Egyptians - then and now

Egyptians then and now

Think of Egypt and you think of the pharaohs, the Muslim brotherhood, Presidents Nasser and Mubarak, President Anwar Sadat who was assassinated by one of his own, you might think of all of these or none of them.

I remember President Nasser giving the world a shock or a reality check by nationalizing the Suez Canal in the late 50s. His actions brought the world to the brink of a world war, and led the then British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden’s wife to relate that during the Suez Crisis, she felt as if the whole of the canal was flowing through her living room. Nasser was an immensely popular figure in the Egyptian politics of the day; he stood up to the Western powers and probably gave his people some pride back.

The world pulled back from a conflict that would have involved the world’s major powers, and since that time the canal has fallen into a decline of sorts with the bigger oil tankers and merchant ships unable to sail between its banks.

President Anwar Sadat paid the ultimate price for brokering a peace treaty in the tormented region – he was assassinated. President Mubarak, the present incumbent, is still alive and well and steering his country between the opposing forces that occasionally threaten the peace of his nation.

When I think of Egypt, I immediately think of my own father who passed away a few years ago. As a young conscript, a sailor in the Royal Navy, he sailed to Port Said and then guarded the canal for the next two years. He did not enjoy the experience generally. Who would? Although ostensibly neutral, or at any rate, not hostile, my father spoke of crowds of irate Egyptians pushing against bulging wooden doors while he stood bayoneted rifle in hand in the event that the door gave way.

He didn’t have many good words for the people he had come to guard from the threat of Hitler’s armies, but his stories were mostly of young lads from British shores and their never ending ‘battle’ with their commanding officers – petty officers, captains and the like, and extended from Queen Street Barracks in Pompey to the shores of the Med and the Red Sea.

Our recollections of the people of Egypt mostly centre around our recent visit there. We met hoteliers, waiters, couriers, shopkeepers, museum curators and Luxor guides, and that other species of people, the chisellers of the street of Cairo.

Like the cockney born in the sound of the bells of Bow Church, Cairenes are not to be taken as being represented by used car salesmen in the case of London, or ‘street con-men’ in the case of Cairo. Guide books quick to relate the ‘hotel scam’ perpetrated by taxi drivers meeting you at the airport, are equally rapid in their assertion that normal, decent people from this enormous city would not dream of frustrating your movements for their own gain.

Said, our guide around the tombs of the valley of the kings on the West bank of the Nile at Luxor, contributed to what I said was one of the most interesting days I have ever spent in my life. Said constantly punctuated his narrative with searching questions to check if we understood. Feeling like a student again is no bad thing for a teacher to experience occasionally; it reminds you what the people sitting at their desks in your classroom feel like, hour after interminable hour.

I enjoyed the company of his friend, another guide, Mohammed. That is all I know of him, though I am sure he will recognize himself from this description. Mohammed took us down the Nile on a skiff to a small hamlet to drink tea and look around the menial dwellings there. He guided us around a crowded Luxor Temple, mouthfuls of information at every pylon and pillar.

When another tourist tried to latch on to his narrative without paying, though we hadn’t paid for this part of our day, he dismissed him briskly, shaking his head in disbelief. When the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, Mohammed begged us pause while he moved his lips and hands in some abbreviated form of prayer.

When we handed him what we though was a suitable sum of money for all the words he had spoken to us, he almost blushed, telling us that he was embarrassing him. He took the money, but at least he had the grace to help us think it was not necessary.

My wife and I both felt that my father should have visited Egypt again after his less than pleasant experiences of wartime Cairo, Port Said, Suez and Alexandria. We felt he had a sort of unfinished business with the country that took two years from his young life at a time when otherwise he would have been learning a trade in the engineering industry.

Instead, he was demobilised in 1945 without a trade, and too old to start one. The rest, as they say, is history; he met the love of his life, a young woman from Greenfield, fell in love with her and married her in 1949, some good few months before I came along.

My mother fell for a lad who had been overseas, fought in the War, been to places she could only point at in an atlas. That he knew his way around Cairo and Alexandria must have impressed a young lass who had barely been out of her valley.

Together, they have visited many foreign capitals: Valetta, Tangiers, Rome, Paris, Ankara, Nicosia, but never Cairo. His only ever tour of Egypt was courtesy of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. He often rued the day he ever set foot in Egypt, but to the day he died, he never stopped talking about it – it was part of his life, as it has become a part of mine – fascinated by a country that was home to pharaohs, generals and kings, and to the urchins who eke out a living in its sordid slums before making their pile in the industries that serve the Gulf states.
Robert L. Fielding