Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin. Sherard Cowper-Coles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      For me, those three varieties of religious experience – Muslim, Christian