Diaries 4: Tehran and Revolution

Three years after returning from South America I found myself in Iran and delighted to be posted there by the British Council. The Council looked after its overseas staff very well and, although the provision of a husband was not on the list of what they supplied, it was there I met the man I was to marry, also working for the Council. The final months of our stay in Teheran were those leading up to the Islamic Revolution and the toppling of the Shah from his ‘Peacock Throne’, in other words the end of that historical fabrication, the Pahlavi dynasty.

I kept a diary from November of the preceding year to the February when the Shah left and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned – a fascinating time to live through. Thirty years later I dug out the exercise books where I had scribbled day by day, and relived the time as I typed the notes up into a more readable form. The diary ends just before I and other ‘dependents’ (which is what I had become by marriage) were air-lifted out in RAF planes when the interim government (at that time the government was metamorphosing almost continually) opened the international airport for three days to allow embassies to repatriate non-essential staff and their families. Keith was not included and we waved an emotional goodbye as the coach left the chilly northern compound of the embassy for the airport.

The diary is a mixture of running commentary on the evolving political situation, and a record of its effect on our work as activities were wound down and the staff and teachers, who were scattered around the six centres in the different parts of the country, were gathered in and dispatched home, along with the more personal and domestic detail of our lives which seems to have included quite a lot of parties. It was the Christmas season of course and any excuse for a party was a good one.
The following diary entry illustrates the mix:-

That day (i.e.23 December) the secondary schools reopened, with some smallish amount of disturbance. Next day Christmas eve were violent demonstrations which the military broke up with tear-gas and firing.

This was when it all started up again. After 17th Dec the black mourning period of Moharram was over – the radio and TV resumed normal broadcasting – traffic was as thick as ever in the streets, oil production going up. Except for regular 8.30 power cuts which lasted an hour and a half each evening things seemed pretty normal. Foreigners however were still leaving the country.

I was shopping on Christmas Eve when demonstrations were taking place. Buying Xmas presents, trying to buy a cylinder of gas. ‘Met Peter Russell the poet in the record shop and had a long chat. Returning by car from Pahlavi(Avenue) the traffic on TJ (Tahte Jamshid Avenue) was impassible, managed to turn and go the other way. From Karim Khan Zand (Avenue) decided to try Villa (Avenue) to get gas but again got stuck in traffic. Got back about 1.30 (pm). That pm members of the office took up to 2 hrs to get clear of traffic, with firing going on over their heads. Spent the evening stuffing the Turkey etc…………………….’
……..On Christmas Eve there was no power cut – a gesture towards the farangi (foreigners) Christmas. Christmas day was enjoyed by all and the meal was a great success. It finished with dancing and a power cut again at 8.30 (pm).

In the early days of January the revolution continued its process but we at the British Council, went on planning for programmes of English language teaching activities for the next six months. With the benefit of hindsight it seems ludicrous but at the time we had no idea how far things were going to change after the Shah’s departure.

My diary includes snippets such as that the press were exhorting the people not to provoke an intervention by the army – a military coup in favour of the Shah. I write about the shortage of heating oil – ‘naft’ – on 10th January:_

‘Little naft for heating in the office. Power cut at 11 a.m. Walked because flat battery in Paykan (my car) and other car (i.e.Keith’s) is hiding its Dip.(i.e. diplomatic) plates.’

I note that television and radio are controlled by the military, at this time still loyal to the Shah, but that in the five minutes before broadcasts began, with a shot of a snowy landscape the music accompanying is the WHO and ‘Revolution’; someone in NIRTV knew how to sneak in a joke behind the backs of the military.

I remember the excitement in the air as censorship of newspapers was relaxed and hopes of the new liberal democracy dared to be expressed. I recorded the day the Shah left:-

Jan 16th
The Shah left today – about 1pm. Piloted himself to Egypt. weeping as he mounted the steps of his Boeing 727.

Amazing jubilation in the streets. Cars hooting horns – headlights on, flowers on the windscreen, portraits of Khomeini. Crowds smiling, cheering, giving flowers and sweets and so on.
I walked down NaderShah, Fisherabad, to Ferdowsi. Took a reel of black and white – talked to a good number of people.
Khomeini is expected within days – maybe for Friday’s big march – tho’ he himself has only said “at an appropriate moment”.
Not everyone is happy – the Armenians are very worried and others, who were not dancing in the streets are soberly worried. Others are just sad.’

I then express sadness that the Shah ‘couldn’t make a go of it’, that he was surrounded by bad advisers, that he didn’t listen to his people and that he despised them. Also that he had no understanding of the intensity of the religious feeling in the country.

Diary entries between that day and February 1st, when Khomeini returned to Teheran note power blackouts, increasing street anarchy, confrontations between military and revolutionaries in parts of the country, with estimates of shootings varying between 100’s and 1000’s and, scenes of turmoil at the airport as expats scramble to make a hasty exit. On the domestic front a bout of flu intervened along with unusual weather conditions. On January 22nd I note:-

In Tehran power-cuts continue intermittently during the day and in the evening. They cause traffic chaos during the day. Few police are doing traffic duty, instead students and volunteers are doing it. Today and for the last 2 days it has rained and rained. This is another unusual thing to add to the portents of a natural kind! In Iran it never rains in winter – clear blue skies day after day once the snow has fallen! Now this year its gloom and cloud day after day!

No one obeys the lights – symptom of anarchy.
Friday is Khomeini’s return. Sat. a day of mourning and a big march scheduled.

On February 1st I note that ‘Khomeini arrived today’. He flew, as everyone knows, on an Air France flight and the diary goes on to note that ‘The only good foreigner is a French one at present. The Brits do seem to have been inept in comparison – not to mention the Americans who have been ludicrous’

I continue to note the day-to-day developments and the effects on our circle of colleagues, teachers and friends. Some we knew were attacked on the streets in the increasing disorder and what happened to Khorshid Ali was particularly upsetting. Khorshid was a teacher at the British Council language centre, working all the hours she possibly could, to save up to take her and her son back to Pakistan and the day she was due to leave she was attacked and robbed, all she had saved being on her. She lost everything.

As more and more staff, teachers and families are evacuated life continues an irregular pattern, now going to work in the office, next working from home, with frequent gatherings at our apartment in the evenings – a poetry reading was on the agenda, I note, for one particular evening. The radio station was located not far from our building and one night as we have the radio on the station reports it is being attacked and calls for help; very soon cars are streaming up the nearby avenue to defend the beleaguered station and we put the lights in the apartment out as a gun-battle rages behind the house. We learn next day that the attack was repulsed but it was never clear who had been attacking, with wild rumours of Libyan and Palestinian involvement flying around.

My last diary entry is on February 15th. I report ‘a quiet day – a holiday. The Prophet’s birthday’. The airport at that time was closed but arrangements had been made to open it for three days to evacuate expats. I note that six planes are expected and ‘We will probably go on Saturday’. ‘We’ meant myself and other dependants. My husband stayed on for another three months.

I am struck now not just by the vivid detail – and it was worth keeping the diary for that alone, but also by the amount of speculation about what was happening. I think anyone living through an event like this will feel the drama of the moment and have their self-importance enhanced by it. I have to ask as well whether we were playing at being journalists, pundits and on-the-spot analysts of the situation. But that’s excusable and really quite modest in comparison to the quantity of citizen journalists empowered today by the internet, mobile phone technology and social media.
When you are living through the event everything else takes on heightened significance, the shopping trips when buying a cylinder of gas becomes an initiative test and a challenge, a trip out to the mountains makes you realise that your relationship with the people you meet has suddenly changed; on January 28th I wrote about a trip to the mountains :

‘Some minor half humorous anti-foreigner chat – include(ing) a road block by young lads: “Iran kharab kardid” they said (You have ruined Iran), so I replied, looking at their sticks tapping the car “machin-e-man kharab nakonid” (don’t ruin my car!) and they laughed – let us on. Tea and abgusht at the waterfall chai khane (tea-house) – no problems.’

And the books I was reading, in one instance on 29 January:
‘Read P.Berger at the hairdressers – what a fascinating moment to be reading him (“The Social Reality of Religion”). The “cosmic legitimisation” of the Islamic Republican cause as opposed to the merely rational and intellectual legitimisation of Bakhtiar’

I feel some embarrassment at the pretentiousness of that entry but then, I think, I had a point.

Finally, with their curious mixture of the day-to-day, political reportage and presumptuous analysis, the diary has the mounting tension and excitement of a rapid succession of lived events, when the participants were wondering, day by day what would happen next, what would the outcome be: for Iran, for friends and colleagues and for this fairly recently married couple. The pull and the tug, the sense of direction of my scrappy narrative was quite unconstructed and constitutes – to me at least – the sort of page-turning narrative that, when novel writing, I spend hours trying to construct. And it reads like that because, as the situation changed I was noting, on several different levels and with occasional time out for reflections, events which were significant on the world stage as well as on our domestic one, as they occurred.

This photograph of melt water gushing down the mountainside is symbolic of the feeling in the air in the early part of the revolution; one of the our favourite songs was the Beatles ‘Here Comes the sun’.

As we know, the sun went behind clouds not long after.