietro. I said it reminded me of Sydney. Rosa said it reminded her of the Helston River. Mr Thorne said of course the British never did quite know where they were in Hav. Sometimes they thought of it as an extension of India, sometimes as an outpost of Constantinople — ‘We still call our waiters “bearers” but our watchmen “dragomans”, and they always call me Sahib. “Rivers of history”, one might say. You remember the quotation? No matter.'

I had heard something interesting of the house. I had heard that in 1913, when T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, was engaged on an archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia, he had met here the young Turkish officer Mustafa Kemal, later to be known as Attaturk. And it is said that this secret meeting between the Oxford don, who was a British agent, and the most formidable of the Young Turks was to have an incalculable influence upon the course of the First World War and the post-war settlement; for Attaturk is supposed to have promised that he would use his influence within the Turkish army to allow the Arab revolt, already germinating in British minds as well as Arab ones, so to succeed that in future years British influence would be paramount in the Middle East. As it turned out, Attaturk was the very Turkish commander who allowed the forces of the Arabs, under British patronage, to capture Damascus, thus ensuring British suzerainty in those parts for another forty years: if the story is true, then the white Agency above the harbour of Hav played a clandestine role of enormous significance in the history of the British Empire, of Israel, and of the world between the wars.

‘I dare say', Mr Thorne was saying, ‘that you may think the survival of this Agency an anachronism. Some of my colleagues do. But our duties here have always been specialized. We are an independent window, as it were, upon the eastern Levant. Here in Hav we can make contacts denied to diplomatic missions in places closer to the mainstream. I would not like you to go away with the impression that we are merely idle lotus-eaters — that's what Kinglake called Stormont, you know, the Resident, in his time — “a plump and idle lotus-eater”.'

‘No, plump we may be,' interjected Rosa, who is, ‘but idle certainly not. Lucky old Stormont hadn't got a radio link, had he?'

The conversation moved on, by way of Wales and the British monarchy, to the subject of 24 Residenzstrasse. ‘I hope you don't believe all the bizarre things they say about it,' said Mr Thorne quite crossly. ‘Von Tranter was as thorough a Nazi as anyone else, I can assure you, and worked hand-in-glove with von Papen throughout the war. Putting up that plaque was a disgrace. As for the poppycock about Hitler coming to Hav, believe me, if he had ever been within a hundred miles of this Agency, he would never have got home alive.'

It seemed a good moment, as we appeared to have entered cloak-and-dagger territory, to raise the story of Lawrence and Attaturk. This was evidently unwelcome. ‘Lawrence did come to this house,' said the Agent, in a formal tone of voice, ‘but the visit was purely private. He came as the guest of the then Agent, a somewhat eccentric man called Winchester, the first man in Hav, as a matter of fact, to ride a motorcycle. His interest was in the barrow-graves of the salt-marsh, at that time supposed to be Minoan, now known to be troglodytic. He stayed some ten days, and then proceeded overland to his dig in Iraq. Anything else you may have heard', said Mr Thorne conclusively, ‘is totally unfounded.' Thus on a detectably minatory note the Agent's hospitality came to an end, and with ‘
so
lovely to see a new face' from Rosa, and ‘You must come again some time' from Mr Thorne — ‘how long did you say you were staying?' — I was shown to my car and waved fairly perfunctorily down the drive.

Hardly was I around the corner and in the shrubbery, out of sight of the house, when an elderly man in green
gallabiyeh
and turban urgently signalled me to stop. ‘Excuse me, memsahib,' he said, ‘I am head dragoman here. Bearer says you ask about Lawrence Pasha — I tell you truth now. My father was dragoman here then, and he remembered visit of Lawrence Pasha very well. Now I tell you,
at same time Turkish gentleman stayed in this house
. Mr Thorne not tell you that I think. British prefer to forget that. But my father remember very well, and he knew who that Turkish gentleman was,
he knew
. . . He remembered very clearly, and many times he described to us Lawrence Pasha riding Winchester Sahib's motorcycle up and down this drive. He never rode motorcycle before, but very fast he rode, very very fast, very dangerous and once, my father said, that Turkish gentleman went for ride on back seat of motorbike, and when they came back to this house he was very pale.'

I have asked several people at the Athenaeum what they know of the Lawrence story, but they do not seem very interested, just as they see nothing to be wondered at in the fact that the fishermen's oil store used to be an English church, and seem indifferent to the presence of the white house with its radio masts above the harbour. ‘All I want from Britain is the Beatles,' Magda said to me one day: for their tastes in Western music are years behind the times.

To Casino Cove — dreaming? — a call from Dodo — hard and steely — Solveig and the champagne — a remarkable menu

It was the loveliest of pearly mornings, all warm and still, the sea as calm as urchin soup, the castle shimmering in the warm sun behind us, when Mario Biancheri, his Chinese henchmen and I scudded away from the market quay on the day of my initiation into Casino Cove.