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

to that of a Cabinet minister, although few Cabinet ministers travelled with a sword bearer and someone who described himself as the Chief Commoner of the City of London. As press attaché, my job was to ensure maximum favourable publicity for what was primarily a commercial visit. With this in mind, I arranged a showing in my flat of a Central Office of Information film about the job of Lord Mayor. But I fear this ancient newsreel-style production left my Egyptian guests more confused than enlightened. The film had opened with the Lord Mayor riding through London in his gilded coach, surrounded by the pikemen of the Honourable Artillery Company: that was what most Egyptians thought a Lord Mayor was. But then, presumably in order to show that the Lord Mayor was human, we cut to a scene of the same man, dressed in very English weekend-shabby clothes, digging potatoes and passing a trug full of the produce of his vegetable garden through the kitchen window to a grateful wife. Egypt grew some of the finest spring potatoes in the world, but her journalists thought that only peasants dug them. They couldn’t work out what was going on with the Lord Mayor.

      Nor did the Embassy press release announcing the imminent arrival of the Lord Mayor help much. There is in Arabic no exact equivalent for mayor. ‘Governor’ is not right; nor is ‘head’ or ‘president’. So we opted for umda, the village headman of London. Translating ‘Chief Commoner’ into Arabic was even more difficult: we ended up with rais al-fellaheen, head of the peasants of London.

      But these royal visitors and the Lord Mayor were only the most prominent of a constant flow of official visitors to Cairo in those days. The cynics in the Embassy couldn’t help noticing how the numbers fell away in the hotter months of summer, and how many of our visitors managed to combine a day or two in Cairo with a fact-finding visit, official or unofficial, to Upper Egypt. Once again, I remembered my university friend who, on failing to get into the Diplomatic Service, had joined Thomson Holidays.

      Away from the Embassy, there was plenty of fun to be had in Cairo in the early 1980s. Both there and in Alexandria, the heady days of the Second World War were not such a distant memory. Groppi’s tea house was still there, as was Shepheard’s Hotel, although it had been moved and rebuilt, hideously. There were still plenty of older Egyptians who remembered what the Eighth Army had called Groppi’s Light Horse and Shepheard’s Short Range Group – the men and women of General Headquarters Middle East.

      In the villas and grander pre-war apartment blocks of Garden City, Zamalek and Heliopolis could still be found Egyptians who mourned the pre-revolutionary cosmopolitan days, which some hoped that Sadat’s infitah, or opening, would bring back. Sitting next to an ancient hostess at a lunch – she would have said luncheon – party in Garden City, I was asked, seriously, whether we still danced the Charleston. She then recalled that, in her family, which was a branch of Egypt’s former royal family, they spoke four languages: English for business, French in society, Turkish within the family and Arabic to the servants.*

      There was also an Eighth Army dimension to the way I used to spend some winter weekends: staying with the settled bedu of Wadi Natrun, halfway along the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, trying to shoot duck and occasionally snipe. We never killed anything much, but Nick Kittoe, the friend with whom I organised this, and I had huge fun. The night before the duck shoot we would stay with the sheikh of the local tribe, Abdul Gader, before rising at dawn to wait for the duck to come in. We built hides, and paid Abdul Gader to put down food for the ducks. But mostly we talked. Abdul Gader had spent the war working in the Wadi Natrun NAAFI canteen. Using his few words of British military English, he would mimic the way he had been taught to answer the telephone: ‘Wadi Natrun 234 Hello’. He was proud of his four wives: we would see them all, unveiled and unashamed in the way bedouin women are, feeding their babies in line along the wall of the majlis (or sitting area) in his breezeblock hut.

      Fun too, though also terrifying for a hopeless non-horseman like me, were hours spent riding in the desert around the Pyramids. Sadly, Frank Gardner’s memory, in his book Blood and Sand,† of me as a fine horseman galloping across the desert is a mirage. But gazing at the view of the Pyramids, over a glass of Stella beer, from one of the rest houses of Sahara City (later demolished by Sadat) was one of the great pleasures of that time in Cairo.

      It was the combination of Arabic (which she had studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London) and horses which had brought my future wife, Bridget, to Egypt. After a holiday there, she and her sister (who taught ballet) and a girlfriend (who taught English) had decided to spend more time in Cairo, renting a flat by the Pyramids and spending much of their time riding. About the only things they brought with them from England were three English saddles. As the Embassy bachelor, I was introduced to the three girls by the Economist correspondent in Cairo, Alan Mackie, in February 1981. Bridget and I married, in London, the following January. Our eldest son, Harry, was born in Cairo in November 1982, at a hospital on Roda Island in the Nile – just near where Moses was supposed to have been found in a basket among the rushes. Witnessing a birth in an Egyptian hospital was not easy. Bridget was given, quite unnecessarily and perhaps dangerously, a general anaesthetic, Harry was extracted with a pair of forceps that I could have sworn were rusty, and, immediately after his arrival, I, as the lucky father, was expected to give a thank-offering, in dirty Egyptian pound notes, to each of the delivery room staff. In the end, however, all was well: thanks in part to Um Nasr’s attention, Harry thrived in Egypt, and I was for ever after known to Arabs as Abu Heneri – the father of Henry.

      Three and a half years in Egypt passed quickly. Soon it was time to return to a job in the Foreign Office in London. Before I did, I had to hand over to my successor. Michael Crawford had joined the Foreign Office after doing research at Oxford on the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and after qualifying as a barrister, so he was a bit older, and much wiser, than me. He also had better Arabic. So, full of enthusiasm, I showed him the business card (reproduced in the endpaper of this book) which I had had printed locally, with English on one side and Arabic the other. ‘You must have one of these,’ I gushed. With the quizzically dry manner for which he was later to become well known, my successor examined both sides of the card. ‘Sherard,’ he said, ‘there is something wrong here. The English describes you as “Second Secretary (Information)”, but the Arabic gives your title as “Second Secretary (Flags)”.’ I grabbed the card back, and my heart fell: a misplaced accent had changed the Arabic for ‘information’ to ‘flags’. What a humiliation! But, just as I hadn’t noticed, nor over three years had any Egyptian. Perhaps they had been just too polite to say anything, or perhaps they had thought that the British Embassy really did have a junior official with the quaintly antique title of ‘Second Secretary (Flags)’.

      That mistake in Arabic had been a blow to my pride, but not potentially fatal. The Political Counsellor in the Embassy, Tony Reeve, had, however, had a rather closer call. One Monday morning he asked me breezily to remind him what the Arabic for ‘mines’ as in land mines was. I told him: alghaam. He turned white. He had spent the weekend with his family on the Red Sea coast. Like the Prince and Princess of Wales, he had wanted to find a mine-free beach from which the family could swim. He had asked a feckless Egyptian sentry if there were any mines on the beach they had chosen. None, the sentry, had replied. But Tony now realised that, from his dimly remembered MECAS Word List, he had retrieved the word for mineral mines (managim), not that for land mines. He was hugely relieved, the more so when a few weeks later we heard that two Norwegians had chosen the same beach for a swim. They had stepped on a mine, and left nothing but their shoes.

      In late July 1983, Bridget, Harry and I left Cairo by Land Rover. We crossed the northern Sinai Peninsula, taking the coast road past the Israeli settlements which had been demolished when Israel had finally withdrawn from Sinai in April 1982. On the Egyptian side, the border post was a fly-blown affair, with a hut, a guard and an ancient field telephone. We were looking forward to relaxing in Jerusalem with the friends with whom we planned to stay. But not so fast. The border guard announced that nine-month-old Harry could not leave Egypt. He had an exit visa, to be sure, but no entry visa. As patiently as I could, I pointed out that he had been born in Cairo, and could not therefore have an entry visa in a passport issued by the British Embassy there. The border guard insisted. I got him to try to raise Cairo on his field telephone. After cranking the handset