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Chapter 2

School for Spies

‘Where did you learn such good Arabic?’ asked the man in the suq. ‘In Lebanon, at Shemlan above Beirut’ was my answer. ‘Ah,’ with a knowing look, came the reply, ‘the British spy school.’

For a generation of British diplomats and spies, such were the first words of tens of thousands of encounters across the Middle East, as the graduates of the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies engaged, in Arabic, with real Arabs.

MECAS was set up in Jerusalem in 1944, as the end of the war approached. Its job was to teach British diplomats, spies, officers and other officials Arabic, and about the Middle East. Its first Chief Instructor was Jewish: Major Aubrey Evan of the British Army, later, as Abba Eban, Israel’s UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister. In 1948, when Britain pulled out of Palestine, the school moved to Lebanon, eventually to a purpose-built mini-campus in the Christian village of Shemlan, in the mainly Druze-populated mountains above Beirut. It was the Egyptian ruler, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Colonel Nasser, who in the run-up to the Suez crisis of 1956 had dubbed MECAS the ‘British spy school’. The name stuck. For thirty years, anyone of any education in the Middle East, and many of no education, knew of the British spy school, thanks to the free air time Nasser had given the institution.

Despite Nasser’s flattery, the school was probably never quite as good as its reputation. It turned out Arabists with a good grasp of basic grammar and political and economic vocabulary. They could communicate with each other in the curious self-referential dialect they learned and practised in the village cafés of Mount Lebanon, and in the bars and suqs of Beirut. But once sent out into the wider Middle East they faced the barrier confronting every student of Arabic: that, while written Arabic is more or less standardised across the Arab world, the spoken language varies widely, from country to country, and sometimes from region to region. Converting the ingratiating wheedle of Lebanese colloquial into words that worked in Aleppo, or Baghdad, or Cairo, let alone in Abu Dhabi, or Jeddah, or Kuwait, or Sana’a, or Tripoli, was harder work, usually never fully accomplished. Opening one’s mouth, however, and speaking something that sounded like Arabic, was a start at least, and showed willing.

But in the summer of 1978 all that was ahead of me. I was proud to have been selected for MECAS, to have been chosen as a prospective member of the Foreign Office’s cadre of Arabists – the ‘camel corps’ much abused by some of the department’s Zionist detractors – an elite within an elite. And I was relieved that it had been decided that MECAS would definitively reopen that September, having suffered since 1975 a series of temporary closures caused by the Lebanese Civil War.

After the austerity of months in the salt mines of London, preparing for an overseas posting felt a bit like the run-up to Christmas. Once the posting had been confirmed, a letter from the FCO’s Personnel Services Department arrived, describing the allowances we would receive overseas, and the advances of such allowances we would be given even before we left the United Kingdom. For me, aged twenty-three, with an overdraft dating back to university, it was unbelievably exciting.

The full list of Foreign Office overseas allowances was breathtaking. As minister resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan once complained that the two very distinguished diplomats advising him, Harold Caccia and Roger Makins, seemed obsessed by allowances and car entitlements. ‘Why do diplomats never discuss anything except houses, furniture, motorcars, food, wine and money?’ he wrote.* Reading the list one could see why allowances mattered so much to members of the Diplomatic Service, and to their spouses.

First, and most important for someone whose main means of transport in 1978 was a Honda 50cc motorcycle, was the interest-free Car Loan. Provided you bought British, you were entitled to order a car tax-free and at a discount for diplomats, usually 15 per cent, and to run it in Britain for six months before taking it abroad. A complication for those posted to the Middle East was that makes such as Ford were subject to the Arab boycott, on the grounds that they were sold in Israel. But I wanted something racier than the Hillman Avengers which most young British diplomats then posted to the Arab world seemed to run. I opted for what I thought of as a Mini Cooper, even though, as my brother woundingly pointed out, the British Leyland Mini 1275 GT of 1978 was far from the original Cooper creation. The only colour available in the time in which I needed my car was what the British Leyland catalogue described as ‘Reynard Metallic’ – a sort of liquid light brown. When eventually I arrived in Shemlan, the MECAS Director immediately and cruelly described my beloved first motor as ‘diarrhoea colour’. I was glad when my Mini was covered in the dust and dirt of Middle Eastern motoring.

Also of interest was the Climatic Clothing Allowance. In those days, diplomats posted to especially hot or cold countries were entitled to extra clothing allowances. Based on his experience travelling up and down the Gulf, Michael Hodge of the Republic of Ireland Department had recommended that I buy a set of washable nylon suits that could be worn after a night on a hanger in a hotel bathroom. I thought that, as a fast-stream officer, I was entitled to something grander. I ordered a lightweight sand-coloured suit from the tropical outfitters Airey & Wheeler of Savile Row. The suit turned out to be an expensive sartorial folly. It showed every mark, and I soon learned that Arabs expect any serious Westerner to wear a dark suit. But sporting my Airey & Wheeler extravagance in England that rainy summer I thought I looked the part of the young diplomat en route to the Middle East.

Even more welcome for an ex-student with little more than a kettle and some chipped mugs in the way of household goods was money for equipping my future Middle Eastern residence for representational purposes. The list of favoured suppliers issued by the Overseas Allowances Section of the Personnel Services Department recommended Thomas Goode of South Audley Street, W1, as a shop (if that is the right word for such an emporium) which offered good discounts for diplomatic orders. So there I went, in search of glasses and china, and found that, even at discounted Thomas Goode prices, my budget stretched only to half a dozen crystal tumblers and a remaindered, and incomplete, dinner service. I would have been better off at Habitat. I went round London discovering that, as the Treasury must have known, the reality of what the allowances would buy was much less than the promise. I remembered Trevor Mound’s cautionary tale, of the first grammar school boy to have joined the Foreign Service fast stream, just after the war. In order to keep up appearances, and encouraged by some who should have known better, he had almost ruined himself by ordering a Lagonda for his first posting, to Buenos Aires, only to arrive in Argentina and find that all the supposed toffs in the Chancery were running around in Ford Populars.

Most of the ‘representational’ stuff I acquired that summer went straight into storage, to await shipping to my first substantive posting, somewhere – I didn’t yet know where – in the Middle East, once MECAS was over.

The next task was actually getting yourself to post. Until only a few years ago, Diplomatic Service Regulations offered those travelling out to or back from postings a choice between what was called the Approved Route, and one or more Optional Routes. In 1978, the Approved Route for MECAS was by Middle East Airlines to Beirut, with an allowance for taxis at both ends. The Optional Routes were more exciting, providing, incredibly even in 1978, for train and sea travel. With two friends and colleagues who were also starting at MECAS in September, I decided that it would be fun to drive from London to Beirut. We would make our own ways to Turkey, and rendezvous in late August on top of the ancient citadel of Pergamon – now Bergama – on the Aegean coast north of Smyrna – now Izmir. With my brother as co-driver, I would travel via Paris (where we would meet friends) down to the heel of Italy. From there we would take the ferry from Brindisi to Patras (reliving my schoolboy classicist’s journey eight years earlier) and drive up through Greece, before crossing the Bosphorus at Istanbul.

The Mini needed some mechanical attention to equip it for Arabia. I had not realised that poor-quality fuel in much of the Middle East meant that the famous 1275cc engine would have to be converted from high to low compression, by boring out the cylinders, very expensively. At the insistence of my worried mother, the garage also fitted a massive sump guard, to protect the underside of the low-slung transverse engine against bumps in the road. More powerful shock absorbers were installed. The car now looked ready for the Middle East equivalent of the Monte Carlo rally. In reality, the super-heavy sump guard dragged the car even lower, making for jarring encounters with even relatively small obstacles of the kind then found on most roads east of Trieste.

The journey out to Pergamon went smoothly enough. As a condition of our driving to Beirut, the Foreign Office had insisted that we call in at each British embassy en route to check that the deteriorating situation in Lebanon had not become so bad as to oblige us to turn back. I therefore dropped in at our embassies in Paris, Rome and Athens, obtaining glimpses of a grandeur I was to encounter later in my career. But no problem was reported. Passing through Greece the short-wave radio I had installed in the Mini relayed the signature of the Camp David accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, but not between Israel and the Palestinians or its other Arab neighbours. I little guessed how they would dominate much of my diplomatic career.

The three cars met at Pergamon, exactly as planned. From there, we raced across Asia Minor in convoy, full of excited anticipation. My brother flew back from Antalya. The rest of us crossed into Syria, and went straight to Damascus, our first encounter with one of the greatest of Middle Eastern metropolises. After checking with the Embassy there, we headed almost due west up over the hills to the Lebanese frontier. Entering and leaving Syria, and entering Lebanon, we used what seemed like relics of a bygone age of international motoring, the huge orange customs Carnets de Passage obtained from the AA in London, guaranteeing that our cars would be re-exported. Frontier formalities took ages, a succession of guichets and tickets and stamps and fees, all resulting in passports proudly adorned with more stamps (with postage stamps affixed) than they had gathered traversing the whole of western Europe.

Once over the border, in Lebanon, the atmosphere changed. The roads were lined with Syrian Army vehicles, Soviet Bloc equipment of every variety, wheeled and tracked, armed and unarmed, armoured and soft-skinned. Sitting and squatting in, on and under them were hordes of feckless Arab conscripts, the ballast of a Middle Eastern army, thirsty, hungry, bored and occasionally frightened. We remembered the advice of our Embassy in Damascus: never ever look Arab soldiers or policemen in the eye. Descending into the Beka’a Valley (the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley), and then climbing the winding road back up the eastern slopes of Mount Lebanon, we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint, manned by Syrian soldiers and military police, and, more sinisterly, the goons of Assad’s intelligence service, the much feared mukhabarat in their trademark cheap safari suits.

And then, over the top of the mountains, with the Mediterranean glistening before us, and Beirut below, we swung left and south off the main road which led down to the city, and took the route along the ridge, through the little town of Suq al-Gharb (or ‘market of the west’) to the village of Shemlan. There, in the centre of the village, a great white sign proclaimed, in English and Arabic, ‘Middle East Centre for Arab Studies’.

MECAS was neither a school nor a university, but it had elements of both. Its Director was one of the shyest, and cleverest, of Foreign Office Arabists, who would go on to become ambassador to Yemen and then to Qatar. Julian Walker’s place in the history of the modern Middle East had already been assured by the part he had played, as a young assistant political agent in the Gulf, in marking out (in stones, it was said) the border between the Trucial States (later the United Arab Emirates) and Saudi Arabia. His Director of Studies was a more flamboyant character, a sort of Scottish intellectual commando whose academic expertise was the Tuareg dialects of Tunisia. Douglas Galloway came from St Andrews, but he was one of those universal Scotsmen who seem to pop up in all the most exotic corners of the globe, trading, teaching and generally flying the flag for their beloved homeland. He loved Arabic and the Arabs, and his enthusiasms were infectious. The only other Diplomatic Service officer on the MECAS staff was an administration officer. His day job, of administering the staff and pupils, and the buildings, seemed almost incidental to the fun he was having, starting mainly in the MECAS bar.

The other pupils on the Long Course (a year until the Intermediate Arabic exam, and then a further six months before the Higher) were a mixed bunch, in every sense. The core was made up of my fellow fast-stream Arabists and me. Back then, the idea of any of us ever actually becoming an ambassador seemed impossibly remote. But in time we all did, using our Arabic too, heading embassies in Amman (two of us), Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Kabul, Kuwait, Riyadh and Tel Aviv. One of us ended up as ambassador in Brasilia, another in Rome. One of our main-stream colleagues – and the best Arabist of our year – became Britain’s last ambassador to Qadhafi’s Libya.

Others on the course included a handful of young spies pretending to be diplomats. There was a group of main-stream members of the Diplomatic Service. They were rather older and more experienced than us, and had been selected for Hard Language Training as they approached mid-career. The FCO would extract real value from their Arabic, working them hard as consuls and vice consuls and commercial and management officers – the backbone of our posts across the Middle East – for the next two decades. Australia, New Zealand and Japan also sent students to MECAS, as did one or two of Britain’s more international banks. Partners – mostly women in those days – were encouraged to join in the lessons and, if they paid, sit the exams. Mixed in background and ability we certainly were, but united in our eager anticipation of working lives to be spent in and on the Arab Middle East.

Our teachers were the most interesting element of the MECAS community. Some were Lebanese, some Palestinian, mostly they were Christians, from many of the different Churches which populate the Levant. The Palestinians in particular had known tough times, leaving homes and possessions behind in the disaster of 1948. The Lebanese had more recent tales of suffering. But few of our teachers let the bitterness of their personal experience of what Britain and the West had failed to do for the Arabs of the Middle East infuse their teaching. Instead, they each exuded real pride in their language and literature, and were eager for us to run linguistically almost before we could walk. Like all good teachers, they found fulfilment in the achievement of their pupils, for whom they showed genuine affection, and unlimited patience.

We struggled. First with the alphabet, then with the rules of an unfamiliar grammar and a strange new vocabulary unrelated to any language any of us already knew. For me, as a recently lapsed classicist, the elegance of Arabic grammar was a delight. It was learning and relearning lists of words that was such hard work. The effort to produce even half-elegant script reminded me of the humiliations of learning to write, some twenty years earlier. But two things gave us hope that we would one day master what in those early days seemed like an impossible language. First were the course materials, tried and tested on a generation of Foreign Office Arabists: the MECAS Word List, the MECAS Grammar and The Way Prepared – a set of fifty political texts of graduated difficulty, showing their age even in 1978, but giving us clues to how the West’s relations with Arabia had evolved since, it seemed, the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The second comfort was the logical key to a Semitic language: the root system. We marvelled at how three consonants could be used to derive every noun, verb and adjective associated with a particular human activity. The root for ‘writing’ for example – k, t, b – enabled you to find the words for everything from a book to a library, and much else in between. The twelve forms of the verb made the active and passive voices of prep-school Latin seem lame: Arabic verbs could be engineered to operate reflexively, causatively, intensively, co-operatively, among other things. A further delight, half remembered from ancient Greek, was the number between singular and plural: the dual, usually denoted by the suffix -ain. Thus, the root for ‘ruling’, or ‘possession’, is m, l, k. To rule is malik, a king is the active participle maalik, and two kings are maalikain.

Being paid, much more than we had received in London, to study all this in a beautiful village in the mountains above Beirut made us all feel incredibly lucky. So did the expeditions we mounted at weekends, idling in the bookshops of Beirut, swimming in the ice-cold mountain river at Jisr al-Qadi, marvelling at the Ottoman delights of the summer palace at Beiteddin, relaxing with wonderful fresh food and Lebanese wine in the Palmyra Hotel at Ba’albek after visiting the massive temple of the Sun God.

But there was trouble in Paradise. As each of us was to see, at different times and in different places in our careers, little in the modern Middle East is as delightful as it may at first seem. Beneath the sun-bleached surface lie deep wounds. Conflicts past are always present. The sand is too often stained with blood.

And so within days of our arrival the tensions between the parties to Lebanon’s civil war started to rise again. After a few weeks, we were told that we could travel only in tightly restricted areas. In what was to become a wearily familiar ritual in later years, we found ourselves receiving a daily security briefing. We started to hear small-arms fire at night, distant at first, and then disturbingly close. The Syrian soldiers manning the checkpoint in the village snapped from sleepy insouciance to dangerous menace. They detained some of our students, briefly and for no real reason. Israeli aircraft began to buzz Beirut, breaking the sound barrier high above us, just to remind everyone north of the Litani River who was top dog, and top gun. Then the Syrian Katyusha multiple-launch rocket batteries (known as ‘Stalin’s Organs’) in the valley behind the mountain started to fire over us, towards east Beirut. The huge oil tanks in the port caught fire, sending a fat column of thick black smoke high into the air.

Suddenly, the Foreign Office’s judgement that it had been safe to reopen MECAS looked wildly over-optimistic. We worried not about our safety, but that we would be forced back to London. Absurdly, we petitioned Britain’s impossibly elegant Ambassador in Beirut, Sir Peter Wakefield, saying we wanted to stick it out. But we were told we had to go. MECAS would close, without announcement, and re-form in London. Everyone, including the teachers, would be evacuated. We were bitterly disappointed, but the tide of violence rising rapidly around us had a compelling logic of its own.

And thus, almost five weeks to the day after we had driven up the mountain, we were driving down again, this time in a longer convoy, adorned with a Union flag (for safety, we said, but really for our morale), before racing up the Beka’a Valley to the northern crossing point into Syria. MECAS closed, with a whimper, never to reopen. Its spirit lingers on, in an alumni association and in the memories of a generation of British and allied Arabists. Somehow, our sudden surreptitious departure from Shemlan seemed a kind of metaphor in a minor key for the recessional in which we would play a part for the following thirty years.

We made it back to London in record time, and were soon regrouping in the ramshackle premises the Foreign Office found for us – Palace Chambers above Westminster tube station, already condemned for demolition to make way for the new Parliamentary building. It was there that over the next fifteen months we finished our formal Arabic training. It was there that we mounted a morale-raising Christmas pantomime only a month after our return. It was from there that some of us heard Airey Neave’s* car explode as he drove up the ramp of the Commons car park in March 1979. And it was there that we wondered what difference Mrs Thatcher and her Government would make to our working lives, as she took office just five weeks later.

From Palace Chambers we were twice sent out on ‘language breaks’, to Syria. On arrival in Damascus, by British Airways Super VC10, we were each given £200 or so in dirty Syrian pounds, and told to go away for three weeks. The only conditions were that we were to keep away from each other, and to talk (and think) nothing but Arabic. Within Syria we could travel where we liked. How times have changed.

And that it is exactly what we did, from Bosra’s black basalt rocks in the south to Palmyra’s wonders in the eastern desert, down the Euphrates to Deir al-Zur not far from the Iraqi border, north from Damascus through Hama and Homs to Aleppo, west to the ultimate Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers and to the shabby port city of Lattakia. We saw the wonders of Syria – Greek, Roman, Nabatean, Persian, Arab and Ottoman. I at least learned the joys of solo travel. My dread of being lonely was quite unfounded: the problem was getting time to myself. We lived and ate and dreamed Arabic, replaying the formulae at the start of this chapter a hundred times. And, while the language was Arabic, the people we met were far from being only Arabs: we came across Armenians and Kurds, Circassians and Turks, and started to understand that since 1917 the only significant change to Ottoman imperial demography had been the establishment in Palestine of the Jewish state.

My favourite memories are of long sessions in the suq in Aleppo discussing linguistics with an Armenian jeweller called John; and of a ride on the Hejaz railway south from the great terminus in Damascus, steam-hauled in the same rolling stock T. E. Lawrence would have attacked only sixty years earlier.

It was from Palace Chambers too that we went across St James’s Park to sit, and pass, in the summer of 1979 the Foreign Office Intermediate Arabic Examination and then in the spring of 1980, with more of a struggle and less distinction, the Higher. We translated written Arabic into English, and English into Arabic; we drafted letters in Arabic; we were made to summarise news broadcasts in Arabic; we acted as interpreter for a fictional British minister. We didn’t yet know how realistic, and relevant, those ordeals by examination would be.

And it was in Palace Chambers, just before Christmas 1979, that we were told to which Middle East post each of us was to be sent: Abu Dhabi, Khartoum, Kuwait and, for me, a spell of further study in Alexandria supposed to turn me into that year’s ‘super-Arabist’, before starting in the Embassy in Cairo in the late summer of 1980. I could not have been happier, or more grateful.

And so, in March 1980, exams behind me, Heavy Baggage shipped, Unaccompanied Air Freight despatched, I set off again for the Middle East in my much loved Mini. Again, I travelled via Paris. Again, my long-suffering brother kindly acted as co-driver for most of the way. But this time, on reaching Italy, I turned left, to Venice, and took the ferry from there down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean to Alexandria.

Arriving by sea in Egypt was an unforgettable experience. As I drove my car up the ramp out of the ferry’s dark hold into the blazing noonday sun and on to the quayside, it was as though I had crossed from the calm of the First World into the boiling chaos of the Third. As indeed I had. Never in my life had I seen so many varieties of Homo sapiens crowded together in a single space. The dockside was heaving with humanity. Policemen, customs officers, soldiers, sailors, businessmen, bedouin, hawkers and brokers, sellers of souvenirs and refreshments, Africans and Libyans, and, everywhere, hordes of Egyptian fellaheen (or peasants). And then there was the noise: hooting, shouting, spitting, yelling, in Arabic mainly, but also in other languages I couldn’t recognise, let alone understand. It was complete chaos, or so it seemed.

After only a few yards, the press of people brought the car to a stop. I was utterly lost. I climbed out, and, blinking and fearful, looked around. And then, out of the crowd, appeared a balding Egyptian in an electric-blue safari suit, swinging a black plastic briefcase about him and sweating heavily. His cry of ‘Mister Shiraard, Mister Shiraard’ could just be heard. It was Magdi, the ‘Management Assistant’ from the British Consulate-General in Alexandria, come to rescue me and, more important, my car. Magdi was my first – but far from last – experience of a phenomenon found right across the Middle East and beyond: the ‘fixer’. No career member of the Diplomatic Service ever asks what exactly Magdi and his kind do, or how they do it. The Bribery Act 2008 now bans Britons from buying the ‘facilitation’ services they provide. But in Alexandria in 1980 all that matters is that Magdi is there to do it. In return for small but significant ‘administrative payments’, always in cash, and often in dollars, permits are procured, licences issued, telephones connected, passports stamped, diplomatic bags despatched inviolate, and goods and people extracted undamaged from customs. Later Magdi even obtained an Egyptian driving licence for me, for five Egyptian pounds.

For the next three hours, I watched in wonder, as Magdi moved from desk to desk, hut to hut, acquiring the stamps and papers and permits which would in the end allow me to drive my car out of the port and into my future life. Rolled-up dollar bills slipped out of his hand as cards come down from a conjuror’s cuff. After every port of call, he returned solicitously to where he had deposited me, on a shaded bench, to ply me with sweet tea and dirty tap water. Sometimes in Arabia it feels as though the Ottoman Empire’s most significant, and baneful, modern legacy is the jumruk – the great racketeering enterprise which calls itself the Customs.

Eventually, we emerged. Following Magdi’s battered car, which betrayed both its Russian design and its Egyptian manufacture, I rolled down the Corniche and up to the Cecil Hotel along one side of a sea-front square. There I was to spend my first nights in Egypt. Before then, however, I had to introduce myself to the man who would be responsible for me – in modern jargon my line manager – during my four months of advanced language training: Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General at Alexandria.

In 1980 the British Consulate-General in Alexandria was a shadow of its former self. And, in a continuing painful reminder of imperial retreat, that former self, the derelict shell of the original Consulate, a classical palace wrecked by an angry mob during the Six Day War in 1967, stood overlooking the square in which the Hotel Cecil lay. But the modern Consulate, on the higher ground of the pleasant inner suburb of Roushdi, had its own history too. For what had once been the residence of the Consul-General, with gardens to match, now contained homes and offices for him and his deputy, plus flats for the Ambassador and Naval Attaché from Cairo when they visited Egypt’s second city and sometime summer capital.

The Consul-General, Jeffrey Greaves, and his wife Joyce could not have been kinder. They loved Alexandria, and Alexandria loved them. They had me to dinner many times in the next few months, and introduced me to a range of interesting Alexandrines. It was in seeing them in action that I realised how lucky the Diplomatic Service is to have in its ranks men and women who, in the past at least, joined straight from school, and put in long years of service in gruelling jobs and tough places. They may never be formally appointed ambassadors, but when, as with the Greaveses in Alexandria, they are called upon to represent Britain, they do so with quiet distinction, mixing with mayors and members of parliament, and academic worthies and whatever passes for local high society, in ways that reflect credit on them and their government. The Foreign Office never quite repays the compliment, but at least in places like Alexandria they are well housed and, overall, well rewarded, not least by the job itself.

It was through Jeffrey Greaves that I found the man who was to make my time in Alexandria: Ahmed al-Sheikh was a member of the English Department of the University of Alexandria. Greaves sent me to see Ahmed, to establish who in the university might be prepared to teach me. Ahmed said that he would do it himself. For the next four months, he and I travelled the byways of modern Egyptian literature. We read plays and poetry written in Egyptian colloquial. But we went further than that. Like most of his generation of Egyptian intellectuals, Ahmed was a Nasserite. He told me what he thought, of Sadat, of the Camp David accords, of Britain and America, and of Russia. Studying with him was a journey through a wonderland of unfamiliar ideas, and words. So too was the visit to the University Library. I had visions of the Great Library of Alexandria of antiquity, but instead found a dusty warehouse, with books shelved not by subject or author, but in order of acquisition.

And it was Ahmed who helped find the family with whom I was to lodge. After a few nights in the Cecil, I had decamped, several miles along the Corniche, to the Swiss Cottage Hotel, a cheap imitation of its namesake in north London, high on a cliff above Stanley Bay. But I told Ahmed and everyone I met that I really wanted to live with an Egyptian family, in order not only to convert my Levantine colloquial into something more Egyptian, but also to understand more of what, in the 1830s, Edward Lane had called the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians.* After a few days, Ahmed introduced me to the Abu Awad family.

Mr Abu Awad was in his late fifties, and, as he told me more than once, had married ‘beneath’ him. He and his much larger and rather younger wife and four children (two boys and two girls aged between fourteen and eight) were crammed into a tiny two-bedroom flat overlooking the east–west tramway which runs the length of Alexandria’s fifteen-mile Corniche, a block or so in from the sea. Just up the street from them was what had once been one of the Middle East’s finest educational institutions, Victoria College. Founded as a public school on the English model, staffed by schoolmasters from Britain, it had a proud history. King Hussein of Jordan had studied there, before going on to Harrow. So had Omar Sharif, and a generation of Arab leaders from across the Middle East. But, nationalised by Nasser, and renamed Victory (‘Nasr’ in Arabic) College, it too was a shadow of its former self.

But Victory/Victoria College was a world away from the Abu Awads. Mr Abu Awad spent most of the week in Port Said, where he worked in the import and export of what he described as ‘popular handkerchiefs’. He had learned some elementary English working as an interpreter for a Sergeant Macpherson of the Royal Military Police during Britain’s occupation of the Canal Zone, which had finally ended in June 1956. The origins of his command of colloquial English became clear later. One day, pointing to his children pushing and shoving each other on the sofa on the other side of their small sitting room, Mr Abu Awad told me solemnly: ‘Shiraard, I am very proud of my buggers.’ It took me a few moments to work out that, as Mr Abu Awad had ridden round Ismailia in the Military Police jeep listening to Sergeant Macpherson speaking British military English, the only term he had heard for ‘child’ had been ‘little bugger’. Mr Abu Awad would have been mortified if he had known the true meaning of the word.

Despite Mr Abu Awad’s frequent absences in Port Said, the family were prepared to accept a young Christian bachelor lodging in the second of their two bedrooms, in exchange for what would be for them quite large sums of cash. I didn’t realise, when I first met the family, that my presence would mean the parents plus the four children sleeping in one double bed in the second bedroom. I would have been more embarrassed if I hadn’t done so much to help them.

There was plenty else I didn’t realise when I agreed to move in with the Abu Awads. There were the little things, like managing for four months without lavatory paper,* or being obliged to spend most of my time in the flat wearing what the Abu Awads had concluded were my fashionably striped old English pyjamas. There was the constant noise. I soon discovered that, if I tried to shut the door of my bedroom, to have some quiet time on my own, a worried member of the family would come rushing in, to see what was the matter. The hours were difficult. I used to creep out of the flat soon after 9 a.m., leaving the rest of the family (unless Mr Abu Awad was home) asleep, for my lessons with Ahmed al-Sheikh. I would return at what I regarded as lunchtime, but we seldom ate before three. After a siesta, I would usually be required to drive Mrs Abu Awad, and several of her equally large cousins, around town, making calls on innumerable friends and relations. The sight of us all squashed into my Mini would have caused amusement if any Westerner had caught sight of us. But, for lower-middle-class Egyptians in those days, to have the use of a car was too precious not to be exploited whenever possible. Such journeys round town, often stuck in traffic, with no air conditioning, took up most of the evening. Usually we would be back home by eleven. We would spend the next two hours watching the interminable soap operas and slushy feature films pumped out on Egyptian television. Dinner would come only when Egyptian TV closed down for the night, at 1 a.m. I would fall into bed at 2 a.m., utterly exhausted.

Although we ate meat only once a week, I found the food surprisingly good. I came to love ful, Egyptian beans. The only dish I could not stand was a greasy glutinous soup called mulookhia. As with everything else though, there was no escape from accepting a plateful and eating it: anything less would have been taken by the family as proof of mortal illness. Saying I did not like the viscous green slime in front of me was never an option. The other culinary ordeal came on Friday mornings. After Mr Abu Awad had been to the mosque, he and I would go to the market and buy a fish called bolti found in the fresh(ish) waters of the Delta. This was regarded as a great delicacy. As the permanent guest of honour, my standard weekly treat was to be invited, with the whole family watching, to suck the snot-like brain of the fish out of the back of its severed head.

I learned more that spring and summer in Alexandria than I can ever record. My classical training, my student struggles with Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, my acquaintance through Durrell with his ‘old poet’, the modern Greek C. P. Cavafy, the knowledge that E. M. Forster had spent much of the First War in Alexandria, as a Red Cross volunteer, trying to seduce the conductor on the tram to Montazah, while writing the best of all guides* to the ancient metropolis – all these added to the interest and attraction of the great city on the sea. When I could, at weekends, I would get away from the Abu Awads. I made contact with a handful of other British students of Arabic. With them, I visited Alexandria’s gem of an archaeological museum, full of Greco-Roman treasures. We went down the catacombs, and east along the coast to King Farouk’s fantastic palace at Montazah and beyond to the fish restaurants on the beach at Abu Kir, overlooking the bay where Napoleon’s eastern adventure had come to grief at Nelson’s hands. We went west to El Alamein, walking the well-kept lawns of the Commonwealth War Cemetery. We marvelled at the Italian ossuary and the cemetery in the style of a schloss in which the Afrika Korps were buried. We ate calamari and drank Egyptian Stella beer in the Spitfire Bar, where the Eighth Army had been only just over thirty years earlier. We met the waiter in the Union Club who claimed to have served Monty, and who told us about Mary’s House, out of bounds to other ranks. We found, in the Greek Consulate-General, Cavafy’s death mask, and in a café near by met some Greeks who had known him. We persuaded the ancient custodian of the great deserted synagogue, whose Torah scrolls had been sent to Oxford, to let us look inside. We stood where the great Pharos (or lighthouse) had once stood, a Wonder of its World. Outside the little Anglican church at Stanley Bay on Sunday, we discussed the news of President Carter’s disastrous effort to rescue the American Embassy hostages from Tehran, and of the SAS’s successful raid on the Iranian Embassy in London.

Alexandria was – is – a palimpsest, one of those ancient manuscripts used and reused by civilisation after civilisation, in script after script. A city of all religions and of none, it had known great wealth, most recently when cotton was king, but was now crowded, busy and poor.

Unconsciously, the varieties of the religious experience in the Abu Awad household caught Alexandria’s essence. Mr Abu Awad was a devout and observant Muslim, as the zabeeb, or raisin, where his forehead hit the ground was meant to tell the world, and me. He prayed, ostentatiously, five times a day, taking up much of the tiny sitting room to do so. He had been to Mecca and Medina on the Hajj.

Naturally the rest of the family were respectable Muslims too. But, unknown to her husband, once a week Mrs Abu Awad asked me to take her and a cousin to one of Alexandria’s many Catholic churches, St Rita’s, Alexandria. Neither Mrs Abu Awad nor I knew that Catholics regard St Rita as the patron saint of hopeless causes. So that wasn’t why Mrs Abu Awad lit several candles on each weekly visit to the shrine, before kneeling in silence, and presumably praying.

But the other religious practice in the Abu Awad household was more unexpected. One day, on my return from my Arabic lessons, I found in the poky little kitchen of the flat three cardboard boxes, containing, respectively, two live pigeons, two live rabbits and two live chickens. I assumed that we were preparing a celebratory meal of some kind. But then Mr Abu Awad insisted that I went with him to a tea house near by, for no apparent reason. We sat there, for an hour, and then for another hour, with nothing much to say to each other. Eventually, Mr Abu Awad said it was time to go home. And then I discovered why he had wanted me out of the way. The livestock I had encountered earlier were now all dead, with their throats cut. An old man in a skull cap was presiding over some interminable ceremony, in which the blood of the dead birds and rabbits was sprinkled over the threshold of the flat, and smeared over Mrs Abu Awad’s ample chest. Much to her husband’s embarrassment, I was witnessing the last stages of a pre-Christian, pre-Muslim zarr, or exorcism, designed to expel from the flat the evil spirits held responsible for some unnamed malady from which Mrs Abu Awad suffered.

For me, those three varieties of religious experience – Muslim, Christian and animist – in a single Arab household captured my Alexandria. It was the best of introductions to the modern Middle East.