Arnold Arnold and the quest for world peace

The past, they say, is another country, which occasionally sends us despatches.

It was the spring of 1979, just after Mrs Thatcher’s first victory. I had lived for four years at 81 Highbury Hill N5, one of those enormous Victorian semi-detached villas on the upper slope of the hill close to Arsenal FC. Then my friend Moira invited me to share the second floor flat at 3 Highbury Hill. She was rattling around in its four bedrooms and wanted some company.

Number 3 is the central section of an imposing mid-Victorian structure at the top of the hill, opposite the clocktower and the entrance to Highbury Fields. At the time it was a licensed squat, the tenants of each flat paying £1 a week to Islington Council, on condition they left at a week’s notice when the leaseholders, the Circle 33 housing trust, scraped together the funds to renovate the building: a very seventies-style North London arrangement.

For me it was a cheap option, close to shops and the 19 bus that took me to and from work.  Also, it was a splendid house, if run down. There were a couple of nice but silly punkish girls on the first floor, while the ground floor housed a handsome well-spoken young man whom Moira and I suspected, on no evidence whatsoever, of being a gigolo.

A couple of evenings after I’d moved in, Moira and I were chatting in the kitchen after supper when we heard a commotion.  A man with a whiney American voice was on the upstairs landing, banging on the door of the third floor flat.

“Arnold! It’s Ronald!” He sounded drunk, as well as self-pitying. “Let me in Arnold… Arnold, let me in. I know you’re in there, Arnold.”

There was at first no response, but then a muffled basso profundo, also American.

“No! Go away!”

Ronald subsided, then tried another tack.

“Arnold, I haven’t got any money Arnold!”

“I don’t care, go away.”

And after a while, Ronald did slope off. It was then that Moira told me that our neighbour’s name was Arnold Arnold, and that his sad friend was Ronald Donald, an American trade union official with a drink problem. We chuckled at the juxtaposition of these two unlikely names.

A couple of nights later Arnold came down to our flat for a beer. He was a compact powerful figure, in his late fifties I guessed, dark thinning hair pulled back in a bun, with goatee beard, thick horn-rimmed glasses and a rasping voice. He took an immediate and unashamed interest in me.

“What happened to your legs?”

“Polio.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“India.”

“What were you doing there?”

That led to a discussion about my father Louis Heren being the Times India correspondent, and now its deputy editor.

“You must hate your parents,” Arnold declared.

“No, why should I?”

“Well, they took you to India when you were a baby and look what happened, you got polio. You got every right to hate them.” He went on a bit more in this vein then went back upstairs. Over the next couple of weeks, I got to know him better, or to be more accurate, he started telling me about himself.

Born Arnold Schmitz in Germany, he and his parents had fled to Britain, where he attended Bedales School, then America. In New York he changed his surname to Arnold, before serving in the 101^st airborne division during World War 2.

Arnold claimed several strings to his bow. He was a child psychologist, graphic designer, games theorist and collector. His first wife was the great photographer Eve Arnold, with whom he’d had a son, and who had kept his name after their divorce. He had remarried and had a couple more children. They enjoyed a nice life in New York and Chicago before moving to London in the early 70’s, and he had a lucrative column on childcare that was widely syndicated in the US press.  Altogether he had been doing very well.

So, why was he living in a licensed squat in Highbury, albeit a grand one?

It seems that his son from his first marriage came to stay with them and began a clandestine affair with Arnold’s wife. This went on for several months before Arnold found out, at which point he completely exploded. His rage was such that the affair became public knowledge, thus killing off his career as a childcare expert. The marriage collapsed messily, with suit and countersuit.  All his wealth and possessions, including a valuable collection of historical games, were held in escrow pending a final resolution. He survived in London on social security.

A sad story, but not without its comic aspects.

The summer passed pleasantly. I saw a fair amount of Arnold, with plenty of robust conversation, usually in our flat in the evenings. Once I took Moira,  Arnold and his son Thomas, aged about 14, for a trip along the Regent’s Canal on my battered cabin cruiser, the Quay Breeze. Thomas lived with his mother, and Arnold was rarely allowed access. As we puttered along from St Pancras to Little Venice and Lisson Grove, I was interested to observe father and son.  Arnold was reining himself in, trying to be genial and paternal. But he occasionally exploded, for instance when I suggested Thomas should not lean outboard while we went under a bridge.

“Thomas, pay attention to the captain’s orders!” he roared.

Thomas was an amiable boy and didn’t seem too fazed by his father’s occasional outbursts. Arnold was clearly under emotional strain. I felt for him but couldn’t find a way to relax him.

In early September came the week’s notice to quit 3 Highbury Hill and we all scattered in different directions. I don’t know where Arnold went, but as a disabled person I was found a decent flat near the Old Street roundabout by Islington Social Services. I also had my job as an oil market reporter at Petroleum Argus. There was a lot going on and Arnold slipped from my mind. Until one day in November when I got a phone call at work.

“Patrick! Your father’s a fucking idiot!”

“Arnold, how are you?”

“I’m very upset. I thought your father was an intelligent man.”

“What’s Dad done, Arnold?”

Another strange story emerged. Arnold had come across a recent paper by a brilliant young Soviet mathematician called Leonid Khachiyan.  Arnold had incorporated it into his own magnum opus on game theory, which he apparently had been working on for years.

Khachiyan had, according to Arnold, made an absolutely revolutionary discovery that would enable the holder of the key to crack the most random code. I, of course, had no idea what he was talking about, but could see it might be important if true. It was to do with the “four-part problem”,  Arnold said, his theory that all puzzles can be solved in four moves.  As far as I can recall of what he said, Khachiyan had devised an algorithm that would enable a cryptographer to identify the four stages in unravelling a random code.  Arnold stressed  however that he alone understood the true significance of Khachiyan’s algorithm.

Leonid Khachiyan

Arnold decided the world should know about this great breakthrough, which he thought might lessen the chance of nuclear war, so he contacted my father at The Times. Louis heard him out, and asked him to drop round the office in Grays Inn Road. When it came to it, he was too busy to see Arnold himself, but he sent two of his best men to interview him: Peter Hennessy (now Lord Hennessy, the eminent constitutional historian) and Stewart Tendler, the crime correspondent. They listened to him for half an hour, but nothing appeared in the paper. (I later learned from Peter that they concluded he was mad.) This had led to Arnold’s irate phone call to me, at the end of which he asked to see me.

We met at a café in Hampstead, where he handed over a bulky manuscript.  Arnold wanted the secret knowledge it contained to go to the British authorities who, he felt, were marginally better than the Americans, the Soviets and the other big powers. However, his personal affairs were at last on the point of being resolved and he was flying to the US to finalise legal arrangements. He might be away for months, and there was no time to lose on the Khachiyan business. Could he leave his book with me? He would ask the British government to contact me, so long as I was prepared to hand it over. Of course, I must ensure that whoever came for the manuscript really was from HMG. By this time, I also doubted that Arnold was entirely sane, but I agreed, to keep him happy.

He left for New York, and I took the manuscript to the Argus office, where it would be safer than in my flat. A few days later I received a phone call at work.

“Mr Heren, this is the Ministry of Defence. We understand you are in possession of a manuscript entrusted to you by a Mr Arnold Arnold.”

“What is your name?” I asked, slightly desperately.

“My name is of no importance. Mr Arnold has told me that you will surrender the manuscript to us.”

I agreed, slightly unwillingly, that this was the case. The voice asked whether he could drop by the Argus office later that afternoon. I said that he must identify himself to me when he arrived.

A short late-middle-aged gentleman appeared, clear blue eyes, clipped silver moustache, neatly belted mac. I took him for a retired military officer now working in Whitehall. I asked for identification.

“I said that I would identify myself as being from the Ministry of Defence, and so I do: I am from the Ministry of Defence.” He gazed coolly at me.

“No, I want to see some ID.”

He sighed and briefly produced a pass with a photo that could have been of anyone white, male and over 40. It might have been a bus pass for all that I could see. I decided the charade had gone on long enough and handed over the manuscript. He thanked me and disappeared.

And that was that. If the manuscript helped protect world peace, I am very glad. I never saw or heard anything of it again. Nor did Arnold ever get in touch. I saw him briefly ten or fifteen years later, drinking coffee with a young woman in yet another Hampstead café, but we affected not to recognise one another.

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