First step in a lifelong commitment to documentation which never reached the second step |
That was where my brother and I were born and eventually started our schooling. Which explains why when I started my first, and ultimately only, scrapbook it was inside an exercise book from the English school in Rome, St George’s.
It was an extraordinary place. It was run by a character who’d been a housemaster at Harrow School, one of the great British ‘public’ schools – i.e. hugely privileged, exclusive private schools. He brought with him all the wonderful sense of entitlement and snobbishness such an institution breeds. It was touch and go whether my brother and I would be admitted, because my father was a Professional grade 3 in the UN and, as a general rule, the school took only children whose parents were at grade 5 or above.
Certainly, being in the school was a wonderful lesson in reward being entirely unrelated to merit. I fell out pretty badly with the authorities there. I assign my lack of ability in football to having missed all sport sessions at a critical time, because I was on detention every single Wednesday afternoon for two years. Indeed, the school briefly made me a fan of corporal punishment: this was the day when the head called me in to his study to tell me I had achieved a unique distinction.
“Out of a school of 500 pupils, you are the only one on detention this week.”
Imagine my pride.
But he hadn’t finished.
“I have no intention of keeping a teacher back to supervise you, so instead I’m going to cane you.”
What relief! My heart sang for joy. I took six strokes of his cane and – at last – could join my class on the playing fields.
As for my father, he too had fallen out with those in authority. His boss loathed him and denied him promotion for fifteen years, a fate he put up with exasperation but stoically, in order to guarantee us a minimum of stability. He then transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, where he was promoted three times in little more than the same number of years, so he ended his career at pretty much the level he would have reached had he been granted some reasonable promotions over his time in Rome.
Sadly, however, while he was able to get into the finance and accounting world without either a degree or an appropriate qualification, he was never able to get out of it. Organisations always need people who’ll keep an eye on the money, and it was known that Leonard Beeson was good at it. Wherever he went, he was cheated of his ambition to move into the running of aid programmes, and found himself spending most of his times with the account books. In the Congo, then called the Zaïre, he did get a programme or two to run, but his main task was still looking after the money.
Talking about the Congo brings me back to my scrapbook.
The Congo was the scene of a major emergency in 1960. The UN sent troops to quell a civil war and large numbers of civilians to put in place a full programme of support and aid. Volunteers were called for and Leonard Beeson was one of just three from the FAO headquarters in Rome. As a married man, he was only required to serve nine months (it was eighteen for those without a family). My mother took it badly, but he felt that it was a duty to step forward when the organisation that paid him needed help dealing with an emergency.
My father's friend As it turned out, a dead man walking |
That event was back in the news a few weeks ago, when it was finally confirmed that, as had long been suspected, the plane had been deliberately shot down by a Belgian pilot working as a mercenary.
Dag Hammarskjöld Iconic Secretary General assassinated in 1961. Along with my father's friend |
Allowing me to write this post, as a bit of a tribute to my father, the UN security guard who became his friend, and of course to Hammarsköld, probably the best Secretary General the UN has had.
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