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3, W e t h e r b y
After the Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswani, I thought to write the 3, Wetherby Gardens. It will not be as interesting. It will not have a plot nor perhaps as many colorful characters. It will not relate the vices and corruption on a scale of the Yacoubian occupants because it has to do mainly with young people though it is not altogether free of these. And it certainly shall not be a best seller. It is a memoir that might perhaps set me writing again after a long, dry period.
3, Wetherby is of course the address of a building; the Victorian type of family home that covers almost the totality of the better-off residential districts of England and seems to have been designed by one single pop architect. An austere Victorian Andy Warhol who, instead of Marilyn Monroe‟s image, duplicated his architectural blueprint ad infinitum and gave it away for free to the rigidly conformist Englishmen of that era. In time, as the wealthy Victorian colonialists became less plentiful and less well-off, as the ranks of the middle classes expanded and lifestyles changed, so did the Victorian homes. The very same ones, that is. Instead of housing one single extended family, most were subdivided into smaller flats where nuclear families resided and many were converted into furnished “bed sitters”, that is, single rooms rented mainly to students.
The 3, Wetherby Gardens boarding house was such a building in South Kensington. A three storey-high construction apart from the attic, which was also subdivided into rooms with small windows and sloping ceilings. It had a basement as well, which in Victorian days was a storeroom, a pantry, a wine cellar and a coal depot connected directly to the street by a circular cast-iron trapdoor on the pavement.
In our days, the basement started off as a dining hall for breakfast but as the demand for rooms increased resulting in higher rental fees, the landlord simplified his life and increased his profits by canceling the very pleasant and sociable morning breakfast and subdivided the basement into rooms to accommodate three or four hard-up students who gratefully paid a lesser rent at the cost of a gloomy and frigid environment.
Wetherby Gardens itself was a wide and pleasant street. The “Gardens” part of it was not immediately discernible. As Wetherby Gardens and the parallel street behind it, together with the two parallel streets at right angles to them fashioned a huge framing rectangle of identical buildings, on the inside part of it a large grassy courtyard was formed with sand paths, flower beds and trees. It was accessible to the occupants of the houses that surrounded it through doors at the back of each building and in the glorious summer sunshine it was used as a playground of well-mannered English children, the momentary breather of busy housewives, and for stretching the arthritic limbs of the elderly.
Many of our fellow students from the English School, Cairo, went on to continue their university studies in England. London, of course, was the destination of choice. In the early sixties it was a fascinating city, very much alive with a new hedonistic way of life. The cultural blossoming in every artistic domain and the rapidly evolving mores made it a sort of world capital of change. Sometime in the late 43
fifties 3, Wetherby metamorphosed into a receptacle of not only students from the ESC but also students and post graduate scholars of all subjects, from Egypt.
The first time I visited London on my way to MIT, I stayed with Andy and Basil (alias Omar) at a house near the South Kensington tube station and we went to 3, Wetherby to meet some of our old schoolmates. Andy‟s brother, George Vayanos lived there as well as Taki Raissi and another classmate called Moataz Al Mansour.
Old boys from the English School were also frequent visitors. I met Clive Gibson who invited us to his home and offered us eggs and bacon in a pleasant afternoon gathering where we exchanged reminiscences. Royten Heath was another classmate from Egypt.
His father was a BOAC ground engineer and Heath was crazy about airplanes. He was a year older than us and was strong and a bit of a bully but not overbearingly so.
He was aloof and not especially friendly with us, his classmates, and mostly hanged around with an American fellow student called Richard (Dickie) Moats whose father was also an airline engineer with TWA.
This is a memoir and although its title specifies a certain setting, I shall take the liberty to digress from this setting both in space and time insofar as other reminiscences intrude and dictate it. I think they might one day bring a smile to an inadvertent and uninvolved reader.
Dickie Moats was our class hero. He was a champion diver at the Airlines Club in Cairo, was a superb gymnast, an extraordinary athlete and a natural at any sport he chose to try out. Good looking, with a terrific muscular body but slightly short, he had nevertheless all the girls drooling. It could hardly be otherwise for in Egypt of the late fifties Americans had the foreign glamour of their films, their music, their beautiful stars and starlets, the lifestyle with their snazzy homes and two-car garages.
After the Suez crisis of 1956 our English School disintegrated. The English staff was expelled and when it reopened under the Egyptian Ministry of Education, most of the foreign students did not return. Hence I lost track of Heath, Moats, Pohoski and many other friends and classmates for many, many years and it was only with the advent of the internet, the English School site that the old boys set up, and the Sherlock Holmes capabilities of Pipsy (a nickname I gave Michael Pohoski, which after half a century is still holding strong) that some of us were reunited, if not physically, at least by email.
I exchanged emotional letters with Pipsy, who avid in his search for the dispersed colleagues, informed me letter by letter, who was where and doing what.
Before he got fed up and gave up the chase, Pipsy managed to organize some reunions, at his home in San Diego, of his closer friends. It is ironical that the one time I went to California on vacation with my family, I did not know where Pipsy was. Basil and Enver Murad went there, later, with their spouses, as well as Dickie Moats with his. Larger ESC reunions were organized through the internet and took place in various parts of the globe as far away as Australia, the US (east and west coast), England, Germany and in Egypt, which was the spiritual and physical home of the old English School.
From Pipsy I learnt a few scant details about Dickie. After leaving Egypt he entered the American University in Beirut where he earned a degree in Economics.
He then joined the US Foreign Service and was assigned for a few years in Kuwait.
Following Kuwait, his tracks were sort of effaced in a mist of mystery because he was unwilling to talk about his activities. While a guest at Pipsy‟s house in San Diego he was asked what he did after Kuwait. He told Pipsy, “If I told you what I was doing I would have to kill you.” Sometime in the span of those 30 years, where one would 44
have to be exterminated if he acquired the least knowledge of his activities, Dickie married an Afghanistani woman and converted to Islam. He dropped the name Richard (and of course Dickie, as well) and took on the name Mustafa. He embraced Islam to the minutest detail. He prayed regularly, fasted at Ramadan, he murmured
“Bi ism Allah al Rahman al Rahim” before putting anything in his mouth and shooed away Pipsy‟s beloved dogs with his feet telling them “Emshi ya ibn el kalb” (begone you son of a bitch). Moslems consider dogs to be dirty animals. The fact that Pipsy loved his two dogs dearly could not have escaped his notice and yet he showed not the slightest delicacy toward his host‟s feelings. Every time Mustafa shooed them away it was akin a knife stab to Pipsy‟s heart. He never forgave him and never spoke to him again after Mustafa left the house where he was so graciously received.
If the relating of the above story sounds a little mean, I plead guilty. There are a few more mean things I want to say. Pipsy sent me a relatively recent picture of Mustafa and his wife. I shall not comment on the wife. I shall expend my bile on Mustafa. Mustafa that svelte, muscular, good-looking athlete had become a fat, pudgy, thoroughly unappetizing not to say gross presence - the original ugly American with a self-satisfied smirk. When I first got his email address, I sent him a nice, friendly, even flattering letter talking of our English School days. I told him I had picked up a new hobby as soon as I settled in Greece, which was writing fiction.
In a short note and a thoroughly ironic vein he answered, “Then send me one of your masterpieces so I can have a look.” Perhaps I am lacking a sense of humor. In any case, I‟ll let the reader guess whether I sent any stories or not.
Back to 3, Wetherby. That day we met in London, our group decided to go to a restaurant for a meal. Royten Heath did not join us. He entered a grocery store, bought a loaf of bread, some cheese and salami and munched them away in the street.
Perhaps he could not afford the restaurant. More likely he was saving up urgently to get a pilot‟s license and, if that was the point, he did realize his dream to become an airline pilot. Eventually he formed a small airline company operating in Africa and exploited it for a few years. Later he sold out at a considerable profit, retired at an early age and enjoyed a happy family life in England with wife and sons.
In those early days at 3, Wetherby, I encountered again another intriguing person, admittedly of a totally different stature from Mustafa. It was Roger Tamraz. I had known him since we were both children at the Gezira Preparatory School. He was a form higher than me and perhaps slightly older. He was a skinny and sickly boy and often fainted during morning assembly; just simply collapsed to the ground. I remember Mrs. Swinburn, our teacher, sweeping him up and carrying him like a sack over her shoulder to the infirmary. Afterwards he was allowed to sit on the stairs while we stood and sang the morning hymns and chanted, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come. . .” We were in the same House called Aurora and because I was good at sports, he relied on me in the inter-House hockey matches which we played at the Gezira Sporting Club.
Later, at the English School we did not mix much but he was popular with his classmates and the girls even though he was not an athlete. He remained quite short and delicate but was reasonably good-looking with reddish hair and freckles. In our sports oriented school our athletes were our heroes but Roger made his mark through an undoubtedly strong personality, through his family‟s wealth and by driving his own sports car, which was a rare event in those days. I do not think he was an exceptional student though he was certainly intelligent. He took extra literature lessons privately with Mr. Spence, our English teacher, who praised him publicly in our class.
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He went on to the American University in Cairo for a BA degree in Economics where my future wife also studied. She was not in his crowd of friends but she knew him well and recounted the following incident. They were guests at a party outside the city near the pyramids. It was getting late and my wife wanted to return home but no taxis were available. At that moment Roger Tamraz was leaving as well and he offered to take her in his car. On the way he stopped the car on the side of the road and tried to kiss her. She rebuffed him and, annoyed, he asked her rhetorically,
“Do you know who I am? I am Roger Tamraz and a hundred girls would have liked to be in your shoes.” She told him that perhaps a hundred girls would like to be in her shoes but she would rather not be where she was. “Then get the hell out,” he ordered her and left her on the deserted road in the middle of nowhere to wait for a taxi which might or might not pass by.
At 3, Wetherby he came to see his friends Taki Raissi and George Vayanos.
He came driving a sports car and accompanied a gorgeous English girl. He claimed he was studying in Cambridge in a PhD program but with people like Roger the truth is never unadulterated. I say this not out of spite but because he subsequently went to Harvard for an MBA. After a PhD at Cambridge University? Perhaps. An Egyptian friend of his once asked him if he benefited from this great institution (Harvard). He took out from the inside pocket of his jacket an address book and showed it to him. It was the most precious knowledge he accessed from Harvard. It contained the names, addresses and phone numbers of the rich and the powerful, the future leaders of businesses and governments.
His subsequent career makes intriguing reading. This is not the place to list the accomplishments of the self-made multi millionaire, the “international businessman with an unsavory reputation”, the CIA agent, the oil financier, Reagan‟s top Republican campaign donor and the Democratic campaign donor of $300.000 for a face-to-face chat with Clinton. He really is admirable and once again, I do not say this ironically or out of spite. Just google to the Wikipedia site of Roger Tamraz to get a flavor of his endeavors. He had vision and dreams, energy and audacity, and I think what finally failed him in his standing as a reputable businessman was his ruthless scramble for money and his consequent unsentimental, deliberate dishonesty.
Through the Wall Street firm Kidder Peabody where he was initially employed, he refloated the Lebanese Intra Bank. He became its CEO and remained involved in labyrinthine maneuvers in Lebanese banking and politics until he fled Beirut in 1989 wanted by the authorities for a financial fraud which led to the country‟s major banking crisis. He was charged of embezzling $200 million and was also ordered by a French court to pay $57 million in connection with the collapse of a French bank.
Despite his numerous business ventures in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the US: businesses in banks, oil, petrol stations, hotels and restaurants, commissions extracted from the building of methanol mega plants in Saudi Arabia, despite the many millions he made legally or illegally, when even the legal ventures were never completely honest, his great obsession was a pipeline from Baku, on the Caspian Sea, to Ceyhan in Turkey. He already had two huge oil concessions in Turkmenistan but without a pipeline they were worthless. If he managed to organize a consortium to build a pipeline he would find himself in the sweet world of billions. Hence his maneuvers to meet leaders and presidents of all countries involved from the owners of the oil wells to the owners of overland routes that the pipelines would traverse, from the providers of funds to the providers of political backing, Tamraz like an indefatigable bee buzzed from flower to flower (!). In the process he managed to 46
convince the CIA of his usefulness if not his indispensability and was added to its payroll. In any case, when he was arrested in Morocco in 2009, it was this employer that sprung him from the Moroccan jail and he just managed to make his daughter‟s wedding in the States.
Perhaps I should end Roger‟s saga at this point but I cannot resist adding a few juicy tidbits to round up the picture. In September 1997 he testified in a US
congressional committee investigating the $300.000 donation to the Democratic Party and his attempt to influence US policy for the Central Asian pipeline. After asserting his love for democracy (!), Tamraz said he began what would become a long association with the CIA when they asked his help in freeing hostages taken around the time of the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241
Americans.
Tamraz : “The US asked me to arrange for safe passage for the person who was to lead American actions in retaliating and recovering our hostages. This man was abducted and tortured to death. His abductors, the suicide bomber supporters, enemies of the US became my enemies. They attacked me with every means at their disposal. I was kidnapped, slowly poisoned, tortured and beaten for three weeks in 1989, while I was the leading candidate in the Lebanese presidential elections (!). All my assets worth more than a billion dollars (!) were illegally (?) seized by my enemies (?).
“I have risked my life many times for this country for no material gain (!!).” When asked about the $300.000 he gave the Democrats in an attempt to meet with President Clinton which never materialized, though he was invited to innocuous breakfasts and lunches with other important people but never managed to have an intimate chat with the President, Sen. Joseph Lieberman inquired: “So do you think you got your money‟s worth?” Roger replied, “I think next time I‟ll give $600.000.” Everyone admired his outspokenness and audacity, especially his friends and our English School classmates. As for the story of his kidnapping, the other and more credible version is that after the collapse of the Intra Bank and the alleged embezzlement of $200 million for which Roger was sentenced in absentia by a Lebanese court to 15 years jail and for which an Interpol arrest warrant is still loosely pending, it relates to a pro-Syrian Lebanese warlord who lost a few million dollars of his money in the Intra Bank affair. He operated in the quickest and only fail-proof way to get his money back. He kidnapped Roger and held him until $7.000.000
dollars were credited to his Swiss bank account. No hard feelings; just business Tamraz style.
Just for the record, I want to list some of the English School friends I met in London during my happy years there. There was Emmanuel Licos, a rich, portly Greek from Khartoum who moved about South Kensington in a late model Mercedes.
The brothers Abdel Aziz and Sadek Radwan, scions of a rich Egyptian family, which apart of their other businesses and landholdings had a stud farm where they raised racehorses. Both boys were polite, intelligent with a fine sense of humor. Abdel Aziz was successful in business, made a lot of money and moved in England‟s highest aristocratic circles. Sadek returned to Cairo to attend to the family enterprises.
Perhaps because of the racehorse breeding and involvement in racing, both brothers were gamblers and at the time I met them there were rumors that their creditors threatened them with brutal physical violence if they did not honor their gambling debts. Sadek, in later years was an outstanding bridge player and a close friend to that other compulsive gambler, the handsome, glamorous and utterly charming film star 47
Omar Sherif. During those early London days we had a few meals together and many, many laughs.
At one time or another, I met Ramsey Mikaati (Basil‟s brother), George Kardouche, John Hewgill, Abraham Levi, Sotiris Nacopoulos and probably quite a few others who slip from my memory.
My initial acquaintance with London, which captivated me so thoroughly, I described in a short memoir I entitled Spreading Our Wings. When I returned after my debacle at MIT and decided to stay on in London, I rented a room at Drayton Gardens and enrolled in a tutorial college to prepare for my GCE Advanced Level in order to enter a British university. The educational downgrading was traumatic but my enchantment with London and the companionship of my friends went a long way to offset the depression of my failure.
I settled into an easy, carefree life and enjoyed the amenities of London and my friendships. Mostly out of laziness but also due to the uninspiring teaching at the tutorial college, I did not let my studies interfere with my extracurricular interests. I was always interested in the novel and my reading flourished in London. I did not miss any of the significant films of the nouvelle vague or any of the wonderful plays at the extraordinary British stage. I even went occasionally to the Festival Hall for classical music and to ballet performances at Covent Garden, which were, at the time, graced by the youthful Rudolph Nureyev, just out of Russia, and Margot Fonteyn.
That is one reason why I often say that I did not gain a good education in England but I grew up as a person. As civilized and as cultured, as tolerant of races and religions (though a nonbeliever), and as aware of our world and universe as my unexceptional intellect allowed me.
Two incidents come to mind from that period, which relate to books and ballet: One afternoon I started reading a book by J.D.Salinger called “The Catcher in the Rye”. It was so absolutely enthralling I could not put it down. I read it right through the night, in one go, in a flush of excitement and gratitude for the thrilling sleepless night it gave me and of course missed my boring classes the next day. As a matter of interest, J.D.Salinger died a few weeks ago. He published just the above novel, which was an instant sensation and a handful of short stories and novelettes although he did not stop writing throughout his lifetime. He was a very private and secretive person and was not interested in publishing his work. He wrote for himself, which is very strange.
Of the second incident I do not recall the exact circumstances. However, it involved a Thai young man I met and invited for a coffee to my room. In the halting conversation we had due to his inadequate English he asked me repeatedly if I liked ballet. I answered I did and wondered why his brain like a damaged gramophone record got stuck on that point. “I have a friend he like ballet,” he said. The next day he sent me his friend and compatriot who liked ballet. He was thin, repulsive, and extremely effeminate. I understood, at that moment, that the repeated questions of whether I liked ballet was a sort of code with which homosexuals discreetly identified each other given that in the early sixties they had not yet come out of the closet.
Needless to say, I was frigid and uncommunicative with my second Siamese acquaintance and he departed on the double but left me with the worry of why the first young man imagined I might be homosexual. On the other hand, I smiled to think what a good friend he was, to ferret out sexual companions for his friend.
During that first year my most frequent companions were Andy Vayanos and Basil Mikaati. Less frequently I associated with Moataz whom we called Al (from his surname Al Mansour). All of us were studying for the A-Level examinations with 48
differing degrees of diligence. We lived separately and although we changed lodgings often it was usually within the same neighborhood and we met daily for meals or a coffee or a cinema. We never cooked at home and fed our appetites at the nearby coffee bars which abounded in the South Kensington area. We also patronized the Indian restaurants for the tasty and copious curry dishes and rice and usually left them feeling heavy, sick, and disgusted at the immoderate overstuffing we indulged in.
Andy and Basil were budding Casanovas. All of us were, of course, interested in girls but it takes a special trait of character to chase girls in that single-minded and not unduly fastidious manner. The motto was: try for five and one is sure to fall. The object, needless to say, was not love or companionship but sexual intercourse. It was understandable. We left behind a vastly conservative Egypt and found ourselves in a country abounding in pretty, unattached young women who were free from moral restraints in their sexual conduct. Both Andy and Basil developed an enviable facility of initiating light-hearted, amusing conversations with girls that interested them wherever they found them. On the street, in coffee bars, in the wonderful London parks or in dancing clubs where young people of both sexes went unattached precisely for the purpose of meeting others.
I was a late starter in the sex game. In my memoir Omar and Juliet, I gave an account of my days with Basil (Omar) and my loss of virginity at 19. Mansour (Al) was also a much less active skirt chaser. He was slightly short and not particularly good-looking with an Arab face and discreet mustache and beard that covered his chin. He was very intelligent and in his later professional life held high posts in international organizations and banks. He married twice. I was present at his first marriage in Cairo together with another school friend called Tousson Roushdy and nearly caused a scandal when I kissed the bride. It was just not done in Egypt at the time. Abdel Halim Hafez, the heartthrob singer and film star was in attendance and though everybody was swooning over him, Tousson and I gave him the cold shoulder.
It was rather childish and I doubt he noticed, but there you are.
Al fathered a daughter, divorced, and married a very beautiful Egyptian woman. In Cairo, I hardly ever saw him even though we were quite intimate throughout our lives. When I left Egypt to settle in Greece a decade ago, he was chairman of the Misr-Iran Bank. In Greece, I was shocked to learn that he was caught out in a financial scam and went to prison for a couple of years. He was released a short while ago but I am reluctant to get in touch with him. Time and distance sometimes creates a gulf one is hesitant to scale. If I were still in Egypt perhaps I would have attempted it. As it is, he is not a letter writer and there seems no point in further contact.
At the end of that first year I sat for the GCE exams and passed in the three subjects I studied: the British Constitution, Economics, and Economic History. On this basis I was accepted at Manchester University but finally, after my summer holidays in Egypt, I returned to London unwilling to go to a depressing English city all on my own. I returned to the pathetic tutorial college and enrolled in a course of French language and literature, which did not help much my spoken French but certainly improved my knowledge of that language as well as getting acquainted slightly with its literature. It was therefore a more or less wasted year in terms of my formal education but, as I pointed out above, a good year for growing up. I read a great deal of literature and delved into as many cultural events as my time and pocket afforded me.
The early sixties was the time of London‟s flowering in music, theatre, and fashions. A whole new bunch of young talented artists were coming out in music with 49
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones overshadowing older American rock stars like Little Richard, Fats Domino and others, including Elvis himself. In the theatre it was the angry young men with playwright John Osborne leading the lower middle-class alienation with the British establishment. And in fashion Mary Quant came up with the mini skirt and hot pants that set a new sexy trend in female clothing styles. The young men, apart from the “square” upper classes and the sensible studious crop of the rest, divided style-wise into the youth subcultures of the mods and the rockers.
The rockers adopted a macho biker gang image, wearing clothes such as black leather jackets. The mods adopted a pose of scooter-driving sophistication, wearing suits and other clean-cut outfits. They ridiculed and hated each other and frequently clashed in violent fighting.
Basil had a television set in his room and we often congregated to watch the concerts of the Beatles and the other groups and singers like Cilla Black and Donovan. Other famous names were becoming known at that time. Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and from the non-Anglo scene Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and the unique, the passionate, the great and beautiful Queen of the Fado, Amalia Rodrigues. Also groups like the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers, the Supremes (Diana Ross), the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors and the Who. Since then the proliferation of groups and singers has been so absolutely mind boggling that only the true aficionados can keep track of them.
A digression: when I wrote the name Amalia Rodrigues, I could not resist visiting her site in Google to hear her lovely songs again. A wealth of memories flooded me. I am 69 and I live with them and by them. In Spreading Our Wings another short memoir of my days in London, I wrote: [one remembers] Always, the lovely girls you met. And the not so lovely. The infinite variety. Your first love affair.
And every other one as well. The girls you kissed. The girls you did not kiss. Your missed opportunities. Missed and gone forever. Yes, just now, Amalia Rodrigues, who died in 1999, reminded me of a missed opportunity. In my fourth year in London I lived on one of its nicer streets. At the house opposite, a group of girls shared a flat and Basil, as usual, managed to get talking to them. We were invited for coffees at their place and I heard Amalia Rodrigues for the first time on a record belonging to one of the girls. There I met a girl from South Africa who had the most perfect body I have ever seen on a woman. Not sexy; just classic and faultless. Apart of that, her face was normal. She was pretty but not exceptional. She made it very clear she liked me.
She was a girl I did not kiss. She was a missed opportunity. Missed and gone forever.
I remember her. I doubt she remembers the silly boy who did not respond.
In 1960, Penguin Books published D.H.Lawrence‟s book Lady Chatterley‟s Lover and was put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act. The 1959 Act, however, made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that an otherwise obscene book had literary merit. At the trial many well known literary personalities were called to offer an opinion and the result was that Lady Chatterle