Where the Clocks Chime Twice

by Alec Waugh

  It is not easy to explain why or how Baghdad came so to grow on me; it was a matter of slow growth, and I was lucky, extremely lucky, in two things: first in that I arrived to find so much work on hand that I had not the time to wonder whether I was liking it or not.

  High-grade intelligence, like all creative work, is a thing of fits and starts. There are alternating periods of calm and pressure. It has been described as cloak and dagger’, and for the layman it has the glamour of ‘blonde spies’. In actual fact it is a business of files and card indexes and lists. It is memory and common sense; it is putting two and two together, and things that ‘ring a bell’. Often it is mere routine, though never without its fascination. It is never hack work. There are times, however, when it is so exciting that you can hardly bear to be taken away from it for meals, when you work a full fifteen-hour day. It was like that during my first months in Baghdad.

  I was lucky, again, in the conditions under which I worked. We were housed, some forty of us, a mixed Army and Air Force unit, in what had been once a regal residence. We led a monastic life. Our office was a two-storied house, built on the Arab pattern round a central garden, out of which a single date palm grew. A balcony ran round the upper storey. It was as cool as any place can be when the mean shade summer temperature is no degrees. We worked in our separate cells like monks, in a silence that was only broken when the colonel came out on to his balcony to summon one of us by name. It was ‘Top Secret’ work. No one knew exactly what the man next to him was doing. It is one of the principles of intelligence work that you are only told as much as is strictly necessary for the immediate job on hand. Although our organisation was largely responsible for the security of the Teheran conference, the first I heard of it was on the radio.

  Our living quarters were on the river in a mud-built raftered house with rickety balconies, sagging walls, uneven stairways; it was only seventy-five years old, but it looked like a medieval castle. We dined in winter in a high, narrow, collegiate-type hall, at a long refectory table which in summer was set out upon a stone-flagged terrace. Secret Service funds were at our disposal for entertaining, and we did ourselves very well.

  The routine of my day could not have been more simple. I woke each morning with the light, in a large bare room, one side of which was windowed like a greenhouse, and which I had furnished with rugs, a few light curtains and a matchboard cupboard. I woke fresh. I had gone to bed early and clear-headed.

  I would start the day while the air was cool, with a half-hour jogtrot run along the river. Though it was barely six o’clock, the life of the neighbourhood had already started. Long-skirted Moslems were gossiping at a café on their rectangular settees as they shifted their yellow beads. A small shack of a store had its shutters open. At an I.W.T. landing-stage, Indians were loading black chunks of congealed crude oil. Scattered mud houses were in various stages of dilapidation. Black-veiled women were scouring out their pans. Small children, their faces blotched with the boils that show disfiguring scars on the faces of nearly all Baghdadis, were tumbling in the dust. Some of them as I passed would scramble to their feet to give a very tolerable salute. Others would patter after me with a whimpered ‘baksheesh’. Scrofulous scavenger dogs barked at me. By a large water-buffalo farm women were collecting manure to plaster in flat, round cakes against the mud walls of their houses, to be used when dry as fuel. Small boys trotted by on donkeys carrying earth and brushwood for repair work on the river banks.

  I breakfasted at seven; as the office did not open until eight I had a spare half-hour to sit out on my balcony and browse through Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Our morning work hours were eight to one. In the afternoon the office reopened at half-past four. We dined at half-past eight. I never took a siesta after lunch; in the winter I would play a round of golf on the nine-hole mud-caked course; in the summer I would take a rowing boat across the river to the Alwiyah Club to swim and sunbathe. I was allowed to wear civilian clothes and often after dinner a brother officer and I would sit on the terrace of an out-of-bounds Arab café, watching the brown Tigris flow south from Nineveh, capping each other’s quotations over a glass of Arak.

  There was a certain amount of social life. Over the week-ends in summer there was cricket. The British community was large enough to support two clubs; the one in town consisting of a bar, a billiard-room, and a large lounge to which ladies were admitted, was patronised chiefly in the winter; the other, the Alwiyah, was a country club a mile or so down the river; it had a swimming-pool and squash and tennis courts. Thursdays and Saturdays are the big Baghdad nights. Thursday because Friday is the Moslem Sunday and many shops and offices do not open then. It is on Saturdays and Thursdays that residents throw their parties. On Thursdays in the summer there is an open-air cinema show at the Alwiyah, and on Saturdays there is dancing on the lawn. In the winter there are monthly Saturday-night dances at the New British Club, and on the following morning, after church, ‘everyone’ gathers for ninety minutes of gin and limes before going home to a curry tiffin. Office hours are arranged to suit the season, so that in winter the resident can take his afternoon exercise between two and four and in the summer between four and six. You could safely say that according to the time of year you would know what any friend of yours was doing at any given moment of the day. There are only two or three places that he could be, only two or three things he could be doing. It is small-town life and, because of the climate, small-town life under difficult conditions. Yet even so Baghdad grows on you.

  I have twice in transit spent a day at Aden. Aden struck me as being as dreary an ‘outpost of Empire’ as you could find; hot, rock-bound, dusty, the sea on one side, the desert on the other, not a tree or flower, the only attraction offered to the tourist was a mummified finless fish that appeared to possess female organs and that was presented as the original mermaid. Yet every soldier, every official, every cable and wireless technician stationed there has assured me that he left with genuine regret.

  Baghdad has an equivalent effect. There is a happy atmosphere about the place. In part this is due to its very distance. There is a world’s end, journey’s end feeling about it all; a shipwrecked desert-island feeling, surrounded as you are on all sides by a desert that becomes in winter an impassable morass of mud. In the consequent enforced reliance on your own devices, there is, as its inevitable corollary, the comradeship invariably found among those who are cut off from their real lives, their homes, their personal tastes, the people and the things they care for. There is also—and this possibly is the determining factor—the cordial relations that exist between the British and the Iraqis.

  Before World War I Britain had few cultural and economic links with Iraq. The vilayets or provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra were neglected outposts of the Ottoman Empire. In 1918 the country was, both culturally and economically, extremely backward, and the British technicians and advisers posted there in the ’20s to reorganise the finances of the country and its public services on modern lines, and to train the young Iraqi to take over as soon as possible “the running of his own show”, went not as rulers but as associates and friends.

  This fact has had a big effect on the social pattern of Baghdad life. There cannot have been many places in the British Raj where it was easier to mix freely, and under pleasant conditions, with the real owners of the country. Most of the prominent Iraqis, certainly the younger ones, speak good English. Many of them have been trained in England; many of them are members of the Alwiyah Club. The majority of Iraqis are Moslems and do not, consequently, introduce their acquaintances to their womenfolk; but the opportunities for men to meet are numerous. Iraqi officers and officials were frequent visitors to our mess. Freemasonry at that time flourished, with Britons and Iraqis belonging to the same lodges. Most specialists and technicians found their opposite numbers. I, for instance, found a branch of the P.E.N. Club. Every three weeks or so there would be a gathering at one or another of the members’ houses. We would meet at about six, when
the heat of the day was lessening. We would be welcomed with coffee and lemonade—alcohol is rarely offered in a Moslem country. Stiff-backed settees and chairs would be set in a circle on the lawn or, if it was winter, indoors against the walls. One of the members would read a paper in Arabic, lasting for forty minutes or so. The Iraqi next to me would whisper explanations. After the paper there would be a discussion. The atmosphere was very much that of a college literary society.

  During the discussion and the last part of the paper, you became conscious of active preparations about the kitchen. The supper was of Trimalchian dimensions. A long buffet table would be piled high with fish and chicken, with a sheep cooked whole and stuffed with rice, with salads and round cakes of bread. A second table was laden with bowls of fruit. There was, usually, no cutlery. You ate with your right hand. At the end of the meal a servant brought soap and a bowl of water, sometimes a bottle of scent to wipe on your hands and wrists. Immediately after supper, the party would disperse.

  When I came to leave Baghdad, I felt that I had made as many Iraqi as I had made English friends there. Though I was returning to be demobilised, to civilian status, freed of discipline, though I was going home, to my own friends and family, to my own work, to my own way of life, I was more than a little wistful. I should often, I knew it well, be homesick for Baghdad.

  I was; more often than I had foreseen.

  It was small things that I found myself recalling—the first night in spring when it is warm enough to take your bed out on to the roof; the luminous sheen that settles at sunset on the Tigris; the sound of Deanna Durbin’s singing carried from an open-air cinema across the river; the vivid scarlet that for a few brief moments slashes the sky at dawn; the cold bitter taste of beer on a parched tongue after an evening’s cricket; the waking at four on a summer morning to the thought that in ten minutes a breeze will be blowing from the north and it will be cool enough to pull on a sheet; the mosques and minarets of the old city, ochre-brown under the heavy sunlight; the golden domes of Kadhimain.

  I recalled, too, the pattern of local customs—the weeks, for example, when everyone you pass will be chewing at a lettuce; the period in midsummer when the Tigris sinks, and the Baghdadis plant with vegetables the mudbanks of the river and the islands that rise in midstream above its surface; the period in mid-September when the river rises and planters scurry out to gather in the vegetables before the islands are submerged; the fires in August along the river banks against which are being roasted on spears of wood the flat, split local fish, the musgoof; a lone Arab riding his horse along the Bund and singing; a Bedouin putting down his mat, prostrating himself in his midday prayers; a group of small boys on donkeys, transporting earth; the boatmen calling to one another at night across the river—sensations and sights and sounds personal and peculiar to Baghdad, linked with memorial traditions, customs that are intrinsic to the city’s life, that have an eternal quality, in which are incorporated a surviving essence of Baghdad’s history and its changing fortunes—with over it all the mellowing influence of Baghdad itself, Baghdad that has survived so much, whose continuity is a symbol of survival, whose long, low, yellow line of buildings against the sky is a perpetual reminder, a constant reassurance of rebirth.

  As my plane from Basra on this return journey after a five years’ absence swooped down over the curving Tigris I was confident that I should find it little changed—except in inessentials.

  I spent a week there, one night in the city itself, in a mid-town hotel, then I went out to stay in the oil compound in an air-cooled villa as the guest of two valued friends Vi and S. N. Hare.

  I know Baghdad so well that I could make a catalogue of the incidental changes that I found—the golf-course built over now, the housing estates on the road to Baquba, the irrigation projects, the new night clubs, the new race-course, an increase of traffic and some smart new buses, Al Rashid Street both noisier and smellier, the terrace of the Semiramis newly grassed—just as I could make a list of the various social changes that I found, changes that had been largely occasioned by the Palestinian troubles. I lunched with Fadhil Jamali, for a long period Iraq’s representative at U.N.O. He told me that since the trouble the Masonic lodges had not been able to meet, since many of the members were of Jewish origin. The finances of the country had been hit by Iraq’s refusal to pipe oil to Haifa. In Baghdad I saw the reverse side of the refugee problem that had been so insistent on the coast. Over 900,000 Palestinian Arabs, many of them Christians, have had to flee from Israel. In Lebanon I had been a witness to much of their distress. Colin Reid had talked to me of the dispossessed Palestinians in Amman without home, country, occupation, future, who sat in the Philadelphia Hotel, gambling away, hour after hour, what remained of their possessions, just to help kill time. In Baghdad I saw, though on a much smaller scale, the other side of the picture: the denationalised Iraqi Jews waiting at the airport to be transferred from the country of their birth to the Israelite refugee camps. The evil that men do lives after them, and the repercussions of the Hitler crime are still being felt by innocent individuals on both sides of the frontier.

  If, however, I were to underline such differences I would be giving a false picture of Baghdad. Such differences are incidental. The new houses that have been built along the promenade leading to the Alwiyah Club have taken their place unobtrusively in the general colour scheme of ochre-brown yellow buildings. The absence of British troops did not make the place look different, in the way that the substitution of American oil-men for French képis had changed Beyrouth. One morning I crossed the river and strolled through the old G.H.Q. area. Silence hung above it as though that alien presence had not yet been wholly exorcised, as though the tide of Arab life was not quite sure whether it had the right to flood back and repossess it. Children were playing under the branches of amber-yellow ripening dates. There was no trace of the occupation except the silence.

  I spent my week in Baghdad in the way that I had always wanted when I was on service under discipline. During my thirty-two months in Paiforce I had two leaves, but I did not have a single complete day off duty in Baghdad. It was very good, master now of my time and leisure, to wake early and work on a manuscript through the cool hours of the morning, looking out on to the dusty grey-green eucalyptus trees; then, when the air-cooler was switched off, strolling slowly to the Alwiyah, savouring my release from the endless saluting and being saluted, sunbathing and swimming in the pool, lunching off a sandwich and a Coca-Cola, leaving the club at about half-past two, returning in time for a siesta before tea.

  My host would be back then from his office, to motor me out of town, so that his dogs could take their run along the river. The heat of the day was lessening; long-tailed magpies and green-breasted bee-catchers darted and dived over the sandbank. Water-buffaloes, calling to each other on the march, raised a cloud of dust as they came down in droves for their evening drink. Later we would dine out under the stars.

  Yes, it was Baghdad as I had known it through those long thirty-two months of exile.

  It is not, I suppose, very likely that I shall ever spend another week there. Baghdad is a long way off, a very long way off. But I doubt if a whole week of my life will ever pass without my missing it.

  VI

  Damascus

  I LEFT Baghdad in an Iraqi aircraft.

  I had travelled during my eight months’ trip by British, American, Dutch, Egyptian, Indian, and now Iraqi airlines. In the days when I travelled by boat I had enjoyed the constant switching to lines of another nation. If you travel by sea you are on foreign soil the moment that you step on board a foreign ship. It was fascinating in Australia to step off a pier at Sydney, cross a few yards of gangplank and find yourself in France. You could learn more about Germany by crossing the Atlantic in the Bremen than by spending two weeks upon the Rhine. But the differences between a French and an Egyptian plane are negligible. You eat the same kind of food, sit in the same kind of chair, are subjected to the same courteous disc
ipline. The interior decoration is the same. The air hostess of the Air India line will probably be wearing a sari; a K.L.M. pilot will talk in Dutch to half his passengers; but you have no sense of being in India or in Holland. Certain lines specialise in the provision of certain complimentary amenities. Air France serves vintage wines, K.L.M. serves Bols gin, Air India curried savouries. European lines run out of ice; Pan-American never does. B.O.A.C. as a Government-run corporation tends to be parsimonious, timid of questions in the House about ‘Whitehall officials swigging whisky at the taxpayer’s expense’. But by and large there is no good reason for preferring one line to another. I have found no real difference in quality of service. Air travel is internationally organised; the pilots and the ground staffs are well trained: the stewards and hostesses are courteous, the various clerks who direct over-night passengers to their hotel accommodation are invariably patient and efficient. The general standard of comfort is improving yearly. A journey from London to New York will soon be as relaxed as the four-hour run from Boston in the Yankee ‘Clipper’. Travel is now as always an adventure; a journey is a journey still. Something is missing though. Travelling hopefully is no longer better than arriving. The journey is nothing; the point of arrival everything. In my opinion the general pattern of living is the poorer for the loss of that streak of colour.

  One advantage, however, the air does hold. You do get during the last minutes of your flight a panoramic sense of the country you are to visit that is impossible by boat or train.

  I had this sense very vividly as I circled above Damascus. I had come to Damascus many times and by many routes : from Lebanon across the hills, from Baghdad across the desert, from the south from Deraa. I had seen it as a green oasis, giving me from a distance, with its mosques and minarets, a look of Oxford. But I had not realised till I flew above it to what extent, surrounded with its gardens and its vineyards, it had fed and welcomed the long camel trains : you have to be above it to realise the extent of its isolation; miles and miles of desert and then this brief green garden.