After putting her three tiny children into a six-year-old Hillman Minx saloon, a Berkshire housewife who had never travelled overseas set out on a 4,000-mile journey to Baghdad on June 30, 1954.
She encountered a colourful cast of individuals in the weeks that followed, including a former U-boat captain and a group of adolescent striptease performers. She also narrowly avoided death when she skidded off a bridge and fell ten feet into a ditch.
I am aware of all of this because my mother, Mary Tisdall, who was thirty-one at the time, wrote a 22,000-word memoir and nearly a hundred handwritten letters to my father, Billy, an RAF sergeant stationed in Iraq, detailing the poignant and dramatic highlights of her trip.
Their intense love for one another is still evident in every letter and word, even after seventy years.
‘My desire for you is terrific at times,’ Billy penned to his ‘bravest of princesses’ from his bed in an air force base in the desert city of Habbaniya.
In response, Mary — living in the tranquillity of RAF White Waltham, just outside Maidenhead in Berkshire — signed off with ‘all my love always and always and always’ followed by a long line of kisses.
Ten months after Billy had left for his foreign posting, they could bear the separation no longer and she resolved to undertake her intrepid odyssey.
Over six weeks, the couple hatched a secret plan to reunite, which they called ‘Operation Magic Carpet’.
Fortuitously, Mary’s brother Alan was employed by the Automobile Association in London, and it was he who provided her with a comprehensive 72-page itinerary.
Its incredible intricacy was hand-typed. The exact distance covered on the European portion of the journey, from Dunkirk to Istanbul, is 2,163¾ miles.
It also came complete with suggested stops for sightseeing — at cathedrals, castles and mosques — while en route, as if the family were embarking on an educational, three-week grand tour rather than a rather hair-raising expedition to the time-worn sands of Mesopotamia.
Before setting off, Mary dashed up to London to get visas for Syria and Iraq for her and her children, Roger, Susan and Bridget, respectively aged seven, five and two. (I arrived three years later.)
To assist finance the venture, little Roger’s Post Office savings account was emptied and vaccinations and dental exams were hurriedly scheduled.
‘Do I need a tent for crossing the desert?’ Mary asked in one letter to her husband.
‘No, the sand is too soft and there are too many insects,’ Billy wrote back. ‘Instead, you’ll have to join a convoy of RAF trucks and sleep in your vehicle, as the chaps do.’
Fired up by her mission, Mary informed Billy that if he dared stop her now ‘there would be a great big row much worse than any atom bomb!’
With that, she booked a Pickfords van to put all their worldly goods into storage and the family headed to Dover in the car that was affectionately known as ‘Miranda’ to board the night ferry to France.
‘Everything is so different and fascinating,’ Mary wrote to Billy, as Mary sped through West Germany still rebuilding after World War II.
She found it strange to encounter helpful and likeable people ‘who all my life I had been taught to dislike’.
At a hotel in the city of Aachen, one fellow guest who struck up a conversation over breakfast turned out to be a former U-boat commander.
‘When he fondly took Bridget on his knee and played with her teddy bear, I found it hard to picture him in his previous grim role,’ Mary mused.
‘How is it a man can be so kind yet so cruel?’
Mary later found out that the German owner of the hotel had been captured at the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940 and had spent four long years as a prisoner-of-war in Bournemouth and Edinburgh.
Rather than harbouring resentment, he declared his appreciation for the English, including our cuisine, and kindly provided his unexpected guests with sandwiches to help them get through the remaining portion of their journey.
‘If only people were to travel more,’ Mary reflected, ‘surely it would be a step towards a greater understanding and world peace?’
Things took a lurid twist when Mary visited one evening to a café where a musical troupe, fronted by a compère ‘with a permanent smile’, was performing for customers.
Its other members included a ‘fat, debauched pianist’, an impersonator who had a ‘horrid’ habit of waving his fingerless hand at the audience, and two teenage striptease artistes’ — one of whom had a nasty scar on her forehead.
‘They started playing a gambling game in which the loser had to buy a round of brandy and the winners drink it all in one gulp,’ Mary recalled.
‘It was fun to watch, but I was full of pity for these two young girls whose lives were being used up so quickly.’
It was when they reached Stuttgart that Billy’s superiors finally learned of Mary’s intended arrival. He was informed in no uncertain terms by his commanding officer that, if his wife turned up at the base, she would be sent straight back to England ‘within 14 days at your expense’.
‘The man is a woman-hater,’ Billy raged.
One aspect of this journey that surprises modern eyes is Mary’s willingness to put her children to bed in a foreign hotel room and then go out at night.
Keen for new experiences, she writes how she went dancing with Josef, a travelling confectionery salesman and dined with Werner, a German engineer en route to Zagreb in then-Yugoslavia.
‘I am a curiosity here,’ she reported to Billy, ‘one Englishwoman with three children going to Iraq.’
Mary provided a ride to a scrawny 19-year-old escapee from communist East Germany when they approached Belgrade, despite being advised not to drive at night or pick up strangers.
Hans had been living on his wits for the last three years and had picked up several different languages in the course of his travels, which came in very useful as they travelled through Yugoslavia, then a desperately poor country.
It was here, near Skopje (now the capital of North Macedonia), that Mary’s trip took a fateful turn. Literally.
Mary skidded and veered off a narrow bridge into a ditch.
‘I remember tumbling and tumbling in the back seat,’ Susan recalls, ‘and Mummy having blood all over her face.’
Additionally seriously injured was Bridget, who was seated in the front on Hans’s lap (back then, seat belts weren’t used).
Fortunately for Roger, his greatest calamity (as he subsequently wrote to Billy with great sadness) was that in the mayhem he lost a treasured toy crane that he had been given for his birthday.
The Tisdalls, shaken but alive, received prompt assistance from the nearby people. Subsequently, a magical carriage filled with twenty-five French vacationers, a few of them nuns, appeared over the hill.
They agreed to take the family and their luggage back to Skopje, but they didn’t appear to understand quite how badly hurt they were. The tour group duly stuck to their sightseeing itinerary, stopping at historic buildings and scenic viewpoints to take photographs as they went along, while ‘les Anglais’, bruised and bleeding, sat at the back of the coach in tears.
It was later discovered that two-year-old Bridget had a broken leg, while Mary required stitches to her face.
Back in Skopje, Mary went straight to the British Consul to ask for assistance. William Maxwell, ‘a real Scottish gentleman’, and his wife, Olive, were ‘kind beyond words’, taking the battered quartet into their home and letting them stay for the next four weeks.
To complete the drive to Baghdad, the Hillman was delivered to a mechanic for repairs while Mary and her children recovered. Maxwell strongly discouraged this, pointing out the bad condition of the roads ahead, Mary’s tendency to break down, and the fact that they would have to travel two hundred miles of deserted desert to enter Iraq.
He suggested that Billy be transferred to Yugoslavia to assist with driving, but the RAF would not approve of this plan. Then, in a surprising turn of events, Mary’s extraordinary journey was discovered by Air Marshal Sir Claude Pelly, the Chief of Staff of the Middle East Air Force.
He was so impressed by her plucky attempt to reach her husband, which — he declared — ‘shows a spirit only too rare these days’ that he made a decisive intervention.
He immediately sent a signal describing her as ‘like a breath of fresh mountain air coming over the hot desert’, and an instruction to ‘see that Sgt Tisdall is reunited with his family’.
Billy was quickly posted to RAF Amman, in Jordan, where the family would be allowed to stay in local accommodation before progressing to married quarters.
Billy turned 36 on August 6, 1954, and Mary and the three kids were finally reunited with him in Jerusalem following two days of delays and rerouted flights via Istanbul and Beirut.
‘The end of your journey is in my arms,’ Billy had written to Mary the month before, and now, at long last, the magic carpet had landed.
What an absolutely beautiful story this is, and what courage and strength this young mother had – this would make a wonderful film.
What a story, what an adventure and the children were no doubt too young to remember it clearly but they were there.
Despite the terrible accident—which might have been far worse—this was an amazing trip and a wonderful experience for the kids. She was undoubtedly committed to finding her true love.
It was a pleasure to read such a beautiful story of strength and love amid all the negativity that surrounds us these days. What amazing memories to cherish. Luckily, common sense won out and they were permitted to be together.
I would love to know more about this amazing woman, and the rest of her life, and the comments that people were kind to her, people she had hated before, I found interesting.
This is the best story I have read this week, considering it’s only Monday, things must be looking up!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 