From Our Own Correspondent: A Celebration of Fifty Years of the BBC Radio Programme

By Tony Grant

The flagship Radio 4 programme From Our Own Correspondent gives Britain's most celebrated reporters the chance to describe much more than they can in a normal report: context, history and characters encountered en route. And for the fiftieth anniversary of the programme Profile collected together the programme's best pieces. From Our Own Correspondent has been one of BBC Radio 4's flagship programmes for fifty years. And this book, containing dispatches from all around the world, shows why FOOC, as it is affectionately known, has become such a well-known and much-loved institution. It contains not only the observations of journalists covering the big news events of the day, but also their personal insights into how people around the world live their lives. There are dispatches from Misha Glenny in Russia, Mark Tully in India, Charles Wheeler in the USA, Jeremy Vine in the Congo, Ben Brown in Zimbabwe and Orla Guerin in the West Bank. All offer a unique perspective describing the background to events around the world as they happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Jul 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781847651068

Tony Grant

Tony Grant, the son of an ancient historian, joined the BBC after working in commercial radio and on newspapers in Merseyside. At the BBC he was at Radio 1's Newsbeat before becoming a foreign news editor and then, in 1992, the producer of From Our Own Correspondent. A keen cricketer, he is married to a political correspondent. They have two children.

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From Our Own Correspondent

TONY GRANT joined the BBC after working in commercial radio and on newspapers in Merseyside. He was at BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat before becoming a foreign news editor and then, in 1992, the producer of From Our Own Correspondent. He is married to a political correspondent and they have two children.

From Our Own Correspondent, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and on the BBC World Service, has been one of BBC Radio’s flagship programmes for more than fifty years. Every week more that 100 million people listen in.

From Our Own Correspondent

A Celebration of Fifty Years of the BBC Radio Programme

Edited by Tony Grant

With a Foreword by Kate Adie

3

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

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Contents

Introduction by Tony Grant

Foreword by Kate Adie

EUROPE

1. MISHA GLENNY, A Family Affair, Russia

2. ANDY KERSHAW, Agostini Killed my Budgie, Isle of Man

3. KEVIN CONNOLLY, Tides of History, Russia

4. MARTIN BELL, Farewell to War, Yugoslavia

5. ANDREW HARDING, Aunt Natasha, Chechnya

6. DIANA GOODMAN, Death Homes, Russia

7. KIERAN COOKE, Oliver’s Gone, Ireland

8. DAVID WILLEY, The Passing of Don Frank, Italy

9. JOHN SWEENEY, Villa Villa, Spain

10. JACKY ROWLAND, Revolution in Belgrade, Serbia

11. MALCOLM BILLINGS, Ships Below Ground, The Netherlands

12. CAROLINE WYATT, Cruel Winter, Russia

13. TIM WHEWELL, Race Against Time, Lithuania

14. DAVID SHUKMAN, Migrants, London

15. HUGH SCHOFIELD, The Last Executioner, France

16. CHRIS BOWLBY, Borderlands, Czech Republic

17. WILLIAM HORSLEY, Dinner for One, Germany

18. BARNABY MASON, Plain Speaking, London

19. EMMA JANE KIRBY, A Lost Generation, Moldova

20. THOMAS KIELINGER, Love Actually, Windsor

ASIA/PACIFIC

1. ALEX BRODIE, The Ayatollah’s Funeral, Iran

2. MARK TULLY, Nehru Dynasty, India

3. RED HARRISON, Australian Christmas, Australia

4. FERGAL KEANE, Letter to Daniel, Hong Kong

5. MATT FREI, China Waltz, China

6. FRANCES HARRISON, The Bauls’ Festival, Bangladesh

7. JULIET HINDELL, Washed Away, Japan

8. COLIN BLANE, Finding Shangri-La, China

9. OWEN BENNETT-JONES, Military Coup, Pakistan

10. JILL MCGIVERING, A New Era, Hong Kong

11. ROBERT PARSONS, The Vineyard, Georgia

12. KATE CLARK, Expelled, Afghanistan

13. DOMINIC HUGHES, Lost in the Outback, Australia

14. MONICA WHITLOCK, Polish Cemetery, Iran

15. ALAN JOHNSTON, General Dostum’s Cavalry, Afghanistan

16. HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY, Going Nuclear, Pakistan

17. WILLIAM REEVE, Mr Computer, Afghanistan

18. JONATHAN FRYER, Black Wrist Dance, Kyrgyzstan

19. ADAM MYNOTT, Cross-border Connections, India

20. KYLIE MORRIS, Taxi Driver, Afghanistan

21. FUCHSIA DUNLOP, Out for a Chinese, China

22. DAMIAN GRAMMATICAS, Awaiting Revolution, Georgia

23. DANIEL LAK, Murder at the Palace, Nepal

24. JOANNA ROBERTSON, Books For All, India

25. RUPERT WINGFIELD-HAYES, Economic Explosion, China

26. JIM MUIR, Moving On, Iran

27. JAMES ROBBINS, Parallel Universe, North Korea

28. CHLOE ARNOLD, Memories of the Caucasus, Azerbaijan

29. JONATHAN HEAD, Tsunami, Indonesia

30. NATALIA ANTELAVA, A Public Hanging, Iran

THE EARLY YEARS

1. ERIK DE MAUNY, Wind of Freedom, The Soviet Union

2. DOUGLAS STUART, The Suez Crisis, Egypt

3. IVOR JONES, Escape from Budapest, Hungary

4. RICHARD WILLIAMS, Detained in Congo, Congo

5. GERALD PRIESTLAND, Funeral Special, India

6. ROBERT ELPHICK, End of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia

7. ANTHONY LAWRENCE, Nightmare in Vietnam, Vietnam

8. CHARLES WHEELER, Post-war Washington, USA

9. PHILIP SHORT, Travel Soviet-style, The Soviet Union

10. IAN MCDOUGALL, The Correspondent’s Trade

11. PAUL REYNOLDS, Flight from Jonestown, Guyana

12. CLIVE SMALL, Desert Disaster, USA

13. JIM BIDDULPH, Special Information, Africa

14. ANGUS MCDERMID, A Sense of History, Africa

15. MIKE WOOLDRIDGE, Famine in Ethiopia, Ethiopia

AFRICA

1. ELIZABETH BLUNT, A Bloody End, Liberia

2. JOHN SIMPSON, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

3. JANE STANDLEY, Cattle Country, Sudan

4. ALLAN LITTLE, End of a President, Zaire

5. MARK DOYLE, Mrs Robinson Visits, Sierra Leone

6. JEREMY VINE, Child Sorcerers, Democratic Republic of Congo

7. BEN BROWN, Farm Invaders, Zimbabwe

8. CATHY JENKINS, Passport for Sale, Somalia

9. ISHBEL MATHESON, A Proposal, Sudan

10. BARNABY PHILLIPS, Celebration in Mozambique, Mozambique

11. ALASTAIR LEITHEAD, Seven Funeral Choirs, South Africa

12. HILARY ANDERSSON, Massacre in Darfur, Sudan

13. TIM BUTCHER, In Stanley’s Footsteps, Democratic Republic of Congo

THE MIDDLE EAST

1. TIM LLEWELLYN, Farces of Freedom, Lebanon

2. BRIAN BARRON, The Shabbiest Farewell, Aden

3. CHRIS MORRIS, Bird Language, Turkey

4. JEREMY BOWEN, The Dinner Party, Israel

5. PAUL ADAMS, Life and Death in Jerusalem, Israel

6. LYSE DOUCET, Dinner with Arafat, West Bank

7. STEPHEN SACKUR, Zina’s Story, Iraq

8. PAUL WOOD, The Bloodiest Day, Iraq

9. FRANK GARDNER, Before It’s Too Late, Saudi Arabia

10. HUGH SYKES, Hot Mood, Iraq

11. ORLA GUERIN, A Sniper’s View, West Bank

12. NICK THORPE, Space from Sinai, Egypt

THE AMERICAS

1. STEPHEN JESSEL, Days of Excess, USA

2. ALEX KIRBY, Neighbourhood Grim Reapers, Brazil

3. JOHN PEEL, Jerry Goes to Hollywood, USA

4. BRIDGET KENDALL, Two Armies, USA

5. ROB WATSON, Trout Crazy, USA

6. GAVIN ESLER, The Real America, USA

7. NICK CAISTOR, Massacre in New Venice, Colombia

8. JANE BERESFORD, Everybody Wanted to Get Out, USA

9. DAVID WILLIS, American Drive, USA

10. SUSIE EMMETT, Knitting in Peru, Peru

11. PETER DAY, Dance of Shattered Dreams, Argentina

12. JEREMY MCDERMOTT, Maria’s Hundred-dollar Bill, Colombia

13. STEPHEN EVANS, A Dog’s Life, USA

14. ELLIOTT GOTKINE, A Navy with No Sea, Bolivia

15. JUSTIN WEBB, FOOC for Bush, USA

Correspondents

Introduction

Just occasionally it doesn’t seem like the best job you could have. This thought usually occurs to me while trudging into work over a rainswept Waterloo Bridge at dawn on a Saturday, hours before the programme is due to go on air; painfully aware that if those last two pieces don’t arrive as planned, there won’t be a programme to put out, and the continuity announcers will be reaching for discs marked ‘Only to be used in times of crisis’. But invariably, and often at the last minute, the dispatches do come in; they’re powerful, thought-provoking, colourful and beautifully written; an excellent programme comes together in the final few moments before transmission, and once again producing From Our Own Correspondent seems like a dream job.

I’ve been working on the programme since the early 1990s, but From Our Own Correspondent itself has been going for fifty years. It’s one of BBC Radio’s longest-running shows. Of course, a great deal has changed since the fifties both in styles of reporting and in advances in technology. In the early years, filing a dispatch for From Our Own Correspondent could be an arduous business. If anywhere near a foreign radio station, the correspondent might book a circuit at a specific time of day or night and, amid much line crackling and arguing with international operators, would then be hooked up to the newsdesk in London. If out of town on assignment, there was a faint possibility that a field telephone could be used. But in the unlikely event of the dispatch actually making it to London, the audio quality was usually so appalling, it would have to be read out by an announcer on duty at Broadcasting House.

Today, with 24-hour television and radio, the broadcast beast is insatiable; there are bulletins and programmes demanding reports and interviews night and day and the next deadline is always imminent. The mobile telephone means a correspondent can be reached instantly almost anywhere in the world. The portable satellite phone he or she will be carrying means that they can broadcast in near-studio quality and the portable video phone means they can also do live television interviews.

FOOC, as it’s known, goes out on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service several times a week. Our website is read by millions of people. Sometimes the correspondent offers us a dispatch, at other times we will contact him or her and try to persuade them to do a piece for us. The busier the correspondent is, the less likely he or she is to offer a piece; more likely we’ll call them up on the mobile, plead for a dispatch for FOOC, which is often written late at night in the hours before the programme goes on the air.

Frequently, a journalist on a big story is confined to a hotel room for hour after hour filing voice reports and doing ‘two-way’ interviews with on-air programmes. The correspondents are sometimes heard complaining that they’re so busy going on air that they have little chance to actually go to the scene of the story to see what, in fact, is happening.

I remember asking one of our senior people how he coped while out on a big breaking news story with the torrent of requests, hundreds of them, from the whole range of bulletins and programmes on both BBC radio and television. And how did he ever get any sleep? It was simple, he said. You filed for all of them, did all the two-way interviews, wrote all the dispatches, pondered long and hard on the piece for FOOC and made sure everyone was happy, whatever the hour. Big stories didn’t happen every day, he said, and were only of interest for a relatively short period. After that, you could relax.

One or two correspondents tell us they knock off the 800-words we require in next to no time. Far more frequently we hear that the dispatch has been re-written over and over again and is still being re-shaped as the words are being spoken down the line to London. We’ve heard many times that writing for FOOC is a cathartic process. The reporter may return to the hotel in the evening bursting to tell more about the story, much more than can be included in a forty-second news clip or in a couple of answers in a live interview. There’s the whole context to explain: how history shaped the events being reported on; there are people and places to be described, experiences to be shared.

On the programme, we try to mix the ‘stories behind the headlines’ with insights into life in different parts of the world. We welcome a great deal of colourful description of faraway places and plenty of humour too, and I hope a similar mix is to be found in these pages. When we came to selecting the chapters for this book, it sadly became apparent that many favourite pieces would have to be left out – I was strongly discouraged from editing a work which stretched to several volumes! As some earlier dispatches have been reproduced elsewhere, it was decided that we would include a larger proportion of contributions from more recent times, in particular the last ten years, a period in which a less formal and more personal style of writing for the programme has developed. The choice was essentially a personal one, although space constraints meant that we could include no more than one offering from each correspondent.

Compiling the book, like putting together the programme each week, involved much consulting of reference works. I suspect that few of my colleagues working in radio news and current affairs are as reliant on these works as we are in the FOOC office. We have a full shelf of them here in our office in Bush House in London and often we are reaching for them even as the correspondent is filing his or her piece from some distant location. Battle of Lepanto? What on earth was that all about? Rustle of pages. Ah yes, of course. October 1571, the naval clash between the Christian Holy League and the Ottoman Empire off the coast of Greece. ‘Off of?’ Surely she can’t say that? And what’s this ‘Paddy’ he’s on about? Ah yes. From the Malay. Meaning rice in the husk. And ‘the mills of God’, where is that from? Oh yes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and they do, of course ‘grind slowly’ and ‘exceeding small’. And what about the word ‘harass’? Has the time finally come to stop telling the correspondents it should rhyme with ‘embarrass’ rather than, in the American way,‘Madras’? Language is, after all, constantly evolving. And, anyway, is it ‘Madras’ these days or are we calling it ‘Chennai’ now?

The pieces included in this book contain plenty of evidence that the foreign correspondent has a dangerous job. The list of journalists who’ve been beaten up, blown up and shot gets longer every year. Our colleague Kate Peyton died after being shot in Somalia as this manuscript was being prepared. The shooting in Saudi Arabia of Frank Gardner, a frequent contributor to From Our Own Correspondent, was another example of the perils of this business. He was left with serious injuries.

Yet the belief persists in some quarters that foreign correspondents lead a life of constant glamour; they shimmer from one exotic location to another, solving mysteries and uncovering international intrigue while becoming intimate with millionaires, film stars and secret agents. The expense account is limitless, the correspondent uses only the world’s finest hotels and only rarely will this diet of hedonism have to be interrupted by anything as mundane as covering a story.

The reality, of course, is different. These days editors keep a close watch on what is spent; often they rule out travel altogether on grounds of cost and, when it is deemed essential, the correspondent has to operate within the tightest of budgets. There’ll be a meals allocation which might just stretch to a sandwich at lunchtime and a pizza for dinner, and the firm is only likely to sanction treating someone to alcoholic refreshment if the expense claim is accompanied by copious documentary evidence proving that the journalist was lunching a contact of the status and influence at least of a US president and one, of course, who isn’t a noted teetotaller!

It may be that there are one or two correspondents operating at the very apex of their profession who do get to stay at smart hotels, but many of those I know stayed in better places when they were impecunious backpackers in the years before they were journalists. Anyway, the dodgy hotels in remote corners of the world prove an invaluable source of anecdote. The Soviet Union used to provide the richest vein of hotel stories: the cockroaches and the lack of bathplugs, the bugged phones and the Mata Haris who came knocking in the middle of the night; the rude waiters and appalling service in the restaurants, the menus where nearly all the items were unavailable and those which weren’t were of unspeakable nastiness.

As to the assignments themselves, how glamorous are they? The job involves a great deal of hanging around, often late at night or early in the morning, waiting for people to arrive at airports or to emerge from hospitals or courts clutching statements. Not much in the way of glamorous anecdote there.

One of the biggest news events of recent times was the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. The correspondents there found themselves facing scenes of such horror they were unable to show them on television, while even the most experienced of journalists found it hard to summon up the words to describe the scenes they were witnessing. Although none had to endure the miseries of those who’d lost families, friends and loved ones to the tidal waves, they did have to work interminable days and nights amid the stink of piles of rotting corpses while short of food and sleep, surrounded by devastated, emotional people. This is about as far from glamour as anyone can imagine.

My thanks are due to Sarah McDermott, my colleague in the FOOC office, whose help with the preparation of these pages has been invaluable; to other FOOC colleagues past and present, Andrea Protheroe and Mike Popham; to our editors Maria Balinska and Gwyn Williams for their support; to Malcolm Downing and Peter Burdin in the BBC’s Foreign News Department, who liaise with the correspondents on a daily and sometimes hourly basis; to the staff of the News Traffic area, who bring in the correspondents’ reports night and day; and, of course, to the vast army – no, the golden horde – of BBC foreign correspondents past and present whose professionalism, courage, ability and sense of humour have made From Our Own Correspondent one of BBC Radio’s most popular programmes these last fifty years.

Tony Grant

Producer of From Our Own Correspondent

Bush House

August 2005

Foreword

Kate Adie

Then: written by candlelight, script delivered by canoe, wireless broadcast interrupted by mosquitoes, accompanied by low-flying bombers and the world’s inadequate plumbing and the sound of a distant country in tumult.

Now: tapped out on a laptop computer, script lost into electronic ether, satellite radio broadcast interrupted by mosquitoes and a cruise missile launch and the usual plumbing and the sound of a world still noisy with news.

The technology changes, but the desire to describe what it’s like to witness history in the making does not, regardless of the hazards and hiccups in a correspondent’s life. Not just the great events, but the small details which paint a vivid picture of everyday life.

From Our Own Correspondent is one of those special programmes for which contributors have to indulge in some discreet elbowing to win their place on air. Even in the most fly-blown or shell-shocked environments, after having rattled off countless terse dispatches for the news bulletins, it’s a treat to be given five minutes of air-time to reflect on momentous events. Not that it’s a heart-on-sleeve outpouring of personal emotion. Rather the sense of what it is like to be present at that notorious ‘ringside seat of history’.

It’s a seat which isn’t always comfortable. However, this is a chance to catch the listener’s ear about matters which don’t always make the news. It’s extraordinary the number of banquets which have to be consumed in pursuit of a story; the hotel bedrooms which double as insect traps; the government minders who confide they want to be poets; the militia roadblocks which turn out to be full of Manchester United fans; the transport arrangements which include camels, mules, dodgy rafts and trucks stuffed with sheep and forty-three of the driver’s relatives; the moments when the poorest peasant offers hospitality, the soldiers break into song, the president produces his battered copy of Shakespeare. None of this makes the news, but it paints in the background and makes journalism memorable. And can be shared with others through the programme.

And there is so much else to tell about the world. Admittedly, we now have 24-hour news channels and can receive live pictures from the desert and the Antarctic ice-floe, but much of that news is dictated by convention. The media spotlight is narrow and harsh, excluding the fascinating detail, the reasons and the consequences. Our own correspondents are well-versed in spotting trends, long before the gigantic press horde descends upon a ‘breaking story’; and they’re also concerned to find what has happened to people, years after the earthquake, the assassination or the war have dropped out of the headlines. There’s analysis and reflection, too, always made worthwhile by having the correspondent on the spot, conscious of the people in the local coffee shops or casualty department who have just given their views. And for those listeners who believe we’re now becoming one unified and bland global marketplace, there are countless dispatches about the sheer oddities and weird joys which thrive despite cheap travel and television.

As a child, I listened to postwar wireless and was not a particular fan of the ‘radio talk’, pioneered by the BBC in the thirties – carefully grafted essays which revelled in telling language, backed with experience and shrewd judgement (Jennings and Toytown were more to my taste). But such a talk was intended for grown-ups – and still is. Away from the frenzied instant satellite chats, the simplification of complex conflicts into tit-for-tat action, the three-second soundbites and the numbing effects of dumb political correctness, there is still very much a place for a trenchant and colourful look at life to complement the brief news bulletin dispatches.

Over the years, the enthusiasm and amusement which correspondents bring to the job have been given full reign on the programme. Some have burst into song, others delivered full-throated football chants or political slogans, and many more attempted accents and acting which they’d formerly kept rather quiet about. All backed with a passion for communicating the essence of their experience, whether on the presidential plane over Texas or getting drunk in Mongolia.

But the essence of the dispatch is the personal fascination with both the everyday and the unexpected – and the correspondent’s own reaction. And it takes a seasoned observer to find the balance between the egotistical and the mawkish participation which can so easily overtake an observer of high emotions and tumultuous events.

Our Own Correspondents find their balance in the midst of the awful and the awesome. They’re part of a long tradition now, but one which responds to change. If this means wrestling with bits of exquisitely tiny computer equipment which has just been colonised by ants, well, that’s all part of the fun. The satisfaction is sharing their experience with the listeners.

Europe

1

A Family Affair

Misha Glenny

The BBC’s then central Europe correspondent explained how his relationship with his translator father led to a lifelong fascination with Europe and its peoples.

(8 January 1993)

‘Here I am in Moscow. It is very cold.’ Every time my father travelled abroad, which was frequently, he would dispatch four enormous colour postcards, one to each of his children. They were adorned with his dramatically curly Italic script, which aptly reflected his exaggerated fascination for life. Each sibling’s postcard would add to the collective knowledge of where he happened to be. So, having learnt from the postcard sent to younger brother Paddy that Moscow was freezing, I was then informed: ‘Here I am in Moscow. Everyone wears furry hats.’ Of course, the information became progressively more taxing intellectually until we got to the postcard addressed to his eldest child, my sister Tamara: ‘Here I am in Moscow. It is all pretty miserable and there are posters of Lenin all over the place, but there is plenty of vodka and caviar to take my mind off it.’

Lenin was an old acquaintance of mine long before I had heard of the Queen or Jesus Christ. Not that this implied approval of Vladimir Ilich on the part of my father, far from it. But his stern features stared down at us toddlers from every second book in the house, pictured either on his way to the Finland Station or impatiently pacing up and down in the elegant mansion where he passed some of his exile in Zurich.

For me as a child, Lenin was just another magical figure from Russia, my very own fantasy kingdom. He took his place next to the characters we would hear about at bedtime as my father translated Russian fairy tales for us before we went to sleep. Along with Lenin, there was Baba Yaga, the gruesome Russian witch who flew menacingly through the air in her mortar, rowing with her pestle. Few friends from childhood have left such an impression on me as Baba Yaga with her putrid yellow eyes. The shack where she lived deep in the forest stood on human bones and was lit by fire emanating from the skulls of her victims. Fairy-tale witches are not intended to be nice figures, but Baba Yaga’s undisguised devotion to torture and cannibalism make the less likeable characters drawn by the Brothers Grimm look positively philanthropic.

On the brighter side, there was Vasilisa Prekrasnaya, Vasilisa the Beautiful, a gullible heroine whose evil stepmother sent her into the woods where she stumbled across said Baba Yaga. Her only salvation was a magic doll who comforted her every night after another miserable day in the service of Baba Yaga with the words: ‘Go to sleep, Vasilisa, for morning is wiser than evening.’ Of course, the following day brought even greater misery for Vasilisa, but then her doll belonged to that rich tradition of Russian politicians whose advice is better left ignored.

Our house was littered with mementos from Dad’s encounters with Russians and other East Europeans. Probably the most valuable of these was his sixteen-stringed Portuguese guitar. He won this in Berlin in the early fifties when, as an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, he was working for military intelligence. Given his unswerving commitment to disseminate liberally even the most uninteresting piece of information, I often wondered as to his suitability for this line of work, especially since he seemed to spend much of his time fraternising with the Russians over a glass or two. That’s how he got the Portuguese guitar. One evening he and some other British officers were drinking with the Soviets. As the senior Allied officer, he was challenged by his Russian counterpart. Each had to drink a pint of the other’s national spirit. ‘Of course,’ my father told me with the sonic boom of a laugh which was his most striking hallmark, ‘the Sov had to drink a pint of gin whereas I only had to deal with vodka and he was down on the floor before he’d finished the half.’

His tales of Berlin during the Cold War influence my understanding of history to this day. Those people responsible for regulating the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain treated it as a great game. Moves often took a long time to execute in this ultimate ritual of brinkmanship in which ordinary people were pawns to be manipulated, more or less at will. Occasionally, of course, the pawns refused to budge, or worse still started wandering around the board against the wishes of the court pieces. When this happened in the East, the results were spectacular, beginning with the uprising in East Berlin in 1953 and culminating, via the Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring and Solidarity, in the revolutions in 1989. The West, however, did not enjoy a monopoly on the truth and its leaders were forced to resort to all sorts of dubious tricks to sustain its nuclear leadership in the game.

If the Cold War had been staged as a medieval morality play, then Duplicity and not Everyman would have been the central character. My father, for example, used to take regular trips into East Germany along the routes which the Allies were allowed to travel. His job was to lose his way on purpose, map the forbidden terrain and then play the absent-minded Englishman when the Russians arrested him, as indeed they did. On one such occasion, he was recognised by a Soviet officer. Would this mean the end of my father’s career as master of ceremonies during Portuguese guitar drinking sessions? Not at all. Dad was immediately given lunch, which included thick, black Beluga caviar, and escorted politely back to West Berlin.

But beyond his curious anecdotes, I was fascinated by the baffling contradictions of both Russian and German political cultures which he outlined in his tales. In very different ways, the Russians and Germans were people without mercy and yet at the same time incorrigible romantics. So accustomed were they to shattering historical events that they wallowed in a hopeless fatalism while still dreaming of the essential perfection of the Russian or German soul. Hitler and Stalin forged a demonic alloy from power and violence. With this satanic material, they attempted to imprison history and then mould events in their image. Dad taught me how in the 1930s and 40s they built shrines to their peculiar dystopias which were constructed on mountains of skulls, to borrow a metaphor from the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. What was it about their national spirit which enchanted so much and yet appeared to deliver nothing but suffering? Why were Russia and Germany, two countries which my father loved dearly, hopelessly attached to the most ruthless examples of authoritarian rule in Europe this century? Following the revolution of 1989, this is once again more than a matter for idle speculation. Now as then, these two countries cradle the delicate future of the continent and even perhaps the world in their hands and it is to these great empires and cultures that we should be paying the closest attention.

To help me explore that dichotomy which led these tremendously resourceful peoples to autocracy and dictatorship, my father directed me to Russian and German literature. For when it comes to exploring the cruelty and despair engendered by despotism, they know no equals. The prison camp literature of the Soviet Union is known chiefly through the remarkable work of Alexander Solzhenytsin, pages of which flowed through our house when my father was translating it. But of all the Gulag tales which Dad uncovered and conveyed into English, one stands out above the rest. Faithful Ruslan is the tale of a prisoner, known simply as the Shabby Man, who in 1955 is released under Khrushchev’s amnesty. But the story is told through the eyes of Ruslan, the guard dog whose job it is to oversee the Shabby Man among others. This expressionistic use of animals is widespread in Russian literature and, in this case, it is used to great effect.

Ruslan views the Shabby Man and all others under his control as well-intentioned children who cannot know what is good for them. From cradle to grave, Russians must be told what to do by those who know better (the state). If that includes suffering, so be it. That, at the very least is what Ruslan, with his sharp teeth, believes.

My father found that his fascination for the subtleties of European life was not really compatible with the frequently mundane pen-pushing required by military intelligence. Not everybody made it to double-O grade and frankly the idea of Dad shimmying over the Berlin Wall at night is ridiculous.

But after leaving the army, he was soon back where he wanted to be, in Europe. My father landed a job as Wedgwood Pottery’s European Sales manager. He was dispatched from London around the continent selling china. His remarkable capacity for languages proved a winner. In Stockholm, he needed badly to land a deal with a wholesaler. The latter spoke no Russian, no German, no French, no Italian, no English and no Spanish. No talk, no sale. My father went to the English department at Stockholm University and hired a student to teach him Swedish over the weekend. On the Monday morning, he waltzed back to his customer and in fairly decent Swedish secured the deal.

My father was an exception who proved the rule about the British and foreign languages. On the whole we are hopeless for two reasons. Everything else, such as poor language teaching, follows from them. Firstly as islanders we do not come into contact with other languages with anything like the frequency that other European cultures do. Secondly thanks to the Americans, English is the essential language of popular culture, so there is little incentive for young people to learn new tongues. Young Germans, Poles and Spaniards spend hours poring over the lyrics of Bruce Springs-teen in order to be hip. Britons’ linguistic incompetence is not just a social embarrassment. It is through knowledge of language that we understand foreign cultures. Only the English have derogatory terms for so many different nationalities. This is partly because our vision of Europeans is two-dimensional; our lack of interest in their languages means we do not know or care how they perceive the world. Instead we cover our insecurity and ignorance by labelling them ‘wops’, ‘krauts’, ‘dagos’ or ‘paddys’.

The truth is that with three main Indo-European language groups, the Romance, the Teutonic and the Slav, dominating Europe, it is actually not difficult for the average European to develop enough language to get around the whole continent. The more languages you learn, the easier it becomes. As my father pointed out, you soon get to a stage where you can recognise immediately how the English word ‘cheap’ evolved from the Teutonic ‘kaufen’ or ‘koopen’. The key to language learning is motivation. Once one is motivated, Europe becomes a treasure trove of historical and cultural absurdity begging to be explored.

It was no great surprise that my father began to devote himself full-time to translation. His translations were masterpieces, although he was hopelessly disorganised and slow. It was also evident to the whole family from an early stage that translation of literature is not a lucrative business. On the contrary, having developed champagne tastes on Wedgwood’s expense accounts, my father was not able to satisfy these needs and those of a wife and four children on the erratic ginger-beer income of the freelance translator. He was so late with his translation of August 1914, the enormous tome by Alexander Solzhenytsin, that the publishers, Bodley Head, ordered him down to London, booked him into a hotel and sent a minder over to ensure that he didn’t leave his room until he had finished the job. To rub his face in the dirt, they sent him the hotel bill six weeks later. I, for one, did not regard the demise of Bodley Head a few years ago as a blow