Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

me-tall, thin European women are not his type. He is happily married, anyway, with wife number four being the current favourite.

I don’t know what we are going to do about his request. He has clearly got a bee in his bonnet about fishing and the Yemen salmon project in particular. It seems almost wrong to take any money from him for something as dotty as this, which is bound to fail, but it is a lot of cash and our project management fees would be serious money just on their own.

Anyway, darling, I just wanted to write to let you know I was thinking about you and missing you.

Love you lots.

Harriet

Letter

5 Scarsdale Road London

15 May

Darling Harriet,

So good to hear from you. I’m sure this letter will take ages to get to you but where we are now is about a from anywhere Under Security Regulations Chapter XII Section 83 all references which might indicate the location, intention or capability of a unit must be deleted from correspondence. Security Office, BFPO Basra and the heat is at least degrees in the shade See above. Security Office, BFPO Basra . I am not allowed to tell you what we are doing but it is not a whole lot of fun, and conditions are. The Iraqis are either very friendly or absolutely murderously. So a letter from home is a chance to escape and forget all this for a few minutes. Keep writing. Each letter you send me is like a long cool drink of water.

I’ll stop now. The censor at Basra will probably delete most of this anyway. Sir or Madam, as noted earlier, under Chapter XII Section 83 we are required by military regulations to delete references in private correspondence which might compromise the unit concerned or otherwise act against the interests of British forces. Security Office, BFPQ Basra

Loads of love,

Robert

XXXXX

Letter

Captain Robert Matthews

c?o BFPO Basra Palace

Basra

Iraq

10 June

Darling Robert,

Your letter took weeks to reach me, and some awful man in the censor’s office in Basra had crossed out lots of what you wrote, and then scribbled over the letter. Awful to think someone else is reading everything we both write. Otherwise, there are all sorts of things I would like to say to you but won’t or can’t, because nothing is private any more.

The papers are full of stuff about Iraq again. It seems to have got worse again after years of relative calm: children being shot, people being blown up by car bombs or shot at from helicopter gunships. I shudder when I think you are in the middle of all that. Why does it all have to start up again just as you arrive there?

I don’t suppose you will ever tell me what it is really like, even when you come home. I can’t wait for you to come home.

We had a meeting in the office a few days ago, and decided we would try and help our sheikh with his salmon fishing project. Everyone was saying things like ‘It’s not our job to tell the client what he can or can’t do-our job is to help him do it.’ The fact is it is ages since we had a really big deal. Things have been slow for a while. So I was deputed to write to some man that our contacts in DEFRA tell us is one of the top fisheries scientists. The pompous little man did not even bother to reply himself-he got his secretary to write a short note containing ten good reasons why the whole idea was a waste of time. Naturally I wasn’t going to stand for that so I rang up an old friend of mine who works in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and told him what was going on. I said, ‘Look, with all this bad news coming out of the rest of the Middle East, isn’t this a potential good news story? Shouldn’t we be encouraging our client to spend his money, however mad it may seem? Isn’t this a good news story about Anglo-Yemeni cooperation?’ I thought it was rather clever of me to think of that angle, don’t you? It only occurred to me because you had just been sent out there.

Anyway, the idea seemed to ring a bell with my old friend. He said, ‘You know, Harriet (yes, I know-former boyfriend but a very long time ago), I think you might have a very good point. Let me talk to some people.’ The next thing I knew I had someone on from the prime minister’s office in Downing Street, asking for more details of the sheikh’s idea. Then the next morning I had some grovelling man on the phone called David Sugden who said he was the ‘immediate superior’ of the man I had written to, a Dr Jones, and that Dr Jones had now ‘come to terms’ with the project. And finally, this morning, I was visited by Dr Jones himself. If ever someone walked into my office with his tail between his legs, it was Dr Jones.

He looked just as I had imagined him after speaking to him on the phone. He wasn’t very tall, about my height, say five foot ten. He had sandy hair and a square, pale, indoors sort of face, and didn’t look as if he told many jokes. He also looked as if he was going to make things as difficult as possible for me. But I had done my homework and managed to show him I knew a little bit about what I was talking about, and after a while he became almost reasonable. I could see the scientist in him thinking ‘This can’t be done’ when I started talking. When I finished I could see he was thinking ‘Just in theory, is there any way in which this could be done?’ So at least he was honest enough to accept he might have been wrong, and in fact he wasn’t really that pompous after all. He did look henpecked, though.

I hope you never look henpecked when we get married. I will try not to peck too hard.

Love you lots

Harriet

Letter

5 Scarsdale Road London

15 June

Darling Harriet,

we drove down a street and suddenly guns were pointing the wrong way.

and the helicopter arrived after a vew anxious minutes, a very beautiful old mosque with blue tiles pieces as a result of an error by a US Cobra pilot. Apart from that nothing exciting has happened, it is mostly the heat and the flies that get us down. Yesterday we drove into a village near and came across a small boy in the street. There had been a visit by the Sunni insurgents lost his mother and stood in the middle of the street screaming. Sunday papers arrived at last four weeks late but before we had a chance to clean up and read them we were given new orders.

I didn’t think we were supposed to be that close to the

Anyway, orders is orders and I suppose we’ve got to go there. I haven’t even been allowed time to go back to base and get a change of clothes. A clean shirt would be nice.

Thinking of you all the time, much love,

Robert

Letter

Captain Robert Matthews

c?o BFPO Basra Palace

Basra

Iraq

22 June

Darling Robert,

I couldn’t make much sense of your last letter. The censor had attacked it with his pen and obliterated nearly all of it. But keep writing anyway. At least I know then that you are well and still thinking of me. Sometimes I ache with worry for you. One hears so many dreadful stories from the newspapers and much worse ones if one ever meets anyone with family out where you-where I think you are.

I’d better go on with my salmon story. My Dr Jones has come up trumps. He has written an absolutely brilliant proposal about introducing salmon into the Yemen. It is too technical to go into here and anyway it would bore you to death if I went into all the details, but the upshot is, he thinks, in theory, that something can be done. When I passed this on to my client he was thrilled. He rang up in person, something he never does, and said, ‘Bring Dr Alfred Jones to my house in Scotland. If I like him, I will give him whatever money he wants to make this thing happen. He is a clever man, but I need to meet him to know if he is an honest man, and if he can have the faith to do this.’

So I rang up Dr Jones, and the client sent his car to take us to a little airport in south London where he keeps his Learjet, and we flew together up to Inverness. Dr Jones was rather overawed and didn’t say much. His eyes kept on darting round the cabin of the plane in a nervous way as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I have flown in the client’s private jet at least twice before, so of course I could pretend that it was all part of a day’s work.

We got to Glen Tulloch about lunchtime but then I had to go and sit with the factor and deal with all sorts of trivial problems about the estate. The sheikh joined us for a few minutes, issued a few