Beer in the Snooker Club (8 page)

‘Thank you,’ we said.

‘You been long ’ere, luv?’

‘About a week.’

‘It’s cold for you I ’xpect. You want to be careful, dears, and wear something warm next to your skins. You want to keep your bodies nice and warm ’ere, luv. That’s our house there, number twelve. Now you be sure and come on Saturday, then we can nip round the corner and ’ave a Guinness,’ she winked. Her name was Mrs Ward. She wrote her address on the back of a ticket and ran downstairs. We got off at West Hampstead and waved to her.

We walked in silence to Hampstead via Swiss Cottage. The double-deckers and the slanting roof-tops and the pubs and the Underground stations were all there. We walked and watched and felt the little hustle of people at Hampstead station penetrate to us. Hampstead was more England than Knightsbridge.

Dr Dungate lived in a semi-detached house up a narrow, sloping street. We pressed the bell and waited. Somehow I expected the exact replica of our old headmaster to open the door.

‘Do you think a butler opens the door?’ Font asked.

‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Jeeves himself will
usher
us in and announce our names in perfect Arabic and ask if we would like an ouzo or whatever we Egyptians are supposed to drink.’

Instead, there was a buzz and the door opened by itself.

‘Come in, come in, young men,’ a voice shouted from the top of the stairs. ‘Hang your coats and come up. Was it difficult finding your way?’

‘No, sir,’ we shouted, just like schoolboys. We hung up our overcoats and went upstairs. There was a very tall man, stooping under his length, waiting at the top. He wore an old tweed jacket, tight and too short at the back, with leather protection at the elbows.

‘Now which of you is Ram and which is Font?’ he asked.

‘I am Font, sir,’ said Font, ‘but I am surprised you know that name; it’s only a nickname.’

Dr Dungate laughed. ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘I have a little biography of you two, here.’

He heartily shook hands with us.

‘You are very welcome here,’ he said, ‘and we don’t want you to feel in the least bit strangers. Come and meet the family. Ha,’ he said, looking at the flowers. ‘That’s very nice of you. That’s for Mother I expect; she’s in the kitchen and we’ll visit her in due course. But here, first, is my son and my daughters.’

He had three daughters in their twenties and a thirty-year-old son who looked like his father. ‘That’s Jean, that’s Barbara, that’s Brenda and that’s my son John.’ We all shook hands and they said ‘hello, Ram’ and ‘hello, Font’.

‘Now come and meet Mother. We’re having a typical Sunday meal for you, and Mother is making sure it is one of her best.’

We followed him to the kitchen. He put a hand each on our shoulders and sort of gave us to his wife.

‘Here they are, Mother.’

She was also tall and rather thin, with a lively look in her bright blue eyes.

‘What lovely flowers,’ she said, wiping her hands; ‘it’s very nice of you to have thought of that.’ She shook hands with us and told us we were both welcome.

We went back to the sitting-room and sat, rather shy, with our arms crossed, answering questions. Our old headmaster turned out to be Mrs Dungate’s brother, and we were told he had always loved Egyptians, ‘but unfortunately he is having trouble reconciling his views with those of the governing body of the school’. Dr Dungate was reading the letter to him about us.

‘Ah,’ he said, skipping a page, ‘we have this spot of bother about the visas. I cannot promise you anything and I do not want you to be disappointed, so I shall not give you any high hopes. You must bear in mind that if you are refused an extension of your stay, you must make sure you leave by the specified date.’ He lowered the letter and looked at us from above his spectacles by bending his head. There was both amusement and severity in his look. Mrs Dungate stood at the doorway listening.

‘If I were you I wouldn’t leave … if you want to stay, that is.’ It was John who said that.

‘Now don’t put any foolish ideas in their heads, John,’ his mother said. ‘I’m sure we’ll do all we can to have them stay, but they must not do anything against the law.’

‘I suppose you call eighty thousand of our soldiers in Suez against Egyptian wishes, not against the law?’ he said, standing up and walking about, his hands deep in his pockets.

‘Please, John.’

‘I’m sure every one of them has a visa duly stamped and paid for at the Egyptian consulate, otherwise they wouldn’t be in Suez. We English never break the law,’ he said; ‘it’s so malleable in our capable hands.’

‘We’ll jolly well see you stay,’ one of the girls said.

‘Now, now,’ Dr Dungate said, ‘we shall discuss the possibilities calmly, and see which is the best way of going about it. I am going to ask a Labour Member of Parliament I know to …’

‘Labour M.P.!’ pooh-poohed John. ‘Dad, you always refuse to see the true colours of most of those Labour M.Ps. Have you forgotten Sere …?’

‘I can hardly ask the Communist Party to help them, can I?’ his father said. John thrust his hands deeper in his pockets and sat down.

Did Englishmen really rage against their own injustices? Font, his eyebrows reaching a good zenith of height, was staring at John with all his might.

‘I don’t think you would ask the Communist Party even if they could help,’ Brenda said. Brenda was the youngest and somehow different from her sisters. She wore a plain, neat dress and was simply combed, whereas Jean and Barbara wore trousers and had their hair in pony tails; which didn’t suit the eldest, Barbara, at all.

Dr Dungate looked at us apologetically and smiled.

‘We have four different political opinions in this house,’ he said, ‘and I am supposed to be wholeheartedly in support of each one of them. John belonged to the Communist Party until recently, but is now disillusioned. Brenda is a communist and was selling the
Daily Worker
at eight o’clock
this morning. My wife is simply liberal, and my two other daughters vote Labour. We have four daily papers in the house:
The Guardian
, the
Daily Herald
, the
Daily Worker
, and four weeklies; the …’

‘You forgot
The Times
, Dad,’ John said.

‘Yes, and
The Times
.’

Jean was interested in Font. She had a lazy, comfortable look about her and politics didn’t interest her.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’re boring Font and Ram with all this.’

‘Not at all,’ we said.

‘Well, I’m for a pint before lunch,’ she said. ‘Who’s coming with me?’

No one answered.

‘Come on, Font; you and I’ll have a pint together and you can talk to me about the Nile and the Pyramids.’ She caught his hand and pulled him up. I wanted to drink too, were it only to shake me out of this lethargy of gratitude and shyness.

‘We’ll all go for a pint,’ John said. ‘Come on, Mummy.’

‘No, dear. I can’t go and I don’t want your father to drink today; he has to work this afternoon and it will only make him sleepy.’

‘But I’m taking Font to another pub,’ Jean said, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of your politics.’

‘Font, you’ve ’ad it, she taykin’ a fancy ter yer.’

Font laughed embarrassedly.

‘I’m going to seduce you, Font,’ Jean said. ‘Don’t you love me a teeny-weeny bit?’

‘I love you all,’ he said.

‘Isn’t that sweet,’ Mrs Dungate said. ‘Now off all of
you and don’t drink too much. Lunch at two o’clock.’

We all went downstairs, putting scarfs and coats on and the girls using their mirrors. There is a certain solitude when a group of people is preparing to go out, which I always relish after sitting in tension at meeting new people and being rather tongue-tied. It is like leaving a party in full swing and going to the seclusion of the toilet for a few minutes with the receding noise to accentuate the privacy. I put my coat on slowly and wondered whether meeting these people and receiving their hospitality was really enjoyable. That moment of putting on my coat was the very beginning – the first time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging. But the cleavage was not complete then, the two forces had only just started to pull in different directions.

Jean and Font went off to a different pub and said they would join us later.

‘That’s where I live,’ Barbara said, pointing to a window on the way to the pub.

‘Don’t you live with your parents?’

‘No; Brenda is the only one living with them. John lives in Baker Street and Jean lives in Swiss Cottage.’ This puzzled me. Dr Dungate’s house seemed large enough to house them all.

We all drank beer in pints. Edna had already explained that if I were offered a beer in England, I must buy a round later on. I enjoyed carrying the glasses to the bar and saying: ‘Four pints of bitter, please.’

‘Brenda,’ I asked, ‘are you really a member of the Communist Party?’

‘Really?’ she smiled. ‘Yes, I am. I have been since I was fifteen.’

‘What do you think of Nasser?’

‘Here’s to Nasser,’ she said and drank her beer.

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘he imprisons communists.’

‘Yes,’ John said, ‘how can you drink to the health of someone who imprisons communists?’

She didn’t hesitate: ‘I drink to anyone who deals imperialism a blow.’

‘That’s typical! That’s why I left the Party. Harry Pollit tells you to support Nasser, so you do.’

‘John dear, I know precisely why you left the Party.’ She possessed a type of calm reminiscent of Edna.

‘I gave the correct reason for leaving the Party.’

‘Correct, but not true.’

‘Ha! You make a difference between correct and true? Exactly why I left the Party. The “correct” tactics and propaganda had nothing to do with the truth.’

I was enjoying myself. Not particularly because of what we were talking about, but because I was there in a pub with the ‘intellectuals’ I had read about in books, and because the girls were attractive, and because John was such a likeable person. It was natural to want to fit this environment to the books I had read, and to tell myself: here you are, Ram … ‘life’.

Barbara told John she wished he’d go back to the Party and put a stop to all this bickering between him and Brenda. But they continued talking about the coming elections and whether the communists should vote Labour. The argument grew heated and even Barbara joined in.

I was just over seventeen when I voted for the first and only time in my life. With my thumb. What I mean is, I pressed my thumb, voluntarily, on an inky pad and then pressed it again, where I was told, on a space next to a name. A boy called Kamal had said:
‘Tu veux faire la noce ce soir?’
I had nodded. ‘Come over then; best Scotch
et puis on paye un petit poucet
,’ I didn’t know what
‘payer un petit poucet’
meant, but I pretended that I did.

I was at the university then. At last the monotony of school life had ended. The university: strikes, fighting policemen, shouting slogans, stealing sulphur and nitrates from the lab; life at last. And besides, I was in the best of the best – the faculty of medicine. No matter, of course, that my Arabic was deplorable, and that I was, according to a certain Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, proficient in literature and mathematics but certainly not in biology. No matter that hundreds of much better qualified people queued to be accepted by the faculty. I was one of the privileged; I had strings to pull. Not that I bothered to pull them; my mother, or one of my aunts, must have pulled one from the dangling assortment within her reach. I became:
‘Il fait la médecine, ma chère.’

We killed a certain Zaki Bey. I don’t remember who was in power then, I think Nokrashi Pasha, but I know Zaki Bey was head of the police and he came, together with fifty half-starved policemen, to the faculty of medicine. They had a dilapidated tank with them. After a lot of mechanical repairs and consultations, the tank’s gun was pointed at us who were on the roof of the faculty’s building, and an explosion took place. Some of us extended our hands, trying to catch whatever was emitted from the tank; but it never
reached our outstretched hands. It fell, instead, with a thud, on a car belonging to my aunt which I had borrowed that day without permission. This made me very angry indeed. My aunt was bound to know I had taken the car, considering there was now a hole in its roof. I therefore helped catapult a bomb which had just been manufactured on the roof, and Zaki Bey died.

I don’t remember which party I voted for, but we were given whisky and salted pea-nuts, after which we were taken in Cadillacs to vote with our thumbs. (Apart from Kamal, none of us was of voting age.)

It was only when I went home that I learnt why Zaki Bey had died. He had ordered the Kasr-el-Nil bridge to be opened while a student demonstration was crossing it, causing death to six. A handsome funeral march, comprising half the police force and thousands of civilians was organized for him next day. Photographs of the procession were mournfully published in all the evening papers. Among the civilians in the photographs I noticed the presence of a few future brilliant scientists, including Kamal. They were the ones who had manufactured the bomb on the roof of the faculty of medicine the day before.

The usual two-months’ closing of the faculty was ordered and most of us went to the beaches of Alexandria.

The university reopened and again I had to choose a political party to belong to. Roughly, there were the following: the Wafd, the Ikhwan (Moslem Brotherhood), the Communists, and the anti-Wafd.

The Wafd paid well provided you were a good orator and organizer of strikes. They gave you a car and, I was told, free drinks at the Arizona or the Auberge – I forget which.
The Ikhwan was a fearsome thing to belong to. You could be ordered to shoot anyone at any time in cold blood; they paid you with promises both earthly and otherwise, and you had to be active even when the university was closed (as a Copt, I would not have been able to join that one anyhow). The Communists were the respectable though secretive ones; the hard-working, the intelligent, the quiet. No rewards, only risk of imprisonment and misery to the family. The anti-Wafd was the most popular, and was joined by socialists, anarchists, university-closing fans, semi-idealists, progressives, and most of the middle class.