Alan Bristow Read online

  My father got to hear of it and forbade me to do it again. Dad’s word was law, not only to me but to the army of men who kept the dockyard running like a machine. Bermuda was an important promotion for my father, who despite his title was a civilian. During the war that was to come, when he was running the bomb-shattered dockyards of Valetta with the invasion and capture of Malta looking a distinct possibility, Sidney Bristow was made an honorary Commodore in the Royal Navy, and there were times in my life when being Commodore Bristow’s son did me no harm at all.

  My father was a quiet, meticulous and able administrator with a talent for mathematics. He had the common touch, and under his guiding hand peace was declared in the perpetual conflict between naval personnel in Bermuda and the dockside navvies, who joined together in membership of a sporting club founded and built by my father largely, I believe, to further his ambition to captain the local cricket team. The members felt duty-bound to vote him into the job in return for his efforts, and he was very pleased to accept.

  His common touch extended to his refusal to avail himself of the car and driver to which he was entitled – a significant perk on an island where only the Governor, the Admiral and Members of Parliament merited such a privilege. It was a sore point with my mother, for whom a car would have been useful; dad got his come-uppance when he was blown off his Rudge bicycle and into the dockyard wall in a hurricane and was quite badly cut about. His cycling came to an abrupt end and a car and chauffeur appeared, much to my mother’s satisfaction.

  My mother Betty was a wholly different character. Bright, outgoing and determined, she had been to Edinburgh University – an extremely unusual achievement for a woman of her generation – and was a great sportswoman, passionate about golf. She and Sidney had met at a sporting event in Scotland, where he was working in the dockyard at Rosyth, and they married late in life – she was forty when I was born, and forty-four when she had Muriel. Astoundingly, my father was unaware of that fact. Many decades later, when I had met with some success in business and was being driven home by my chauffeur in my Rolls-Royce, the radio-phone rang. It was my father.

  ‘You’d better come round,’ he said. ‘Your mother is unwell.’

  When we got there it was clear mum had been dead for some time. Funeral arrangements were made, paperwork was pressed on my grieving father, and he came to stay with me while I made arrangements for housekeepers. He was not a drinking man but he liked a pale ale, and one evening he was sitting in the living room, nursing his beer, lost in his own teary thoughts. Suddenly he gave forth.

  ‘Your mother deceived me, son.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Mum like that,’ I said. ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘No, she deceived me all of our life together.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘She was never unfaithful ...’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I had to sign her death certificate. She was nine years older than me! She always told me we were the same age!’

  Dad subsided into his chair and stared long and hard into his pale ale. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said at length, ‘she did seem to be getting a bit wrinkly.’

  Mum was largely responsible for the success Dad enjoyed in his career. He seemed to be a man without ambition; had it not been for her, he would probably have remained a middle-ranking civil servant at the Admiralty. She nudged him in the direction of advancement and promotion, and once he tasted it, he found it to his liking. Outside the windows of his impressive office in the Royal Navy Dockyard in Bermuda, D-Class destroyers were bunkered, armed and provisioned, fussed over by busy stevedores under his command. Down on my dock I watched the warships come and go – Danae, Dragon, Dauntless, Despatch – and I knew that Dad made it all happen.

  At home in Alfred Terrace he would play the grand piano, a talent he had achieved without benefit of lessons. He’d go to the music hall and hear a new song once, then come home and work it out on the piano. By midnight he’d have it note-perfect. I inherited his love of mathematics but no part of his musical talent, which went to my sister Muriel.

  Muriel is here today thanks to me; as a four-year-old she got stuck underneath the iron steps leading out of the water below our dock with an octopus the size of a football clinging to her leg, and was drowning. Bristow, eight-year-old man of action, leapt into the water and cut away the ‘okky’ with his knife, lifted Muriel out and pressed the water out of her. I probably got to her a few seconds before Dyer, but I claim the credit.

  Events rarely disturbed my shoeless idyll. The hurricane season came and went; Mum, Muriel, the cook and I would huddle together under the stairs and listen to the wind roar. On one occasion I ventured to the door to look out just as the roof of one of the traders’ stores sailed by fifty feet off the ground, and I dived back into the comforting bolt-hole between Mum and the cook.

  I attended the Royal Naval Dockyard School in Ireland Island, where Commander Fred Giles was headmaster. It was an egalitarian establishment in which the sons of British admirals sat side by side with black Bermudian children whose fathers worked in the dockyard. One of my best friends, Freddy Dale, was a Bermudian, and we sailed, swam and played cricket together. Two of my tutors, the Hunt brothers, were well-known figures whose talent did much to improve the image of Bermuda in the sporting world, and who fostered my lifelong love of cricket. Even academic work was a joy to me. I was naturally gifted in maths, and the teaching was virtually one-to-one so standards were high. I went looking for Freddy Dale when I moved back to Bermuda in later life as a tax exile, but he had died young. I took a nostalgic walk by the old school, the docks and the house, and I realised that in all my childhood years in Bermuda, I had never once felt unhappy.

  I was nine when we moved to Portsmouth. I felt surprisingly content to leave Bermuda – Dad had been promoted, he had to go, we all had to go. The cold was a shock, but because it was beside the water it didn’t seem to matter too much. We moved to a Victorian terrace near Fratton Park, and Dad had an office with a big round window looking straight out at the bow of HMS Victory. He took me to Portsmouth Grammar School for an interview with an imposing headmaster who was wearing full gown and mortar board. I was told I might be a bit behind, academically, so I’d have to sit an entrance exam. One of my tasks was to write a word as it would be seen upside down in a mirror, and somehow I got it right. I was asked what books I had read. I was not a great reader, but I had just finished a book Dad had bought for me called South with Scott, by Vice Admiral Teddy Evans, and this impressed the headmaster mightily. Scott and Evans were Navy men, Portsmouth was a Navy town, and their heroic and tragic exploits in Antarctica twenty years before had passed into Navy lore. The book had made a great impression on me. I was amazed at how many animals they’d got down there in the boat. One never associated horses with the sea – I thought they would be seasick. It planted a seed within me that perhaps opened a door to the Antarctic adventures that were to come.

  Far from being behind, I was put in the ‘A’ stream and remained there throughout my years at Portsmouth Grammar. The school had a strong sporting tradition, and that suited me fine. I played cricket and soccer, learned to box, and joined the Officer Training Corps where my sergeant major was an impressive young man called ‘Jimmy Clavvle’. Jimmy was a born leader of men, clear of speech and decisive in manner, and I was happy to follow him. He was a year older than me, but he was in the ‘C’ stream largely because of his poor grasp of English. His spelling was atrocious, and I used to help him with his written work. We were fated to meet again twenty years later, at which time he told me he was now called ‘James Clavell’, pronounced as it was spelt, and he was a successful Hollywood scriptwriter – hadn’t I seen The Fly? We remained close friends until his untimely death from cancer in 1994, and during those years he became a literary phenomenon with such books as Tai Pan, King Rat, Noble House, Shogun, and Gai Jin. I introduced him to the Shah of Iran, who tried to get Jimmy to write a book about his country – something he finally did w
ith his best-seller Whirlwind, a fictionalised account of one of my adventures, when I extracted all the Bristow families and almost all our helicopters from Iran under the guns of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guard. Jimmy used to send me notes on little strips of paper, and to the end of his days his spelling was bloody atrocious.

  My father bought me a boat, a fourteen-foot wooden dinghy with a dipping lug sail. I called her Sharpy because she was pointed at both ends, and during the school holidays I was taught to sail her properly. I learned the rudiments of navigation aboard a youth training ship, the TS Foudroyant, tied up in Portsmouth Harbour, and I never stopped swimming – Dad insisted that I swim in the sea every day, rain or shine, summer and winter. I joined Portsmouth and Southsea swimming club, and would cycle down to its changing rooms by the war memorial on Southsea seafront on my Rudge, a bike that had synchromesh gears and curling handlebars you could turn up like rams’ horns or down for racing. The keen swimmers had keys to the club because the staff didn’t come in until nine, and very often we were there before dawn. I loved it, but there were some cold winters in the thirties and swimming could be terrible. I would put on a black rubber cap, goggles and gloves, and on a few icy days I’d venture in just far enough to get my costume wet, and to hell with swimming around the buoy. It was torture, but Mum said it would make me live longer and I’d be stronger for it, and perhaps she was right. I never caught cold, never got sick. I sometimes think now that Dad had some god-given insight into my future, because when ships were being sunk under me during the war, I withstood the rigours of the water better than most.

  The war shook my faith, which had been strong. Mum was deeply religious, and Muriel and I were schooled in scripture, joining the Crusader bible-reading group and going to church and Sunday School. Mum said later that divine providence had spared me during the fighting, but what discriminating hand had passed me over while slaughtering my friends, and in such terrible ways? I retreated into an open-minded agnosticism.

  For all my Christian teaching, my behaviour was less than pious. Workmen who were digging near our house had placed warning lamps around their excavations and their pyramids of pipes, and I thought it would be quite fun to put them out. A few days later a sergeant of police called at the house and asked my father if he could speak to me regarding an accident that had befallen a pedestrian who had missed his step in the dark and tumbled into a hole. I could not tell a lie. ‘Yes, I did that for fun,’ I told him. The sergeant left my father to deal with the matter and I got a jolly good hiding. It had seemed such a nice, simple way of annoying people, but I didn’t turn lights off again.

  In the holidays Muriel and I were sent to Scotland where Mum’s family, the Falconers, were big landowners along the Cromarty Firth, around Dingwall, Invergordon and Alness. There I would plough with Cleveland Bay horses or help with the harvest, stacking sheaves and riding home on the great horses, my little legs sticking out almost at right angles on their broad backs. Mum actually ran the farms. Her brothers lived on them, but she was the eldest – an older sister had been killed in a riding accident – and under Scottish law nothing could be done without her agreement and signature. There were three brothers, Bob, Jimmy and Hamish, and while it was always said that times were hard on the farms before the war, they each had a new car every year.

  Bob was the gentlest of men, without any aggression in him, but god, he was tough. He was built like an oak tree. Family legend said he’d won the caber tossing at the Highland Games in Perth, and he certainly supplemented his farm income by bare-knuckle fighting at fairgrounds. When he played the bagpipes he’d take off his shirt and vest and stand in his kilt, and he was a sight to see. Behind the house in Alness a steep track ran up through a fir wood, and he’d go up there with his Border collies in the early morning to check on the sheep. He’d stroll back playing his pipes, and I’d wake to the skirl of the bagpipes coming down through the mist and the trees half a mile away, and the thought of it makes me shiver to this day. Only two things could induce me to fight for Queen and country, a bottle of port and the bagpipes.

  The land was sold shortly after the war. Jimmy died of cancer and Hamish went to Australia. Bob ran all the farms for a while, but for reasons that were not vouchsafed to me it was decided to sell up. Before the war Mum had mapped out a career path that had me going to Cambridge, then running the farms. I rather liked the idea at the time. But neither Cambridge nor Scottish farming were to figure in my future. The Navy built Evanton, a Fleet Air Arm aerodrome, on one of the farms and I landed there in a Spitfire after the war, when I was flying with 1834 Squadron in the Reserve. But the sound of the bagpipes had faded, and nothing now calls me back.

  Flying appealed to me from the earliest days. Behind our house in Fratton was a garage owned by a chap called John Randall whose son was at school with me. We didn’t have first names in those days – we were Bristow, Clavvle, Randall Minor. Randall’s father had a de Havilland Puss Moth, a lovely four-seat biplane in which we would fly from Portsmouth Aerodrome to the Isle of Wight, landing on a beach near Ryde. There was a regular air service, too, from Portsmouth to Bembridge in an aircraft called a Westland Wessex – an interesting portent – and dad would take the whole family to the island for the day. I was fascinated by how those machines worked, but I was far too young to try flying for myself. Portsmouth Aerodrome closed in 1973, and today it’s an industrial estate.

  I found I was quite good at boxing. Portsmouth Grammar School had a Navy PT instructor called Chief Petty Officer Bellinger, a man who was very keen to have a boxing team. We started at fourteen years of age and fought inter-schools competitions. It was a cushy number. You got away the day before, you stayed overnight at the other school, and you had a superb meal after the fighting in the afternoon. It served me in good stead in the merchant navy later on, when the officers seem to enjoy having cadets around them who could fight. One of my fights at school was against a chap called Clarke – quite a handy fighter, but I knocked him down hard and he went into a coma. He was in hospital for a while and it was a difficult time, with his mother getting on to my mother and saying I might have killed him. But he recovered and came back to school as though nothing had happened. He never fought again.

  As I progressed, Bellinger started to teach me some of the nasty things – the elbow, the low blow in the clinch. He would say that my opponents might do this to me, and I needed to know how to react. My record was good – fought 26, won 25, KO 2, lost 1. I’ve forgotten almost all of my victories, but I remember that one defeat vividly. I was fighting for a Navy team against an Army team from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers at Whale Island in Portsmouth, with a full programme, a real ring and several regiments competing. I took a right old bashing. The KOSB were hard men from the slums of Glasgow, where they were taught to fight in the crib. My opponent was stocky, wiry, a lot older than me, but I only found out later that he was the Sergeant Major of the Regiment. I wish I’d known that before I agreed to get in the bloody ring with him. We went the whole five rounds and I only really got pulverised in the last, when he battered me round the ring first one way then the other. I lost one of my top front teeth, and with it went my passion for boxing.

  My enthusiasm for all other sports was undiminished. I swam, and played soccer and water polo whenever I could get a game. I played cricket for Hampshire Colts and might even have played for the County had things turned out differently. But unknown to me, far away from Portsmouth a man called Hitler was making plans of his own, and his plans for me impinged on Mum’s.

  3 September 1939 was my sixteenth birthday, and Britain and Germany celebrated by declaring war. The Bristow family were huddled around the beautifully veneered radio receiver in the dining room, its ornate fretwork spelling out the name ‘Philips’, as Mr Chamberlain announced in clear and sombre tones that ‘as from 11.15 am today, Great Britain is at war with Germany’.

  I have to say, it came as a surprise to me. My attention had been directed el
sewhere. I was aware of the talk, but hadn’t Chamberlain come back from Munich with his celebrated piece of paper, ensuring peace in our time? I felt a tinge of fright. Would we be bombed? ‘I’m absolutely sure we will,’ said Dad, and he was absolutely right. Portsmouth was hit early in the war and hammered regularly thereafter, but those old Victorian terraces took a lot of knocking down. Our house was only lightly damaged despite some very near misses and stands to this day. At Dad’s urging we set about fortifying the cellar against the Luftwaffe. Pit props were brought in for reinforcement; cupboards were installed and stocked with provisions. This was urgent and vital war work, and I plunged into it with a will.

  I missed all the bombing. On 4 September my mother received a telephone call from my housemaster, Colonel Willis, at Portsmouth Grammar School asking if I could be employed with other boys in removing school furniture destined for new premises well away from the town. That afternoon I found myself sitting in the back of an open truck en route to Christchurch, feeling very cold, in the company of a tough young lad called Peter Tickner who was just about to become the school First Eleven goalkeeper. Our lives were to come together again twenty-five years later when I was chief executive of British United Airways and Pete worked for me as a captain flying BAC-111s out of Gatwick.

  The move to Christchurch was well organised to the extent that all the students were comfortably billeted in the vast bed and breakfast empire that existed there. By a glorious turn of fate I was lodged in a house full of sixteen- to eighteen-year-old girls evacuated from a college in London, and a new chapter opened in my life. One of the girls, Susan, a dark-haired, exotic creature whose father was a figure in the Greek Embassy, found her way into my bed. I forget her last name; it was typically Greek with a lot of ‘dopoulopulos’ in it, but my memories are otherwise vivid and positive. I think we boys all got very serious about these girls, at least for a short time. They made us feel we were serious about them, anyway. Women always call the shots like that.