There were always records in our house. One of my earliest memories is of a heavy old 78 of Hound Dog by Elvis Presley. I remember destroying it with a hammer. I suppose I must have assumed everyone would be OK with this because we never played these old shellac discs, the family legend being that they had been ruined by sand from the desert that got into the grooves when we were in Iraq.
This seems fanciful, but it is certainly true that we were in Iraq. My father was sent to Baghdad by BOAC, his employer, on secondment to Iraqi Airways, and the family went with him. I was too young to remember much but my sister, who is five years older than me, has proper organized memories of that time—organized, but not particularly pleasant.
Ten days before my second birthday a group of Iraqi officers mounted a coup d’etat and slaughtered the ruling family. The body of the reigning monarch (Harrow-educated Faisal II) was strung from a lamppost outside the Defence Ministry. Abd al-Ilah,the Crown Prince, had his mutilated corpse trailed through the streets and cut into pieces. Mass rioting followed. Baghdad wasn’t safe for westerners. Guns pounded at night (a sound that haunts my sister’s nightmares to this day). During all this my father, a taciturn and withdrawn man, would apparently go out for walks just to see what was going on, disappearing for hours at a time. While he was out one day the servants took all our furniture and drove off with it in a truck. After that we were corralled in a compound with other British families until a flight out could be arranged. When we left my father stayed on, and we didn’t see him again for six months.
The flight home was in an unpressurised plane. As we climbed to get over the mountains I apparently turned blue, and my mother, who was heavily pregnant, almost gave birth to my younger brother Paul over Cyprus. We landed in Britain at Southend Airport. As we hit Arrivals, the horror of what she had been through welled up in my sister and she started sobbing. ‘What’s that little brat got to bawl about?’ remarked a passing Southender.
The records we had at home when I was growing up betrayed some influence from our time in the Middle East, but in truth it was a pretty watered-down one. We had an Eartha Kit record or two, a soundtrack recording of the film musical Kismet set in a Hollywoodised Baghdad but using the music of the Russian composer, Borodin. And there was a seven-inch of an instrumental by the Italian-American band leader Ralph Marterie and His Orchestra called Shish-Kebab, all snake-charmer melody and twangy, pre-surf guitar, which years later I covered with my street busking band Pookiesnackenburger. Otherwise, it seems, the sands of the desert hadn’t penetrated very far into the Helmer grooves – which is not to say the experience didn’t mark us.