Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  ‘Oh, hello, Susan,’ she said. ‘What’s Miles doing here? Why isn’t he at school? He must be ill. Poor boy. How are you feeling, Miles?’

  ‘No, he’s perfectly OK,’ said Ma. ‘It’s a holiday at the lycée today.’

  ‘No, no, Susan. You are mistaken. My Hamid is at the lycée. There is no holiday today.’

  Half an hour later I was back at the school in the headmistress’s study, dragged there by a very irate Ma. My unexplained absences had been logged and were exposed. I had nowhere to hide.

  I received a talking-to of record length and was confined to home as a punishment. But I was taken out of the lycée and placed in the British embassy school where I could speak English and wear normal clothes.

  7

  Trouble on Ferdozeh Boulevard

  After Mahmoudieh we moved to a little house in an alley off Ferdozeh Boulevard in the middle of Tehran. Most of the big embassies had compounds in that part of the city, none bigger than the British compound, which occupied a site of some fifteen acres less than half a mile away from our little house. This was the main embassy, occupied for all but the hot summer, months when the ambassador and his imperial retinue moved up the hill to the summer site in Gulhek. We often went to the embassy compound; it was a good place for me to be left to play by the swimming pool watched over by other mothers and nannies. At the entrance were two massive iron gates topped with spikes and curlicues and guarded by silk-turbanned Sikh havildars. Inside was a whole town in miniature centred around the crenellated Edwardian villa that was the ambassador’s palace.

  The reason we moved from Mahmoudieh to central Tehran was that Ma had got a job. She had become manager of the Tehran Club, the meeting place for Tehran’s European and American community. The back entrance to the Tehran Club was opposite our little house across the alley, so when I was not at school I could mooch around in the house with the servants but always run across the road to the club if I needed anything. I had orders not to stray by myself further than the newspaper shop fifty yards away at the end of the alley. To this I would commute as often as my pocket money would allow to trade Captain Marvel comics. I was not allowed beyond there unaccompanied. Ma, however, was too busy to enforce this law; one day she was trying to talk the French embassy into releasing their chef to oversee a French night at the club, the next wondering where she could source hot dogs for the 4th of July party.

  The Tehran Club had a cosmopolitan membership. About half were English and American but the rest were French, Italians, Armenians, Greeks, Scandinavians and other colonials – Australians, South Africans, Canadians. The club was for expatriates so it had no Iranian members, although elegant and cosmopolitan Persians were frequent and welcome guests in the bar and the dining rooms. I do not remember any Germans and there were certainly no Russians. Nor were there Arabs or Turks. I soon discovered that the Iranians look down on both races. We had a lot of Iranian friends and nothing amused them more than a Turkish joke. These jokes would be long and complicated and would usually involve donkeys – animals with which the Turks had a great affinity if our Iranian friends were to be believed. The Arabs they regarded as being so inferior as to be not worth even joking about.

  Tehran in the early 1950s, with the Soviet Caspian border no more than a few hours’ drive away, had an atmosphere of wartime frivolity and let’s do it today. From listening to the gossip at our own lunch table I gathered that it was a place where people came and went with bewildering speed, stopping sometimes only long enough to have an affair with someone else’s wife. However, in 1952, towards the end of our time in Iran, the political situation was balanced on the edge of anarchy.

  Everyone talked in nervous voices of Muhammad Mossadegh. This man was a mystery to me. I looked at pictures of him in the magazines and newspapers that lay around the Tehran Club. Most important men on the front pages of the newspapers in 1952 wore formal suits, some even with wing collars. Mossadegh, who had just become prime minister of Iran, was often photographed in pyjamas lying on his bed, frequently weeping. This was the man everyone in the Tehran Club was frightened of. The word most often used to describe him was dangerous. Although I could not follow all the politics, I had heard constant talk of how worrying the situation was. This seemed strange as the Iranians we knew remained as urbane, charming and polite as they had ever been. I had heard that Westerners were at some risk if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; one or two had been killed as a result of finding themselves unwittingly at the centre of a disturbance.

  I loved wandering around Tehran and paid no attention to the newspaper-shop boundary. This almost cost me my life. One of my favourite excursions was to walk down Ferdozeh Boulevard past the British embassy and then turn right into a busy shopping street, where I would window-shop and search for cut-price comics. After an hour or so I would buy a strawberry ice-cream cone and wander back to the house. This was a pleasant and regular beat.

  One day I was returning from such an outing, ice cream in hand. As I rounded the corner and walked back up Ferdozeh Boulevard, I could make out in the distance a deep rumbling sound such as I had never heard before. I remember that noise today with exactness but did not know how to describe it until I heard my first avalanche. The noise of rush and tumult was the same. The noise grew and then suddenly, tumbling into Ferdozeh Square, some half a mile away, and erupting out of it and directly towards me down the boulevard, came the Tehran mob.

  They filled the boulevard from side to side. The front rank waved clubs and knives, a few pistols; some had flags and banners with slogans. At their head was a dark bearded man brandishing what looked like a chair leg. The noise changed. As they got nearer the roar defined itself as high-pitched chanting.

  The mob, in full career, was no more than four or five hundred yards from where I stood, motionless with terror, ice cream dripping down my hand. Where they were going, I did not know. Probably to sack the House of Assembly. One thing I did know: a seven-year-old English boy caught in their path would be swept underfoot and left a smudge on the road in their wake. Flight was impossible; I was too far from the crossroads to turn back and hide in the side road. Ahead of me, perhaps twenty yards away, were the great iron gates of the British embassy. The silk-turbaned Sikh sentries were stepping back from their posts outside the gates to safety within. The mob by now seemed almost upon me although the rioters must have been still 200 yards away. The noise seemed to get shriller and their speed to increase as they roared closer.

  I dropped my ice cream and bolted for the embassy, as did a number of other passers-by. The gates were a scant body’s width open when I reached them, the Sikhs trying to pull them closed, those on the outside trying to shove them open far enough to get in. A mighty red-sashed Sikh stood in the opening pushing bodies out. If I had been bigger I would be dead today. Luckily I was small enough to wriggle at knee-height under the shoving bodies in the gateway and pop out the other side. As I did the gates clanged shut and the bolt was thrown across.

  Seconds later the mob howled past. The gates shook; rocks and sticks were hurled over their top by passing rioters, but the British embassy was impregnable.* For what seemed like minutes the tumult roared and thundered past the gates and then, as suddenly as it came, the noise retreated into the distance, the howl became a mutter and then silence.

  I stood in the entrance of the embassy compound behind the bolted gates. I was not crying – the shock was too great for that – but every muscle of my body shook. A giant Sikh standing by my side patted my head. Twenty minutes later they opened the gates. The Sikh patted me once more and gave me a friendly push; I scurried out of the embassy, up the boulevard, across the road into the alley, past Captain Marvel and home. Four hours later I was still trembling.

  *Or so it was until 29 November 2011, when a government-inspired group of students stormed the embassy and sacked it. The same day they also invaded the summer Gulhek site, where I used to go to school.

  8

  Midnight
in Meshed

  The road to Meshed lay across a dry and stony desert. It was going to be a long dusty two days’ drive from Tehran. JRC announced that we would have to leave before dawn and, if we were lucky and did not find that the road had been washed away by a sudden storm or blocked by a lorry colliding with a bus, we might arrive in time for supper on the second day. We were going to stay with the Macleods. Mr Macleod, whom we had got to know in India, was the British consul in Meshed.

  It was a hot, hot day when we set off. We had all the car windows open with the little quarter-lights in the front windows turned backwards to catch the air and create a breeze in the car. This worked well until we needed to overtake another vehicle, a process which involved a long and complicated manoeuvre. Virtually the only other vehicles on the road were the creaking lorries that spluttered and groaned their way along the Persian trade routes. They were always loaded to twice their carrying capacity with unwieldy burdens that had often slipped to one side and threatened to fall off at every bend in the road. The road itself was set up on an embankment for most of the way to allow it to traverse the dried-up wadis that cut across it at frequent intervals. It began to lose its tarmac surface about twenty miles from Tehran and soon petered out into a track of ruts, dirt and stones.

  Every twenty minutes or so we saw a huge smudge of dust more than a mile away, which got thicker and thicker as we caught up with the truck stirring it up. When we were about 200 yards behind, the order was given to close windows to keep out the dust that was beginning to billow into the car. Before the overtaking manoeuvre began, Petrossian pulled out to the far side of the road to see if he could spot a plume of dust signalling a truck coming in the opposite direction, as once we got close enough to begin overtaking, the dust was so thick we were driving blind. Once Petrossian had checked for oncoming traffic he changed down and accelerated into the thick brown dust-fog. All the time the horn was sounded non-stop, sometimes in a continuous blare, sometimes sharp hoots, and from time to time Petrossian hammered out an Armenian tune. The truck always made a point of driving in the middle of the road. There was never any question of it hugging the side to give us a little extra space on the narrow raised surface to squeeze past. During most of the time we were overtaking the truck driver also sounded his horn, his deeper purmp-purmp sounding in counterpoint to Petrossian’s parp-parp.

  Once Petrossian had pulled out and committed to overtake, there was a tense silence in the car. The heat rose quickly with the windows and air vents closed. Each of us apart from Petrossian rocked backwards and forwards making giddy-up noises to urge the car to greater speed. Meanwhile the dust got thicker and thicker until all we could see were the pounding truck tyres no more than inches from our windows as we ground past. And then at last the air cleared as we breasted the truck’s bow wave of dust; we were past and out blinking into the sunlight and winding the windows down as fast as we could, grateful for the stream of cool fresh air that blew in from the quarter-lights.

  As evening fell on the second day we saw the minarets of Meshed ahead of us. We joined the slow procession of carts, donkeys, camels, buses and trucks pushing its way through the Tehran Gate in the great mud walls that surrounded the city and into a crowded tree-lined boulevard down the middle of which ran a wide stream. White-robed pilgrims were everywhere. The consulate was set in wide grounds behind a high stone wall. The gates through which we drove were almost as big as those at the entrance to the Tehran embassy, and like them were guarded by giant silk-turbaned Sikh soldiers, who peered into the car and then, seeing we were European, stood back and saluted smartly as we drove in. The main consulate building reminded me of the house we had had in Bandra, north of Bombay, except that it was bigger and grander. The garden had sweeping cedar trees, a beautifully trimmed lawn and rose beds, a little piece of Wiltshire in the middle of the holiest city in Iran.

  We were glad to have a quick supper followed by an early bed after the long drive, as the next day was to be a busy one. JRC, Ma and Petrossian had been talking about the famous mosque of Meshed in the car. It was the holiest place in all Iran because the Imam Reza was buried there. Shi’ites came from all over the Muslim world to make a pilgrimage to his shrine. Non-believers were not allowed into any of the mosques in Iran at that time, and this one, because of the special holiness created by the presence of the Imam’s tomb, was particularly forbidden to those who were not Muslims.

  Even in peaceful times it would have been a brave Christian who attempted to set foot in the mosque. At times like this, when tempers were frayed and tension between Iran and the West was in the air, only the most foolhardy would have contemplated trying to get inside, as discovery would cause a riot in which lives would almost certainly have been lost, the intruder’s first among them. Against this background, Ma with her striking red hair and blue eyes had expressly come to Meshed to get into the mosque.

  The Macleods had reluctantly arranged for Yasmin, a Persian lady who had lived in the West, to be her guide. At ten o’clock the next morning Yasmin arrived with a little suitcase containing Ma’s mosque-visiting clothes. Ma went off to her bedroom with Yasmin, who had herself arrived at the consulate wearing smart Western clothes. Half an hour later two black-chadored figures glided out from the bedroom. Nothing could be seen of them apart from one pair of hazel-brown eyes and one pair of light blue eyes. But then Ma scrunched up the face bit of the chador from inside and the light blue eyes disappeared.

  We all then got into the car, JRC and I squeezed into the back with Ma. It was not deemed safe for a car with Europeans in it to drive too close to the mosque. The huge square in front of it was choked with pilgrims making their way to pay their respects at the Imam’s tomb, and there were few other cars. As we edged our way forward through the crowd, with Petrossian giving discreet little beeps on his horn rather than the full-blooded toots he used in Tehran, we were the subject of hostile stares from the pilgrims who were forced to make way for us, and when they looked inside the car and saw Europeans with chador-clad Muslim women there was angry and threatening-sounding muttering.

  ‘I think it’s time for you girls to walk,’ said JRC. ‘These laddies don’t look any too friendly. Time for us to leave you to it.’

  ‘Bye, Ma. Good luck,’ I called as Ma and Yasmin climbed out of the car and were swallowed up in an instant in the pushing throng.

  ‘Right, Petrossian. Let’s get out of here,’ said JRC briskly.

  Petrossian reversed gingerly out of the crowd, turned the car as soon as he was able and sped back to the consulate, where I mooched around the garden while JRC put his leg up on the veranda rail and fidgeted with old copies of Country Life, not something I had ever seen him read before. Neither of us felt much like talking. Petrossian had agreed a rendezvous with the mosque-goers an hour and a half after we had dropped them off. It was thought inadvisable for us to accompany him in view of the mood of the crowd. If there had been any trouble with Ma at the mosque, two more Europeans arriving in a large American car would only make it worse.

  Petrossian set off. I mooched some more. JRC ordered a gin and tonic and concentrated furiously on his Country Life. Twenty minutes passed. Then half an hour. Finally, just as we were giving up hope and about to ask Mr Macleod and the Sikhs to organise a rescue mission, we heard a car sweep up behind the consulate. I ran around, JRC hopping alongside on his crutch.

  A solitary Muslim lady in a chador emerged from the back of the car. JRC and I stopped simultaneously. Where was Ma? Was she all right?

  ‘Hi, Mileso, hi, Johnny,’ said the chador.

  ‘Oh, Ma. Are you OK? Where’s Yasmin?’

  ‘We dropped her off on the way back. Don’t be so silly. I’m fine.’

  Later, over lunch, Ma told us of the visit.

  ‘I had a great old time. Yasmin had told me that all I had to do was to follow her and do the same as her. I did exactly what she did. Of course, the bits the women are allowed in were so dark and crowded that you could hardly move and y
ou couldn’t see that much. The men had a much better view.

  ‘But we did go and see Reza in his shrine. I must say, I’ve been in some pretty niffy places but I’ve never been anywhere quite so smelly as that. Literally hundreds of barefoot sweating Persians milling around in a room about the size of the black hole of Calcutta. And then when we got up close to the shrine there was so much pushing and shoving that you could hardly breathe. I had to kiss the brass bits on the outside of the shrine, and if you peered hard you could just see something wrapped up on the inside. Funny little dried-up chap he must have been.’

  ‘Did you have any dangerous bits?’

  ‘Not really, because all I needed to do was follow Yasmin and copy her as she bowed and scraped, though there was one moment when I got separated from Yasmin and of course all those Persian women look exactly the same in their chadors and I found myself following the wrong woman, who turned round and gave me a very funny look. I just screwed up my chador so she couldn’t see in through the eye hole and then luckily felt a tug on my sleeve from Yasmin. But that was the only time. Otherwise there was nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Well I’m jolly glad you’re back,’ I said.

  That night the Macleods took JRC and Ma out to dinner with the French consul in Meshed. I was given an early supper and tucked up in bed. I had been put in a great echoing bedroom with two enormous beds; it had a high ceiling and two large uncurtained windows through which I could see the shapes of the tall trees in the garden silhouetted against a moonlit sky. When Ma came to say goodnight we went through our usual dialogue.

  ‘What time will you be back?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mileso. I don’t expect we’ll be late. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know. But what time will you be back? Will it be after ten?’