2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (15 page)

‘I do not think Mr Maxwell quite understands us yet,’ said the sheikh when Peter Maxwell had left the room. ‘But perhaps, one day, God will reveal himself to him and help him understand.’

The three of us sat together for a while longer, the candles on the dining-room table burning low. Being with Sheikh Muhammad had a calming effect on me, especially now we were without the abrasive presence of Peter Maxwell. For a while no one spoke.

I wondered if the sheikh would say something more about Peter Maxwell, for although he had shown not the least sign of it, I was sure he disliked him. Instead he surprised me by turning his eyes upon me and saying, ‘You seem sad, Dr Alfred.’

I did not know what to say. I flushed again and was thankful that in the candlelight the change in my colour was probably not obvious. I saw Harriet look from the sheikh to me, intently.

‘Oh…nothing. A few problems at home, that’s all,’ I said.

‘You have illness in your home?’

‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

‘Then do not tell me, for it is not my affair. But I regret to see your sadness, Dr Alfred. I would rather see you with an untroubled spirit and with your whole heart and mind bent upon our project. You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.’

‘I’m not very religious, I’m afraid,’ I said.

‘You cannot know,’ said the sheikh. ‘You have not looked inside yourself, and you have never asked yourself the question. One day, perhaps, something will happen that will cause you to ask yourself that question. I think you will be surprised at the answer that comes back.’

He smiled, as if he realised the conversation was getting a little deep for the time of night, and then made a gesture with his hand. Malcolm materialised from nowhere, startling me, for I was absorbed in what the sheikh was saying, without understanding him. The butler must have been standing in the shadows of the dining room, watching, perhaps listening. He pulled back the chair as the sheikh stood up. Harriet and I both got up at the same time.

‘Good night,’ said the sheikh. ‘May your sleep bring you peace of mind.’ Then he was gone.

Harriet and I walked slowly up the staircase together without speaking. On the landing, she turned to me and said, ‘Fred, if ever there’s anything you want to talk about…talk to me. I can see things are not right with you. I hope you can count me as a friend. I don’t want you to be unhappy either.’ She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek and I smelled her warm perfume. Her hand brushed mine for a moment. Then she turned away.

‘Thanks,’ I said to her, as she walked down the corridor to her room. I don’t know if she heard me.

I thought for a while about my life as I undressed in my bedroom. It was warm, and a fire still burned low in the grate. I hung my borrowed evening clothes in the wardrobe and changed into my borrowed pyjamas and, having brushed my teeth, climbed between the white linen sheets of the enormous, soft bed.

What a strange evening it had been.

I remember thinking as I lay in bed that everything about my life is strange now. I am sailing in uncharted waters and my old life is a distant shore, still visible through the haze of retrospection, but receding to a grey line on the horizon. What lies ahead, I do not know. What had the sheikh said? I could feel sleep coming upon me fast, and the words that came into my mind, my last waking thought, were his but also seemed to come from somewhere else: ‘
Faith comes before hope, and before love
.’

I slept better that night than I had done for a long time.

Interrogator:

Describe how you found the salmon?

Alfred Jones:

It is not my happiest memory. The chartered helicopter came to pick us up after breakfast the next morning and the sheikh, Harriet, Peter Maxwell and I climbed in and buckled our straps. The blades started turning and then, in a moment, the grey roofs and soft green lawns of Glen Tulloch were slipping sideways below us. We flew amongst the scurrying rain clouds and over the brown moors beyond the house, which sloped gradually upwards to become craggy mountains.

Then the helicopter found a line of lochs heading southwest. I think it must have been the Great Glen. Low clouds brushed against the helicopter and obscured the view from time to time until suddenly the sky cleared and it seemed as if we were flying straight into a brilliant sun. Below us now, sheets of water alternated with the spongy greens and browns of headlands, and I saw we were losing height and approaching the shore of a sea loch. I glimpsed the structures I expected to see below us.

We landed in an empty car park next to some Portakabins. Beyond them was a jetty with a couple of boats tied up, and beyond that, metal structures in the loch glinted in the sunlight. As the rotors stopped spinning, a door in one of the Portakabins opened, and two figures in oilskins and hard hats came out to greet us.

When we were on the ground the first of them shouted above the engine noise, ‘Dr Jones? Dr Alfred Jones?’

The pilot cut the engines and I said, ‘That’s me. Archie Campbell?’

‘Aye, that’s me. Welcome to McSalmon Aqua Farms, Dr Jones.’

I presented Peter Maxwell and Harriet and the sheikh to him. The sheikh was wearing a beret and a military-looking pullover with epaulettes, and khaki drill trousers. Harriet and I were in waxed jackets and jeans. Peter Maxwell was wearing a white trench coat over his suit and looked, I thought, like a private detective from a bad film.

Archie Campbell gestured behind him to the cages moored in the loch.

‘You want a tour?’

‘That was rather the idea.’

We went into the Portakabin and were handed cups of hot Nescafe. Then Archie Campbell said, ‘Well, now. Let me tell you what we do here. We raise the finest, freshest salmon that money can buy. Don’t believe what they tell you. There’s nothing wrong with farmed salmon. And at least you know where they’ve been, not like the wild ones which could have swum through anything!’

He roared with laughter to show it was a joke. On the wall of the cabin was a laminated chart showing the different stages of rearing farmed salmon: the freshwater hatchery where the broodstock was reared to become alevins, then fry; the cages where the salmon parr were released and grown to smolts; the big cages further out in the saltwater of the loch where the smolts were ranched to become mature salmon. Archie led us through all this and then, when it was obvious we had had enough, suggested a tour by boat.

There was a converted fishing boat tied up to a jetty; we climbed in and slowly chugged out into the middle of the loch. Now that we were close we could see the metal structures were a series of booms which formed the tops of deep cages moored to the bed of the loch. The water inside these booms was frantic with movement, boiling with the desperate churning of tens of thousands of fish which all wanted to be somewhere else. Every few seconds a fish would leap out of the water as if it was attempting to escape or climb some fish ladder or run up some waterfall that its instincts or its race memory told it should be there. I could hardly bear to look. Here was a creature whose most profound instincts urged it to swim downriver until it could smell the saltwater of the ocean and then find the feeding grounds of its ancestors in the far north of the Atlantic, where it would live for the next two or three years. And then, by an even greater miracle, it would return south, travelling past the mouths of all of the rivers where it might have been born until something made it turn north again, searching the coastal waters until it smelt or sensed in some other way the river waters that led to the place where it had been spawned. But these salmon spent their whole lives in a cage a few metres deep and a few metres wide. ‘Look at the little darlings,’ said Archie Campbell fondly. ‘Look at all the exercise they get. Don’t tell me they aren’t every bit as fit as wild salmon.’

The water around the cages was cloudy with effluent, debris of all sorts floating past. The sheikh looked around him with growing dismay. Then he turned to me and said, ‘This is the only way? The only way?’

‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘The only way.’

‘And how many was it you will be wanting, Dr Jones?’ asked Archie Campbell.

‘We’re still working on numbers. Think along the lines of five thousand, if you can.’

‘It’s a big order. We’ll need notice.’

‘I know,’ I said.

On the flight back to Glen Tulloch the sheikh said nothing for a while. I knew this was not what he had envisaged. He had imagined silver fish which had run home from the storm-tossed waters of the North Atlantic, fresh as paint, surging miraculously up the waters of the Wadi Aleyn. He had not imagined these sea lice-infested creatures, born and raised in the equivalent of a gigantic prison.

But that was what we were going to have to use; there was no other solution. Eventually, the sheikh smiled a bitter smile, turned to Peter Maxwell and said, ‘You see, Mr Maxwell, how our project answers to the wishes of your government? How well it matches your policies? We will liberate these salmon from captivity. We will give them freedom. And we will give them a choice. We will release them into the waters of the wadi, and they can vote to turn one way to the sea, or the other way to the mountains. I think that is very democratic, is it not?’

Peter Maxwell, I remember, chewed his lip and said nothing.

Peter Maxwell is interviewed for the ‘Time Off column of the
Sunday Telegraph
, 4 September

An occasional series of articles in the
Sunday Telegraph Magazine
in which Boris Johnson interviews well-known public figures to find out what they do in their spare time. This week, it’s Peter Maxwell, the director of communications at the prime minister’s office in Downing Street
.

Boris Johnson:

Peter, you’re going to tell me that you never do take any time off, aren’t you?

Peter Maxwell:

Boris, you are absolutely right. I almost never do. That’s the trouble with my job. You’ve got to be available 24⁄7 because things around the world happen 24⁄7 and they need dealing with 24⁄7. Whether I’m in my office or travelling, I’ve got to be connected. I’m watching live feed from at least three news channels most of the day, and picking up maybe a couple of hundred emails on my Blackberry. Then there’s the meetings. You wouldn’t believe how many meetings I have to go to. That’s just a normal working week, Boris, and my working week doesn’t end until Sunday night and usually starts again on Monday morning. But it’s when the unexpected happens, as it constantly does, that the pressure really comes on.

Boris Johnson:

You mean, ‘Events, dear boy, events?’

Peter Maxwell:

I’m not with you there, Boris.

Boris Johnson:

Harold Macmillan once said that.

Peter Maxwell:

Then Harold knew what he was talking about.

Boris Johnson:

But just suppose you had a few days or even a few hours to spare, what would you do with them? What about holidays?

Peter Maxwell:

It’s a long time since I had a proper holiday, Boris. My colleagues are always suggesting it, but I don’t think any of them have the faintest idea of what would happen if I wasn’t there to look after their interests. I did go to Ibiza, once, for a weekend, and I suppose I’d like to go back there again if ever I had the time.

Boris Johnson:

And what about time off for a bit of exercise?

Peter Maxwell:

Well, as you probably know, I’m a bit of a fitness freak so if I can take a few hours off, often it’s all about physical exercise. I think it’s well known I’m a keen salsa dancer. It’s probably less well known I got into the Islington area finals two or three years back. I’m not saying I’m any good at it, but I suppose I can’t be doing everything wrong, to nearly win the North London Salsa Cup.

Boris Johnson:

Any other sports or recreational activities of that sort which appeal to you?

Peter Maxwell:

I suppose the boss and I play tennis a bit…

Boris Johnson:

The boss being the prime minister, I suppose?

Peter Maxwell:

Exactly.

Boris Johnson:

And who wins?

Peter Maxwell:

Well, Boris, I think my job might be at risk if I told you that! Seriously though, it’s pretty even between us, which is great. I think when you have a fairly intense desk job—on the phone or watching the screen all the time—anything that gets you outside and takes your mind away from the daily pressures and stresses has to be good.

Boris Johnson:

Mens sana incorpora sano
—all that sort of thing, you mean?

Peter Maxwell:

I’m not following you there again, Boris.

Boris Johnson:

Any other interests outside work you can tell us about, Peter, apart from sports?

Peter Maxwell:

I like music a lot. Of course I like salsa music, that goes without saying. But I also like the classics. The ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is one of my absolute favourites. I think it is a fabulous piece, so evocative.

Boris Johnson:

What exactly does it evoke for you?

Peter Maxwell:

It always makes me think of that wonderful scene in
Apocalypse Now
when they play it from loudspeakers on the helicopter gunships while they napalm a Cong village. A really moving bit of cinema history, and the music to go with it.

Boris Johnson:

We’ve moved on a bit from those days, Peter, haven’t we? I mean, napalming insurgent villages isn’t anything we would do nowadays, is it?

Peter Maxwell:

Are we straying from the subject here, Boris?

Boris Johnson:

Possibly. What about reading? Do you have any favourites?

Peter Maxwell:

Hansard
.

Boris Johnson:

But what about works of fiction? Novels and so on?

Peter Maxwell:

I don’t really get a big kick out of novels. I admire people who can organise their lives so well they have the time to curl up in a chair and read a few pages of a novel. Personally, I don’t have the time. I’ve kind of got a restless mind, Boris, and reading a novel has always seemed to me to be a terrible waste of my waking hours.