On June 30, 1954, a Berkshire housewife, who had never been abroad, bundled her three small children into a six-year-old Hillman Minx saloon and embarked on a 4,000-mile drive to Baghdad.
In the weeks that followed she met a cavalcade of colourful characters, from a former U-boat captain to a brace of teenage striptease artistes, and almost died after skidding off a bridge and plunging 10ft into a ditch.
I know all this because the woman involved, Mary Tisdall, then 31, was my mother, and the highlights of her trip, poignant and dramatic by turn, are recorded in a 22,000-word memoir and close to a hundred handwritten letters that she exchanged with my father, Billy, an RAF sergeant who had been posted to Iraq.
Seventy years later, their deep love for each other still shines out of every word and missive.
‘My desire for you is terrific at times,’ Billy penned to his ‘bravest of princesses’ from his bed in an air force base at the desert city of Habbaniya.
Mary Tisdall with her children Roger, Susan and Bridget, aged seven, five and two in Jordan as part of their trek across the world to see her husband
The family’s trusty six-year-old Hillman Minx saloon which they drove 4,000 miles to Baghdad
One of the letters Mary sent her husband Billy, an RAF sergeant who had been posted to Iraq
A letter sent from Billy to his beloved wife who was in Berkshire until she plucked up the courage to make their journey to re-unite her family
In response, Mary — living in the tranquility 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 the course of six weeks, the couple hatched a secret plan to reunite, which they called ‘Operation Magic Carpet’.
By sheer good fortune, Mary had a brother, Alan, who worked for the Automobile Association in London and it was he who supplied her with an extensive 72-page route description.
Hand-typed, its detail is astonishing. The European leg of the trip, from Dunkirk to Istanbul, is listed as precisely 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.)
Vaccinations and dental checks were urgently arranged, and little Roger’s Post Office savings account was raided to help fund the enterprise.
Mary with her three small children in a family portrait. The family set off across Europe and Asia to be together
Billy with his children in Jordan after Mary had made the arduous trek. She told her husband that if he dared stop her now ‘there would be a great big row much worse than any atom bomb!’
‘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 Miranda sped through a 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 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.
But far from bearing a grudge, he professed a liking for the English — even our food! — and generously gave his unlikely guests sandwiches to sustain them during the next leg of their journey.
Letters exchanged between the lovers from across the world: This letters reads:’I cannot get to you quick enough!’
Roger, Susan and Bridget posing in front of historical sights. The family made sure to go sightseeing as they drove across the continent
Mary posing next to the car the family practically lived in as they made their way to India and Iraq
‘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 made a visit 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 was Mary’s willingness to put her children to bed in a foreign hotel room 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.’
Family photos Tisdall. Mary was only 31 when she embarked on the ambitious journey with her three children
Although cautioned not to drive at night or pick up strangers, when they drew near to Belgrade Mary gave a lift to a gaunt, 19-year-old escapee from communist East Germany.
Hans had been living on his wits for the last three years and had picked up a number of different languages in the course of his travels, which came in very useful as they travelled though 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.
Miranda 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.’
Bridget, who was sitting in the front on Hans’s lap (no seat belts back then), was also badly hurt.
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.
Shaken but alive, the Tisdalls were quickly helped by local villagers. Then, miraculously, a coach carrying 25 French holidaymakers, including several nuns, came 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.
A registration card in English and Arabic for the family stating their intentions and the length of stay
A detailed route was written up for Mary by her devoted brother and took her step by step through the 4,000-mile road-trip
While Mary and her children recuperated, the Hillman was sent to a garage for repairs, with a view to them continuing the journey on to Baghdad. Given the poor state of the roads ahead, Miranda’s propensity to break down and the need to cross 200 miles of uninhabited desert over the border into Iraq, Maxwell sternly advised against this.
His proposal was to get Billy sent to Yugoslavia to help with the driving, but the RAF refused to sanction this move. Then, in an unexpected twist, Air Marshal Sir Claude Pelly, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Air Force, got to hear about Mary’s epic venture.
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.
After two days of delays and re-routed flights via Istanbul and Beirut, Mary and the three children were eventually reunited with Billy in Jerusalem on August 6, 1954, his 36th birthday.
‘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.
For more information, go to: journeytojordan.co.uk
