Authors: Martin Booth
'They're called gully-gully men,' my mother explained unnecessarily and she put a coin into the man's open hand. His fingers were calloused, his long, curved fingernails striated like an ancient nag's hoof. He touched his forehead, secreted the coin in the folds of his clothing and produced a hen's egg from inside my other ear. I felt his talon of a fingernail scrape against my ear hole.
My father decreed we could quite safely go ashore. He had been here during the war, had lost no friends to enemy agents or native collaborators and purportedly knew his way around. A decaying landau with faded cream leather seats, pulled by a gaunt pony with a hangdog look, took us into the centre of town. Once there, we entered a museum of ancient Egyptian antiquities filled with glass display cases containing faded turquoise faience
ushabtis
, scarab beetle amulets, wooden and sandstone carved figurines, framed strips of linen and parchment upon which had been written dynastic poetry in hieroglyphs, bead necklaces, pottery oil lamps and bronze jewellery. The difference between this museum and those I had visited in England, however, was that everything here was for sale. Captivated by the
ushabtis
, I attempted to persuade my mother to buy me one, even desperately arguing that it might help me with my history lessons, but the price was too high and this was not, she told me in hushed tones, an emporium in which one haggled the price down.
'What does haggled mean?' I asked. My mother's reply was a severe keep-your-mouth-shut look. I complied.
Further along the same street we came upon a low, colonnaded building which seemed to be attracting passengers from the
Corfu
as a picnic did ants. The interior was dark and cool, large wooden and rattan-bladed ceiling fans spinning overhead, blue sparks dancing in their electric motors. This was the Simon Artz department store, almost as famous in Egypt as the Sphinx or the pyramids, alabaster replicas of both of which it sold in a variety of sizes. In addition, one could buy copies of ancient Greek amphorae; grotesque leather poufs decorated with hieroglyphs, high priests and heavy brass studs; camel saddles (labelled as being
genooine Bedooine
); beaten copper water jugs; wooden boxes inlaid with brass, lapis lazuli or ivory; carved camels, red felt fezes; brass salvers, alabaster ash trays and a working model of a water-raising system called a
shadouf
which I coveted but was forbidden to purchase by my father in case it harboured woodworm. That said, he purchased an alabaster ash tray. Without his knowing, my mother bought me a small wooden camel supposedly devoid of insect infestation.
Wherever we went, my father was addressed as
effendi
, my mother as
Mrs Simpson
. This I found puzzling in the extreme.
'
Effendi
is like saying Sir or Mister,' my mother said when I questioned her.
'But our name's not Simpson,' I went on.
'That's Mrs Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.'
'Are you related to the Duchess of Windsor?' I enquired wondrously.
'No!' my mother replied tersely. 'She's a tart.'
The look on my mother's face precluded any further discussion of the duchess or her pastries.
We took lunch in a small hotel overlooking the sea, which my father had frequented during the war. The meal consisted of cubes of nondescript gristle immolated on metal skewers and served on a bed of gummy rice mottled with dark brown objects that might have been unhusked grains, mouse droppings or steamed weevils. My mother ate one piece. I masticated another for the better part of ten minutes before swallowing it with difficulty. My father liberally soused his in Tabasco and ate the full portion. His face went red, his brow broke out in a sweat and he drank a number of glasses of pilsner. This, he declared, was an ideal prophylactic for malaria. (Nevertheless, he periodically suffered from a recurrence of the disease, regardless of this occasional medication, until he was in his late thirties.)
As he ate, my father embarked upon a tale of his wartime exploits.
'I was having dinner in this very room in 1942 – er 3 . . . It doesn't matter – when an Arab approached my table.
"Effendi,"
he said, "I have some very fine dirty French postcards." He started to open his jacket.'
My father started to open his as if he, too, had something to offer.
'Ken . . .' my mother remonstrated in vain.
'"I have fifty,
effendi
. Just one hundred piastres."'
My father gave me a salacious wink. His eyes were somewhat glazed as if, in his mind, he was back in early-forties Egypt.
'That's enough, Ken,' my mother muttered sternly.
'I bought them,' my father continued unabashed, his voice now quite loud, having gradually increased in volume through the telling. 'And do you know what they were? Fifty grubby identical photos of the bloody Eiffel Tower.' He laughed loudly – a sort of braying sound – and drained his glass of pilsner.
That evening, the
Corfu
left the dock to join a line of vessels waiting to sail in convoy through the Suez Canal; the following morning, she started down it. Along the west bank ran a road and a railway line. It seemed bizarre to be travelling on a ship through a desert landscape dotted with low, square houses and palm trees. Moving at only six or seven knots, it was not long before a train overtook the ship, cars and trucks continually passing it on the road. The only form of transport the ship overhauled were donkeys and camels plodding methodically in the merciless, shadowless landscape.
By late morning, the dry heat was oppressive. My mother insisted I wore a white straw sun hat at all times. As it resembled a cross between a Mexican sombrero and a surrealist's lampshade, I resisted, yet to no avail. Instead, I contrived to forget it whenever possible, eventually managing to engineer for the detestable thing to blow over the side, only to discover the ship's shop had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them. At least, I placated myself, it was preferable to the absurdly embarrassing knotted cotton handkerchief my father sported, which made him look like a retired London bus driver on the beach at Margate on a Whitsun bank holiday. It gave him little solar protection. The following day, his face was as pink as a prawn. The day after that, it started to peel so that he looked as if he was sloughing his skin.
'It's your own silly fault, Ken,' my mother chastised him as she rubbed calamine lotion on to his forehead, nose and cheeks. The lotion, being coloured faintly pink and drying to the texture of whitewash, did little to alleviate his general over-cooked appearance. 'I mean, what did you do when you were stationed out here?'
'Work,' he replied sullenly. 'I didn't have time to sunbathe. There was a war on.'
Despite the blowers being on full blast and the porthole wide open, our cabin on the port side (facing the supposedly cooler east bank) still reverberated with heat like the sides of a blast furnace. Luncheon consisted of a green salad in a bowl immersed in a tray of ice. Even the sliced roast beef was served on plates set in beds of ice. Icecream, provided in greased paper cups with a wooden spoon like a miniature canoe paddle, melted in minutes into a thick, warm, vanilla drink.
My mother spent the afternoon wallowing in the ship's minuscule swimming pool or lounging in a deckchair, 'doing a reptile', as she referred to it. She wore tight, brief shorts and a blouse with flounced sleeves: it was to become her informal norm for the rest of her life in the tropics. Meanwhile, my father pretended he was the officer of the watch. He busied himself with his binoculars, watching out for shipping coming the opposite way through the canal and dhows that looked as if they had recently set sail out of the pages of the child's illustrated edition of the Old Testament which Granny had given me the previous Christmas. She was a Salvationist.
Gradually, the
Corfu
edged by the town of Ismailia and entered the Bitter Lakes. The desert receded and the air cooled slightly. Around dusk, the lights of Port Suez twinkled in the hot night air and, shortly afterwards, we entered the Red Sea which, to my disappointment the following morning, was not in the least red.
More on-board diversions were planned to stave off boredom. There was a gala and tombola night for the adults and a casino evening. Every day, a sweepstake was held to guess how far the ship had sailed in the previous twenty-four hours. My father addressed this with mathematical precision, filling several sheets of the ship's notepaper with calculations every day. He did not win once. My mother, by pure guesswork and common nous, won three times, my father taking her success with such bad grace that, at the third win, he sulked and retired to his cabin claiming an upset stomach. We did not set eyes on him again until the following day when he complained my mother had not visited him in his sick bed.
'No, Ken,' she replied, 'I did not. A sick tummy I can fix with chlorodyne but a sick mind's beyond my reach.'
This did not improve matters and my father continued to brood for another day, his mood only being broken by an invitation from the captain to drinks that evening with a number of other male passengers in or connected with the Royal Navy. Women were excluded. He returned from this party with his plumage puffed up and his head held high.
A fancy-dress tea party was thrown for the children. I was dressed by my mother as a pirate in a crepe paper cummerbund, one of her head scarves and an eye-patch borrowed from the ship's doctor and painted black with a mixture of indian ink and mascara. A cardboard sword was tucked in the cummerbund and I carried an empty whisky bottle. I took home no prizes. First place was awarded to a tubby boy of twelve whose parents had seized their opportunity in Simon Artz. He wore a pair of round sunglasses, a real cummerbund, baggy pantaloons, Egyptian felt slippers and a fez. A long ivory cigarette holder completed his ensemble. He was King Farouk.
The ocean provided its own diversions. Dolphins cavorted ahead of the bow wave and we were permitted, under the supervision of a parent and a deck officer, to go for'ard to the f'c'sle (as my father would have it) and look down on them. They were sleek and grey, the colour of torpedoes. On occasion, they swam on their sides, the better to look up at us with an almost human eye. Flying fish scudded over the waves, their fins outspread like grotesque, ribbed wings. Occasionally the wind took them and they glided up on to the deck to be spirited away by the Lascars, low-caste Indians who cleaned, painted and polished the ship, who ate them. Off the Horn of Africa, a vast pod of at least fifty whales was sighted, blowing and diving, the huge flukes of their tails rising into the air only to slide under the surface once more.
Every evening, I lay in my bunk watching the sea speed by and reading or pondering what lay ahead of me. At least I knew the pigtail was unlikely, for my mother had insisted I had a haircut from the ship's barber soon after departing Algiers. But for the rest, I could only let my imagination wander. My father refused point blank to discuss anything about his job, claiming it was top secret. I considered the chances of him being a spy and asked my mother one night as I got ready for bed if this was his role in the Navy.
'A spy!' she retorted. 'In the Navy? What gave you that idea?'
'Daddy said his job was secret.'
'Your father could no more be a spy than I could be a spanner,' she replied, always keen to find an alliterative metaphor. 'He's a Deputy Naval Stores Officer. A naval grocer! It's his job to see ships get fresh supplies of lettuces and eggs. Secret!' She laughed. 'I'm sure the Commies're not interested in how many tins of sardines HMS
Ark Royal
is carrying.'
At seven o'clock – or nineteen hundred hours, as my father preferred – my mother, having seen me into my bunk, would join my father on deck for cocktails and dinner. Although, once in the tropics, the formal evening dress code for the dining room was waived unless there was a dinner dance or the like being held, my father insisted on wearing a lounge suit when all that was demanded was a tie. This greatly embarrassed my mother and, one afternoon between Aden and Bombay, it created an argument conducted
sotto voce
in my cabin. I only heard a part of it, eavesdropping at the door.
'. . . but it's unnecessary, Ken,' I heard my mother say insistently. 'You stand out like . . . like . . . like a daffodil in a daisy field.'
'Just because the mercury touches eighty, Joyce, it doesn't mean we have to abandon all our bloody standards.'
There was a pause.
'You know what they call you, don't you?' She did not wait for a response. 'Commodore Blimp.'
'I don't give a bloody damn,' my father answered, yet I could tell his anger had been goaded.
'And that knotted hankie. I mean! That's setting a standard? You'll be rolling your trouser legs up next. You could at least buy a panama in the shop.'
'I'll wear what I bloody like, when I bloody like, where I bloody like. It's a free bloody country, thanks to the likes of me.'
'Here we go,' I heard my mother say with an air of well-tried boredom. 'Tell me, Ken, I forget: which submarine did you serve on? Which Atlantic convoy did you escort? Which landing craft did you command on D-Day?' She fell silent for a moment. 'None. And whose father was imprisoned for three years in Germany after his ship went down under him at the Battle of Jutland? Mine. And whose mother snubs mine because her husband was only a Chief Petty Officer? And you talk of standards. Double standards in your case, Ken. Double standards.'
There followed a brief scuffling at the end of which there was a loud bang as my father slammed his hand on the wardrobe door. I later saw the dent his signet ring had made in the veneer.
'Don't you ever speak like that to me again, Joyce, or . . .
'Or? Or what, Ken? A divorce? My! That would look good on your record sheet, wouldn't it? A real blot rather than a splat of ink. Set tongues wagging in the wardroom. And what about Martin?'
'What about him ?' my father answered.
It was then I decided to make myself scarce and scurried away down the corridor. An hour later, my father appeared on the deck wearing a straw panama hat with a dark blue band.