A Letter to Sarah

I.The Day I was born

The day I was born, my grandfather got very drunk. He went to Hosni who ran a sweet shop by day and a clandestine bar by night. My mother had already had two girls and it seemed obvious that she would produce a boy. But instead she had me, the third girl. It was the 8th of October, a Sunday, at the Italian maternity hospital at Abbassieh, a part of Cairo where there was also a well-known psychiatric hospital. Time of birth not sure, between 5 and 7 in the morning (not good enough for a horoscope). The news must have reached grandfather in the evening and he must have gone straight to Hosni to drown his disappointment. Mama told me that I was a very pretty baby with masses of black hair that the nurses combed in the shape of a banana on the top of my head. Apparently, they would find any excuse to come and see me. When I was finally brought home, grandfather looked at me and fell in love with me. Papa, mama, grandpa Felix, grandma Caterina, Renata, my elder sister and I lived in Cairo, in a flat on the fifth floor of a building in Faruk Street. Mama’s first daughter was called Silvana. She had died of typhoid at the age of four. I was born several years later and they named me after her. From then on she became “Silvana la prima”. My mum and grandma talked very little about her. I think the pain of losing a child remained with them forever. Typhoid in those days was associated with poverty and dirt and penicillin was not widely available then. At first Silvana 1 was diagnosed with tummy problems, but when it became apparent that she had typhoid she didn’t live long after the diagnosis. I remember once grandmother saying “If I had known that she was going to die, I would have given her the pasta al forno she wanted to eat”. I have a photograph of Silvana and she looks really lovely.

I remember grandfather. I must have been about 2 1/2 years’ old. He was always in bed, wearing what I thought was a red skullcap and a white turban, much like the Arab men in the streets (called an 'emma’). I wondered why he wore his in bed. The most vivid memory I have is of me climbing on the high brass bed, crawling towards him. He had a bowl of coffee and milk and a piece of toasted baguette with butter and sugar. He let me dip it in the coffee and eat some. I still remember how delicious it was. It wasn’t until many years later that the mystery of his headdress was revealed. Mama was talking about him and when I said that I remembered him she gave me a dubious look. I insisted and then said “Of course I remember him. He wore his ‘emma’ in bed!” She looked at me with her big blue/green eyes. “You remember him! Well, it was not an ‘emma’ but because of his diabetes his head was full of sores painted with Mercurochrome* and when the head was bandaged, the red was the stain of the Mercurochrome and the white was the rest of the bandage." Grandfather was a painter and decorator and had his own small business. After he died it was his assistant, a Maltese called Mikhail, and his sons took over the business. Of course, whenever we needed any decorating done, they would come and do it under grandmother’s overcritical eye. “Grandfather would not have done it this way” she would say with a sigh and shaking her head from side to side. Grandfather had a big black moustache with curled ends. He was extremely proud of it and took great care in making it look perfect. To make it curl he would use a metal nutcracker that had a smooth handle, put it on the fire, and when it was hot enough he would curl the moustache ends around it. To finish off he would dab a little black shoe polish to make the moustache shine and keep the curls in place. The nutcracker had turned completely black and every time we used it someone would say “Did he really use this for his moustache?”

Grandfather died before Lydia, my younger sister, was born. Apart from my early memories of grandfather, two other early events are still vivid in my mind but it’s difficult for me to say how old I was. Here’s the first one. We are all at home, sitting in the lounge, my Mum is boiling an egg for me. It’s early evening and getting dark. Suddenly the sirens go off. There is an air raid over Cairo. Quickly all the lights are switched off. My mother has just finished boiling the egg and takes this air raid very personally. “Did they have to start just now, when I want to give this child her egg?”. So she calls me and we both go and sit in our balcony from which, being on the fifth floor, you have a good view of Cairo. And it is there, among the glory of the searchlights, that I ate my boiled egg.

The other memory is almost surreal. It’s after lunch time. The whole family is having a siesta. It is sunny and I am on the balcony. I can only see part of the street because the balcony is built in masonry with the top part in wrought iron. My eyes reach just above the masonry. The street is quiet. No cars, no trams. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I see a man dressed in a suit, running like hell, followed by three men in Galabieh*. Each man is holding a weapon: a hammer, a knife and a sickle. They all scream. They leave my field of vision still screaming. What happened? I didn’t know for many years. Then one day, while we were having lunch, Papa was talking about the barber who had a tiny shop in the street, just under our building, praising him and saying “Of course he saved Mr. Cohen’s life”. Then to my mother, “Don’t you remember? He pulled him in the shop, shut him in there and went out to talk to the three men who were running after him wanting to kill him?” I suddenly felt very small and mean. Why? Well, it was because of that little game Lydia and I played sometimes when we were bored. In the hot months this poor barber used to sit his customers outside the shop to get some air while he attended to them. He would place the chair just under our balcony and proceed to shave his customer while my sister and I from our vantage point on the fifth floor would collect as much saliva as we could... spit and duck! If we heard screams coming from the street, we knew we’d hit the target. A Muslim barber saves a Jewish guy’s life and his customers get spat on! Do you call this justice? * Mercurochrome is a powerful disinfectant that is bright red and does not sting when you apply it. * A galabieh is the traditional long shirt that Egyptian men wear.

II The Y-Shaped Apartment The apartment in Cairo looked like a sort of Y with the front door at the tail of the Y. The door frame was in solid wood with a panel of frosted glass protected by wrought iron. There was a crack in the middle of one of the glass panels on the right hand side, which made it handy for those on the outside of the apartment to peep through! From inside, you always knew who was at the door! When you came into the apartment, the dining room, the “best room”, was the first room on the right. This was used only on special occasions or when we had unexpected visitors. Next to it was a bedroom. A long balcony, overlooking the main road, ran along these two rooms. Grandmother had her plants at one end of the balcony. Next was my parents’ bedroom and then the “everyday” room with its own balcony, the little balcony. On the left side of the Y was a bathroom with a separate, low, storage space above it. There was also a Turkish toilet at the bottom end of the corridor. This was used for storage and housed the old wooden ice-box. The “sitting room” was the fairly large entrance hall. The kitchen was in the middle of the Y. The apartment had many tall windows everywhere and when she was cleaning them my mother was always muttering against the landlord, and how he built this whole building cheaply, using glass instead of solid Bricks! Before Lydia arrived, I slept in my parents’ room and Renata slept on a settee outside their room. My grandparents had the first bedroom. When grandfather died, Renata moved in with grandmother, Lydia took my place in my parents’ room and I moved onto the settee. I remember very clearly the day Lydia arrived home. My parents made me sit on the settee announcing that they were going to let me hold the “little sister”. I was 2 1/2 years old myself. I was expecting to hold something the size of a doll. So when Lydia was placed on my lap with her legs resting on the settee and both my arms around her head I thought “Well, she’s not that ‘little’ the “little sister”!

Lydia reappears in my early memories on the day of her christening. We were Greek Catholics, and as is the practice, christening and confirmation take place on the same day. The ceremony was held at home and I remember a fairly large gathering, the priest chanting and blessing some water in a very large round oven tray. Lydia, probably about 7 or 8 months’ old, screaming her head off, is made to sit in it and the ceremony continues. Then Leila, her godmother, picks her up and wraps her up in a bath towel. There is quite a gap between Lydia’s arrival and the two of us remembering growing up together. There I was, between my two sisters: one a baby and the other one 10-years old. So not much fun to play with either of them. But there were plenty of other children in the building, at least 30 living on the roof terrace. The terrace had about 20 rooms, one for each apartment. They were supposed to be used for putting the washing to dry, instead of hanging it out of the balconies. But the greedy landlord rented the rooms to Arab families. Twenty of them lived about six to a room, with maybe just one toilet and one tap for water for the whole terrace. And there were all these kids. Some were my age, some were older and some younger. When the terrace was not big enough for them to play, or if their parents chased them away, they would descend onto the fifth floor (our floor). I did play with them for some time. I remember screaming and running with them on the terrace. I don’t think this lasted long. I was the odd one out, I lived in an apartment, and I never belonged to their group. Also, whenever there was something going wrong between the kids, they would go to their mothers and say it was me! There was this woman in particular, Nefissah, who was huge and fat, and I remember my mother having almighty rows with her in her broken Arabic. This woman would point two fingers close to my mother’s eyes and threaten to blind her! I would watch all this, full of pride for my Mum who stood her ground against that horrible woman. One day this became too much and that was it, I was banned from playing with the children from the terrace.

One of the children’s favourite games was to come and play and scream mainly on the fifth floor landing, which at times was so packed, no one could move. They would all talk at the same time resulting in a deafening chaos. When the noise became unbearable my mother or grandmother would suddenly open the door and shout at them. They would scatter like birds on the stairs leading to the terrace, be quiet for a while and ..... five minutes later start all over again! Sometimes other neighbours would do the same thing and especially if it came from the Muslim woman at No. 18 we had a longer peaceful break! Other times if we were having a heated discussion (a row, to be precise) in the house, it would suddenly go quiet on the landing, the kids would listen to the incomprehensible language coming out of flat No. 20 and then, the bravest of them would tiptoe to our door, peep through the crack in the glass door and stay there until one member of my family would notice them, run noisily to the door, scare them off without even opening the door and the whole lot of them would scamper! I think the kids were fascinated by the fact that we did not speak in Arabic like the rest of them but in a puzzling mixture of French, Italian and Arabic; not quite Babel Tower but a very close thing. On the fourth floor we had Jewish neighbours with whom we were quite friendly. They were Céli and Daisy but they were Renata’s age. When she would go and visit them she often took me with her. I liked it because they always made a fuss of me. Sometimes though, they had this friend, a Mr. Abramino, who would visit the family. He was huge and wore glasses. He simply terrified me. I would not say a word, but I’d start shaking uncontrollably, and eventually burst into tears! I remember that I did not want to be afraid, I did not want to cry or shake. I knew he was nice. I even felt sorry for him because when this happened, they would laugh at him and tell him to go away because he was scaring “la petite”! But I just couldn’t. So I was growing up, not really knowing or remembering what was happening to Lydia. I spent long hours on the little balcony watching a busy life go by. One moment I especially loved was the passage of the sheep! Every day, at the same time, a flock of sheep was herded past the pavement opposite our building and I could see them through the wrought iron part of the balcony. They came at about 10 o’clock in the morning. I would first sit and watch the big clock in the sitting room and then make a dash for the balcony. Sheep were not the only animals going through the street. There were camels, horse driven carriages, donkey driven carts, trams and buses and a variety of passing traders! Faruk Street was very busy and from my balcony I had this colourful world at my feet that no box office film could ever replace.

3. Fi-dè-le a de la fa-ri-ne III

« Fi-dè-le a de la fa-ri-ne ». I am 3 1/2 years old and I can read. My mother makes me read this little story, of which I remember the first few words, in front of Frère Fidèle, a Brother from the College where my father works as a teacher. “She can read”! He is all chuffed particularly since the hero of the story is called Fidèle, like him. My mother says proudly “I taught her!” Before she got married she too used to be a teacher, a primary school teacher. Like every girl from a ‘good family’, she stopped working after her marriage. With great patience she taught me how to read and at 3 1/2 I could read fluently. I loved reading. This, however, was a source of concern for my grandmother who firmly believed that if I read a lot my eyesight would deteriorate. Well, my father had glasses, Renata had glasses, this was something hereditary so it had to be prevented from happening to another member of the family! I escaped grandmother’s watchful eye a few times: I would take a book, hide under her brass bed, read for a while and because it was fairly dark underneath the bed, I would eventually fall asleep. One day, lunch was ready and my mother called everyone to the table. When I didn’t appear my father, mother and grandmother called me again and again, then looked in every room, then asked the neighbours, then went right down to the main entrance where the caretakers Hefni and Hachem spent most of their time sitting on a bench, asking as they went along if anyone had seen me. Nothing! I was nowhere to be found. Eventually Renata who had come back to the flat, looked for me again, and she found me, fast asleep under grandmother’s bed, with my book on my lap. She called them from the top of the fifth floor; they were so relieved to have found me that they didn’t tell me off. They didn’t seem to mind either having to eat a luke-warm lunch. So my hide-away had been discovered. I tried again a few times but grandmother was quick in getting me out of there, as if she was chasing a cat. Because I was good at reading, my parents decided to send me to school a bit earlier than other kids. It was an all-girl Convent and Renata was going there. She was an excellent pupil and the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul thought they might have another promising genius on their hands. So they agreed to take me in for the last two months of the first year. I hated school. I liked reading and singing. The rest I hated. From the moment we left the house, Renata and I, I hated it. I cried my eyes out every morning, but nobody felt sorry for me.

We used to go on the blue school bus that we could see from our balcony. The bus stopped twice before our house: the first stop was by the building where my aunt, uncle and cousins lived, the second was “Tektonides” (some Greek folk who owned a shop). So when whoever is watching out for the bus shouts “Zia Mary!” I know we are going to take it easy walking down the five flights of stairs, but when it’s “Tektonides!” it is like a hurricane hitting me. Here I am, crying noisily, hoping that maybe today someone will take pity on me, when Renata grabs me with one hand, her school bag - with our mid-morning snack - in the other, runs through the door already held open by grandmother and drags me down the five flights of stairs, going like the wind. I forget to cry. I forget to breathe. I am terrified. In leaps of five steps at a time we run downstairs and reach the street with a few seconds to spare, just in time for me to breathe out and resume crying! It was the same almost every day. Amazingly I never tripped, I never had a fall, I always arrived at the bottom with my two shoes still on. One day, we must have descended even faster because we had to wait a couple of minutes for the bus to arrive. As usual I am sobbing and screaming when a small Arab boy in ragged and dirty clothes comes close to me and goes “WAA! WAA! WAA!” mocking me. What?? A dirty little Arab doing this to me? I am so shocked that I stopped. My pride has been seriously wounded and because I did not want any more little Arab boys to mock me and see me so vulnerable, I never cried again before going to school. What I remember most of those first two months, is not reading or learning to count or anything remotely educational! It’s the break we have mid-morning. I am « chez les petites » and Renata is « chez les grandes ». Two different recreation areas, with supervisors and lots of kids in both.

Before leaving me in the morning in front of my class Renata gives me a sandwich for me to eat during the break. That's the idea anyway. Over the blue skies of Cairo there is a constant flight of kites, a type of hawk, black, with a long tail, and very rapacious. They obviously know when it is break time and they start circling our playing ground, coming nearer and nearer. They know exactly where I am and every day they wait for me to unwrap my sandwich. As soon as I take a bite off it, and in the time it takes to lower my arm, they have snatched my sandwich from my hands, pushing me sideways and leaving me screaming (I did scream a lot, didn’t I!). The supervisor checks that I have not been scratched by the beasts and fetches Renata, who naturally is quite cross with me for not being careful. “You should hide your sandwich instead of walking around practically holding it up to the hawks!” she screams every time. What really annoys her is that she has to give me a piece of her sandwich to make me stop crying! This happened many, many times. Eventually, I learnt to take a bite of my sandwich and quickly hide it under my crossed arms and watch the sky for the hawks.

So I finished my two months, then each year a new teacher: Soeur Marthe, then Mlle Yvonne who shortly after the beginning of term was replaced by Mlle Marguerite. I liked Mlle Yvonne: she had long fair hair and blue eyes. She liked me too. I think it was from the day I sang Ay ay ay Maria, Maria de Bahia. Not very appropriate for a five year old, singing about this Maria with a skin like satin and driving the boys crazy when she showed her shins the colour of café au lait! She liked a bit of fun, Mlle Yvonne. That's the type she was. Unfortunately the nuns didn't like her type. So Mlle Yvonne was out, and Mlle Marguerite was in. She was fat and ugly and she shouted a lot. I really didn't like her at all.

One day I desperately needed to go to the toilet. I had to approach her desk where other children were standing and wait, with my index finger lifted to ask permission to speak. When at last she asked me “What do you want?" I replied "I've finished". I was standing in a puddle looking at her defiantly. If she hadn't taken so long to talk to me I would have made it to the toilet! The Arab woman who cleaned our class was called in. She took me away and gave me a pair of clean cotton knickers. She said not to worry about the wet ones, she "wash tomorrow and give back". I got back an old pair of knickers, clean, but not mine. My mum said that she obviously kept the good ones for her children. Can't blame the woman really. After Mlle Marguerite there was Mlle Clothilde. During that year I remember that Miranda, this childhood friend who grew up to become sex obsessed - or something like that - and another little French girl, Eveline, who was ever so sweet the first day she came but turned up to be a real snake, were in the same class. Miranda and Eveline got on together very well, being both of well off families and they were ganging up against me. One day Eveline, having fallen out with Miranda, suddenly became my best friend forever and gave me a really lovely music box which I still remember very well, insisting that it was mine to keep. I carried the box home as if it was an egg, so much was I afraid to drop it. My parents were dubious about this present, but I insisted she had given it to me. It wasn't to be mine for very long. The next day, Eveline and Miranda having made up, the little snake complained to the teacher that I had taken her music box. I was so indignant. I strongly protested to the teacher saying "She gave it to me, and when you give something you don't take it back!". The teacher took me aside, told me that she agreed with me, but nevertheless ordered me to bring the music box back. To this day I still get mad about this and if I ever met this Eveline now, I'll probably spit in her eye! Luckily at the end of the year both sets of parents decided that St Vincent de Paul wasn't good enough for their daughters and both Miranda and Eveline went to another Convent. I never saw Eveline again.

After Mlle Clothilde, I don't remember who was next. By then I was 7, had learned to read and write Arabic, and I remember this fat Arab teacher, who, because I didn't know the answer to something, hit my stretched-out hand with a square black ruler. That's another one I would spit on if I met her! Meanwhile, Lydia had joined the school. And following the teacher whose name I can't remember was Soeur Elizabeth, whom I shall never forget! She was a tyrant, small, bony, skinny like sin, apparently from a noble French family. She used to call the Arabs "les arabicots". Although at the time, and for many years later, I knew like everyone else that the Arabs were poor and dirty because they didn't want to work, this name annoyed me. One of her favourite punishments was to write some reprimand for the parents to see and sign. Can you imagine, me, the first of the class, having to face my parents? And by that I mean mainly Grandmother! You see, we had these exams every month. At the end of the month there was a presentation in the theatre hall (which doubled as Chapel on Sundays): the one who came first of her class had a red sash and a medal and the second only a blue sash. You were sent home like that, for the whole neighbourhood to see how clever you were! So if I only had a blue sash, grandmother would moan, saying that only Renata in our family was studious, intelligent, hard-working, etc... If I had the red sash and the medal (meaning I was first of my class) she would moan that the medal made a hole in my pinafore! With a grandmother like ours, you can imagine the terror that overcame me at the thought of taking my reprimands to be signed by some member of the family? One day I was really desperate. I don't remember what I did that deserved this written reprimand, but I didn't want to show it to my father. That month I was sitting at the back of the class. Incidentally, one advantage of being first or second of your class was that you sat in the front row so you had a good view of the blackboard. That month, however, I had a very good reason for being at the back: I had had jaundice and for what seemed an eternity, I stayed at home, eating only boiled food, no fat and lost quite a bit of weight in the bargain. So, as I could not take those end of month exams, I found myself sitting with a group of older girls at the back of the class (obviously lazy and stupid in everybody's eyes because they were sitting there). We got on well though and on many occasions that month I helped them a bit (that is, whisper the answers or push my exercise book their way so that they could see what I had written, also known as cheating). One of them, Stella, seeing how upset I was at the reprimand, took pity on me, and said: "Can you show me your father's

signature". As luck would have it I had a previous school report, signed by Papa. I was a bit puzzled but I showed it to her. She then started to practise on a piece of paper and when she was satisfied, she said: "Give me your exercise book. I'll sign the reprimand". I didn't ask her to repeat the offer! The reprimand was signed, I was in heaven! The next day I gave it to Soeur Elizabeth and what a tremendous kick it gave me to have fooled her! Although my heart was racing in my chest, I didn't twitch. She looked at the signature and said "And what did your father say?" I replied in a very sheepish voice that my father was very cross with me. Needless to say Stella and I became very good friends and remained friends until her family left Cairo.

1. It really was much later in life that I realised that, through nobody’s fault, we had a neo-colonial education.

Rain

It does not rain often in Cairo. When it does, it's a downpour: the streets get flooded, the next day the newspapers are full of pictures of women being carried across the street to avoid getting wet, and of objects floating by.

I'm probably three years' old. It's raining really hard. My Mum sits me on the table facing the french window. She sits besides me with a bowl of pistachio nuts. She shells them for me. I watch the rain falling down and munch on my nut. We sit there until the rain stops.

I still love to watch the rain fall down and I think of my Mum.

4. IV

Thinking of my early years, it seems that I did nothing else but go to school. We had Thursdays off, but for the Christian girls, we went on Sunday morning as well to attend mass and play some games afterwards. The bus would pick us up and bring us back. I think many parents decided to become very religious so that they could get rid of their daughters for a few hours on a Sunday!

In the Summer holidays we would go to the Mouski Church, a Catholic church, and rarely to the Greek Catholic one, which is really where we should have gone. The services there lasted for what seemed hours, the priest speaking a mixture of Greek and Arabic, which made the whole affair quite tedious. The only perk was that Communion was given in the shape of a small piece of bread dipped in sweet wine. Very nice, but the piece of bread was too small. In the holidays, when we went to mass with our parents on Sunday, Lydia and I wore pink taffetas dresses, made by Grandmother, and had a pretty straw handbag (made in Florence!) containing a rosary and a handkerchief on which mum had dabbled a drop of Yardley Lavender. We learned how not to sit on our dresses in order to keep them neat and free of creases by flicking the back of the skirt without revealing our knickers and then sit down on the church bench.

And then one day, the big event in the life of every good Christian approached: the first communion. I was around 7 years’ old and the most exciting thing for me was the white dress! First one had to go to confession (what on earth do you have to confess at 7?) then one had to fast before taking communion. But that was a small price to pay for the great pleasure of wearing a white dress and veil that made you look like a bride. There was also, on the big day, after the ceremony, a breakfast of hot chocolate and croissants. Heaven!

It was therefore with great excitement that I waited for my first communion. The white dress was borrowed from my cousin. I tried it at my aunt’s and as it fitted perfectly she promptly undressed me and put it in its box so it wouldn’t get dirty. Why would I want to soil the first communion dress? I didn’t have the slightest chance to look at myself in the mirror! Save it all for the day, I consoled myself.

The night before the big day my hair was divided in strands then rolled around pieces of cloth, knotted at the end. When the knots were undone in the morning, nice bottle-opener shaped curls were dangling around my head. Shirley Temple style, I guess.

The moment to wear the dress and go out finally arrived. Tulle veil fixed to my hair, hands in white satin gloves, a little purse (also in satin) arranged around my wrist, new comfortable white shoes, I was ready to go and receive God.

“I want to look at myself in the mirror”, I said.

“Didn’t the nuns tell you”? Renata said.

“Tell me what?”

“That it is a mortal sin to look at yourself in the mirror on the day of your first communion. And if you commit a mortal sin, as you well know, you cannot take communion”.

Renata being much older and wiser than me, her words sounded like coming straight out of the Gospel. My jaw hit my little flat chest from shock and astonishment. Of course I believed her. I never looked at myself in the mirror! “I was only kidding” she told me much, much later, when one day we were going through the family album. There was this photograph of me in this lovely white dress because after the ceremony my parents took me to the photographer. Why do we have older sisters?

There were other events at school, like the end of year ‘show’. I made my early debut on stage. My class sang a little song while we waved a handkerchief and went round each other. We had new blue ribbons in our hair, impeccable shoes and of course the best handkerchief our mothers could find in the house! We also were allowed to wear lipstick. Needless to say we were terrified. But we did it. And when the audience applauded, I liked it a lot. I would have done it again. There were other plays and sketches every year. Most of these were directed by Soeur Elizabeth, the dragon. One time, one of the sketches involved a doctor and a patient. Soeur Elizabeth realised that one of the players was absent, because she was ill in bed, just a few minutes before she was due on stage. I was older then, and no longer in her class. I was behind the scenes having just finished my part in something. She grabbed me by the arm, made me slip a long robe on and put a silly pointed hat on my head, then shoved a piece of paper in my hands saying: ”You read well, you’ll do her part”, which was that of the doctor. Then, as the curtains went up, she pushed me on stage. My heart raced so fast that I didn’t even see the audience. I went along, playing the doctor, running after the poor patient in order to give her an injection with such conviction that not only the audience was laughing but also the “patient”. When it was over, I got the biggest compliment the dragon could ever make: “You couldn’t have done it better if we had rehearsed it many times”.

Yes, I could read fluently and had a good voice. I can’t remember when it started but it was my task to read extracts of the Gospel or other prayers at Sunday mass at school. Sometimes, when the assembly was silent, at a nod from one of the nuns, I would begin to read something and the assembly would startle. Suppressing the giggles, I would carry on in the most convincing tone. I went on reading in the old chapel, and in the new chapel, when this was built, learning to start with a soft voice and then at a normal volume. Sometimes, by mistake, I would jump a line. Nobody noticed. It couldn’t have been gripping stuff!

Among the joys of being in a school run by nuns, there were some surprises like the arrival of a new one, or the departure of another. Some departed with their suitcase, some with feet first. The first time I saw a dead nun, come to that, first dead person, I must have been around 9 or so. She was laid on a table covered by satin sheets, her white headdress stiffly starched, with the ‘wings’ standing out like those of a bird just about to fly, her hands crossed on her chest with a rosary between her fingers. All the school was taken, in small groups, to say prayers in front of the body while a nun would sprinkle holy water on the poor dead one. I had to make a tremendous effort not to burst out laughing when this happened. Just think of it, you’re asleep and someone comes along sprinkling water on you. Wouldn’t you wake up shouting “Stop it”! This nun was really dead though. She didn’t wake up.

Every arrival of a new nun provoked quite a stir. Who is she? Where does she come from? Which class is she going to teach? When Soeur Geneviève arrived it was quite a surprise: she was young, very pretty under her “cornette” (the starched white headdress), Parisian maybe? She spoke softly, and she blushed a lot. It didn’t take long for the fathers whose daughters she was teaching, to take a sudden interest in their progress at school. Even my father went to see her, on some excuse or other, to my mother’s annoyance. She was bright too, and later became the Director of the School in Beirut. The mystery was, of course, why would such a beautiful and clever woman become a nun? Many romantic reasons were put forward but probably she simply answered “the call”.

“There are a few chosen ones amongst you, and they will know when Jesus will call them”. That was “the call” or how the recruiting campaign would start, especially when we were around 11 or 12 years’ old. At the first upsurge of hormones, while we had those strange sensations and mood swings, we ‘knew’ we had been chosen. Me too! Except that shortly afterwards I fell madly in love with the priest!

He was French, tall, fair hair, blue eyes and … rode a motorbike. He was a Jesuit, in charge of all religious services at our school, and by mid-morning he would take his motorbike and vroom …vroom, would go off to some college to learn Arabic, taking away with him the last hope that I might have a furtive look at him that day. He was destined to go and work in some Arab country. He was clever, though this was of no importance to me at the time: the fact that he was gorgeous was enough. He learnt Arabic in a relatively short time and a couple of years’ later was celebrating Mass in Arabic at our school. Going to confession was an ordeal though, having to tell this angel the stupid petty sins that I had committed in the last two weeks! And just being separated by the flimsy mesh of the confession box little window? I wished I could have had real interesting sins to confess. I tried “Father I had bad thoughts”, he gave me more Ave Maria to recite! This love story lasted maybe 2 years, until he left for good. But it wasn’t just my love story. All the girls of my age and above had had a crush on him! I don’t dare think of the nuns!

The priest who replaced him had obviously a hard act to follow. One day, probably deciding that he was forward looking and modern, he gave us a short lesson on sex. Yes, sex! It was, I repeat, a very short lesson. It went like this: “It’s wrong to do it with boys, but if you have girlfriends who behave in an unusually friendly way towards you, it’s wrong too”! Teenage girls have filthy minds. But this was a shade above our immediate comprehension. We looked very, very blank and thought that perhaps it would be safer for the time being to stick to “the call”.

I think you have to go through a religious education in order to become thoroughly vaccinated. I could go on forever talking about the nuns at school. Maybe it was that particular order (St Vincent de Paul) but I can’t remember other friends who went to other religious schools talking about ‘sacrifices’ like we did. One year, we had this slimy mousy looking nun responsible for religious education in our class. During Lent, she gave out slips of paper on which there was a table: the days of the week, and under each day plenty of space to write what ‘sacrifice’ you had accomplished. Looking back, I think this is how the Japanese TV game “Endurance” may have originated! Salt in coffee, stones in shoes, whatever little pocket money I had went to the poor. I even offered to do the dusting for grandmother … Could it be that there is, perhaps, a pagan heaven for ex convent girls? I deserve a place there.

4.
I think I have to give some credit to the nuns on two occasions.
It’s January 26, 1952. It’s all a bit confused now, but we were at school as usual. We normally finished at 4 o’clock but that day suddenly, well before 4, the doors of the classrooms were opened by some nuns moving very fast but not in a panic. “We’re finishing early today”, they said, “and your parents are waiting outside the school”.
Our parents waiting outside? Who told them? How? Very few families had telephones and why would they come to get us? Still, within a fairly short time, all the classes were emptied. There were lots of puzzled and frightened looking girls. The blue buses stood still in the yard and the gates of the school were shut. The parents were gathered behind them. Something was wrong. The nuns delivered us into the hands of our parents, asking, for those girls whose parents couldn’t be contacted, if someone could take them home. Lydia and I were together and father was waiting for us. We took along our cousin Lucy and we went off in a taxi.
“There are some troubles in town at the moment” my father said “so the nuns thought that it would be wiser to send the girls home not in their blue buses with the name of the school written all over them in French, but with their parents”. What troubles? And why was it dangerous to go back home in the bus?
When we got home, the atmosphere was heavy. Mother looked very worried. From our windows and balcony we could see a lot of smoke coming from the town centre. “They are burning buildings owned by foreigners” father said. Cairo was burning. ‘They’ must have been the Arabs I thought. What did they want? I couldn’t know then. But in the following months events unfolded which eventually led to the exile of King Faruk. ‘They’ were officers of the Army who had organised a coup. Egypt was still under the protection of Britain and ‘they’ wanted total independence and the fall of the monarchy. Which they got a couple of months later. ‘They’ were headed by two officers, Mohammad Neguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
That afternoon many buildings were burnt. At nightfall we could see the flames and the orange light they threw in the night. Many foreigners were indeed killed. We prayed Jesus, Mary, Joseph, all the Saints we could think of, we invoked them all with great urgency, as fast as we could, all evening. No one went out the next day, certainly not mother with her white complexion and blue eyes. Father did go out to gather news. We didn’t go to school for some time. That day was the beginning of a new Egypt. And the nuns had acted with great wisdom.
I’ll come back on the implications of this ‘new Egypt’ and to later events that turned our world upside down.
But, back to the nuns and the second good thing they did for me.
I must have been around 12, I think. There was going to be a gathering of several classes in the theatre where one stranger, a woman who came from Russia, was going to show us how she lived. Her name was Varbinka Dimitrova. This woman was born without proper arms and legs. She had stumps with a little thumb at the end of the arms. It is possible that she was a victim of Thalidomide, but at the time the name of that drug was unknown to us. So, to put it bluntly, we were going to see a freak show. The purpose, however, was to teach us that with perseverance and courage one could achieve great things. It did just that for me.
Varbinka taught us that you can be independent even when you are disabled. She showed us how she could sew, cook, iron, do everyday tasks, which in her case had demanded a lot of effort and determination. I was deeply moved. For a long time after the demonstration of her skills I kept telling myself “If Varbinka could do it, then I can do it”. Who was she, where did she really come from, how did she end up, doing what she was doing, to earn her living? I will never know. But she taught us all a great lesson.

5.

V

I think I have to give some credit to the nuns on two occasions.

It’s January 26, 1952. It’s all a bit confused now, but we were at school as usual. We normally finished at 4 o’clock but that day suddenly, well before 4, the doors of the classrooms were opened by some nuns moving very fast but not in a panic. “We’re finishing early today”, they said, “and your parents are waiting outside the school”.
Our parents waiting outside? Who told them? How? Very few families had telephones and why would they come to get us? Still, within a fairly short time, all the classes were emptied. There were lots of puzzled and frightened looking girls. The blue buses stood still in the yard and the gates of the school were shut. The parents were gathered behind them. Something was wrong. The nuns delivered us into the hands of our parents, asking, for those girls whose parents couldn’t be contacted, if someone could take them home. Lydia and I were together and father was waiting for us. We took along our cousin Lucy and we went off in a taxi.
“There are some troubles in town at the moment” my father said “so the nuns thought that it would be wiser to send the girls home not in their blue buses with the name of the school written all over them in French, but with their parents”. What troubles? And why was it dangerous to go back home on the bus?
When we got home, the atmosphere was heavy. Mother looked very worried. From our windows and balcony we could see a lot of smoke coming from the town centre. “They are burning buildings owned by foreigners”, father said. Cairo was burning. ‘They’ must have been the Arabs I thought. What did they want? I couldn’t know then. But in the following months events unfolded which eventually led to the exile of King Faruk. ‘They’ were officers of the Army who had organised a coup. Egypt was still under the protection of Britain and ‘they’ wanted total independence and the fall of the monarchy. Which they got a couple of months later. ‘They’ were headed by two officers, Mohammad Neguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
That afternoon many buildings were burned. At nightfall we could see the flames and the orange light they threw in the night. Many foreigners were indeed killed. We prayed Jesus, Mary, Joseph, all the Saints we could think of, we invoked them all with great urgency, as fast as we could, all evening. No one went out the next day, certainly not mother with her white complexion and blue eyes. Father did go out to gather news. We didn’t go to school for some time. That day was the beginning of a new Egypt. And the nuns had acted with great wisdom.
I’ll come back on the implications of this ‘new Egypt’ and to later events that turned our world upside down.
But, back to the nuns and the second good thing they did for me.
I must have been around 12, I think. There was going to be a gathering of several classes in the theatre where one stranger, a woman who came from Russia, was going to show us how she lived. Her name was Varbinka Dimitrova. This woman was born without proper arms and legs. She had stumps with a little thumb at the end of the arms. It is possible that she was a victim of Thalidomide, but at the time the name of that drug was unknown to us. So, to put it bluntly, we were going to see a freak show. The purpose, however, was to teach us that with perseverance and courage one could achieve great things. It did just that for me.
Varbinka taught us that you can be independent even when you are disabled. She showed us how she could sew, cook, iron, do everyday tasks, which in her case had demanded a lot of effort and determination. I was deeply moved. For a long time after the demonstration of her skills I kept telling myself “If Varbinka could do it, then I can do it”. Who was she, where did she really come from, how did she end up, doing what she was doing, to earn her living? I will never know. But she taught us all a great lesson.

6. The Family
VI
At the beginning of this letter I talked to you about grandfather and that I was about 21/2 years old when he died. Grandfather Felix Bayada and grandmother Caterina Macchiarelli were my mother’s parents. I never knew my father’s parents and I believe they had both passed away well before I was born. After grandfather Felix died, grandmother continued to live with us.
I don’t know much about her, except that she was born in Naples, and the family immigrated to Egypt around 1880. At the time the family left Italy grandmother was about 4 years’ old and all she remembered about Naples, was that it was beautiful and that she could never forget the wonderful smell of baked bread coming from a nearby baker. Typically, she loved Italy the way immigrants love the country they’ve left and she transmitted her love for her country to all of us. She deeply admired Mussolini, who in her views had elevated Italy to the level of countries such as England and France by acquiring some colonies. At one time, during World War II, Mussolini had asked Italian married women to give their gold wedding ring in exchange for an iron one as part of their duty for the mother country, the gold being used to support the war budget. Grandmother had exchanged her wedding ring and was proudly wearing the iron one. I have no idea what grandfather thought about it!
Grandmother was not a fascist or anything like that. She just loved her lost country and Naples. Mussolini had put Italy in the right place on the world map and that was enough for her. The bad guy, of course, was Hitler.
My grandparents had three children: Ovidio, Egizio and Ilda, your grandmother. Uncle Ovidio and family lived at the beginning of Faruk Street about 20 minutes’ walk from our house. Egizio, the second child, died in a pole-vaulting accident at the age of 16. Grandmother was close to Renata, and I’m sure that she knows a lot more about her but for some reason (maybe she’d feel she would betray a confidence) she never ‘explained’ grandmother to us.
Grandmother was a stern person, always dressed in grey or dark blue (as all widows did then). She had grey eyes, very regular features and what were once dark hair was now long, straight and silver. She used to let us comb it and plait it before rolling it in a bun. Lydia in particular, who as a child had already a fixation with straight hair, loved doing it and grandmother was very patient.
Grandmother made our dresses. She had a foot pedal-operated Singer sewing machine that she treasured. We were absolutely not allowed to touch it. Temptation being too strong, I touched it a couple of times, while she was having a nap, hoping to learn how to use it to make clothes for my dolls. When she discovered that the threads were all entangled I incurred her wrath! And I never learnt to use any sewing machine!
She also made my father’s boxer shorts. That’s what we call them nowadays, but in reality the ones my father had to wear looked like Bermudas! They would argue every time, father saying that they were too long, and grandmother saying that they were not, reminding him that he had three daughters in the house!
Sometimes, in the night, she would have a nightmare. I can only guess that it was a recurring one, because she would start moaning loudly in a blood chilling way and in the silence of the night it sounded like there was a ghost walking about. What was it? She never said.
What I remember vividly is that when I had some illness or other causing me to have high temperature, she would apply a cloth soaked in vinegar and water on my forehead. The bowl was in the kitchen and she would do the soaking there, but while walking towards my bed she would shake the cloth energetically as when you shake a mat out of a window. Maybe it was to keep the cloth cool. At the end of 1999, I caught whatever type of nasty flu was circulating at the time. It was bad. I did not care that I was missing the millennium parties, I just lied in bed… and I could hear the cloth being shaken, I could smell the vinegar, expecting grandmother to suddenly appear.
Grandmother in true Victorian fashion, did not show her emotions. No cuddles, no bedtime kisses, in fact, we kissed only for our birthdays, Christmas, New Year and Easter! Maybe this is how things were in the old days! At some time in my childhood I had chicken pox, and it was really bad. I remember wanting to scratch my face and my body as the itching was unbearable. Grandmother sat with me for hours, gently holding my hands explaining that if I did that, I would be full of holes. That is my nicest memory of her.
She was very strict about cleanliness, particularly about washing our hands every time we came back home. She would even check if the hands were smooth and not sticky or sweaty. If one of the hands felt damp because of sweat, back to the bathroom for another scrub. I think this was because Silvana the first died of typhoid. Another fixation of hers was me sucking my right thumb. I sucked my thumb to go to sleep and she would creep up on me demanding to touch my thumb to see if it was wet or not. I would give her my left thumb to touch while I dried my right one under my pillow. One day we had visitors and this lady said something nice to me. My grandmother promptly told her that despite my age (7 years’old) I was sucking my thumb. This lady laughed and said to her: “Leave the child alone, Mrs X’s son sucked his thumb until he was 19!” Silvana 1 – grandma 0! End of thumb story!
Having married a Maltese and Malta being then and until 1965 a protectorate of Britain, grandmother became a British subject and had to renew her residence visa every year. She carried her British passport like Jesus carried his Cross. The English were foes. Well they’d won the war and beat Italy and made fun of it. I remember her going on her own to whatever Ministry she had to go, taking the tram and practically spending a whole day there, until she came out with a stamp on her passport allowing her to stay another year. That was quite brave I thought at the time, for someone her age.
One of grandmother’s speciality was the ‘coppette’. These little cups were made of thick glass. They have a thick lip and a rounded bottom so they sit upside down. When we had a really bad cold, with coughing and wheezing, it was time for the ‘coppette’. Grandmother would take them carefully out of their box. Then she would light a piece of cotton wool inside the cup, wait until it stopped burning, remove it, and apply the cup on the bare back of the ‘victim’ lying on the bed. The cup would stick to the back and would suck out the moisture in the lungs. In fact, after a while you could see vapour inside it. So it went on until the whole back was covered with these little alien things. They made a ‘plop’ when you removed them and would you believe it? The cold was so much better the next day! The back of the ‘victim’ was marked with rings but as nobody was going to see them, it didn’t matter. In fact, it was proof of martyrdom!
Although grandmother was in reasonable good health, there were times when she was very ill and the doctor had to be called in. In Egypt, when you called a doctor, it was serious. But, she usually recovered after taking some medication or other. I recall that she had to take a series of intra muscular injections. My father usually performed this task on any one of us who needed them. So he gave grandmother her injections and more than once you could hear him say: “God, what have I done to you, that my punishment should be to see my mother-in-law’s bum every morning”!
Grandma helped my Mum at home. Sometimes she would go to the Ataba market on her own, but as it was a good twenty minutes away from our house, the return home was becoming quite hard on her, having to walk all the way back with heavy shopping bags. On one such trip to the market, she arrived home in a fairly state of shock, some hair having escaped from the bun, flying around her forehead. It was Summer and she was wearing a dress with short sleeves. As soon as she came in, she put the shopping bags on the floor, and with a shaky voice said that a camel had bitten her arm! She sat down, we brought her a glass of water and after she drank it, she pulled back the sleeve of her dress and there it was: a big red mark on the soft part of her arm that in the following days became black, yellow and blue. A camel, in the middle of Faruk Street? Oh, yes! Not far from where we lived there was a kind of little crescent, where often sheep, or horses drawing carriages, or a little caravan of camels, would rest. Grandma obviously walked a bit too close to one of them and it bit her! Of course the bite hurt, but I think it was so unexpected that the shock was greater than the pain. As for me, needless to say, I don’t like camels: apart from biting they also spit!
It was thanks to her that I started to read in Italian. I don’t really remember how the subject was raised but Uncle Ovidio had books in Italian, one of which was called ‘Cuore’ by Edmondo de Amicis. He was very careful about his books and didn’t like to lend them. One day, grandmother said to me: “Ask your uncle to lend you the book ‘Cuore’”. At our next visit to our cousins, I asked him. Everyone went silent, looking in turn at my uncle and me. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Uncle Ovidio unlocked the bookcase, took the book out and gave it to me with the recommendation that I should not damage it. I held the book like it was some giant egg and promised to look after it. I read it, a bit slowly at first, thinking that it was not so difficult to read in Italian. The book was a collection of short stories written in 1888 for young people, promoting good behaviour towards parents, teachers, and nation (was grandmother hinting at something, I wonder?). After a while I got used to the archaic language which although was proper Italian, was quite different from the way we spoke it at home. After I returned it, to my surprise my uncle said that if I wanted other books, I could borrow them. So I borrowed Pinocchio and enjoyed all the mishaps that occurred to him!
Grandmother lived with us until November 1956. She, her son and family, like thousands of foreigners, had to leave Egypt. They were sent to a reception centre in Kidderminster, where they settled and where one of my cousins still lives. She died in 1963.
As for my paternal grandparents as I said, they had died well before I was born. Their names were Suleiman Homsi and Rose Dahan. There was one photograph of grandmother Rose, framed and hanging on the wall of the living room in Cairo. It was like the place of honour, because anyone coming to our house would see it. My mother and grandmother were not pleased about it and for years had to put up with it until my slipper ended it. It sounds absolutely amazing but I have a witness, Lydia!
It was holiday time on a boring morning and we had nothing to do. I was sitting on one armchair and Lydia was in front of me, sitting on another one. The bookcase, above which hung the framed photograph, was on my left. To pass the time I started to play with my slipper, flicking it with my foot and catching it before it landed on the floor, with the same foot. I had been doing this for some time when suddenly the slipper, perhaps flicked with more energy, went up and instead of coming down like the law of gravity would suggest, veered to the left, hit the framed photograph and broke the glass! You cannot imagine the horror on all our faces! If you hadn’t seen it you wouldn’t believe it, so how would Father react? When he came home and I told him what had happened, my father picked up the pieces of glass, removed the photograph from the frame and with a very grave tone of voice said to me: “Is that the way to treat your grandmother?”
That was the end of grandmother Rose watching all of us from her place of honour. She was never put back and I’m sure my mother and grandmother were absolutely delighted!

7.

VII
My father was born in 1904 in a town North of Cairo called Ziftah. He was the third of 7 children, 5 boys and two girls. I don’t know much about his upbringing or at what time the family moved to Cairo.
We did not have a close relationship with my father’s family. My mother and her family considered themselves ‘Europeans’ whilst my father was of Middle Eastern descent. This alone made him already an outsider in the view of my mother’s family. The very name of his family, Homsi, means ‘someone from Homs’, a town in Syria, like you would say, Romano or El Greco! His father came to Egypt from Lebanon after having spent one year in Australia. In Lebanon our cousins’ family name is El Homsi.
Before their wedding, my father had told my mother’s parents that one of his sisters was married to an Englishman and that made him more acceptable to them. However, he had not told the whole truth: a few days before the wedding it was revealed that this sister was di-vor-ced! And there was worse to come: she had married a Muslim! I guess that must have been the beginning of the feud. But sadly it didn’t stop there.
My father’s family spoke Arabic as their main language and we spoke French or Italian. Speaking Arabic as your first language was derogative (mainly in grandmother’s view) so the Homsi’s were definitely not on the same level as the Bayada’s implying that the latter had more moral values than the former. On top of having the misfortune of not being Europeans, my father and his family had the Arab way of looking at the family, which is that the children of brothers or sisters have equal status as one’s own. Except that my father’s salary as a teacher was certainly not astronomical and my mother had to balance the monthly budget until the next payday. To make matters worse, when grandfather died, grandmother continued to live with us, and father’s family demanded that he took care of some member or other of his family since he was providing for his mother-in-law. Grandmother did contribute towards her upkeep but there were six of us in our household and only one salary coming in.
My mother kept the family lacking of nothing and managed this tight budget not without difficulties. So one can imagine her anger knowing that my father had ‘helped’ one or other of his brothers or sisters! It did seem to us sometimes that my father was more loyal to his family than to his own. How things were said, passed on, between one family and the other I don’t really know. For years to come, there was this divide. My mother had been on the receiving end and although my father did care for her, he failed to protect her and defend her in front of his family. Looking at it now, I realise that my father was in a no-win situation and had to live with it for most of his life.
My mother had given my father’s sisters nicknames: one was called “The Viper” and the other “One-eyed” (she had only one good eye). I must have met The Viper maybe twice in my life and occasionally our family met with One-eyed and her family. Which makes me think that most of the trouble was generated by The Viper.
We were very close though to my father’s eldest brother Elias and his wife Rose. She had been very supportive of my mother and was like a sister to her. Their daughter Leila was our oldest (and wisest) cousin and was Lydia’s godmother. She lived in Montreal and knew more than any of us about the Homsi saga. We have numerous cousins of whom I vaguely remember the name (Leila knew) who first immigrated to Canada with their families and who have probably invaded the USA by now. I think it’s a shame all this has happened but one cannot change the past, nor the way families behave.
My father left teaching to work in a private company but I don’t remember when. But I remember that the school organised a party. There were tables in the middle of the courtyard, lots of boys (in fact, Lydia and I being the only girls we received a lot of attention), something like a late breakfast with hot chocolate, croissants and little sandwiches. Even after he left teaching, he kept meeting many people who had been his former pupils. Very often, if we were going out together, he would stop every 10 metres to say hello to one or other of these pupils, while Mum, Lydia and I had to wait patiently until their salamaleks were over!
My father was a great storyteller. He had a slight stutter that he used to his advantage, letting the flow stop and the suspense float, until the word came out. He would tell the stories usually around the table, while we were having lunch, our main meal of the day. His accounts of a day at the office gave me visions of how wonderful it must be to go to work in an office where everyone was having a great time. He did not tell stories about his childhood although I’m sure he’d have many to tell, but that meant probably speaking about his family and it was wiser to keep quiet. One story though (and maybe the only one) I’ve always loved, is that when he was little he used to be a choirboy, helping with mass on Sundays. He would also go, with other boys, to such religious services as funerals and would be given a small amount of money from the family of the deceased at the end of the ceremony, as was the tradition. In those days films never ended: there was always a cliffhanger at the end and the film would continue the following week. My father, as a little boy, would pray with all his heart that somebody would die during the week so there would be a funeral, earn some money and go to the cinema to see the rest of the film!
My father would go to work in the morning, come back at 1pm, have lunch and go back to work at about 4 o’clock until 8pm. Lunch had to be ready shortly after one, more or less the moment he opened the door! After lunch he would have a nap and very often when we were on our summer holiday, it was me who would wake him up with a cup of coffee, Turkish style. He liked it with a ‘face’ on it (a very compact froth really). Very often, on his return in the evening, he would bring ‘something’: biscuits for soaking in the morning tea, fruit in season like melons or watermelons, sugar cane, and sometimes ice cream, our favourite!
Once a year, he would ward off the ‘evil eye’ by burning incense in a special burner and go into every room mumbling something. We followed silently behind: I loved the smell of the incense, the same stuff as the one in the Church, not the little sticks you now get from Indian shops.
My father smoked, loved sweets and fatty foods and occasionally drank. His breakfast was always the cream skimmed after my mother had boiled the milk and let it go cold (not unlike clotted cream in taste). We would have happily eaten it ourselves every morning, but were only allowed to sample some of it if the milk had been particularly rich and had therefore rendered more than the normal amount of cream. On top of the cream there would be jam. He must have secretly eaten more sweets while he was out, I’m sure.
It’s difficult to say how much he smoked, as in those days, it was customary if one wanted a cigarette, to first pass the packet around in case someone else was tempted to smoke too. When I was about 12, late one night, I pinched a cigarette out of the packet that was in the pocket of his jacket and went with Lydia on the big balcony, while my father was in the small balcony. I lit the cigarette, had a few drags, passed it on to Lydia who had only one puff and never another one in her life, and then put it out halfway through. I felt really very important having broken this taboo. The next day my father asked my sister and I “Who has taken a cigarette out of my packet?” “I did”, I said, expecting the sky to fall on me. But, my father simply said: “Next time you want a cigarette, don’t go and steal it, ask me”. In the years to come he would say to me: “Do you want to light me a cigarette? Just don’t wet the tip.” Lighting up as smokers know, is the best bit! I believe to this day that because smoking was not forbidden anymore, I have been an amateur smoker. I enjoy a smoke but if necessary I can go without for days. I often wondered, however, how on earth did he know that one cigarette was missing?
Father did not drink at home, not spirits anyway, perhaps the occasional beer in the summer. But he would sometimes go to Hosni who never ceased to be a sweet shop by day and a clandestine bar by night! On those rare occasions, he would come home late and go straight to bed. The next day he would not go to work because he had a ‘bilious attack’. He would spend the day lying on his left side, moaning quietly every now and then. That’s when my mother would say that he had been to Hosni! Nowadays, we call these ‘bilious attacks’ hangovers.
My father was a first class snorer! How my mother could fall asleep with his snoring, I’ll never know. He would sometimes lie on the couch by the radio and listen to his beloved Um Kalsum (a very, very famous Egyptian singer). After a while he would start snoring, covering the voice of the singer. We would tip toe to the radio and turn it off. This would make him sit up immediately, outraged, demanding to know why we turned the radio off and strongly denying that he was snoring! One day, when we least expected it we were vindicated.
We were spending a seaside holiday in a place called Ras-el-Bar. What distinguished this seaside resort from others were the blocks of chalets divided into rooms with straw roofs and communal bathroom and kitchen. One morning, about 4am, a group of men armed with sticks gathered at our parents’ door ready to burst into their room. But they didn’t. We were absolutely unaware of this and only found out when we were having breakfast that these men were convinced that someone was trying to kill my father who was groaning in pain. In fact, when they stopped at the door and listened carefully, they realised that my father was simply snoring his head off!
Father took an interest in our schoolwork and would help us especially with maths. He was very good at explaining problems to us. He also gave private lessons, even after he had left teaching for some time. So, when we wanted rational explanations to such questions as to what had Mr So and So died of, we turned to him expecting to be enlightened. But we had to be content with what became a regular answer which was ‘Mr So and So died because he forgot to breathe’! One morning I woke up and told him that I had a really a bad dream. He came out with ‘Make sure to cover your bum when you go to bed!’ A good bit of advice that I’ve always remembered.
My father took care of us, in his own way. His role in the house was well defined. He was the one providing for us but at the same time was trying to retain some independence, like visiting his family. He was trying to supplement his salary not only by giving lessons, but by taking some extra work at home. One such job was a seasonal recurrence. The ‘coupons’. He would bring from work huge ledgers on which, page after page, he had to stick these coupons. For a couple of weeks the whole family participated in this activity. The coupons came in pre-arranged packets and we would have to trim them, cutting the edges off, to make them fit on the pages of the ledger, keeping them in the right order. Then he would dip them in the bowl of glue placed in front of him and stick them on the appropriate page. He worked fast and sometimes it was hard to keep up with him.
I still don’t know what they were for but they had to do with shares the shareholders held in the company for which he worked.
On the night of the 26th of January 1952, when Cairo was burning, my father took a bayonet that a Mr Clark had given him and spent the whole night with the caretaker at the entrance of our building, ready to defend his family. He came back in the morning saying: ‘You are safe now’. I was so proud of him! And who was Mr Clark? He was an Australian soldier posted in Egypt whom my father had befriended and together with the bayonet he also gave him two bronze shells of unexploded bombs that were used as flower vases.
My father died in hospital in Beirut in the Summer of 1973. He had had three heart attacks and the last one was fatal. The last time I saw him I was in Beirut where I had spent a month with my family. We were going back to Turin on that day and that morning I was still asleep. He was going to work. He came into my room, kissed me, said Goodbye and wished us a safe journey.

8.

VIII
My mother was born in Cairo on August 11,1905. Despite her mother being so stern and cold, by some miracle Mum had a warm and cheerful character. She probably took after grandpa Felix. How was she as a child? Where did she go to school? How did she become a teacher? You guessed, I don’t know. A good few years ago, when I realised that my mum had another life before becoming our Mum, a life of which I knew nothing about, I decided to write about my own upbringing. You might read it as one reads a normal story, or cast a curious glance into my past, but at least you’ll know a bit more than the three things I know about my Mum.
Thing No. 1: Mum told me one day that as a little girl, she would go out and ring other people’s doorbells and then run away!
Thing No. 2: Mum had a cat, called Pizzo, who lived to be 19.
Thing No. 3: Mum spent her youth preparing her ‘trousseau’ – her bottom drawer.
She embroidered tablecloths for large tables, tablecloths for small tables, napkins, curtains, pillowcases, cushions. She also made bedspreads that were all lacy, that you put on top of coloured satin lining, as well as the lace to finish off many of her other embroideries. And when I say embroidered, it was not simple stitches. My knowledge is very limited but there was petit point, point rempli, point lancé, cutting out figures and embroidering them around the edges. The curtains were also made like that, all white. She spent years embroidering by daylight and by the light of oil lamps. There would have been enough to supply a manor house with all the linen needed.
How did she imagine her home, furnished with all the beautiful things she was embroidering, what dreams did she have? Was it normal for a young girl to have such an extensive bottom drawer? Of course many items were used in the house, in particular the curtains and the pillowcases. I have kept a bedspread for a child’s bed (never used), a couple of napkins to put under vases and a tablecloth with matching napkins for a small tea party. Tea party? We never had tea parties! Our visitors would be given a cup of coffee, or lemonade, never tea! The embroidered parts of some of the cushions have survived and have all been framed. Renata has a Harlequin’s head, Lydia has the one with children playing ‘blind man’s bluff’ and mine is a Dutch boy and girl wearing clogs.
My mother’s story for me begins the day she met my father. As I mentioned before, they were both teachers and although they didn’t teach in the same school they must have had similar working hours. My mother would come home, sit on the balcony of her parents' flat with a piece of work and quietly sing while doing her embroidery. My father would hide behind a tree and watch her. I always thought that my mum was beautiful. She had big blue green eyes, a light complexion, dark hair and a lovely laughter. The story goes that my father fell in love with her and decided to ask for her hand in marriage. He went to speak to a priest who spoke to another priest who agreed to accompany him to my mum’s family. Needless to say, my father was not warmly received! He, however, managed to ask what he came to ask, and my mother said ‘Yes’. It wasn’t love at first sight. My mother was not a young girl any longer and in those days if you weren’t married by the age of 25, you were on the shelf and became a spinster! My mum was getting there.
Was my mother hoping to have her own house? Was it all arranged that her parents were going to live with the newly wed? Was it normal? After all, my mother’s brother was married too. Why didn’t they go and live with him? As a child you don’t ask yourself these questions. Your family is your family and you live with it.
As far as I can remember, Mum was always the first one to get up in the morning. She would prepare breakfast (tea, bread and jam for us) and sandwiches to take to school. Every day except Sundays all the beds were stripped, the sheets shaken outside the windows, the pillows beaten and aired and the mattresses folded in half. (In the school holidays, Lydia and I spent many hours playing on my Mum’s bed, pretending it was a horse-drawn carriage).
Most days she would go to the Ataba market, a good twenty minutes’ walk. She had her regular suppliers; one that I remember well was Vassily, a Greek greengrocer, from whom she would buy Greek cheese, olives and charcuterie.
At the market Mum was a different person altogether: in her broken Arabic she would barter hard with the vendors, using all the rules of that art, sometimes walking away and having the vendor run after her or going as far as calling them thiefs! It did not always work her way.
One day, in the school holidays, I went with her. She wanted to buy a chicken. Chickens in those days were eaten quite rarely. They were sold alive and were in cages. My mother went to the chicken vendor, picked a chicken, and instead of waiting for the man to kill the chicken and pluck it in front of her, she said that she would come back for it so that she could continue her shopping while he did the deed. When we came back, she looked at that chicken and said to the man: “This is not the one I picked!” The chicken was dead and quite naked, but it had a strange colour, a waxy yellow! The man swore on the life of his children that it was the one she wanted, that he killed it with his own knife, and plucked it as quickly as he could for her, such a valuable customer! Mum couldn’t argue any more and the chicken came home with us. There was definitely something strange about that chicken. It was probably already dead, hidden somewhere between the cages, and the man was waiting to fob it off on somebody which happened to be Mum! We ate it, of course, and we were fine!
The Ataba market was very large, with coffee shops among vegetable stalls or butchers shops, small alleys taking shoppers to even smaller alleys where one could find all sorts of trades. The fish section was unbelievable: every Friday we would have fish and I’ve never seen such a variety of fish as in that market. The prawns and crabs were crawling out of their baskets, and sometimes even big fish were still quivering. The fish was undoubtedly fresh, brought to the market a couple of hours before. Mum would nevertheless inspect whatever fish she was buying. As a child I didn’t like fish much, apart from prawns and soles. When I think of it now, how I wish I could find the same quality, taste, freshness!
The hardest part of shopping was, of course, coming back home as the twenty minutes walk seemed an eternity because of the heavy bags. Mum sometimes complained, but if we went with her, she would always let us carry the lighter bags, even when we grew up to be as big as her. What I remember most is that so often, once we were at home and she was putting the shopping away she would exclaim “I’ve forgotten the parsley!”
Mum was a good cook. The kitchen was very small. She did not have a cooker, she had two Primus stoves, and one slow cooker on which she would let stews or sauces simmer for hours. It had three wicks and was filled with paraffin. The Primus stoves were used for everything: from boiling water for our baths to cooking. For the whole time we lived in Cairo, Mum had no oven. She had a special round utensil in which she baked cakes. It looked like a deep doughnut base into which the batter would be poured and it had a domed lid. Both doughnut and lid had perforations around the circumference. The doughnut had a large hole in the middle in which an iron insert was fitted. This insert conducted the heat throughout the contraption et voilà, you baked your cake! Unfortunately as it wasn’t easy to maintain a constant temperature with the Primus stove, sometimes the cake was undercooked or burnt. When it happened Mum would say “Next time, I’ll cook it a bit less, or a bit more”. Lydia’s favourite cake was a chocolate pain d’épices and mine was a baba. I remember that she could also make a sort of crème caramel in this doughnut.
Coming back from the market Mum would cook lunch. I think she liked cooking but the daily cooking was a chore, especially in such cramped conditions. She did prepare really lovely dishes, but for me my favourite food was her omelettes. I’ve never been able to make them as light, fluffy, tasty as hers! Mum was always in search of new recipes and from whatever newspaper or magazine that came to the house, she would cut out recipes, mainly of cakes, that she would keep in cardboard boxes. She had this so-called friend, a Miss Isabella, a spinster it must be said, whose cakes were always perfect. Every time we visited her and she produced some light as air cake, my mum would ask for the recipe. And Isabella would give it to her. And when my mum tried to make the cake it was always a disaster. That woman always missed something or added something else on purpose, so that nobody would make cakes like hers. Eventually it dawned on my mum that it wasn’t her fault if the cakes failed and at long last, she stopped asking Isabella for her recipes.
Mum always prepared what is now called ‘balanced meals’. With no formal training, no TV programmes to show you what to cook, she had her own ideas and stuck to them. For example, if she served pasta as a first course, she would not serve potatoes with the roast. She was very conscious about using fat, preferring olive oil or butter to ‘samna’ or ‘ghee’. Most of the times, our mid-morning snack would be whatever seasonal vegetable or fruit was available. When Lydia and I were little, we would have a soft-boiled egg after she came back from the market. My mother had this incredible skill to crack the soft boil egg into a little plate, making it look like a fried egg. I’ve never seen a chef do that! Mother never taught us to cook. The kitchen was too small but that was not the main reason. She would say: “You’ll have plenty of time to cook when you get married!”
Grandmother helped Mum in the running of the house. We also had a cleaner who came twice a week and a washwoman who came once every two weeks. Washday was what Mum called “The day of the Devils”. We all hated it. The washwoman, Zenab, arrived early in the morning. She had bandages around her wrists to give her some support. She needed it: she washed sheets, towels, shirts, tablecloths and other smaller items. The water was heated on the Primus stoves. The only place where this ritual took place was the bathroom. I can still smell the soap she used to rub the washing with, like Marseille soap, and see the steam filling the corridor. If we wanted to use the toilet, she had to stop and wait for us to come out. Sometimes, if she was busy, and it was me or my sister wanting to perform, she would tell us to go ahead, she’d seen it all before! In all this chaos, the meal had to be cooked, and the washing finished by lunchtime before my father arrived from work.
What I remember most was the number of sheets being washed! Drying them was not a problem, even in the winter, as in Cairo it was sunny all the time. When the sheets had dried, another ritual began: folding them. It was done like this: two persons held two corners of the sheet, pulling it for some time to smooth the creases. Then it was folded in half, lengthwise, and then again, still pulling. Then the two ends were brought together, the sheet folded, and placed under the mattress of a bed in lieu of ironing. If Lydia and I were around, we would help. With all this pulling sometimes the sheet would escape from our hands. And sometimes, if it was grandmother at the other end I would let it escape on purpose, making her almost lose her balance. Yes, I enjoyed that! But I would never ever do it to Mum!
Mum did all the ironing except for father’s shirts. These were sent outside to a professional ‘ironer’ and would come back perfectly ironed and folded. Whenever possible, I would stop in front of his shop and watch the man doing the ironing. There were no steam irons and the man, having taken a sip of water, would spray a fine mist on the item he was ironing. Ironing in the Summer heat made you perspire as if you were in a sauna or in Purgatory as Mum would say.
After she had a nap, Mum would often sit by the window in the corridor and mend whatever needed mending. The moment she picked the needle, she would start to hum. She seemed quite happy to do that. Lydia and I would be quiet and listen to her. But sometimes we would burst out laughing because she would repeat the same couple of verses on and on. Mum would laugh with us! We so often felt that it was she who was our elder sister and not Renata.
Sometimes when we thought we might have visitors, Mum would wear a beautiful dressing gown. It was made of satin and had red flowers. At home, whether adults or children, we had two sets of clothes: one for the house and one for going out. So as the lady of the house, you wouldn’t be sitting at home in your going out dress and you wouldn’t receive visitors in your house clothes. Hence the beautiful dressing gown. My mother disliked dark colours immensely and her dresses were light coloured with bright prints.
On Thursday, our day off school with no going to Church, Mum would take me and Lydia to the Ezbekieh gardens and spend the morning there. It was a beautiful park with a band stand where all the kids played. It had a little stream too and it looked large. Mum was apparently chatted up one day by an English man, no less, when we were playing around. Blushing to the root of her hair she simply replied that “Me, no speak English”. Other times we would take the tram and go all the way to another garden much smaller. We just enjoyed the tram ride!
Mum was so patient. When I look back at my early years I remember that for a certain period I refused to eat. I didn’t like anything. And Mum sat patiently by my side not only playing the ‘One for dad, One for Jesus, One for whoever crossed her mind’ game, but she eventually made me eat by telling me stories about two characters she created, two friends Chico and Chanco, who were always getting into trouble and were very mischievous. I loved those stories and would eat without realising it!
I could not be in Beirut neither when Mum had her stroke nor when she died some months later in 1980. After she came out of her coma and in the following months, her hair which had always been dyed black had turned naturally white and Renata said that she looked beautiful. But I’ll always remember her with dark hair, blue-green eyes and lovely laughter. I returned to Beirut twenty years after her death, in the year 2000, after the civil war had ended and Renata took me to the cemetery. Only then, did I realise that she was really gone and I broke down in tears. I miss her.

9.

IX
Now that I’ve talked about grandma, dad and mum, I’ll turn to us, the children. Renata was never a ‘child’ to Lydia and I, because she was older than us. So to us she was more of a grownup. She was always with grandmother, the two of them being inseparable. By the time Lydia was born, Renata was nearly 10 years’ old. She told me one day that when she saw the baby, and because Lydia was a bit of an ugly duckling, she said ‘That’s my baby”. Until now, she has this attitude towards our youngest sister, and I must say that their relationship is a bit like mother and daughter.
As for Lydia and me, Mum used to say that we were like cats and dogs. She was always asking: “Why aren’t you like ‘normal’ sisters, loving each other, being nice to each other?” Our first reaction would be, of course, Yuk! But yes, if we were together we would more often than not end up a game with a fight, under any stupid pretext. If, however, one of us would be away, spending the day at our cousins’ for example, the other one would be utterly lost. I remember in one of our fights, we really went for each other, ending up with pulling each other’s hair. Grandmother, who always told us off, this time just looked at us and laughed really loud saying that we looked like two Arab women having a fight. It must have been a good one!
Renata was doing her own things. By the time we were aware that we had an elder sister, she wasn’t a child like us, anymore. She always referred to us as ‘”les petites soeurs”, even when we moved to Lebanon and were 18 and 16! She had already left home to study in Beirut, and by the time the rest of the family arrived, she was already teaching. So what a disappointment for those who knew her when they met the “little sisters” who were not ‘little’ anymore but were two ungraceful teenagers!
Lydia and I played a lot together, peaceful games I mean, before they ended in a squabble. Among our favourites were: the coach driver, using Mum’s bed whilst it was aired. It was a brass bed with the head and the foot of the bed made with square rods. We would tie a rope on the middle of the foot of the bed and shake it, pretending it was driven by a horse. One of us would be the driver, the other the passenger. On arrival at the passenger’s destination, and as part of the game, we would argue for some time about the fare. Another game was ‘the milkman’. Milk was delivered everyday at home. The milkman arrived with his churn and had a measure that looked like a metal mug. I think we had two measures daily that he poured in a saucepan. So, Lydia and I would go to the bathroom, fill up the sink, get an empty can and a saucepan and play for hours pouring the water in and out of the saucepan… until someone had to use the bathroom. In this game one would be Mum and the other the poor milkman: you see, Mum was always complaining that he didn’t fill the measure properly, that he wanted to cheat her, that he added water to the milk, that the milk was not fresh, and so on … Plenty of play material!
Another game we liked was ‘having a baby’. We would be a couple, a married couple, waking up in the morning and finding a baby on the doorstep. Sometimes the baby was a doll, sometimes it was Lydia! We believed that babies arrived in this way, and didn’t know that they had to transit first in a woman’s body. However, it was never very clear how they ended up in a family as these things were taboo. When I grew a bit older, I came home one day, saying: “I saw a woman who was incredibly pregnant, she was so huge!” Grandmother just slapped me saying that I was bad, and that I should never say ‘that’ word again!
As we grew up, we started to play more and more with other children in the building. We would normally go to their house, because grandmother didn’t want more children and more noise in our house. As for us, we were very happy to be out of her sight! We learnt to play a game of cards called ’7 and a half’ and we would play for hours until a grownup would come and fetch us. I loved that game and wish I could remember it!
Sometimes we would go and spend the day with our cousins. The one nearest our age were Anna and Lucy. But only Lucy played with us. She was 2 and a half years older than me. Apart from playing together as kids, and later on going out to the cinema just the two of us, Lucy was the main provider of my wardrobe. Well, almost. Because we had a school uniform and house clothes, we didn’t have many going out clothes and these for the majority were hand me downs. Lucy had hers from Anna, I had Lucy’s dresses and after I was done with them, Lydia had them. I didn’t mind at all having my cousin’s dresses, in fact when one year she would have a nice dress, I was looking forward to wearing it the following year. But Lydia just hated it. I guess that’s why, when she started to work and buy her own clothes, she would never wear a piece of garment that did not have a designer label!
With our cousins we often played in our house at getting married: Mum had this beautiful tablecloth that was all lace and she would lend it to us. That was the veil. I can’t remember the dress itself but I think the veil covered everything. We would go through the ceremony, singing and marrying each other several times in one morning, just to wear the veil.
Of our time together at school, I don’t remember having much to do with my sister, except at meal times. For what seemed an eternity, we used to have school dinners. Absolutely inedible stuff. There was one girl on my table who was the rubbish bin: she ate everything that we were able to pass to her, whenever the supervisor was not looking. I eventually convinced my mother that she was wasting money because we just couldn’t eat the food supplied by the nuns. So she reluctantly agreed to prepare our lunch boxes. Yes, it was more work for her, but at least we ate lunch. The tins were collected in the morning in the refectory and placed in a large bain marie before lunch so that they would be warm when we went to eat. Lydia and I were at the same table and I was in charge of sharing the food. Have you heard the story about the custard? You haven’t? Lydia must have told it at least twenty times and given the slightest opportunity she would tell it again!
I don’t remember having pudding often as we normally had a piece of fruit. But on that particular lunch, Mum had made us custard. Just custard, in the fashion of milky pudding. Except that this custard was very runny. To the best of my ability I tried to half it with Lydia and ended up with me having a bigger portion. Lydia was sitting opposite me and seeing that I continued to eat the custard after she had finished hers she realised that the parts had not been equal at all. I’ll never know how I didn’t choke or die on the spot from the looks she gave me. She has never forgiven me, because custard was her favourite pudding.
As we grew older I started having my own friends. I would mainly go to their house to study for exams, or they would come to our house. Then, of course, we would go to ‘parties’ with boys, and under the watchful eyes of the parents dance or talk to other girls. I can’t remember Lydia being part of that, nor of her bringing any friends at home. Her best friend was the little boy on our floor with whom we played 7 and a half and who was about her age. When the family left Cairo in 1956 she must have been utterly lonely. But she never asked to come with me and frankly we both welcome a break from each other.
Renata was a very bright pupil. At the baccalauréat session she came second amongst all the students from various schools, and that was a great honour for her school. Narrowly ahead of her was the son of the owner of Cicurel, a department store that in Cairo was something like Harrods in London. She too, had friends coming to the house to study and then stay for lunch. Some became friends of the family.
She started to study Italian to include in her exams, I guess. Her teacher was none other than our Italian greengrocer who apart from supplying us with all the goodies around Christmas, was also a friend of the family. He wasn’t much older than her and we all wondered whether, one day, he would propose to her. Well, he was a nice man, and he even offered to take the family out on a picnic. That picnic was an omen! I was ill and stayed at home with grandmother. Mr Pastanella had a very old car and that day my father, mother, Renata and Lydia went. Mum had prepared lots of lovely food for the picnic that, being ill, I couldn’t eat. They all piled up in the car and went. I’d barely finished drying my tears that the door bell rang and guess who was at the door? The picnic party! Mr Pastanella’s car had broken down and absolutely refused to come back to life. Renata did not marry Mr Pastanella. The Italian lessons continued but no more offers of picnic were made.
Renata left home when I was about 14 and went to Beirut where she still lives. Lydia has lived in Lausanne for over 35 years. Renata has unsuccessfully tried to reconvert me to Catholicism and we have reached a compromise: if she so wishes, she can pray for me, and she has absolutely free choice of which saint to pray. Over the years Lydia and I have become good friends although now and then the old cat and dog make a brief appearance.

10.
X
Life on the 5th floor of 85 Farouk Street could be very boring in the long summer months when we were on holiday. Our main source of entertainment, as soon as the baking sun would allow it, was to spend the rest of the evening on the little balcony.
The little balcony! It gives both Lydia and I nightmares just thinking of it. The reckless things we used to do, like bending over the parapet to see who would go further; jumping over the large window-sill of my parents’ bedroom which formed one side of the balcony … and of course leaning over to see some event happening in the street. Now, I can’t bear to see a child just standing and looking out whether it’s from a little hill or a cinema balcony, without having this impulse of grabbing her by the shirt and pulling her away.
Back then, the balcony was for us like having the best seats at a theatre! Being out on the balcony gave me a sense of space and of the extent of the sky. The view itself was not fantastic, far from it. Ahead of us was a wide expanse of very old houses, not more than a couple of floors, extending to the horizon dotted here and there with a minaret. It was a poor part of Cairo, a labyrinth of small and dirty alleys. My father used to go through these alleys as a shortcut on his way to work, but we were not allowed to go through there on our own, although I went with him maybe once or twice only. All this area was much lower than our balcony, hence the sense of space. The spectacular sunsets that set the sky on fire most evenings were to me a source of such wonder! When I read Le petit Prince for the first time, and reached the part where on his planet he only has to move his chair to watch another sunset, I thought to myself, “I want to go there”!
The sunsets and the boy with the pigeons. The two went together. I was fascinated by this boy who would come out on his terrace every afternoon, let his pigeons out, and when it was time for them to return, would waive a rag and whistle until the last one came home. Almost at the same time as the sun would start sinking at the horizon.
When you looked to the left you could see in the distance the dome of a department store that was typically art deco and buildings that announced the city centre and more affluent areas.
Our street was very busy. It was a very long street that started around the Ataba square and continued for a very long way (the notion of measured distance, exact location of buildings, a sense of direction like north/south east/west, never entered my mind until I went to live in Italy; but I can’t say that it has improved much). So it was a very long street! As I mentioned before there were sheep, camels, trams, buses, arabeya carro, a flat bed cart driven mostly by one donkey, used to carry everything and arabeya khantour, a horse drawn carriage for the transportation of people (the same type you see in Seville, Florence or even Central Park).
Later there were also trolleybuses that caused quite a stir when they were installed. And there were buses and cars and bicycles and vendors of so many different things, and lots and lots of people. Crossing the road was always a great challenge. It was extremely noisy and dusty. People would think that by being on the 5th floor the noise would not be so loud. But it was. One could hear everything. We could also call out to vendors in the street, tell them to wait for someone to go and buy whatever they had, mostly vegetables. The floors below could lower baskets and get the goods in that way. But we would have needed a very long rope to do that.
I cannot forget the ice-cream vendor. I would call him and ask him to wait, which he would do and then rush inside and ask if I could go and buy an ice-cream. The answer was invariably ‘No’. So I would go back on the balcony and waive no, my disappointment even bigger than that of the man. In fact, we could only buy ice-cream from Radwani, an ice-cream parlour below my uncle’s apartment, because he was ‘clean’. I had always hoped that one day I would have a taste of the forbidden ice-cream sold by that man. It never happened.
The trams in particular provided a good source of entertainment. There was a stop in front of our house. They were open trams and each time it stopped, bunches of humans looking like bunches of grapes would get down and promptly reform as soon as the tram would start moving again. They would get on the narrow platform and hold on to whatever they could. Sometimes the tram would stop, the ticket collector would shout at these people, they would come off, but again as soon as the tram crawled forward, everybody was up again!
I recall one very sad accident. I’m waiting for the blue bus on the balcony. The tram at the stop is slowly moving, the human bunch of grape has reformed, when suddenly there is a scream that I will never forget: one unfortunate man has slipped and has gone under the wheels of the tram. I’ve never fainted in my whole life, but I think that was a close thing. I’m not squeamish but what really hit me was that this man who had no money to pay for his fare, would possibly lose his legs. My Mum took me in and gave me a glass of water. Half-an hour later I started to shake as a reaction to the shock.
The arabeya carro as I said carried everything. Huge mounts of melokhia (when it was in season) a type of mallow from which one makes a delicious soup, furniture, cages of chickens, you name it, it was carried. The best though was when a bride was paraded on the flat cart, with some musicians playing and sometimes part of the furniture following on another cart. Whoever was on the balcony would quickly go inside and shout ‘Bride’! We would all rush to the balcony to watch the small cortège go by!
Anything out of the ordinary would immediately attract a small crowd. Often a fight would break out. That was quite a show. We would call the other members of the family to come and watch. It would start with shouting and a lot of arm waiving then the two men fighting would start pushing each other in an attempt to intimidate one another. When this wouldn’t work then the real fight would start and punches would rain down on the men fighting and … on the people among the little crowd who would try to separate them. If it went on for too long, a shawish, a sort of policeman would appear, take his truncheon out of his belt and would start hitting blindly at both the fighters and the crowd until the heated spirits cooled down.
We thought these were good fights but grandmother was quite critical: she would shake her head and say “They didn’t break any tables, they didn’t use any chairs, fights these days are not what they used to be”!
The most unbelievable sight I remember is that one late afternoon a woman, barefoot, with long black curly hair, wearing only panties and bra, appeared out of nowhere walking briskly and looking straight ahead of her. She went past a café where the men sitting outside stared at her in silence, carried on walking until she disappeared from sight. Not a whisper, not a comment. After we realised that this apparition had been for real, grandmother indignant, said: “What would they have done if it had been one of us”? I was about ten years old and didn’t dare say anything but thought “Why would we want to walk in our panties and bra”? The woman looked like she had escaped from somewhere (Circus? Psychiatric hospital?). I always wondered what on earth had happened to her.
During Muslim celebrations there were little events that I looked forward to. I’m not quite sure, but I think it was at Ramadan, children would go around in the evenings in small groups, carrying a coloured lantern with a candle, chanting a little song and people would give them a few coins. I think we had a little lantern at one time and we played with it at home. They were called Fanous in Arabic. I recall that we had a cleaner who used to call me Fanous, because of my big eyes.
For the birth of the Prophet, there would be stalls with sugar dolls. I don’t think they do that any more, but it was fascinating to see these dolls, dressed in bright clothes made of crêpe paper, the faces brightly made up, looking like princesses. They would also sell rounds of chickpea brittle and sesame seeds brittle, a cross between hard nougat and caramel. We were allowed to eat those, though I don’t know where my father bought them from. But we never had a sugar doll. From the balcony, even if they were a bit far away, I could see these dolls all lined up, the bigger ones at the back like when you take a school photograph. Forbidden dolls! Oh! How I wanted to have one!
The reason there was so much space in front of our house was because on the other side of the street there was a low building, only a row of shops. I can’t remember what types of shops there were except for one where these strange looking people would come out and load a cart standing by the pavement. As I grew a bit older I realised that they were men with a jute sac opened on one side, which they put on their heads making them look like very dirty monks. In fact they were carrying coal and the sacks gave them some protection against the coal dust.
One day, coming back from work, my father announced that the row of shops opposite us was going to be demolished and that a new building was going to be constructed. Imagine our consternation: what, no view, no more open sky in front of us? Then another day, having checked his information, my father said that they were going to rebuild the shops and there would be a terrace above the shops to be rented out for parties and weddings. Again, we moaned: think of the noise and the disruption at night! On the other hand think of the fun of watching the party and possibly admiring a belly dancer doing her stuff!
The shops were indeed demolished and rebuilt. And the terrace was rented out. Not as often as we feared though and we never had a chance to see what was happening at these parties, because there were always drapes against the walls on the sides of the terrace and drapes above it, turning it into a huge tent. When such parties occurred we could hear music and clapping and zaghalit (the cries women make during a joyous event). We never saw a thing, not even the slightest glimpse of a belly dancer!
The shops, however, provided us with long hours of entertainment. On the left, was the fetira shop, the largest of all: fetira is a type of very fine pastry, like filo, cooked with lots of butter and sugar. The man in charge of making the fetira would start with a small ball of dough. He would roll it out on the marble worktop and when it was about forty centimetres wide, would pick it up and start twirling it above his head. Some pizza makers do that, but not to the extent of what this man used to do. He would keep twirling and twirling until it was so thin that it looked like a small round table cloth. We watched every move with bated breath. In all the hours we watched, over all the years, he never ever dropped it. He would then put the sheet over the worktop, fold it while brushing it with butter and sprinkling it with sugar, until it was the size of an A4 sheet. This would go into an oven, come out after a short time, and was eaten warm. We did buy a fetira a couple of times, against all the rules of eating food not cooked at home. But we could see how it was made and besides any existing germs would not have survived the wood oven! It was, however, extremely sweet and oozing with butter and once we satisfied our curiosity we preferred to just enjoy the show. The man made fetira all year around, even in the summer when food could bake just by leaving it out in the sun. Yet, the oven was on from mid-morning until late in the evening. This man was super-human!
Next to this shop was the kochari shop. Kochari is a combination of rice, lentils, vermicelli and fried onions. It is an Egyptian national dish, like foul medames or falafel. I was looking for something on the internet recently and discovered that kochari is becoming just as well known as falafel! But all the recipes were wrong in my opinion because they would include short pasta instead of vermicelli! But back to Cairo. The shop was small and one could see from the window large round trays with mounds of rice as well as the other ingredients. The man serving waiting customers was so quick at putting the food into small bowls that it was like he was playing the drums: a measure of rice, a measure of lentils, a sprinkle of vermicelli and lastly a sprinkle of onions and onto the next bowl! People would take their bowl and spoon and eat outside.
The next shop was selling something called lahmet ras (head meat). We never ate it but it must have been either lamb or beef or both. When we had our first cat, Pompon, my mum would send the maid everyday to buy a piastre of head meat for him. The maid was also given some money every day so that she could buy herself a mid-morning snack. She always bought a foul medames sandwich and not a portion of this meat. The cat loved it, but it didn’t look too appetizing, quite the opposite! Still, the place had lots of customers and we could see the comings and goings.
The last shop to provide us with some entertainment was the ice-cream shop. This was quite small and looked like all ice-creams shops look: containers at the front, small cups or cones on the side. There wasn’t too much choice, probably vanilla, pistachio, strawberry and chocolate. Not that we ever went there to buy an ice-cream, but we could see it from our balcony or when we walked past it. Like the other shops, this one too was opened all year around and opened all hours. Business was very good in the warm months and considering that it would be already hot from March until November, he wasn’t working less than the other shop keepers. He wouldn’t open until about 10 in the morning but he was the last one to close.
Unlike the other shops which had quite a display of serving trays and cooking implements, he had one scoop with which he dished out the ice cream into cones or paper cups and in between flavours he would plunge it in a container filled with water. In the summer we would normally sit outside well after the sun had gone down and watch the street and the shops until fairly late at night. We could see that the ice-cream man was busy all the time. I’m saying this because of the container filled with water. He never emptied it, regardless of how many times he had plunged his scoop in it, and regardless of how many ice-creams he had sold during the evening. We caught him several times taking this scoop out of the water container, helping himself to some ice-cream, eat it off the scoop and then back it went, into the water! The best was still to come.
One summer night when it was particularly hot and we couldn’t sleep, my mum and dad, Lydia and I were on the balcony. The street was quiet. The other shops had closed. Only the ice-cream man was in his shop. Unaware that four pairs of eyes were watching him, he took his scoop with the right hand and ate a bit of ice-cream. Then, with the scoop still in his right hand he proceeded to scratch his left forearm!! When he finished, he put the scoop back in the water. Just in time to serve a late customer!
The ice-cream shop was the end shop on the right. A narrow alley ran between this row of shops and another low building. The last shop in this next building we could see from our balcony was a type of café, where they served foul medames, and coffee and provided customers with the ubiquitous narguileh. The fights I mentioned before originated mainly from there. Foul medames is the national dish: it’s called fava beans in English. It’s mainly eaten warm, with cumin and lemon juice and a dash of oil. The Egyptians eat it with a flat bread made with wheat bran. Our little maid used to get her sandwich from this shop.
The height of excitement in the shops daily business came one year when the neighbour on the fourth floor below us got a monkey. Yes, a monkey! When we heard about it, we went with our parents to see the little animal. The lady of the house warned us that this monkey did not like women. He liked men. So we couldn’t stroke the monkey but he was alright with my father. Actually, it looked very weird to have a monkey in an apartment in the middle of Cairo. How they got it was a mystery.
During the day this monkey was attached to the railing of their big balcony so he could run along. The thought makes me ill, because although monkeys are used to heights, they usually sit on trees, not on a balcony overlooking one of the busiest streets on earth! Of course, for the owners of the shops, this was a godsend! For several weeks, when the children came home from school, they would gather on the pavement opposite our building, in front of the shops. They would buy some food or ice-cream, sit down and watch the monkey who did his best to entertain them. Suddenly, the monkey disappeared just as mysteriously as it appeared. End of show! Things went back to normal. What happened to the monkey? I’ll never know.
During Ramadan, the shop selling head meat had some tables on the pavement. The foul medames café would put more tables on the pavement. At the end of the day, just before fast would be broken, these tables were full of men, their plates of food in front of them waiting for the muezzin to announce that the fast was over for the day. This was always a very eerie moment. Imagine a city like Cairo so noisy all the time. At that moment it is so quiet. Perfectly still. The sun, a big ball of fire at the horizon, is slowly going down. A cannon somewhere is being fired. And then, just one sound: hundreds of forks hitting the plates at the same time, like an orchestra hitting the first note of a concert. And in the relative silence one could hear the chant of the muezzins across Cairo. Magic! Every time!

11.

XI
After that 26th of January 1952, when Cairo was burning, we returned to school and life resumed its normal pace. But the events of that day were to mark the beginning of a new Egypt. It wasn’t until many years later, watching a programme on the BBC, when I lived in England, that these events were made clear to me. At that time Egypt was a monarchy and was both corrupt and pro-British. On January 25, 1952 a group of Egyptian policemen in Ismailia rebelled. They refused to surrender to British troops who then attacked their barracks. Fifty Egyptian policemen were killed and one hundred were wounded. Egypt erupted in fury. The next day, the Cairo Fires, were seen as the beginning of the end of the Monarchy. Many British businesses were the prime target but also other foreign establishments were attacked and burnt down.
Then, on July 23 1952, a military coup overthrew King Farouk I. The coup was led by two officers: Mohammad Neguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was Neguib who became the first president of Egypt. He was 54 and a moderate. Nasser was younger, aged 34, and was very ambitious.
The only immediate result for us for that the name of our street was changed from Farouk Street to Army Street. Looking at a map of Cairo recently, I saw it is still called Army Street. We carried on going to school with the same teachers and the same curriculum. Midweek day off used to be Thursday and remained Thursday and we really didn’t think much about the King’s abdication. In his youth he had been a very attractive young man but he spent all of his life spending lavishly on himself, doing nothing for his people, and as he grew older he grew fatter and fatter. It was said of him that one day he would die in a nightclub. In fact, he died in a restaurant in Rome, after a huge lunch, aged 45.
Egypt became officially a Republic on 18 June 1953. In the aftermath of the King’s departure nationalistic feelings ran high. Not a week went by without speeches on the radio. Very often the streets would be closed to traffic because a motorcade with either one or the two officers, Neguib and Nasser, would be cruising along. This invariably drew a lot of people out on the pavement, waiting for the new leaders to come by. From our balcony we were in prime position to see them go by. In fact, every time this happened, Mohammed Neguib would waive at us and turn his head while going past our building to keep on waiving at us. This apparently did not go unnoticed by people around. These motorcades happened in the afternoon at a time when we were all of us, women, at home. Five women, from grandmother to Lydia, waiving frantically at Neguib, of course it could not go unnoticed! We thought he looked kind and a bit like our uncle Elias!
Neguib did not last long: in November 1953 he was accused by Nasser of sympathising with the Muslim Brotherhood and was forced to resign. Subsequently he was put under house arrest until his death in 1984. The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed. Gamal Abdel Nasser became President of Egypt. The rest is history, and quite complicated.
With Gamal Abdel Nasser as President, things started to change gradually. Demonstrations of love for the new leader became quite frequent. Again, from our balcony we would watch the human flows, screaming and dancing. There were many military parades: soldiers would march under the baking sun, and tanks rolled in the streets of Cairo, digging deep grooves in the melting asphalt. After every parade the roads would be resurfaced quickly just before another demonstration of some kind would take place.
In 1954 a treaty was signed with Britain for the evacuation of British troops from Egypt. I still remember this picture of an English soldier in shorts boarding a ship and the caption read: “The last of the British soldiers leaves Egypt”.
Nasser had this grandiose plan of building the Assuan Dam in Lower Egypt. He had been promised money from the World Bank and Britain. However they both went back on the agreement. On 26 July 1956 Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the administration of which was under Britain and France, these two countries being the main shareholders. There was jubilation among most Egyptians but we started to worry about our future in Egypt.
On 26 October 1956, we were listening to the news on the radio. Hungary had been invaded by Russia and Renata in particular wanted to hear what was happening there. It was evening and of course the lights were on. Suddenly there was banging at the door and people shouting “Teff el nour”, turn the lights off! Because of the crackling of the radio, we had not heard the sirens going off and we had no idea why they would go off. We promptly put all the lights out and went on the balcony. Cairo was in total darkness and we could hear airplanes flying in the distance and the sound of bombs exploding. Nowadays it is called the Tripartite aggression, but it is better know as the Suez war: Britain, France and Israel were attacking Egypt, with the aim of regaining control of the Suez Canal. But the USSR threatened to come to the aid of Egypt and the US demanded that the invasion be stopped. To prevent the use of the Canal, Nasser sank several ships thus blocking the navigation. The Canal was reopened in 1957.
I’ve tried to give a summary of the events preceding and following the aggression, but the best way to find out more is to go to Wikipedia and follow the various links.
This war lasted a few days but for us it changed our lives.
During the war there were many demonstrations against Britain and France. We didn’t go out during those days and certainly we didn’t let our Mum go to the market. But the saddest thing we watched from our balcony was a group of children who had tied up a dog onto a makeshift cross and were chanting ‘Eden’s dead, long live Krutchev’ while walking down the street. Eden was the Prime Minister of Britain and Krutchev the Prime Minister of the USSR. As a result of the aggression towards Egypt, Eden lost his job and Krutchev was elevated to the rank of god amongst the Egyptians!
In retaliation for the aggression, Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered that all British and French citizens should leave the country within a week. Uncle Ovidio and his family had to leave and grandmother too. For some reason this deadline was extended to one month.
Then it was our neighbours, who had French citizenship, who were ordered to leave. So many of our friends and acquaintances had to go. Many Italians left too, gradually, in fear of what might happen. It was an exodus that took place over the following months.
Uncle Ovidio and grandmother were sent to Kidderminster. Imagine grandmother going to live in England! Technically our mum should have gone too, but my father promptly got her an Egyptian passport, her first passport, stating that she was married to an Egyptian.
Within a month, our uncle sold or gave away their furniture. One of his daughters, Anna, quickly got married to her Lebanese fiancé and went to live in Lebanon where subsequently she had two children: Maty and Carlo. It was a very sad wedding because we knew we would not see each other again, at least not for a long time. I saw my cousins again in Lebanon and England but never grandmother nor my uncle and aunt.
Brazil, Canada and Australia facilitated entrance to those who wished to emigrate. We parted with many friends with the promise that we would be reunited in Brazil, as this seemed to be quite a popular destination. But with so many people leaving, we ourselves felt trapped, no way out, we would stay forever in Cairo.
My father had a shock when he went back to work. Most of the management had been foreigners and had been kicked out of the country. The good days were over even for him. Foreign managers had been replaced by Egyptian nationals who hadn’t been given any sort of training for the job. In the following months and years he became quite fed up with his job.
As for us, when eventually schools reopened in January, things started to change too. The curriculum was changed. French was the first language in which we were educated, then Arabic. But the subjects in Arabic were limited to language and literature. The number of hours was increased and new teachers were brought in. Again, as for the managers in my father’s office, it’s sad to say, they were totally incompetent. By then, I was starting secondary school and although I still had good marks thanks to the other subjects, Arabic was quite a difficult subject, made even less attractive because of the lack of skilful teachers. Further changes occurred the following year, in September 1957. Geography and history were to be taught in Arabic! I’ll never forget the history class about the French revolution (it was after all still a French school!). The teacher related what Marie-Antoinette said to the crowds: “Let them eat brioche”. We simply did not believe her! We thought she was so stupid making such a stupid statement. It shows how much we distrusted our teachers. I confess that when later in life I learned that it was true, that the stupid person here was Marie-Antoinette and not our teacher, I felt quite guilty. Another incident, with the same teacher, was when she told us that in Catholic Europe, rich people would buy indulgences to make up for their sins, thus guaranteeing a place in heaven for themselves. Where does she get these stories we asked ourselves? She’s totally crazy! She was not, poor woman, but some Pope must have been!
But back to November 1956. Uncle Ovidio came early one morning to collect grandmother. They were leaving Egypt. Renata was really distraught at the fact that her beloved grandmother was going away. Lydia and I, who did not have the same feelings for her, were upset, but more by the fact that our mum was saying goodbye to her mum and that she was in tears. And then they left. Mum and grandma never saw each other again.
A few days before leaving Cairo, grandmother had one of her dreams in which she was in a town like Venice, but it was not Venice. There was a lot of water around. We tried to interpreter this dream but really could not see that it had any meaning. When they left Cairo they flew with KLM. They didn’t know it but the flight had a stopover in Amsterdam before they were flown to England. I did call grandmother ‘old witch’ one day in desperation (and Lydia told her). Maybe I was right?

12.

XII
It seems quite extraordinary now, that despite being in an apartment in the middle of Cairo, every now and then we had animals given to us. I don’t mean cats and dogs. These were gifts of animals that would eventually end up on the dinner table.
Lydia and I were to have an operation: Lydia was going to have her tonsils removed and me adenoids in the nose. Was it because of this operation that some friend of my father thought that it would cheer us up to have a rabbit each? A few days before the event, two rabbits arrived. We were absolutely delighted. One we called Jeannot and the other Lapinot. My sister and I thought that they were ours and that they were going to stay forever with us. We treated them like we would have treated a kitten. We carried them around, we sat them on our laps and didn’t mind if they peed, we cuddled them all day long. We didn’t care that the only bathroom in the apartment was full of ‘bersim’, a fodder for animals, that there was rabbit droppings everywhere or that one had to tread carefully when using the bathroom. These were our pets.
The day of the operation arrives and off we go to the hospital. I must have been 6 years’ old then. I go first and on entering the surgeon’s room, a huge black male nurse, built like a wardrobe, picks me up and sits me on his knees. Suddenly it’s all black, I can’t see anything and there is a horrible pungent smell that makes my eyes water. I start kicking and kicking the poor man to no avail: the mask is still on my face. Then I think to myself: “I’ll pretend that I’m asleep and they’ll remove it”. I don’t have time to pretend, I fall asleep. When I start to come round, I feel that I am in a tunnel and at the end of it, is this man with a light on his forehead. It’s over. I’m awake and taken to a room, later to be joined by Lydia. We spent a couple of days in the hospital looking forward to going back home.
The first thing we did when we went home was to pick up our rabbits. In the few days that we were away, and despite it being cleaned several times a day, the bathroom was in an even worse state than before we left. Then we noticed that our rabbits had like little pimples on their ears and didn’t look too perky. Then the announcement was made that the rabbits were not going to stay with us, but were going to be eaten! Hefni, one of the two caretakers, took them away. They came back without their coats and that’s when we started to cry. And we kept on crying when they turned up at the table, and we were obliged to eat them. It was just horrible! I don’t think we ever had rabbit again at home. To this day, I confess that I am reluctant to cook rabbit unless it is cut into portions to disguise the fact that it is a rabbit!
A couple of years went by and then another gift of animals arrived: twelve pigeons of various sizes. Egyptian pigeons are renowned to taste delicious and were not cheap, so this was a substantial gift. There may have been other gifts in between the rabbits and the pigeons, but they probably went straight to Hefni to be dispatched.
These twelve pigeons, it was decided, would have to be fattened up before becoming roast pigeons. They were kept in a big cage in the storage room: this was originally a Turkish toilet, but a big wooden board had been put on top of it and it had been turned into a storage room. So long as the window was kept shut, it was quite safe to take the pigeons out of their cage and play with them. This time, my sister and I knew the outcome. Nevertheless, we started giving each pigeon a name. Little by little, over the following weeks, they were getting quite plump until the fatal day arrived. Hefni took the pigeons away. The next time we saw them again they were nicely arranged in a large round tray, having been beautifully roasted in the public oven.
Lydia and I looked inside the tray. As we recognised each one of them and called out their names, we started to sob uncontrollably and carried on crying through the meal. Despite the tears I remember that they did taste delicious and even remember that there were fresh peas as a side dish! I never touched a pigeon again until one Christmas when I was visiting Lydia in Lausanne. She had bought two pigeons from Bourg-en-Bresse, also highly renowned for their quality, and had roasted them in Cognac. I forced myself to eat it out of politeness, but it was really excellent and I ate the whole bird. But, that was the last time I ate a pigeon!
Some time after the pigeons, two chickens arrived. Again, it was decided that they needed fattening up. So off they went into the storage room. My sister and I kept well away from them. My mother looked after them and was proud to see them growing bigger. But …the chickens went to the public oven, came back nicely roasted, and this time my sister and I enjoyed our meal. But guess who was quietly shedding a few tears at the table? Our Mum!
The last of these live gifts was a magnificent turkey! He stayed only a few hours in the apartment. He was big, with beautiful shiny black feathers. He started to walk up and down the corridor clucking away, then went into my parents’ bedroom and came face to face with another big turkey. A fight ensued. No one dared go near the infuriated bird. At last he calmed down, turned his back and walked out of the room. The turkey had just been in front of a mirror and had picked a fight with his own reflection.
In the afternoon, Hefni took the turkey away. After the deed was done, my father took the bird to Uncle Elias. Him and his wife, Aunt Rose, had invited us for Christmas lunch. She cooked the turkey and this time we all enjoyed the meal.

13.

XIII
Pompon
One day, coming back from her daily shopping trip to the Market, my mother said: “Vassily wants a kitten”. Vassily was the Greek greengrocer where my mother regularly shopped. Why would he want a kitten in the middle of the covered market? “Because he has mice and he would lock the kitten at night to rid the shop of them”. “Ask at school, if anyone has a kitten” my mother said to me.
I did as I was told and it so happened that Béchir, the doorman, had a very pregnant cat. So I went to see him and he asked me to come back in a couple of weeks’ time. “You won’t forget?” I asked. “Non, non,” he said “you want petit chat, and I’ll give you petit chat”. I went back a couple of weeks later but the petit chat was not ready to leave his mum. He said to come back the following Thursday and to bring something into which he could put the cat. I told my Mum and it was decided that the kitten could be carried home in my lunch basket.
On the day, after I had lunch, I left my basket with Béchir. He would have it ready to hand to me on the bus going home at the end of the school day. I told the bus driver who slowed down at the entrance gate and sure enough Béchir was there handing me the basket with the recommendation not to open it until I was in the house.
When I arrived home, I opened the basket. In there was a very small, completely white cat. Renata thought it was a white mouse and she ran away, screaming! My mother said: “This kitten is too young, tomorrow you take it back”. But tomorrow was Good Friday, and the first day of our Easter holidays! Crafty Béchir, he really wanted to get rid of the kitten! Suddenly it was all my fault if I had brought home this tiny creature. I had never had a kitten before and besides even if I had checked that inside my basket was a reasonably sized kitten I wouldn’t have been any wiser. So my mother decided that since I brought him home, I would have to take care of him. So be it, I thought. First thing though was to feed the poor animal. He was probably three weeks’ old and still had no teeth. What to give him to eat? Milk, but how? We looked into our toy collection – which was rather small – but as luck would have it, we found a small bottle with a small teat, a doll milk bottle! I warmed up some milk and gave it to the kitten. I then found a shoe box, lined it with paper and placed the kitten in it and put the box in the storage room.
The next morning, at about 5am, I could hear him scream. He was hungry, of course. So I quietly got up and went to him. He was covered in shit! The milk obviously did not quite agree with him. Patiently I got some cotton wool and water and started to clean him up. This is when my Mother arrived and asked me: “What are you doing”? “Well”, I said “you can see, I’m cleaning him”. “Go back to bed, I’ll do it” she said. “But you said that he was my responsibility” I said. “Go, I’ll do it”. That was how Mum fully adopted the kitten.
We called him Pompon, because he was all white, not one hair of a different colour. After a few days, Pompon got used to his milk. We bought him a proper baby milk bottle and it wasn’t long before he would hold it with his front paws while we held him in our arms. Hefni, our doorman, found some sand for his litter box and he never made a mess in the house. There was no way this kitten was going to the Market to chase mice for Vassily!
Looking back it was quite a commitment then to have any sort of animal at home. What we now take for granted, like cat litter, cat biscuits, and vets (especially vets) did not exist then in Cairo. There were doctors for humans but more often that not, one went to see them only in an emergency!
So you can imagine having a cat in an apartment on the fifth floor! I often hear people saying that their pet is ‘part of the family’ and it is something we all accept. But in Cairo a cat was just a cat. There were thousands of them all over the city. Pompon, however, really became one of the family. I think that because he had been bottle fed like a baby, in my mother’s eyes he became ‘her son’! My mother never missed an opportunity to say what a clever cat he was. Clever because he never made a mess outside his litter tray; clever because he would not use it if it was too soiled; clever because the second he would hear the clean sand flowing in it he’d rush to use it. And this was only for the litter tray!
For Lydia and me it was quite a novelty having a kitten at home and we played a lot with him. I must say that because he had been taken away so early from his mother, as a kitten Pompon was a bit neurotic. He had moments when he would grab hold of our hand and bite it whilst kicking it with his back legs. We had a few scratches, of course, like with most kittens.
It was at night that he was most playful and naughty. Hot weather usually starting in April, we had no longer blankets but simply sheets to cover ourselves at night. Lydia and I shared a big bed and in the middle of the night Pompon would jump on our bed and start biting our toes, or play with our hair. Grandmother and Renata shared another big bed next to us. Grandmother would get up and try to chase the cat. He would lie absolutely still and flat between my sister and I, and because we thought he was really cute, we would pretend that we were asleep and that there was no cat on the bed. Grandmother knew he was around but thinking that he had jumped off the bed she would go back to sleep. Only to start again 10 minutes later until she could catch the cat, put him out of the room, and shut the door.
There was the time when we thought he had disappeared. He was still a kitten and we were careful not to let him escape whenever we opened the front door. We looked everywhere until we found him deeply asleep next to one of Lydia’s dolls, an ugly one too. What a relief! Pompon was really and truly a member of the family. My mother was calling him ‘my son’ and one day talking to a lady friend who was visiting, she let out that ‘her son’ had done whatever clever thing he had done. To which this lady said, “I didn’t know Ilda that you had a son”! My mother went red in the face and very embarrassed said “Oh, it’s the cat but I call him like that as a joke!”
Pompon was growing up. He started to have urges and needs that all cats have. We couldn’t keep him in any more until one day he did run away! My mum was so distraught: would he come back, how would he cope with the traffic, where would he sleep, and so on … Mind you, she had reasons for being so worried: a cat going out into his own front garden is one thing. Running down five flights of stairs to end up in one of the busiest streets of Cairo is another thing. We did not expect to see him again. But, miracle of miracles, after a couple of days, there was a miao at the door and Pompon had come back! That’s how his new life started: he would go out at night, come back in the morning and sleep in the living room on one of the armchairs that my mum had covered with a sheet.
He had an uncanny habit: Mum would come back from the market at about 10 o’clock in the morning, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. However fast asleep he was, Pompon would suddenly get up of the armchair and go to the front door waiting for her. If we were at home, one of us would go out on the balcony and sure enough, there was Mum coming back home! Even now, Lydia and I keep saying “How did he know”? It must be said that my Mum would buy scraps of meat from the butcher at the Market and that was the cat’s main meal given to him when she arrived home. But it wasn’t always the same time. Besides he couldn’t hear footsteps as she was still in the street, walking towards the house; and she had still to take the lift to get to our apartment. Yet he was at the door.
Pompon’s favourite place to go to at night seemed to be the public oven. I don’t know where it was but he had found it. We knew because he would come back covered in soot. We gave him a bath one day, because he was so dirty. As soon as he was dry, and “clean as a jasmin flower” as my mother said, he ran away!
He didn’t always come back in the morning. One time he didn’t come back for a whole week and just as we thought he had been ran over by a car, he appeared at the door. He was very thin and his tail seemed to be attached to his body by a few hairs. He didn’t want to eat and was trying to hide. We put some old towels in a box and put him in the storage room with the litter box next to him. My mother took care of him, and by that I mean that no one was to go near the cat. She hand fed him, she nursed his wounds, she was there with him 10 times a day at least, until after a week, Pompon got out of his box. What do you think he did? He went out!
We went to a birthday party one day and got some balloons. For some reason grandmother didn’t like us to have balloons, something to do with blowing them up and bursting our ear drums, or our cheeks, or something else. So it was quite unusual for us to have balloons. After the party we took them home where somehow they disappeared like balloons usually do. A few days later Pompon appeared walking in a funny way. There was something bloody coming out of his bum, just hidden by his tail. “Haemorrhoids” was the verdict. My mother picked him up to inspect the anomaly: there was something red with a piece of string attached to it. She picked the string and pulled. Out came a piece of rubber that in a former life had been a balloon! I bet Pompon was relieved!
While grandmother was still with us, there was the episode of the plant and the neighbours’ evil eye. Grandmother had a number of potted plants on the big balcony. One of these plants was a jasmin that produced beautifully scented round flowers in the spring. If we cut one and put it in a glass it would perfume the room. This plant was grandmother’s pride and joy. That particular spring, the plant looked very sick. The flowers didn’t bloom and grandmother was putting the blame on the neighbours. Their balcony was a continuation of our, with a wall and spikes on the side separating the two. They could see us and we could seem them. They could of course see the plants at the other end of the balcony. It was certainly their envious evil eye, which had caused the jasmin plant to wilt. Grandmother went on muttering and moaning against them until one day one of us caught Pompon carefully covering up the little puddle he had made in the big jasmin pot!
So many memories of Pompon….
Like the time he did his acrobatic stint going from one window to the next suspended in the air. Let me explain: outside all the windows there were rows of metal hanging lines quite taught and fixed to the walls. Our apartment had many windows and glass doors. It was shaped like a capital letter Y and at each of the arms of the Y there was a window. Metal wires were fixed at each end of the walls thus connecting the two windows. What came over this cat is impossible to guess. The two windows were open. There was no washing hanging on the wires. Pompon sat on one window sill for a while. Mum, Lydia and I were near him and as he started to put one paw on one wire our first instinct Lydia and I was to catch him. But my Mother stopped us: the cat would have fallen off the wires. Instead, we stood still and watched this cat walk across on the wires, five floors up in the air, towards the other window, with our heart in our mouth. My mother never doubted that her son would make it. And he did it! Phew!
And the time when the priest came to bless the house. Like every year, the Greek orthodox priest would come to the house and bless each room by sprinkling holy water and reciting prayers. That year Pompon was in the house. When he saw the priest with his flowing black cassock, he ran into one room to hide. He was chased by the priest and his holy water into another room, and into another room until the whole house was blessed! How everybody kept a straight face, I’ll never know.
And the time when he caught his first prey. It was Sunday, we were all having a nap when suddenly loud miao miao woke us up. Pompon was playing with something and was pushing it around in front of our bedrooms. It was a gecco, one of these lizards that appeared in the summer and lived behind the pictures on the walls. They were lovely I thought, calling each other from one end of the house to the other, especially at night. It was the first time Lydia and I saw a cat play with his prey: he was proud, putting the poor lizard down in front of us only to catch him again if he twitched. His eyes were shining, he was so excited and he wanted to show us what a clever cat he was! In the end we managed to take the gecco, by now defunct, and praise Pompon. Of course, my mother was very proud of him!
A few years went by, grandmother had left and Pompon was now a six-year old cat. Lydia and I took him for granted. Not so for our parents. My father had taken the habit of having his siesta with Pompon at his side. I remember the times, in the Summer, when the cat would be stretched out on the tiles in the corridor to keep cool and my father going near him, saying in Arabic: Pompon, come Pompon, come with me. And Pompon lazily getting up, stretching and following him to bed!
The day arrived when there was a knock on the door. It was Hefni, the doorman, who brought the bad news: Pompon had been run over. My father was quite distressed and sad. But, Mum! She could not stop crying. She cried on and off for nearly two weeks. Lydia and I couldn’t understand her grief. She would sit in the kitchen peeling vegetables and all of a sudden she’d say : “Pompon used to sit with me and watch me!” whilst tears were pouring down her face. She really grieved for her cat, remembering so many details about him and crying. I have never seen my mother cry so much.
Of course, I do understand her now. Who would have thought that a certain ‘petit chat’ too small for a lunch basket would have brought us such unforgettable moments?

14.

XIV

CHRISTMAS

Christmas preparations started early. On the 4th of December to be precise, Saint Barbara’s day. The story of this Saint is a bit confusing. The daughter of a rich man, she had become a Christian. Her father was furious and she was arrested, locked up somewhere, but managed to escape only to be recaptured later. But during her escape she sustained herself by eating barley. She was caught and eventually was beheaded by her own father. She is greatly revered among the Christians in the Middle East and to celebrate the 4th of December a dish called belila consisting of boiled barley, is prepared and served with syrup, raisins and nuts, quite delicious.

More importantly for us, on the 4th of December my mother would get small pads of wet cotton wool, put them in small tins, carefully scatter some barley over them and put the tins in a dark place. Sure enough, after a week or so, the barley would sprout. The tins would then be put somewhere in the light and regularly watered. By Christmas we had ‘grass’ about 20 centimetres long. This was not some kind of delicacy to savour on Christmas day, but simply something to put in our Nativity Scene to simulate green pastures!

Well ahead of the 24th of December, my father would start building the nativity scene. A stool and other small items of furniture were strategically propped on a table placed against the wall. Then this frame would be covered in brown paper, so that the whole construction looked like a hill with various grottoes, the bigger one being reserved for the Holy Family. But the part I liked best was when he would colour the brown paper, making it look a bit more like a hill. Some artists use pencils, some use brushes, my father used a Flit gun! This gun was a very elementary air pump with a round reservoir at the front and it was made of metal. Its normal use was as a sprayer to kill flies, when the reservoir at the front would be filled with an insecticide. But in December it became an artist’s tool! He would fill the reservoir with a water-soluble colour, spray the brown paper here and there, empty the reservoir and refill it with a different colour, and so on until he obtained the desired effect.

The spraying job done, it was time to put the figurines, the Santons, as they are called in Provence. They were made of clay, vividly coloured and represented all the characters that would make the Nativity Scene. Over the years we had several boxes of them: the shepherds and their sheep, a variety of people representing various trades, all carrying presents for Baby Jesus. There were little wells, little houses, little windmills, little bridges, mirrors representing rivers or ponds, and of course the cow and donkey, Joseph and Mary, the Three Kings with their camels and escort and … two baby Jesus! A small one, which was put in the crib on the 24th of December and the other, a bigger baby for the 6th of January when the Three Kings come to visit. How we loved taking these figurines out of their boxes, like old friends who were coming to visit. Little by little the Nativity Scene was looking like a real village. Bits of cotton wool would be glued onto the rock. That of course was snow! The tins of what was now tall grass were put in strategic places and there were lights here and there just like you see when passing a small village in the night. And of course on top of the entrance to the manger was the star that guided the Three Kings.

In the evenings preceding Christmas the whole family would sit around the Nativity Scene and sing all the French Christmas carols we knew. It was so lovely, because it really made us feel close and happy, at peace with one another. In those days, Lydia and I never had fights; we were so good that my mother wished it were Christmas all year around.

A week or so before Christmas, there would be frantic preparations of food. Not the turkey and Brussels sprouts, but cakes and biscuits that we would then share with our neighbours and family. Big trays were brought in from the baker. Apart from my father, we would all gather around the table and help. My mother would make the dough for each type of pastry: maa’mouls, ghoraieba, biscuits, noisettines, (one of her specialities). I remember her beating the sugar with the butter using a large fork and a lot of energy. Electric whisks had not made their appearance in Egypt yet! All the various recipes seemed to start with “beat the sugar with the butter”, and my mother kept beating until everything was fluffy. Then the flour was added and when the dough was ready we all joined in to make little pies filled with nuts, or dates. These were decorated on the top using a special type of tweezers making little patterns that would then retain the icing sugar after being cooked. Other sweets were simply little pieces of dough rolled in the palm of our hands and then slightly flattened, or rolled like sausages and shaped into little bracelets and figures like S and 8, depending on what type of pastry was being prepared. All this went to the baker with strict recommendations about cooking times. In all the years that we kept sending the sweets to the baker, nothing was ever burnt.

When the pastries returned from the baker, they had to be coated in sugar and then put away in containers until Christmas day. We were allowed a ‘taste’ of the pastry, just to see if it was well cooked or had enough sugar, or enough filling, or whatever! All these goodies were to be eaten from Christmas Day onwards and not before.

Another tradition was for my parents to go to Mr Pastanella, the Italian grocer and friend of the family, to stock up on Italian goodies: panettone, panforte, torrone, salame, some Sicilian fondant sweets, marzipan, walnuts, provolone, and the traditional bottle of Chianti (wrapped in straw). All of this would be packed in one big cardboard box, probably one third of my weekly shopping, but didn’t we feel rich and spoiled back then! I nearly forgot the Christmas tree! An artificial one, of course, that Father would take out of its wrappings year after year. I loved that tree, and how after we straightened its branches we would proceed to decorate it with baubles, bits of cotton wool, little ornaments and tinsel, it would stand there as beautiful as the year before. I confess that I can’t warm up to real trees, the fact that you have to cut the trees (or put simply, kill them), and when you’re done with them you throw them away and moan that they have shed their needles. When Christmas was over, our tree went back in its box …to sleep until the following year!

And finally, as part of the preparations, the house was decorated with paper garlands and paper lanterns, criss-crossing the living room, that my Father, perched on a ladder with one of us in attendance, would attach from one wall to the opposite one. Maybe a bit over the top but hey, it was Christmas after all!

On Christmas Eve, the only time in the year when we ate supper, we would sit around the table fairly late in the evening. The meal had no meat and it was rather light: a pie made with filo pastry, feta cheese and eggs, would come back from the baker (that man worked all hours) and a salad. As usual, fruit to end the meal. The sweets were for the next day. Not everyone went to Midnight Mass, as someone had to stay with Lydia and I. Soon after the meal we were off to bed looking forward to the next morning.

Christmas Day! First thing we do my sister and I is to look at the bottom of our bed to see if Papa Noel had been. Yes, there is a box for each of us. We get only one or two presents but we certainly don’t expect more. One Christmas morning, when Lydia was still very little and unaware of Papa Noel, I wake up and there’s nothing at the bottom of the bed. I jump out of bed, look underneath it, and still nothing. I look around the room and begin to sniffle and tears are welling up and I say: “Papa Noel didn’t leave me any presents!” My parents, awake by now, pretend to look too and go to the dining room. “We found it!” I hear and they come back with a box. “He must have got confused in the dark.” says my father. I quickly dry my tears and open the box. I still remember one of the toys in it: a big fat cook, with a chef’s hat holding a pie in one raised arm. You wind it up and it moves ahead then has a twirl and moves ahead again.

After we’ve opened our presents, it’s time for breakfast. We all sit together around the table. We have hot chocolate and at long last we can eat the little pies and biscuits that have been jealously guarded. This is also a special moment as the next time we have breakfast together will be at Easter.

In the evening my uncle and his family come over to us. We sit around the table in the dining room, the best room of the house. We play tombola and use small change for the winner to pocket. We play for a long time, but it feels like ten minutes. The next day we go to my uncle and play there and eat the cakes that my aunt made and then my mother would ask us “Which ones were best? Mine or hers?” Yours were always the best Mum!

During the Christmas holidays, our parents would take us into town to look at the displays in the windows of various department stores. They were just magnificent! The best one, was Cicurel, the Harrods of Cairo. The store windows were so beautiful, different every year, with moving displays – trains that run, dolls that moved arms and heads, teddy bears, bunnies, all sorts of toys to make every child dream and think that perhaps next Christmas if I’m really good Papa Noel would bring me one of these!

There were also Sednaoui and Hanaux and others of which I don’t recall the names. They all had beautiful displays and as evening fell early, they would all be lit up. Pure magic!

That’s how our Christmases were. Until one day, when I was probably 7 years’ old, Renata said to me: “You don’t still believe in Papa Noel, do you?” I hated her for that! I know, she was 14 by that time and what does anyone expect from a stupid teenager? I was so hurt at having been deceived! Of course, after that, Christmas was not quite the same thing despite all the same rituals. I missed Papa Noel. And |I suddenly remembered: he never got confused in the dark and put my present in the dining room. My parents had slept through the night and forgotten to put it on my bed!

As we were growing up Christmas changed. We could now go to midnight mass and drink a little Chianti mixed with water on Christmas day. I can’t remember when we stopped receiving presents. Presents were for children and my sister and I had grown up. Then after grandmother and uncle Ovidio left Cairo, there was no more tombola. As for the Nativity Scene in all its glory, that stopped too. I think there was a much smaller version, but it wasn’t the same. One year, after Renata had left home to go to study in Beirut, Lydia and I put our savings together and surprised our parents, while we were having the usual Christmas Eve supper, by giving them a present each! They were chuffed!

It may sound sad that Christmas changed so much for us, but many things change in life. What remained though was still a feeling of goodwill, of peace on earth, of sharing things with friends and neighbours especially our Muslim ones. Even if it was only for one day.

EASTER

The Easter period was a rather gloomy time. It started on Ash Wednesday with a mass at school, at the end of which we had our foreheads smeared with ashes, to remind us that we were made of ashes and would return to being ashes. We would spend the whole day trying not to remove it and if it had fallen on someone's nose we would try not to laugh.

Then, of course, there was the Lent time, during which we had to produce every week a list of sacrifices that I mentioned earlier on. Some relief would come on Palm Sunday when we would attend mass at the Mouski Catholic Church where at some point the whole congregation would go in a procession outside the Church, holding palms and singing hymns. For many years it was quite safe to do so and even 'normal'. But after Nasser came to power, we only went around inside the Church.

Then the Wholy Week started. And more often than not, the hot weather started too. The most memorable day was Maundy Thursday. On that day, in the early evening, to avoid the hot weather, we visited 7 churches. The visit should have been to 14 churches, each one marking a station on the Way of the Cross, but it was a muslim country after all, and to find 7 churches not too far from us, was already something, I thought!

So we went, Mum, Lydia and I, walking under the heat and finding relief in the cool churches. Inside, there were a lot of people, all doing what we were doing. I remember there were many flowers in the Churches and candles, some quite big ones. The main Crucifix was covered in a purple satin cloth as a sign of mourning. There was incense and the murmur of prayers. We prayed. Afterwards we would make a small donation of money. We did that 7 times in one afternoon.

On Good Friday there would be the traditional preparation of cakes and sweets like at Christmas. One type of little pies, ma'amoul, stuffed with walnuts and rose water, was according to cousin Leila only made during Easter. These were my favourites and even now, if I make any Arab sweet, it would be ma'amoul, whether it's Christmas or Easter. Like at Christmas, we would share our sweets with our neighbours.

Then there were the eggs! That was just done at Easter. Mum would hard-boil about two dozen eggs. They were boiled in water coloured with a special dye: blue, red, green; sometimes the colour didn't take well, sometimes it permeated the egg itself. There were also the really special ones, with transfers (made in Germany, I remember) representing some cartoon characters or flowers. The eggs were put in a big bowl and looked really pretty. On Easter Sunday, and in the following days, we would eat the eggs, one a day: we would bash two eggs together to crack the shell and say “Christos anestis” meaning, in Greek, “Christ has risen”! My father would also buy a big chocolate Easter egg always very nicely decorated. It was left in the best room, and every time we entered that room, the smell of chocolate and vanilla was overpowering and tantalising. My sister and I always looked so much forward to breaking the egg and see what was the surprise inside. As always there was an assortment of chocolate eggs, sometimes inside a smaller egg.

There was a solemn mass on Easter Sunday. The cloth on the Crucifix had been removed. The organ was playing, the faithful were singing, the choir boys were franctically swinging the incense holders, the bells were ringing, alleluia! Lent was over!

Our two main religious celebrations over, we would look forward to the Muslim ones. Particularly the Eid el kebir, where they eat lamb or mutton, like we do at Easter. Early morning, when there was almost no traffic, we could hear the prayers rising from all the mosques around us. It was very moving, awsome we'd say now!And then, we would patiently wait for the moment when our neighbour would ring the bell and present us with a pie made of layers of filo pastry and minced lamb or mutton. It was oozing with fat, but it was so delicious that even my mother who was always very conscious of fatty food, didn't make the slighest remark and enjoyed her piece of pie!

Another event which would have us running to the balcony was called 'El Mahmal'. It's only recently, that I understood the significance of this ceremony. It occurred once a year, and it marked the departure of pilgrims to Mecca which was around the middle or end of April. The streets were cordonned off and the crowds would wait for the procession to come by. The chatting and noise from these crowds would reach our fifth floor and make a constant din; but, gradually, the distant sound of drums would make us run to the balcony. And then we would see it, arriving at the top of our street and very slowly moving forward. The term 'Mahmal' means carriage. What came down the street in a wobbly way, was a large litter, with absolutely no one inside, covered by golden tapestries and carried by camels. This carriage was a visible symbol that a pilgrimage to Mecca would take place, and the whole ceremony was, despite the pomp and circumstance, a joyous event. I seem to remember that at the front of the procession there were men, the pilgrims, chanting and beating their chests. There were horsemen on splendid horses and drummers beating their drums. I remember it as being very solemn, almost like coming straight out of Ancient Egypt. I don't think this is still a current event.

The procession took a long time to arrive in front of our building. And as it continued on its route, gradually the crowds would leave the streets and as on one side the sound of the drums would fade away, on the other side traffic noises would return to normal.

15. XV

Food

What is it about the food eaten in our childhood that brings out so many emotions and nostalgia? I have eaten food from many parts of the world but when I think about the food in Egypt, I just wish I could leap back in time, eat whatever I fancy and leap back to the present day! Is it all in my mind, or is it that the food I liked tasted really different then? Same recipe, same ingredients, or maybe that's where the difference is: the intensity of some flavours is not the same many years on. Where do I start? There's so much to talk about!

Breakfast. Our everyday breakfast was bread, jam and a cup of tea. But on one special day in the year we had ful medames (field beans) and spring onions eaten with Arab bread (made mainly with bran and far tastier than pitta bread): Sham-el-Nessim (or Smell the Breeze) was a national holiday to celebrate the arrival of Spring. It occurred on the Coptic Easter Monday. People would go out into gardens, or the banks of the Nile and at the Zoo, which was very big, like the London zoo. When we met with friends or family the joke was to wave a spring onion under someone's nose and say “Smell the Breeze”! It was always a very happy day: we would go out on a picnic, and this was such a great occasion for us, to feel the grass under our feet, or to roll down any grassy slope we could find.

The Egyptian ful medames was special. The beans were fat and plump and melted in your mouth. It was eaten with hard-boiled eggs, olive oil and cumin. The proper way to eat it was with pieces of Arab bread held in your fingers to scoop up the beans. Full medames was a staple food and people would eat it all day long as it was a cheap and filling meal. For us it was a real treat!

Another treat was 'taamiyé' or what has become known, world-wide, as falafel. The Egyptian falafel is completely different from the ones sold in Beirut, Tel-Aviv or even New York. It is made with dry skinned broad beans instead of chickpeas and has a different texture. It is shaped in little patties and not little balls. There was a street vendor half-way between our house and that of our cousins, who would sell half an Arab bread filled with either ful medames, or taamiyé. One of my cousins once said that she would give her right arm if she could go back and eat one of the taamiyé sandwiches he made! Lydia loved the ful medames sandwich and I loved the taamiyé one. I can see it and feel it in my hand: warm taamiyé, shredded lettuce and tomatoes, covered with tahini sauce, absolute heaven! On our way back from the market with Mum, we would often have one and couldn't wait to get home to eat it. By the way, eating in the streets was a sign of very bad upbringing!

On some Sundays, my father would go and get us kebab for lunch. I don't know where he bought it but we would wait eagerly for him on the balcony to return, and as soon as we could see him holding a parcel with both hands we'd cry in excitement “He's here, he's here!”. That was really special to us: shish kebab, pieces of lamb that had been grilled on a skewer and kefta, oblong lamb meat balls with a very smooth texture, both grilled over charcoal. The pieces were arranged on a large flat bread and with the meat came a pot of tehina sauce. By the time my father arrived home, the juices from the meat had soaked into the bread and really that was the best bit of all! We put pieces of meat into the bread, a little tehina and it was just so delicious!

Food in Cairo was not just ful and taamiyé or kebab. Everything about it makes me feel nostalgic, the taste, the variety of it and the times we ate it.

Take the humble croissant: on those Sundays when we didn't go to school for mass but went to our local Church, after mass we would often go to Tseppas, a pâtisserie at the top of our road. In those days, in order to take communion, one had to fast. So by eleven o'clock in the morning we were quite famished! At the entrance of the shop was a thick beaded fly curtain through which one entered, making quite a lot of noise as it was pushed aside. The smell greeting us as we entered the shop through the curtain is one that I cannot forget and one that I've never encountered again. It's not vanilla, it's not bread, it's not cakes but all of these blended together. We used to buy mainly croissants from that shop, similar to French croissants, but filled with cheese. For me, they remain the best croissants ever. We also used to buy from Tseppas individual small cakes for birthdays, or if we knew we were going to have guests coming. One bought them by the dozen and it was a tantalising choice. But just standing there and breathing in the various aromas was wonderful!

Cairo was very cosmopolitan, so one could find anything. From filo pastry to delicious ravioli made by an Italian lady, Signora Bergossi. One bought the filo from the market and sometimes one had to wait while it was being made. As for the ravioli, like in Italy, one ordered them by the dozen, stuffed with meat most of the times.

Sometimes we had a big party. Lots of friends would come and my mother would work hard for a couple of days preparing the food. She prepared a large buffet and there was food left over for a few days after the party! I remember these little rolls, pains au lait they were called, that one had to order in advance from Tseppas. We would fill them with Italian ham and then nicely arrange them on a large plate. In addition to the rolls, there was a mixture of Egyptian and Western food: kebbeh, a meat pie made with bulgur, stuffed vine leaves and assorted cold meats. The preparation of the meat pie was laborious. The bulgur was soaked in water overnight, then mixed with minced lamb or beef and worked into a soft paste. For this, my mother used to pound the meat and burghul with a pestle in a heavy bronze mortar. It took a long time and a lot of effort, not to mention that it made a hell of a lot of noise. When I make it now I put the mixture of moist burghul and meat into my processor and a couple of minutes later it's all done.

To make the stuffed vine leaves, we would sit around the table and help mum prepare the little parcels of vine leaf, rice and meat. For some reason, we used to call these stuff vine leaves 'dogs turds' (stronzi di cane!). Never questioned the origin of the name, not even when it was obvious where it came from because of their shape and dark green colour.

When the vine leaves were in season, young and tender, my Mum would announce: “Today, we're going to eat 'dog turds” and we would look so much forward to eating lunch. My sister and I only realised that this was not the proper name for the dish during a particular wedding party.

There was a big buffet and adults were served first. But Lydia and another kid had a peep at the food on offer, and Lydia came back very excited saying that there were 'dog turds'! One of the older children said that she was disgusting and that she made him nearly sick. When she explained what it was, he said that he'd never heard stuffed vine leaves called that before, and that it made no difference, it was still disgusting. I guess from that time we were careful to call them by their Arabic name, war'a enab, when we were out!

We ate what was in season. Molokhieh was another of those dishes we really looked forward to eat. It was a type of green, not unlike nettles, but withoug the sting. I believe it is called Jewish mallow. In the Spring, there were carts piled high with it and pulled by donkeys. One would buy large bunches of it and the hard work would begin. The stems had to be stripped of the leaves, and we all helped Mum pulling them one by one. Then the leaves had to be chopped very finely. My mother had a double mezzaluna and by the time she'd finish the leaves looked like chopped spinach. They were then tipped in a chicken broth, after a big fat chicken had been boiled in it. The chicken was cut into bite size chunks and to finish the thick green soup a 'ta'lieh' was poured in it. This is a mixture of chopped garlic and ground coriander fried in vegetable oil and tipped into the soup. The way we ate molokhieh was like this: a layer of boiled rice, some chunks of chicken, a ladleful of melokhieh and then a couple of teaspoons of a relish made with finely chopped onions and vinegar was poured on top. It took a whole morning to prepare and a few silent minutes to enjoy!

Years after we'd left Egypt molokhieh leaves appeared on the market in dry form. To give it its green colour my mother would make a spinach soup and then add the dried leaves. Then in England I discovered the frozen packs which you simply put in a good broth. Here in France I found it in powder form and again, I make a good chicken broth with spinach and add a couple of tablespoons of the powder. Not like the real thing, but near enough.

In the Spring and Summer months there was such a variety of produce that we never ate the same vegetable twice in a week. Meat was eaten in small quantities and as it's still the custom in Oriental cuisine, made to go a long way. Courgettes, aubergines, peppers, tomatoes were stuffed with a mixture of minced beef, rice and onions. There was one type of aubergine that was so delicious but that I haven't been able to find outside of Egypt, even in Indian grocers in England: it was ivory colour and had no bitterness to it at all, while it had an intense flavour. I have tried white and stripy aubergines to recapture the taste but was disappointed each time.

In the Summer months Lydia and I would share the most wonderful fruit in the world: a mango. It was cut in half widthway and then the two parts were twisted, leaving one with the stone and one without. We kept an accurate record of which one of us had the stone as there was a lot of flesh attached to it, and the following time we would make sure that the halves were handed out properly.

There were melons, water melons, cherries, apricots, and for the shortest of time even strawberries. As the season progressed there were figs, big fat red ones and big fat green ones, prickly pears piled up in carts with some blocks of ice and sold six for a piastre; the vendors would peel them for you and you ate them on the spot. When they had no customers, the men would remove the little thorns out of their fingers using a pair of tweezers.

Towards the end of Summer we had sugar cane. My father would come back from work with a couple of whole sugar canes. He was particularly fond of the tip of the cane which was the softest and sweetest part. The outer part of the cane is very hard and must be removed before the central juicy, sugary part can be reached. I remember the evenings, after my father had come back from work, that we sat and watched the adults cut the cane in pieces, wielding a hefty knife like a machete. Once, the blade came flying off its handle but luckily did not hit any of us! The edible part of the sugarcane was then cut into sticks which we would chew to extract the juice. A lot of work for not much, in my opinion!

What I really loved was going to a little shop with my mother, after she'd finished her shopping at the market and have a glass of sugarcane juice. The shop was small, with a sort of tiny bar at the front and a kind of big noisy mangle where the sugar canes were put through a pair of rolls. The juice was collected in a container. The noise was tremendous and one could only signal how many glasses of juice were required. The juice when poured into the glasses, was of a light green colour, with a froth at the top. Chilled and sweet, for me it was my idea of 'nectar'.

I could go on for ever talking about the food in Cairo! I have bought cookery books on Mediterranean cuisine and I get very nostalgic when I read the recipes. As I said earlier on, it is not only the food but all the memories that various dishes are able to evoke.

However, there's something that is never mentioned in any cookery books, something that was for me and many children like me the best sweet of all: Caca Chinois! Any French speaking person my age would know! There wasn't a lot of choice in the way of sugary treats: boiled sweets (I remember the make, Nader), sugar barley sticks, some vanilla wafers and …caca chinois ! It was a chewy fudge that was rolled into sticks about 20cm long and 1.5cm round. The sticks were dusted with a little cornflour and then wrapped in paper, looking like a thin Christmas cracker. When you bit into the stick it would pull nicely, being soft but chewy too. Where did it get its name from? Although it was made mainly with molasses, the end result was of a very yellow colour, hence the Chinois definition, and because it was a pliable stick … Well, you've guessed!

16. XVI

Entertainment

Often, when I give my friends a brief glimpse of our life in Cairo, they say “But you must have been so confined in that apartment!”. Like all apartments, it certainly was confining. The two balconies were our opening onto the outside world, where we could watch, observe and pass the time. I think of those long summer holidays, when schools finished at the beginning of June and started again in mid-September. In those months one could not go outside until at least 7pm, when the sun would slowly begin to go down and the outside temperature would be more bearable. Those were very long months, when for most of the time we stayed at home. We learnt how to get bored and put up with it.

There were diversions, of course; visitors would drop by and traders would knock at all 20 apartments to sell their wares. The one I loved, who would come every year, was the rose vendor. He had a very large soft straw basket full of the most wonderful scented roses. These were Bulgarian roses, small, pink, headily perfumed, used to make rose water or jam. Many families had small stills, just to make the rose water at home. Making rose jam was a very time consuming process since only the petals were used. The yield was very small, only a couple of jars. We did not eat this jam with bread: it was offered to guests to eat with a spoon from a little dish and accompanied by a glass of chilled water.

There was another occasional visitor who would come maybe twice a year. He had a couple of baskets with all sorts of things, mainly kitchenware. There was no money involved, his goods were bartered. We knew that he would turn up at some time, so my Mum used to put aside whatever items were not needed any more, and exchange them with whatever she wanted from the baskets. Old clothes and shoes is what I remember mostly, as we did not keep much stuff (karakib, clutter, Mum would say!). So for a couple of pairs of shoes or sandals, old shirts from my father and a lot of time spent arguing, my mother would close the deal taking a metal tray, or a glass salad bowl! We always stood behind her, gripped in the suspense of their discussion (will she get the tray in the end?) and feeling almost elated when she got what she had bargained for!

There were regular traders too. Some came every day, at very regular hours. We had an ice box and in the Summer a man, wearing a thick layer of jute sack over his head, would carry a big block of ice to our 5th floor, twice a day. If he was lucky and the lift worked, the block would still be a decent size. But on some extremely hot days, he had to carry the ice and walk five flight of stairs. The block would have melted considerably and the poor man would incur the wrath of my mother or grandmother! In the winter he only delivered the ice once a day. Winter or Summer, I felt really sorry for him.

Then there was the mikman, every day. My Mum would open the door holding a saucepan into which the milkman poured a couple of measures from his large milk can using what looked like a large mug. I remember the smell of the milk, an animal soothing smell. It came out of a cow alright!

The milk would be boiled and cooled. Once cold my Mum would skim the cream which she put away for Dad's breakfast. You would think this daily routine took place with no problems. Oh, no! More often than not there would be complaints such as: the measure of milk was a bit short; the milk wasn't quite fresh, and worst of all, the milkman had watered the milk! How could she know this? Because the next morning there wasn't enough cream to be skimmed! One time she had a big argument about it with the milkman and she ended up knocking him on the head with the empty saucepan! Not only did the milkman not strangle her, but he begged her to continue to take her daily delivery!

Maybe once a week we would have yoghurt delivered. The yoghurt man carried a large tray with little brown earthenware dishes containing yoghurt. He moved swiftly balancing the tray without ever dropping the little dishes. I remember the yoghurt being acid, and we sprinkled it with sugar when we ate it. Yoghurt was used quite a lot in the Oriental cuisine just plain, but, especially in the Summer, with cucumber, garlic and dry mint. After a few days, the yoghurt man would come back to take away the dishes to be reused over and over again.

Once a year, the mattress man came. Sounds a bit like Father Christmas, but that was no Christmas at all! Our beds had two mattresses: one filled with wool and one filled with cotton as were all the pillows. (According to the season the mattresses would be changed: wool on top for the winter and cotton on top for the summer).

The day before we would inform our neighbours of his arrival the following morning. The man arrived very early and would settle on the landing; he carried something that in my memory looked like a harp with two strings, two sacks one filled with wool and the other with cotton, and a smaller bag where he kept needles and cotton.

He would unstich one side of the mattress and all the knots retaining the filling in place, empty the contents onto the floor in a heap and then he would start. Handful by handful, balls of wool or cotton were fluffed up on his 'harp'. It would go pling, pling, pling, pling, and the small ball he had picked up would treble in volume. The pling, pling would go on all day and the landing was foggy with the dust and fluff. When all went quiet it was because he would start stuffing the mattress again. He would sew up the side of the mattress and then change needle using a very long one that would go through the rejuvenated mattress, make a little knot, cut the thread off and continue until it was all done, very regularly spaced out and very tidy as if he had followed a grid. He did everything in one day and when he finished he would help my Mother and Grandmother clean up the landing.

When our mattresses were back on the bed, we practically had to climb up onto it to go to sleep, so high they had become. As for the pillows they would have been wonderful for a giraffe because they were so thick. We would sit on them for a couple of days just to reduce them to an acceptable height! And then, little by little, everything would go slightly down until it was time to call the mattress man again.

We had visitors who came unannounced. We expected family and close friends to come for our birthdays and would prepare cakes and refreshments and buy a birthday cake, moist and delicious from Groppi.

Groppi was a Swiss pâtissier and in my memory everything coming out of Groppi was out of this world! Some years ago, Giorgio went to Cairo and remembering how I sang Groppi's praise bought me a box of chocolates. I was very touched; however, the chocolates tasted pretty horrible and of course I never told him that. But, there was a reason. Thanks to Internet, I recently found out that Groppi had been sold a long time ago and of that glorious pâtisserie, only the name remains.

I often wonder how we had such a social life, when there was no telephone. Yet, we 'knew' who to expect and on what day. There were moments of panic, of course, when for example the priest would make a surprise visit preferably at siesta time. Promptly ushered into the front room by whoever opened the door, the rest of the family would quickly get up and do their very best to hide their annoyance at being woken up!

Talking about the unexpected, there was Signorina Maricca. She was a mystery: no one knew where she lived, from what country she had come, how old she was, how she supported herself. She was tall, with straight lank hair, I think black, dark tanned skin (tanned like in leather). She smelled of cooking fat and sweat. She spoke with her hand in front of her mouth, like she was telling you a secret, or maybe to hide the fact that some teeth were indeed missing. She would enter the house, go straight to one of the armchairs in the hall/living room, collapse into it and cross her legs like a double helix, all at the same time. She spoke broken French, broken Italian and fluent Arabic. The general consensus was that she was Romanian! Maricca was a living “Hello” magazine. She would inform you about every wedding that was going to take place in Cairo. She often went to the wedding herself and brought back those sugar almonds 'bonbonnières' given to guests. She knew about every birth, funeral, engagement, what people did for a living, she knew everything!

I think she was a cook, going from house to house to help prepare food for various social events. We could not believe the people she knew, some with cars (a definite sign of wealth) and some even with villas and servants (unquestionably wealthy people)! When she'd come to visit, my father, if he was at home, liked to chat with her and they both drank coffee and smoked cigarettes for what seemed to be an eternity! Sometimes, she came to help my Mother to make some time consuming dish. I remember dates stuffed with almonds, that took hours to prepare. Or another time it was tamarind syrup, that took practically all day and was not pleasant at all! On those days she would eat with us but I don't think she took any money for her help. Other times, she would arrive unexpectedly just before lunch and of course we would ask her to stay.

We often wondered what happened to her after we left Cairo. Many of the people we knew she was visiting had already emigrated. How she fared in her old age, we shall never know.

The main source of entertainment at home and our link with the World was the radio. I vaguely remember the old one but sometime in the early 50s it was replaced by a brand new Telefunken. My father was proud of his new acquisition and spent some time showing us how to tune in to the right station. This magnificent Telefunken radio had “a green magic tuning eye” and my father would say something like “When you've got the right tuning, the green eye will be full”. It was almost as if there was a djin inside the box watching every slight turn of the tuning knob!

As children, our favorite programme was “Le coin des enfants” a children programme, broadcast in French every Thursday, our midweek day off. More often than not it ended with a cliffhanger and so the following Thursday at 4 o'clock we would promptly sit around the radio and listen to our programme. Later, as a teenager, our favourite programme was “At your request”, where listeners (mostly silly teenagers like me) would send a request for a particular song. The names were all read out so that there were really a few songs and a lot of names! But we listened carefully, in case we recognised one of our friends!

At the end of October 1956 the 3-day Suez war started. We were totally oblivious to the sirens calling for a black out, as we were all gathered around the radio, trying to listen to what was happening in Hungary which was being invaded by the Soviets, until we jumped, hearing furious knocks at the door and people shouting “Turn the lights out”! We suddenly realised what was happening: war at home!

During those troubled days, we were glued to the radio set. The reception was not good and the magic green eye was blinking furiously, but we kept in touch with the world at large, trying to understand what was going on around us. We could not have imagined that our lives would be changed so suddenly and forever.

17. XVII

Cinema

Looking back, I don't think going to the cinema was 'entertainment'. It was an essential part of our lives! It was our outlook on the World at large – from the Wild West to the narrow streets of Naples; to war films and their heroes; to Bambi and Snow White... We were full of wonder about how films were made: some of us, kids, were convinced that the action took place behind the screen. Then we realised that there was a beam of light coming from the back of the cinema and that somehow it was related to what was happening on the screen. Whatever it was, going to the cinema was as exciting as going on holidays; and we did go at least once a week.

As a young child I remember that we used to go to the Italian Church Hall in Boulac, a neighbourhood of Cairo where a large Italian community lived. They showed only Italian movies and there were rows and rows of ordinary chairs put there for the show. I don't think we went to Boulac other than for the films, and as we would take a taxi to get there, I have absolutely no recollection of the area outside the Church Hall. But the atmosphere inside the Hall was very lively. Most people knew each other and there was always a lot of noisy chit-chat and moving of chairs before the start of the film. I cannot remember seeing a film in colour, but remember seeing some old classic Italian films in black and white. When I first watched Cinema Paradiso (1988) I was so full of nostalgia, because it was just like being in Boulac, even down to people shouting when the scenes where the actors are about to kiss had been cut!

There were many cinemas in town, and they all had four shows a day. The main films were American ones. For a certain period there were a series of Italian films in the 60s that the Egyptians loved because the actresses were pretty and young and certainly not skinny. Films were subtiled in French and Arabic. We didn't learn much English by watching American films, but became very good at reading the subtiles in French very fast!

Before the main feature there was always a sort of news reel, then 'the shorts' (or film previews) and then an interval during which usherettes would go around selling ice creams and chocolates. I guess this must have been the same in many countries. One cinema, the Radio City, had live performance during the interval: dancers would come at the front of the stage and perform their number accompanied by live music. I used to run to the front and stand close to the stage to look at them and promising myself that when I grew up I would become a dancer! Sometimes, when they left the stage they would give me a little wave of the hand. What a wonderful life, I thought, you get to watch all the films you want and you also dance! I loved dancing and my greatest wish was to become a ballet dancer, but, grandma swiftly cut my hopes of becoming a ballerina by saying that if I was to take ballet classes I would neglect my studies. However, one time, she took me to the cinema. I must have been about 9 years old. She plaited my hair and off we went to watch Limelight with Charlie Chaplin. Here's an extremely short description of the film that I found on the Internet: A fading comedian and a suicidally despondent ballet dancer must look to each other to find meaning and hope in their lives. The music was so beautiful and when the ballet dancer eventually danced I stopped being me. I became her, transported by the magic of it all. Grandmother bought me an ice-cream stick during the interval. This was the only time we went out the two of us.

We used to go every Sunday to the cinema. There was such a choice of films, that we started to go less and less to the Italian Parish Church. Also most of the films in the main cinemas were now in colour rather than in black and white.

This passion for films was not a peculiarity of our family. I remember the whole of my class being in anticipation on Monday mornings. Who had seen what film, and was it good? Will it be shown next week? Films were judged by us in this way: 'very good: they marry and live together; “sad”: everybody dies; “I cried a lot”: everybody dies and you cry a lot!

Nor was it a passing fashion. When we were about 13 or 14 and for the rest of the time we spent at the St Vincent de Paul school, every Monday, during the lunch time break, a small bunch of about eight girls would walk like one body. One of us would tell the story of the film she had seen the previous day. She would be in the middle of the bunch and the rest of us all around her, walking backwards if we could not stand beside her, in order not to miss one word. What astonishes me now, is the fantastic memory we all had in relating the film: all the dialogues, the scenes, at what time the music would come in, we remembered everything. At the end of the break it was like we had all been there.

I remember the big rush to see the first film in cinemascope, The Robe. The cinema was absolutely packed and the film was shown for several weeks. Considering it was a film about christianity, the interest it arose in a Muslim country was quite something. But I think that was the cinemascope part and with Richard Burton in the lead role, who would complain?

And then, of course James Dean happened! One girl in my class had a total crush on him. I still remember her name: Ikbal! She was of Turkish origin, had blonde hair, fair skin and was an incredible poser. She was emulating an actress, Lana Turner. We had seen the film Imitation of life (during which we cried a lot) and this girl acquired all the mannerisms of the actress! I didn't like James Dean, I liked another actor, called Tab Hunter, whom I thought was really gorgeous. One time we entered into a heated argument about who was better looking and she ended up crying: I had really upset her by saying that Tab Hunter was by far better looking and a better actor that James Dean!

And what about the divas, like Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Sofia Loren, Silvana Mangano? Cinema was not just for us kids, but an escape into another world for everyone. There were of course Egyptian stars, like Omar Sharif and his wife Faten Hamama, but then he left Egypt and became very famous, and she stayed in Egypt.

And I'm forgetting Elizabeth Taylor! Grandmother was still with us when one day, coming home after seeing one of her films, I said dreamily: “I can't wait to have a sweetheart!” and did not realise that grandmother was near me. I didn't see the hand hitting me, and her furious voice calling me a bad girl!

I also remember the time when, with my cousin Lucy, we went on our first outing on our own to see a film, in a morning show. I remember the film, Forbidden Planet, my very first science-fiction film. I got quite frightened by the invisible monster. I learnt much later that this film was based on The Tempest by Shakespeare. I remember everything of that outing, even the snack we had Lucy and I during the interval: a big macaroon each that we had bought from Tseppas!

In the summer months we would go twice a week to the cinema! There was an open air one that showed two films in one evening. I remember that with my Mum and Lydia, we would first go to my Father's place of work, say hello to his colleagues, being given little treats and then off to the cinema that happened to be nearby. The first film started at 8pm but it was still full daylight and so we couldn't see anything or understand anything because we couldn't read the subtitles! Then, some fifteen minutes later, the sun would suddenly disappear and everything would go dark and we could at last watch the film.

We did go out to other places apart from the cinema, although watching a film was what we loved best. With my parents, Lydia and I would go to the Nile corniche, for a walk, then sit down somewhere for an ice-cream or a khoshaf, a kind of fruit salad. Or, at other times, just go out for a walk in the Ezbekieh gardens where in the summer there would be some cafés serving refreshments. Sometimes, coming out of a movie, we would have a little stroll and go to one of the many little shops selling fresh fruit juice. I'm still dreaming of the mango juice we drank when mangoes were in season!

And at some point we did go to the Opéra! I was maybe 14 when my Father got us a season ticket for the opéra season in Cairo. For a few months, every week was Opéra. It got a bit boring after a couple of weeks, but I'll never forget Aïda, the first opéra I saw and the magnificence of it. The Opéra house in Cairo had been built to inaugurate the opening of the Suez Canal. It was beautiful and the singers (I learnt later) were first class. We saw several opéras and with hindsight I am grateful that we did. The Opera House was completely burnt down in October 1971. A new one has been rebuilt in a different part of Cairo and where once the beautiful old Opéra House stood, there's now a multi-storey cark park.

18. XVIII

I don't really remember how it started. I wanted to learn to play the piano. I really wanted to be able to play that instrument. Little did I know that it took years and years to become an accomplished pianist. Nowadays, you see programmes on TV like “Young musician of the year” where teenagers play like virtuosos and it does make you realise how committed one has to be.

My uncle Elias and auntie Rose had a piano and every time we went to visit I would sit at the piano and play tunes by ear. With the right hand only, of course. Leila, their daughter, was getting married. They decided that the piano wouldn't be of any use to her and seeing that I was so keen to learn how to play, the piano arrived at our house! I was delighted and it was decided that I was going to go to piano lessons. I was so happy! However, it was also decided that Lydia was going to take piano lessons and I was annoyed: after all, I did all the asking, given promises that I would practise and learn, not neglecting my school work and Lydia who didn't do anything gets to share what I considered my piano with me!

My father found a piano teacher, Madame Forget, a French lady, who didn't charge much for her tuition. The classes were of one hour duration for each of us. She lived in Heliopolis, a good 40 minutes on the bus from our house, so our day off school was mostly spent going to the lessons. She had a big house, with maybe 15 cats and had a male servant whom she treated really badly, in a typical colonial way. She didn't have much money and spent it all on her cats. The house stank of cat urine.

We went to Mme Forget for about six months. The bus journeys were awful: the bus was always packed, and unlike trams, where there was a special compartment for women, there was none on the buses. You had to become a contortionist to avoid groping and other things that happen on crowded public transport, particularly in those days. I had had enough and told my parents that I wouldn't go again to Mme Forget, because I couldn't stand going on the bus again. She wasn't a bad teacher and was cheap, but my love for the piano was beginning to be a bit of a burden! So I told her that we wouldn't be coming again, because we had too much to study and couldn't spend so much time travelling. She had tears in her eyes, and almost offered to teach us for free, but I told her that was not the reason.

The piano lessons continued. My father found another teacher, an Italian, who lived in town and charged double for half the time! But he was a good teacher. We took lessons until almost the end of our stay in Cairo. We did learn to play, albeit between the time spent doing homework and fighting with my sister to get to the piano to practise (she always seemed to go to it just five minutes before me) these lessons were becoming a bit too much!

This Italian teacher lived with his brother's family and had two nephews, both quite nice looking guys. I got a crush on one of them, who had fair hair and blue eyes. He only opened the door occasionally, smiling politely, but that was enough to send my heart racing. This lasted some time until I saw him one day with his girl friend, a real looker! It made me feel very stupid as I realised that at fifteen or so, ugly ducklings are just that!

Then one day my father came home with the news that Mme Forget had been murdered by her servant. It was in the paper. After the shock passed, my mother wondered what would happen to all her cats. I wondered what would happen to the servant. Did he kill her in a moment of anger, when she talked to him like he was rubbish?

Apart from piano lessons, we also started to take Arabic lessons to help us with our studies. The first teacher was a sheikh, recommended by my best friend, Mervat. As her name suggests, she was from Turkish origin but like us, at home, they spoke French more than Arabic. This sheikh looked like Groucho because of his moustache and would come regularly once a week on Sundays. He was always impeccably dressed in his long white djellaba and his head dress. For some reason or other, we changed teacher.

This one was mad about football and was often late because he would go to a football game. One day, the khamsin was blowing really hard and we were expecting him for a lesson. The khamsin is a strong wind coming from the Sahara that occurs over a period of 50 days, hence its name, khamsin meaning fifty in Arabic. When the wind blew, all the windows in the house were closed tight but still, we would feel grit in our mouth. Two hours after the lesson was due to start, Lydia and I began to rejoice that the teacher would not turn up. Our joy didn't last long: the door bell went and when my mother opened the door there was a grey figure, looking like a ghost, that we didn't recognise at first. It was the teacher! Covered in thick dust, like he had been dug up from his grave! He had been to a football match and probably because of the weather this match took longer than usual. I could not concentrate that day, watching the dust collected in the fold of his eyelids falling on his cheeks every time he blinked! Then one time, towards the end of the lesson, he had a strange conversation with me, something about love being so important. I felt very uneasy and as soon as he was gone I told my father. End of dusty teacher!

The last one was my teacher from school, the only intelligent and knowledgeable Arab teacher I've had. I wish we had him as a teacher very early on, I would have learnt Arabic better, I'm sure. The lessons finished when I finished school.

At some point at school, probably around the time I was fifteen, a new type of 'lesson' started to take place. It was called 'military training '. I was never good with ranks and even now I couldn't say if Captain is a higher or lower rank than Major, but I'm sure that this woman instructor who came to teach us must have been a bit more than a simple soldier, quite something for a woman back then.

The lessons took place on Wednesdays, in the morning, for a couple of hours. We had to buy a uniform: skirt, shirt, beret and socks. Khaki was the colour, but it looked more like a yellowy pea soup, darker for the skirt. (These days, khaki has been made a fashionable colour, but it has nothing to do with the colour of those uniforms). At fifteen, none of us was exactly a Vogue model and apart from one girl who ate like a horse and was as thin as a chip, we were, let's say, rather podgy! These uniforms did nothing to enhance our figures! The skirt was straight and the shirt had to be tucked in. We looked like little khaki puddings! Every Wednesday we had to wear the uniform to school. I didn't take the school bus anymore, so I was thoroughly embarrassed on the tram going to school, not that the other passengers really cared !

So what did we do? In the school recreational grounds we learned how to march, in a group, obeying commands such as “turn right”, “turn left”, “ stop”, “march”. Pretty simple you would think. But it took many lessons for our group to learn to do it properly: on the turning order, half the group would go one way and the other half the opposite way. On “Stop” very often the rear of the group collided with the rows at the front. Sometimes, even the instructor who behaved like a dragon, could not help smiling. We got it in the end.

She taught us how to use a rifle. The make of the rifle sounded like 'Lianfilt'. Many years later, I found out by chance that they were Lee-Enfield rifles used by the British Army until 1957. Probably Nasser bought the job lot at a reduced price! Anyway, we were taught to dismantle the gun, clean it, grease it, put it back together and eventually learn how to fire it. We even went to a special practice ground, where we had to lie down flat behind sacks of sand and fire blanks. All I remember is the recoil and my rifle pointing up to the sky. Many sparrows must have died of fright that day!

We were also shown how to put a bayonet onto the rifle and were told that in combat, when you have to use it, you scream so as to cover the screams of the person you are about to skewer. Luckily, we only practised putting the bayonet on and off!

We also learnt how to use hand grenades. The instructor showed us, like in films, that you pull the ring with your teeth … count to eleven and throw! We were given a dud grenade for practice. I can't remember exactly, but I think the type of grenades we were told about were designed to explode after a set time. One did not throw them straight away, because the enemy would have had the time to pick them up and throw them back at you.

The only useful and practical set of lessons we had during the whole 'military training' was how to treat wounds. I learnt how to bandage wounds in various parts of arms and legs and how to put a tourniquet. Mouth to mouth resuscitation was not known to us in Cairo, so as they say, thank God for small mercies.

19. XVIIII

When grandmother and Uncle Ovidio left the apartment early in the morning to join the rest of the family and go to the airport, we were quietly sobbing away. Until then our two families had been quite close. It was November 1956. They had been kicked out of Egypt, like thousands of other British and French citizens. They were going to go to England, somewhere called Kidderminster.

Travelling then was a big affair. They went by plane and to us it felt that they were going to the other side of the world. We didn't have any thoughts of a possible reunion whether in the near of far future. We were not going to see them ever again. That's why we were crying, because it really was like death.

The Suez war did not make much difference to the pupils of our school. There were many Italians and Greeks who carried on living in Egypt. The Jewish community was still fairly large, despite the fact that many people with French or British nationality, had to leave the country. More and more Jewish families who had lived all their lives in Egypt, declared themselves Italians from Livorno. This city had had for centuries a very large Jewish community. From what I can gather, during WWII severe bombing destroyed many important places in Livorno including the Registry office where birth certificates etc, were kept. It burnt down. So when you heard someone saying “I'm an Italian from Livorno” who didn't speak a word of Italian you knew that they were trying to get Italian nationality on the strength of lost certificates destroyed in the fire. As it took some time for these families to sort out all the paperwork, our classes re-formed more or less as we had parted three months before: Christians, Muslims, Jews, all back on the school benches!

Time went by and one day we received a letter from our Uncle. We were very excited, of course! In it he was describing their new life. What I remember is this: they had had snow! He was trying to describe it to us, “like fluffy small pieces of cotton wool” (snow was certainly one thing we would never see in Cairo). He was also remarking on some curious habits the English had: they would buy their vegetables and fruit … by the piece!! This made us laugh because in Cairo one bought fruit and vegetables by the kilo and my Mum said “Imagine, if I only bought two apples, what would the vendor say?” My uncle finished his letter saying that although it was almost 10 o'clock at night, it was still light in Kidderminster.

Then another letter came, this time telling us that Lucy was going to school and was doing well. That Uncle Ovidio was now working at a carpet factory, and that Aunt Mary was getting by in her new life, despite the few words of broken English she had learnt! And that, wonder of wonders, they had a television set! It was like having a cinema in the house, uncle said, only smaller and it was in black and white. At school many things had changed after the war and its consequences. All the pupils were present but many would leave in the months to come. The big change was in the curriculum: many subjects previously taught in French were now being taught in Arabic. The problem was with the sudden appearance of Egyptian teachers who had not been trained to teach in secondary schools. We also started to learn geometry and algebra taught by a teacher who really was not up to scratch. The girls in my class loved her because she was fun, but I didn't think she was very bright from the way she taught.

Luckily for me, anyway, we had a French teacher who, incidentally, was Bulgarian, I think, Mademoiselle Tefta, who was to stay with us until we left school. She was one of those figures who became a “pillar” of our school. Thanks to her I learnt to love the written word. Whatever the changes made to our curriculum, I was always first in French (literature and grammar).

After grandmother left, my parents must have realised that, for the first time since they had married, they were at long last on their own. Little by little there seemed to be more space around us. Without grandmother ruling over our lives, we began to have a taste of freedom. For me, the realisation that I could express an opinion without being told off, or that I could live without necessarily having to be the best, gave me a wonderful feeling of self-importance: I was me, not a must-be copy of my elder sister, or the model pupil of the class and all this nonsense.

My first act of asserting myself was my unspoken decision not to work hard at school. I finally enjoyed learning without having to be first of the class at all costs. I liked geography, history and French of course. We also started to learn English, taught by a Greek woman. I'm not so sure that she was qualified as a teacher, because for two years we learnt very little. She was replaced by a “white” Russian teacher (a “white” Russian is someone that left Russia after the Revolution; in his case, as he was not that old, he was a descendant of Russian immigrants). He spoke very good English and made us speak only English in his class. Needless to say, we all made a big progress.

I was about to become a teenager. When I think of how today's teenagers behave, in those days we must have been a pretty tame lot! But I do wonder if I would have been the same person had grandmother stayed with us.

Like all teenage girls I started thinking about boys. Let me tell you that they were not thick on the ground! There was the elusive brother or cousin of a friend, or some kid more or less your own age with whom you played a few rough games (not what you may think, but stuff like sword and buckle or cowboys and Indians), a friend of the family who maybe one day, one never knows, might propose and so on!

I became good friends with a Greek girl in my class, Madeleine, who was an only child, a bit spoiled by her parents. Somehow, she convinced her parents to have parties at which she invited many girls from our class and … boys! These were all Greek, sons of friends of her parents, and there wasn't much conversation going on. The party took place in a large room, the furniture having been pushed away and a number of chairs lined up against the wall. Madeleine's father was in charge of the music and sat near the turn-table with one eye on the record and the other on the dancers. Rock and roll had not reached the shores of Egypt yet, so what we had was tango, samba, waltz, and more tango. Some guys were very good looking and in turn they danced with every girl in the room (did Madeleine's Dad tell them to?). Of course, we had our own criteria of appreciation: “He holds you really well” or “He didn't walk on my feet once” or “He was stroking my hand”. Full marks were given when “you could feel everything!” I leave that to your imagination.

I did enjoy going out. And then, of course, the delights of gossiping the next day at school. At the beginning, I had to fight my father's refusal to allow me to go to a party or just out to have an ice-cream with some friends (as always, all girls). It would go something like this: “Papa, Madeleine invited me to a party. Can I go?” “No”, would come the answer. “Why can't I go? Didn't you use to go out when you were my age?” I would see my mother from the corner of my eye, repressing a smile which only encouraged me to go on. “All my other friends are going, their fathers allow them to go”. In the end, my father would only say “At what time are you coming back?” After the first few times of having this conversation whenever I was invited out, my father relaxed and only asked me when I would be back home. Like Cinderella, I always came back by the time agreed.

Around exam time, with one or two of my friends, we would meet in each other's house and revise. Sometimes, on the spur of the moment, the mother of one of them would say “Stay for lunch”. Whenever possible, I would phone my father at work and tell him. But not everyone had a telephone, including us. Yet, my parents would not give me hell if I had not been able to contact them. Somehow, there was this sort of trust in each other, or maybe the notion of 'time' was more elastic.

It wasn't always plain sailing. Nowadays we talk about hormones (at any age) as if it was just a little rash. Back then, I would have said “Hormones? What's that?” I was, don't forget, a teenager, and it takes a lot to please this particular breed. I wish I could remember why I was getting into a fury every now and then. We had big glass doors and often in such moments, I would just slam the door with all my might shouting to my mother (of course) “You don't understand!” Poor Mum, she just had to let the storm pass!

Having become a family of four instead of six persons, my father's salary could go further and we started to go out a little more often and not just to the cinema. We would sometimes go to little restaurants, nothing fancy really, more like beer houses, where simple food was served. My mother loved tripes cooked in a tomato sauce. It must have been such a treat for her not to have to cook occasionally. She would also drink her glass of the local Egyptian beer, Stella, with great delight. Actually, that beer was nice: the brewery had been created by none other than Stella Artois! Other places would be a walk along the Nile corniche or at the Ezbekieh gardens and we would stop at a café for some refreshments.

One day, we went for an unforgettable visit to the Cairo Zoo. The zoo itself was very large, in fact as large as the London zoo. It had such a variety of animals including elephants on which you could get a ride: one went up onto a platform and when the elephant arrived, you went into a “houda” (imagine a large saddle with two benches facing each other, strapped onto the elephant's back, capable of carrying up to 8 people). One would spend the whole day at the zoo, having a snack at various small cafés. I remember one animal that looked like a huge rat, and when I say big, it was the size of a little pig! The guardian said it was a rat from South America. But apart from the huge rat, what really made this particular visit memorable was the lion cub.

My father was a chatty person and when we arrived at the lions' area he started to talk to the guardian who then told him that the lioness had had cubs! They kept talking in a low voice for some time. My father then turned towards us and said “I'm going in with him and when I come out, don't make a noise!” And guess what? He came out holding a little lion cub in his arms! How did he achieve this, I'll never know. We couldn't touch the cub or go near him and although now I wonder what the lioness made of it, at the time I was so envious of my father.

In the summer of 1957, Renata left Cairo and went to study in Lebanon. So now at home there were only four of us. Despite the heartbreak and separation from family and old friends, for Mum, Dad, Lydia and I, the five years to come before our departure from Cairo, were going to be the best.

20. XX

When my cousins left Cairo to go to Kidderminster, the chain of hand-me-downs was broken. No more of Lucy's clothes to wear the following season. And because grandmother was gone too, her Singer sewing machine remained silent. Buying ready-made clothes from shops was something we were not used to. All our clothes were hand made, apart from our school uniforms bought from the school. Our wardrobe was very limited: a Sunday dress made by grandma, a couple of house dresses and a couple of my cousin's dresses.

Even if the weather was hot most of the times, in winter we needed a wollen coat and for that we would go to a tailor who had a tiny workshop full of coats, suits, jackets, a mirror and a sewing machine. There was barely space to stand for the fittings. He was a brilliant tailor but he had a not so secret vice: he liked to drink. I have no idea how and what he managed to find to quell his thirst, but some days when we would go for our fittings he could barely stand and his breath smelled like a distillery. Swaying gently from side to side, he would mark our coats with his chalk, take in some material here, pin something there and finally would say “Come back tomorrow”. There were times when the shop would be closed because he was sleeping off his hangover. So, if we wanted the coat for the winter months, usually December, January and February, we would have to start in September! And yet, when the coat was ready, it was perfect!

Imagine then our surprise when one day my father said that we were going to go to Atallah to buy skirts and blouses! This man was a friend of my father and the reason we were to go there was that he would charge a 'good price'. So my mother took my sister and me to his shop. At the time, skirts with flounced petticoats were the fashion. The petticoats had to be starched and ironed so that the skirt would stay open like a lamp-shade. We must have tried all the skirts in the shop to find one that was not something Marie-Antoinette would have worn, with bows and ribbons; as for the colour there wasn't much choice: pink or pink! For our first ready made garment, this was a big disappointment. We did buy the skirts but I felt slightly ridiculous wearing mine. I became quite good at starching and ironing the petticoat though. Years later my mother found out that my father had lent money to Atallah and getting clothes there was for him a way to pay the money back.

Then Renata learnt how to sew: she joined classes where she learnt to use dress patterns to cut and then make the dress. She used grandma sewing machine. She used to buy a fashion magazine called Burda where there was a complicated insert with patterns for many clothes photographed in the magazine. According to the model chosen, one had to follow dotted lines, or bold lines, or whatever line represented your choice of dress. Then with tracing paper you copied the lines, cut it out, et voilà! You had your sleeve or your skirt. You continued until all the parts of the dress were completed. Then you pinned these on your material, cut around them, praying you were doing the right thing, while the rest of the family watched with extreme interest!

But Renata did not have enough time to make dresses for my mother and us as well. So when she left home, we started to use a seamstress, who would come to the house and be paid by the day to make our clothes. The Singer machine was once again purring away. I wonder who got it when we left.

Life continued with the same routine and monotony felt by most teenagers. Except that at the time, you couldn't ignore politics and think about what the future had in store for us. Already one would hear that Christians could hardly find jobs. Not a week went by without a 3-hour long speech made by Gamal Abdel Nasser. There were loud-speakers all over the streets, and people would stand and listen from start to finish, applauding and cheering at what he was saying. We lived at a time when it was difficult, especially for the Christian community, not to take an interest in politics.

Between 1958 and 1961, Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic. I have to look at a history book (or Wikipedia) to understand the reasons for such a union. However, Egypt and Syria were now one country and travelling between the two countries was greatly facilitated because of their union.

At the same time, the political situation in Lebanon was unstable: same problems as now between Christians and Muslims. The Lebanese president at the time, Camille Chamoun, offered to those Christians who could prove that they were descendants of Lebanese citizens, Lebanese citizenship. With Renata already in Lebanon, it was only a question of time before we would leave Egypt. So mother, father, Lydia and I flew over to Damascus in the Summer of 1960, our very first flight. From there we took a taxi to a resort in the Lebanese mountains where we were met by my sister and our Lebanese cousins. We spent a week in a hotel while our papers were being prepared. Then we returned to Damascus and back to Cairo. Going from Damascus to Lebanon by taxi was a very common means of transport and immigration formalities between the two countries were minimal. Then as now, if you had an Arab passport, you had free access.

It was done with some secrecy, and we certainly never divulged the fact that we intended to become Lebanese. There was a reason, which I always thought was far fetched, but I met a retired reporter who confirmed it: the country was crawling with spies. We were told at home never to say anything against the government, to anybody. The ordinary Egyptians adored Nasser: he was the one who had kicked the Monarchy and the British out of the country. And gained control of the Suez Canal the cause of the crisis that followed and all the upheaval for us. Nasser was to use the revenues generated by the Canal to build the Aswan Dam.

To build the dam, The Great Temple of Abu Simbel and other significant monuments would have been destroyed. A rescue operation under UNESCO began in 1960. The temple and some monuments, twenty-two in all, were moved to the shores of Lake Nasser, a huge artificial lake.

Another of Nasser's project was to build a model village, with running water and toilets in every home. There were exhibitions concerning this village and I guess all the people in the poor countryside saw the possibility of one day living in such a home.

The political hype was so great for both projects that one could turn anything, any composition, into praise for Nasser. We studied ready-made sentences to use at exams so that whatever the subject was they could be included in the so-called dissertation!

The radio broadcast several times a day a particular song referring to the dam, and while the world was working around the project, the Egyptians were singing “We'll build the dam”! This went on for many years.

I finished school at St Vincent de Paul and opted for the Bac philo (there were three types: philosophy, mathematics and sciences). I was going to go to the Lycée and guess what? It was mixed classes! There were going to be boys! I couldn't wait.

September 1961, I started my last year. Guess what? We were 34 girls and one, yes one, puny looking French boy who certainly wished he was elsewhere! I enjoyed the course, particularly the philosophy part of it. Then, I really cannot remember what happened: at the end of the first trimester, all the French teachers were kicked out of the country.

It was then that I made a big decision which was to affect my life: I told my father that I had had enough of these changes at school and that I did not wish to return to the Lycée whenever it re-opened. I decided to join a private secretarial school, study English in order to obtain a Cambridge certificate, and learn shorthand and typing.

My father had also decided that despite the fact that he loved his country, he could not see any future there. His brothers and sisters were also taking steps to emigrate to Canada. We didn't go that far: my father was offered a job in Beirut by his former boss in Cairo. I left first in September 1962 in order to help Renata find an appartment for all of us and also to find a job (which I did). Then my father, mother and Lydia came two months later. My father had permission, because he was leaving Egypt for work, to take some furniture and a very small amount of money for each member of the family. When we arrived in Lebanon, our new Lebanese identity cards were ready for all of us.

Many years later, when she became a stewardess for the Pakistan International Airways , Lydia returned to Cairo. The rest of us never did.

Veritas

Letter to Sarah

I.The Day I was born

3. Fi-dè-le a de la fa-ri-ne III

Pompon

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