“Are you the writer fellow?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good show. Nice car.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think it is wise to drive it right through Bandit Country?”
I recognized the media term for South Armagh, which I still had to cross.
“Perhaps you should,” he drawled. “Anyway, on you go. And take care.”
With this encouraging farewell I let in the clutch and the white beast purred forward into County Armagh and its silent and hostile hedges. A week later, it was the same going back to the south—a very quiet drive both outside the car and inside. After that, I sold the Rolls and bought a nice anonymous Austin Montego estate car.
About that time, the Cosgrave government fell and Fianna Fáil came back to office, with Charlie Haughey appointed minister of health under prime minister Jack Lynch, with whom he had feuded until he finally toppled his own premier and took over in 1979.
Hardly had he got the top slot when Ireland received Pope John Paul II on a state visit. Over the pine kitchen table, Charlie put to me a pretty odd request. He said he needed a monograph to present to the cabinet on security—he was terrified of an attempt being made on the pontiff while he was in Dublin.
I suggested it was out of the question for His Holiness to be in mortal danger in Dublin of all places, and that the British government had a dozen security experts with years of experience. He countered that he would not turn to London, but that the Irish Garda had had no experience with this sort of thing. He needed the techniques that had kept de Gaulle alive. There was nothing for it but to do what he wanted.
I thought back to all that de Gaulle’s bodyguards had let slip when chatting with the French media in 1962 and put together a paper stressing the difference between close-up protection against the madman and the hazard of the long-range sniper.
I never knew whether he put this paper to the cabinet as his own work or mine, or as that of some anonymous ace known only to him. Probably the last. Anyway, the three-day visit of the pope went off without a hitch, though I noticed a few snipers from the Irish Army perched on the rooftops, scanning all the windows opposite.
Both our sons were born in Dublin: Stuart in 1977 and Shane in 1979. But in the autumn of 1979, my wife developed an all-consuming fear that something might happen to our two babies.
In the case of Ireland in 1979, such a fear was far from illogical. IRA renegades had already kidnapped the Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema, who was rescued unharmed after a nationwide manhunt, and others had more recently visited the Outwood home of my friend the Canadian tycoon Galen Weston. Neither he nor his wife, Hilary, were in residence but they terrified his personal assistant.
By the early spring, the condition was serious. One friend in Dublin remarked to me: “You’re not the most famous man in Ireland, you’re not the richest man in Ireland, and you’re not the only Brit in Ireland. But you’re probably the most famous, richest Brit.”
So a kidnap attempt on one of the babies was not a complete fantasy at all. It was time to go, and it was my Irish-born wife who was the more adamant for a departure back to England. It seemed courteous to inform our friend the prime minister. Without explaining why, I asked for an interview at his office in Kildare Street.
He greeted me warmly, but somewhat puzzled. When the door was closed, I explained that we were leaving and why. He was horrified and asked me to stay. I made clear the decision was made.
He could not offer me Irish citizenship. As the firstborn son of a firstborn son of a man from Youghal, County Cork, I had that right, anyway. So he offered to make me a senator of Ireland. Apparently, the Senate is part-elected, but a few seats can be nominated. I thanked him, but declined.
Accepting the reality, he led me out of his office and then down the length of the long hall to the street door, his arm around my shoulders. Doors popped open as openmouthed senior civil servants looked out to see their premier draped round a Britisher, never seen before or since.
A few days later, I had one last call from him. It was to give me his word that not a single IRA man in the country would dare raise his hand against me or my family. The only way he could have known that was if he had given a flat order to the Army Council of the IRA. Not many men could do that.
On April 7, 1980, loaded to the roof and with more luggage on the roof rack, the Montego rolled onto the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Fishguard.
Margaret Thatcher had won the 1979 election and the maximum income tax rate had tumbled from 83 percent to 60 percent, which, though high, was acceptable. We arrived in London just in time to see on television the interruption of the World Snooker Championship in the final frame as the SAS stormed the terrorist-occupied Iranian embassy.
Since then, I have lived in Surrey, St. John’s Wood, Hertfordshire, and Buckinghamshire. But I have never emigrated and never will.
A NEAT TRICK
By the summer of 1982, my physical situation had become extremely comfortable—boringly so. I was on the threshold of forty-four, eight years married, the father of two growing boys of three and five, living in a large white house at Tilford, a village in the county of Surrey, and had realized that I could apparently make a comfortable living writing novels. No wonder I was bored.
There is a passage in the John Buchan novel John McNab, where the hero is in a similar state and goes to his doctor. This shrewd man, after a complete examination, advises his patient: “As your doctor I can do nothing for you, but as your friend let me offer you advice. Go and steal a horse—in a country where horse stealing is punished by hanging.”
I did not feel the need to go that far, but I had to do something more interesting than sitting on the terrace reading the papers and drinking coffee.
It happens that though I do not suffer from acrophobia—the panic-stricken fear of heights—I do not really like them. In an apartment on the thirtieth floor of a skyscraper, I would prefer not to go to the balcony and lean over. In truth, I would prefer to be back inside behind the plate-glass doors.