CHAPTER I : LONDON, THE EARLY YEARS.
When I graduated from the English School Cairo, in Heliopolis, my father sent me to England to continue my studies. That was in the late nineteen fifties after the Suez Crisis. In London I enrolled at a tutorial college to prepare for the Advanced Level GCE exams needed to enter University. I was very happy to find myself in the midst of old school friends and a carefree existence began in that wonderful city, cultural hub of England, of theatres and actors, ballet and opera, National galleries and museums, of music and fashion, of Piccadilly Circus and sleazy Soho, of clean, orderly streets, parks and palaces, and red double-decker buses. Yet, all seemed strangely familiar, unpretentious and hospitable, even the endless roads of exactly similar Victorian houses, and cars running on the wrong side of the street. More particularly, with only minimal effort for studies to exercise my unexceptional intellect, with money coming in for the rent of a bed-sitter, regular meals in the cheaper restaurants or coffee bars and a little leftover for pocket books, the occasional movie or the special treat of a wonderfully acted theatrical play, life was pretty wonderful.
Mine was a relatively Spartan existence though the epithet Spartan is an ungracious adjective to use for my comfortable, carefree life during those years in London. I lived in a pleasant serviced room in Drayton Gardens of South Kensington. The street itself still retained some of the gardens that gave it its name. It was an amalgam of the standard Victorian houses and modern apartment buildings with backyards of well-kept lawns and heroic, tall, time-defying trees. My room, a few steps above street level, had a large panoramic window facing the street with curtains to protect my evening privacy. A bed, two armchairs with a small table, a gas heating stove, a cupboard with drawers and a sink of hot and cold water.
There were other tenants above and below in the basement. All pleasantly polite and practically all single and not much above their thirties. Eventually I befriended a young fellow who was working in a solicitor’s office, doing his articles, which I found meant he was learning law through a mixture of study and office practice. I often went up to his room where we talked mainly of girls. My interest was purely academic because I had neither the experience nor guts to go any further than expressing my opinions and pretending I was playing the field. He told me he never went after beautiful girls because they were usually difficult to land and kept his chasing to homely types who were much easier. Nevertheless I never saw or became aware of him bringing a single girl in his room. He could not have been earning much money because on weekends he cooked simple meals in his room and cut his cigarettes in half, which he said was healthier and more cost-effective. The trouble was he needed a mirror to light them because with half a cigarette he often burnt his nose.
Another tenant who intrigued me lived in the basement. He must have been in his early thirties and most of the mornings slept late in his room. He was tall and handsome with close cropped blond hair and he had a devil-may-care but friendly attitude whenever our paths crossed in the corridor outside my room. When he woke up he usually put on loud music which disturbed no one since the house was mostly empty in the daytime. He had many beautiful women going in and out of his room and often spending the night with him. I asked my thrifty friend Paul about him and he said he was an actor. It stood to reason. His girls, or rather, women were also of the same age group, well dressed, well made up, glamorous even, often in high heels. I saw them from my window as they often used an iron staircase that descended directly from the street to the basement. I presumed they were also actresses or aspiring starlets or even nude models in girlie magazines. They completely outclassed the twenty-year-old secretaries that my friends picked up off the streets or the dancing clubs. But I was puzzled that an actor would be living so frugally in a basement flat. One day as he was entering the house through the main door I asked him if he was an actor. Yes, he said. He was currently playing at the Prince of Wales theatre in The World of Suzie Wong. If you come on a weekday, he said, ask for me and I’ll get you in free. A week or two later I went to the play, which was a musical about a prostitute in Hong Kong called Suzie Wong. He was not much more than an extra, a face in the crowd of British sailors that frequented the bar where Suzie picked up her clients. His only spoken line was when Suzie entered the bar crowded with sailors. It was a shout, Hi Suzie. Not much talent, not much glory, not much money but plenty of desirable young women. A worthwhile compensation.
The house was kept spotless by a plump, good natured, cockney woman who hoovered our rooms, made our beds, changed the sheets once a week, and talked to me in a language I did not always understand. There was one communal telephone, as in most rooming houses, with an extension on each floor which any tenant available would answer. If the person requested was not at home a note was left on the mantelpiece informing him of the call.
Chelsea, which in those days was starting to become trendy with a proliferation of coffee bars, clothing shops of the new modish fashions, and a cool clientele of young people was within walking distance. A conventional cinema, the ABC Fulham was fifty yards away on the opposite pavement and the Paris Pullman was a few paces next door. This was a tiny cinema that specialized in the arty and high-brow films of the European nouvelle vague and the classics. Temptation, consequently, beckoned on a daily basis. It was a serious rival to duty, conscience and mainly to the afternoon classes at the tutorial college.
Most of my friends were budding Casanovas and this was something of a drawback because of my inexperience and shyness with girls whose local sexual morals had progressed by the early sixties far beyond equivalent notions in our Middle Eastern society where I grew up. Still, I was supremely happy with the freedom, the companionship and limited responsibilities of my student life even with a repressed libido which found its simulated reality and imaginary involvement in the sexual game through the loudmouthed recounting of my buddies’ exploits. They had become, in no time, audacious and saucy, and adept at picking up young women on the street, chatting them up and offering them a coffee. With improbable tales of their worth and exotic oriental origins they arranged appointments, which, hopefully, with a minimum of effort and expense would land them on their bed. I just trailed along and felt part of the game, which I certainly was not. They were not too fussy about the looks of the lassies, my friendly and dedicated “fornicari” or fazed by brush-offs and their success was a product of a thick-skinned adherence to the law of averages. For every five pickups one was sure to fall.
It passed like a dream that first year. The weather did not bother me. Not the gloomy skies, the frequent rainfall nor the freezing cold of January and February. Never had a cough or runny nose in all my years in London. The saying that England has bad weather but a good climate turned out to be true. A-level exams were due at the end of my second year and I chose my three subjects in view of minimal scholarly exertion. I had no ambition to excel in anything and no goals or dreams for the future. The future was too vague and the present totally absorbing. I was inevitably infected by my easy-going years in Egypt and my fellow students at the college were of low caliber and could not outclass me. The college itself was a moneymaking enterprise and the teachers uninspiring and mostly indifferent. I was well suited to that environment and much of the time skipped my afternoon classes to see an interesting film at the Paris Pullman or finish an intriguing novel.
That summer I did not return to Egypt to join my family at our summer place in Alexandria. Much as I loved the sea and, yes, my family that provided the funds for what turned out to be the best and easiest years of my life, I chose to remain in London. Some of my friends returned home for the summer but my Egyptian schoolmate Omar Abdel Moneim decided not to return for fear of being drafted in the army. His mother was English and he was blond and delicately handsome and our friends teased him, perhaps not unrealistically, that he would attract any number of sex-starved Arab boyfriends in the army camps. He could have a ball if only he could switch from hetero to bi. He laughed it off but I believe it worried him and he badgered me to stay and keep him company during summer. The funny thing was that for all his effeminate beauty, Omar was a sex fundamentalist. An obsessive sex nut with a convoluted, irresponsible and selfish love life. He was capable of juggling two or three girlfriends at the same time, made appointments which he missed without qualms and more than once received a well-deserved slap on the face. I had already decided to spend the summer in London and with the temporary thinning out of friends I became close to Omar despite our different characters and interests. Where I daydreamed with books and films and plays he seemed solidly down to earth. I don’t even know what sparked his life beyond sex and a desire to get an engineering degree. And yet a sincere affection and sense of companionship developed during meals we had together, walks in the lovely London parks and of course picking up girls. He was puzzled by my reticence to get involved in a relationship and I never expressed the restraining inhibitions of my inexperience and shyness. How would I ever tell Omar that I had never kissed a girl?