Enchanted Evening (48 page)

All the rest of the woodwork – dressing-table, chairs, bedstead, windows – was painted with aluminium, and to set it off I made two little artificial Chinese-style blossom trees, one to stand at each end of the long, low bookcases against the wall on either side of my bed. The tree-trunks and boughs were dead twigs selected from bushes in the garden, stuck into small pots and also painted with aluminium, and the pink petals and buds were modelled out of fresh bread, stuck on to the twigs with glue from a glue-pot on Sandy's office desk.

Bread makes a marvellous modelling material if squeezed between your fingers until it's the right consistency. And if you wait until your flower or whatever is dry, it takes watercolour paint beautifully. Best of all, it lasts a surprisingly long time, hardening into something that could almost be china – and if you've got any colourless nail varnish (I hadn't, worse luck) it will last for years.

Sandy was delighted with his house when we'd finished with it. And so was the PWD, because since the whitewash, ink, aluminium and white paint were all items that came out of stock, the expense was minimal, for Mother and I had done nearly all the painting ourselves. We struck at doing the ceilings, but did everything else, and the bill for the country-made curtains, covers and druggets was astonishingly modest. So were the satin ones that we bought in the covered bazaar in Basrah. Those last were the only furnishings we did not obtain locally. No one would believe that the Consulate funds had not been heavily drawn on when Sandy gave a large party to celebrate the metamorphosis of what had been, let's face it, an essentially hideous house. Even the husbands approved, while as for their womenfolk, they ‘ooh-ed' and ‘ah-ed' and refused to believe that this was not the result of official privilege, and a bottomless purse provided by the Foreign Office for the decoration of their overseas Consulates.

Several of them appeared to take it as a personal grievance, and one woman in particular informed me acidly that it was all very well for people like us, who had the use of the Consular launch and could go shopping in Basrah whenever we liked and didn't have to worry about bills, whereas ordinary people such as herself … etc., etc. When she had quite finished, I told her exactly what the decoration of my bedroom had cost, item by item, including the covered bazaar curtain-material. At which she merely said crossly that she couldn't have done any of it because in the first place she never would have thought of it, and in the second, if she
had
thought of it, she couldn't possibly have done the mural; adding bitterly that I was merely lucky in that I could draw and paint: ‘Because most of us can't, you know!'

The complaint about the use of the Consular launch and our supposedly frequent visits to Basrah was anything but true, for Sandy got the use of the launch only when the Consul did not need it, and then one way only, Basrah to Khorramshah. Never vice versa. This meant that we only visited Basrah on those occasions when for some official reason or other the Consul had gone up by launch but would not need it to come back in for some time, so that it would have been returning empty. This did not happen very often. This was just as well, since the city of Basrah lies in Iraq, several miles beyond the borders of Iran where, in those days, the Iranian officials who manned the border post demanded that any European crossing into Iraq should be provided with no less than
seven
photographs of themselves, in addition to filling in a lengthy form on which you had to give your surname and all your given names, date of birth, place of birth, etc., etc., plus the same for your parents, and, believe it or not, your grandparents.

The whole business of crossing the frontier merely to spend a few hours in Basrah (though Sandy generally had some business with the British Consul there) was a lengthy and humiliating one. Our passports and our pack of seven photographs were handed over to an Iranian guard, who would keep us waiting for some time. Sandy would hand over the passports, one at a time, and the guard would take them without a word, stare at our faces and compare them with the ones in the passport before putting out a hand for the next. Finally the packs of photographs were handed over and the forms to be filled in were given to us. While we struggled with these, the senior official (who sat throughout in a chair in the wooden hut that did duty for a border post, his feet on the table) went through the passports examining the photographs one by one and commenting on them to the couple of assistant border-guards, who would look at them over his shoulder and laugh loudly whenever he laughed.

When the senior official felt he had wasted enough of his valuable time on us, he would take up our passports and throw them out of the open door of the hut on to the ground, from where, as the guard made no move, our chauffeur would descend from the car and pick them up. After which we were allowed to cross the border into Iraq, where the Iraqi officials glanced at our passports, stamped them, and handing them back waved us politely through.

On a later visit we were accompanied by a Frenchman, a friend of Sandy's who had business interests in those parts, and who showed us (too late to be of much use to us, I'm afraid) how to shorten these ridiculous shenanigans considerably. He wrote his surname and his Christian names in the correct slot, but drew a long diagonal line across the rest of the form. The border officer bristled at once and demanded the reason for this action, and the Frenchman said in a hushed voice: ‘Illegitimate!' At which the Boss and his assistants visibly melted, and murmuring ‘Ah, M'sieur, but how sad!' they patted him consolingly on the back and passed him through with no more fuss.

Basrah, what little I saw of it, remains in my memory as a pleasant town full of mosques and shade trees, busy streets and, in the suburbs, familiar East-of-Suez-style houses with flat roofs and whitewashed walls, and gardens full of poinsettias, canna lilies and bougainvillaea. It was the vast covered bazaar that drew us there, and Mother and I could have spent hours in it if our time had not been dictated by how long the car journey from Khorramshah had taken us this time, the hour the Consular launch would be leaving, and how soon Sandy could get through his official business and all three of us could escape after the inevitable luncheon party with friends or acquaintances. Any spare time that these restrictions left us we spent in the covered bazaar under the eagle eye – and wing – of one of the Consulate's Iraqi clerks, a jewel of a man who acted as a guide, interpreter and chief haggler.

There must be covered bazaars in many Eastern cities and I have seen a few of them myself, but none that held such fascination for me as the one in Basrah. The stalls that lined its winding ways made it into an ancient and far more attractive version of a modern shopping mall. It also had the advantage of looking like something out of the
Arabian Nights,
since most of it was covered with awnings of tattered canvas which let the sun shine through in a hundred brilliant shapes that patched the goods, and the shifting stream of turbaned or
bourkha
'd customers, with blobs and lozenges of gold.

Here and there a tear in the swagged ceiling-cloth would let in a long streak of sunlight, full of dancing motes that showed the atmosphere of the bazaar to be full of a hazy mist compounded of equal parts of the smoke of innumerable hookahs, dust, incense-sticks and fumes from the coffee-shops and purveyors of cakes and sweetmeats. The smell of the covered bazaar is not easily forgotten, an entirely individual mixture of the foul and the fragrant, for there were stenches as well as delicious scents, and one put up with the former for the sake of the latter.

Mother and I never stayed long enough to explore the bazaar, for we saw no point in wasting time on the stalls and shops which displayed goods that we knew we could not afford – carpets for instance, or jewellery. There were incredible glittering displays of the goldsmith's craft, earrings and necklaces, bracelets and brooches, chains and wrist-watches, ropes and handfuls of pearls from the Gulf, emeralds from the emerald mines of Swat, rubies from Ceylon – the island now known as Sri Lanka – and diamonds from Golconda.

We looked, but we did not buy. Our interest lay entirely with the cloth shops, for we needed materials for the furnishing of Sandy's house, and all the curtains and cushions and covers in it came from the covered bazaar. We also bought what we could for ourselves, because the material that made such an Aladdin's Cave out of every silk shop included offcuts from all the great Paris dress-shops. The head designers of such houses designed their own material and had it made up in limited lengths. Anything left over would not have been used again by the fashion-house that had ordered it, nor would they have allowed it to be sold locally. It was offloaded instead on to Arab traders in the Middle East, and one of the places where it ended up, to be re-sold at rock-bottom prices, was the covered bazaar in Basrah.

I still have several odd lengths that I bought there and never made use of. One (which I made into curtains for the ‘Columbine and Harlequin' room that was my bedroom during our stay in Persia) was so pretty that Sandy paid for it himself, so that he could keep it for curtaining the guest-room of whatever house he would be occupying next. I think it cost him the equivalent of one shilling and sixpence a yard. I lined the curtains with heavy unbleached linen, also bought in that bazaar, to make them hang better, and they should have lasted him for years, but for a sad accident that befell them not long afterwards. By a curious fluke, Mother and I happened to be spending a few nights with Sandy, this time in Peshawar, to which outpost of Empire he had been transferred following his stint in Persia, and where he was again in need of a bit of help with the furnishing …

Sandy had already hung the Basrah curtains in the guest-room that had been allotted to me in his Peshawar house. This was a small, bare room that appeared to have been tacked on to the bungalow as an afterthought, since it was on a different level to the rest of the house and had to be entered by way of two or three shallow steps. Facing these, on the far side of the room, was a door that led into a small, Indian-style bathroom and beside it, filling the rest of the space on that wall, were three windows set side by side, making one oblong one. The windows looked out on to a short gravel drive that led out, over a culvert, to one of Peshawar's main side-roads. There was only one way of watering the public and private gardens that kept the city a green oasis in a largely barren land: an elaborate series of ditches that circled the cantonment area and threaded through it under a series of culverts. Once a week each section of these suburbs had its individual sluice opened, usually at night, so that anything that needed watering, lawns, flower-beds (Peshawar was famous for its roses), shade trees and gardens, was flooded to a depth of about three inches. This method is used in many arid countries, so I was familiar enough with it to recognize the sound of rushing water that awakened me out of a sound sleep on my second night in Peshawar.

Lying in the dark and listening to it, I got more and more irritated by the noise and began to work out what I would say in a snarky letter to the Municipality, complaining of being woken up by the uproar and being quite unable to get to sleep again.

I remember tossing and turning and pulling a pillow over my ears to shut out the maddening sound, and my imaginary letters of complaint grew more and more acidulated, until suddenly, after a good hour of this I lost my temper. After a brief angry struggle with my mosquito net, I swung my feet clear and jumped out of bed. To land in over a foot of cold water!

It gave me the shock of my life and I did one of the stupidest things I could have done in the circumstances. I groped under my sodden mosquito net and turned on the switch of my bedside light. One is always warned not to muck about with electricity when in a bath, and I was in one all right. Almost up to my knees. Luckily, I came to no harm. I realized that the roar of water that had been driving me crazy was coming from a point much nearer to me than the culvert. I waded across the room and opened the bathroom door. It was a mistake …

The room appeared to be full of water, and I had a lightning vision of a wall of water on which leaves of Bromo lavatory paper floated like lily-pads, before the whole thing fell on me like the Red Sea falling on the hosts of Egypt. It swept me across the room to end up on the steps, and I managed to crawl up them, soaked to the skin, get the door at the top of them opened and, again without pausing to think, turn on the lights.

My room opened into the hall, and there was less water here, only a few inches, just enough to launch Sandy's treasured Persian carpets, which looked very pretty floating about on the surface of the flood. Sandy looked equally pretty when I banged on his bedroom door and he came paddling out wearing pale blue short-legged pyjamas, with his yellow hair all ruffled from sleep, just like Little Boy Blue. I remember telling him so. He was not amused. But fortunately, the sight of my duck-pond strewn with leaves of Bromo suddenly struck both of us as funny, and we spent the next half-hour in intermittent attacks of helpless giggling, which made it difficult to explain what had happened to Mother and Kadera and Sandy's bearer, who shot out of different doors and found themselves splashing in shallow water.

It wasn't anything to do with the Municipality after all. It was the pipe that brought the cold water into my bathroom – the hot was still carried in kerosene tins. It had broken somewhere near the ceiling, and if only I hadn't been sure that it was water intended for the garden, I could have stopped it – or rather, got Kadera and Co. to do so – almost as soon as it started. As it was, it left a horrid high water-mark on the wall of my bedroom and a worse one on the Basrah curtains. It didn't do much good to the furniture or Sandy's carpets, either. Sandy gave me the stained remains of those charming curtains, and I cut off the stained halves and kept the rest for years, using them for short windows and cushion covers and things like that. But to get back to Iran/Iraq …