I knew nothing about this, nor did I know that the Argentine authorities had decided to invade the islands-though the Comodoro aerodrome was filled with Hercules transport planes, and fighters were flying overhead for much of the day. My only inspiration had come the day before, via a chance remark from a Royal Navy officer I had met at the British Emba.s.sy in Buenos Aires. I had asked him if, in his view, it was worth my while trying to get to Port Stanley-the BBC had said that no journalists were going to be allowed to go, and I would have to use some degree of subterfuge to get aboard the plane. The Argentine authorities might be rather annoyed if they found out-so, was it worth the risk? 'Go,' was all he said. 'It should be worth it.' (Some months later he told me that, having a fair idea of what was going to happen over the coming days, he had wondered guiltily how I ever planned to get back.) But no complicated subterfuge was necessary. The little plane took off on time, and all the pa.s.sengers who had queued were aboard. No matter that task forces and battle fleets were even at that moment a.s.sembling at the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean, and satellites were being interrogated hourly for information on troop movements and diplomatic messages, no matter that the world's spying community was working overtime, and that presidents and prime ministers were engaging in urgent late-night telephone calls for advice and support-of all of these events that history now insists were taking place that day, the plane's pa.s.sengers were quite insensible. I had lengthy conversations with three men aboard who had come to the Falkland Islands to buy land. One was a minor Spanish count; one was a High Tory gentleman farmer from Shropshire; the third was a Scotsman who lived in Egypt. Each one had the fullest confidence in the ability of the mother-country to prevent any unpleasantness: no one in the plane was thinking of war, except perhaps the uniformed men in the c.o.c.kpit, who may well have known what we did not. Only London was expecting trouble, and Buenos Aires was less than sixty hours away from delivering it.

I felt a thrill of excitement as the plane b.u.mped its way downwards an hour later, and the seat-belt signs snapped on. There was a thick and dirty layer of cloud, and it was several minutes before I could see anything below through the Lockheed's picture windows. But then, grey and heaving and white-veined in the gale, there was the sea. It had everything I expected of a Cape Horn sea. It was shallow-the South American continental shelf was only thirty fathoms down-and the waves were short, and steep. The sea here had a vast emptiness, and a subdued fury to it-not at all like the North Sea, for instance, across which ships of all kinds are for ever making way. This was a deserted quarter of the ocean, and the clouds were very low, and ragged wisps blew down to the crests of the swell, where big seabirds-albatross, I imagined, or the southern ocean mollymauks-whirled lazily on the storm.

We were coming in north of the islands, and making a tight turn into the wind, landing from the east. The charts ('Islands Surveyed by Captains R. Fitz Roy and B. J. Sulivan, RN, 18381945') were not entirely helpful. Macbride Head, for which I looked in vain, had a notation beside it. 'Reported to lie one mile further northward, 1953'. The cliffs around Cape Bougainville were said to be a mile and a half further south than depicted by the Victorian captains. And the interior of East Falkland, which they either never took time to see, or else found too intimidating to describe, was curtly dismissed as being crammed with 'Rugged mountain Ranges and impa.s.sable Valleys'. I trusted that the Air Force men up front were using more accurate maps.

And as we turned for the final approach, so I spotted my first glimpse of this uttermost outpost of the old Empire. A chain of black rocks, streaked with white foam, surrounded by a tangled web of weed, heaved up from the seabed. There was a tiny beach, and on it the lumbering forms of seals, frantically racing into the comfort of the surf to escape our noisy approach. There were said to be four types of pinnipeds on the Falklands-the southern elephant, the southern sea lion, the South American fur, and the leopard. True seals walk by flexing their stomach muscles (unlike sea lions, which use their flippers) and furs are the most common Falkland seals, and as these below seemed to be both numerous and heaving themselves about on their bellies, I a.s.sumed these to be furs. But before I could be sure two more islands, these covered with tall bushes of tussac gra.s.s, flashed by and we b.u.mped down on the most southerly governed dominion of the United Kingdom.

The rain lashed cruelly out of the rugged ranges and impa.s.sable valleys to the west, though it was not cold. Two bedraggled and dejected baggage men waved us into the low block of the arrivals' hall, where there was the smell of cigarette smoke and damp corduroy, and where a rather dated picture of the Queen and Prince Philip hung, steamed up, on a whitewashed wall. A small and cheerful man in blue oilskins welcomed us, said his name was Les Halliday, customs and immigration officer and harbour master, and could he have our pa.s.sports? Much inspection, and questioning followed-how long was I staying, did I have enough funds to support myself, where was my return ticket, what was my business-before Mr Halliday felt confident that I was not an Argentine zero pilot out on the islands for a recce, and he chalked my dripping bags and stamped my pa.s.sport.

A small oblong stamp in blue-black ink: 'Immigration Department 30 March 1982 Falkland Islands'. Neither Les Halliday nor I knew that was to be the last mark he would put in a pa.s.sport for a long while, and that the plane even then refuelling in the storm outside would be the last international civil flight into the Falklands for five years, at least. The next foreign aircraft to land at Stanley airfield would arrive in three days' time; it would fly the blue-and-white flag of Argentina, all of its guns would be loaded with sh.e.l.ls, and Mr Halliday would be under strict curfew, ordered to stay indoors and pay the arrival no official heed at all.

A clutch of mud-spattered Land Rovers stood outside, and a pleasant-faced girl took my bags and led me to one of them. Her voice sounded vaguely Australian, though she was rather shy, and clearly rather uneasy with the strangers who piled into the cab. She unb.u.t.toned her anorak once the heater got going, and she was wearing a tee-shirt with a Union Jack, and the slogan 'British and Proud of It' over an outline of the islands. We lurched forward with a belch of diesel smoke and crunch of wet gravel, and set off for the colony's capital.

A few weeks before I had been on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and the similarities were remarkable. No trees. Bare rocks, ever wet from the rain and salt spray. Endless stretches of green bogland, fading into the fog and the drifting squalls. Lines of black diggings, some with tiny figures in black plastic coats moving slowly among the pools of inky water, stacking fuel for the coming winter. Gulls mewed and squawked as they wheeled in the eddies. Discarded cars lay rusting beside the road, which was either deeply rutted, or covered with thick patches of beach sand scattered by the last storm waves. And through the holes torn in the Land Rover's canvas top, the sweet smell of peat smoke, and, as we rounded a bend and breasted a low rise, the sight of it blowing in blue streams from a hundred mean cottage rows in Port Stanley herself.

We pa.s.sed a small forest of radio aerials: this was where the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company had set up its first transmitter in 1912, and had sent a message in morse to King George. The Admiralty built a second set of mighty aerials just before the Great War, in the mountains to the west of the capital; the first time they were tested some hapless matelot turned on too much power and miles of wiring burned out in a flash and a drizzle of sparks. A submarine cable laid to Montevideo snapped, twice. Then a set of rhombus aerials was built for a s.p.a.ce-research team that came to the Falklands in the mid-Sixties, and a private circuit was established between the unlikely twin towns of Stanley and Darmstadt, in West Germany. But after seven years it closed, too-leaving behind, as seems the custom here, a cl.u.s.ter of odd-shaped radio masts. There may be no native trees on the Falklands, but the twentieth century's sterling efforts to allow the colonists to talk to the outside world has left many rusting iron masts and rotting hawsers that, from a distance and in a mist, look much the same.

Up in the Caribbean, where the winds are from the east, colonial capitals were usually built on the western sides of the islands-protected by the lee of the land, accessible for sailing ships that used to bring and take the Imperial trade. Down in the Falklands, where the winds-and what winds!-are from the west, precisely the opposite is true. The eastern sh.o.r.es are those protected from the gales, and logic and prudence thus dictate that the trading vessels call and anchor there. The first township was at Port Louis, on the eastern side of East Falkland, but the approaches were shallow, and troublesome for the bigger ships of the day; and when the Royal Navy surveyed the nearby waters and tested the anchorages and decided on another spot, it too was on the eastern side of the archipelago. The place they considered most fit was a tiny settlement named Port William at the southern side of an inlet called Jackson's Harbour. To honour the peer who was then Under-Secretary for the Colonies, it was renamed Stanley, and formally designated capital 'with a turf hut and a small wooden cottage in progress' in 1844.

Like Bird's custard and the shapeless cardigan, the design and structure of a British working-cla.s.s town is quite unmistakable, utterly unexportable and-to the British, and only to the British-charming in a ghastly sort of way. As we b.u.mped down the final hill into Stanley there could be no doubt that this was the creation of Britons, seeking familiarity and rea.s.surance so far from home. It was a town that appeared to have paid no heed to its position so close to the Patagonian coast. (It is notable, though, that Stanley is at almost exactly the same lat.i.tude south-fifty-two degrees forty minutes-as Great Yarmouth, Stamford, Cannock, Oswestry and Barmouth are north, and it is similar to the poorer parts of all of those towns and has, in winter, a not dissimilar climate, too.) There is nothing like it anywhere in South America, though there are villages in the older parts of Australia and New Zealand that have the same ramshackle aspect-a blend of mining-town and fishing-port, Industrial Revolution and Prince Albert, memorial hall and cenotaph, red brick terrace and tiled roof, pebbledash and peeling paint, potting shed and allotment, conservatory and geranium and privet hedge. I was never to see another Imperial town quite like Stanley. The Caribbean capitals have more grandeur and permanence about them; the old garrison cities-Gibraltar, Hong Kong-have been subsumed by modern development, the mid-Atlantic colonies have in their capitals stone constructions that proclaim the might and main and dignity of Empire. But not poor Stanley. This is a truly forlorn and gimcrack little town, creaking and damp, and with the feel of impermanent permanence about it, as though it had been put up by a Ministry of Works to solve an immediate housing problem, and never removed. There used to be rows of what were called prefabs in some English towns, erected to ease the shortage of housing after the Hitler war. They stayed for years-ugly, and yet not hated. Stanley seemed to me rather similar-a town that has suffered from too little money, too little confidence, too little care taken in its design and its maintenance. It does have a certain charm-but that tends to derive from its people, rather than from its appearance. No historian, surveying the architectures of Imperial power, would ever select the Falklands capital as an exemplar of what the world's greatest Empire had done. The Imperial ties that bound Chowringhee and Pedder Street and Albert Road, Hong Kong, never extended as far south as Ross Road, Stanley.

Stanley was built on the northern flanks of a steep hill, its streets running down to the waters of Stanley Harbour. The light, in consequence, is intense-the sun always hanging in the northern skies and reflected back by the riffled and sparkling sea. As we turned down the hill the town suddenly became curiously luminous, everything bathed in the pastel brightness of a low sun and the sea. From here the town looked like a freshly painted water-colour of itself, shining with the damp. The rain had stopped, the sun had broken through and the gale had eased to a stiff breeze. There was washing flapping on the lines, the peat smoke rose half-vertically from a hundred chimneys, gulls were finding it possible to land on rooftops, and children, in oiled pullovers and Wellingtons, spilled out on to the streets, to play. This might have been a Scottish islands capital-Stornoway, perhaps, or Tobermory, on a brisk morning after a night of storms.

The Upland Goose Hotel, made famous by the events of that autumn, was rather less of a hostelry than would be found in a Scottish fishing town. It was more like a youth hostel-spartan, old-fashioned, worn out. The name comes from the wild goose that island sheep farmers loathe, regarding it as an absolute pest. They call it 'Magellan's gra.s.s-eater', and claim that seven geese can wolf down as much gra.s.s each day as the average healthy sheep. There was a plan to slaughter 15,000 a year and offer a bounty of fifteen shillings for every hundred beaks, but the conservation lobby won the day, and the geese remain, to be shot for food, and served with redcurrant jelly and slices of orange.

I had a cup of instant coffee and sat in the conservatory, basked for a while in the afternoon sun and read old copies of Weekend Weekend and and t.i.tbits t.i.tbits, and smelled the geraniums and the roses. Mutton, too: it was lamb for dinner at the Upland Goose, as it is so often that the islanders call the meat three-six-five (or so it is said; I never actually heard anyone call it anything but mutton).

There was a purr of heavy tyres on the road outside, and a new, bright green Land Rover shot past. Royal Marines, members of Naval Party 8901, the Falklands garrison. I might have supposed they were bent on some secret military expedition-setting up fortifications, perhaps; or making a last-minute reconnaissance. But as I strolled out into Ross Road to look, it turned out to be much more mundane. They had stopped at the grocer's, and were inside buying Mars bars. They were curious when I told them I had come all the way from London. Everything was pretty relaxed, they said. No crisis, except that a few lads had come across from Montevideo and were crowding out the barracks up at Moody Brook. Come over and have tea, they said. Or even a drink. The major's a pretty decent sort, be glad to see you.

And off they rumbled, westwards, towards their little headquarters camp at the head of the sea-loch. Up in London matters were fast moving to a head; down here, 8,000 miles away from the diplomatic argument, the marines whose task was, in theory, to defend the integrity of the Colonial Government, were blithely unconcerned, or at least appeared to be.

As the sun began to slip its way westwards, and ease itself down behind the Saddleback and Mount Longdon, I strolled through town. (The 800-foot peak directly south from Stanley is called Twelve O'Clock Mountain, and islanders set their watches by it, when it is not raining, and covered with cloud.) Christ Church Cathedral-'the most southerly Anglican cathedral in the world'-was the only structure of any real Imperial value, it seemed to me, even though its roof is made of red corrugated iron. The first Falklands church had been wrecked in 1886 when a river of liquid peat had roared down from the hills; Sir Arthur Blomfield designed its replacement, and it might have been particularly grand had the Austrian stonemasons he employed not walked out after a year, leaving the tower half-finished, and forcing the abandonment of plans for a thirty-foot steeple. But what resulted was pleasant enough: a chunky, well-b.u.t.tressed tower, and an impressive expanse of red roof-proof, if any were needed, that the Imperial deity was of the Church of England, and could survive even among the winds and the waves of the far south Atlantic.

I liked the cosy Britishness of it all, too. The altar had been carved by masons in Yorkshire, the kneelers had been embroidered by the good ladies of the parish, and there was a tiny stained-gla.s.s window in the south corner, dedicated to the memory of the island nurse, Mary Watson, who pedalled the rough roads of Stanley on her ancient Raleigh bicycle, visiting the new mothers and the old men and the sickly children, and who was much loved by her people.

Yes, there were the grander memorials, too-a battle ensign from the Achilles Achilles, which had streamed behind her as she tackled the pocket battleship Graf Spee Graf Spee off Montevideo in 1939, and a plaque for the sailors who died at the battle of Coronel, in 1914. But it was the gentler, less strident memorials that seemed more suited to this most gentle of colonies-like that to the old Dean, Lowther Brandon, who had travelled by horse and by ship to every corner of the islands (a complete tour took three months) bringing the post, books, his own off Montevideo in 1939, and a plaque for the sailors who died at the battle of Coronel, in 1914. But it was the gentler, less strident memorials that seemed more suited to this most gentle of colonies-like that to the old Dean, Lowther Brandon, who had travelled by horse and by ship to every corner of the islands (a complete tour took three months) bringing the post, books, his own Falklands Islands Magazines Falklands Islands Magazines, and his magic lantern, which sat on the saddle of his second horse and with which he would entertain the island children. 'In appreciation of many years of faithful service' reads the memorial. No hectoring monuments to conquering generals here, and only one governor (the splendidly named Herbert Henniker Heaton) gets a mention.

The lights were coming on all over Stanley as I strolled back to the hotel, and out in the bay, too, there were the pinp.r.i.c.ks of lanterns on the few ships at anchor. Two fixed lights showed the Narrows, the entrance to the wonderfully sheltered anchorage; and beyond it there was the bulk of a vessel that, according to a pa.s.sing policeman, was a Polish fish-factory ship. Polish and East German fishing vessels crawled all over Falklands waters, he said, 'stealing our hake'. But, he added, 'we steal the Poles', so it all works out fair.' It turned out that whenever a Polish vessel came into Falklands waters a number of seamen jumped ship, and asked the colonial authorities for asylum. There were six in the police station outhouse just now, he said, and they were being taught English by one of the local wives.

There were as many Poles as policemen. The force in Stanley is smaller than in any other colony-one chief, from the Colonial Police Service, an inspector, a sergeant and four constables. One member of the thin blue line for every 300 colonists, a number that Falklanders like to think compares favourably with an island like St Helena where there is one policeman for every hundred Saints. There is almost no crime-a little drunkenness, the odd bout of sparring between spouses, and a.s.sorted beastliness with sheep (of which there are three-quarters of a million-400 for every islander). The task of the police force, then, is limited to handing out licences for islanders wishing to collect penguin eggs, and making sure dogs are regularly inoculated against a worrying local ailment called hydatidosis. 'A pleasant sort of life,' said the constable. 'Boring, though.'

The dinnertime rituals at the Upland Goose would have been familiar to a travelling brush salesman who had ever worked his way through a wet Wednesday night on the Ayrshire coast. The dining room was cold, the furniture cheap, the ugly floral wallpaper was scuffed and the gla.s.ses on each table were made by Duralex, in France. The pa.s.sengers from the plane were seated at separate tables, and were not encouraged to talk to one another, but to munch solemnly at small clumps of congealed mutton and instant mashed potatoes, boiled carrots, and Bisto. The waitresses caught the glumness of the hour, and moved with a sullen weariness from kitchen to table, finding it difficult to smile, impossible to talk. An excited babble of Spanish came from an adjoining room-a dozen workers for the Argentine natural gas combine were staying, someone explained; they were building a gasworks down by the docks.

I had met, and had dinner with, one other Argentine who was staying locally. He was a photographer named Raphael Wollman, and he had been on the island for a week. Des King, the owner of the Upland Goose, was very suspicious of him. 'Big coincidence, I'd say,' he remarked. 'All this talk of trouble, and we have an Argentine photographer here. Funny business.' And he shook his thin head with distaste. He didn't care much for the Argentines, he said. Impossible to trust. Unpredictable. Very emotional.

The radio was on in the kitchen, and at eight-midnight in London-the familiar jauntiness of Lillibullero Lillibullero cascaded through the static, and the BBC newsreader came on air. All conversation stopped, forks hovered in mid-route. The South Georgia saga was the first on the list, and hotting up: Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, had broken off a trip to Israel and had made a statement to Parliament. 'The question of security in the Falklands area is being reviewed...' It was almost the first time the name of the colony had been mentioned, other than as a mere adjunct to the trouble 800 miles to the east. I felt the adrenalin pump briefly into my system, and my hands shook slightly with excitement. cascaded through the static, and the BBC newsreader came on air. All conversation stopped, forks hovered in mid-route. The South Georgia saga was the first on the list, and hotting up: Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, had broken off a trip to Israel and had made a statement to Parliament. 'The question of security in the Falklands area is being reviewed...' It was almost the first time the name of the colony had been mentioned, other than as a mere adjunct to the trouble 800 miles to the east. I felt the adrenalin pump briefly into my system, and my hands shook slightly with excitement.

There was more. Some newspapers in London were reporting that submarines had been sent south. The Navy High Command in Buenos Aires had declared its force 'in a high state of readiness', and there were reports that the Argentine flagship, the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo Veinticinco de Mayo, had put to sea. (It was forty years old, built for the Royal Navy as HMS Venerable Venerable. But elderly or not, it was still a carrier, and sending a carrier to deal with a gathering storm on South Georgia suggested that someone in Buenos Aires had decided it was time to stop playing games.) There was said to be a row brewing between Britain and the United States over which side the Americans were on.

And to complicate matters still further, riots were breaking out all over the Argentine capital. The rioters were angry with the military government. Raphael Wollman, listening solemnly to all this, shook his head sadly. 'Madness,' he said. 'This will all come to no good.'

Everyone on the islands would have heard the news from London. Every house-and not merely those in Stanley, but in all the outlying settlements dotted across the vast expanse of countryside they called 'the Camp'-was equipped with a brown walnut box, a gold-coloured grille on the front, and a single black bakelite k.n.o.b below. This was 'the Box', the radio-rediffusion system that had been introduced to the islands in the Thirties, and which conveyed, by land-line and telephone circuit, every piece of news and gossip a remote colonial community was ever likely to need.

It was customary to keep it switched on all the time-the Box in the Upland Goose was always burbling away in the background, a combination of Muzak and a pictureless telescreen that I half-suspected would bring me news of increased chocolate rations and successes against Oceania. The feeling was enhanced by the acronym used by the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service, FIBS. 'All they tell,' Des King laughed. The usual fare was music, very much from the Fifties, with interleaved snippets of news read by a man named Patrick Watts, and announcements-who would be on the next morning's float-plane departure to Fox Bay and Port San Carlos, who had flown in on the afternoon flight from Comodoro, what His Excellency the Governor was doing for the remainder of the week. 'And now-Edmundo Ros...' The BBC broadcasts were relayed, and were much listened to-particularly a brief fifteen-minute programme each Friday, 'Calling the Falklands', which generally consisted of birthday greetings of the 'to little Janice at Walker Creek from her Auntie Jill and Uncle Bert in Southampton' variety, and usually ended with sad promises that they would try to get down to see everyone 'before you're too much older', and which everyone seemed to know would never be fulfilled.

These days, of course, it was the news that stopped most islanders in their tracks. The names of the BBC readers-Roger Collinge, Michael Birley, Barry Moss-were as familiar in this bleak corner of the ocean as were the Cronkites or the Days of the outside world. 'Always worry when Mr Collinge is reading the news,' said one man in the hotel bar afterwards. 'Reminds me of Frank Phillips in the last war. He always seemed to be given the bad news to deliver. Collinge seems the same. If it's grim stuff, give it to old Collinge.' Mr C-I had seen a picture of him once; he looked very gentle, and wore dark gla.s.ses-did seem to be on a lot these days.

The radio service, antique though it may have been, was the very soul of modernity when compared to the Falklands telephone system. I had decided to call the Governor. The telephone was enormous, made of bakelite, weighed twenty pounds and had a hand crank on the side. Not for the first time I felt that I had whirled backwards in time, and that I was playing a bit-part in a Rattigan play, all seedy gentility, brilliantine, ration cards and Utility furniture. But I followed the instructions on the card-picked up the 'instrument', twirled the handle-it rasped alarmingly-and was connected to a cheery lady whose name, I had read, was Edith. 'Thirty-eight two rings,' I said somewhat diffidently offering the number of Government House. 'His Excellency's having dinner,' said Edith, without a moment's pause. 'Can you try in ten minutes? Give him time to have his coffee.'

Rex Masterman Hunt, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Falkland Islands, Governor of the Falkland Islands dependencies and High Commissioner of British Antarctic Territory, presided over what is by far the biggest remaining land acreage of British Empire. The Falklands, which cover just under 5,000 square miles, are but a morsel. The dependencies of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (which Governor Arthur, in the Fifties, represented by a stuffed king penguin at one end of his office, and which he kicked every so often to remind himself how irritating the dependency problems could be) add another few thousands of square miles; and the Antarctic Territory-the South Orkneys, South Shetlands and a ma.s.sive wedge of Antarctica claimed by Britain-represent 100,000 more.

Despite the rigours of having to rule such a mighty Imperial domain, Mr Hunt said he would be delighted to have company, would I please come over right away, coffee was being brewed, and Mavis keen to hear all the gossip. Did I need a lift?

He had a red London taxi, just like the Governor on Grand Turk Island. Taxis were considered eminently suitable for gubernatorial transport because, the Foreign Office had said, they were unmistakably British, impressive-looking, and tall enough inside to allow governors to keep their plumed hats on their heads while on ceremonial drives. The Falklands taxi, I was glad to learn, did not suffer the depredations of its Caribbean colleague, which was always being gnawed to bits by inquisitive wild horses. Here the only snag was that the car got a little rusty.

Government House, Stanley, was a pleasant and unpretentious Victorian villa, looking rather like a cross between a manse and one of the smaller railway hotels found by the junction stations of the Scottish highlands. It had brick chimneys and a tiled roof, and conservatories and offices had been tacked on later, as business flourished. It was next door to the Cable and Wireless office, and there were a couple of wooden houses nearby where junior officials from the Foreign Office lived. A flagpole stood on the lawn and a copse of Douglas firs, some of the very few trees on the islands, and planted as a windbreak, so that His Excellency could read old copies of The Times The Times in the garden, and not risk having the court and social news blown out to Cape Pembroke. The house was wholly unprotected-there was no guardian fence, just a tall pine hedge, and pipework cattle grids, to keep the sheep off the lawns. No duty soldier was in evidence, either-odd, considering the fuss in London and Buenos Aires; even odder, when you think that even on an island as tranquil as Montserrat a white-uniformed soldier stands constantly in a sentry-box beside Government House, Plymouth; and that in Hong Kong armed police patrol the grounds, on eternal watch for possible a.s.sailants. in the garden, and not risk having the court and social news blown out to Cape Pembroke. The house was wholly unprotected-there was no guardian fence, just a tall pine hedge, and pipework cattle grids, to keep the sheep off the lawns. No duty soldier was in evidence, either-odd, considering the fuss in London and Buenos Aires; even odder, when you think that even on an island as tranquil as Montserrat a white-uniformed soldier stands constantly in a sentry-box beside Government House, Plymouth; and that in Hong Kong armed police patrol the grounds, on eternal watch for possible a.s.sailants.

Here there was no one. I strolled up the path, rattled the door, and the Governor and Commander-in-Chief opened it himself, as though we were neighbours calling in for a cup of Nescafe. He was wearing, as I recall, a cardigan; Mavis was sitting by the peat fire, drinking brandy and soda from a tumbler and reading a copy of the previous week's Times Times. A Beethoven sonata was on the tape player, the velvet curtains were drawn, and on the spare armchair was a pile of mail from England, and a great number of recent London newspapers, all of which had come in with the diplomatic bag from Comodoro.

'Governors,' The Times The Times wrote in the mid-Sixties, after the anonymous Latin American correspondent paid a visit, 'are fleeting birds of pa.s.sage in this out-of-the-way colony.' Many would never have chosen to come to 'these islands of peat moorland, where people are few and sheep are many'. The place had many shortcomings-the water 'which the stranger finds has a peculiar taste and effect, looks like whisky' the winds blow hard, trees are a rarity. Small wonder so many of Her Majesty's men-none of whom had ever been high fliers in the Colonial Service, and were always paid indifferently-were so hostile. Governor Arthur kicked his stuffed penguin; Governor Moore forced his staff to go to church, banned drink, and could be kind about nothing Falkland except his garden, in which he once grew a thirteen-pound cabbage; Governor Robinson let it be known he loathed this tiny settlement 'at the f.a.g end of the world'. But Governor Hunt, who had paid his dues in the service of Empire-he had been a District Commissioner in Uganda, and had worked in Jesselton, Brunei and Kuala Lumpur, as well as flying Spitfires against Hitler's air force-seemed to like the place. Mavis Hunt, a stalwart of a colonial wife who preferred warm places, was not so sure about the weather; and Tony Hunt, the tearaway teenager who rode his motorcycle furiously around the rutted Stanley streets, was not keen at all. But they all liked the scenery, and the people; and they had no doubt that they were loyal British subjects, and intended to remain so. wrote in the mid-Sixties, after the anonymous Latin American correspondent paid a visit, 'are fleeting birds of pa.s.sage in this out-of-the-way colony.' Many would never have chosen to come to 'these islands of peat moorland, where people are few and sheep are many'. The place had many shortcomings-the water 'which the stranger finds has a peculiar taste and effect, looks like whisky' the winds blow hard, trees are a rarity. Small wonder so many of Her Majesty's men-none of whom had ever been high fliers in the Colonial Service, and were always paid indifferently-were so hostile. Governor Arthur kicked his stuffed penguin; Governor Moore forced his staff to go to church, banned drink, and could be kind about nothing Falkland except his garden, in which he once grew a thirteen-pound cabbage; Governor Robinson let it be known he loathed this tiny settlement 'at the f.a.g end of the world'. But Governor Hunt, who had paid his dues in the service of Empire-he had been a District Commissioner in Uganda, and had worked in Jesselton, Brunei and Kuala Lumpur, as well as flying Spitfires against Hitler's air force-seemed to like the place. Mavis Hunt, a stalwart of a colonial wife who preferred warm places, was not so sure about the weather; and Tony Hunt, the tearaway teenager who rode his motorcycle furiously around the rutted Stanley streets, was not keen at all. But they all liked the scenery, and the people; and they had no doubt that they were loyal British subjects, and intended to remain so.

The house was certainly very comfortable, with a kitchen big enough for a mansion, a billiards room, eight bedrooms, studies, drawing rooms, gun rooms and diplomatic offices. A small lair at the end of a corridor housed the communications centre, where there was a cipher machine and a telex for sending and receiving coded telegrams, and where Rex Hunt kept his one-time pads, the code books for those rare occasions when it was necessary to send messages in ultra-secret. The Government House secretary turned out to be a woman I had known some years before in Islamabad, in Pakistan.

In the kitchens I met the Governor's chauffeur, an islander named Don Bonner. He had been asked to stand by until I was ready to leave, and was nursing a cup of cocoa with one of the kitchen maids. He was a dignified man, grey haired and weather-beaten, with the manner and the accent of a countryman; he had been in the employ of the past three governors, both as driver and preserver of His Excellency's dignity. 'I make sure the flag's the right way up-that sort of thing.' He drove me back to the Upland Goose, in the little taxi with a crown in place of a number plate.

He admitted to being bewildered, and not a little alarmed, by all that seemed to be going on. 'We've had all sorts of troubles with the Argentines over the years, you know,' he said. 'They landed a plane on the racecourse once. They built a base on Thule Island, and no one in London seemed to mind. No one even knew about it for the best part of a year! And now all this. Landing planes at our airfield again-they did that last week-and all this nonsense at Leith. We've seen it all before, I suppose. But it doesn't sound good.'

Don set me down, and waved me goodbye. 'Cheers che che!' he cried. There are a number of such residual Spanish words and phrases in use on the islands. Every part of the colony outside Stanley is known as the Camp-from campo campo, the Spanish word for 'countryside'. The islanders take a coffee-break each morning, only they call it 'smoko time' the sheepskin fleece on the farm horses is known by its gaucho word, the cojinillo cojinillo, and the noseband is the recado recado, the halter is the cabezada cabezada, the harness is the apero apero. And farms, too-Rincon Grande, Salvador, and San Carlos. (But Lafonia, the huge southern part of East Falkland Island, did not get its name from the Spanish: Samuel Fisher Lafone was a merchant settler who bought vast tracts of land in the 1840s, and later sold out to the magnificently named Royal Falkland Land, Cattle, Seal and Whale Fishery Company-later to become the Falkland Islands Company, a subsidiary of an English firm of coal dealers. The firm's greatest land a.s.set is the soggy waste of Lafonia.) Next day dawned bright and clear, though the wind still stung, and as I walked by the sea after breakfast-Rice Crispies, bacon and eggs, damp toast and Chivers marmalade-droplets of salt spray whistled through the air like fine rain. Outside the hotel, mounted on a plinth on a patch of gra.s.s that ran down to the harbour, was the mizzenmast of the SS Great Britain Great Britain, one of the many wrecks that litter the island. The Great Britain Great Britain herself, built by Brunel in 1838 and one of the world's first iron ships, was dismasted off the Horn, and ran to Stanley for shelter, where she lay for more than a century. Eventually enthusiasts had her brought back to Bristol, leaving only the mast behind. herself, built by Brunel in 1838 and one of the world's first iron ships, was dismasted off the Horn, and ran to Stanley for shelter, where she lay for more than a century. Eventually enthusiasts had her brought back to Bristol, leaving only the mast behind.

But there are other ships that remain intact: the huge ironclad Lady Elizabeth Lady Elizabeth, with her three masts, lies on a sandbank near the airport; the Snow Squall Snow Squall, the Vicar of Bray Vicar of Bray, the Charles Cooper Charles Cooper-and my own favourite, an East Indiaman known as the Jhelum Jhelum, which was built in 1839 and now lies where she came to grief, in front of Government House. (I felt a certain affinity for this creaking old beauty, condemned and dangerous though she might be. I had been in Jhelum, in the Pakistan Punjab, only a week before leaving for Port Stanley: the symmetry seemed remarkable, to say the least.) Close to the hulk of the Jhelum Jhelum was the colony's most famous memorial-that commemorating the triumphal naval engagement of 8th December 1914, and which has ever since (despite later happenings) been known as the battle of the Falkland Islands. Admiral St.u.r.dee and the battle cruisers was the colony's most famous memorial-that commemorating the triumphal naval engagement of 8th December 1914, and which has ever since (despite later happenings) been known as the battle of the Falkland Islands. Admiral St.u.r.dee and the battle cruisers Invincible Invincible and and Inflexible Inflexible were on duty, defending the Horn from the German grand fleet, under the command of Admiral Graf von Spee, in his battleship the were on duty, defending the Horn from the German grand fleet, under the command of Admiral Graf von Spee, in his battleship the Scharnhorst Scharnhorst. The Falklands Volunteers, islanders mounted on ponies and armed with two machine-guns, were sent out on watch; and at seven thirty on the morning of 8th December saw the smoke of the approaching Germans. (A Mrs Melton, who worked on the farm at Fitzroy Settlement, managed to get a message to Stanley that three German warships were lying off Port Pleasant.) Admiral St.u.r.dee, accompanied by a mighty squadron of British Imperial naval power, put to sea, and sank the marauding Germans, sending von Spee to the bottom. The islanders have always been proud of having helped trounce the Kaiser's attempted domination of the South Atlantic, and celebrate the day each December-one of the few occasions when the Governor turns out in full Imperial rig, and the garrison steps out in style.

I called on the garrison at their tiny base at Moody Brook, a couple of miles along the sea-loch, to the west of Stanley. On the Wednesday the marines were said to be on yellow alert, but their officers seemed relaxed enough, and gave me tea and sandwiches from a silver mess teapot. There had been a small celebration, since one of their number-only forty in usual times, though more had come over from Montevideo since the South Georgia affair started-had married a local girl named Alana Cusworth. He was reckoned lucky by his chums, who saw their eighteen-month tour of the islands as 500 days and nights of excruciating s.e.xual frustration. 'We give them lots of training exercises, and they run around, and sail a good deal,' their commander, Major Gary Noott, remarked over a piece of toast. 'But it is still tricky for them.' He took me to one of the marines' rooms: an entire wall was covered with pin-ups from floor to ceiling-there must have been a thousand nipples on display, and still the man wasn't happy.

Major Noott seemed unbothered by the gathering storm. He had his orders, he knew what to do in case of a 'threat', but as he had almost no weapons ('just enough to support a troop, spread among sixty of us') he considered his presence more symbolic than useful. 'If they were foolish enough to invade us,' a brother officer remarked, 'we have to remember that there are nearly 80,000 of them, and sixty of us, with just a few rifles and a machine-gun. I'd say our chances of success were-well, limited.' Everyone in the mess laughed, but sardonically.

It was a curious time. Diplomacy, away in London and New York and Buenos Aires, appeared to be staggering towards disaster. Ships were involved in complicated manoeuvres in the South Georgian waters: I managed to send a telex to HMS Endurance Endurance, asking the skipper, Captain Nicholas Barker, for some news on just what was happening, and he promised to reply on Friday morning. But here in the eye of the storm, all was uncannily calm. The Penguin News Penguin News carried stories about the Horticultural Show (Harry Ford won a bag of fertiliser for displaying the 'most outstanding potatoes'); Stanley beat the marines in the annual soccer match; Timmy Bonner from Port Howard won seven races at Port Stephen, on horses named Happy, Parker, Trigger, Matcho and Ulster. Someone had written from New Zealand to say that diddle dee berries, which grow in great abundance on the Falklands, could make excellent aftershave if mixed with alcohol. And one of Stanley's little shops, the Kelper Store, was up for sale; its owner kept it open for only nine hours a week, and consequently found it woefully unprofitable. carried stories about the Horticultural Show (Harry Ford won a bag of fertiliser for displaying the 'most outstanding potatoes'); Stanley beat the marines in the annual soccer match; Timmy Bonner from Port Howard won seven races at Port Stephen, on horses named Happy, Parker, Trigger, Matcho and Ulster. Someone had written from New Zealand to say that diddle dee berries, which grow in great abundance on the Falklands, could make excellent aftershave if mixed with alcohol. And one of Stanley's little shops, the Kelper Store, was up for sale; its owner kept it open for only nine hours a week, and consequently found it woefully unprofitable.

The store's plight echoed one of the main troubles of the Falklands. There seemed a pathological lack of initiative and drive among the islanders. The shops were dreary, made no effort to compete with one another, never made a bid for excellence. There were no local industries-no whisky was produced, despite the ideal conditions for growing all the ingredients. No one tried to sell fresh vegetables to the marines, who had to buy their supplies from England. There were 600,000 sheep on the islands-yet no one tried to sell a single skin, or make a single coat, or spin a single ball of wool. There was but one restaurant in Stanley. (Its owners later upped and left.) There was no fishing industry-indeed, I found it hard to buy fish in any shop, or order it in any hotel. Nor was there a butcher's shop: the meat supplies were brought in the back of a Land Rover, which called at houses only if a sign was displayed-'Meat today please'.

The marines had noticed it. The Governor had noticed it. A few of the islanders, and the more recent immigrants had noticed it. The place was dying on its feet. Islanders were leaving-a score or so each year, the population sagging now well below 2,000, the ratio of young women to young men declining rapidly, the social ills of a small, introverted group-alcoholism, divorce, depression-increasing fast.

I liked the colony very much; but I had no illusions about it. This was no elysium, a remote and peaceful corner of the world in which the forgotten idylls of mankind were still performed. It was a place of change and decay, of decline and pointlessness-gentle, yes; harmless, yes; but a sorry kind of wasteland, the abode of the spiritually dying, and of the intellectually dead. It was, I realised after my first few days, a place that made me angry-that so much beauty and serenity had to be wasted on so many who were so unwilling or unable to reap the most from its natural goodness and potential.

There were, of course, places and people I came to like. I loved Cape Pembroke Lighthouse, with its bra.s.s gleaming and its lenses sparkling, and its keeper (who had worked for twenty years on an Imperial light on South Georgia) proudly showing me the log book, and telling me of the various vessels he had watched over the years as, despite the warnings of his ten-mile beam, they hurled themselves on to the rocks below. I loved the penguins-the rockhoppers and the gentoos, the kings, the magellans, and the improbably named macaronis. I found much pleasure in the names of the animals and birds and plants these strange sub-Antarctic islands provided homes for. There were Cuvier's beaked whales, Falkland foxes, South American sea lions. You could see steamers and loggerhead ducks, Johnny rooks and mollymauks, Pampa teal and Chiloe widgeon. You might walk across meadows of swamp rush and pigvine, the Cape Horn boxwood and the Christmas bush, the vanilla daisy and scurvy gra.s.s. And all under a wind so cool and fresh and clean that a quick turn of an evening left you feeling scrubbed down to bright metal, with the appet.i.te of an ox and the fitness of an athlete. The Falklands felt a place that should have been good for the body and the soul, and it puzzles me still that so much was so evidently missing.

Some newcomers were not as disappointed as I, and did indeed find the islands a source of perfect peace and spiritual inspiration. A small community of Ba'hai had been started there in the mid-Seventies; I became friendly with one young Californian family, the Sheridans, Jeannie and Duffy. Duffy Sheridan worked by day writing road signs for the Government, and at night turned his talents to oil painting. He was good enough to be given an exhibition in London, devoted to portraits of the island people, and he made a considerable amount of money.

It was mid-afternoon on Thursday, All Fools' Day, when things started to go visibly wrong. The news from London was bad that morning, and when we stood in the kitchen, wreathed in porridge steam, and listened to the World Service, the girls clenched their fists until their knuckles turned white. Mrs King was from the Pitaluga family, well known in Gibraltar, and she knew a thing or two about the travails of Empire. She looked up from her cooking and scowled at the radio. 'Something's happening,' she said. 'Something's going wrong.'

That afternoon I made a brief attempt to get a ride to South Georgia, so that I could see exactly what was going on between the Royal Marines and the sailors on board Drummond Drummond and the and the Granville Granville. There was history of a sort being written out there, and I felt I wanted to take a squint into the epicentre of the moment. A steel sloop had slipped into harbour overnight, sailed by a young Czech who was on a single-handed circ.u.mnavigation. He had left the Baltic a year ago, had wandered down the Atlantic to Montevideo, and was now crossing to Cape Town in the roaring forties, and had stopped in the Falklands for shelter from the storm, like thousands of sailors before him.

He said he would take me to Grytviken. It was on his way, and he was bored with his own company. So we sailed out into the harbour, and swung the compa.s.s for an hour or so, tacking back and forth along the length of the loch. Two others came for the ride-Raphael, the Argentine photographer, and a stray Polish seaman who had jumped ship a few days before, and wanted to give his fellow crewmen a wave as we cruised cheekily close to the factory vessel. I rather fancied that the Czech planned to go back home when his journey was over, and might not look too kindly at his Polish friend thumbing his nose at fellow Pact-members, but he was a relaxed sort of fellow, as most lone yachtsmen have to be, and seemed not to worry.

It was about five, and we were sailing close to the Narrows when, with a roar of exhaust and a plume of spray, three uniformed Royal Marines shot by in a rubber boat. I had seen them the night before, and I waved. They did not wave back, but sped ahead with a look of rather grim purpose. They landed at the westerly entrance, just by the tiny green navigation light, and began unloading weapons-a light machine-gun, and a pair of mortars. One marine remained behind, his colleagues sprang away again and unloaded more weapons at the other side of the entrance. Something, I said to myself, was definitely up.

When we got back to the tiny dock by the Upland Goose there was a telegram waiting for me. My masters in London had decided that, in view of the deteriorating situation, I should remain in the Falklands, and I was asked not to sail on to see the sc.r.a.p men 800 miles to the east. Then I spied d.i.c.k Baker, the Colonial Secretary, striding purposefully to his car, which took off in a screech of rubber towards Government House. A friend who had had an appointment with him followed: it had been cancelled, he said. There was something urgent afoot.

At five minutes to eight, while I was struggling through another of Mrs King's ten thousand ways with mutton (though there was the promise of red mullet on the morrow) the Governor telephoned. He was calm, but in deep earnest.

He had requisitioned five minutes of radio time at eight fifteen, he said. Would I come round immediately afterwards, please? It was a matter of great urgency. He would not say what the matter was, other than there was trouble in the offing.

I put down the telephone. All of the King family stood around in silence, waiting for a word. They looked shrunken, and frightened. I told them all I knew, and went back to the dinner table, where one of the girls served me my ginger sponge, her hand shaking as she did so. 'Balloon going up, I expect,' bellowed the Shropshire farmer from across the room. 'Nasty business. Had to come one day, I suppose.'

I felt, quite suddenly, gripped by a terrible sadness for these people. I could imagine a little of how they felt. Here I was, on the verge of becoming witness to a cla.s.sic episode of Imperial history, excited, absorbed, all the instinctual routines of journalism swinging into their familiar actions; and here were the Kings, and their neighbours and their friends, who had come here to this bleak and windswept rock because they thought it would be safe, and peaceful, and because they loved the land and the wind and the kindred spirits, and because they wanted somewhere that was securely British, with all the essential decencies and protocols of an England that was herself slipping away from the things they had come to love.

I once bought a house in an Oxfordshire village from a pair of elderly ladies who had decided to emigrate to New Zealand, because, they explained, 'it is like England was in the Fifties, and that's the time we liked so much. We don't like England today. We want to find a place that's like it used to be.' And as with New Zealand, so with the Falkland Islands. What these people had wanted, when they or their fathers set out on the ship so long ago, was just what my old ladies wanted: a country with no crime, no television, no permissiveness, no coloured people, no disco music, no drugs...These were a people for whom Carnaby Street meant the beginning of the end, and for whom progress was a dirty word. And the land they had found, and for all its faults the world to which they clung so eagerly, was about to be desecrated. I remember thinking, as I spooned up the last morsels of sponge and custard and poured a cup of watery coffee from the cheap steel pot, that this would be the last night ever during which all those things for which these people had become colonists would survive. I was not quite sure exactly what was about to happen, but I knew, and I could see these people knew, that from this moment on, in just a matter of hours, or minutes from now, nothing on the Falkland Islands would ever be the same again. It made the fact of this particular reliquary of Empire, with all its reasons and its history, seem suddenly to have been a pathetic waste of time.

Events then moved swiftly, in a blur. The announcer at the radio station had not quite grasped the urgency of the moment, and tried for a ribald tone. 'Lay your ears back, folks, for His Excellency the Governor!' And Rex Masterman Hunt, the man who had taken down the flag on the British Emba.s.sy in Saigon and who thus knew some of the rules of diplomacy in extremis in extremis, was on the air, with every house in Stanley and every settlement in the Camp hanging on his every word. Not a sheep was shorn, not a word was said, until the news was delivered.

The islands were going to be invaded. (d.i.c.k Baker was to say later that up until Thursday afternoon London insisted they would not be.) A battle group of Argentine warships-led by that former British carrier, the Venerable Venerable-was on its way. There were frantic discussions in the world's interested capitals, but no one held out much hope. The first units of the force could probably be seen by the keeper at Cape Pembroke in two hours' time. The first men might be ash.o.r.e by dawn. The local Defence Force was being called up. There was no need for alarm.

Nor was there any. Stanley was stunned into silence. A curfew had been declared, and only soldiers were abroad. I walked the deserted streets, which were like any working-cla.s.s English town during the screening of Match of the Day Match of the Day-every single person was inside. Everyone was awake. The Governor was back on the radio at four, declaring-as colonial governors have the perfect right to do-a state of emergency. All the Argentines staying at the Upland Goose were arrested and led away by marines, lest they try to give some help to their arriving colleagues.

But the colleagues had already arrived. The first party was ash.o.r.e by four; the first shots were heard at eight minutes past six. By this time I was in the small frame building beside Government House, under a bed upstairs. Don Bonner's foot was in my ear, and a tabby cat, terrified by the rattle and pounding of the guns, was huddled under a mess of candlewick bedspread. A small island nation was busily changing hands.

The surrender came three hours later; the Union flag came down, the blue-and-white banner of the Republic of Argentina went up in its place. The Falkland Islands were instantly trans.m.u.ted into Las Islas Malvinas, Port Stanley became Puerto Argentina, the British colony, together with her dependencies and the Antarctic Territory were, in the minds of millions of jubilant Argentinians, part of the device that had for years been printed on all Spanish-language charts of the area: 'Territorio National de la Tierra del Fuego Antartida e Islas del Atlantico Sur'. After a century and a half of argument, this windy quarter of the southern seas was now a province of Argentina.

The British Colonial Government was kicked out; Rex Hunt and his colleagues were on an Air Force plane to Montevideo by sunset. As a final humiliation he had been ordered to take off his white Imperial uniform and dress instead in sober style. He had to change behind a curtain in the Stanley airport, while impatient and unamused soldiers fingered their trigger-guards, and muttered Spanish imprecations under their breath.

Next morning the islanders awoke to find new road signs being painted: from now on they would drive their Land Rovers on the right, said the commanders. They were, after all, a part of Argentina, and it did not behove them to be different, in any way. And Spanish lessons would be started in all the schools, with immediate effect.

I stayed around for two more days, until the Argentine officials on the island expressed their irritation and deported us, back to Comodoro Rivadavia on the mainland. The following day I was in Buenos Aires, one of the hundreds of reporters a.s.signed to cover the story from the perspective of the jubilant Argentine capital, wondering, like half the world, how it would all turn out. And to judge from the sounds of outrage howling down from London, the Empire, after years when it had seemed well on the way to becoming a wholly moribund and insignificant inst.i.tution, was coming very much to life once again.

This is not the place in which to recount the events of the early northern summer of 1982-the Falklands 'war' or 'operation' or 'recovery' has been well chronicled elsewhere, and for reasons I will explain in a few moments, I was not in the best position to report them. It will be sufficient to say that the Government in London responded with deliberate and brilliantly schemed ferocity, just as it might in times of earlier and more cla.s.sically Imperial crises.

A ma.s.sive battle fleet put out from Portsmouth, scores of civilian ships-liners, container vessels, tugboats, tankers-were requisitioned, soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen were brought from every corner of the world, arms and diplomatic a.s.sistance were sought and won from the Allies. And all with one single, uncomplicated end-to regain what had been so brusquely s.n.a.t.c.hed from British hands. 'The Empire', Newsweek Newsweek magazine perhaps inevitably wrote on its cover, 'Strikes Back!' magazine perhaps inevitably wrote on its cover, 'Strikes Back!'

The British troops, replaying the grand manoeuvres of Normandy and Sicily and the Italian beaches, landed on East Falkland Island in mid-May. The next day one Falkland farm was liberated, and the Union flag flew on British soil once again. Some three weeks after that all of the island group was wholly dominated by the British forces.

The Argentine dream had lasted just seventy-four days and a little over sixteen hours. On 14th June, at 9 p.m., local time, the warring generals put their signatures to an Instrument of Surrender. Twelve minutes later a message was received in Whitehall, from Major-General Jeremy Moore. 'In Port Stanley at 9 o'clock p.m. Falkland Islands time tonight 14 June 1982 Gen. Menendez surrendered to me all the Argentine armed forces in East and West Falklands together with their impedimenta. The Falkland Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants.' It had taken thirteen hundred deaths to accomplish the ending of this Argentine dream and this Falklands nightmare.

But I was not to see any of that. A week after I had returned to Buenos Aires-long before the British forces had landed at the Falkland settlement of San Carlos-I travelled down to Tierra del Fuego, in company with two friends, both from a rival newspaper. We were arrested in southern Patagonia, charged with spying, and spent the better part of three months locked up in a tiny cell in gaol in the small town of Ushuaia, the most southerly town in the world.

But once the British victory was announced, and once enough bail money had been collected to satisfy the pride of the local magistracy, we were released and flown back to London. The war had happened without us. I had been there at the beginning, but had never been allowed to witness the end. I felt slightly cheated, as if a mission had been left incomplete, and the journey had no symmetry to it. The paper sensed this, and suggested I go back down to the islands as soon as possible, to see what the war had done to the place I had thought so very peaceful and so serene.

And it changed everything, of course, and for always. It was a month later when I returned, in a Hercules transport plane. The airport at Stanley had been shattered by bombing and sh.e.l.lfire. There was torn metal and oil and devastation on every side, and a crush of soldiery with their tents and their radios and their portable latrines and all the other toys of military occupation. Stanley's roads were pitted, fences had been knocked down, tank-tracks and minefields and depot flags spoiled every view, and the air was constantly filled with the whirring and chugging and buzzing of helicopters as they carried the new residents back and forth over the once-peaceful little town.

I flew out to the Camp. The helicopter pilot and the army public relations men and the foreign office news managers pointed out the famous battlesites, as though they were Blenheims and Trafalgars and the salient at Ypres. There was Mount Tumbledown, and there Wireless Ridge; that's where Colonel 'H' Jones fell; that hut at Goose Green was where the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds locked up the entire settlement; and that's where they kept the napalm, evil sods!

We stopped at the settlement at San Carlos, and had a cup of Typhoo and a bacon sandwich in the farmhouse kitchen. Woollen socks were drying over the Raeburn, and a small child came in with peat for the fire. The family sheepdog lay curled up on the floor. There were copies of the Daily Express Daily Express on the table, and a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar, and a box of Capstan cigarettes. The islanders who stood beside the range said they were thankful for what had been done, and would now like to be left in peace again. It had been a trying time, and still was. on the table, and a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar, and a box of Capstan cigarettes. The islanders who stood beside the range said they were thankful for what had been done, and would now like to be left in peace again. It had been a trying time, and still was.

I walked outside, into the sunshine and the wind. The field, beyond the gorse bush, was rutted with tyre marks, and the helicopter sat to one side, its rotors bouncing in the breeze. Up the hill a Nigerian gunnery sergeant was shouting abuse at a squaddie: there was a Rapier missile battery near the summit, and something had gone wrong with the tracking computer. The squaddie set off on a khaki-painted motorbike, to seek out a spare part.

To the west, shining gold in the afternoon sun, lay San Carlos Water, and Falkland Sound. Three months ago there would have been nothing there but the water and the birds-perhaps the little island packet, or a yacht, or a child in a rowing boat off for a day's fishing. This afternoon six warships steamed at anchor, their guns ranged high, their radars swinging round and round on perpetual watch. But no Admiral St.u.r.dee here, with battleships and cruisers bent on some mighty task; these were mere sentry ships, stationed to ensure that for the time being there was some truth in the old Imperial axiom about Holding what we Have.

'Come on-no time for gazing!' shouted the man from the Ministry of Defence. The helicopter rotors were up and running, and it was time to whirl away and leave the islanders to their own devices. Their lives had been shattered, and changed for ever-and all for the preservation of a sad corner of Empire which, by rights and logic and all the arguments of history should, by some device or other, be permitted and encouraged to fade away. Arguments were later to be advanced about the need for keeping the Cape Horn pa.s.sage in safe hands, for the day when Panama fell to the other side. But most of the world, perhaps less sophisticated and more cynical than it should be, saw this as quite simply the pointless preservation of Imperial pride. And yet the preservation could only last a few more years, or a few more decades; when finally it was allowed t