The Warming by Stanley Johnson

Author:Stanley Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062414908
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

XIV

Falklands I

The rain streaked the windows of the plane as we flew in low over the West Falklands. From the air, the landscape reminded me of the Scottish highlands on a wet day. Bleak, barren, treeless, miserable. I caught a glimpse of a penguin colony on a rocky promontory. That was one difference: you don’t get penguins in Scotland.

Harry was still out to the world, so I had time for my own thoughts. What was it, I wondered, that Britain had really fought for during that brief bloody Falklands campaign in the early eighties? Not these desolate uncluttered hills, surely. Not the wool produced by the handful of sheep stations dotted around the island with names that awoke echoes of the grim battles of the Falklands war: Darwin, Goose Green, Fitzroy and so on.

I doubted, frankly, whether the conventional political arguments were any more powerful. In the space of fifty years, Britain had rushed to give away an empire which encompassed at least a fifth of the human race. Were we really so exercised by the need to preserve the right of a handful of Falkland Islanders to self-determination? We hadn’t bothered much about the people of Hong Kong, when we handed them back to China, and there were four million of them.

In my view, you had to look elsewhere. I had long believed there was one reason, and one reason only, why Margaret Thatcher decided to send the fleet south that fateful Saturday in August, 1982. The Falkland Islands are Britain’s gateway to Antarctica.

Britain is one of the claimant nations to Antarctica. We have half a dozen bases down there in what we call British Antarctic Territory. And the vital supply point for the whole of Britain’s Antarctic presence is the Falklands. Without the Falklands as a logistical hub, as a jumping off point to the south, Britain would have no Antarctic ambitions. It is as simple as that. The fact that Britain, at vast expense, has now constructed a spanking new airport outside Stanley only reinforces the point.

‘Christ, Harry,’ I exclaimed, as we came into land. ‘Look at this bloody great airport.’

In truth, it wasn’t so much an airport as a vast tarmac airstrip. The Mount Pleasant airfield might not be able to handle a jumbo 747, but it could certainly take your run-of-the-mill long-haul jet, your C130 or anything else RAF Transport command decided to throw at it. If the Argies ever tried it again, our men could be on the ground in less than eighteen hours.

Harry had some difficulty waking up.

‘Oh God,’ he groaned. ‘Are we there already?’

We settled up with the pilot there and then. Harry had paid half the fee for the charter in advance. Before we disembarked, he gave Irving the rest, laboriously counting out hundred dollar bills onto the table in the cabin.

Some sixth sense had told me that it was a bad idea to arrive in a place like the Falklands without at the same time knowing how you were going to leave.

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