A Father's Betrayal

by Gabriella Gillespie

It was a long tunnel-like room with a small round window at the other end, and under the window was a hole in the floor and a bucket of water in the corner. It was dark and the only light came from the tiny window; there was no light fitting in sight.

  To get over to the hole at the other end you had to bend down and, as you were hunched over, make your way into the toilet and stay that way until you left. The ceiling was made from tree branches and little thin bits of wood that were covered in cobwebs. The hole for the toilet dropped to the bottom of the house and the draught came up as you squatted over it. It stank, and it was so uncomfortable I wished that I never had to use the toilet ever again in my life, ever!

  When I finished I ran upstairs and told Issy about the toilet. She didn’t believe it was as bad as I said, so I took her downstairs to see for herself. She was horrified! It was even worse for her because she was taller than I was, so she had more bending down to do.

  I mentioned the fact that there were no light fixtures in the toilet and that I hadn’t seen any anywhere around the house, so off we went to explore. As I thought, there were none to be seen anywhere. However, we thought, there must be electricity, otherwise how do they have light? Use the appliances? Or watch TV? I went in search for Farouse once again and tried to demonstrate a light switch to her. She looked puzzled so I tried a light bulb, and again she was puzzled. I told Issy we might as well give up and wait for Uncle Mohammed to come back and ask him, because there was no way there were no lights!

  The gathering took place in the middle room of the house. The women came from all over the village bringing with them huge pots of teas. The teapots were so big I never knew they made them that size! They kept them warm by covering them in the side of the room with big huge blankets. By the time all the women had arrived the room was full and the pots of tea were stacked high.

  We were puzzled that the women kept forcing money into our hands; not realising it was one of their customs, we tried to refuse, but Gran kept telling us off, forcing the money back into our hands, so we took the money and put it in our pockets.

  Uncle Mohammed’s wife came and she was quite pretty, she had a young boy and two young girls. Issy and I were made to sit at the head of the room while the women sat all around us.

  Farouse went around with about ten tiny tea cups, handing out one each as far as they went, and then she went and took a pot of tea from under the blanket. She then went around and filled the cup of whoever had one. The women drank the tea down as quickly as they could and then Farouse collected the cups and handed them out again without even washing them! Starting from the female she had ended with when the cups ran out, she started handing them out again and pouring tea.

  The tea they drank was not like tea we knew, these afternoon teas were different. Some were brown with big bits in them called gishr, made with sugar; another was called buon which was a coffee with ginger, made without sugar and not the most popular drink.

  We refused to drink, and I think Farouse understood it was because the cups hadn’t been washed. So after the cups had gone around the room a few times, Farouse brought down a bowl of clean water to wash them; she then offered us a clean cup before anyone else which we took. I enjoyed the taste of the gishr; it became one of my favourite drinks!

  The women here were so different to the women in Aden and the dress style so different. Some females here were dressed in colourful high-waisted and puffed out at the bottom dresses. They had average high necks and came below the knees. But they also wore tight fitting trousers underneath.

  The headscarves they wore were again colourful. They wrapped the hanging bit of the scarf under their chin and back up to the top of their head tying it in a little knot at the top of their heads. They were such big heavy scarves that extra material would leave a ‘v’ shape part hanging down from the neck to cover any showing cleavage. However, their faces were uncovered even when walking through the village.

  The colourfully dressed females, we found out, were the married women. The other little girls or younger females wore baggy, shabby dresses with high neck lines, mostly black or grey, and had baggy trousers underneath that dragged in the dusty floor. Although a few of them wore black scarves, they mostly wore these silly looking pointy things on their heads that were neither scarves nor hats, but something in between, they also didn’t have to cover up outside.

  The afternoon went by and the women left after a few hours. Gran didn’t say a word as Issy and I sat at the downstairs windows and watched as she herded the goats, sheep and chickens from the outside stables into the inside stables which, we found out, were inside the house on the bottom floor. The reason Gran was OK with us sitting at the downstairs windows was because they were protected by metal poles so you couldn’t stick our head out, so we couldn’t really see much, and nobody could really see us.

  As it got darker we got anxious to see what was going to happen about the electricity because we hadn’t seen Uncle Mohammed so we still didn’t know. When Farouse walked into the room with a hand held lamp and started lighting candles and putting them around the room, my heart sank. She walked over to us and handed us a candle and a torch.

  “I really, really just want to cry right now!” I sulked with the saddest look on my face. Issy looked up at Farouse.

  “Uncle Mohammed, can you take us to Uncle Mohammed?” she asked in very slow English to try and get Farouse to understand. It worked! Farouse ran off and we could hear her and Gran arguing downstairs, and then it went silent.

  About ten minutes later Uncle Mohammed turned up, his mouth the size of a small ball on one side; he was chewing ghat, a green leaf that almost all the men, and sometimes women, chew in the afternoons when they get together. The juice from the ghat gives them a mild sedative affect that makes them relaxed. They chew on the leaf until they have a ball in the side of their mouths. They suck the juice out of the leaf and swallow it as they chew, sometimes spitting out the juice if it’s too much in their mouths.

  We asked him about the electricity and he told us there was none in the village or any of the villages nearby. Only the big cities and towns had electricity at that time. Our village was hoping to receive it in a few years, together with water pipes.

  Once again our hearts sank. We had no idea that the house had no water connection! He told us that they used hand held lamps, candles and torches for light; however he tried to reassure us that Granddad had a tape recorder that he would allow us to borrow – if we used it sensibly, because batteries were expensive.

  He told us the water was brought in from the wells on a daily basis and the wells are in the fields not far away. After we moaned at Uncle Mohammed for an hour or so he said he needed to go home to his family, but would be back in the morning to check on us. Then he left us, leaving Issy and me to deal with our first night in our new home.

  That night we stayed upstairs with our candles and refused to go downstairs. Farouse came up and tried to get us to go down and sit with them but we didn’t see any point in it. We did not know these people, and had no wish to get to know them. We liked Farouse, but at that moment in time we had so much to come to terms with.

  We sat together and talked about Yas and Ablah and how much we missed them. Ablah must have been so worried about us by not hearing from us at all since we left England. Yas was all alone in Aden; we wondered how she was coping and whether or not she had any friends to talk to.

  We cried a lot that night, and silently I prayed that Dad would come quickly and bring Yas back to us. We put our mattresses together and cuddled up to go to sleep.

  “Goodnight Issy, goodnight Yas, goodnight Ablah, love you all!” I whispered as I closed my eyes.

  Next morning we were woken at the crack of dawn by Gran’s voice shouting at Farouse; it was as if she never stopped. We tossed and turned as much as we could to get back to sleep, but in the end we couldn’t so we got up.

  It was barely light outside but everyone must have been up for hours because we could smell
the smoke from the clay oven burning. We went down to the kitchen and found Gran and Farouse cooking breakfast.

  Gran was busy making ‘foul’ on the smaller clay oven. Foul is a brown bean which looks similar to a kidney bean and made into a curry so that you can dip the bread into it. Farouse was making the ‘maloowja’ which is a bread cooked in the larger clay oven.

  There are two different types of breads made, one called maloowja and one called ‘khobs’ but the daily and most commonly made is maloowja. As we watched Farouse make the bread, we were amazed she didn’t set herself on fire!

  Once all the wood and anything else that was in the clay oven had finished burning, there was a round pile of burning flames coming from inside. These flames were being kept alight by a big piece of wood that was stuck through a hole at the bottom of the clay oven.

  From a big bowl of dough made the night before, Farouse would break off a big handful of dough. Then she kept transferring it from one hand to the other, smoothing it out and stretching it. While doing this she added a yellow slimy substance on one side which was called ‘hilba’, this was the un-whipped version of what was added to the soup the day before. The hilba helped the dough from sticking to her hand when she needed to transfer the dough onto the inside of the clay oven wall.

  Once the dough was stretched and hanging from her hands Farouse leant over the oven, putting one leg up onto the side of the clay oven for balance. Then she put her hands into the oven and transferred the dough onto the oven wall as quickly as she could, spreading it thinly across an area of the wall. While spreading it across the oven she would quickly take her hands out and dip them into a bucket of water placed on the floor next to the oven. This was supposed to help her with any pain she felt from the flames rising from the oven.

  She did this three times until the oven wall was completely covered in bread. Then she covered the oven with a very large round metal lid that had a little handle, and a little small hole to look through to check when the bread was cooked. Once the bread was cooked, she gently tugged on the sides of the bread, easing them off the wall of the oven with her fingers and then pulling them out. If any of them broke and fell into the fire Gran would shout at her and Farouse would have to put her hands into the fire and rescue the bread quickly before it burnt. We watched in awe as Farouse made at least ten breads that morning, enough for the day ahead.

  After breakfast was made Gran transferred some foul into a little bowl. Then she wrapped some bread in a piece of cloth and poured some tea from an old black kettle that had been brewing on the smaller clay oven, into a smaller black kettle. After she had done all this she put everything in a little basket, covered them with a little thick blanket, put them on her head and set off to the fields to take breakfast to Granddad, who had been working in the fields for hours!

  We had our first taste of hot maloowja smothered with home-made butter dipped in foul and washed down with sweet black Arabic tea that morning. Farouse let us have our own dishes since Gran was in the fields with Granddad, it tasted good and we ate loads!

  Uncle Mohammed did not visit us that morning so after breakfast we helped Farouse with the chores. She took us down to the stables that were under the stairs on the bottom floor of the house, they were to the left as you came through the front door. She had to light the lamp to go in because it was so dark and I could hear the animals inside before we entered.

  There were three different stables, one for the goats, one for the sheep and one had loads of chickens in it! The stables were big and dark and the smell was so strong and overpowering I could barely breathe! She opened the stables one by one and the animals ran out and made their own way into the stables outside, except the chickens, they ran wild for a while outside the front door before she managed to gather them up and put them in their rightful place.

  Farouse then took us to the other rooms that were on the middle floor. The room straight in front as we came up the stairs was Gran and Granddad’s; it was always locked.

  The other two to the left were store rooms. One of them was a store room where they kept their clothes and belongings and any food that didn’t need to be stored in a cool place. The other room was a really cold room and had lots of small round windows like holes in it. That’s where all the food that needed to be kept cold would be stored and it was as cold as a fridge. There were pieces of dried meat hanging from wires in the ceiling, the meat was dry and shrivelled up and looked like they had been hanging there for years!

  She was eager to show us how she did her chores, starting with the cleaning and brushing the stairs. She used a brush made from tree branches that were tied together with a piece of string. First of all she would sprinkle water onto to stairs with her hand from a small bucket, and then she would dip the brush in water and shake it. This would stop the brush from breaking and make it last longer, and also stop dust from coming up from the floor as she swept, because the floors were made from cows’ dung and straw. Every couple of months they would go over these stairs with a new layer of cows’ dung to keep them looking new.

  As we were helping I noticed three big barrels of fresh water down by the stables, covered up with plastic lids. There was one just like them upstairs in the kitchen that Farouse and Gran were scooping water out of in the morning when making breakfast. I wondered what they were for. I didn’t ask Farouse at the time because she was busy.

  We helped clean the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes in the sink on the floor with just hot water that had been boiled on the oven that morning. We watched as she prepared meat and rice in big black pots and added water and spices to them. Then she buried them between the coal that was still burning hot inside the clay ovens from the morning, before putting the lid on the oven, and covering the oven with a huge old blanket! She soaked the hilba ready for lunchtime. It was a powder that was sprinkled over a bowl of water and left to soak for a few hours.

  Farouse was cheerful, happy and eager to teach us everything she knew; she was also eager to learn. She pointed out everything, telling us in Arabic what things were called then asking us what they were called in English.

  She would repeat everything we said to each other. She even started calling me ‘Moo’ and Issy ‘Issy’ instead of Ismahan, because that’s what she heard us call each other. She was clumsy and forever falling over and dropping things and banging her head. She just made us laugh.

  After we finished in the kitchen she took us outside and pointed over to the fields. “Wardy,” she said, telling us we were going to the fields.

  Then she picked up a few little buckets and handed one each to Issy and me and took one large bucket for herself. Off we went to the wardy to get water.

  We thought the fields were just around the corner, as Uncle Mohammed did say they were not far away, but we were so wrong!

  We walked for about two miles, passing fields full of both men and women working on their hands and knees. We were stared at by everyone and were joined on our way by about ten other girls, all with their huge buckets chatting happily away as if they were going shopping. They waved hello to other women on their way back from the well carrying huge buckets of water perfectly balanced on their heads, not a drop being splashed about, and they weren’t even holding onto their buckets!

  “I really hope no one’s expecting us to do that? Can you imagine us trying to balance anything on our heads like that and walk without holding on? We will be here forever!” I moaned to Issy.

  “Holding on or not, there’s no way I’m carrying anything on my head! Oh my God! Look at that donkey! I wonder what it’s got on its back, it can hardly move!” Issy said, pointing to a donkey with a saddle on both sides of its back.

  The saddle was hanging so full and low the donkey was swaying from the weight and behind the donkey there was a little girl about eight years old with a stick whipping it to keep it going. I nudged Farouse.

  “What’s that?” I asked pointing at the donkey. Farouse showed us it was a water saddle on the
back of the donkey. Only the well-off people in the village had a donkey. We had one, but Granddad had our donkey in the fields that day, and most days, that’s why we were fetching the water on our heads.

  On our way to the well I spotted a funny looking mountain with a flat top in the distance. “Wow! Look at that volcano!” I pointed out to Issy, but she just laughed at me.

  “Don’t be stupid! That’s not a volcano, it’s just a little mountain, one day we should sneak out the house and go up to the top,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, I’m up for that!” I said as we carried on walking.

  We got to the well and could see Granddad and Gran working in the fields nearby. There were loads of women at the well, all eager to come and say hello to us English girls and get the gossip from Farouse on her new English cousins.

  The well belonged to our family so as soon as we got there we jumped the queue and filled our buckets from a large pipe that was pumping water onto the fields nearby. Farouse filled her bucket then took a scarf she had wrapped around her waist, rolled it into a round circle, and used it as a padded cushion for underneath the bucket on her head. Then one of the other females helped her as they lifted the bucket onto her head. Within seconds she let go of the bucket, looking around and walking as if she had nothing on her head.

  “She’d be in the flipping circus if she was in England! Just think how much money she would get paid for doing something like that! She hasn’t dropped a single drop of water!” I gasped in amazement.

  Issy and I looked like idiots as we filled up our pathetic little beach size buckets and carried them in our hands while following her home. By the time we got back to the village we were knackered! Farouse carried her bucket upstairs to the kitchen, and then poured it into a funny shaped water barrel on a window sill. The barrel was on a sill carved deep in the kitchen corner to keep it cool for drinking only.

  Farouse told us that day we were lucky we didn’t need to go back to the fields to get more water, because sometimes she would have to go up to six or seven times a day!