The strange behaviour of subatomic particles.
We arrived in Mallorca on 18 April 1986 on two-week duration charter flight tickets. After the two weeks, I was returning to the UK, alone, to work to support our Mediterranean adventure. Sandy and the children would stay in Cana Cavea by themselves; leaving them seems irresponsible now, but they were more innocent times.
In 1986 there was no Easyjet or Ryanair. There were two options to fly off the island, an exorbitantly priced ticket from a national carrier or a surplus charter ticket from someone who wasn’t going home. There were always transient travellers doing temporary work on boats or in bars and hotels. It was cheaper to book a two-way charter flight and not use the return than go single scheduled. Selling unused tickets was illegal, but could be circumvented by putting a classified ad in the local English Mallorca Daily Bulletin newspaper, like ‘Flight to Birmingham this week Telephone–‘. As only I was going back to the UK, we had three spare tickets. We placed an ad in the Bulletin and went into the travel business. John and Daphne Hadland, who had a telephone, offered to be the contact for any potential clients, we got two takers.
This is what happened:
We drove to Palma airport and parked in front of the terminal building. In those days the airport was nothing like the international hub it is today. Terminals, A and B, were small, shed-like, single-story buildings that handled both incoming and outgoing passengers. I stood by the car, nonchalantly waving the flight tickets like a fan. I was approached by a man, in his early twenties, in denim dungarees and a flowered shirt, who turned out to be Canadian. A little later a blond girl in a pink mini dress arrived, she was Danish and spoke very good, slightly accented English. The girl seemed nervous about paying upfront, but the young man, who must have done it before, was relaxed about the whole thing. We’d already agreed on the ticket prices over the phone, so I took the money and the man and girl’s cases and headed for the check-in leaving the two travellers sitting in a corner,
At the check-in counter, I produced our four tickets and told the lady that only three people would be travelling, myself and my two children. My wife was staying in Mallorca. The lady probably thought we had a complicated marital situation. She checked the three passports, put identification tags on the cases, put them on the conveyor and gave me three boarding passes. I went and sat with the clients and unobtrusively handed them two of the passes.
In those days the boarding passes didn’t show any details for the holder, so the two substitute passengers just had to show a valid passport and a pass to get onto the plane. They had to go through security checks, so there appeared to be no security problem.
But there was a problem. The final ticket recipient didn’t know what luggage was put on the plane or what was in it. The authorities must have known this went on but didn’t seem worried. This was strange, because on 13 October 1977, Lufthansa Flight 181, a Boeing 737–230 Adv en route to Frankfurt from Palma de Mallorca was hijacked by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Five traumatic days followed between Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai and Aden, during which time the captain, Jürgen Schumann, was murdered. On 18 October the aircraft was stormed in Mogadishu, Somalia by the West German counter-terrorism group GSG 9, with the clandestine help of the British SAS. All 86 passengers and the remaining four crew members were rescued. Three terrorists were killed, and one was captured.
This type of switch cannot be done today as boarding passes carry the name and passport number of the traveller, that must be supplied before the flight.
We went to the departure gate to say our goodbyes. I told Rohan that he had to look after everyone while I was away. He interpreted this as he was now the boss and told Tayrne so, and she told him what he could do with his new authority. Sandy said to do what I had to do and get back as soon as possible. We kissed for a long time. It was an emotional farewell. The policeman checking my passport looked from me to Sandy, to the children. Clearly moved, with moist eyes and a quivering lip, he waved me through to departures.
Most times, I didn’t need to buy a ticket through the classified ads. When I went to the UK, I’d buy a two-week charter return, spend two weeks in Mallorca and then return to work in the UK. I had clients like Rolls Royce Aero Engines, The Ministry of Defense, Shell Research and some smaller companies. I didn’t initially tell my clients I’d moved to Mallorca. I didn’t think their corporate mindsets could handle my nomadic wanderings between them and the Mediterranean. They knew I had other clients that I rotated between, unbeknown to them Mallorca was just another client I incorporated into my work schedule.
However, I had to plan for the unexpected when a client required urgent support. For such times Sandy’s dad was my point of contact, he took messages and passed them on to Mike Brown, an 80-year-old American in the village who had a telephone. Mike would get on his bicycle and peddle down to our house with the message, a sort of modern-day, senior citizen, mechanised version of the Pony Express. I would then go to Mike’s place and phone the client. The client had no idea I was phoning from Mallorca as there was no digital technology in those days. To them, I was merely returning the call. I’d tell them I was occupied with another client and make an appointment to see them in two days. I’d then get a Daily Bulletin, and find a ticket to an airport as close to the client as possible.
Most times it was easy to pick up a ticket. One time, my friend Max Born and his partner Sue asked me to wire their old farmhouse. They were renovating it as a spiritual retreat for stressed inhabitants from northern Europe. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get the workers to understand that I only wanted horizontal and vertical cable runs. I wanted the client to know where they could drill a hole to put up a picture or shelf without electrocuting themselves. The workers always took the easiest route, cutting diagonal or serpentine runs around resilient rocks. To them, the shortest path between points was the only method. In the end, I did the channelling myself. Chasing out cable runs in stone walls with a disk cutter, hammer and chisel was a hard, filthy job. In old clothes, a jungle hat and safety glasses, I looked like a dust-covered miner. One day while I was at Max’s house, Sandy arrived and came into the building looking for me. Mike Brown had delivered a message from Rolls Royce Aero Engines, the Tornado fighter inspection system had gone down, I was required urgently. While Sandy gave me and Max the news, the room filled with building workers curious to find out what tragedy had occurred. Max, with a little pride, told them that his electrician was required urgently to resolve a problem at Rolls Royce and must leave immediately for England.
Forty-eight hours later, I was in the clinical environment of Rolls Royce’s radiography department at Parkside Coventry, dismantling a micro-focus X-Ray machine. This machine fired electrons (sub-atomic particles) in an evacuated tube to hit a tungsten target to produce ionising radiation.
Only two days earlier, I had been in Max’s house in Mallorca, covered in dust channelling out stone walls. This change in my working environment was ironic. Max’s grandfather was Max Born the German-Jewish physicist-mathematician who, when Hitler took over Germany in 1933, emigrated to England and became a naturalised British citizen. A friend of Albert Einstein, Max’s grandfather, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 for his part in developing Quantum Mechanics, the science that explained the strange behaviour of subatomic particles.