Don’t leave the marines just because your girlfriend whines at you every time you have to go away. If that’s really what you want to do, then of course it’s right. But don’t do it for me if it’s a sacrifice, because then you’d blame me when you got bored and restless and then we’d end up divorced five minutes later. I don’t want to divorce you; I want to marry you. Anyway, what would you do instead?
We’ll talk about it when you come back. Don’t do anything until then.
Masses of love,
Harriet
Letter
Captain Robert Matthews
c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace
Basra
Iraq
15 May
Darling Robert,
I wish I knew where you were and what you were doing. It would mean I could worry a bit less. I hope, wherever it is, you are not too uncomfortable and it is not too dangerous. I tried to look your unit up on the Internet but, of course, I found nothing.
Isn’t it strange, writing letters to each other? Because I’m not allowed to email you and I can’t speak to you by phone, I am left with no choice. Apart from a few thank you letters and one or two to you I haven’t written any letters to anyone since I used to write to my mother when I was away at school. Even then it was mostly to ask her to send me more money. And because I haven’t the least idea what you are doing in Iraq, thank God, we can’t talk about that. So I suppose I’ll have to bore you to death, and tell you about me.
Our client, a sheikh from Yemen (I’m not supposed to tell anyone his name-I would tell you, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway) has come to see us with the most extraordinary idea. He wants us to commission the best UK fisheries scientists to introduce salmon into the Yemen. He has an estate up near Inverness we helped him buy a few years ago, with a few miles of river which are apparently quite good fishing in June and July. You would know about all that sort of thing. The sheikh has become rather good at it, and enjoys going up there to fish more than almost anything. He also takes beats on other rivers whenever he can. He is almost obsessive about his fishing, much more so than his shooting or stalking. I’ve seen him at it, and he seems to know what he is doing.
He is a very impressive character. He is quite small, but stands very upright and communicates a sense of power which you cannot ignore. I don’t mean I fancy him, and he certainly doesn’t fancy 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.