Jon Haylett

The Highlanders

It is a misconception that the Highland Clans were destroyed at the 1746 Battle of Culloden when Bonnie Prince Charlie ordered the charge across open heathland into the jaws of Cumberland's regiments. If you have visited the battle site you will know what a bleak and pitiless place it is. A new visitors' centre was recently completed on the battlefield, and its opening ceremony proved how strong the Clans still are.

The Scottish Government thought it would be a good idea to have children who are descendants from both sides take part in the ceremony in what they supposed might be an act of reconciliation. There was little problem in finding representatives from the Jacobite Highland clans. Not one descendent of the Government side volunteered - this despite the fact that almost as many Scots fought for George as did for Charlie.

Humans are drawn together in diversity and, it seems to me, the people of the Highlands epitomise this. Although the Highlands were, as a matter of UK Government policy, opened up following the '45 rebellion, they remain today remote and neglected. The area in which I live is designated a 'Region of Difficulty' and receives grants accordingly. Life here for many is hard yet its population is fiercely proud.

The Clearances followed the '45. Thousands of clanspeople were deported, usually against their will, to Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Outside Scotland, more people speak Gaelic in Nova Scotia than anywhere else. Those that remained eked out a living by crofting on land which might politely be called marginal. Crofting remains today the main occupation in this village.

Kilchoan, which might be translated as the cell of St Columba, isn't at all what one would expect. It's strung out along over two miles of coastline surrounding a bay on the south side of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, facing across the Sound of Mull to Tobermory. Strictly it isn't a single village but three crofting 'townships', each croft running from the shoreline to the common grazings on the hills. Its population is a tenth of what it was at its height and, until recently, has continued to decline as the young people moved away to work in Glasgow and further afield. That this trend has paused is largely down to people like me, 'incomers'.

It is a wonderful place to be a writer, not only because of the breathtaking scenery and punishing weather. Living amongst these independent, tough people, watching the dynamics of their small society, is an education. It's a place which respects those who prefer to be solitary, which cares for its old and disadvantaged, which watches out for its neighbours and, despite often being riven by dispute, pulls together when things go wrong. The other day I was out searching for a girl who had gone missing in a nearby village. As we moved through the houses everyone already knew what had happened and was looking out for her.

Last winter we had too many funerals of the older people. Many were Gaelic speakers taking with them their memories and the village's history. At the latest, at the little cemetery on the hill high above the village, a piper played a lament at the graveside. The sound tore me apart.

Zimbabwe

I was sufficiently interested in politics as a university student not only to become involved in demonstrations but also to change from my science subjects to Politics. It wasn't a sensible choice in view of my planned career - to be a secondary school teacher in Africa - though, to be honest, nor was the other subject I took as part of Keele's joint honours system: Geology. As a consequence I ended up teaching subjects I knew precious little about: Maths, which I'd always hated, Geography, because, to the timetabler, it sounded like Geology yet I didn't even have an O level in it, English, in which my sole qualification was O level, and anything else left over when the timetabler had almost finished allocating teachers to classes. In retrospect, that I taught subjects which I knew little about might have been a good thing: at least, when I took up my first teaching post in what is now Zimbabwe, I approached lessons from the same position as the student.

I've never regretted that decision all those years ago. Geology walks with me wherever I go. I see landscapes differently, and I've always had mineral and fossil collecting as hobbies. Nor have I ever regretted my Politics, perhaps for much the same reason: I have a deeper understanding of what is going on.

Most of us who live in a democracy accept that there is a contract between a citizen and his/her government, the basis of which is that the former will support those in power, even if he/she doesn't necessarily agree with everything they do, in return for the opportunity, at regular intervals, to remove them if and when they perform badly through a free, fair and peaceful electoral process which involves all eligible citizens. In the intervening period, while a citizen expects to be able to influence government, he/she also accepts the right of the government to govern, but on one condition: that what it does is evidently in the interests of the citizenry as a whole. To me, the big question has always been how a citizen judges when this contract has been broken, and what he/she has the right to do when it happens.

It is evident that the contract between citizens and government has been broken in Zimbabwe. No-one believes the recent elections were legitimate, not least because so many were coerced - the opposition party as well as the voters. Even Mugabe has shrugged aside any such pretense. Secondly, the government has long ceased to act on behalf of its citizens. It is now an elite that seeks power only to accrue individual wealth, even at the expense of its citizens: the inflation rate is 8.5 million percent, which means that the price of an item doubles every three days, social services such as schools and hospitals are in a state of collapse, considerable numbers of the population have been evicted from their homes and exposed to the elements (it is winter there), and large areas of the country face an almost biblical famine.

That Zimbabwe's government - if one can still call it that - has abrogated its contract does not seem to me a reason for other states to intervene. This should only happen if conditions in Zimbabwe directly affect another country: thus I have every sympathy with Botswana, which has moved troops to the border in case the chaos it fears in Zimbabwe threatens its good order, and I support the position of the British and other western governments which refuse to intervene militarily. The argument that the situation is, in some way, Britain's 'responsibility' because it handed over power to Mugabe at independence is fatuous. What all democratic countries and supra-national organisations such as the UN must do is clearly state that Mugabe's government is illigitimate. That is why the timing of the election was such a master-stroke by Mugabe, with the count declared quickly (compare the time to the first round) so he was able to fly straight off to Egypt to the conference of the African Union and bounce them into effectively recognising him by failing to throw him out.

I taught for some time in Zimbabwe, professionally some of the most fulfilling years of my life. I was last there when Ian Smith was in power running his UDI government, a regime elected largely on a racist vote. The citizenry at that time, quite justifiably, believed that the regime lacked a contract with the majority even though it was developing the economy, kept all its people fed and, to some level at least, educated, and could boast a national average life expectancy of about 60 whereas today it is about 35. The people's response to state repression, as was their absolute right, was to rebel against it in a successful battle led, in part, by Robert Mugabe.

There is only one solution to the problem in Zimbabwe and that is for its people to rise against the illegitimate regime that represses them. Those of us on the outside should do what we can to help - for example by putting pressure on those who are in a position to weaken Mugabe's clique, such as the South African government and big mining companies like Anglo-American - but, in the end, be it at an individual or at a government level, we must do what many did for Mugabe when, all those years ago, he fought on the side of justice: help Zimbabweans re-secure their rights by arming them for another struggle.

Jon

Starting Out

Behind the boy, crouching darkly in the gathering dusk, lay a continent, before him, and far below, a harbour low-lit by the sun's last rays in which a cargo ship turned sharply, its wake toothpaste white as it worked towards the entrance and the open ocean.

They hadn't given him the shilling he'd been contracted to receive for a supernumary's six-week passage. The previous evening the Chief had cracked his daily ration of twenty-four cans and half of whisky without which the engines didn't run, the cadets had shaken his hand, the ship's master hadn't bothered to say goodbye: all somewhere within the brightly lit machine which heeled across the green waters far below.

He sat on the wall's warm concrete coping kicking his heels against its bricks, his stomach tight against a pang of loneliness, against the knowledge that no-one in the city sprawled below him knew, or cared about him, against the keen anticipation that, come the morning, he would turn his face again to the old continent and begin a journey in the footsteps of Livingstone and Rhodes, Kruger, Moffat, Selous, Jamieson and de Beers, crossing the realms of Tchaka and Mzilikaze, the diamondlands of Kimberley, the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, and the sluggish Limpopo, to a land he didn't know locked deep in its heart. All he had for his journey was the name of the man who would meet him two thousand miles to the north and the bright confidence of youth.

Saida

Ten days previously the soles of the the hitch-hiker's feet, hardened by weeks on the road, had cracked, and one of the raw wounds had turned septic. That he was nearing the end of the road - not the end of the journey, because he still had a thousand miles to drive before he was home, but the end of the hitch-hiker road - made no difference: he was too sore, too low to be buoyed up by the prospect of an end. So when he limped into Saida as the evening rolled in across the Sahara he had only the energy to struggle out of his rucksack and collapse into a chair of a small sidewalk cafe. The waiter brought coffee, a miniscule cup half filled with grounds, and a glass of water.

The hitch-hiker didn't want it when a young Algerian pulled up a chair to his table, yet they talked, the Algerian curious about his journey, the places he had been, the people he had met, the, to him, enormous distances he had travelled. When he asked the hitch-hiker where he would sleep that night he explained that he would sleep as he always slept, some distance out of town rolled up in his sleeping bag at the side of the road.

The Algerian sat for a few moments considering this answer, then excused himself, returning ten minutes later with an older man who introduced himself as the organiser of the Saida Jeunesse de Sport. Everything is arranged, the man announced as the youth looked on. A room is booked at the hotel next door. The cafe will serve supper, and petit dejeuner tomorrow morning, early, so you may be on your road again before the camions start out.

I have no money, the hitch-hiker explained. It is kind of you, but....

It is paid, all paid. You are our guest.

HELP!

I need your support. Please, please help.

Thomas Dandois is a young freelance journalist and photographer currently employed by Camicas Productions to compile a report for European TV station ARTE on the situation in the Republic of Niger. He and his companion, Pierre Creisson, were arrested on Monday 17 December after being followed by security services into the northern part of the country where they had gone to interview leaders of a rebel group, the Movement of Niger People for Justice (MNJ).

The reason for the MNJ's uprising are complex but the truth needs the sort of investigative experience that Tom and Pierre can bring to bear. Both have reported in the past from places we've all heard of: Darfur, Chad, Zimbabwe. To learn more, Google "Thomas Dandois".

They are imprisoned in the Niger capital, Niamey. Last Friday they were formally accused of "intelligence with armed groups" for ignoring the ban on journalists visiting the north of the country. We now understand that they could face the death penalty.

The two freely admit that they ignored the ban. They have written an letter to the Niger President, Mamadou Tandja, admitting their mistake and apologising. They appreciate that they have trespassed on the goodwill of a democratic country, BUT we believe that they should be treated with the respect that should be accorded to men doing an honest, necessary and very dangerous job. If people like Tom and Pierre did not take risks, we would know nothing of the horrors of places like Zimbabwe and Darfur.

Tom's a hell of a good guy. If you want to imagine it, the job he does is just like Maddy Bowen's in Blood Diamonds.

Tom is my first cousin, Carolyn's son. His grandmother, who is 92, lives here in the village with us. We are all worried sick about him. Tom has dual nationality, French and British, and is a British citizen holding a British passport. We want the British government to take an interest in him - to date, HMG appears to have done nothing. PLEASE -

(1) Copy the letter you'll find as the download "TomDandois_MP" on the 'Publications' page on my website JonHaylett and send it to your MP at The House of Commons. If you don't know who he/she is, use the site Writetothem - find this at Writetothem.

(2) Write to the Foreign Secretary using the download "TomDandois_F&C" on the 'Publications' page of my website, and send it to The Rt Hon David Miliband at the Foreign and & Commonwealth Office.

Both these letters can be 'copied' then 'pasted' into Word, and have the necessary addresses. In addition, anything you can do to personalise the letter would be appreciated.

(3) Go to our site 'Freedom for Thomas Dandois' on Facebook and give your support there.

(4) Email your MP. You can do this at the site 'Write to Them' at Writetothem

With my sincere thanks for anything you do.

Happy New Year!

When it comes to the change of a year, there seem to be two attitudes. In one, the main impulse is to look back over the year passed, to analyse the successes and the failures. The other looks forward, either with the intention of setting targets - they used to be called 'New Year's Resolutions' - or with less precise hopes for a different, perhaps better year.

The young, I suspect, are more of the latter persuasion. Certainly, I can remember as a sixteen-year old welcoming in the New Year in Trafalgar Square with my heart full of hope and excitement for the year ahead. The older are perhaps more interested in looking back, in judging themselves on what use they have made of the late time given to them. I confess that that is what I do, and, the older I get, the more stern my judgement.

In a way, looking back in order to learn is one of the main justifications for the study of history. In schools in the UK, judging from experience and the figures of GCSEs and A Levels taken, it is probably one of the most disliked subjects. I don't think there are many young people in this country who have left school who would confess to an interest in the subject, and fewer still who would have bought a 'history' book in the past year. This is, in my view, a sad reflection on the way history has been taught, but also a symptom of the modern world, where immediate gratification is far more important than any careful consideration of consequence, and 'wisdom' is something for fuddy-duddies and, incidentally, certainly not a talent one looks for in a politician.

In the last few weeks I have read two novels and a history book. I don't know why I bothered with the former, but at least I go out of 2007 with another first class history book under my belt. Trafalgar: the Men, the Battle, the Storm by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig, is history at its very best, carefully researched, strongly supported with good primary evidence, vividly described, and a damn good read. Perhaps the greatest accolade one can give to a book which was, after all, written about one of the pivotal moments in British history, an event all of us British have heard of and should, if we have any education, know something about, is that my frequent reaction was, "Blimey, I never knew that!"

Search for it on Amazon. Is there any significance in the fact that they don't stock it themselves, so their price is the full £12.95 RRP, plus a £1.99 sourcing fee, but that you can buy it through Amazon from 'other sellers', the advertised prices starting at £0.01?

Perhaps it is appropriate that I plan to see in the New Year in the company of my nearest and dearest and a bottle of good, French red wine, though I might also take a dram or two of Tobermory malt whisky.

A very happy, prosperous, healthy and fulfilling New Year to you all.

Jon

African Genesis

In 1968 I was given African Genesis by Robert Ardrey. It was, without doubt, the most illuminating yet frightening book I had ever read, for its thesis was that the evolutionary innovation which created the big-brained human animal Homo was its ability to kill using tools. Ardrey went further by suggesting that humans were unique in that they used their technology to kill their own kind either individually or en masse, that they ate them, and that they enjoyed doing it.

Ardrey derived much of his evidence from the fossil remains of our early ancestors, animals like Australopithecus africanus, then being found and interpreted by experts like Raymond Broome in South Africa. One of the most vivid descriptions was of the Taungs infant which appeared to have been killed by a single blow to the left side of the head, the damage to the skull being a deep, double depression. Ardrey and Broome saw this as proof that man used the distal end of a large antelope's leg bone as a weapon, and that the hunter who had killed this child was right-handed.

Ardrey saw Homo sapiens as a calculated killer. As he put it in the first line of African Genesis, 'Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was man born'.

What was so terrifying about his book was that my generation had listened on our transistor radios as Soviet freighters carrying ballistic missiles to Cuba steamed across the Atlantic while John Kennedy made it quite clear that, if they didn't turn back, he'd sink them - and we all knew what would happen then. What we inferred - and this may sound melodramatic - was that, if we humans were, as Ardrey suggested, programed to develop more and more sophisticated weapons of mass-destruction, then, one day, we were going to use them.

Some of Ardrey's arguments were subsequently, if not discredited, at least modified by later discoveries. For example, closer evaluation of the Taungs infant shows it was probably killed by a large, predatory bird, and we are not alone in the enjoyment of hunting, killing and eating our own kind, for chimpanzees in the wild have been observed doing it.

I never forgot Robert Ardrey's argument but, like so many things that shock, I learned to live with it, learned to hope that the goodness that is also inherent would prevail - until, the other day, I read The Most Dangerous Animal by David Livingstone Smith, published this year. If anything, as a read, it's even more terrifying than African Genesis.

Of Pride and a Fall

I get a tremendous kick out of my membership of the local Coastguard. It's partly the adrenalin rush when my pager suddenly emits its 'whooosh' for a callout which, fortunately, happens very rarely. It's partly feeling that, although I'm still an incomer to the village after over ten years here, it's one small way in which I can made a contribution to this tiny community. It's partly a perverse pride that I'm still in the team: in the 'good old days' of age discrimination they'd have retired me long before now. But mostly it's the pleasure of working with a team of very likable individuals.

It's a general misconception that the Coastguard operate on water: we don't. Mostly, we walk. Our most common operation is a coast search for anything from an item of flotsam to a missing person. Sadly, we've had too many of the latter, the most common cause of their loss over the years being a diving accident - though recently kayakers are fast catching up. The other night we were out after a lady suffering from dementia. The callout came just after midnight, and she was finally found some eleven hours later.

We have a truck, a Nissan Hilux Crewcab with chequered stripe down the side and a fearsome collection of blue, red and white lights on top. It carries our cliff rescue gear, a stretcher, first aid equipment and body bags. It's used so rarely that we've been told by our Sector Officer that we're to take it out for regular runs to put some mileage on it, otherwise we'll lose it, so the other day Nan and I went to collect an emergency beacon which had come ashore just south of Ardnamurchan Point Lighthouse. And here's another joy of the job - I get to see places which I would otherwise never discover, all at Her Majesty's expense because they do pay us, albeit the national minimum wage. The beacon had been washed up in a small cove with a wonderful white sand beach at the back. The stiff walk to reach it was worth the effort.

We meet monthly for training but, a few weeks back, we were summoned for a special training session. One of our members, a lass whose life as a modern crofter is being followed in a mini-series by the BBC, was to have her Coastguard role filmed. We put on a cliff rescue, lowering her down a cliff and hauling her up again, twice. Miraculously it all went very well - even the winch, which can be a bugger when it wants to be, fired first try. When the young lady who was doing the filming had finished we collected our gear and set off briskly down the hill to the station; and, as we approached the point where she was standing, I slipped and went arse over tit down the slope. She swore she'd not been filming at the time but I don't believe her.

If you want to check the episode it's on 'Landward' on BBC Scotland, 7pm Friday 30th November.

Jon

The Hypocrite

I detest reading about how to write. I don't particularly enjoy other people's fiction, and it is very rare that I find a short story to enjoy. There are exceptions. The winning story in the Bridport Competition of 2002, the year before The Crossing won, called Amore, is the finest short story I have read. Written by Lynsey White, it had all the key features of that difficult medium - a sense of atmosphere, wonderful characterisation, an ending with a punch and, most important of all, it was about a turning point in someone's life.

When Justice Bird was published and I realised that, far from having reached the heady pinnacle of literary success, there remained ridge upon ridge of higher land yet to conquor because the book needed selling, Keirsten said that I should try to write some articles for magazines. It wasn't anything I had ever attempted before, but I chose two publications, Wanderlust, because I though the Bird would appeal to a youthful readership looking to travel in wild lands, and The New Writer.

Please don't be surprised at the latter, a magazine full of tips on how to write and be published. It's the only writing magazine I have ever taken, and it has paid dividends. For a start, it lists all the worthwhile short story competitions giving a outline of their requirements. Then, and perhaps more importantly, it has the occasional request from publishers looking for new work. A small Essex publisher put in just such a request, for 'GritLit', as a result of which PaperBooks published the Bird. TNW in its paper form appears six times a year, but Suzanne Ruthven and Merric Davison also mail a monthly eLetter to all subscribers, an invaluable source of information which must take them hours to produce. Find them at New Writer

I offered Wanderlust an article about my hitch-hiking days back in the sixties, when backpackers didn't take aeroplanes, didn't cheat with trains or long-distance coaches or even local buses, didn't have mobile phones or pills to sterilise the water. The article described twenty-four hours on a dusty roadside outside Tobruk in Libya, a famous but flyblown town on a scorched coastline where the Sahara reaches the sea, a stopping point on a journey which took me from the Algeria Sahara right along the North African coast and up the Nile; and back. The proposal was rejected.

The second article, for TNW, was published in this month's edition. Called The Mule in Us, it described the sense of frustration that drove me to write Justice Bird, a book which, as far as I was concerned, broke every one of my writing rules. It was written very quickly, in anger and frustration but with a heady sense of liberation, it didn't show it bloody told - yet it's the only one of my eight novels which has found a publisher.

So he who spurns advice now gives it. Oh dear, what hypocrisy!

Memory Hold the Door

One of the great fears of getting old is what will happen to our memory. When we're young, we don't worry too much about it. We're aware that we have failings, and we know that others have different failings - and different strengths - but we accept them, if unhappily. As a school teacher I was always deeply envious of colleagues who seemed to have blotting-paper recall when it came to children's names. I remember, as a probationary teacher in my first job in the English Midlands, witnessing an old harridan of the classrooms scold a small girl for some trivial offence by prefacing her tirade with the words, "Emma! I taught your dear grandmother, Grace, and your poor mother, Jemima, and I never, never had such behaviour from either of them!" How the hell did she remember their names? Or did she make them up in the certain knowledge that the poor little mite would be too terrified to correct her?

As I age I cannot rely on my brain cells to retrieve information like they used to, certainly not as quickly. The names of places and people, and our daily attack on The Times quick crossword, which we do as we were told it was a good memory exercise, are a lottery with the grey matter so selective. And yet... I was appointed to that same school as teacher in charge of a small geology department. Since the town was in one of the most geologically rich areas in the whole UK, I was like a small child placed in charge of the sweeties department. I had a keen group of students for A level, some of whom were prepared to spend weekends out in the countryside with me, mostly paddling up fast-running streams or knee deep in glutinous quarry mud, looking for rare fossils. One day one of my students found one. I hadn't a clue what it was, so we sent it to the British Museum of Natural History which, in those days, ran a wonderful service dealing with public enquiries such as ours. The next thing we knew, a professor of geology at Southampton University phoned the school in a state of great excitement to say that he was on his way up to see us: the little beastie we'd found in the Llandovery Shales was the only specimen of Osculocystis monobrachiolata in the country. The only other one, also from the Midlands, resided in a museum in New York.

So I can remember fossil names from decades ago, many without any such exciting connection - Paradoxides davidis, Reticuloceras reticulatum, Didymograptus murchisoni, to name but a few - yet I struggle to recall the name of a neighbour or the cat we had at our last house. Mostly it doesn't bother me as I now accept that most people quietly shake their heads during conversations as I scratch around for an elusive name, and if I'm by myself I find that, if I go away and do something else for a few minutes, the name will suddenly pop back. However, if my present state doesn't bother me, there is one thing of which I am absolutely terrified.

I'm in the process of writing the second book in my three-book contract with PaperBooks. It's to be similar to Justice Bird but different. Like all my books, one of my key requirements is that it should convey a vivid sense of place. Obviously, in Justice Bird this was secondary to the action, while in some of my more literary efforts the description of the environment is almost central to the story. So what I fear is the loss of memory of what it feels like to be in a place. Look at that picture at the top of this page again: you can't see the heat but I can FEEL it. It has a texture, a presence, it's enveloping, overwhelming, deadening, heavy. Am I at risk of losing memories such as that? Will I, one day soon, sit in a bath chair staring out at our lovely view and not be able to remember that beach? In other words, will I live in a past-less present, my only pleasure the spoonfuls of lemon jelly a carer shovels down my throat?

I'll remember how to swallow. I'll remember how to breath. I'll probably remember that, if I pick up a coal from the fire, it'll hurt.

Memory lifts us from the animal to the human. Memory is what we spent millions of years developing as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and then Homo evolved on the plains of Africa. Memory doesn't hold the door, it unlocks the universe.