Bryan Islip's Blog, page 5

Seeing about Gairloch

From the turmoil of my business adventures (and misadventures) in the Middle East and the associated madness of the fall of the twin towers in New York City, our Gairloch holiday presented, in September 2001, a true haven of tranquillity. I think this is reflected in my painting at the time; A Gairloch Morning ...


I painted this in pastels. 'Painting' is probably an incorrect word for the use of sticks of pure pigment stroked across, then finger rubbed into a sheet of special 'paper' in order to produce an original picture. Never mind. As you can see it was a perfect morning. I sat on a smooth rock up on An Ard overlooking the loch and some of its islands. I had first ventured here with Joan and our young family way back in 1971. Later on I had returned with Delia for her first visit amidst a November storm of rain and wind that I had been sure at the time would put her off the place for life. It had not; quite the opposite.Who knows what stirs into reawakened life our individual genetic history?

Years later I made this picture into a greetings card. The back of the card bears a version of this poem ...

Seeing Gairloch


You have to come here, I told them.
But it’s so cold and wet, they said, isn’t it?
I said, I want you to see what I’ve been looking at.
They said, Well, why don’t you tell us about it?
Right, I said, I’ll send you a card.


Sitting in a café with a cup of tea,
a Highland scone,
I wrote…
‘Dear people
You think you know about colours
until you’ve seen an early day
over a cloudless Gairloch. you think you know about distance
until your eyes have roamed around
the curves and contours of the world
through air so clear, this clean;
noiseless save the shushing of the sea,
the calling of the gulls as if to you and me
…perspective…
You know, just what are me and you,
within all things?
I swear you taste these lands
of time lost Highland clans,
so wild, so free - this everlasting majesty:’


And so they came, our friends,
and it rained and blew a gale of wind all week.
(A different kind of beauty.)
This place smiles not, shows not herself
so often, nor to everyone.
And they will come again.

Dee had already suggested it was time for us to think about migrating north. I am sure many people have such thoughts following their holidays in Wester-Ross, especially should the sun have shone for them!. But of course you need to consider life where the nearest supermarket is seventy miles away, ditto hospital, where the winters can bring hundred mile an hour (plus) gales, where the summers will definitely bring hordes of biting insects in still conditions together with overmuch rain, where local society revolves largely around the church(es) and where we 'white settlers' can all too easily divide up into sects or cliques; above all where looking out of your window at the stunning scenery will soon lose its lustre unless you have need (and the ability to) make a living, thus creating a properly useful way of life for yourself, 'retirement' being the soft and pointless option. But of course this machine on which I'm writing makes it all that much more possible for the incomer.

Above and beyond everything there is this indefinable sense of calm by way of contrast to the generally overpopulated and materialist turmoil of the world outside.And here the people generally have a smile and a wave for you - even have the inclination to remember your face, perhaps your name.

We discussed all the possibilities on the long drive home to Laundry Cottage near Winchester. We discussed them constantly whilst Stuart and Lorraine tidied our things up for us in Bahrain before themselves returning to England, eventually settling down in the romantically and appropriately named Carefree Cottage in heart of a pretty Dorset woodland. Almost exactly one year later we were to make our move north.

But there are one or two episodes of this before that!.

All dreams must end

At boarding school in Abingdon my reports sometimes mentioned my weakness for dreaming rather than learning. And yes, I suppose I've always been a bit of a dreamer. More imagination than intelligence, you could fairly say. No apologies for that.  That's why I can paint things that are not there, why I can write stuff that is not true (it's called fiction and by the way this blog is not fiction), and why I can create a business that was not there before. Such a business was Sweetheart International in Gosport UK, such was Bibs-industry in Riyadh, then Al-Khobar, then Bahrain, and such, latterly, was the manufacturing company Sleeves Arabia in Al Khobar on the East coast of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.


As mentioned in at least one previous episode I set up 'Sleeves Arabia' to make stretch sleeve labelling from reel-stock that I I imported into the KSA from Dubai. The Middle East market for stretch-sleeves didn't exist until I introduced the concept - and the PDC machinery - to Almarai Dairy of Riyadh in the early 90's. Back then I had gone to extraordinary lengths to find a sound supplier of rthe printed reel-stock. Without that I would never have attempted to persuade my friend Bob Barratt of EPS in Leicester, (makers of stretch-sleeving)  to join me in the Saudi joint venture. (At this point I have to confess to having completely forgotten the name of my nemesis - that is, the UAE company I had contracted to supply my Sleeves Arabia. Probably a case of not wanting to confront one's personal demons.) Be that as it may, the main reason for my decision was the general manager of that UAE company, a British expatriate named Darren. In due course Darren got things going nicely for us with good material coming in on time and my guys able to convert same into stretch-sleeving, no problems for my customers which equalled no problems but good money for me. Plan A looking great. Then I made my mistake. I hired Darren to represent Bibs-industry in the Emirates. Suddenly I had no technical / ethical link into my one essential supplier, the Arab owner of which clearly had no love for me (or my sponsor Faisal) and was obviously asking himself why he should not do the whole job himself, thus taking all the profit rather than half of it. Did he really need Bryan Islip's Sleeves-Arabia?

But instead of going ahead with investing in appropriate machinery and developing his own sales relations with my customer friends, the end users, the owner elected, Arab style, to put me out of business! How? Simply by supplying me with large quantities of perfectly useless sleeving reel-stock. Material that would not possibly be stretchable therefore operable on my bottling customers' PDC machines. Pandemonium. In vain I protested that I would no more pay for material not up to specification than I would pay for petrol that not only left my car kangaroo hopping down the road but would quickly burn out its bloody motor altogether! Stuart and Darren and I attended the crunch meeting in Dubai with the supplier's owner and his acolytes. Absolutely no sign of any understanding or sweetness, much less any light! In vain I produced from a world respected UK University laboratory a technical analysis of the Dubai company's defective material. The Arab owner glanced at the report for all of five seconds then tossed it aside, indicating that anyone could bribe a scientist to write anything one wanted! Having paid a lot of money for this report and with my whole  position teetering on the edge, at that point I saw many colours including a most brilliant shade of red! All in vain, naturally.

Soon after this my Saudi sponsor, call him Faisal, asked to see me. Stuart and I sat in his office. He indicated that 'the powers that be' locally had woken up to the fact that a manufacturing business in The Kingdom was not owned by a Saudi national. Surprise, surprise! The solution? He, my 'friend' Faisal, would become the owner of Sleeves-Arabia with myself as managing director and Stuart as something else. By this time I calculated  I had four hundred thousand pounds in the business. I think you could say my response was not entirely positive.  'Come, let us take a walk around the block, Bryan,' he said. And so we did, during which I noticed (a) Faisal had nothing to say and (b) Faisal was sweating profusely. When we returned to the office it was to find Stuart sitting there in stony silence with Faisal's equally silent wheelchair-bound teenager son and a rather scruffy uniformed policeman standing by. Alarm bells clanging all around!

The uncomfortable impasse continued, for some reason unfathomable in the local police station in front of a quite sympathetic senior police official. I have never been more relieved to get out of anywhere and cross over the Causeway border posts into Bahrain. I'm quite sure Stuart ditto. We had been well and truly stitched up. I was still well kippered! It would be thus for me in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as far ahead as mind and eye could see. I had two options at that point; either take the dispute into a Saudi  Court or retreat as gracefully as possible to lick my wounds in good old Blighty. That was on Thursday 8th September 2001. My natural instinct was to fight the bastards but on Tuesday 12th September the phone rang in my Bahrain penthouse. It was Dee, speaking from our home in Headbourne Wortyhy, Winchester: Quick, switch on your TV, she urged, America's under attack. I said something akin to What the hell?(as if I hadn't had enough bloody excitement!. I rushed down, crossed over the road to the Irish Harp Bar. That place had a giant screen in front of which the usual expat beer drinkers now sat or stood in shocked silence whilst young Arabs, apparently Saudi, whooped and hollered and blew kisses whilst the twin towers of New York spewed forth smoke and bodies in equal amounts. Then came that awful collapsing.

My collapsed world would never be the same again.

On Saturday 16th September 2001 I landed at a near deserted Heathrow, for the whole world seemed to think Armageddon was at hand. Anyway Dee and the dogs were waiting, the Jeep fully loaded for our long planned fortnight's holiday in a Braeside, Gairloch rental. Before we had passed Manchester I had related our own sorry tale to my wife who was doing all the driving. By then I had made up my mind. I turned to her, told her that I would never return to the Middle East. I had no idea what we could do for a living but that was it. Stuart would stay on out there for so long as it took to clear up.

Dee said, That's good darling. Don't worry, we'll be all right. What a hell of a woman! I could have cried.but didn't. Instead I slept all the way to a Scotland so Bonny it seemed to me that day more like Valhalla.

The Icarus problem

The one thing about me that used to drive Dee nuts, (no doubt amongst others), was my propensity to develop new ideas and immediately shift focus from the other ones. This is a major failing. I have to admit  my latest creative interest was always the one that got my primary attention. Still is! By way of illustration, today I should be travelling down south in Wester-Ross selling my greetings cards etc or ordering new stocks of them - important to the money-in department. Or I might be working on my new blockbuster(!) novel; 81,000 words in the can and about 20,000 to go but in which direction?. Or I could be taking up my paint brushes again. I know what I have wanted to paint since Dee departed but my easel still stands forlorn. Or I could be working on a Cinderella pantomine script as requested by Ullapool Rotary. Or creating the long narrative poem about life in Wester-Ross that will hopefully form the basis, with my friend the photographer and my friend the musician, of an audio visual production this coming Autumn.I always seem to want to be master of all trades! Not very intelligent, I know. But instead of those things, here I am writing another episode of my personal memoirs. Why? Because this is my latest venture, therefore the one that captivates me the most here and now, this morning!

This was very much my position in macrocosm in year 2000. Things were going well for my consultancy, Bibs-industry now based in Bahrain. In fact I had a twenty four carat clientele covering most of the Middle East. In addition our labelling factory Sleeves Arabia was up and running, supplying good product to several major dairies and soft drinks bottlers. At that point in comes an enquiry from a British friend of a friend of a friend: a huge tobacco company would like me to find out why Saudi Arabia has no cigarette factory. More importantly, could they (said tobacco company) create one?

Everybody knows the Arab male is a universal smoker of cigarettes imported by the multi-billion from the USA, Britain, France and Japan. My sponsor, Faisal, tells me he could have the necessary contacts. I hurry to Imperial Tobacco in Bristol, England. To say they are interested is an understatement. Together we proceed to the City of London and a major merchant bank. What prospects for raising the two hundred million dollar finance for such a cigarette plant? Every prospect.What kind of a deal for Bryan Islip's Bibs-industry? Twenty thousand sterling for the initial introduction plus five percent of the investment for masterminding the project. (Not actually doing anything, I hasten to add!) I am very quickly on a fully paid up first class flight with my new Imperial Tobacco friends to Bahrain, there to meet a couple of Arabs high in wealth and politics (possibly something else).The whole entourage of us moves on to Dubai, which is one of the United Arab Emirates. Another of the Emirates, the remote Fujairah is our final destination. This is where, agrees the local Emir, we can build the cigarette factory that is going to make me rich! It is a free of charge gateway into Saudi Arabia and the whole Middle East. Also for export because Fujairah in under mega development as the end point of an oil pipeline that will enable the tankers (and freighters) to load up without having to sail round into the Gulf itself. (take a look at the map!)

We all fly back to Britain together; in-flight champagne all round. I receive my twenty grand. The very next day I also receive a message from my new pal at Imperial. I'm told that, from the company's highest level has descended an edict. 'Forget all about manufacturing cigarettes in the Middle East'. No explanation given or would be given. My bubble is pricked but the explosion is nothing to that of my Arab friends. Feverishly I canvas all other of the world's main cigarette brands. Blank. Nada. It was the beginning of the end for my consulting business relationship with my sponsor, although I did not know it at the time. He wanted to take Imperial to the British High Court even though nothing had been signed on paper. Very reluctantly but at his insistence I obtained expensive legal advice. What advice? Forget it.

Months later I hear through confidential channels the reason for the tobacco industry's top level negativity. It seems that The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's importation of cigarettes has for decades attracted duty - and that duty is of particular interest to the Monarch himself! Local production equals no duty. The message has gone forth!

It was not long before Sleeves-Arabia also came under deliberate attack. More on that next time.

My castle and that of the people who worked for me, not least my son and his family, was beginning to crumble. And I would begin to think about a new life or no life.

Udrigle Millenium

Remember the millenium? You know, midnight thirty first December nineteen ninety nine when the world as we know it was to descend into chaos whilst all our computers crashed and burned?  Dee and I had rented Joanna Mackenzie's lovely old Udrigle House, having driven the seven hundred miles north after Christmas. If this was to be the end of life as we know it we might as well be where we had long wanted to be. Two Christmases ago we had stayed here with our dogs, recharging batteries, wondering, as ever, why we needed, really needed to go back to our work and homes in Winchester and the Middle East. At that time I composed this poem for Joanna, whose ancestor William originally built Udrigle House for his new bride, Lilias ... it is reputed to be the oldest intact dwelling house in this part of Scotland



Christmas at House Udrigal
I dreamed a dream most magicalOf times before House UdrigalOf clansmen, living by the shoreAnd on the hill, well used to warYet speaking, singing poetry.I dreamed this fierce northern land, Made beautiful by Nature’s handFrom ice and loch and living rockWas gifted to its Highland stockWhose origins are mystery.
Those people lived in hardinessIn turv-ed structures windowless,Until that chieftain did decideIn honour of his fair haired brideTo build a house for history,Named ‘Outer gully’ (‘Udrigal’);Here’s where he dug away the soil,Well found on rock his place would beSafe from the storms, the raging seaWithstand all that adversity.
Great boulders came up from the beach;He chipped and shaped and fitted eachTo those beneath, row upon row And joined the timbers one by oneBuilt solid strong in symmetry.And then upon a lintel stone, to markAbove the fire, in letters starkFor all who here sometime might passThat this was “Williams’, Lilias’s”And shall be through eternity.
Then in my dream I gladly talkedWith friendly ghosts of those who’d lookedAcross this moody, salty-planeTo distant hills in sun and rain -A view of such great majesty.I spoke with lairds and tacksmen andThe crofters who had worked this landHad built this Highlands House sublimeSired of the wind, the sea and timeThat always shall stay close to me.
Awake! It’s Christmas ninety eight!We walk the dogs and get back lateThen eat and drink and so at lastWe toast our future and our pastFor each is vital, equally.And when we pull the curtains back -A star-less night of stygian black,But lights ride bright up in the sky-And yes, we hear a baby’s cry.For this is Christmas, magically.
Bryan Islip December 1998
Anyway it's now the dreaded Millenium Eve. We had been in good company over in Gairloch's Badachro Inn having enjoyed a long walk with the dogs. On the way from Badachro back to Udrigle House, (herself in the driving seat, for I have never left that Badachro Inn in fit condition), I thought we might drop into The Sand Hotel for a livener. Now, this hotel was always 'let out' to parties of friends / relatives rather than to individual chance callers although but there was a bar always open to the public. It transpired that the resident group was a party of genuine, English, dyed in the wool, both sex Yuppies - dealers usually to be found in the money towers and champagne bars of the City of London. Why don't you join us for dinner, they insisted. No, we didn't come up with that sort of clothing, Dee whispered to me - actually quite fiercely. Thank you very much, said I, full of goodwill to all men. We'll see you later.
What a Hogmanay that was. First the banquet, us in our dog walking clothes, the other twenty of so, half our age, in full evening dress! Anyway Dee and I duly applauded their semi-incomprehensible speeches and made sounds of appreciation re the quality of that splendid meal with its good and plentiful red wines, bubbly and vintage port. All free of charge to us! Then the real fun as the Scottish Highlands dancing began. I have not seen energy and activity like it since we were chased, tumbling over a hedge, by an enraged Hampshire bull. I have a vision of shrieking young ladies being hurled by the men without let or mercy from pillar to post - and even vice versa! No place there for shrinking violets although we old folk did manage to stay hors d'combat. I could by then in any case have barely stood, never mind danced any strip the bloody willow. As midnight came and went and everybody had duly kissed everybody and the company had ascertained by mobile that their cyber world was still rotating we all trooped out into the cold cold night. A bonfire was lit which was the cue for a continuation of mad gyrations only this time on frosted and tufted grass instead of parquet flooring. The celebrations were less than dampened when one lady fell down a ditch and did considerable damage to her ankle. At that we stole away into the night. I don't suppose by then we would have been missed.
As you may have picked up in previous episodes I am not a particular fan of  the City of London with its sharpster banks and bankers. However, being kind at heart I forgave them for that one night.

Days of wine and poppies

One day, if I live long enough I think I'll amass these episodes into a proper autobiography. I'll call it...
Me - Myself - So What?Why?  After all, who could be interested in reading the life story of a non-celebrity except possibly some of his/her immediate family? Anwer: probably nobody. Yet I have a suspicion that there are some more important clues in the parson-poet John Donne's sixteenth century ...No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.Any man's death diminishes me!! Of course. And he might have added, Any man's life enhances me. Above and beyond that I write simply because I like to put together the written word. I love the English language and my thoughts of what has been and what is to come, and why. I think we all should have some interest other than simply what am I doing today?  
At any rate there is a selfie photograph on my bedroom wall that takes me to where I have now reached in this mainly chronological narrative: We are pictured in our Bahrain penthouse before leaving the building for that special event on the Island of Bahrain called The Poppy Ball. So, come along  with me ... Of course this annual event was (is still, so far as I know) a celebration of victory at the end of world war one. Yes, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. It is held in a large Manama hotel ballroom with continuous though silent action movies on the wall - biplanes in combat, big guns firing etc. Everyone is well dressed up, there are round tables each of about ten guests. There is of course much dancing . A group of red-coated Chelsea Pensioners is flown in from London for the occasion. The officers of any British military in the vicinity are also invited. On this occasion it seems that most of the upper deck of a destroyer were present, clad in their best whites and having little trouble attracting dance partners amongst the local young ladies. In fact I particularly recall Tom Jones' Delilah being played and a rather beautiful girl being thrown about like a hysterically laughing rag doll. I also recollect Dee being asked to dance by a minute Chelsea Pensioner - an octaganarian whose nose barely reached her bosom!

On another occasion my assistant, Dina, agreed to accompany Dee on a shopping trip. Dina would pick her up outside my office in Bahrain Towers. I could look out of the window to observe her standing down there at the roadside, waiting. After some minutes past the agreed time and no Dina I suspected the worst when I saw a car - not Dina's - stopping alongside her. She began to talk to the driver through his window, then I saw her go, obviously for protection, to the building's security cabin, quickly leaving that to hurry back up to the office. Before she arrived Dina was on the phone panicking. She had been waiting outside our apartment building, not the office. The red-faced Dee told us that the man in the car had stopped to ask her how much she wanted! Then, when she went into the security kiosk for protection the policeman asked her if she was 'in business'. There always was a special sort of innocence about my wife for she pointed up to the tower block and told him, Yes, up there! When the man began to talk money the penny dropped for the second time in ten minutes!
It is extremely hard to obtain a visitor's visa for a woman trying to visit Saudi Arabia with husband, as opposed to reside with husband on a compound That's not straightforward either, come to think of it. In fact on only one occasions did Delia cross over into The Kingdom. That was when Faisal's wife, Nair, invited Dee through Faisal and me to one of her parties. We stayed with an American business couple, good friends, on their residential compound.  At the appointed time a large chauffeur driven limousine with blacked out windows made its appearance. I waved off my lady, dressed up to the nines as she was. Saudi Arabian parties are of course attended only by males or only by females. Never the twain shall meet.

For years afterwards my wife dined out on her account of that party. It seems She had barely introduced herself and had hardly cleared the compound gates before Nair was relating details of her personal life including her childbirth experiences - and expecting Dee to retaliate! Once at Nair's mansion of a home she was seated on the left hand side of Nair in a great, stark white salon with stark white leather settees arranged around all four walls. The only decoration took the form of golden birds in full flight around the walls.When each guest came in she was introduced to Dee before they took up their stations on the settees in strict order of seniority. They were of all ages, all dressed in the black of course, but most of the younger ones at once removed the black to reveal underneath the kind of female apparel you would find in Paris, London or Milan. The older ladies, pure Bedouin with intricately hennaed hands, would prod Delia's stomach with their forefinger and, laughing raucously, comment to each other in arabic that she could not possibly be attractive to her husband as she was far too thin!

Interminable talk of the most frank nature, accompanied by much reacous laughter followed whilst a young woman did continuous rounds with the coffee pot (called a 'dallah'). Dee asked Nair who this strikingly beautiful person was. She was told that this was the ex-wife of a wealthy man who had divorced her by simple declaration, leaving her penniless. Her only way to support herself was to become a servant to the woman (Nair) who had for long enough been her friend, an equal in society.

Dee had been starving herself all day in anticipation of the feast to come but the hours ticked by with the hunger pangs growing and still no sign of anything to eat. Then at midnight she was led outside into Nair's high-walled garden where was enough - and strange enough - food as to make her heart sink. She had read the book of 'Good Manners for British Visitors to Saudi Arabia' so knew it would be very rude not to partake of each and every offered dish. Especially - yes, you've heard about it - the piece de resistance for the principal guest of a sheep's eye!

Meanwhile I am sitting in Virgil's front room long after my hosts had taken themselves off to bed, waiting with gathering concern for the return of my Delia. It was two o clock when the black limousine made its reappearance. Dee tumbled out bidding Nair her farewells and multi thanks. She had the dazed look of somebody who had just been ten rounds with Mohamed Ali. . 

Right, I'd best move on with the story. Just another sixteen years to go..... !

Sending for reinforcements

I believe it was in the Spring of '98, a weekend day, and I was working on my PC in the Bahrain penthouse when Stuart called from England. He was very unhappy with the scant rewards of life as a south coast inshore fisherman, he told me. I could tell he was serious. Now with partner Lorraine and their two little girls, even living in that idyllic Carefree Cottage right in the heart of the Dorset woodlands had lost its lustre. Anything you can suggest, dad? I said I'd talk to Dee and call him back. It so happened that Dee was visiting me at the time and was right then sunbathing by our rooftop swimming pool. For an hour I sat with her in the scorching sun - her that is, me under a great beach umbrella . We discussed all the possibilities as we saw them for our thirty five years old son. Clearly if he was going to make a change of career, better now than later, but qualifications? Stuart had suffered more than his fair share of hardship, growing into and through his early teens in the dark shadow of his mother's multipleschlerosis and then his older brother's mental illness. Little wonder he'd rebelled at school and followed Robert's example, running off to Cornwall and a life on the fishing boats. But Stu was a bright, honest, personable man, far more sensitive than his outwards persona might at times suggest. His wild oats had been well and truly sown. By now he, like his father, had forgotten where he'd cast them!I was alredy well aware that Dee had had a very soft spot for Stuart ever since ten years back in Hayling Island. When knowing she was feeling down and knowing of her liking for toffee fudge, he would quietly slip a few squares of it into her apron pocket.

For some time I had felt myself much overstretched by the multiple pressures of my Bahrain based design and packaging consultancy and Sleeves-Arabia, by now well up and running and producing good volumes of high quality product. I was all over the place, often making five or six flights in a week and/or 'commuting' across the deserts to Riyadh. Although I had good back up in the office and out at the Sleeves Arabia factory and, through Robin and Saeed in the field, I had begun to think about divesting myself of some of the top load.

It is not easy taking decisions that represent a gamble with the lives and prosperity of those near and dear to you. Our Middle East businesses were after all anything but secure. Promising, yes. On an upwards curve, yes. Secure, certainly not!  A dynamic new business active especially in foreign fields can never be that. At the end of our talk Dee and I looked at each other for a few seconds, weighing th risks. Then Dee nodded,  Let's do it she said. I called Stu back. Would he think about coming out to take a look around? If we all gave it the thumbs up, (precisely what 'it' would be by way of a job we would firm up later), Stuart would bring his family out to live in Bahrain. However, I explained, he and Lorraine would perforce need to get married. Middle Eastern countries had a habit of asking to see the wedding lines of incoming couples! No lines, no entry. I knew this would be a test of their commitment, for neither of them had much time for mere convention!

Stuart came out, liked what he found and I liked the way he conducted himself. Within the month came the wedding, two pretty little girls as bridesmaids, and not long after that I was greeting the whole family at Bahrain airport. Soon they were happily and safely ensconced in a leased villa within a compound with swimming pool, etcetera, and the girls were enrolled in a good Manama school for expatriates. They had a rented company car and friends of their own age outwith the business. Their new life was up and running.  How very adaptable are the young - and the young at heart. Of course Stu had the business executive's L plates up but he very quickly got used to the dreaded necktie and suit - and his daily commute across the Bahrain - Al-Khobar (Saudi) causeway with its double, and doubly infuriating customs posts. Most Saturdays (their Saturday equals our Sunday) I would meet with Stuart, Lorraine, Jadine and Sinead at our favourite breakfast cafe, taking the opportunity to catch up with all the family news as opposed to business news. My friend Thomas Kelly was quick to befriend my family as well, which meant they would be invited to the parties and gatherings that are such a feature of expatriate life in Bahrain. If you keep out of any kind of trouble in the Middle East life there can indeed be very good.

The role of the sponsor in Saudi Arabia is a many splendoured thing. Anything and everything from the simple arms length signing off of visa applications to being an active supporter in the often difficult and convoluted world of Arab business. (I am not, in case you're wondering, referring here to corrupt practices. In fact I seldom came across any definite such - or other than by oblique reference to those ultra high level arms deals. In any case the latter are not regarded as corruption by high ranking arabs. More the entitlement of rank. Our British values and laws have absolutely no meaning or force. ) My own sponsor, Faisal, was of course responsible for the lawful correctness of all our activities in The Kingdom but as I have indicted herein he was, I truly and firmly believed, more friend than arms length sponsor. Certainly he had allowed me  to be privy to some of his more unusual social activities. But rule number two for expats in The Kingdom, after 'do not infringe religious Law' is, 'never put your trust in an Arab or believe he is your friend, western style'. Thinking back, I should have read the coldwater signs even as early as that, in 1997/8. Perhaps it was unfortunate that the advent of my son on the scene coincided with the permanent disability of Faisal's son following his reckless motor car accident and Faisal's incredibly expensive but unavailing medical efforts in Europe and America.  

However Stuart's participation in my business life and the whole family's presence in my personal life proved to be a major help as well as a great comfort. He had all the energy that once I had myself, now perhaps slow ebbing, an innovative and enquiring cast of business mind and the adaptablity / resourcefulness so essential to an expatriate.

Growing old gracelessly

I really cannot remember whether in these episodes I've written much if anything about Winnie Boulter, nee Smalley, Delia's Mother. On the basis that I haven't, let me explain that I first met her not long after I met her daughter. She would then have been in her late sixties. Not many years before she had lost her husband, Bill, Delia's father, to a heart attack on board the Gosport - Portsmouth ferryboat. Of course a bitter blow for the family but not totally inappropriate - for an ex Royal Navy officer who had spent the greater part of his life at sea or latterly shorebound as Chief Instructor at Whale Island,  Portsmouth's famously tough Gunnery School.

As an ex wartime WREN Winnie was a really larger than life character, idiosynchratic in so many ways.  For me she was the epitome of that wonderful poem by Jenny Joseph ...

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.


Well, Winnie Smalley would have been terribly disappointed were people who knew her never 'shocked and surprised'! And she surely did wear her favourite colour purple. Although from an ordinary enough background, by heart and soul she definitely felt herself to be of the elite, if you see what I mean! She told me with all seriousness that she, Winnie, would never re-marry unless to at least an Admiral of the R.N.! Well, one day in the eighties whilst I was still at a loss for how to earn a longer term living after Sweetheart International I decided that life as a painter (pictures not houses!) held considerable attraction and and least a glimmer of potential, and that to properly equip myself and Dee with the associated commercial skills we should go on an advertised country house weekend to learn the arts of picture framing. Winnie was also a painter of watercolour pictures so we invited her to join us. However when we went to pick her up, to our surprise she had with her a somewhat abashed, though fine looking looking elderly gentleman carrying both cases; his and hers! His name was Len Boulter, a 'friend and fellow watercolourist', as we were told. It turned out that Len had been an officer of H.M.Customs charged with the specially onerous duty of touring the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to certify the bonded facilities of the whisky distillers.

That first evening in the big house Dee and I were much intrigued by the sounds of merriment from the room next to ours - Winnie's room! Consumed with curiosity we knocked on the door. It opened to reveal the two of them in fine party mood. We had no idea they were sharing. Winnie did not drink alcohol but there she was, doubled up with laughter, champagne glass in hand! Just come and have a look at this, she demanded. In Len's case, opened on the bed, was a neat pile of silken cord. No, not what you are thinking - or Dee of I or Winnie for that matter. Len offered his indignant explanation; he had a phobia about hotel fires so always travelled with this rope ladder. The fact that we were on the ground floor and that most of his international travel provided him with rooms high up - much higher up than his 'ladder' could be effective in hotel tower blocks - that had nothing to do with it!

When, a few years later and in her eighties, Winnie's overactive conscience got the better of her she decided she could live in sin no longer. Even though her subsequent marriage to Len cost her and her two daughters two of her three wartime pensions, the splendidly-hatted deed was done in Winchester. Afterwards she took me on one side, explaining in all seriousness - I know he's not an Admiral but he does have an O.B.E. ('Order of the British Empire', as is awarded to most senior British civil servants upon their retirement.) Len in his eighties still possessed a healthy interest in the opposite sex. What with him and my father I was beginning to look forward to my own old age!

A good and dangerous life

Whenever I was home in Hampshire I tried to make time with Dee to take the dogs out for walks twice daily; once immediately after breakfast and once around lunchtime.  How well we got to know the sweet-flowing, crystal clear river Itchen and the pretty little villages down the valley alongside it, and all the chalk hills, the bluebell woodlands and New Forest ways of south Hampshire. These were happier times. Neither of us had in the past been overmuch for friends outwith business and our family/ies but now our social life was very pleasing, both in Winchester and out amongst the expatriated luminati of Bahrain .

The tiny, ancient Eclipse pub close by Winchester cathedral was home from home to a truly eclectic group of folk who, I think, wouldn't mind me calling them, for the most part, intellectuals. Especially as one of them was World Quiz Champion! Most of them could, as they say up here in Scotland, 'take a good drink!' as well as being able and willing to expound their views on any topic under the sun (or, quite likely there in Winchester, under the rain!) I thought of the Eclipse as being somewhat akin to an Elizabethan Coffee House. In addition to that pub Dee's dinner parties at Laundry Cottage were quite famous and great fun if sometimes a little on the OTT side. I remember one more than usually alcoholic occasion when a certain guest was seen departing up Bedfield Lane in his kangaroo hopping Rolls-Royse. I have to confess I was myself very much the worse for wear on that occasion. Truth to tell I never was a top-rate drinker, much preferring nourishment to punishment.

The British Ambassador in Bahrain held regular garden parties. I imagine all British Ambassadors have done so worldwide since diplomatic time began. Anyway Bahrain's were splendidly formal affairs held in the evening outside the Embassy building on its highly securitised, well-kept lawns. Dusty old palm trees, scents of tropical flora and expensive ladies' perfume hanging in the hot and humid air, everyone 'who is anyone' both British and Arab dressed up, doing their best to move assiduously group to group with glass in hand, talking much, listening little. But our ambassador was a splendidly radical fellow living a strict protocol were it not for the fact that he had broken ranks to marry his native housemaid. Long live the British individualist! Our mentor into these affairs was always Thomas Kelly, a strikingly bold fellow, husband of Dina, my personal assistant, much akin both physically and in personal projection to Charles Dance. We often had lunch together in one or other of the Manama bistros or in the Yacht Club or, when Dee was in town, dinner at their home. Thomas was one of those lucky ones, the classic English who would have been born elite even if in some East London ghetto instead of a fairly stately home!

On the darker side there is one incident that I cannot possibly leave out of my memoirs. Since retiring from (or actually having been kicked out of!) my last long-term employment in 1987 I had kept in touch albeit sporadically with many of my colleagues at Sweetheart International. Perhaps foremost amongst these was my friend Ted Pool who I had recruited and who had worked with ever since the company became a green-field start-up in 1971. Ted's first wife left him, apparently to go off with her boss, about a year after he joined, taking their two little daughters with her. Just before that I well recall that lady coming up to me at a company Christmas party; all right, Bryan, she said quietly, he's yours; you can have him. At the time I had no idea what that was all about. Anyway Ted remarried and had three more daughters with his second wife Jane, all of them now teenagers. He had left Sweetheart after I went, as had the majority of my team, and had gone to work for a competitor where his new boss was Peter Bright, another leading extrovert of the ex-Sweetheart brigade. One morning Peter phoned me with the shocking news that Ted had passed away the previous night in a West Country hotel room after a no more than ordinary dinner with some customers. Heart attack, as it transpired. Somebody other than a policeman had to go to visit the family. Peter said he was on his way himself but could Dee and I come, please? The three of us knocked on Jane's Lee-on-Solent door, steeling ourselves for what was to come. They were out! Huge relief. We spent the hours in the local Swordfish pub before the girls returned. Coffee and soft drinks only. But eventually on that terrible day we found them in; three smiling young ladies and one smiling mum at the opened door  - before those awful clouds of fear transmuting into terror came over their faces. Somehow they knew. Tragedy transmits itself just as easily as do smiles.

The church was filled literally to overflowing for the funeral. That man had so many friends, many of them his business customers. People would say he was one of the very few for whom nobody had a bad word. His and Jane's youngest, twelve years old daughter did the reading. She was as good and as brave as was her father. Neither Dee nor I knew at the time that his second trio of daughters knew nothing about the existence of their father's first two. Jane said they had just never got around to telling them. It came as another dreadful bewilderment, even though it did not damage their deep-held love for their father. Besides, in the event the first daughters by then in their twenties did not turn up for the funeral. I was proud to be asked by Jane to deliver her late husband's eulogy. Amongst other things I told the people about how, in the very early days of Sweetheart International, Ted and I once set out from Gosport to visit Northern Dairies in Hull and then Bibby, the fats company in Liverpool, then back home. So, in a single seven hundred miles day we saw the English channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea as well as doing some substantial business. But why would I tell them this? Because not twenty miles on the road Ted asked me to stop the car. I braked to a halt. What's wrong, I asked him. Nothing, Ted said. Sometimes you have to take time to look at the world, boss. I looked. Over the dawning fields and woodlands of Hampshire the sun was rising , the sky a kaleidoscope of colour. Everything was beautiful.

Of new beginnings

On the 10th of October 1996 Dee and I were married. We deemed it too soon after Joan's death to make a big production out of it so invited no family, only our two friends, the recently married Jonathan and Dorothy. They acted as the necessary witnesses in a Brighton Registry Office somewhat reminiscent of a public urinal Afterwards the four of us we went out to a very nice Italian restaurant for dinner during which I drank copious amounts of Bardelino Classico, thus pretty much wasting the Grand Hotel's finest four posted bedroom suite. One other trivia comes to mind; over the road outside that restaurant was a public telephone kiosk in which a young man was busily jemmying open the cash box. We reported this criminality to the restaurant owner who simply shrugged his Italian shoulders and muttered they're always doing it.

The following day we drove along the south coast to my father's apartment, there to impart the news. Dad did not seem unduly surprised or much impressed although he had always been very fond of my new wife.  That day he spent the time whilst I was out buying a fish & chip lunch in showing her compromising pictures of himself and his 'chiropodist' lady friend! I must explain that my father, long since retired on a cost of living indexed civil service pension, had about him a certain unworldly quality. Thus he was happily living, for those last ten years of his life, on his own in his elevated sea-front apartment. Here in good weather he would  sit out on his balcony armed with binoculars watching the girls go by on the promenade and, bikini-clad, sunbathing on the beach. 

On the occasion of which I now write, when I asked him where I could go get some fish and chips for our lunch he looked in the telephone book and dialled something called, I seem to remember The Chippy Plaice. When they answered the phone he made the following enquiry; "Do you supply fish and chips please?". They put the phone down on what was obviously a joke call. 

After that lunch Dee and I went on to Dover and across to France on the ferryboat, for we had been invited to another - one might say a 'proper' wedding with all the bells and whistles in Montdidier - in fact Margaret and Jean-Claude Vandevoorde's lovely young daughter Celine to her fiancee Thierry. We had become good friends with the family and by then I had been appointed Middle East Sales Agent for the special kind of labelling machinery invented by Jean-Claude and engineered in their 'PDC' local factory. That wedding really was a splendid affair with many people in attendance including Margaret's Scottish family, some of the males clad in kilts of the Rangers FC tartan, I recall. Much live and good music before, during and after the ceremony and a magnificent wedding feast unfortunately marred by some kind of a falling out between in-laws, (long since repaired, thank goodness.)

We had enough time after the wedding to pursue Dee's deeply held, long-time interest in World War one. Montdidier is a small town close to the Somme that had been utterly destroyed in the cataclysm and subsequently rebuilt, stone on stone. In particular Delia wanted to locate the burial place of the WW1 poet Roland Leighton. We found it. Later, on my return to business in Saudi Arabia, sitting in the evening in my Riyadh hotel room I composed a collection of verses under the one title; IN WOUNDED FIELDS. Each of the six verses was addressed to a deceased poet of that War ... the one following is to Lieutenant Leighton, who had been expected to marry his long term fiancee, the writer Vera Brittan  ... There is some unresolved mystery about that poet's latterday life and the facts surrounding his death on the battlefield ...



To Roland Aubrey Leighton: March 1895 - December 1915  We searched the lanes, found you in Louvencourt’sSmall cemetry amidst a company Of stones standing straight-rowed to attention, Smart white in a slow rain, near where you died; ‘Lieutenant R A Leighton 7th Worcesters,’Says your monument; said that telegram.“I walk alone although the way is long,”You said, in private lines in your black book,“And with gaunt briars and nettles overgrown;”What pain you meant by this we’ll never know. Just such a light so bright as yours alignsThe many-splendoured ones on which it shines.
She capitalised your ‘Him’ as godheads doWhenever afterwards she wrote of you.
Yes, “Life is love and love is you, dear, you”You wrote, prize scholar bursting sweating out Of your illicit wet night dreams of she,Who’d written to herself ; 'Impressive, he,Of powerful frame, pale face and stiff thick hair.’Would you we know had she not loved you so?Dee likes to know you in those violets,Pressed brown and withered, desiccated now,You sent to Vee from shattered 'Plug Street' Wood,Picked from red sticky ground around the head,The horrid face and splintered skull that sheMust never see... What, she, Vera of the V A D?
Who, from your sceptic pact with her enticedYour secret taking of Rome’s hand of Christ?  And I, not knowing of you very much,Looked in that brass bound book at LouvencourtRead this year’s batch of private messagesTo you, young friend, mostly from those unborn When that one, shiv’ring in his field grey,Unsurprised to see you that cold night, glad Of the Christmas gift, squeezed the steel trigger,Exploding pain into your youthful frame...From far and wide they’d come to speak their grief,So many words to you who wrote so few.Why stood you there, why dare the guns, Roland?‘Hinc illae lacrimae;’ your code...                               Hence those tears’ ....   (Terence)I still don’t understand....  
Jean-Claude's PDC machinery requires a kind of polyethylene film with precisely inbuilt stretch qualities. The PDC machine cuts and applies it at high speed to milk bottles and the like as a form of labelling. I had located a small company in Leicester called EPS, owned by Bob Barratt, which could convert printed quantities of this special material into sleeving ready to export into Saudi for Almarai's PDC machinery.. Thus I had become agent for both both the machinery and the material. I am talking millions of pounds sterling here of which I, as agent, was happy to collect ten percent.  
By now well set in our new Bahrain environment and enjoying the very expensive services of five employees instead of previously only Robin, I came up with my next Big Idea! Rather than carry on importing the printed sleeving material into Saudi Arabia why not set up a factory to convert it from printed sheet? I spoke about 'Sleeves-Arabia' to my sponsor Faisal and to Bob Barratt, seeing clear the green light for GO. To make maximum financial sense out of converting material into sleeving I really needed a local plastic extruding company with the right skills to supply Sleeves-Arabia with extruded and printed polyethylene reelstock. With Faisal's help I located and rented a suitable empty factory in Al-Khobar then made a partnership deal with Bob to supply both the converting machinery and a young Leicester employee of his as supervisor. I cannot recall his name. Anyway he came out and began by recruiting two Philipino production workers. I had found a suitable materials supplier in Dubai (call it Al-Shark. That was not its actual name but events three years down the line would prove to make it sound quite appropriate!) Al-Shark was at the time managed by an English expat named Darryl. A thoroughly reliable and technically perfect source - or so I thought!
My Middle East house of cards was now almost complete.

A tragedy non-Shakespearean

In the summer of '95 whilst home from Bahrain I wandered into an antiquarian bookshop in downtown Winchester. This was not unusual. Dee liked to tour the shops; I didn't, except for this one. In any case Dee was as captivated by old books as much as I, hence the massive library we have carried around from home to home like the heavy shell on the back of a tortoise. On this particular occasion I picked up a slim and dusty volume that was to become one of  three books to affect my life.Written by Professor Logan Pearsall-Smith in the USA and published in 1928 it was entitled On Reading Shakespeare.

Now, although I had done very well at school with English Literature and had kept up a steady regime of reading both fiction and no-fiction since then, I had never really got to grips with The Bard, even on those rare occasions when I had seen the plays on stage. Something about the archaic language and the odd mix of prose and verse perhaps. Now here was the good Professor telling me to see the plays in the theatre of my mind by reading them in the fully interpretive Arden paperback editions, rather than through the voice and actions of actors on stage. But what first affected me so dramatically was the purity and beauty of the Professor's actual prose. The combination of his words and his message struck home. Between the summer of '95 and the autumn of '96 I read, one by one, all of William Shakespeare's plays plus each of his narrative poems and sonnets. Indeed, aided and abetted by the Arden translations, (on my bookselves to this day), throughout that period of time I read nothing else!

And so it was that I was reading in bed at 11.30 p.m.on Monday the 6th of August, 1996 when I came to this passage in The Merchant of Venice ... Lorenzo is at last alone with Jessica in a forest glade ...

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Just at this very point the bedside telephone rang. It was matron at the South Winds nursing home. Gently she informed me that my wife Joan, the mother of my children, had breathed her last. Don't come now, she said. The morning will be soon enough. Ignoring that I explained the situation to Dee, got dressed and drove off, arriving at the nursing home just as the ambulance was leaving. So instead of going in through the gateway I drove down to the nearby marina, switched off the engine and sat looking out over the starry black mirror of yacht studded water ...Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night ... the passage above reverberated in my head alongside all the good memories of long before: the dance in York where we had first met, our holiday up in Ayr when we had ended up sleeping on the beach, living in tiny little Moulton with my sister Shirley and her husband John, the birth of Karen, (no letter 'i' in her forename then), our flats in Bateman Street, Cambridge then houses in Kings Heath and Solihull and Southport and Lee-on-Solent; the inevitable onwards and upwards not always welcomed by my girl whilst along came the new babies. All the countryside perambulator walks, the camping holidays, the family Christmases. I thought about our making of love at a time when love was all we had, and so was very precious; (Love does not just happen; it has to be made, doesn't it? And protected);  All the fun and the adventures and misadventures. I thought about my weekend visit with our visitors from York and afterwards, the two of us on our own, the things she had said on the eve of her death. Things that will remain with me and only me for ever. Bi-ig boys, they don't cry-ey-ey, goes the song. I cried all right, for such harmony is indeed in immortal souls. But for the first time in years, there in that Marina car park at one o clock in the morning my belief in an afterlife - in a world with and of beauty and with neither pain nor tears - re-awakened itself.

There was much suffering in the aftermath, especially in the passing on of the news to my family and Joan's family. I recall waiting outside Kairen and Roger's north London home late into the evening that following Saturday as they and their family were due home from the airport after their overseas holiday. It was for them a devastating return.

All of our children - even Bob, who fortunately fitted the clothes I lent him - and all Joan's people and all our grandchildren attended the funeral service at Southampton Crematorium but the event was somewhat sullied by the appointed Reverend forgetting actually to turn up! Fortunately our funeral director had the necessary qualification to officiate. I had spent much time in writing Joan's eulogy and I'm afraid it caused the service to overrun, thus stacking up the following funeral services. In that eulogy I quoted a line from one of her favourite songs; You flying high in the air, me on the ground / Bring On The Clowns: Bring on more tears.

Delia had elected out of respect to stay away from the funeral. We had been living together for some ten years and it had been eight years since Joan had needed to enter professional care. Yes, there was an element of guilt on Delia's side but I can testify that there was also a great deal of mutual respect between the two women in my life. And Joan knew well that I may not have been able to make it through the night without Dee.

Soon enough I would again be a married man. One love does not necessarily destroy another. On the contrary, if one is lucky and tries hard enough it can re-inforce it.