Into
Suez
Stevie Davies
To Emily, Grace & Robin
my beautiful three,
& remembering Frank
Gottes ist der Orient! God’s is the East!
Gottes ist der Occident! God’s is the West!
Nord-und südliches Gelände Northern and southern lands
Ruht im Frieden seiner Hände Rest in the peace of his hands.
from West-östlicher Divan,
J. W. von Goethe, 1816
[Holding] Turkey and Egypt in the hollow of our hands, the Mediterranean is an English lake, and the Suez Canal is only another name for the Thames and the Mersey.
(from Daily Bristol Times and Mirror, 29/11/1875)
How many of [your correspondents] have had the ‘privilege’ of defending this filthy race from the onslaught of German forces at El Alamein only to be spat upon, hissed at, booed at, and in many cases even murdered?
(from Tribune, 14/8/1956)
I viewed the [Oslo] agreement as embodying a rare moment in history, the moment of recognition of the other. I exist, and you also exist. I have a right to live, and this is also your right. It’s a hard and long road, ending in freedom and human rights of the individual, a road strewn not with roses but with struggle and patience …
There is no end to the pain felt by most people when you suddenly raise their curtain of illusions and lies.
(from Ali Salem, A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors, 2001)
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part Two
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part Three
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Into
Suez
Prelude
There they were again, larking in the alley. They’d all pour out and rock with laughter or stand in their petticoats with folded arms discussing some proposition in philosophy. Wittgenstein! they’d cry. Sartre! Which might lead to more laughing or crying or passionate wrangling, for such women could afford to be extravagant, in their emotions as much as in their clothes. Ailsa would look down on them, a timid spy, sash window suspended over her neck like a guillotine, peering through the geraniums she cultivated in a window box. She saw the tops of their fashionable heads: the ginger girl with her hair in a complex system of sausages; the luscious dark girl, caramel-skinned; others sleep-mussed, one sporting the grey-blue disc of an RAF officer’s peaked cap. They had dash, they had flair, they had money and university education evidently.
Emotion next door was tumultuous, titanic at all times. The girls acknowledged no middle temperature. Uniformed men poured in and out. It was impossible to say who was in love with whom, at any given moment. Meanwhile, through the membrane that separated them, Ailsa lived like a nun in the flat built above the stables of a Victorian brewery. You could still see the loose boxes in the wall and attachments for halters. Ailsa had been amazed to come upon such an ancient, secret recess within strolling distance of Buckingham Palace, down an alley at Brewers’ Green. She lived up a steep staircase in the storey that had served as the brewer’s granary. The bohemians next door racketed away just beyond a wooden partition painted a hideous flaking green. Ailsa heard it all: their water-fights, their singing, their lovemaking, their rows about Sophocles. Doing her washing-up in the bathroom (for the kitchen had no water, hot or cold) or hunched over her mean wartime gas fire, Ailsa wanted to tell them she knew exactly who Sophocles was: she’d read the Antigone for herself in Shrewsbury Library at the age of fourteen. She was a girl hungry for knowledge, endowed with what her family, who ran the village post office at Sutton Bridge, had regarded as ‘the brain of a boy’. The late child of elderly parents, Ailsa had early set her heart on university and might have got there, for the Birches had been willing to stretch their limited resources to fulfil her aspirations. But her parents had died of pneumonia within three weeks of one another. Then the war had come along, with its altered horizons.
Ailsa bumped into one of the girls at the post box. It was the dark, charismatic one with liquid eyes who seemed more hysterical than the others. She wore a dark green coat with a black velvet collar and a scatter of dandruff on her shoulders: for all her messiness, she had a foreign, exotic air. Each made to post her letter and drew back in the other’s favour, smiling. ‘I say, aren’t you the person next door?’ asked the girl in peerless gentry English. Mona, she said. Mona Serafin. And then another arrived and said that her name was Billie and that Bobbie was on the way. Did they mostly have boys’ names then, Ailsa wondered. Was that the thing nowadays? Ailsa, she said. Gorgeous name, Billie thought. Big Ben had sounded then and they’d agreed that the sound was reassuring rather than otherwise and that the mice at the Old Brewery didn’t on the whole bother them. ‘After all,’ Mona or Billie had said, ‘they’ve got lives of their own to live in their little world behind the wainscot.’ Mona was perishing, she said. She had her own method of dealing with it, look. She opened her coat to reveal a hot water bottle slung from her shoulder and dangling across her belly.
Another time the redhead, hair as flaming as Ailsa’s but more exuberant as to coiffure, knocked to ask if she’d like to come in for a party that evening. ‘We’ll make the most frightful racket and it’ll be better for you if you’re sloshed with us than having to hear it through the wall. Anyway, we all want to get to know you. We think you’re so mysterious and glamorous.’
Of course Ailsa didn’t go, although she was flattered at their view of her. Having invented some excuse, she was kept awake through the small hours. Anyway, she’d have been tongue-tied, out of her depth. Oxford and Cambridge types, silver spoon and all that. They all looked well-fed, to put it mildly, for they escaped the depressing rigours of the home front by eating on the hoof at cafés and grills.
One Sunday Ailsa watched the whole coven spill out into the cobbled courtyard wearing differently coloured berets, ginger, violet, red, cream and navy. Off they clattered in high heels that echoed down the alley. Berets at jaunty angles with tails like mushroom stalks. It was one of the few occasions when she’d seen them bother to dress up. They could wear hot water bottles slung across their chests and still be ravishing and superior. She gathered that they’d quit their undergraduate studies to work at the Ministry of Defence as clerks. Two of them spoke Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian; another was fluent in modern Greek, ‘a doddle compared with ancient’.
Ailsa sat in her one armchair, her few possessions neatly arranged on an orange box covered in a cloth embroidered by her auntie in Church Stretton. Was she lonely? She examined a segment of her guarded face in the mirror of her powder compact: skin translucently pale, a scattering of ginger freckles, eyes blue-green. Ailsa ought to feel lonely but the freedom was too novel; solitude offered a roving eye on the boundless possibilities at the centre of the capital. If there were times when she was haunted by a kind of background hum – of the countless deaths in the ruins, void and emptiness – the thought of dull Shropshire reconciled her to London danger. Archie Copsey had gone down on one knee just before she left and she’d said no, Archie, oh no! He would wait, her cousin had promised. All his life if necessary. Don’t do th
at for me, she’d thought, her forehead wrinkling in concern: I might not come back, ever. To be a farmer’s wife and feed chickens held no appeal. So much history all around her. Ailsa loved to mingle with the Fleet Street hacks and watch the wigs pageanting up and down at the law courts. She attended concerts at the Albert Hall with her schoolfriend Betty, alike smitten with the capital. She’d go and hear the angelus at Westminster Cathedral. Once she saw Mona Serafin there, genuflecting to the altar. How did that sort with the socialism with which next door resonated? For they were all downright Commies, paid up too. Surely you had to make a choice between Lenin and Christ. Or was it not so simple?
But oh, the young men who came and went. Beautiful, willowy idealists, in officers’ uniform or civvies, with great piles or flaps of hair, corn-coloured or conker-brown. Way beyond Ailsa’s league. A pantheon of young gods – and older gods too, for owlish balding dons in hacking jackets hung about the girls, carrying a tribute of rare books instead of chocolates or flowers. But the young men, with the bloom still on their skin, instant Majors and Flight Lieutenants at the age of twenty-two, were all in transit, off to the ends of the earth to struggle, not for the Empire, but for the socialist new world, as one heard on breathless summer evenings when all the windows stood wide open. Once Ailsa saw a young man let himself out into the moonlight where, softly latching the door behind him, he sobbed aloud, face in his hands. One or all of them collectively had broken his heart.
Ailsa buttoned her tunic, tweaking at its basque; she pulled in her stomach and buckled her belt taut. She didn’t have to worry about her stockings, all darned into a maze of lumps, for as a courier she wore slacks and boots. The motor bike was her version of their all-night party, yielding an exultant freedom, weaving in and out of traffic, enjoying a certain emancipation from ladylike rules and codes. Bike and rider made up a centaur, the machine an extension of Ailsa’s body and will, tuned to soar at the least touch of the throttle. She took a pride in maintaining its splendid engine.
Ailsa met Joe Roberts at a dance. They walked in St James’s Park, bubbling with talk and chastely kissing; ate sticky buns in Lyons Corner House, washing them down with gallons of tea. Two weeks after meeting Joe, she was no longer Ailsa Birch but Mrs Ailsa Roberts, whose husband was an aircraft fitter from Glamorgan, stationed in the Western Desert. The blue air-letters on the door mat were her life line: she’d burst into the cold, dank flat and, if she were lucky, there would be her heart’s desire. Her husband’s uneven handwriting touched her, for Joe was not at ease with the pen, having left school at fourteen for the steel mill; he was a career airman who, having joined up at nineteen, felt his inferiority to his wife. She traced his journey from Libya and Egypt across the Mediterranean and up through Italy, the one precious life that drew her quivering compass needle.
She hardly registered her neighbours’ absence until one evening, writing to Joe in Italy, and hearing the sickening silence that signalled that the doodlebug had reached its destination – hovering suspended above her own head, ticking with mindless purpose – Ailsa saw in a flash: she was a goner. There’d be no Joe, no babies, no great adventure. This was it. She tuned in at the same time to the silence of the lively girls next door. They’d vanished without her noticing.
Part One
Church Stretton, October 2003
The Empire Glory, June 1949
1
She had never liked her mother’s bosom friend: a thoroughly bad influence on Ailsa, Nia reckoned. But she’d felt surprisingly moved when Irene died, in her mid-eighties: a full quarter of a century after Ailsa. An era ending. Now, a fortnight after the funeral, the boys phoned. Irene had held on to a box of Ailsa’s, which Topher and Tim had found when they were sorting the lumber.
Nia, visiting her stepfather and half-brother on the farm at Lyth Clee, borrowed the Land Rover to go over to the Whites’ house at Wenlock. Mam and Irene had been in one another’s pockets. Whatever did they find to gas about? In her memory the two of them were forever winding wool by the log fire, Ailsa’s big strong hands holding the skein, Irene’s smaller hands a whirling blur as she wound it off into a ball. This memory went back and back to when things were clearer and more vivid, when she and Topher (also the bane of his mum’s life, and this was the bond between them) would play rugby with the ball through the sitting room or roll it for the kitten.
Later on Nia had gone right off Topher. Their two kinds of hippiedom branched in different directions – his toward dropping out and dope and the affectation of calling himself a poet; hers into political activism. Which was the more angry, Topher in his sullenness, Nia in her bitterness? The two of them went back forever. To Egypt, scene of her first memories, as vivid as they were mysterious. Looking through a wire netting grid at the desert, suffused in pink, the sun at its horizon like blood in a yolk. She recalled khaki men with rifles rushing through a grove of palm trees, barking like dogs. The strange and beautiful daily sound of the muezzin calling believers to prayer, which years later she recognised when visiting Bradford, stopping dead in her tracks. The White boys featured as vague but stubborn presences in these memories. And if Nia grew to detest Topher’s droning monologues, this was the everyday contempt of a sibling.
They had in common their mothers’ shuddering disapproval: Ailsa and Irene being Air Force widows who had been fighting, as Nia once put it, for Queen Victoria, the Raj and table manners. Not that Ailsa had been given to making reactionary speeches. It was the stiff quality of her silences that betrayed archaic allegiances. And actually Ailsa was too intelligent for the opinions Nia intuited: too bright, come to that, for airhead Irene. But something bound the two women tightly to one another, so that when Ailsa had remarried and moved back to Shropshire, Irene came to live nearby. Nia’s Peace Movement activism had landed her in court on a couple of occasions. And Topher had been called a degenerate by his mother, he expressing surprise that she knew the word. An aura of disgrace had hung above these children of the crumbled Empire – even before (so Nia felt) they had done much to merit it.
She’d not seen Topher for several years when he rang about the box. His fair hair had hardly greyed but much of the centre had fallen out and his face had weathered into a thousand wrinkles. He affected a thin pony tail. Male pattern baldness, Nia thought as he stood in the stairwell calling up to Tim, who was busy upstairs emptying the loft where the box had been stored. ‘She’s here, Bruv!’
‘Oh, right. Down in a sec. Make the lady a brew.’
Irene had laid great stress on the importance of an Aga in any well-regulated home. The kettle was kept forever simmering on the hob. Topher made them mugs of coffee, heart-stoppingly strong stuff he drank all day, the aftermath of various addictions he’d fought and (chiefly) not fought for twenty years. He was quiet. He’s been weeping, Nia thought. Why that should have surprised her, she couldn’t think. Hadn’t she been crying inside for Ailsa for a quarter of a century? And yet, to put it mildly, mother and daughter had not got on. All the more reason to grieve, when you’d been at daggers drawn.
Topher sat at the other side of Irene’s kitchen table. She put out her hand, covered his briefly. He bit his lip and looked away. Following his gaze, she saw, with a start, that the brothers had removed the picture of their father that had enjoyed pride of place over the hearth for as long as Nia could remember. This portrait of a young man in dress uniform had loomed over the White boys’ childhood, their mother referring to it as likely to be disappointed in this or that behaviour of her sons, particularly the elder. It was supposed to be a picture of heroism. Nia remembered catching sight of Irene through the door, raising her eyes to the portrait as if in worship. It was the first time Nia had ever thought, Poor soul. She’d got an inkling of the fact that Irene had lived most of her life in loss. Which explained and mitigated a multitude of sins.
The two women had returned from Suez widowed, their husbands war heroes. This had happened in the run-up to the so-called Suez Crisis, the first oil war, when t
he British Empire had been sent whimpering with its tail between its legs. Ailsa and Irene had been flown home in 1952, the year of the Egyptian Revolution. Four years later when President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Britain had hatched a mad conspiracy with France and Israel: Israel would attack Egypt over the Sinai; Britain and France would go to ‘save’ the canal from both Israel and Egypt, thieves disguised as policemen. The tiny island made of coal and surrounded by fish and ruled by gentlemen-fascists had been cut down to size by American pressure and its own near-bankruptcy. Nia remembered sitting by the big brown Marconi hearing, rather against her own will, the news reports, for the wireless was insufferably dull to the child. Looking back, Nia could see that Suez politicised her childhood by making her elders look fools.
Sergeants Roberts and White must have been killed by terrorists in the build-up to the fiasco. You knew not to penetrate Ailsa’s forbidding silence on this theme. But Ailsa, unlike Irene, had married again – her cousin, Archie Copsey. And she’d united herself to a man so lovable that, if Ailsa had not managed to be happy with Archie, well, that was her own stupid fault. She might have learned a thing or two from him too, for the mild Archie, a Quaker, had been a conscientious objector in the war. He worshipped the ground Ailsa walked on; in his eyes she could do no wrong. He had loved Nia as his own, taking her part even against the two boys born to Ailsa and himself. When Nia was bolshy and impossible, Archie had been a presence whose wry quietness had drawn the sting from countless quarrels and made the earth firm under her feet. She hardly remembered her own father, who was never talked of. No picture of Joe Roberts stood above the hearth or anywhere else in the house.
Irene on the other hand prattled interminably about her husband. Roy had been a saint. If only Topher could have taken after him even a little bit. She’d spoilt the younger brother, Tim, very much at Topher’s expense: Oh, darling, you’re so like him. But Tim had grown up a bit of a creep, not above stealing from his mother’s handbag. He was all right these days, as far as she knew.
Into Suez Page 1