SPEAK TO ME OF SUEZ

Posted in Family life, Places by carolcooper

In this short extract from my novel The Girls from Alexandria, ten-year-old Nadia gives her take on the events of Suez.

ALEXANDRIA, 1956

It began on the twenty-sixth of July when I was ten and a half years old, or, as I preferred to put it, nearly eleven.

The whole thing was about a canal and a dam. President Gamal Abdel Nasser was a big man with a muscular jaw and impressive teeth that he showed all the time.

That night in 1956 was the fourth anniversary of the revolution. Nasser celebrated by giving a long speech right here in Alexandria, in Mansheya Square by that statue of Mohammed Ali Pasha wearing a turban and brandishing a sword as he sits on his horse.

^{Mansheya Square, Alexandria, via Wikimedia Commons}

I enjoyed listening to Nasser on the radio because I could understand his speeches. Unlike other important men who make themselves sound clever by using formal Arabic, Nasser spoke a colloquial language that every Egyptian could follow, even a child of not quite eleven. That, I thought, was much cleverer.

Whenever anything interesting happened, I was sent to bed instead of being allowed to stay up, so I missed the big speech. Mother told me about it the next morning, which was hardly the same thing. I was especially sorry to have missed the firemen dispersing the crowds in Mansheya Square.

We were all upstairs by the air conditioning which was on at full blast against the sweltering heat. Father and Mother told Simone and me that the Suez Canal now belonged to Egypt instead of France or Britain. That meant it would raise lots of money for Egypt and would pay to build a High Dam at Aswan.

It was a good thing that the Suez Canal had been nationalised. Unless you happened to be Britain or France, I supposed.

For a while after that, I forgot about canals and went back to puzzling over Uncle Selim. Selimkept a thin book in his pocket. Whenever I took an interest in it, however, his reptile eyes swivelled towards me and I’d have to look away. I only glimpsed it once before he whisked the little book back into his breast pocket.

‘Poetry and papyrus,’ Tante Zahra scoffed between burps.

When term started, I consulted the encyclopaedia in the school library. Papyrus came from a plant in the Delta, though that did not enlighten me about Selim. For good measure, I looked up palimpsest as well, its entry being nearby. That was all about scraping something off a parchment to use it again.

As it turned out, I didn’t get a chance to visit the school library for ages after that. In October, some countries got angry with Egypt for taking a canal that should have been Egyptian in the first place. Father and Mother did not fully explain it but, in no time at all, France, Britain, and Israel all ganged up to declare war on Egypt.

Abdou stuck blackout paper on all the windows, and every night we heard air-raid sirens and anti-aircraft guns. That’s what my horrid cousin Victor called them. With schools shut, he was in our garden more than ever. He told me that the guns were at Smouha, barely a few kilometres away, but I insisted that didn’t scare me at all, so there.

Simone knew better. She hugged me and reassured me that everything would be all right. ‘You can sleep in my room,’ she said.

I padded into her room when the lights were out, leaving my teddy bear behind. I didn’t want my sister to think I was still a baby. What with the guns and Simone’s feet, I barely slept at all while sharing her bed, but at least there was the chance that some of her courage would rub off on to me in the night.

***

The Girls from Alexandria is out on April 1, and features this stunning cover designed by Emma Rogers.

16Mar2021

COCKTAILS & CAMELS

Posted in Family life, Writing by carolcooper

I’ve mentioned my forthcoming novel The Girls from Alexandria a fair bit recently, but it’s a while since I shared something from Cocktails and Camels. Sixty years on from when my mother wrote it, I still think it’s one of the most entertaining books ever. And no, I’m not at all biased.

Grandmother, a beautiful green-eyed woman with jet-black hair, had come from Damascus at the age of thirteen to marry Grandfather, whom she had never set eyes on before.

Grandfather had originated in Lebanon, studied in Paris, then emigrated to Egypt and prospered as a merchant. Although the marriage was one of convenience, as marriages often were, it seems to have worked out. My grandparents had eight boys.

Mother and Father were less fortunate. They had us —three daughters. A daughter was not only nothing to write home about, it was something one should definitely not write home about. As for having three daughters, it was a calamity. Obviously someone had given Mother and Father the Evil Eye.

The Evil Eye was, like the British, very active in the Middle East and responsible for everything that went wrong. If someone admired your new dress and then you spilled coffee all over it, it wasn’t that you were clumsy. It was the Evil Eye.

But, if Father was disappointed at having three daughters, he never showed it. Father never showed anything, which was very smart of him but most un-Arab. He faced his fate very well, far better than Maha, the Lebanese nanny who had been with Mother before she was married.

Maha was a big moon-faced woman with brown velvet eyes and pierced ear-lobes from which hung tiny blue beads which were meant to ward off the Evil Eye. She seemed to have been put together out of a series of cushions and looked like a Michelin advertisement.

Because she was flat-footed, but mainly because she was Lebanese, she padded around in bedroom slippers which she had turned down at the back. Her elephantine tread was always accompanied by the soft clinking of thin gold bracelets on her plump wrists. They were her entire fortune and she added one whenever she had saved some money.

Once a week on her afternoon off, she painted her eyes crudely with kohl and stuffed herself into a corset and high-heeled shoes several sizes too small. Then, pirouetting clumsily in front of us, she’d say, smiling like a child, ”I’m not all that fat, am I, my darlings?”

When I was born, Maha sobbed for a week. She did not throw her arms up in the air and cry, ”Mabrouk, mabrouk, congratulations, may the little one live to be one hundred,” and then bake some very special Lebanese dish which would sit on our stomachs for the rest of the night.

She did not utter one single little mabrouk. Such congratulations were used for happy things like baby boys, and really important things like having a new dress or getting over a corn on the foot. But having a girl was not a corn on the foot. It was a pain in the neck. As for being a girl—well, maybe one could live it up in England or the United States, but in the East it was something to live down.

Things have changed so much for women. Or have they?

3Mar2021

THOUGHTS ON WORLD BOOK DAY

Posted in Animals, Family life, Places, Writing by carolcooper

World Book Day is about every child and young person getting a book of their own, but it has also made me think around the topic of children and books.

I was about four or five years old when my mother began writing her first book, Cocktails and Camels. She did it in my room, it being the sunniest one in my grandparents’ house in Alexandria where we all lived.

As if that weren’t bad enough, silence was required while my mummy filled reams of paper with her pencilled scrawl. Sometimes she stopped to smile at what she’d written, and occasionally she even laughed, but she rarely read any of it out loud to me. Here’s a tip if you ever want to annoy a child: make sure they have no idea what’s going on, then demand they keep absolutely quiet during it.

After some time, I piped up. “I’m going to write a book too!”

Because it’s also #throwbackThursday aka #TBT, you’re getting this of my mother and me in the garden.

I did end up writing books and, like my mother, I use pencil and paper for my first drafts. The novels are entirely made up, but where do the characters come from? I don’t know. They come from here and there, I suppose, from snatches of conversation or a chance sighting of someone so offbeat that they beg to be put in a book.

They also come from ill-defined experiences that go way back and suddenly decide to leap into my head. This they usually do in the middle of the night, and I have to jot it all down on paper lest I forget, which I’m told can be annoying when it happens at 2am, and again at 4am.

As I recall, my mother was apt to do this too. And no, it’s not ‘annoying’. I prefer to think of it as the circle of writing life.

I’m very proud of my mother and all her books, including those for children, but especially this one as it’s a warm and witty tribute to the cosmopolitan Alexandria that I loved and was home.

And now my childhood has led to a novel set in the same world that no longer exists. You may know this already from my frequent mentions of The Girls from Alexandria which is out next month. I’m sorry that my mother isn’t around to enjoy it, or to hear me say how much I owe her.

***

Enough of this wallowing in sentiment. It’s not just World Book Day and Throwback Thursday. It’s also Mishmish’s tenth birthday. Her name is Arabic for apricot and she is a goddess.