Portrait of a Turkish Family

"It’s by a man called Irfan Orga and it’s called Portrait of a Turkish Family . It was a bestseller in the 1940s and is still on sale. Orga was from a good Ottoman family. They lost everything in the [First World] War and he ended up in an orphanage. He went into the army and became a Turkish fighter pilot. He fell in love with an Irish girl, but if you worked in the Turkish state you couldn’t marry a foreigner. So he resigned, married her, and trained himself to be an English writer. He wrote this wonderful classic about an Istanbul family, which describes the atmosphere and disasters of 1918, how they struggled back on the road, where they travelled to, what they eat and so on. It’s very good stuff. It became a bestseller, and the sad thing is that on the strength of it he bought a house in Colchester with his wife and she got a job in publishing, whereupon they got divorced. After that he never really recovered. He just knocked out potboilers about Atatürk and that kind of thing. They have a son, a quite distinguished musicologist, who wanted to take up his Turkish inheritance. So, aged 57, he travelled from England to Turkey and asked for Turkish citizenship. They said, yes but only if you do your military service! But this really is an awfully good book. It’s one of the many classic and wonderful books about Turkey. You can see the beginnings of it with the young Turks in the late 19th century. They’re thinking, how do we go about setting up a modern state? France was the example. You can see them talking about language reform, changing the script and giving rights to women. The thoughts were all there, but they couldn’t really do anything until the great smash of the war. When the Egyptian uprising happened, I was in Egypt purely by chance. Newsweek rang me up and asked if Egypt could use an Atatürk. I said, I’m afraid not. I thought you’d have to have a First World War to get an Atatürk figure. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Oh no, that would just be a bore. Utterly unnecessary. Things are jogging along quite well. I had problems with my health last winter, I tried to use the private route and they did the usual business that private healthcare does to people aged 70 – they lie and weasel in order to get out of it. So I went down to the state hospital, and it worked like a charm. I got put on my feet again. That’s typical of modern Turkey and one of the reasons why this government is so successful. I shouldn’t really say this, but I would rather get my health dealt with in Turkey than in parts of England. You hear such awful stories of slovenly nurses with nose furniture and the telly on all the time. That would kill me. Well, the EU has always really just been a bit of NATO. If countries get into NATO, they get into Europe. It’s too big an economy to be ignored. There is endless to and fro, and Europe will protest, but I imagine Turkey will get into the EU in 10 years or so. I don’t particularly want them to. God, the Europeans try your patience."