Freya Stark (5 page)

By the end of November, Elinor’s throat was giving trouble, Gertrude was pining for London and Freya was saying that she had always known that she would end up as nurse. ‘There are not many born travellers, though they think they are … I hate archaeology if it means that one’s whole soul has to turn into statistics and eliminate human beings … You may not believe it, but with
Gertrude our
whole
conversation is either ancient flints or tinned food: there seems no half-way house.’

With more than a passing touch of reflective malice, Freya sat down one day and sketched out the qualities of the true traveller. ‘Last night,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘I made a list (for myself) of the seven cardinal virtues for a traveller:

‘And,’ she could not resist adding, ‘I should like to see Gertrude trying to conform to
one
of them.’

It would have been funny had it not been so tense. They must have been a curious party, the three excessively English ladies: Gertrude off digging whenever she could, Elinor sifting through her rocks, while Freya wandered or sat writing, all against a gentle but incessant bickering, while fevers raged and the heat rose into the hundreds. The problem, for Freya, lay only with Gertrude, who minded very much who was in charge, and while she would not tolerate Freya interfering with her flints, spent much time meddling with what Freya called ‘human relations’. ‘I think’, noted Freya, ‘I shall emerge from this winter an
anti-feminist
, because really women might be a little nicer to each other: they practise none of the graces of life …’ The words are revealing. By the end of the thirties, Freya had very strong views as a traveller, she did find most women irritating and unquestionably preferred men, and, even so, only the deference which her upbringing had instilled in her to regard men with respect ever made them tolerable as travelling companions. Gertrude and Elinor were doomed.

At the beginning of March the party split up. Gertrude and Elinor set off thankfully back towards
Cairo, while Freya decided on a last solitary exploration of South Arabia, a month’s ride along an unvisited incense route to the coast through the tribal borderlands of the west, to try to establish the whereabouts of the Himyaritic harbour of Cana, emporium of the incense trade. She left, perched high on a camel, under her sunshade. It was a gruelling 120-mile ride. Yet again she was not well, afflicted with what turned out to be dengue fever. At Azzan, still some twenty miles from her destination, she was warned against journeying alone through dangerous countryside, hostile to infidels. She made it to the coast by joining a well-armed caravan of twenty-seven camels, carrying tobacco, with a bodyguard of twelve soldiers and four relations of the Sultan of Azzan. She brought with her a lizard, named Himyar after his mountain home, clasped to her under a quilt.

Freya on her desert travels in the 1930s

At Balhaf, on the coast, a dismal, volcanic spot, the caravan unloaded the tobacco onto a boat. Freya was still some eight hours’ ride from her real objective, the town of Husn-el-Ghurab. She travelled on, having been promised a boat to carry her back to Balhaf. At
Husn-el
-Ghurab she found buildings, fortifications and cisterns, all consistent with its claims to be Cana, and noted ‘crocodile black snouts of lava, half submerged, push through … everywhere.
Beyond, in a sea misty with sunlight, are the islands as the Peripeus describes them …’ While she was wandering in the town, the inhabitants gathered and began to threaten; there was talk of shooting; the boat had not turned up. Freya climbed back onto her camel and rode to Balhaf through the night. Before she left, while waiting to discuss her future with a deputation of village leaders, came a characteristic bit of bravado: ‘I was beyond anything else thirsty. “Are they sending the boat and the water?” I asked.

‘“They are sending the water, but no boat.” Their methods of warfare, I could not help feeling, compared favourably with those of Europe.

‘It was time to attend to the bewildered envoys. Diplomatically speaking, we had the situation in hand. “Welcome and ease.” I said. “When are you coming to shoot us?”’

Later, Freya described her expedition in
The Times
, and in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society. Though others before her had suggested Husn-el-Ghurab for Cana, no one had produced such detailed and careful descriptions of the surrounding countryside. ‘The average Englishman’, wrote Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the distinguished Arabist and diplomat, in a foreword to
A Winter in Arabia
, Freya’s book on the Hadhramaut, ‘is not
blessed with an exaggerated sense of imagination in his dealings with other races, but it is to be hoped that all who read Miss Stark’s pages will learn the difference between the right way and the wrong, and profit thereby.’

The months of unhappy partnership, under Freya’s pen, made their way into the book. She started with a ferocious attack on Gertrude Caton Thompson, but her asperity was toned down by Cockerell (to no more than a few acid asides about an unnamed archaeologist, and a smug comment that whenever Freya spoke of her companions to the women of Hureidha, they spat), though not before some ruthless fighting with Jock Murray, to whom she protested bitterly that cutting would destroy all point to her words.

Miss Caton Thompson waited over forty years before taking her revenge. In 1983 she brought out her autobiography,
Mixed Memoirs
; the Freya who emerges from Chapter 23, clearly named and identified, is inefficient, quarrelsome, imperious, unscrupulous and, noted the ninety-year-old author with a kind of tart relish, had been called a ‘bloody bitch’ by the pilot who had come fruitlessly in search of her when she was ill. ‘Which,’ she concluded sombrely, ‘I thought moderate in the circumstances.’

Freya returned to a Europe on the brink of the Munich crisis, bringing with her Himyar, who had developed an expensive taste for violets, and forever disillusioned with archaeology: ‘It means seeing nothing but the dead,’ she complained in a letter to Cockerell, ‘and the living world is too beautiful and vivid for that.’ She sat writing in Asolo, waiting for a coded telegram from Lady Iveagh in London. When it came all it said was ‘Olga dying’. ‘Olga’ meant peace. Freya packed, caught the Orient Express from Venice and was in Paris ordering a final hat when she saw Hitler’s ultimatum to Czechoslovakia printed, like a funeral announcement, in thick black letters.

There was just time for one more journey. Early in 1939 she travelled for a last look at the Crusader castles. On the way up to Krak des Chevaliers a guide tried to plunder her baggage. Instead of cowering, Freya rounded on him, rallied the others, and having subdued him continued to berate him all the way down the mountain; when he sought to kiss her hand, she pulled it away. The incident said much about how she saw herself as a traveller, intrepid, yet respectful of the dignity of those among whom she travelled, a woman alone, subduing bandits by superior moral strength. It was also the same spirit of courage that prompted her, when in her
late seventies, to pursue a band of robbers from her remote house in the foothills of the Dolomites firing a revolver over their heads. She later explained that she had had to shoot, otherwise no one would have believed her capable. A last series of short visits, then back ‘to look again at Greece before the curtain fell’.

Freya began the war in London as a South Arabia expert for the Ministry of Information. She was given a salary of £600 a year and immediately spent some of it on what she considered the basic necessities for a prolonged war: a little bag for all ‘one’s toilet things to take with me to the basement … a winter suit … and French face powder which we may never see again for the next five years’. Within a couple of weeks came a request from Stewart Perowne, now Information Officer in Aden, to join him as his assistant. Pausing in Asolo to collect a trunk of tropical clothes and in Cairo where she noted approvingly that the women were wearing scented
jasmine around their wrists for parties, she reached Aden in November.

Before the Suez Canal was built, Aden was a coaling station on the route to India. It had been a British colony for just over a century, Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines having captured the rocky promontory in the name of Queen Victoria in January 1839, and turned it into a prosperous merchant city. At the outbreak of war a rich ship-owning family had donated a building to the British as a free war gift, and it was here that Freya came to work and live, up steep wooden stairs, with a terrace overlooking the harbour. Her two personal rooms were full of hefty Victorian furniture and hung with stately royal portraits. She woke, in a mahogany four-poster bed, to distant muezzin calls to prayer. There was a secretary called Dyllis and a translator called Ali Muhammad.

From her two earlier journeys in the Hadhramaut, Freya still had a number of friends in Aden. They did not give her quite the welcome she hoped for. Gertrude Caton Thompson, travelling back through the city at the end of their winter in Hureidha, had managed to add her own voice to an opinion gaining some ground that, though fascinating and full of charm, Freya as a traveller could be ruthless, too quick to use others and lazy in her gratitude.

Whatever reserve may have been felt locally was soon dispelled by the war. Stewart Perowne put her to writing a summary of the day’s news which Ali would translate into Arabic so that it could be broadcast from a loudspeaker in the square after evening prayer. The news started out as truthful; as reports from Europe grew more worrying, ‘we stressed the celestial city in the distance and pointed out with stronger emphasis the temporary nature of those swamps and thickets that lay in the immediate path’. It was the sort of thing Freya was best at.

Life in Aden was agreeable. Freya rose early, drove out by taxi beyond the peninsula, by windmills and saltpans, and rode around the dunes, skirting the gardens of a Sheikh Othman which smelt ‘like all the spices of Arabia’. Sometimes she saw flamingos. In the evenings, after work, she gave a glass of vermouth to anyone who turned up on her terrace, and they sat watching the lights of the ships in the bay. There were dinner parties in Government House with Sir Bernard Riley, bridge games at the Union Club and dances for the soldiers on their way out to India. Her relations with Stewart Perowne were very cordial; almost flirtatious. On her arrival she had found him ‘long-necked and bald-headed like a young vulture, but with none of that pompous slowness which gives vultures their official look …’
To Cockerell, she wrote that he treated her as if she were his wife, always expecting her to be there, but giving her no information to go on. ‘I keep him in a state of mild but continuous exasperation. Do you think it’s a sign of love or hate? It seems quite pleasant anyway.’ To escape the constant work, she insisted on ‘two walks a week in the hills to listen to silence’.

Towards the end of the year, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, then in Political Intelligence, wrote to ask for information, particularly on the Yemen where the Italians and Germans were active. It was the sort of request that appealed to Freya. She despatched one of her most forthright and reasoned letters back, arguing that the British were doing wrong in not taking the Italians more seriously, and suggesting a ‘riposte to every Italian step’. What she proposed to do, she said, was to smuggle a portable projector into the Yemen, with a number of very British films. ‘The idea is to sit there, visit harems, rectify rumours and alter the atmosphere as much as one can from the standpoint of female insignificance, which has its compensations.’

Sana’a, the walled capital of Yemen, was like a medieval European town. The narrow streets were lined with craftsmen, polishing gems and carving daggers; down them wound an endless procession
of men leading donkeys and camels. Freya reached the city by lorry, ‘like a new weapon of iron into the bronze age’, with a cook, a servant and three other men, having taken six days up the torrent beds of the northern frontier. She found a state ruled over with ‘religious fastness’ by the Imam Jahya, so that toys showing the human form were confiscated. It was as well that she had thought to hide her projector. There were a number of Italians, who had cornered the medical field, and a small British community who possessed the only tennis court.

Obedient to local custom, Freya was fed by the palace kitchens for the first few days, given a guard of three soldiers and lodged in the Turkish suburb in a house among gardens. In the first week she taught the Imam’s cook to make butter and translated a telegram from King George into Arabic. For the next two months, she visited harems, peering with the women through carved lattices at the busy life of the town below, and infiltrating her cinema into their rooms. Soon she was showing to a different harem every night. Never practical, she found setting up the performance, while stumbling over women and children, threading the film and setting up the screen, extremely nerve-racking. She had three military films with her, but found that
Ordinary Life in Edinburgh
went down best with the ladies of the court.

By March she felt that she had done as much damage to the Italian mission as she could, having obviously derived considerable enjoyment out of teasing them. ‘This place’, she wrote to Stewart, ‘is now fairly convinced that Britain is
strong
.’ She returned to Aden in time for the air raids, for Italy had now declared war. Soon a ship was sunk outside the bay; then a submarine was captured. As Freya knew Italian, she was invited to breakfast on the Admiral’s flagship, to look at captured papers and to translate in the interrogation of survivors.

While on her way to join Stewart Perowne in Aden the previous autumn, Freya had spent a night at the British Embassy in Ankara. There she met ‘an officer with many ribbons, active, not tall, with grizzled hair and a stead-fastness as of friendly granite all about him; and in his general expression, a look of gaiety and youth’. It was General Wavell. By 1940 he was Commander-in-Chief in Cairo. Feeling in need of a break, Freya now set off for Egypt, where she bought herself a ‘Molyneux creation’ and went to call on Wavell. The moment had come, she argued, to encourage a raid on the hinterland of Genoa and to rally the anti-fascists. Wavell was a notoriously silent man. He said nothing. Even Freya was somewhat intimidated. Eventually he spoke: ‘I have no troops to
spare.’ This was an improbable start to a friendship, but Wavell and Freya were to be close friends from this time on. Though she was unable to launch a battle, Freya got herself transferred to Cairo, at double her existing salary, and somewhat to Stewart Perowne’s annoyance.

Early in September, Freya settled into a flat in Zamalek, on the edge of the Nile. From her terrace, she could watch the ibis and the barges on the river. She bought two carpets, a silver coffee-pot and a baby Austin, telling Stewart Perowne that ‘one has to live dangerously somehow in wartime’ (Freya’s driving was almost too dangerous to be a joke; people spoke of her, when at the wheel, accelerating down the troop-filled streets, as one of the ‘chief menaces to the general safety of Egypt’). Cairo was very gay. There were dinners and dances at the British Embassy, set among wide lawns on the edge of the Nile, with buckets of roses and silver plates, and the soldiers all in their mess jackets. There might be breakfast with General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, and talk about when to invade Italy; perhaps lunch at the Turf Club with Steven Runciman, a tea party on her terrace, then on to drinks at Shepheard’s Hotel, with some of the soldiers back on leave from the front. Freya spent Christmas in Luxor with the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, and his wife, dancing with the pashas in
the evening and galloping on donkeys across the desert in the day.

She was, however, also hard at work. When Freya reached Cairo, General Graziani was at the Western desert frontier, advancing with 300,000 men. There were some 80,000 Italians in Egypt, most of them inclined towards fascism. The intention behind Freya’s appointment was to help find a way of keeping on the British side the Egyptians whom the fascist Italian colony were trying to undermine. To this work Freya brought a new idea of her own. Propaganda, she had decided, was a wrong word to focus on, since it implied a sinister twist of deceit. What was needed instead was persuasion, and that entailed commitment on the part of the person practising it; it had to be of advantage to both speaker and listener; and the local people themselves had to interpret and distribute the words. Encouraging would-be friends, not proselytising enemies, was her goal.

Freya’s chosen tool was something she had been thinking about ever since war broke out. This was a network of committees or cells, who would meet, and talk, in a pro-ally, pro-British spirit. The Brothers and Sisters of Freedom, as they were soon named, began by meeting on her terrace over coffee. Then they spread to other parts of Cairo. All kinds of people joined
in, both Egyptian and foreign, and within a couple of months Freya had been invited to speak at the Al Azhar University, stronghold of Moslem learning.

Nominally, Freya was attached to the embassy. Much of her time, however, was spent in her baby Austin, visiting cells, first in Cairo, later, as the Brotherhood spread, in the villages. In Alexandria, where a cell was started by a rich contractor, Abd-al-Khalil Kinawi, it soon grew enormous, particularly among the workers from the dockyards.

During the autumn, Freya was joined by Pamela Hore-Ruthven, whose husband Pat was fighting in the desert, and Lulie Abul Huda, Oxford educated and daughter of a prominent Turkish-Egyptian family. Pamela Hore-Ruthven spoke no Arabic, but was tall, fair-haired, beautiful and had many friends; Lulie Abul Huda had both friends and perfect Arabic. They started out with a plump Coptic assistant and twenty camel drivers. Freya worked them hard. Considerably older than any of them, she seemed inexhaustible, sitting bolt upright in her tight European suits and extraordinary hats, talking for hour upon hour, listening, reasoning. ‘She was never lackadaisical,’ remembers Pamela Hore-Ruthven. ‘She did hope to find others to do the donkey work – but if they didn’t, she did it herself. She had this extraordinary faith in Britain winning the war. There was something in that
short, tough body that never doubted about British Empire.’

Reactions to the Brotherhood in Cairo were mixed, with the older Turkish aristocracy regarding the ‘whisperers’ with some suspicion, as ‘intelligence’, while some of the British diplomats mocked it, or wondered whether it shouldn’t concern itself exclusively with women, something Freya was adamantly opposed to. Among the military, however, there was little but admiration for Freya, whether for her tenacity and enterprise or her charm, and among the young soldiers in particular she was soon something of a mascot, in her improbable clothes, with her quick repartee, and a way of talking the young men found ‘not exactly erudite, but wonderfully philosophical’. With those just back from the desert, she could be flirtatious, in an intellectual sort of way. She was both very wise and charmingly, absurdly innocent. They felt they grew up, listening to her talk.

By the end of 1941, the Brotherhood had 400 members; in the following years it spread up and down the Nile so that by January 1942 there were thought to be some 6,000 people pledged to fight the fifth column. Only by then Freya was long since gone, having carried her weapon of persuasion with her to Iraq.

In April 1941, four Iraqi colonels, known as the Golden Square and heavily influenced by the Germans, seized power in Baghdad. They were led by a politician called Rashid Ali Gailani. They took over the post office and the radio station and entered the palace to arrest the British-supported regent, Emir Abdulillah, uncle of the young King Faisal the second, only to find him gone, having been spirited out of Baghdad, hidden under rugs at the back of a car, by the American minister Mr Knabenshue.

The British community was in a state of some flux, with a new ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, distinguished Arabist and former British adviser, arriving. There were rumours, uncertainties, a pause, during which Cornwallis arranged for the landing of British troops at Basra. A second landing of troops triggered off the start of hostilities in the desert. The embassy was besieged.

Freya was one of the last to arrive in Baghdad before its gates closed. She had been travelling in Persia and had hastened south, driving up, she later explained to Cockerell, through ‘about 5,000 students with banners, and dancing and patriotic yells. They engulfed the car and surged along on either side, giving it a kick or a spit now and then; I kept smiling …’

While one rescue party set off from Basra, and
another from Transjordan, the embassy settled down to its siege. There were about 350 people, including the servants, but very few women, the wives and children having been flown out to India; it was the kind of situation Freya greatly enjoyed. While the gardeners went on watering the cypresses and the verbena, she recruited Seton Lloyd, former adviser to the Iraqi Department of Antiquities, to help her monitor the foreign news and prepare a daily bulletin for the embassy. Since all the other radios had been confiscated, they listened to one in a car, parked on the lawn. To this day Seton Lloyd can remember Freya’s cross voice saying: ‘We’ve
heard
all this,’ as the dim voices from Jerusalem crackled and faded.

Freya’s morale was superb. Spurning the dormitory set aside for the ladies, she took her mattress up to the terrace and slept in a corner overlooking the Tigris from where she could watch the police launches chugging up and down the river and keep an eye on the crowds gathering in the upper town. Through Vyvyan Holt’s good relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fresh food was brought in every day; Freya put in a request for face powder for the ladies, causing a policeman on the gate to remark how strange it was that English women could think about their faces when they were shortly to be massacred.