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

black basalt rocks in the south to Palmyra’s wonders in the eastern desert, down the Euphrates to Deir al-Zur not far from the Iraqi border, north from Damascus through Hama and Homs to Aleppo, west to the ultimate Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers and to the shabby port city of Lattakia. We saw the wonders of Syria – Greek, Roman, Nabatean, Persian, Arab and Ottoman. I at least learned the joys of solo travel. My dread of being lonely was quite unfounded: the problem was getting time to myself. We lived and ate and dreamed Arabic, replaying the formulae at the start of this chapter a hundred times. And, while the language was Arabic, the people we met were far from being only Arabs: we came across Armenians and Kurds, Circassians and Turks, and started to understand that since 1917 the only significant change to Ottoman imperial demography had been the establishment in Palestine of the Jewish state.

      My favourite memories are of long sessions in the suq in Aleppo discussing linguistics with an Armenian jeweller called John; and of a ride on the Hejaz railway south from the great terminus in Damascus, steam-hauled in the same rolling stock T. E. Lawrence would have attacked only sixty years earlier.

      It was from Palace Chambers too that we went across St James’s Park to sit, and pass, in the summer of 1979 the Foreign Office Intermediate Arabic Examination and then in the spring of 1980, with more of a struggle and less distinction, the Higher. We translated written Arabic into English, and English into Arabic; we drafted letters in Arabic; we were made to summarise news broadcasts in Arabic; we acted as interpreter for a fictional British minister. We didn’t yet know how realistic, and relevant, those ordeals by examination would be.

      And it was in Palace Chambers, just before Christmas 1979, that we were told to which Middle East post each of us was to be sent: Abu Dhabi, Khartoum, Kuwait and, for me, a spell of further study in Alexandria supposed to turn me into that year’s ‘super-Arabist’, before starting in the Embassy in Cairo in the late summer of 1980. I could not have been happier, or more grateful.

      And so, in March 1980, exams behind me, Heavy Baggage shipped, Unaccompanied Air Freight despatched, I set off again for the Middle East in my much loved Mini. Again, I travelled via Paris. Again, my long-suffering brother kindly acted as co-driver for most of the way. But this time, on reaching Italy, I turned left, to Venice, and took the ferry from there down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean to Alexandria.

      Arriving by sea in Egypt was an unforgettable experience. As I drove my car up the ramp out of the ferry’s dark hold into the blazing noonday sun and on to the quayside, it was as though I had crossed from the calm of the First World into the boiling chaos of the Third. As indeed I had. Never in my life had I seen so many varieties of Homo sapiens crowded together in a single space. The dockside was heaving with humanity. Policemen, customs officers, soldiers, sailors, businessmen, bedouin, hawkers and brokers, sellers of souvenirs and refreshments, Africans and Libyans, and, everywhere, hordes of Egyptian fellaheen (or peasants). And then there was the noise: hooting, shouting, spitting, yelling, in Arabic mainly, but also in other languages I couldn’t recognise, let alone understand. It was complete chaos, or so it seemed.

      After only a few yards, the press of people brought the car to a stop. I was utterly lost. I climbed out, and, blinking and fearful, looked around. And then, out of the crowd, appeared a balding Egyptian in an electric-blue safari suit, swinging a black plastic briefcase about him and sweating heavily. His cry of ‘Mister Shiraard, Mister Shiraard’ could just be heard. It was Magdi, the ‘Management Assistant’ from the British Consulate-General in Alexandria, come to rescue me and, more important, my car. Magdi was my first – but far from last – experience of a phenomenon found right across the Middle East and beyond: the ‘fixer’. No career member of the Diplomatic Service ever asks what exactly Magdi and his kind do, or how they do it. The Bribery Act 2008 now bans Britons from buying the ‘facilitation’ services they provide. But in Alexandria in 1980 all that matters is that Magdi is there to do it. In return for small but significant ‘administrative payments’, always in cash, and often in dollars, permits are procured, licences issued, telephones connected, passports stamped, diplomatic bags despatched inviolate, and goods and people extracted undamaged from customs. Later Magdi even obtained an Egyptian driving licence for me, for five Egyptian pounds.

      For the next three hours, I watched in wonder, as Magdi moved from desk to desk, hut to hut, acquiring the stamps and papers and permits which would in the end allow me to drive my car out of the port and into my future life. Rolled-up dollar bills slipped out of his hand as cards come down from a conjuror’s cuff. After every port of call, he returned solicitously to where he had deposited me, on a shaded bench, to ply me with sweet tea and dirty tap water. Sometimes in Arabia it feels as though the Ottoman Empire’s most significant, and baneful, modern legacy is the jumruk – the great racketeering enterprise which calls itself the Customs.

      Eventually, we emerged. Following Magdi’s battered car, which betrayed both its Russian design and its Egyptian manufacture, I rolled down the Corniche and up to the Cecil Hotel along one side of a sea-front square. There I was to spend my first nights in Egypt. Before then, however, I had to introduce myself to the man who would be responsible for me – in modern jargon my line manager – during my four months of advanced language training: Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General at Alexandria.

      In 1980 the British Consulate-General in Alexandria was a shadow of its former self. And, in a continuing painful reminder of imperial retreat, that former self, the derelict shell of the original Consulate, a classical palace wrecked by an angry mob during the Six Day War in 1967, stood overlooking the square in which the Hotel Cecil lay. But the modern Consulate, on the higher ground of the pleasant inner suburb of Roushdi, had its own history too. For what had once been the residence of the Consul-General, with gardens to match, now contained homes and offices for him and his deputy, plus flats for the Ambassador and Naval Attaché from Cairo when they visited Egypt’s second city and sometime summer capital.

      The Consul-General, Jeffrey Greaves, and his wife Joyce could not have been kinder. They loved Alexandria, and Alexandria loved them. They had me to dinner many times in the next few months, and introduced me to a range of interesting Alexandrines. It was in seeing them in action that I realised how lucky the Diplomatic Service is to have in its ranks men and women who, in the past at least, joined straight from school, and put in long years of service in gruelling jobs and tough places. They may never be formally appointed ambassadors, but when, as with the Greaveses in Alexandria, they are called upon to represent Britain, they do so with quiet distinction, mixing with mayors and members of parliament, and academic worthies and whatever passes for local high society, in ways that reflect credit on them and their government. The Foreign Office never quite repays the compliment, but at least in places like Alexandria they are well housed and, overall, well rewarded, not least by the job itself.

      It was through Jeffrey Greaves that I found the man who was to make my time in Alexandria: Ahmed al-Sheikh was a member of the English Department of the University of Alexandria. Greaves sent me to see Ahmed, to establish who in the university might be prepared to teach me. Ahmed said that he would do it himself. For the next four months, he and I travelled the byways of modern Egyptian literature. We read plays and poetry written in Egyptian colloquial. But we went further than that. Like most of his generation of Egyptian intellectuals, Ahmed was a Nasserite. He told me what he thought, of Sadat, of the Camp David accords, of Britain and America, and of Russia. Studying with him was a journey through a wonderland of unfamiliar ideas, and words. So too was the visit to the University Library. I had visions of the Great Library of Alexandria of antiquity, but instead found a dusty warehouse, with books shelved not by subject or author, but in order of acquisition.

      And it was Ahmed who helped find the family with whom I was to lodge. After a few nights in the Cecil, I had decamped, several miles along the Corniche, to the Swiss Cottage Hotel, a cheap imitation of its namesake in north London, high on a cliff above Stanley Bay. But I told Ahmed and everyone I met that I really wanted to live with an Egyptian family, in order not only to convert my Levantine colloquial into something more Egyptian, but also to understand more of what, in the 1830s, Edward Lane had called the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians.* After a few days, Ahmed introduced me to the Abu Awad family.

      Mr Abu Awad was in his late fifties,