14/07/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

The remaining expats on the Caribbean island of Montserrat were referring to the Kleebs as The Cliffhangers. This reflected a mixture of irreverence and awe. Robert Kleeb and his wife, Beverley, had retired to their sunshine tropical paradise from Detroit just three years previously and built their luxury home on the headland above Isles Bay. Things had not gone quite according to plan.

First of all, the cliff fell away beneath their house, right in front of them. Unnerving. Then, in July 1995, the apparently extinct Mount Soufriere volcano started to blow its stack behind them. Two years later, the couple seemed remarkably unfazed by either event: they - alone - have stayed on to live literally in the shadow of the volcano in the so-called Forbidden Zone, in defiance of government, police, governor and all the apparatus of officialdom. With water, electricity and telephone cut off they were isolated and under siege from both natural forces and fellow humans.

But Robert Kleeb was not a man to give up. I drove to his home across the abandoned golf course. Access was guarded by two large dogs: a Doberman and a Great Dane. “They keep the police away,” observed Kleeb, laconically, as he unbolted his ash-stained front door.

He had his strategy worked out. "I've got 3,000 flushes of the john in there. I've worked out we can last a year here," he said, waving at the waters of his swimming pool. Instead of being turquoise blue, they were grey with pollution from the ash that was everywhere: every surface - from the pool deck to the statue of Winston Churchill in the hall - was layered in the volcanic ash which fell all day, every day. Much of the time it was fine and invisible. But when the volcano was in full flow it floated down like autumn leaves, or came down like grey sludge with the rain.
  
Montserrat was not the first time I have observed this type of head-in-the-sand reaction to imminent danger. It is, of course, a fact of life - and, more often than not, of death - that people never believe that disaster will come knocking on their door.

From the Bosnian peasant who locked his door, and somehow believed the horrors of ethnic cleansing would pass his family by, to the man who lived underneath the volcano, there are, at any one time, I suppose, hundreds of thousands of people in the world who firmly believe that they enjoy a special immunity; that they can survive the most unpleasant extremes of this planet.

I didn’t usually do volcanoes. Most of my reporting from danger zones has been from civil, and uncivil, wars. But, in August 1997, scanning the news agency reports, I spotted a brief, two-sentence item about the volcano in Montserrat.

Apparently, it showed signs of renewed activity. No big deal, no big story. But it knawed at me that morning. I had a strange premonition and I went to the telephone and called my travel agent.

Yes, there was a single seat left on a charter aircraft leaving Gatwick the next day for neighbouring Antigua and, the cruncher, at a bargain £200 for a 14-day return ticket.

A quick search on the internet revealed the possibility of staying in a rather beautiful house, in a private flat at the pool level, formerly the home of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. I was clearly meant to go.


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