Liberty Silk (39 page)

Remember, you are always welcome to visit here, but I understand that you are a very busy young woman. Róisín tells me that you have big plans to travel the world. Your grandmother was an adventuress, too.

Your loving aunt,

Lisa

July 1963

London

Dearest Lisa,

Thanks so much for yet
another
birthday cheque – you really are too kind. I’m far too old now to be getting hand-outs from my aunt! But you’ll be glad to know that I put it to good use – I got myself a bike – very handy for getting around London.

Life here is good, although I miss Mam and Dad, of course. I’ve had a great response to my latest portfolio, and it means I get to meet some really interesting people!

I’m so sorry to have to turn down your invitation yet again – every time I think I’m going to be able to make it over to France something else comes up. Thank you for the offer, anyway. My last boyfriend kept trying to persuade me to visit a town called Cordes, that he said was very pretty – a real artists’ town – but things didn’t work out.

I hope all’s well with you and Raoul. I saw a picture in a magazine of the art gallery he designed in Cannes. Very cool! Maybe I’ll have an exhibition there some day. Then I’ll definitely come and stay!

Lots of love,

Cat.

PS: I’ve enclosed a photograph – a self-portrait. I’m afraid my hair looks a bit all-over-the-place in it. I took it on a windy day at Dun Aengus in the Aran Islands

The portrait showed her on a cliff, looking out to sea. The light of the sun setting over the Atlantic. It lent her complexion a preternatural glow, as if her skin, her brows and eyelashes had been dipped in gold. Her hair was a tawny flag, her mouth determined, her expression hawk-like. Her gait was that of the queen she’d been named for.

Summer ’64

Dear Aunt Lisa,

I’m in the Mediterranean, in Rhodes! I thought this postcard of a beach called Anthony Quinn Bay might amuse you – apparently he bought it when he was filming The Guns of Navarone, and intends making it into a retreat for artists and film-makers.

I came here with some people on an assignment for NME
^*
. So far, so boring. Sun, sea and sand just don’t do it for me!

Love, Cat.

^*
New Musical Express.

She’d put the asterisk in because she realized that her aunt probably wouldn’t know what NME stood for. She certainly wouldn’t know that it was the hippest journal on the scene, the barometer of what was with it and what was not in swinging sixties London.

Finding herself in the right place at the right time, Cat had graduated from St Martin’s school of art with a BA in photography, and done well. She’d missed the opportunity to take the first famous head shots of Jane Asher (David Bailey had got there first), but she had snapped an up-and-coming Susannah York. Michael Cooper had nabbed Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, but Cat had stolen an intimate portrait of guitarist Keith Richards. Terence Donovan had got Mary Quant, but Cat found a textile designer called Zandra Rhodes, like herself barely out of art college, and with outrageous hair. Cat was creeping up quietly, stalking the alpha males; but while the men enjoyed leading a posse that
Private Eye
described as Britain’s new aristocracy, Cat hated to think she might be part of some snooty elite. Which was why, when she had been invited along to a sunny Mediterranean haven by a group of musicians who were being groomed as the new Fab Four, she had been glad to escape ‘swinging’ London.

Rhodes was beautiful – a compact world of ruins to be explored and mountains to be climbed and islands to be hopped – but Cat’s companions had no sense of adventure. They just wanted to hang out in their villa, writing songs and strumming guitars and drinking Jack Daniels all day, desperately willing themselves to be icons of cool. Cat had read their new lyrics and tried not to smirk. She’d been subjected to their attempts at seduction and tried not to laugh. She had taken their photographs and tried not to despair. She felt sorry for them. They were just boys, after all, and boys were so very jejune. And when they decided to head westward to try their luck in the USA, Cat had decided that there was more action to be had to the east, in Cyprus.

Reports had been rife of political unease on the island reputed to be the birthplace of Aphrodite. Cat had always been fiercely opposed to any regime that smacked of injustice: she guessed it was part of her Irish heritage. Her father had regaled her with tales of insurrection, of Michael Collins and the fight for an Irish Republic, and instilled in her the nationalist politics of Charles Stewart Parnell; while still at school she had wholeheartedly embraced the American civil rights movement, sticking pin-ups of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte on the dormitory wall and quoting chunks verbatim of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech; she was a supporter of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, resolutely boycotting South African imports, and had signed a petition to have the country banned from participation in the Olympics. On a more mundane level, her nursery rhymes had been rebel songs, she was the proud owner of an LP by the Wolfe Tones (autographed by all three band members), and she was inordinately chuffed by the fact that Che Guevara claimed to have Irish roots.

This passionate crusade against injustice in an unfair world had led Cat to a bar in the centre of Nicosia heaving with international press corps. In every city in every theatre of war worldwide, an old guard of hard-bitten reporters, photojournalists and veteran broadcasters sniff out a congenial place to congregate, and in Cyprus they’d hit upon the cocktail lounge of the Ledra Palace Hotel. It was this elite clubroom into which Cat had wandered wide-eyed, unwitting and ingenuous, sporting a Ban the Bomb T-shirt and pigtails.

Sitting on the bar stool next to her was a man with a deeply tanned face, unruly hair, tired eyes and a five o’clock shadow. He was nursing a large whisky. Cat was longing for a Fanta or a Pepsi-Cola; instead she ordered neat Jameson.

‘You here on your own?’ asked the man, proffering a pack of Camel unfiltered.

Cat was just about to improvise a spiel about being here with friends, but something about his open, streetwise demeanour made her decide not to mess with him.

‘Yes,’ she said, accepting a cigarette. ‘Thanks.’

‘Brave girl.’

‘Why brave?’

‘Ledra Street is known as the Murder Mile.’ He gave her a crooked smile before striking his Zippo and lighting her cigarette.

‘I didn’t know that.’ Cat inhaled and tried not to cough. The Camel was ferociously strong.

‘Welcome to the war zone. The name’s McCullin, by the way. Don.’

‘Good to meet you,’ said Cat, taking his outstretched hand. ‘I’m Cat.’

‘You’re a photographer?’ He nodded at the camera bag strapped across her chest.

‘Yes.’ Cat hoped he wouldn’t ask for her credentials. She didn’t think her degree from St Martin’s would cut much ice with a man who exuded machismo, and she certainly didn’t want to mention that her last assignment had been with a bunch of velvet-clad musicians.

‘So what brings you here?’

‘I – I don’t really know.’

‘If you’re that clueless, my advice to you is to get out now.’

‘But I’ve only just arrived!’ protested Cat.

‘Then go on the guided tour tomorrow; there’s one laid on by the RAF. They’ll hold your hand, show you what they want you to see, then wave you goodbye. You got a press pass?’

‘No.’

Don shook his head in disbelief. ‘You show up out of the blue and expect to be treated like a pro?’

‘No. I just – I felt that by coming here I might be doing something. Something positive.’ She took a hit of her drink and, trying not to wince, made an apologetic face. ‘Complacency scares me, you see. I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself very well: I must sound like a witless dilettante.’

‘Go on digging.’

Cat smiled. ‘You’ve heard of Lee Miller?’

‘Our paths have crossed.’

‘She used to say she was spurred to action by a fear of boredom.’

Don took a deep drag on his cigarette, then shook his head thoughtfully. ‘A fear of boredom,’ he said, ‘is no bad thing. As long as it’s accompanied by a sense of outrage.’

‘That’s it! That’s just how she described it.’

‘So. Tell me what outrages you.’ Don nodded to the barman, who came over to refill their glasses.

‘The unfairness of life,’ said Cat, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘That’s what outrages me.’

Cat had written an essay on the subject of ‘Injustice’ while at school. She had received a lower than usual mark because she had – according to the lay English teacher – not been objective enough.

‘How can I be objective about something I care so passionately about?’ she’d retaliated. ‘Haven’t you seen photographs of the Nazi death camps?’

‘I’ve read the statistics,’ said the teacher. ‘They’re what matters.’

‘No! You’re wrong! A picture paints a thousand words – a million! In the photos, there were piles and piles of bodies, all starved and emaciated. The crematoriums had run out of fuel, so the ones who weren’t lucky enough to be gassed died in their own excrement and puke. It doesn’t matter how many
statistics
you read. Until you’ve seen the images you know nothing about injustice!’

‘I hardly consider such images appropriate for—’

‘Appropriate!’ Cat had spat. ‘What’s
appropriate
about atrocity?’

There was a fierce light in her eyes now as she turned back to Don. ‘If the world doesn’t know what’s going on in the hellish places, no-one will feel the need to help. I want to make a difference.’

‘And just how do you think you’re going to do that, a girl of what – twenty? Twenty-one . . .?’

‘Twenty-five,’ lied Cat.

‘. . . Here, on your own without a press pass?’

Cat shrugged to indicate an insouciance she was far from feeling. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Yet.’

Don glanced at the camera bag again. ‘What have you got in there?’

‘A Rolleiflex 3.5 F and a five-year-old Leica.’

This met with a brief nod of approval. ‘Rolleiflex happens to be my own weapon of choice. Lenses?’

‘Telephoto; wide-angle.’

‘Are you quick on your feet?’

‘Very.’

‘Fearless?’

‘I like to think so.’

‘In that case, I know what you’re going to do,’ said Don, draining his glass. ‘You’re going to come with me.’

And the next day, while the rest of the press corps were escorted around the island by the Royal Air Force PR people, Cat and Don set off on their own.

No photographer ever forgets his first foray into a war zone. But even if something radical had happened to erase Cat’s memory, if some damage had been done to her brain, or some blessed oblivion or fugue state had descended upon her, or if some sorcery had been worked to make her un-see what she had seen, her photographs would remain as testimony to the carnage that had been visited that day upon the tiny village of Agios Sozomenos.

The hamlet was located about fifteen miles south of the capital. She and Don drove there under a burning sun. The cluster of stone and mud houses were peopled by Turkish Cypriots, but most of the young male inhabitants were dead. They had been killed not long before Don and Cat happened upon them.

Cat had seen dead people before. In Connemara it was common practice to hold a party or ‘wake’ the night before burial. The corpse would be laid out on a bed; family and neighbours would gather around, and
poitín
or whiskey would be offered while songs were sung and jokes shared and stories told of the deceased. When she was small, Cat had delighted in the task of carrying news of the passing to the livestock and the bees, as was the tradition. Death in Connemara had a homey feel to it, and the dead slept peacefully, hands folded upon their chests. In Connemara there had been no blood.

Here, there was blood. In Agios Sozomenos the eyes of the dead men stared vacantly skyward. They lay where they had fallen on the packed earth, their limbs jutting and splayed at awkward angles as if a puppetmaster had just severed the strings, waiting for the ministrations of their womenfolk; waiting for their wounds to be cleansed, their heads to be cradled, their eyes to be closed, their bodies to be covered; waiting for prayers to be said for their souls.

The women came, and the children, and the old men. Cat wanted to leave; she wished she had not come. What had made her think that she could make a difference? What arrogance had persuaded her to believe that some specious sense of moral responsibility could change
anything?
How naïve had she been?

As the villagers congregated, Cat remained frozen in an attitude of abject deference with her head bowed, face expressionless, eyes fixed on the ground. She felt that a single glance in the direction of the bereaved would constitute an intrusion. Her camera bag weighed heavy against her hip, the strap was chafing the flesh of her neck, her throat was constricted by a hard knot of choked-back tears.

Don stepped forward and said something in a low voice to one of the women. She nodded as another woman, barely more than a girl, took off her headscarf and first kissed, then covered the face of one of the men lying on the ground. Her husband. Then Don turned to Cat and said, ‘They want us to do it. They want us to record their grief.’

He raised his camera and started to take pictures in a solemn, dignified fashion, as befitted the cataloguing of an event of such magnitude. Cat followed suit, apprentice to Don’s master. And as she framed each image through the lens of the viewfinder, she felt as though she were following in a tradition that went back centuries to the paintings of Delacroix and Goya and beyond, to those artists who had recorded their wars and the anguish they generated in mosaics and tapestries and in bas-relief sculpture, and even on the walls of caves. She felt less observer than participant, as if she too were involved in this age-old universal tragedy.

Take your pictures
the womenfolk seemed to be saying.
Take your pictures and tell the world that evil is commonplace, and atrocity just around the next corner.