High life | 3 November 2016

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things.

And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York to Bermuda for a tennis tournament. I remember the news about Budapest and Suez being passed back to the cabin from the cockpit, and the players on board being far more interested in whether we’d play the best of three or best of five, and other such petty details. Actually, although I was among the youngest at 20, we should all have been ashamed of ourselves.

The problem with the American quest for happiness is that they sometimes ignore what makes other people happy. No one on that flight gave a damn about the Hungarians, among the best people in Europe, who were being slaughtered by T-34 tanks for daring to want to be free. What I should have been doing is what a couple of English girls that I met later on did — fill a car with food and medicine and drive from Vienna to Budapest to distribute it among the freedom fighters. Instead I went to Hamilton and pursued a beautiful Bermudan lady by the name of Jackie B.

My father, who was planning to build a large textile factory in Khartoum at the time when Nasser began to push Europeans around, was on Eden’s side.