It came as no surprise, then, to learn that the military attaché confessed to Sterndale Bennett that he did not know whether the charges described by Süreyya were in fact correct. The attaché robustly suggested that perhaps the solution lay in deporting Gandour as soon as possible. Helm regretfully responded, ‘I should be afraid that removal to Africa is no longer a cure by itself.’ It was decided, in the end, to ‘choke off’ Gandour’s lawyer. When Süreyya tried to see the British ambassador on 3 November 1942, she was informed that His Excellency was very busy; and on 7 November 1942, the first secretary in Ankara, D.L. Busk, wrote to Colonel Thomson in Istanbul instructing him to ‘continue the choking-off process at every opportunity’.
Meanwhile, the problem of Norman Mayers had returned. The tenacious consul reiterated his ‘conviction’ that Gandour was not guilty of espionage and commented that, although Süreyya blamed Doran entirely for instigating the case against Gandour,
she should lay the blame, unless I am very much mistaken, on other quarters nearer home. It leaves me with my old distaste and sense of shame, for it points to local jealousies and suspicions as the source and origin of Gandour’s troubles.
Quarters nearer home? Jealous locals? Mayers never made explicit what he was hinting at. Instead he made a practical proposal: a reconsideration of the evidence by an independent ‘British legal personality’.
The counsellor, Helm (who noted that ‘Mr Mayers has for years had a bee in his bonnet over such cases’), replied as follows:
I can say at once that, in normal times, we should have complete sympathy with the case which you put up. These times are, however, anything but normal and, whether we like it or not, we have to face the fact that principles which are perfectly good in peace-time have to be scrapped or weakened under the exigencies of war. This applies particularly in matters affecting security and I am sure you will agree that under this head no avoidable risks can or should be run.
This does not mean that I am making any excuses for the handling of the Nazim Gandour case. For perfectly good reasons security is confined to special people and in the case of Gandour we are completely satisfied that this man is by no means as innocent as your letter suggests. Moreover, and also for very good reasons, it is neither practicable nor desirable in matters of this kind, under war conditions, to have the whole story brought out.
Against this background I would just like to emphasize once more that the case against Gandour is not based on information derived solely, or even principally, from Turkey.… If Mlle. Süreyya should return to Mersin and try to discuss the Gandour case with you, we must ask you to take the line that, while you can listen to anything she has to say, you are precluded from discussing it as it is being handled by other authorities.
There, it seemed, the matter effectively came to end – or, perhaps, not. The Gandour file at the Public Records Office contained two blank documents consisting of one page and two pages respectively. They were marked ‘closed until 2018’.
The Nazim Gandour papers made no mention of Joseph Dakak. But they clarified that Gandour was (contrary to my grandfather’s fearful belief) an authentic prisoner and not a British stooge, and also that Gandour had correctly maintained to Joseph that Desmond Doran was instrumental in their arrest and internment. More generally, the Gandour affair undermined any notion that the fact of internment was some kind of indication of the existence of good grounds for internment; because the closer one looked into the matter, the more apparent it became that the smoke surrounding Gandour was traceable not to inculpatory fire but to the fumes produced by the wilful confusions of the attachés and the secretaries and the lieutenant-colonels. In the end there was little doubt that the treatment of Nazim Gandour was, applying normal notions of justice, almost comically unfair. He was not charged with, let alone convicted of, any offence. He was denied access to a lawyer. He was detained indefinitely, by security forces accountable to no one, on the grounds of mere suspicion. He was not properly, if at all, informed of that which he was suspected of having done; and – most bizarrely of all – the suspectors themselves were unsure about what specific wrongs they suspected Gandour of: after all the enquiries and memoranda and Secret letters and consultations and relayed messages, not one of these bureaucratic Chinese whisperers was able to grasp or spell out precisely what the case against Nazim Gandour was. Then again, there was never a case against Gandour as such. He was not the subject of a juridical process. On the contrary: his fate – from his arrest to his eventual release – was in the hands of persons with no real interest in (as Norman Mayers put it) ‘the furtherance of justice’; and Joseph Dakak, it could be assumed, was subject to the same regime.
But there was, it had to be acknowledged, a limit to the criticism that could be levelled against the British authorities. It was true that, once Gandour’s situation was brought to their attention, they acted obtusely and without any regard to the well-being of the ‘Levantine trader’. Against that, however, they were fighting a war – a just war, it might safely be said – and, as is well known, the efficacy of war depends precisely on the massive and systematic infliction (and endurance) of undeserved personal suffering. In such circumstances, the moral sense may only with difficulty be attuned to the lot of any particular individual, which can seem of minuscule significance – particularly if the lot in question is that of wrongful internment, which is not the worst fate to befall a man in times of war.
But this kind of macro-rationalization was unlikely to help or even occur to the wronged individual. Joseph Dakak, certainly, did not regard his situation with philosophical resignation. He experienced his captivity as an unmitigated physical and mental catastrophe. My grandfather was terrified and angry and bemused and incredulous and shocked by what was happening to him. He could not relativize his situation, or go with its flow, or ascribe to it a rational or even, as appeared from the opening words of his first (and only surviving) prison letter home, an earthly cause. The letter – which Amy found and copied to me from Geneva – was written in French and addressed to Ma Georgette chérie, mes petits amours:
The Lord has wished to submit me to the most terrible ordeal to which a human being could be submitted – may His will be done.
My dear Georgette, I received your letter of 15th September in which you express your fears concerning my health. Alas, even the strongest will and the most robust constitution would be shaken by the mental and physical suffering I have endured these past six months.
To have not done a thing, to have a clear conscience and yet to be in the state I am in, that is very hard.
How many times, when I have awakened in the morning, have I asked myself in a half-sleep if I was not dreaming, but alas, hard reality was not slow in affirming itself.
I have wept so much, thinking of you and of the little darlings, that my tears have run dry. Me, to whom their cooing and caresses were a whole world.
Our consul-general has brought me the two flannels, your letter, money. He came to see me and was very kind to me, I did not know how to thank him.
My dear Georgette, don’t weep or fret, what will be will be. Maybe we shall meet again one day, if God permits and adversity is less cruel.
Kiss my little angels and remind Lina not to forget me in her bedtime prayers.
Thank you for all that you are doing on my behalf, and pray for your Joseph, who loves you all and does nothing but think of you, at home in Mersin, day and night.
The letter was dated 8 November 1942. It was written at the Hôpital du Liban, Beirut, while my grandfather was convalescing after his final attempt at suicide.
It was thanks to the Turkish consul in Beirut that my grandmother received the letter. In September 1942, Georgette Dakad temporarily entrusted the children to her sisters and boarded the Taurus Express in an attempt to see her husband in Lebanon. On the outward journey, she met un monsieur très raffiné who, no doubt intrigued by the well-dressed young woman travelling in mysterious solitude, propositioned h
er. My grandmother rejected the advance; but once the distinguished gentleman became aware of the purpose of her trip, he introduced himself formally as the Turkish consul to Beirut and put himself at her service. The consul, Rifki Bey, was not able to secure for my grandmother access to her husband, but he did pay a personal visit to the prisoner and passed him a letter and various items sent by Mamie Dakad. He also conveyed Joseph’s letter to Mamie Dakad. It was the first time she’d heard from him since his arrest more than five months earlier.
My grandmother had been facing an ordeal of her own. Georgette Dakad was a strong woman – as a strong as a man, her friends used to say – but she was devastated by her husband’s disappearance; and things got no easier after 28 April 1942, when she gave birth to a third child, Amy. (Whom, in fact, she named Claude. When the little girl finally met her father at three and half years of age, she was renamed after a nurse who had been good to him. ‘Your name shall no longer be Claude,’ her father informed her. ‘You are Amy now.’) In their father’s absence, the three children grew up surrounded by women. Their grandmother, Teta, lived in the house, and their mother’s spinster sisters Isabelle and Alexandra were a constant presence. My mother said that she was a happy young child. When she grew old enough to ask about her father, she was told that Papa was away on a business trip. Then one day a spiteful girl said to her in the course of a kindergarten tiff about hopscotch, ‘At least my father isn’t in jail.’
Prices in Mersin were very high and Georgette was forced to make savings. The racehorse, Tayara, was sold, as was the shop in which the valuable hoard of tin had been secretly deposited by my grandfather; and so (the story went) a fortune was mislaid. Georgette also had to take over the business of the Toros Hotel. This was not without its complications. The British, Mamie Dakad would later tell my mother, posted a spy in the hotel. Masquerading as a customer, he occupied the room near the office and stayed for some time, peeping and prowling around. One day, Georgette entered her office to discover that there had been a break-in. The safe was open, papers were scattered everywhere, but strangely the thousands of lira kept in the safe (a sum large enough to buy a property) were untouched. On another occasion, she was greeted on the stairs of the hotel by an eminent Axis guest – the German or Italian ambassador, my mother thought – and she immediately went to the British consulate to report the encounter before they heard it from anyone else. Otherwise, Mamie Dakad effectively withdrew from society. She saw to the hotel in the mornings and stayed at home in the afternoons, when she would do housework and play cards with trusted girlfriends like Kiki and Dora and Lolo. According to Lolo, my grandmother was right to be cautious. The war split Mersin into factions, and a partisan or ambiguous gesture or flippant remark could lead to trouble with the Turkish authorities.
Georgette and Joseph, 1940. A family friend holds my infant mother.
In May 1943, the same month that Joseph Dakak was moved from the military hospital in Beirut to the monastery at Emuas, Denis Wright took over from Norman Mayers in Mersin. This was a significant development: according to my grandmother, Monsieur Wright helped her with sending and receiving letters, and he advised her not to invest hope and money in trying to secure her husband’s release but, rather, to await the end of the war. ‘I don’t remember giving her that advice,’ Wright said to me when I raised the subject, ‘but if I had advised her, that is the advice I would have given.’ ‘What do you remember?’ I asked. ‘I recall seeing her from time to time about her husband,’ Wright said. ‘I don’t recall much else.’ He added with a smile, ‘I take it you’ve read my letter about that party in Gözne.’
I had read it, in Wright’s volume of his letters home from Mersin. On the first weekend of September 1944, Wright went up to Gözne for ‘an end-of-season party arranged by the Vali but paid for by the Syrians’:
The Saturday evening dance took place in the garden of the coffee house: the Club orchestra was there and the refreshments were all prepared by the Syrians who complained that the Turkish women had done nothing to help with the fête.…
It was a rollicking party with a full moon shining down on us and all Gözne was there. The Syrians were as noisy as ever but seemed happier and less restrained in their own Gözne. I had a dance with Mme Dakad, the Toros Hotel woman whose husband is in one of our concentration camps in Syria or Palestine: it was the first time she had really amused herself in public since his arrest and the excitement of it all and the odd drinks she had had (and I gave her one which perhaps I shouldn’t have done) went to her head. She had a fit of crying and a sort of hysterics (by this time she had been removed from the dance floor to a room in the pub) shouting ‘J’ai dansé avec M. Wright! Vive M. Wright! Vive le Consul d’Angleterre!’ and repeating all this until she was forcibly taken home by Mme Carodi. She had recovered yesterday morning when I saw her playing poker – these Gözne Syrians play morning, afternoon and night daily and lose or win anything up to 300 liras a session, probably more. Mme Dakad has won about 3000 liras [about £410, which was more or less Wright’s annual salary] in the last few weeks, they say.
Denis Wright’s letters of the autumn of 1944 portrayed a more relaxed Mersin. The blackout was lifted, cricket matches were played at the ‘Braithwaites’ construction camp, and the consul represented Mersin in a tennis match. A jazz band played on the ‘millionairish’ seafront boulevard that was being built under the direction of the new Vali, Tewfik Gür. Jewish refugees bound for Cyprus passed through Mersin, and another excitement was the defection of an Austrian couple and a German who were working for German intelligence in Turkey – Herr and Frau von Kleckowski and Wilhelm Hamburgher. (The Americans had asked the British to smuggle them out of the country, and the trio stayed at the consulate before heading off to Syria on the Taurus Express.) Otherwise, life at the consulate passed quietly. On 11 November 1944, Mr Busk at the Ankara embassy noted, ‘The importance of Mersin has in the past lain in the fact that it was one of two accessible ports. We may hope that the Aegean will be shortly opened up and when this happens the importance of Mersin will sink to almost nothing.’
The old seafront at Mersin
And so, in January 1945, Denis Wright left Mersin for London. Before he left, he received a letter from my grandmother dated 9 January 1945 which he kept and later pasted in his album of memoirs. Mamie Dakad wrote (in French):
Mr Wright,
I have just learned of your departure and unfortunately there is not enough time to see you and thank you for all that you have been good enough to do for me. I hope that you will not forget me in Syria, because I must receive news from my husband.
Bon voyage and good luck.
Best wishes
G. Dakak
In May 1945, the European war ended. Still Georgette waited for her husband. Four months later, she was in the mountains, in Gözne, when she received a letter informing her of Joseph’s release. She was so absorbed by the letter that she didn’t notice a creature slithering in the vine overhead, and didn’t even flinch when the serpent suddenly fell and landed at her feet. My grandmother enjoyed telling her daughters this story, with its connotation of Eden regained.
The northern extremities of the Red Sea consist of two fingers of water that point, respectively, at the Mediterranean Sea and the Israel–Jordan border; and wedged between them is the triangle of the Sinai desert. The easternmost finger is the Gulf of Aqaba and at its very tip is the Israeli holiday destination of Eilat, a conglomeration of hotels, purpose-built lagoons and concrete apartment blocks generated by the proximity of coral reefs and submarine wildlife. I flew there from London on 7 April 1996, Easter Sunday. The British capital was passing through a tense, unpleasant phase, and I was glad to be leaving. A few days before, special stop and search laws, rushed through parliament that same week, had come into force: it was the eightieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, and intelligence reports suggested that the IRA planned to mark the occasion with violence. Londoners feared the worst. The IRA ceasefire h
ad ended on 10 February with an explosion at South Quay, in the Docklands, in which hundreds had been injured and two killed. The city was subjected to further disruption and violence. Walking home one evening, I found that Soho was blocked off to traffic and that an ‘explosive device’ was being defused in a telephone booth I passed every morning on my way into work. Then, on Sunday 18 February, the 171 bus (which I used to take daily when I lived in south London) blew up at the Aldwych near Bush House, again at a place I walked by most working days. The explosion injured six and killed the carrier of the bomb, Eddie O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old from Gorey, Co. Wexford. For a few days after, the spectacular carcass of the bus remained on the road, a fantastically mangled mass of strawberry metal coated with flakes of fine snow.
But the place I was flying into was far more dangerous than the one I was leaving. In nine days in February and March, Hamas suicide bombers had killed sixty-one people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. These events triggered – as they were probably designed to – measures from the Israeli government that were as retaliatory as they were defensive, most notably the imposition of very strict restrictions on the movement of Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza. With many thousands separated from their families and jobs, the military and political crisis grew ever more bitter, and it seemed that further bomb attacks were imminent.
But there was no sign of trouble as I drove out of Eilat and across the stony heights and crumbling sandy hills of the Negev desert – only of ostriches, donkeys, camels and hovering hawks. I drove through Sodom and then, passing Masada, along the western shore of the Salt Sea into Judea. When the Salt Sea came to an end I turned westward; for some distance now (my map told me) I had been travelling in the Autonomous Territories. The desert was now freckled with bushes. Grazing lambs and nomad encampments appeared on the hills, and the roadside bloomed with poppies and shrubs with mustard- and lavender-coloured flowers. I passed through a couple of Israeli army checkpoints, and then, abruptly, I was in Jerusalem.
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