Enchanted Evening (47 page)

8

Persian Interlude

Chapter 29

Sandy had been posted as Vice-Consul to Khorramshah in Persia and wanted his bungalow (which he described as ‘a tip') taken in hand and turned into something more fitting the home of a Vice-Consul.

Funds were on hand for this purpose, and he wanted us to come for the cold weather and to stay on for as long as we liked after we'd ‘tished the place up'. I think we were both enthralled by the idea of living in Persia; and equally enthralled by the prospect of taking the Vice-Consulate in hand. So we accepted joyfully, setting out on a small coastal steamer to travel, via a brief stop at Karachi, up the Persian Gulf to the oil town of Abadan, which stands at the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab waterway.

It was a slow and idyllic voyage. No shred of cloud or breath of breeze came to ruffle the glassy blue of sea and sky as we steamed across the Gulf of Cambray, past the little Portuguese islands of Daman and Dui and the long western shores of Gujerat and Cutch, to cross the Tropic of Cancer and steam up the Gulf of Oman past Jask and through the Strait of Ormuz, into the Persian Gulf and some of the most godforsaken country I have ever seen.

It probably doesn't look nearly as bad now, because the oil-rich countries have, I am told, made miles of the desert lands bloom like the rose, with the aid of desalination plants and such-like modern inventions. But, at the time I am writing about, the hills and the mountain ranges behind them were grey and bleached and lifeless. Not a speck of green or even the skeleton of a dead tree broke the miles of waterless rock and shale. Nor was there any colour in it – just grey. Ash-grey, as though the once liquid rock had only recently cooled.

A more desolate and inhospitable land I have yet to see. And just to make the landscape even less alluring, the sea here was no longer blue, but green with the dull green of over-boiled spinach, and alive with water-snakes – hundreds of them, weaving and writhing through the water in which, on the previous days, there had been platoons of jellyfish, families of smiling, frisking dolphins, shoals of shimmering unidentified fish and flights of flying-fish.

I asked the ship's Captain if the Gulf was always full of snakes, and he said no, only at certain times of the year, and probably only after a particularly large hatch of them. He himself had only seen them in this quantity once before in all his years of plying those waters, and didn't care if he never did so again. He believed, he said, that they were considered a delicacy among some of the Gulf people.

We ran out of the ‘snake belt' eventually, not far from the little island of Bahrain – then an almost barren and practically unknown dot on the map – and passed through a fleet of fishing boats whose occupants called out greetings to us and held out their outstretched palms in the manner of beggars soliciting alms. But when I remarked acidly that they couldn't possibly catch a coin at that range, the Captain laughed and said they weren't begging, they were showing off their day's catch. ‘Oh, fish,' I said. ‘Nothing so ordinary: pearls,' replied the Captain. One of the neighbouring islands was the headquarters of the Gulf's pearl fishery. Not a very big one, but its pearls were greatly prized.

One casualty of that dream-like voyage was Mother's anti-rheumatic charm, which had not only cured her rheumatism but, we were to discover, ensured that neither that nor any form of arthritis would ever trouble her again. That little white floret had died, as the doctor had told her it would unless it had a glassful of fresh milk every day. And alas, after the first day, there was no fresh milk available until we reached Abadan. I have since been told that the doctor's magic floret was obviously only the germ of yoghurt. And I suppose this is so. Yet I have never seen anything quite like it; all the other ‘seeds' of yoghurt have been much smaller than this one, and none have acted so instantly. Nor has the cure been permanent, as it was with Mother. I have a feeling that this curious organism must be the special yoghurt that some tribe or other from the wilds of Soviet Russia are supposed to live on, which enables them to live until they are a hundred and seventy or thereabouts.

Sandy, plus a horrid stink, met us as our ship docked in Abadan. He appeared to be in the best of spirits and, noticing that Mother held a strongly scented handkerchief to her nose (the stink met us from a good half-mile down the river), apologized for it, adding that she couldn't expect anything else from an oil refinery and that all the ‘oil chaps' and their families didn't even notice it after the first few days. But it wasn't like this in Khorramshah. Which proved to be true, except on those occasions (fortunately rare) when the wind was blowing towards us from Abadan, and we would hastily rush round the house shutting every door and window, and lighting joss-sticks to try and counter that pervasive nastiness.

Sandy had brought his own car, and the Vice-Consulate one, complete with chauffeur, to take Kadera and the luggage. And off we went through tidy streets and rows of whitewashed houses with wide verandahs, each in its own square of garden shaded with flame trees and bushes of bougainvillaea and hibiscus. It looked like a typical colonial town, except for the tall blocks of offices and all the towering modern machinery that goes with a refinery. We saw a club house, complete with tennis courts and a swimming-pool, a hospital, shops – and then suddenly the desert.

Miles and miles of nothing but sand. No roads, no landmarks. Nothing to guide one. This must have been the kind of landscape that Shelley visualized when he wrote in one of his sonnets: ‘boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away'. They did indeed. I remember remarking to Sandy that at least there could be no traffic accidents in a countryside as flat as a pancake in every direction, and with enough room for about a couple of hundred tanks to drive in line if they felt like it.

‘You'd be surprised!' retorted Sandy. ‘But then you don't know the Iranians.' He went on to tell me that there were more car crashes on the desert routes than there were on Calcutta's main street, Chowringi, any day of the week. When I protested, he explained that the local population all drove at top speed and with no regard for road rules (he said there weren't any) or, of course, speed limits. Every driver considered that with enormous stretches of desert to choose from, the other fellow could get out of the way.

They all, said Sandy, drove like Mr Toad, ‘
poop
-pooping!' on their horns while keeping a foot well down on the accelerator. It appeared to be a matter of personal honour not to give way to the other driver – even when it became clear that unless one of them did, they were indubitably booked for an almighty smash in which (depending on the size of the vehicles involved) anything between two and twenty passengers were bound to be killed and the rest badly injured.

Even when a driver did lose his nerve at the last moment, the move was just as likely to spell death and destruction, because with unrestricted space to manoeuvre in, one never knew in which direction the loser would decide to swerve. And then of course there was always the chance that both drivers would lose their nerve simultaneously, which could lead to a horrendous pile-up. But since in either or any case there was always the consoling thought that since one's fate is tied about one's neck from birth, and Allah has decreed that ‘what is written is written', the whole affair was ordained from the beginning and so could not possibly have been avoided.

Sandy told us many tales of the reigning Shahanshah, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had risen from being an officer in a Persian Cossack regiment to become Prime Minister of Iran, and from there, when the absentee ruler of the country had been deposed by the National Assembly, had been elected to take over the throne. Sandy was of the opinion that Reza Shah was just what the country needed, but that it would be interesting to see how long he would last the course. Because he had already trodden heavily on the toes of the Mulvies. ‘The trouble with that chap,' said Sandy, ‘is that he's as tough as old boots and does exactly as he pleases.'

Apparently the Imam of the largest mosque in Tehran had been criticizing the Shah's behaviour for some time past, under the mistaken impression that even the Shahanshah would not dare take action against a holy man. Reza had ignored the initial attacks, but when they became more and more insulting, he drove into Tehran, unaccompanied and armed only with a whip, and, marching into the mosque, dragged the Imam out into the middle of the courtyard, and flogged him, threw the victim down the outer steps and drove off – no one raising a finger to help or hinder.

Chapter 30

I can't remember how long it took us to drive across the desert from Abadan to Khorramshah,
1
though I must have made that journey many times. I only remember the relief of seeing greenness and trees and water again after those miles of greyish-brown sand. Sandy's house and the large and more pretentious house in which the British Consul lived were on the far side of the river as one approached Khorramshah from the direction of Abadan.

The house, when we reached it, was a sprawling and vaguely unattractive building, faintly suggestive of a Dâk bungalow, with the same flat roofs, high, whitewashed rooms and french windows opening on to stone-paved verandahs. The furniture was of the usual Army-quarters pattern, and there was very little of it. In fact one might have been back in any cantonment house in India. Except for one thing. Here every room sported a hideous matting ‘dado' that covered the lower four feet of the wall and was fastened to it by thin batons of wood in a criss-cross pattern, topped by a single thicker length of wood which managed to suggest a picture-rail that had slipped too far down the wall. I could see at once why Sandy had sent out that urgent SOS, urging us to come and make the Vice-Consul's house fit to live in. But when I said so, adding that we could make a start by stripping off those hideous matting splash-boards, Sandy shook his head sadly and said, ‘No such luck.'

It seems that this was the first thing he himself had tried to do when he had first seen the house. Only to discover (as I did when I tried it) that those hideous splash-board things had a purpose. They were there to disguise the far more hideous stains of salt, leaching up from the ground: the Persians had never heard of such things as damp courses (nor had the British for that matter, not until fairly late in the day) and the sand in this part of the Persian desert was full of salt. That was why it was so hard to grow anything in it, except along the river banks.

Later I removed a bit of splash-board to make certain I couldn't disguise it some better way. But the salt stains were beyond hope, all crusted and peeling, as though the walls had caught some terrible disease. Sandy said the surface had been scraped off many times and repainted, but sooner or later the salt won. Even the matting that hid the stains had to be replaced at fairly frequent intervals; but so far, it had proved to be better than anything else that had been tried. So we abandoned that, and gave our attention to the rest of the house. And I have to say, with pride, that Mother and I did wonders with it.

Almost
nothing
was available in that unalluring segment of the earth, and we had to make do with what little there was. We went down to the workshop where the furniture was made, and, sticking firmly to the idea of something simple, designed a sofa in three sections which, put together, made a large, curved and very comfortable piece of furniture on which five people could sit with plenty of room to spare, and six could sit without feeling squashed – very useful for parties. The chairs were made to match, and upholsterers were set to work to cover them with a heavy, white knobbly-surfaced material which was hand-woven locally, washed like a rag and was very cheap. An equally cheap form of carpeting was produced, I was interested to discover, by the prisoners in a local gaol.

Shaggy white sheepskin rugs were also obtainable locally, and since the only wall paint available in the bazaar was whitewash, we had a really lovely white drawing-room. I covered one door, the one that led to the hall and the dining-room, with a single slab of three-ply, and then muralled it with a Chinese-style picture of birds on a branch of a flowering cherry tree. And Mother had cushion covers made out of some remnants of the heavy white satin that we bought on one of our expeditions to Basrah, in the famous covered bazaar. The curtains were made of the same knobbly white material as the sofa and chair covers, and Syrie Maugham herself would not have been ashamed to own it.

The dining-room presented a more difficult problem, for facing the windward side of the house it got the full force of the monsoon rains, and here the salt stains came well above the wickerwork splash-board that was supposed to hide them. They crept above it in a series of odd-shaped streaks and blotches that were impossible to hide, since they leaked through any amount of over-painting. But looking at them one day, I suddenly saw the obvious answer, and instead of trying to hide them I turned them into rocks and tree-trunks and birds in the Chinese manner. It worked beautifully. So well, in fact, that I was to use the same trick again and again on the walls of Army quarters.

My bedroom too, ‘tho' I says it me'self', was a triumph. The PWD office, who were in charge of painting and looking after official property, only stocked whitewash for walls, white enamel for woodwork, and aluminium paint for things like lamp-posts. Period. But they also provided the Consulates with such necessities as ink. Red ink, added to a pailful of whitewash, produced a charming shade of apple-blossom pink, with which I covered the walls and ceiling – plus the usual wickerwork splash-board of course.

The ceiling, for some reason, had been criss-crossed with flat wood batons, which I painted with the aluminium paint, and having also painted a large sheet of brown packing-paper with it, I cut out aluminium stars and stuck one in the centre of each square. The effect was charmingly frivolous, and somehow suggestive of Columbine and Pierrot. So, remembering a small black and white poster I had seen and admired in my art student days, I did a suitably pastel-coloured mural in the space over the fireplace, depicting a coy, pink-skirted Columbine being serenaded by a colourful Harlequin in a flowery setting of blue-green, decorative trees and daisy-spangled grass.