Operation Scheherazade
by Sinbad
Chapter 5
Of course it made sense that once the family found themselves back in Britain, they should settle Ricky into Boarding School. He'd have had to go within a year anyway, and it was just necessary to negotiate with the school to arrange that he become a pupil there a year early. But it didn't make it any easier for him, lying in his bed in the long narrow dormitory. Twenty-eight beds in two long rows, and another twenty-eight in the room above, in addition to the single-bed studies for the prefects and privileged senior boys.
Ricky was of course a junior, and a new boy at that. He had not yet made any friends and was feeling agonisingly homesick. His parents had rented a flat above his mother's brother in Blackheath and within a week had found him a place at this school. And left him here. He'd never felt so abandoned. He missed his parents and his friends from Jordan, especially his best friend Chris.
He had never slept in a dormitory before and it was unsettling to lie and listen to the breathing and, in some cases, snoring of twenty-seven other boys, and the creaking of bedsprings as they turned on their uncomfortable hair mattresses. He lay on his side, watching the mound under the bedclothes in the bed next to his rise and fall in the moonlight as the boy breathed steadily and slowly. And the tears came, oozing from his eyes and running down to dampen the pillow where he lay.
Eventually he slept, and soundly. In the morning he woke in fear, to the sound of a strident electric bell hammering insistently into his skull. He sat bolt upright, disorientated, and slowly realised where he was. A feeling of despair flooded through him and his shoulders slumped. He took his cue from the other boys and swung himself out of bed, put on his dressing gown, collected his wash bag from the bedside cabinet and stumped down the centre of the dormitory to the bathroom. He washed the sleep out of his eyes and had a pee at the long urinal and returned to the dormitory and dressed himself. Clean socks and underpants, but the same shirt as yesterday – shirts had to last two days. At home he always dressed in clean fresh clothes and he hated this.
Unlike the night before, when the dormitory had been cacophonous and the housemaster had to shout to make himself heard at lights out time, this morning nobody was talking, everyone was going through the routine zombie-like, mechanically. Once dressed, the boys filed downstairs and out across the green to the dining hall, where they queued with trays to collect their breakfast, a full fry-up which Ricky would grow to appreciate as the best meal of the day.
It was in the dining hall that everything changed. As Ricky took his tray, now laden with his breakfast, across the room towards a mostly empty table to eat, he walked past other tables with boys of all sizes bent over their plates eating. As he passed one such table he jumped when a voice called out “Ricky!”
Unbelievably, the boy who pushed his chair back and rushed around the table to punch Ricky on the shoulder excitedly was Chris.
“Ow! Hello, you! How...?”
“Dad said you'd be surprised! They hadn't sorted out my school and they got all panicked by the evacuation and having to find me a school quickly. So my folks asked your folks about it, and they told them where you were going, and my Dad got me in here. And here I am! Pleased to see me?”
“You bet I am! I really hated yesterday but now you're here it's all different. Which house are you in?”
“I'm in School house. You?”
“Maze Green house. That's the one at the top of the green, by the tennis courts.”
“Pity we're not in the same house. That would have been brill.”
Ricky took his tray and sat next to Chris, squeezing in between him and another boy, who ignored them both. There were about twelve boys around the table and the two friends talked together, sufficiently wrapped up in their excitement not to notice the disdain on the faces of the other diners. Neither boy heard the whisper between two boys across the table from them:
“First names – that's so sick. What are they, poofters?”
The boys from Jordan would have a lot to learn in a very short space of time if they were to survive in the only place where Darwinian Evolution really works, the British Public School system. The survival of the fittest.
The boy sitting directly opposite called out:
“Hello, you boy, did I hear your name's Chris? I'm Charles. So pleased to meet you!” and a limp hand was held out to be shaken. Chris took it hesitantly, and a suppressed titter ran around the table.
Another boy piped up: “I'm Cedric!”
Undisguised laughter now.
and another: “and I'm Cyril!”
The laughter grew.
The boy at the end of the table joined in: “I say, isn't it simply spiffing that we all have names beginning with a C. I'm Chumley, by the way!” and it was clear from the ridiculous, affected accent that the name would be spelled Cholmondeley. This was enough to cause the group to collapse in howls of hilarity and Chris and Ricky left the table to take their trays back to the servery to be washed.
So they learned a lesson, and from then on were careful to use surnames only. After a while they got used to being Sutton and Taylor. When roll call was taken any time they were both present, they came next to each other in the alphabetical list, which was neat.
It was tough on the two boys to get used to this new life. Quite apart from the homesickness they both suffered, there was the very foreign-ness of the boarding school life. Everything happened when a bell rang. Some things happened that seemed strange to them but apparently normal to the other boys, for instance swimming lessons took place naked, the wearing of trunks punishable by detention. The two boys were used to swimming, in Jordan school had started at eight and finished at one because it was considered too hot for the children to work in the afternoon, and their mothers had been in the habit of picking up the boys from school and taking them straight to the big swimming pool at the hotel on the second circle. So swimming was an important part of life and they were both very good at it. But it took a long time to lose the self-consciousness about 'swinging free'.
Neither boy would admit it to the other, but each were missing their mother. They missed the affection and love that they were used to taking for granted; there was no substitute for a mother's love at the school. They were not the only boys who cried themselves to sleep each night for the first couple of weeks of term.
The boys were allowed to go home at weekends, but neither Chris or Ricky had parents close enough to make that practical more than a couple of times in a term. To make matters worse, the war in Jordan died down quickly and journalists dubbed it the six day war, although it continued for months in different areas. But Amman quite quickly became again a reasonably safe place to be, and Ricky's Dad wrote to him to tell him that he was going back, to complete the period he had originally been posted to Jordan for. Shirley would not be going, so she would be living in England, but nowhere near Ricky's school. Ricky would be spending school holidays alternately with his father in Jordan and with his mother in England.
Chris' parents had decided to settle in England and were in the process of buying a house in Surrey. So Chris would have a home base, but there was no chance of them spending holidays together any more.
Their days were quite full, with compulsory prep. time on weekday evenings, and lessons on Saturday mornings and sports on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Only Sunday was mostly their own time, although even then they had compulsory church in the morning. The two boys got together most Sunday afternoons and explored. There was a wooded area in the school's grounds down near the lodge at the beginning of the drive. And one of the trees was an old, tall oak, with an errant branch that grew diagonally downwards from around ten feet up the trunk, and eventually brushed the ground around thirty feet out before curving back upwards again. Without this branch the tree would have been impossible for a small boy to climb because there was no branch low enough on the trunk. But by walking up this branch from the end you could get to the trunk already ten feet up, and from there clamber from branch to branch, higher and higher. There were several places that required ingenuity to climb past, but Ricky had his experience with the pine trees at home and he was able to lead Chris right up to the very top, where they stuck their heads up above the canopy of the woodland and enjoyed the view all around. The top of this tree became a favourite place for them, where they were unlikely to be discovered or disturbed. It felt safe, although if they lost their grip they would have fallen probably eighty feet to the ground. And up here on a Sunday afternoon Chris and Ricky sat in the top of the tree, legs dangling either side of their seat, and discussed home, and the mystery of the dinar note.
Ricky told Chris how, a day after they arrived in England, his father had taken him on the train into central London, and on the Underground for the first time, to Westminster Bridge Road and the imposing building at Number 100 that was the headquarters of MI6, or SIS – the British Secret Intelligence Service. Ricky had wondered why a secret organisation would have such a prominent and publicised building as its headquarters, but he assumed they knew what they were doing.
They had climbed the steps to the imposing entrance hall, and presented themselves at the reception desk and been shown to a row of straight backed chairs against a wall and asked to wait to be called. And after an awkward quarter of an hour feeling like patients in a dentist's waiting room, they were approached by a deferential clerk who murmured: “Mr Taylor? Come this way, please.”
Roger got up and grabbed Ricky's hand, pulling him with him as he followed the stick-thin man who pattered delicately along a marble-lined corridor like a Kenneth Williams caricature. He led them to a door marked 'Middle East' and opened it and ushered them in. They found themselves in an ante-room with a reception desk, and once again presented themselves, and once again were shown to a row of chairs and told to wait.
This time they were collected after only a minute or so, and directed through a door to an office, a big spacious office, with wood panelling and bookshelves everywhere, and a big mahogany desk in the centre of the room with three chairs on one side and one swivel chair on the other. The swivel chair was occupied by a very fat man, with a shock of silver curly hair and glasses, and a smile which took in not just his mouth but his nose, eyes and eyebrows so that his whole face smiled benignly at the two Taylors. When he saw Ricky his smile widened further, and his eyes crinkled up so much that they almost closed.
“Mr Taylor, I think? And Richard, is it? Come in, come in. Take a seat, sit down, do. Would you like a cup of tea? Do you like tea, Richard, or would you rather have milk?” All of this was delivered with an infectious enthusiasm and Roger and Richard tried to answer the questions as they came at them. But the fat man didn't leave his chair, just pushed a button on his desk and moments later a young woman entered with a notepad. She took an order for tea for Roger and milk for Ricky.
“You have us at a disadvantage, sir?” asked Roger.
“I do? How? Oh, sorry, so I do. Silly of me.” said the man across the desk. “I'm Cholmondeley Farquharson, head of the Mid East department. Pleased to meet you!”. He pronounced it 'Chumley Farkerson' though Ricky could picture the correct spelling. Mr Farquharson held out a pudgy hand to be shaken – again without getting out of his seat. Roger got up to shake the hand, but Ricky had got a fit of the giggles over the ridiculous name, which reminded him of the ragging he and Chris had got from the boys at the meal table at the beginning of term.
Much to Ricky's surprise, Cholmondeley opened a file on his desk and slid out the banknote that King Hussein had given him. “Let's talk about this money. Richard, I want you to tell me exactly how you came by it.”
And Ricky told him, mentioning every detail he could remember about the occasion, the colour of the motorboat, the appearance of the boatman and the four men with the King, and the details of the King's rather abrupt conversation with him. He even included his impression that the King cut the conversation short and passed him the dinar note when he noticed one of the other men had turned back and was approaching Ricky's position.
The lady appeared with the tea, and a plate of biscuits and slices of cake. She left the tray on the desk and returned to the anteroom.
Mr Farquharson was a very good listener, sitting silent through Ricky's hesitant recounting of his tale and just nodding or breathing 'hmm' at appropriate points to encourage him. And when Ricky had finished his story, with the arrival back in Amman and the discovery that they were about to be evacuated, Ricky made it clear he was disappointed that the story had left his hands and he no longer knew what others knew about it. And he asked Mr Farquharson to tell him the whole story so far.
The fat man sat back in his seat, deep in thought, for a minute or more before speaking.
“I would like to tell you everything we know about this, but then we wouldn't be a Secret Intelligence Service any more, would we? I think there are some things we can tell you, though, and I do think you deserve to know as much I can tell. You must understand what I am about to tell you is in strictest confidence and not to be mentioned outside this room?”
The Taylors, father and son, nodded enthusiastically. Mr Farquharson continued.
“King Hussein has access to intelligence sources that we don't have. He is a remarkable man, a unique power in the Middle East. He has united a divided country and ruled it peacefully for years, although it is in the middle of the most strife-ridden region in the world, and nearly a quarter of his population are refugees, displaced when the State of Israel was formed by us, the Brits, in 1948.
“But he does have enemies, and those enemies particularly distrust his good relations with the West and with Britain in particular. So recently it has become difficult for him to share his intelligence with us. He is not able to trust all of his inner circle or his bodyguards, so we have worked out a system with him that in emergency might enable him to get an urgent message out. An innocent sentence, a coded message, written on any scrap of paper and passed to us gives us the information we need. That is what the King gave you on the beach that evening. He warned us that war was inevitable and that he thought it would begin within days. The men who were with him might have been untrustworthy so he didn't want to pass it to any adult westerner. But he thought giving a small gift of money to a child would not arouse suspicion. And we think he got away with it.
“Unfortunately we didn't get the message in time. There were pressures we could have brought to bear on the Israelis that might have averted the war, we will never know for sure. But we are grateful to you, and to your father, for the part you played.
“Does that make it all any clearer to you?”
Ricky nodded, pondering what he'd just heard. “What happened to the King? Is he alright?”
“Yes, we're sure he's alright. His palace in Amman was bombed during the fighting but he was not home at the time. He has been seen in public, and appeared on television, since the bombing of Amman. We don't know how this will have affected his policy, though. He had been in secret talks with Golda Meir of Israel for three years with the aim of maintaining peace the the region, and the Israeli actions have smashed through all that he had achieved in that time. He won't be pleased and may no longer be willing, or able, to continue to broker peace. His own people are demanding retaliation and he may not wish to resist their calls for it.”
“Now, Ricky, I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say. We don't think the King's message to you was noticed but it may have been. So it is possible that his enemies do know of it. If that is so, it is even possible that your life may be in danger. I really think that's a remote possibility, but it would be irresponsible of me not to mention it to you. So, if you are approached by a stranger on any pretext, you should be even more vigilant not to trust them than you would, I hope, normally be. Is that okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Well, that's all, I think. Thank you for coming to see me, both of you. I hope you have a safe journey home. Oh, is there a slice of cake left? Would you pass it to me? Thank you so much!”
Roger put a slice of cake on a plate and passed it to Cholmondeley, and they said their goodbyes and left.