Good-bye to all that

So, second-class, by P. & O. to Egypt, with a nurse for the children, a new wardrobe in the new cabin-trunks and a good-looking motor-car in the hold. Lawrence had written to me:

I had a married half-brother and half-sister in Cairo who had both been there since I was a little boy. My brother, a leading Government official (at a salary less than my own), and his wife viewed my coming to Egypt, I heard, with justifiable alarm. They had heard of my political opinions. My sister, to whom I was devoted, had no such suspicions and wrote a letter of most affectionate welcome. Siegfried came to see me off. He said: ‘Do you know who’s on board? “The Image!” He’s still in the regiment, going to join the battalion in India. Last time I saw him he was sitting in the bottom of a dug-out gnawing a chunk of bully-beef like a rat.’ The Image had been at my last preparatory school and had won a scholarship at the same time as myself; and we had been at Wrexham and Liverpool together; and he had been wounded with the Second Battalion at High Wood at the same time as myself; and now we were travelling out East together. A man with whom I had nothing in common; there was no natural reason why we should have been thrown so often in each other’s company. The ship touched at Gibraltar, where we disembarked and bought figs and rode round the town. I remembered the cancelled War Office telegram and thought what a fool I had been to prefer Rhyl. At Port Said a friend of my sister’s helped us through the Customs; I was feeling very sea-sick, but I knew that I was in the East because he began talking about Kipling and Kipling’s wattles of Lichtenburg, and whether they were really wattles or some allied plant. And so to Cairo, looking out of the windows all the way, delighted at summer fields in January.

My sister-in-law advised us against the more exclusive residential suburb of Gizereh, where she had just taken a flat herself, so with her help we found one at Heliopolis, a few miles east of Cairo. We found the cost of living very high, for this was the tourist season. But I was able to reduce the grocery bill by taking advantage of the more reasonable prices of the British army canteen; I presented myself as an officer on the pension list. We had two Sudanese servants, and, contrary to all that we had been warned about native servants, they were temperate, punctual, respectful, and never, to my knowledge, stole a thing beyond the remains of a single joint of mutton. It seemed queer to me not to look after the children or do housework, and almost too good to be true to have as much time as I needed for my writing.

The University was an invention of King Fuad’s, who had always been anxious to be known as a patron of the arts and sciences. There had been a Cairo University before this one, but it had been nationalistic in its policy and, not being directed by European experts or supported by the Government, had soon come to an end. The new University had been planned ambitiously. There were faculties of science, medicine and letters, with a full complement of highly-paid professors; only one or two of these were Egyptian, the rest being English, Swedish, French and Belgian. The medicine and science faculties were predominantly English, but the appointments to the faculty of letters were predominantly French. They had been made in the summer months when the British High Commissioner was out of Egypt, or he would no doubt have discountenanced them. Only one of the French and Belgian professors had any knowledge of English, and none of them had any knowledge of Arabic. Of the two hundred Egyptian students, who were mostly the sons of rich merchants and landowners, fewer than twenty had more than a smattering of French—just enough for shopping purposes—though they had all learned English in the secondary schools. All official university correspondence was in Arabic. I was told that it was classical Arabic, in which no word is admitted that is of later date than Mohammed, but I could not tell the difference. The ‘very learned Sheikh’ Graves had to take his letters to the post office for interpretation. My twelve or thirteen French colleagues were men of the highest academic distinction. But two or three English village-schoolmasters would have been glad to have undertaken their work at one-third of their salaries and done it far better. The University building had been a harem-palace of the Khedive. It was French in style, with mirrors and gilding.

British officials at the Ministry of Education told me that I must keep the British flag flying in the faculty of letters. This embarrassed me. I had not come to Egypt as an ambassador of Empire, and yet I did not intend to let the French indulge in semi-political activities at my expense. The dean, M. Grégoire, was a Belgian, an authority on Slav poetry. He was tough, witty, and ran his show very plausibly. He had acquired a certain slyness and adaptability during the war when, as a civilian in Belgium under German occupation, he had edited an underground anti-German publication. The professor of French Literature had lost a leg in France. He greeted me at first in a patronizing way: I was his young friend rather than his dear colleague. But as soon as he learned that I also had bled in the cause of civilization and France I became his most esteemed chum. The Frenchmen lectured, but with the help of Arabic interpreters, which did not make either for speed or accuracy. I found that I was expected to give two lectures a week, but the dean soon decided that if the students were ever to dispense with the interpreters they must be given special instruction in French—which reduced the time for lectures, so that I had only one a week to give. This one was pandemonium. The students were not hostile, merely excitable and anxious to show their regard for me and liberty and Zaghlul Pasha and the well-being of Egypt, all at the same time. I often had to shout at the top of my loudest barrack-square voice to restore order. They had no textbooks of any sort; there were no English books in the University library, and it took months to get any through the French librarian. This was January and they were due for an examination in May. They were most anxious to master Shakespeare, Byron, and Wordsworth in that time. I had no desire to teach Wordsworth and Byron to anyone, and I wished to protect Shakespeare from them. I decided to lecture on the most rudimentary forms of literature possible. I chose the primitive ballad and its development into epic and the drama. I thought that this would at least teach them the meaning of the simpler literary terms. But English was not easy for them, though they had learned it for eight years or so in the schools. Nobody, for instance, when I spoke of a ballad-maker singing to his harp, knew what a harp was. I told them it was what King David played upon, and drew a picture of it on the blackboard; at which they shouted out: ‘O, anur.’ But they thought it beneath their dignity to admit the existence of ballads in Egypt; though I had myself seen the communal ballad-group in action at the hind legs of the Sphinx, where a gang of fellaheen was clearing away the sand. One of the gang was a chanty-man: his whole job was to keep the others moving. The fellaheen did not exist for the students; they thought of them as animals. They were most anxious to be given printed notes of my lectures with which to prepare themselves for the examinations. I tried to make the clerical staff of the faculty duplicate some for me, but in spite of promises I never got them done. My lectures in the end became a dictation of lecture-notes for lectures that could not be given—this, at any rate, kept the students busy.

They were interested in my clothes. My trousers were the first Oxford trousers that they had seen in Egypt; their own were narrow at the ankles. So I set a new fashion. One evening I went to dine with the rector of the University. Two of my students, sons of Ministers, happened also to be invited. They noticed that I was wearing white silk socks with my evening dress. Later I heard from the vice-rector, Ali Bey Omar, whom I liked best of the University officials, that a day or two later he had seen the same students at a Government banquet, wearing white silk socks. When they looked round on the distinguished assembly they found that they were the only white socks present. Ali Bey Omar gave a pantomime account of how they tried to loosen their braces surreptitiously and stroke down their trousers to hide their shame.

For some weeks I missed even my single hour a week, because the students went on strike. It was Ramadan, and they had to fast for a month between sunrise and sunset. Between sunset and sunrise they ate rather more than usual in compensation, and this dislocation of their digestive processes had a bad effect on their nerves. I have forgotten the pretext for the strike: it was some trouble about the intensive French instruction. The fact was that they wanted leisure at home to read up their notes of the earlier work of the term in preparation for the examination. The Professor of Arabic, who was one of the few Egyptians with a reputation as an orientalist, published a book calling attention to pre-Islamic sources of the Koran. His lectures, delivered in Arabic, demanded more exertion from them than any of the others, so when the examination came round most of them absented themselves from the Arabic paper on religious grounds. To an orthodox Mohammedan the Koran, being dictated by God, can have no pre-Islamic sources.

I came to know only two of my students fairly well; one was a Greek, the other a Turk. The Turk was an intelligent, good-natured young man, perhaps twenty years old. He was very rich, and had a motor-car in which he twice took me for a drive to the Pyramids. He talked both French and English fluently, being about the only one (except for twelve who had attended a French Jesuit college) who could do so. He told me one day that he would not be able to attend my next lecture as he was going to be married. I asked him whether this was the first or second part of the ceremony; he said it was the first. When he returned he told me that he had not yet been allowed to see the face of his wife, because her family was orthodox; he would only see it at the second ceremony. But his sister had been at school with her and said that she was pretty and a good sort; and her father was a friend of his father’s. Later, the second ceremony took place, and he confessed himself perfectly satisfied. I learned that it seldom happened that when the veil was lifted the bridegroom refused the bride, though he had the right to do so; she had a similar right. Usually the couple contrived to meet before even the first ceremony, The girl would slip the man a note saying: ‘I shall be at Maison Cicurel at the hat-counter at three-thirty to-morrow I afternoon if you want to see me. It will be quite in order for me to lift my veil to try on a hat. You will recognize me by my purple parasol.’

I inquired about the rights of Mohammedan women in Egypt. Apparently divorce was simple; the man only had to say in the presence of a witness: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,’ and she was divorced. On the other hand she was entitled to take her original dowry back with her, with the interest that had accrued on it during her married life. Dowries were always heavy and divorces comparatively rare. It was considered very low-class to have more than one wife; that was a fellaheen habit. I was told a story of an Egyptian who was angry with his wife one morning because the breakfast-coffee was badly made. He shouted out: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.’ ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘now you’ve done it. The servants have heard what you said. I must go back to my father with my ten thousand pounds and my sixty camels.’ He apologized for his hasty temper. ‘We must be remarried,’ he said, ‘as soon as possible.’ She reminded him that the law prevented them from marrying again unless there were an intermediate marriage. So he called in a very old man who was watering the lawn and ordered him to marry her. He was to understand that it was a marriage of form only. So the gardener married the woman and, immediately after the ceremony, returned to his watering-pot. Two days later the woman died, and the gardener inherited the money and the camels.

The Greek invited me to tea once. He had three beautiful sisters named Pallas, Aphrodite, and Artemis. They gave me tea in the garden with European cakes that they had learned to make at the American college. Next door a pale-faced man stood on a third-floor balcony addressing the world. I asked Pallas what he was saying: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t mind him; he’s a millionaire, so the police leave him alone. He’s quite mad. He lived ten years in England. He’s saying now that they’re burning him up with electricity, and he’s telling the birds all his troubles. He says that his secretary accuses him of stealing five piastres from him, and it isn’t true. Now he’s saying that there can’t be a God because God wouldn’t allow the English to steal the fellaheen’s camels for the war and not return them. Now he’s saying that all religions are very much the same, and that Buddha is as good as Mohammed. But really,’ she said, ‘he’s quite mad. He keeps a little dog in his house, actually in his very room, and plays with it and talks to it as though it were a human being.’ (Dogs are unclean in Egypt.) She told me that in another twenty years the women of Egypt would be in control of everything. The feminist movement had just started, and as the women of Egypt were by far the most active and intelligent part of the population, great changes were to be expected. She said that neither she nor her sisters would stand her father’s attempts to keep them in their places. Her brother showed me his library. He was doing the arts-course as a preliminary to law. Besides his legal textbooks he had Voltaire, Rousseau, a number of saucy French novels in paper covers, Shakespeare’s works and Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, a book which I had never met before. He asked my advice about his career, and I advised him to go to a European university because an arts degree at Cairo would be of little advantage to him.

I did not pay an official call at the Residency at first, though my brother urged it as etiquette; I decided not to until I had seen how things were at the University. I had not realized before to what extent the British were in power in Egypt. I had been told that Egypt was an independent kingdom, but it seemed that my principal allegiance was not to the King who had given me my appointment and paid me my salary, but to the British High Commissioner. Infantry, cavalry, and air squadrons were a reminder of his power. The British officials could not understand the Egyptians’ desire to be rid of them. They considered Egypt most ungrateful for all the painful and difficult administrative work that they had put into it since the ’eighties, raising it from a bankrupt country to one of the richest in the world. None of them took Egyptian nationalism seriously; there was no Egyptian nation they said. The Greeks, Turks, Syrians, and Armenians who called themselves Egyptians had no more right in the country than the British. Before the British occupation they had bled the fellaheen white. The fellaheen were the only true Egyptians, and it was not they who called for freedom. Freedom was mere politics, a symptom of the growing riches of the country and the smatterings of Western education that they had brought with them. The reduction of the British official class in the last few years was viewed with disgust. ‘We did all the hard work and when we go everything will run down; it’s running down already. And they’ll have to call us back, or if not us, the dagoes, and we don’t see why they should benefit.’ They did not realize how much the vanity of the Egyptians—probably the vainest people in the world—was hurt by the constant sight of British uniform.

Egypt now considered itself a European nation. At the same time it attempted to take the place of Turkey as the leading power of Islam. This led to many anomalies. On the same day that the University students made the protest against the professor of Arabic’s irreligious views, the students of El Azhar, the great Cairo theological college, struck against having to wear the Arab dress of kaftan and silk headdress and appeared in European dress and tarbouche. The tarbouche was the national hat; even British officials wore it. I myself had a tarbouche. Being red it attracted the heat of the sun; and it was stuffy inside and did not protect the back of the head. It would have been difficult to find a hat more unsuitable for the climate.