The British Cabinet was never informed about the Sèvres meeting; only a few of Eden’s associates were in the know, the foreign secretary’s presence was to be hushed up in perpetuity, any record was suppressed where possible. We know about it all now because there were records, people have talked. At the time, as things rushed ahead in October, unfolding precisely according to the Sèvres agreement, there were some suspicions. But only now has the great collusion become the essential – and shameful – aspect of the Suez crisis.
On October 29 Israeli paratroopers were dropped into Sinai twenty miles east of Suez, and a light division began to move in order to join up with them. At the same time an Anglo-French convoy with warships and supporting craft set sail for Port Said. On October 31 the first British bombs fell on airfields around Cairo, the idea being to neutralize or disperse the Egyptian air force so that it would not be a threat to the Israelis – which was what was done. By now, the United Nations was taking an active interest and calling for a cease-fire between Egypt and Israel – Egyptian forces were resisting in Sinai. On November 5 the British Cabinet decided that a cease-fire had not been achieved and that therefore occupation of the Canal Zone should take place. On November 6 there were seaborne landings of British tanks and commandos. Fighting took place; seven hundred and fifty to one thousand Egyptians are thought to have died, British and French killed amounted to twenty-three. And then, later on the 6th, in response to the United Nations and to American pressure, Britain and France agreed to stop their action.
It was all very quick – a few days. There had of course been weeks of preparation; the stationing of the seaborne force in Malta and Cyprus, the devising of an elaborate campaign of advance, Musketeer. Much of this had been all too apparent; you don’t move aircraft carriers and cruisers around the Mediterranean without someone noticing, in particular the American Sixth Fleet, which had been acting as an interested shadow, and reminder of Eisenhower’s displeasure at what was apparently brewing. But, when it all happened, it was done within a week – a week of newspaper headlines, mass protest meetings, furious exchanges in the House of Commons, argument in households up and down the land. Was this Britain standing up for our rights or an outrageous and illegal exercise of power?
For me, it was certainly outrageous, and also disturbingly evocative. The place-names – Suez, Ismailia, Qantara, Port Said. I had never been to Suez, which is the southernmost point of the Canal, where it joins the Red Sea. But Port Said was entirely familiar; the bustling harbor, presided over by the statue of de Lesseps. There, not that long ago, just over ten years earlier, I had stood on the deck of HMS Ranchi as the ship sailed past the statue, and had thought in a rather self-consciously grown-up way that this was the end of something. I was leaving Egypt forever. The year 1956 was to be the end for de Lesseps: on December 24 the statue was blown off its plinth to the jeers of an angry crowd; apparently only his shoes remain, embedded in the concrete. As for Ismailia and Qantara, both were part of my childhood, the points at which you crossed the Canal when going to Palestine, whether by train or by car, in which case the car was driven on to a ferry, an exciting and hazardous process. At Ismailia my mother had had a quarrel with an Egyptian customs official over two Palestinian tortoises I was importing in a shoebox: contraband, according to him. At Qantara I had inadvertently dropped my sandwich lunch into the Canal, leaning too far over the rail of the ferry. I knew the Canal; it was part of the landscape of the mind – a great reach of water, ships, the dockside commotion of shouting porters, people selling oranges and fizzy drinks, skulking pi-dogs, little boys begging for baksheesh. And here it was today the center of world attention and, right now, apparently, out of action entirely, blocked by wrecks the Egyptians had sunk to that end.
In April 1957 the Canal reopened, under Egyptian management. The Suez crisis was over, except of course for the repercussions. It was a long time before Anglo-American relations recovered; for some, the crisis marked the end of Britain as a Great Power. Eden resigned in January 1957 (though he lived for another twenty years). The truth was that he had been ill throughout the crisis, following a gall-bladder operation some while earlier, and was heavily dependent on medication. It does seem that his condition may have had some effect on his state of mind, and his actions, during the crucial months of 1956. Certainly a number of his associates were surprised by his responses, their bewilderment expressed in their language at the time: “gone bananas,” “bonkers.” His reputation never recovered – a tragedy for a man who had been a politician of integrity and a distinguished foreign secretary.
The Senior Common Rooms of Oxford settled back to more parochial matters of disagreement, except perhaps for St. Antony’s, which had always been concerned with the wider world. Jack and I got married; his fellowship came to an end, we were expecting a baby, there were not many jobs around for young academics. In retrospect, we seem to have been extraordinarily unworried – no money, our home a two-room rented flat. As it was, Jack got a job – a lectureship at the University of Swansea – we moved to Wales and the next stage in life began.
In November 2006, a conference took place at the School of Oriental and African Studies: “Fifty years since Suez: from conflict to collaboration.” There were British and Egyptian contributors, papers were read on political and economic relations and on cultural relations – the section to which I was asked to contribute. I talked about “cultural confusion,” about what it had been like to grow up knowing myself to be English, but identifying with Egypt, and feeling an alien when eventually I arrived in my own country. And I spoke also of my feelings at the time of the Suez crisis, about my sense of outrage at what my country was doing to the country with which I still identified, about the way in which the crisis made so many of us young sit up and take notice of a political climate. I felt rather out of place amid some distinguished academics and commentators, and was surprised to be warmly received – rapturously, indeed, in some quarters. Middle-aged Egyptian men came up afterwards, putting an arm round my shoulders, fixing me with those liquid, emotional brown eyes: “Oh, Mrs. Lively, you spoke to my heart!” I basked in brief undeserved glory, and went home thinking of how then had folded into now, the clamor of 1956 distilled into analysis and opinion – and my twenty-three-year-old self become an elderly woman whose mind she still tenuously inhabited.
Suez did not so much politicize me as join me to the times. Before that, I had not been paying attention – did not much read newspapers, was blithely cruising in a solipsistic world of my own. Plenty of the young do this; public affairs are not their concern, leave that to the oldies. At the other end of life, I look back at myself with surprise, and a certain impatience. How young. How – not innocent, but ignorant. And how judgmental I am being now, groomed by decades of newsprint, radio, television. We are indeed in, or of, the world, there’s no escaping it, why should there not be a time of prelapsarian freedom?
Because I wouldn’t want it now, I suppose I am saying. I can’t do without the world. And perhaps that need is a characteristic particularly of later years. I want to know – must know – what the world is up to for as long as I am still a part of it, I feel – unsettled – without one ear cocked to the clamor of events. Wake up to the Today program, on–off attention to that for an hour or so, read the paper, check in at one o’clock for the news, again at six, probably, and of course the television on at ten, before bed. Some of this was caught perhaps from Jack, for whom foreign travel was a torment unless he could lay hands on an English newspaper. But he was extremely concerned with politics; it was print he was mostly after – analysis and comment. For me, it is the narrative – the many narratives – the sense of an unstoppable progress, the march of time, everything going on everywhere, and because of the miracles of communication it is possible for me to know, sitting here thousands of miles away. Not a spectacle, but an abiding interest. How can you not be involved? These are your times, your world, even if those events are on the
other side of it. And as for the narrative – you are a part of that, for better or for worse, whether the gray inexorable economic inevitabilities – recessions and recoveries and having less money or more – or the grand perilous global story.
*
That story was at its most perilous – or so it seemed – by the time I was a sentient adult. The Soviet invasion of Hungary exactly coincided with the Suez crisis. A deliberate coincidence, perhaps, and certainly one that meant the eyes of the world were focused elsewhere. But a reminder that the central matter of the day was the Cold War.
From the first test explosion of a Soviet atom bomb in 1949 to the Test Ban Treaties of the 1960s and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty many people lived in a state of nuclear angst. I did. Not initially, not perhaps seriously until after the Korean War, not until there were constant reminders – the first thermonuclear tests, the stark assessments of what a hydrogen bomb could do, the crises, Khrushchev’s threats, the constant lurking menace behind everything, over and beyond anything else. You got on with life – of course – you managed to put it all aside, and then it would come slamming back at you from the newspapers, from some new turn of events. It was always potentially there, that tight knot in the stomach.
I looked at my small children, on a beach in Swansea, and thought that there was a real chance they would never grow up. I have that moment still: the sand, the sea, them with their buckets and spades, and the sense of apocalypse. I have the moment, it is still there, but I can’t now believe in it. Post-apocalypse – if that is where we are – it is hard to recover that abiding shadow, the specter that stalked the days. Again, I go to the books, to find out where it went, what really happened.
Put at its simplest, this happened: because in any war between the Soviets and the West nuclear weapons would have been used, no such war took place. The Cold War was precisely that – cold. Mutually Assured Destruction saved the day, which was what was being gambled at the time, but when you were living through the gamble, that was all that you were aware of – the rolling of the dice, the arms race, the ratcheting-up of manic firepower, the concept of retaliation, tit for tat, city for city, Armageddon.
Jack and I did not join CND, go on Aldermaston marches. I can remember being uncertain, undecided, and then persuaded by his doubts about unilateral disarmament. In those early days of the bomb, Russian bombers could not reach the United States; the United Kingdom, with its American bases, would be likely to be the primary target. Discussion raged, always, accentuating that knot of fear.
And then, in 1962, there came the nine days of the Cuba crisis. Jack went to the university each morning, and I would wonder if I would see him again. My neighbor drove our five-year-olds to the school a mile away; the plan was that she would dash to fetch them if the four-minute warning went, while I minded our younger ones. You read in the papers of those who had retreated to the Highlands, or the west of Ireland. At one o’clock, at six o’clock, I would switch on the TV – those pulsating concentric rings that heralded the news back then, I can see them still – and I would watch the footage of the Russian missile-bearing ships, the faces of Kennedy, of Khrushchev. Waiting. Waiting.
Khrushchev backed off. It was over. It hadn’t happened, but by a whisker, or so it felt. And still does, to those who have analyzed that time, and those who were at the heart of events. And we know now, as we did not back then, of the elaborate preparations for a nuclear holocaust. The government – around four thousand people from various government departments – would have holed up in a bunker close to Box Hill near Corsham in Wiltshire, sixty miles of tunnels that had been used in the last war as an ammunition depot, a factory and an RAF operations center. Assuming that there had been sufficient warning, sufficient buildup to a nuclear exchange, for them to get there; assuming that people agreed to go, leaving any surviving families to the mercy of radiation and the anticipated breakdown of any kind of social order. Ten Soviet hydrogen bombs on Britain would have killed nearly a third of the population and left a swathe of others seriously injured. With the government festering beneath Box Hill, the police and the military would have assumed control. Not that control seems a feasible term; thinking about this scenario, you move at once into fiction, as plenty have done, since: the absence of all facilities, a free-for-all where food was concerned, marauding gangs, violence, the rule of law a distant nirvana. It has been imagined many times, in print and film, and chills the blood.
Peter Hennessy has written graphically of the Cuba week, of how, if Khrushchev had not changed course at lunchtime on October 28, 1962, Prime Minister Macmillan would have set World War III drills in motion – the Transition to War Committee was nearly called that weekend. But it wasn’t, the world breathed again, and one reads now with astonishment, and a kind of nervous hilarity, Hennessy’s description of the arrangement whereby, should the prime minister have been in his car, on the move, at a moment of crisis, he would have been reached by way of the Automobile Association’s radio network, whereupon his driver would have sought a phone booth from which the prime minister could make the essential call: “. . . only the Brits . . . could have dreamed up a system whereby the Prime Minister is envisaged making a collect call from a phone booth to authorize nuclear retaliation.”
Indeed, one reads of all these meticulous, bureaucratic preparations with a certain incredulity. They had to, of course, that is what civil servants are for, what a government has to do. But it is eerie now to think that all this was going on – the discussions, the paperwork – while the rest of us were listening to the Cold War rattling of sabers, understanding what thermonuclear meant, looking with fear at our children playing on a beach. The plan for removal of art treasures before nuclear attack – eleven vans with military escort to quarries in Wales and Wiltshire; the Corsham bunker with its bedsteads, its ovens, its cups and saucers, equipped for post-holocaust government. Government? Who, or what, would they have governed?
Escalation: the word that haunted, all through the sixties, the seventies, until at last the Vietnam War came to an end. Would the Russians come in? Would there be a direct Soviet–United States confrontation, spiraling up from that distant, localized conflict? It was as though the Cold War was already starting to smolder, the embers poised for a conflagration if the wind blew the wrong way.
Again, it didn’t happen. The history of the late twentieth century seems like a sequence of reprieves, until the one great, startling positive of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism. I remember Jack, a political theorist, watching the events of 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union with amazement, almost with disbelief. And with exhilaration. He was the author of what is still seen as a seminal work on the definition of democracy; he had an interest.
Thirty years earlier – the summer of 1959 – there had been a summer school in Oxford for a party of Soviet academics and their students – quite a radical departure at that point, surprising that the Russians agreed to it. Jack was one of those giving lectures and leading seminars. I think that the general theme was Britain and its institutions, so he must surely have given them a rundown on democracy, but what I remember is his wry amusement at the appreciative reception of Harold Nicolson, a visiting lecturer whose subject was the monarchy, and the irritation of the Oxford organizers at the KGB man – ostensibly a professor of something or other – who sat through all sessions reading Pravda and smoking a cigarette. Jack did everything he could to make contact with the small group of students, who were under draconian supervision but occasionally managed to break free. I remember Vanya, a particularly charming and exuberant boy, vanishing into the garden with the hostess’s Italian au pair girl at one evening party, and being hauled back by the KGB man. On the last night, at another party, everyone fairly tipsy, we hugged Vanya and said we hoped, we really hoped, we’d see him again. His exuberance fell away; he pulled a face – “No, no, you will never see me again.” He was well aware of the system under whic
h he was living, would continue to live.
*
In 1984 I had my own glimpse of that system, as a member of a delegation of six writers sent by the Great Britain–USSR Association (which was sponsored by the Foreign Office) to have talks with representatives of the Soviet Writers’ Union. We were there for ten days, first in Moscow having conference-style talks (immense long table, everyone wired up to microphones and headphones for simultaneous translation) and interminable toast-punctuated evening banquets, and then a few days’ rest and recreation at Yalta on the Crimean coast as guests of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union.
My diary of that visit is in a separate exercise book; we had been warned that if we were keeping notes we should have them with us at all times – our rooms and our luggage would undoubtedly be searched. They were; I found the contents of my suitcase slightly rearranged. Reading those scrawled pages now, I am at once taken back to the baffling, frequently tense, always inscrutable practices of that encounter with Soviet life. I wrote of the initial speech by their spokesman: “‘We know a great deal about you all,’ says Kuznetzov after his remarks of greeting. Which was somehow unsettling rather than flattering.” And of Red Square: “an eerie place, that rippling scarlet flag in the black night, hushed religious atmosphere in the small group in front of Lenin’s tomb, people standing in silence or speaking in quiet voices. Statuesque policemen facing each other at the entrance, which was a crack open – a suspended feeling as though someone might come out – Lenin? The mausoleum is a monolithic slab-like structure. It – and the posture of the policeman – made me think of Pharaonic tombs in Upper Egypt.”