Gandamack Lodge Kabul, Afghanistan

Home – History – Rooms – Reviews – Contact Us Post your comments EXTRACT From the book FRONTLINE by David Loyn Read a review of the book FRONTLINE Read more about the book FRONTLINE Read about Peter Jouvenal who established Gandamack Lodge They moved into number 10 Canal Bank Road, close enough to a rather greasy canal, which Rory would throw people into if they offended him, or if they contravened the arcane rules of complicated ball games which he devised. Sometimes Peter would arrive with a foreign TV crew, expecting to stay for a few days on their way in or out of Afghanistan, and they would have to sleep on the floor because the rooms were full of Rory’s girls. But behind the games and the jokes, there was always an eccentric correctness to what they did, a heightened sense of right and wrong, a feeling of what was and what wasn’t ‘done.’ Despite Rory’s willingness to sleep in a tent in Afghanistan for a month, he could get unreasonably impatient if he came back to find that someone had eaten the smoked salmon from a hamper he had brought in from Fortnum and Mason. Peter too knew how things should be ‘done,’ surprising an Afghan who came to live in his house in Henley for the summer by his obsession for the different polishes needed to clean the brass and the silver. He once turned up at a friend’s wedding bearing a priceless antique teapot as a gift. The delicate porcelain survived although he was carrying it loosely in a plastic carrier bag. In the field he was always immaculately turned out, wearing the best foreign correspondent khaki in the front line, and preparing himself well. He was the living example of an old British military saying that ‘any fool can be uncomfortable.’ When the travel writer Peregrine Hodson stumbled on him travelling with a friend in the Panjshir valley, he was startled by their supplies. Besides a large medicine chest, they had a mouth-watering selection of food: boxes of instant meals, including sausage and mash; beef in gravy; paella; curry; packets of soup and vitamin drinks; tins of steak and kidney pie and baked beans; porridge and honey and bars of chocolate….In addition they had a tent, sleeping bags, foam rubber mattresses and inflatable pillows. Unfortunately a day or so after they met, they were cut off from this life-saving store house by a major Russian offensive. Peregrine Hodson counted thirty troop-carrying helicopters going overhead, who fired at the Englishmen hiding behind rocks on the ground. Their only route to safety lay through a minefield. They picked their way carefully across, hoping that the mines that they could see thinly covered by sand were the only ones that had been laid. Peter picked up one of the small green plastic anti-personnel mines which he said, with some authority, was inactive since it looked as if the firing pin had gone. He tossed it away to one side, where it exploded. He grinned sheepishly under his moustache at Hodson ‘That’s lucky. I’d thought of lobbing at you for a joke.’ They travelled together to safety in Pakistan, walking hundreds of miles across hostile terrain, with few supplies, all encountering sickness along the way. One night there was a loud burst of automatic gunfire while they were staying in a village where they believed that there might be robbers. Hodson recalls that Peter’s head hardly lifted from the pillow at the sound. Rory too valued courage above everything else. Although with his classical understated good manners he would never of course claim that he was brave himself. In one incident he narrowly escaped death after an attack by a Russian helicopter gunship. All of the mujaheddin he was travelling with were killed except for one young man who was very badly injured. Rory put him on his back and carried him for a day. When he could go no further, he sharpened a Swiss army knife, and laid out a makeshift operating theatre on a rock to try to get the bullets out. The young man died before he could begin to operate. Rory once told a friend that being shot at was ‘like standing on a green at the golf course. There are lots of balls being fired at you, but none of them hits you.’ No one spent more time in danger than Rory Peck, and people flocked like butterflies around him. Peshawar was the front line in the Cold War, awash with money and guns as America paid for influence. There was lots of money too from TV companies who were often paying for the same thing as the American spies – information about the war across the border. The city was full of glamorous fit young men going into danger and coming out with their pockets full of cash. There were parties, but none as large or loud as Rory’s parties, and there was gossip in a city where the last thing you came across was a fact, but there was no gossip as good as that heard in Number 10 Canal Bank Road. Amid the journalists, aid workers, diplomats, spies and soldiers, they were freelance adventurers drawn to that thing which is deep in all of us, the thing which draws people to fast cars, sky diving, Russian roulette, cocaine, the exploration of the border of life and death. There have been cities before which had that allure, life on the edge of danger – Saigon in the 70s, Beirut in the 80s until the kidnapping started, Split in the 90s. But not perhaps since Vienna in the years after the Second World War has there been a city like Peshawar. Everybody pretended to be working for someone else, dealing in secrets in the large concrete villas where they all lived. And among them American right-wing fanatics traded in the belts of dead Russians like scalps. The garden at Canal Bank Road filled with vintage motor bikes, and the sheds filled with antique rifles which Peter began to deal in. There were plenty about. Alongside the hi-tech weapons which the Americans gave the mujaheddin fighting their proxy war against the Russians, there were many Afghans still using rifles which had been supplied by (or taken from) the British more than a hundred years before. Perhaps Flashman was still the best book to take in your luggage to the Hindu Kush.