Born in 1961, Frank Gardner is the BBC’s full-time Security Correspondent, reporting for television, radio and online on issues of domestic and international security.
A fluent Arabist, with a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies, he was previously the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent based in Cairo, and before that in Dubai. He has written for the Economist, Daily Telegraph and The Best of Sunday Times Travel Writing. His first book was his best-selling memoir, Blood and Sand. Awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to journalism, and the prestigious El Mundo Prize for International Journalism, Frank Gardner is married with two children and lives in London.
TO THE TEAM AT MY PUBLISHERS, TRANSWORLD, including my ever-patient editor Simon Taylor, for backing this book, and Kate Samano, for keeping a cool head, and to my well-connected agent, Julian Alexander of LAW Associates, for recognizing my renewed love of travel after all my injuries even before I did.
To Michael Palin, the traveller’s traveller, for so generously sparing his time to write so eloquent a Foreword.
To the BBC’s former South America stringer-turned-ace-cameraman, Keith Morris, for his corrections to my dodgy spelling of Colombian names, and to Katy Brown for her corrections to my even more suspect spelling of Hungarian.
To George Seel, Tim Yates, Carrie Hill, Peregrine Muncaster, John Donald, Guy Bonser, James Maughan, Amanda, Eduardo Zandri, Natalie Morton, John Macintyre, Katie Pearson, Will Griffiths, Sean of BackUp Trust, Stuart Hughes, Dominic Hurst, Alex Gardiner and everyone else who’s ever had to put up with me on the road: thanks.
TRAVELLING AGAIN AFTER VERY SERIOUS INJURIES IS MOST definitely therapeutic. True, I still have to call up the airline in advance and explain that I cannot walk from the door of the plane to the seat, I still have to starve myself before short-haul European flights because there is no means of conveying me from my seat to the onboard toilet, and I still have to buy a business-class ticket for long-haul journeys to avoid getting pressure sores on my bum. But mentally, I have crossed a barrier: I no longer think, ‘That trip is too far or too hard,’ I just find myself working out the practicalities of getting over the various obstacles. It is almost as if there is a sliding scale whereby the less accessible a country is for someone in a wheelchair, the more people there are on hand to help. In Cambodia, the only way for me to get on and off the little turboprop plane to Siem Reap had been courtesy of a piggyback from two of the aircrew.
Not for one minute would I pretend that travelling is better now in a wheelchair than it was before. Quite the opposite, it is endlessly frustrating. To be unable to descend with my family into the spectacular rocky gorges of Bryce Canyon in Utah on holiday, for example, was almost unbearable for someone who would otherwise have been leading the charge. But I have found there is usually a more ready acceptance by the people whose country you are passing through, as if I could not possibly present a threat or an intrusion. And this imposed immobility has had another spin-off: years after abandoning it, I have resumed sketching, since I am now assured of a chair and a stable lap wherever I go.
But for more than four years after the injuries that put me in that wheelchair I had a nagging curiosity about one thing: I wanted to meet the man who saved my life that night in Riyadh. Dr Peter Bautz is a South African trauma surgeon, a gunshot-wound specialist whose team in Cape Town was treating an average of 114 victims a month. It was my incredible good luck that he happened to be working in a Riyadh hospital when I was shot; in fact he was in the final months of his five-year contract and was making preparations to leave. In the seventeen days when I was in his care at the King Faisal Hospital before I was airlifted back to Britain I never met him consciously; heavily sedated, I was only occasionally aware of someone in the room with a deep, Germanic-sounding voice. But Bautz and I had since exchanged text messages, with one of his earlier ones completely confusing me. ‘You had an acute case of lead poisoning,’ it read; only later did I learn this was medical black humour for being shot multiple times. He and his family had emigrated to Australia and while we often talked of going to see him it never quite happened. Then in December 2008, Bautz announced that he was coming to London for a conference and we arranged to meet in a hotel in Kensington.
‘Frank?’ said a deep voice from behind and above me, as I wheeled up to reception. It was more of a statement than a question. This was, after all, the man who had cut me open to save me and had stayed up through the night as I hovered on the cusp of life and death – he knew exactly what I looked like, inside and out. But now I saw him for the first time: tall, powerfully built, in his early fifties, with curly hair, a faint smile playing about his lips and a surgeon’s air of precision about him.
We sat down at a café table and ordered cappuccinos as Bautz powered up his laptop. ‘I hope you’re ready to see these,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought the pictures I kept from Riyadh.’ When the waitress brought our coffees she nearly dropped them on the floor and Bautz had to close the laptop quickly. The image on the screen must have looked like the final scene from a snuff movie: it was a close-up of my blood-soaked backside where a bullet had gone in, exited lower down, then gone into my thigh and come out again, four wounds from one shot. Once she had gone, Bautz continued his slideshow from hell, warming to his subject. ‘Now this one’s a beauty,’ he said, pointing to a neat entry wound, ‘but the exit wound on the other side is a shocker.’ I stared at the screen, surprisingly unsqueamish for once, looking at this mangled body on the operating table and feeling strangely detached. It felt almost as if this had happened to another person, not me.
‘Protoplasm,’ said Bautz. ‘Sorry?’ ‘Protoplasm. You survived because you had good protoplasm. It’s the condition the body is in at the time of trauma. If you had been older, heavier and a smoker your body would not have been able to fight so hard for survival, and yours was really fighting.’ I found myself silently thanking Marine Sergeant Terry Paliser for beasting me up all those Austrian mountains as a teenager. ‘So why don’t I remember anything about the hospital in Riyadh?’ I asked. ‘I can’t have been in surgery the whole time, can I?’ ‘No, you weren’t, but we gave you a drug called Medazalan intravenously. It’s a memory obliterator.’
Outside the window a woman was arguing with her dog, wagging her finger and shaking her head as it ran circles round her in the park. Kensington Gardens was cosily familiar to me: my father had taken me sledging there as a child, and then in the 1990s Amanda and I used to rollerblade through it at weekends, mercifully unaware that I would one day be looking out on it from a wheelchair. But there was one final footnote to come on this whole surgical survival saga. Bautz was giving a lecture the next day on damage control in trauma surgery at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. He would show his pictures, then I would appear as the ‘one he prepared earlier’.
So, on a cold clear December day I drove myself to the hospital I had last left strapped to a bed in an ambulance, to be met by the smiling face of Frank Cross, the consultant surgeon who did such a brilliant job of managing my recovery there in the months after I was airlifted back from Riyadh. Inside the lecture theatre Bautz calmly discussed such grisly topics as Abdominal Compartmental Syndrome, where the intestines become so swollen during surgery that the abdomen cannot be closed up for days – a condition which, needless to say, I had. Wearing my callipers beneath my trousers, I duly stood up, gave the medics the patient’s perspective on being shot and lifted my shirt up to show how the scars had healed, while Bautz and Cross smiled and nodded like a pair of genial god-parents. Then, at my request, we went up to the helipad on the roof. This was hugely symbolic for me, because it was where I had been brought in four years earlier by the Helicopter Emergency Medical Services, choppered in from Luton airport in a little red helicopter after a flight from Riyadh in a Saudi air ambulance. I looked across at the London landmarks on the skyline and down at the teeming streets of Whitechapel far below, and I know it’s a cliché but it felt good to be alive. When I was brought here that summer afternoon in 2004, morphined up and exhausted, incapable of surviving on normal food, I was a patient to be processed – I even had a codename, Dan Kilo. But now I was a visitor, peering in through the window at an unhappy juncture of my past life and feeling glad to have put it behind me, despite the continuing paralysis in my legs. It was a good moment.
So the horizons that once receded only to the lime-green walls of my hospital ward beneath that helipad are now rolling back once more. I still harbour ambitions to take our daughters to see orang-utans in the wild before either they all disappear or the girls grow up and become more interested in another kind of hairy primate. West and East Africa are high on my wish list for future destinations and as I write, we are saving to go on safari in Namibia. I am all too aware that there remain very real limitations imposed by my injuries, physical limitations that no amount of optimism and can-do attitude will ever get over. I have given this some thought, but just as when my ribs were broken in the karate gym all those years ago, just as when I sustained those terrible gunshot wounds in Riyadh, I have taken a deep breath and moved on. It is the only thing to do.
On 6 June 2004, in a quiet suburb of Riyadh, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by Islamist gunmen. Simon was killed outright. Frank was hit in the shoulder and leg. As he lay in the dust, pleading for his life, a figure stood over him and pumped four more bullets into his body at point-blank range . . .
Against all the odds, Frank Gardner survived, and this is his remarkable account of the agonizing journey he’s taken – from being shot and left for dead to where he is today, partly paralysed but alive.
It is a journey that began twenty-five years earlier, when a chance meeting with explorer Wilfred Thesiger inspired in the young Frank what would become a lifelong passion for the Arab world – an abiding interest that would take him throughout the Middle East and lead to his becoming a BBC journalist. And this same passion would, in the wake of 9/11, send Frank on another journey that came to dominate – and nearly end – his life: his coverage of Al-Qaeda.
Honest, moving and inspiring, Blood and Sand reveals a deep understanding of the Islamic world and offers an insider’s compelling analysis of the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ and what it means in these uncertain times.
‘Gardner tells his remarkable tale well and bravely, with an astonishing lack of anger and enduring love and respect for the Islamic world’
Sunday Times
‘What makes Gardner’s moving, often humorous, deeply personal story so important is the fact that he has woven into it a brilliantly dispassionate, clear-eyed account of the Islamic world’
Scotsman
9780553817713
CHRISTMAS DAY, AND A VISION OF HELL WAS PURSUING ME up an Austrian mountain in the rain. Sergeant Terry Palliser was all Royal Marine: muscled, moustached and superfit. ‘Get up there, you bastards!’ he roared to his unhappy bunch of trainees. ‘I’m going to make you regret every drop of beer you drank last night!’ Christmas Eve was already a distant memory, with its warm, candlelit Gasthaus atmosphere, a choir outside singing ‘Silent Night’ in German, steaming plates of dumplings and sauerkraut, and that faint smell of human excrement that used to linger in certain Alpine hotels because their plumbing worked rather differently from ours.
Along with half a dozen other teenage schoolboys from around Britain I was on a week-long biathlon ski course with the Army. It was a plot dreamed up by Bruce Tulloh, my hugely inspirational athletics coach at Marlborough College who had set the record for running across America. Since running and rifle shooting were two of the few things I excelled in, then why not combine them, he reasoned, and send me off in the holidays to try biathlon skiing? I had never even heard of this sport and had never been near a ski slope, but it sounded like a free holiday in the Alps to me. How little I knew.
Biathlon skiing was about as different from downhill skiing as it was possible to get. First off, it involved very little contribution from gravity: this was a sport where you had to power yourself over a twenty-kilometre course with around a third of it on the level, a third downhill and a third uphill. And then there was the added joy of having to carry a rifle on your back, since after every five kilometres you had to stop, unsling the rifle and shoot out the bull’s-eyes from five targets. Miss one and you had to ski a penalty lap of four hundred metres. Instead of using broad downhill skis, this sport used thin, flexible Nordic cross-country skis and a lightweight boot where only the toe was attached. You moved by kicking off with one leg, raising your heel free from the ski as you moved the other leg forward over the snow. In each hand you gripped a long, powerful ski pole to help propel you forward. Getting this whole leg–arm–ski-pole thing in sync was called the ‘Swedish Step’. And there were rules. ‘Keep your front knee bent and ahead of your foot,’ shouted the trainers, ‘and do not, I repeat, do not bring the ski poles across your chest. Why? Because if they hit an obstacle in the snow they’ll drive straight into your chest and you’ll be skewered like a kebab.’
Britain’s national biathlon ski team had no commercial sponsorship so it was run by the Army Physical Training Corps in Aldershot under a middle-aged fitness fanatic called Colonel Moore. Every team member had to join the Army as a private, then live, breathe and dream biathlon skiing for the next few years. The A squad was busy training for the next Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in Vermont, but Colonel Moore had his eye on the future and was already scouting for talent for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Since I was only sixteen and still at school I did not have to commit to anything yet, which suited me just fine, but it was agreed that a schoolmate, James Montefiore, and I would be taken on trial for a couple of years of training in the school holidays to see if we had what it took. We would have to apply ourselves completely and solemnly undertake never to go near a downhill ski slope, because the Army trainers knew that after just one taste of proper skiing we would be tempted to dismiss all this biathlon stuff as a lot of needless hard work.
There was, however, one key ingredient to biathlon skiing and that was snow. The problem with cross-country skiing is that because it is mainly done on the flat it takes place in the valleys, where, not surprisingly, the air is milder than higher up the mountains. On our first foray into the Alps in that winter of 1977, a warm wind suddenly descended on our village of Mandling in Austria’s Steiermark province. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve we had been sliding smoothly across trails that cut like railway lines through crisp, fresh snow, but the next day we woke up to driving wind and rain; all skiing was cancelled until further notice. But Sergeant Palliser was not the sort of instructor to give anyone Christmas Day off. At twenty-nine he knew he was already past his peak when it came to the Winter Olympics; we couldn’t tell if he was driving us hard out of personal career frustration or whether, buoyed up on a wave of altruism, he was determined to give us the best chance of getting to the Olympics. Either way, here he was at seven thirty in the morning on Christmas Day, looming in our bedroom doorway like a bad dream and barking instructions. ‘Right, lads, get yer running kit on. Downstairs. Five minutes.’
At an hour when all sensible people should have been either asleep or unwrapping presents round a tree, our Marine nemesis had us running Fartleks uphill. These were hundred-metre bursts of sprinting followed by hundred-metre stretches of jogging, and I use the term ‘jogging’ in the loosest possible sense. Palliser was not even breaking a sweat while we were all close to throwing up. ‘Try sucking in air,’ Mont advised me. ‘That’s it, breathe in deeply.’ A veteran of plenty of illicit pub crawls round the backstreets of Marlborough by the time he was fifteen, Mont knew all the tricks. ‘What are you two lesbians gossiping about?’ roared Palliser from somewhere behind us. ‘Right! If you’ve got the energy to swap stories you can both give me twenty press-ups . . . Proper ones! Not like that! Get your arse down flat, Gardner! What are you? A bloody camel? Right. Start again.’
And so it went on. The snow returned, the skis went back on, but the training was relentless. Whenever we got back to our hotel for meals we learned to snatch a few precious minutes’ rest on our bunks, zoning out completely and letting our aching muscles relax before we trooped out for more punishment. It is a technique I have often found useful in later life, grabbing a few moments’ respite in the midst of something quite demanding. We must have been burning up the carbs because I remember being permanently hungry, at one point blowing the last of my precious Austrian schillings on a block of truffle chocolate which I ate in one go. There were occasional interludes of light relief but they were few and far between. One night we got ourselves invited to an Austrian party and as we all piled into someone’s chalet a girl came up and gave me a long, lingering French kiss. I stood there stunned as she asked me something coyly in German, but my language skills failed me just when I needed them most. ‘OK,’ she said, giving me a parting peck on the cheek, ‘I go back to my boyfriend now.’ I looked over and there was a strapping blond Austrian watching us with a bored expression. This was all a bit weird.
‘So what d’you think, Mont?’ I asked my schoolfriend at the end of that first week. ‘Are we going to keep this biathlon ski thing up?’ Mont had both stamina and a fiercely competitive streak (he was later commissioned into the Royal Marines); in one timed race he lost his temper when one of the other trainees overtook him, and hurled his ski pole after him like a javelin. It was quite a good shot, hitting his opponent on the calf from some distance, and I think the instructors secretly admired his spirit, but Mont still had to be reprimanded because they really couldn’t have half the team impaling each other every time they were overtaken. We agreed to give it another year, then promptly forgot all about biathlon skiing as soon as term began. But in the holidays we were summoned back to Aldershot for short, sharp training sessions where they would clamp cold, wet heart-rate sensors on to our bare chests as we pedalled like crazy on stationary bicycles called VO2 machines. ‘It’s all about hearts ’n’ lungs,’ said the instructors. ‘You need a strong engine for this sport.’ At the blast of a whistle we would have to jump on and off a bench until we were well and truly out of breath, then fire off ten rounds from a rifle at a target, to simulate the breathing control needed to shoot straight during a race. In the summer we pounded round an artificial ski track made out of wooden grooves built on a Hampshire hill; the following winter we were back in Austria, and in the spring we were competing with other juniors in Scotland. I had mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, I really enjoyed cross-country skiing – I loved the freedom and independence of being able to go anywhere across a silent, snowbound landscape, powered by my own muscles, without being dependent on the noisy machinery of ski lifts or cable cars. On the other hand, these races were really very hard work and with the constant mention of the 1988 Winter Olympics I was becoming increasingly wary of committing the next nine years of my life to a sport in which, to put it bluntly, Britain did not excel. The East Europeans and the Scandinavians had proper winters and trained for months in real snow, often by floodlight, and in retrospect I suspect that artificial chemicals probably played a significant part in some of the Eastern Bloc successes back then. Despite all the effort the British squad put in, it was extremely rare for them to get anywhere near the top ten finishers in a race. In short, I was having my doubts. But so was Colonel Moore, the man in charge, who ever so nicely agreed that neither Mont nor I were what he was after for the Seoul Winter Olympics of 1988. After all that pressure, we felt like birds released from a cage.
By now I had bought my own set of cross-country skis, boots and poles, which stood propped up against the wall in my parents’ garage, a constant reminder that I should take them away and use them somewhere interesting. In my final year at school I had started to get the travel bug: at the age of seventeen I announced I was spending halfterm at a friend’s place in London, then secretly bought a return boat fare to Holland. My parents were none the wiser until I got back and confessed I had hitch-hiked from Amsterdam to Antwerp and back. As road trips go, standing thumb-out beside a featureless motorway in the Lowlands on a mild afternoon in October is about as tame as it gets. But for me at the time it was pretty exciting. I had fond memories of living in Holland before I was ten and was delighted to be back on the Continent at last, savouring the freedom to roam wherever I wanted. As I got dropped off from one lift beside a field on the outskirts of Antwerp, the enormity of what I was doing suddenly hit me: I had very little money, I was several miles short of a town where I knew no one, I had no idea where I would spend the night and it was getting dark. And my parents thought I was in Bayswater. To this day, the smell of certain pungent vegetable crops like kale and cabbage reminds me of that liberating moment in the Belgian countryside. I wasn’t in the least bit worried, I was exhilarated. Hours later, having failed to find anywhere cheap to stay, I flagged down a police car and the Belgian gendarmes obligingly dropped me off at a backpackers’ hostel, or ‘YMCA’ as it was known. I don’t recall seeing any handlebar moustaches, Californian biking leathers or Red Indian outfits as we queued to wash our dishes in the dreary communal kitchen – but when a new song of the same name came on the radio we all sang along, completely unaware of the enduring cult hit it was to become.
Now eighteen, with a place at Exeter University to study Arabic miraculously secured, the glory of the fabled gap year stretched ahead of me and in February 1980 I announced that I was going to take my skis up to Arctic Finland. My parents took it quite well, offering sensible advice and practical help: my father lent me his fleecelined RAF flying boots that he had bought off a pilot after the War. Having skied quite a bit in Norway, he made little secret of the fact that he was very envious.
Back in those days before EasyJet and Ryanair it was almost inconceivable that a hard-up student like me would fly to Scandinavia; instead the trip would be a long slog by boat, train, boat again, then more train – but that, of course, was half the fun of it. I bought a ticket at Victoria station, crossed the Channel, watched Holland turn into Germany from the train window, then raced a fellow backpacker, a spiky Yorkshire punk called Muzz, up some medieval tower in Copenhagen. In Stockholm I killed time before the Finland ferry by exploring the cobbled backstreets of the historic Gamla Stan quarter and stuffing myself with hot waffles dripping in whipped cream and molten strawberries. But it was disturbingly mild for February. I had expected the place to be in the grips of a bitter Scandinavian winter; instead, by the time I crossed the Baltic to Helsinki it was raining. The Finns were wearing light raincoats and going for strolls in the park while I was clumping around in my wool-lined boots lugging a pair of skis. I must have looked ridiculous. But I did have a plan of sorts: a crumpled address in my pocket and an open invitation to stay with a Finnish girl halfway up the country in a place called Seinäjoki. I had met Elona a couple of summers earlier in a sweaty disco in Majorca. Glitter ball on the ceiling, coloured patterns on the dance floor, Bony M’s ‘Brown Girl In The Ring’ playing on the turntable. After I’d had several glasses of sangria the three blonde Finnish girls sitting in the corner had looked irresistible. ‘Why you not ask them to dance?’ asked Olivier, my French-exchange host, his arms already entwined, octopus-like, round a freckly girl from Liverpool. I was supposed to be spending my pre-A-level summer learning French with his family, but they had transplanted themselves to their summer apartment in the Spanish resort of Magaluf, which rather defeated the object. Still, this was fun, I had never been clubbing before. ‘OK,’ I said and stumbled over to the girls. Two got up immediately but one stayed and patted the couch next to her, and when we parted that night addresses were exchanged, then later Christmas cards, although I really had no clear recollection what she looked like. That should have been the end of it, but on my skinflint backpacker’s budget I liked the idea of a free pad on this trip; I would see Finland the proper way, I told myself, staying with a Finn, meeting her friends, learning a bit of the language.
In the fading late-afternoon light the train from Helsinki slowed to a halt at Seinäjoki station, where Elona had agreed to meet me. Here the snow lay thick on the ground and my skis no longer looked out of place, in fact quite a few other people on the platform were carrying them too. But who was I looking for? What did Elona look like? She was blonde, I knew that much, but in Finland that was hardly a distinguishing feature. The crowd on the platform began to thin out, train doors were being slammed, whistles blown. A tall, svelte girl with shimmering blonde hair and piercing blue eyes stood by herself, looking around for someone. Wahay, I thought, here we go! And then she ran into the arms of a man with a briefcase. There was now only one other person left on the platform and she was staring right at me, her unkempt hair falling across her face, which was slightly smudged with mascara. ‘You are Frank?’ she asked tentatively. I have always been rubbish at disguising my emotions and in that moment I’m ashamed to say that my disappointment must have shown. Elona was perfectly nice – after all, she was putting me up in her flat – but I did not find her attractive, and the feeling may well have been mutual. Her English was very limited and my Finnish was almost non-existent, so we rode in the cab in awkward silence broken only by brief, pointless exchanges like: ‘Lot’s of snow, I see’ (me), ‘Excuse please?’ (her), ‘Snow – plenty of snow here’, ‘Slow?’, ‘No, snow – you know, white stuff’, ‘Ah yes. Snow. We have snow.’ This was going to be a long week.
The taxi pulled up at a low block of flats and Elona shrugged almost apologetically, saying, ‘Is home.’ She pushed open the door to reveal a wonderfully clean and functional Scandinavian apartment, all pine surfaces and frosted glass. I smiled in appreciation, then froze – Elona was showing me the bedroom, where the covers on the double bed were pointedly turned down on both sides. It was one of those intensely embarrassing moments when you want the earth to swallow you up. ‘D’you know what?’ I muttered. ‘I’ve got this bad cold, I think I’d better stay on the couch.’ Elona did have enough English to tell me that she found her job as a secretary very boring, she had no boyfriend, and at the age of twenty-four she worried she was getting old. Despite all my verbal attempts to cheer her up she seemed to be terminally morose. I made a rapid reappraisal of the wild week of booze-filled Finnish partying that my eighteen-year-old mind had allowed to ferment.
In the morning Elona went off to work and I uncurled myself from the couch and got up to inspect the view. Outside the window a cross-country ski trail snaked away through the snow beneath the larch trees and every few minutes a fit-looking Finn would stride past on skis, doing that Swedish Step thing with the ski poles that the Army had taught us. This was prime Nordic ski country and I could hardly wait to get out there, so I downed a glass of fruit juice then burst out into the cold glare of the winter sun. This was exhilarating! With my breath clouding in the sub-zero air I flung my skis down on to the snow, clipped the toes of my soft Nordic ski boots into the bindings, gripped the ski poles then launched myself off into the winter landscape, kicking out with my back leg, sliding forward with the front. The fresh snow made that wonderful crisp scraping noise as my skis passed over it, like two strips of Velcro being ripped apart, and within minutes I was gliding through a forest of white larches, passing other skiers and being passed in turn; it seemed as if the whole country was on skis. Wooden signs in Finnish pointed to exotic and unpronounceable destinations, but when I followed one on a whim to somewhere called ‘Keskussairaläa’ it turned out to be the Central Municipal Hospital.
Back in Elona’s flat that evening I enthused about what a brilliant day I had had, which was quite tactless given that I was on holiday and she was working, in a job she disliked. But Elona didn’t ski, and her indifference became the catalyst for me to move on to where I really wanted to be: in the far north of Finland, hard up on the Arctic Circle. After two days I said goodbye – in Finnish, which raised almost the only smile of my whole ill-conceived stay – and headed for the railway station, to catch the night train to Lapland.
In Seinäjoki the snow had covered the ground but the trees had been bare and dark. Now, as the train forged ever northward, I awoke to a magical winter wonderland where every pine tree was weighed down by what looked like wheelbarrow loads of fresh snow. There were few larch trees this far north, but those that grew were frosted white while the low sun sparkled across a landscape straight out of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. The train passed snowbound station platforms in towns with names like Kokkola, Oulu and Kemi; I was now far up this country of frozen lakes and forests, the land that inspired Sibelius to write all those mournful but moving symphonies, but I was about to be snapped out of my reverie. ‘Rovaniemi! Rovaniemi!’ called out the guard, announcing the name of my destination. This was the ‘capital’ of Finnish Lapland and at 67 degrees north it was teeth-chatteringly cold – so cold, in fact, that when the door opened on to the platform I thought seriously about staying inside the nice warm train. Then I had a fleeting image of Marine Sergeant Terry Palliser, who would not have been impressed: I had come to ski in Arctic Finland so now it was time to brace myself and step out into the minus-25-degrees air. Everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going except me.
Right, concentrate, I told myself, there must be a tourist-information office somewhere. There was, and when I found it they soon directed me to a warm and cheap hostel where I immediately treated myself to the local speciality: fillet of venison with arctic cloudberry sauce. Peering out of the steamed-up window at the bleak and frozen world outside, I tried to take stock of my situation. All right, so I had made it this far, but temperatures like these were not to be taken lightly. After all, the Finnish winter had seen off both the invading Soviet troops who died in their thousands in these forests in the 1940s, and the Germans, who had burnt Rovaniemi to the ground in revenge for being driven out by Finnish ski troops. When I ventured out it had better be with a purpose and a clear idea of how I was going to get back. I unfolded the local map the tourist office had given me and traced my finger along the Arctic Circle. To my surprise, this was actually a long way south of the North Pole and quite a substantial part of mainland Norway, Sweden and Finland lay above it on the map. More importantly, it lay just a short bus ride north of Rovaniemi. Back then, in 1980, this place had yet to become the renowned ‘visit-Santa’ package destination it was by 2008, with 800,000 tourists flying in each year, 120,000 of them from Britain. Leaving my skis in the hostel I went out to buy supplies for the next day, loading up my rucksack with all the things I reckoned would sustain me for a day’s cross-country skiing in these glacial temperatures, then went back inside and ate some more. ‘Remember,’ Sergeant Palliser had lectured, ‘you ski tomorrow on what you eat today.’
The morning dawned pink and blue, if that is possible. The low, slanting rays of the northern sun lit up the snowbound trees with a curious, almost supernatural light, but in the shadows everything was blue and purple. I had never seen a light like this before. Stamping my feet and clutching my thin cross-country skis, I boarded a bus bound for the town of Kemijärvi on the other side of the Arctic Circle. But almost immediately the doors hissed open, depositing me at a wooden cabin on the edge of the forest. A colourful sign at the side of the road announced in several languages that this spot lay right on the Arctic Circle. ‘You can get a certificate inside,’ said a voice behind me in English. I turned to see a man clothed from head to toe in what I took to be fancy dress. On his feet were reindeer-hide slippers with pointed, upturned toes like shoes worn by an elf, and above them he wore embroidered trousers, a quilted red and blue jacket and a woollen cap that covered his ears. ‘This is not fancy dress,’ he said defensively, as if reading my mind. ‘This is our Lapp national costume. You can buy it inside.’
Ten minutes later I emerged from the ‘Arctic Gift Shop’ with my souvenir certificate and a nifty pair of Lapp reindeer slippers which I could envisage my father wearing in front of the fire at home. Now for what I had really come for. I squinted up at the morning sun then walked away from it in the opposite direction, crossing the road to the north and entering a silent, frozen world. I snapped on my skis, shouldered my rucksack and glided off into the wilderness.
At first I was concentrating hard on carving a path through the deep snow as there were no trails, no tracks, in fact nothing to distinguish one patch of forest from another; this was Hansel and Gretel country and it would be easy to get lost. When I finally looked up, something was moving between the trees, something large and slow. I began to wonder if you could out-ski a bear. But this turned out to be a far more benign and familiar creature: it was a reindeer, one of nearly 200,000 that roamed this part of northern Scandinavia, crossing at leisure the heavily armed border with the Soviet Union to the east. The animal looked up from foraging in the trees and held my gaze for a long time before vanishing into the forest. It gave me a glimpse of a natural, nomadic world and in that moment I longed to go after it, skiing on recklessly into the wilderness as the snow became ever deeper and harder to negotiate. I glanced at my watch: it was only early afternoon but I had been skiing for several hours and with the short Arctic winter days it was already growing dark. It was time to head back to the road, the bus and my warm hostel before the temperature plummeted with nightfall. To have spent the day skiing alone in the frozen forests of Arctic Finland had been a liberation. Now, I thought, let’s see the rest of the world.
‘YES MR GARDNER, THE TEST SHOWS POSITIVE. I’M afraid you have typhoid fever.’ These were not words I wanted to hear. I had woken that morning in a fleapit hotel in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica with my head pounding and my guts churning like a combine harvester; I had spent much of the night commuting between the sagging mattress and the foetid loo. I suspected I knew the culprit: for the last week I had been in Istanbul, hanging out with Dutch backpackers, and on our last day we had pooled our resources and eaten at a particularly suspect kebab stall. From then on, the train journey westwards across Thrace had been tough going, sandwiched as I was between large, belching, sweating men and their interminable cigarettes, feeling ever more nauseous as I tried not to vomit, standing up to clear my head, swaying in the aisle, then immediately having to sit down with a bump.
In the 35-degree heat I had wandered alone and bewildered around Thessalonica, hunting for a hospital. My rucksack was cutting into my shoulders and my forehead felt as if it was on fire. I clutched a note, written in Greek by someone on the train from Istanbul, which said I might have typhoid and could the reader please direct me to a hospital, but it was hours before I finally found one. A nurse read my note, looked at me gravely, then told me to wait in line with the old women queueing for their physiotherapy. After an hour of moving no closer to the front of the queue I could bear it no longer; I felt like death warmed up. I got up, tottered over to some men in white coats, clutched my stomach and groaned. They ignored me. But then I uttered the magic word ‘Constantinoplou’ (Greek for Istanbul) and they turned and grinned. Why of course, if I had come from that place then surely I must have a genuine medical complaint, so I was taken straight into the surgery. The Greek doctors spoke some English but were unsure what to make of me, so they gave me an injection in the backside for good measure then took a blood sample. They told me to come back in an hour to hear the result, but when I did they confessed that they had lost the sample and asked if I would mind giving another. This time they analysed it on the spot and there followed a sudden flurry of form-filling. They told me I had caught typhoid and needed to be transferred to another hospital that specialized in highly infectious diseases. I did not like the sound of this one bit, but by now I was so exhausted that the prospect of a ride in an air-conditioned ambulance was quite appealing. It was not to be. ‘So now you must find taxi,’ I was told. ‘Here is address.’ With that, the nurses hoisted my rucksack back on to my shoulders, turned me around to face the door and all but shoved me through it.
The Limodon Hospital was a substantial building on a small hill, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence; I could not be sure if this was to keep the public out or the patients in. From reception a doctor led me to a basement where I was cross-examined. The medical staff were very concerned about where I had spent the previous night in case I had set off an epidemic of typhoid in the city. I told them I could not remember the hotel’s name but could show them if they drove me. At that, the matter was dropped. I was then told to strip off and put on a pair of hospital-issue pyjamas, and was escorted to my ward. This turned out to be in a separate outhouse, set in a dusty courtyard; a woman with a handbag was sitting sobbing quietly outside. There might as well have been a sign above the door reading ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ The hut contained only about a dozen patients but it was already full so I was given a bed in the corridor, between the peeling wallpaper and the open door on to the courtyard. From behind me I could hear the Greek patients whispering, ‘Typhus! Typhus!’ I did not know what illnesses had brought them in here, but they all gave me a wide berth on that first day.
I slumped on my bed and took stock of my surroundings. Every few minutes a squall of hot wind blew dust and dirt into the ‘ward’ from outside, though it did not seem to bother anyone. Cats pawed around in the rubbish heaps, which seemed to consist mainly of rotting bread. Inside the hut, the much-in-demand lavatory was one of those colourful footprint jobs where you squat double behind a door with no lock and whatever you produce has a habit of bouncing back up at you. The stone floor, I noticed, frequently flooded with urine and faeces, yet I never saw anyone wash their hands. It occurred to me that if I was not careful, I would end up considerably sicker than when I came into this place. I was just wondering how long I would be stuck here when a young man with terrible acne came up and introduced himself in English. Johann was from Belgium and his spots turned out to be chickenpox. He was very excited to find someone he could communicate with as the Greek patients, he said, were a surly lot. ‘They will talk to you in Greek but they will never sit on the same bench as you. Really, it is most comical.’ This wasn’t turning out too badly, I thought, but then at midnight a nurse came round and insisted on extracting another blood sample, this time a whole testtubeful of the stuff. She then motioned for me to roll over on to my stomach for an injection in the backside. It was, without doubt, the most painful injection I had ever experienced to date, administered like a public execution with the whole ward watching. That night I wrote in my diary: ‘as the drug was forced into the muscle it felt like I imagine it must feel to be shot’. At eighteen I still had a lot to learn.
Somewhere in the small print of the rules and regulations of Limodon Hospital, I decided, there must be a clause that read, ‘Do not on any account allow the patient a whole night’s sleep.’ Midnight injections were mandatory and the nurses came again at five thirty a.m. for more injections and blood samples. Just when I was drifting off to sleep again there would be a stampede for the loo by the more elderly inmates. One old man seemed to be groaning in there at regular intervals, but when I eventually went to investigate it turned out to be a sheep. This did not seem to strike anyone as strange, in fact the animal came and went as it pleased, wandering into the ward from the courtyard, nuzzling the odd patient, then leaving, although often not before dumping a load of droppings on the floor. One nurse made the mistake of trying to pat it and the beast turned nasty, charging at her and knocking her over.
Meanwhile, apart from the mosquito bites, nobody here actually seemed to have anything wrong with them. Far from being confined to our beds, we were left to wander around the yard in the sun, which is where Johann and I would sit and chew our breakfast. In fact, I was feeling pretty good for someone supposed to have typhoid. ‘You must drink milk!’ said the doctors. ‘And eat bread!’ But the bread was dry and hard to swallow, while the milk tasted like sugary water, so I resolved to pour it away when no one was looking. But this was Greece and there was always someone looking, particularly since the other patients had developed a touching concern for my welfare. If I was to have any hope of disposing of this sticky liquid I had to tiptoe round to the back of the hut, which was always buzzing with flies. When lunch arrived it was rice, vine leaves, meat and peaches – in fact a veritable Mediterranean buffet – for the other patients, but a bowl of foul-tasting baby food for me. I obtained permission from a doctor to eat biscuits since he was confident I didn’t have any, but I soon discovered there was a highly developed system for smuggling forbidden food in from outside. First you had to go round to the front gates of the hospital and make friends with the guards. You then had to bribe them with a few drachma notes, and they would then send for a grocer who would happily pass food through the fence at extortionate prices. Fortunately no one had checked the contents of my rucksack when I first came in and I managed to eke out a packet of chocolatechip cookies for some days.
In the sultry hours of the afternoon I chatted to a policeman who was a patient in the main block. He had caught viral hepatitis in an Athens jail, only noticing something was wrong when his urine turned the colour of cognac. That evening a new set of doctors came to peer at me. ‘You must not drink milk!’ they announced. They also admitted that they did not know what, if anything, was wrong with me. With some persuading they began to come round to the theory I had been working on in the blessed hours between injections: that my blood was only showing positive for typhoid because of the inoculation I had been given before I set off from Britain, and that this had in fact been a simple case of food poisoning. Doh! I decided to press home my advantage, winning a reprieve from their beloved buttock injections, but that night the men in white coats padded over to my bed with worried expressions. ‘We feel very sorry for you,’ they began. Oh God, what is it now, I thought. Salmonella? Cholera? Gastro-enteritis? The doctors glanced at each other and cleared their throats to deliver the bad news. ‘England nil, Italia one. You lose bad in the football, yes?’
The next day no fewer than eleven doctors and nurses were gathered around my bed, the cream of Thessalonica’s medical profession, listening while I argued my case for early release. ‘Look,’ I reasoned, ‘I’ve felt fine for three days now, I have no temperature, and anyway this couldn’t be typhoid because I’ve learnt it has an incubation period of two weeks and I wasn’t in Turkey then.’ At the mention of Turkey their faces darkened; the two countries may have been NATO allies but they really didn’t like each other one bit.
The doctors countered with a suggestion of their own. ‘Maybe you caught an amoeba?’ said a man with a luxuriantly bushy moustache. This was clearly medical diagnosis by group negotiation. I requested a three-day trial without any drugs but was refused; every few hours I was to be given a small pharmacy of foul-smelling pills. I had no idea what they were supposed to do, but they smelt so bad I decided I would be better off without them: I pocketed them dutifully then went round the back of the hut at the first chance I got and dumped them on the garbage pile. I was not surprised to see a growing heap of other patients’ pills there too. I returned to sit in the sun with the other patients and listen to my tiny radio. As luck would have it the local station was playing all the hits of The Police, so I treated the ward to the finest lyrics Sting had to offer and was finally rewarded with a place on the treasured bench.
At dawn the routine resumed. A nurse woke me at five a.m., quite unnecessarily, to tell me to take some pills at eight. Breakfast was stale bread and crumbly goat’s cheese. I read my well-thumbed copy of Midnight Express until the doctors came round. They were palpably tense – I suspected that their professional pride had been hurt by first misdiagnosing what was wrong with me, and then being unable to diagnose it at all. As if suddenly wanting to play a new game, they now sent me off for a stomach X-ray.
Back in the yard with no one about, I stripped to the waist to bask in the June sunshine, only to be confronted by a frantically gesticulating doctor who sent me inside and banned me from the sun. As soon as he was gone I sneaked up on to the roof, but was soon discovered and ordered back downstairs. It can only be a matter of time, I thought, before I get sentenced to solitary. I wondered what my Dutch friends in Istanbul were doing, and realized that by now they would probably have crossed into Iran, well on their way overland to Katmandu. And here was I, rotting away in this stagnant dustbowl of a hospital with a bunch of cranks for doctors. I had not been ill for a decade and I wasn’t ill now – all I had had was a twenty-four-hour bout of food poisoning. I was kicking myself for having panicked into thinking it was anything more serious. I began to think of escape.
The next day a nurse brought me my X-rays and said I was ‘more than normal’. ‘However,’ she cautioned, raising an elegantly shaped eyebrow at me, ‘they found a strakulomunos