My childhood in the Middle East
I was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1948. My parents were American Diplomats, so I am a natural American Citizen despite being born outside the USA. From Turkey we went to Augsburgh, Germany, and after a few years to Washington DC. I don't remember any of that time.
Cairo
From there we went to Cairo, Egypt which I do remember a bit of. We lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building on the banks of the Nile River. This is what I looked like then. As you can see I was quite the ladies man.
I remember watching feluccas plying up and down the river. What's a felucca? It's a boat with a big lateen sail used in the Middle East. Below is a picture of a couple of these boats..
Photo courtesy Michael Reeve
One thing I clearly remember was watching men tow these boats upriver by walking
along a towpath with a long rope from the boat ending in a sling around their forehead. They walked at forty-five
degrees to the ground, sloping forward and heaving leg after leg for miles up the river. Even then it struck me
that they were working awfully hard.
Another thing I remember was the Gazira Club, a kind of British colonial country club sort of place where we spent a lot of time. I particularly remember a Banyan tree we climbed around in. Here's a picture of one.
Photo courtesy A. Nath
We were in Cairo when Gamal Abdul Nasser led the Egyptian revolution that ousted
King Farouk. I remember the fighting and explosions and fire.
I remember going into the Great Pyramid. I could walk with my head bowed a little due to my then diminutive stature. The grown ups had to crawl up the long sloping tunnel to the burial chamber. Once there you are in a stone room with little else. I remember climbing up the outside of the pyramid to the top. The stone blocks were about three feet high. A lot of labor to build the thing.
Aden
From Cairo we went to Aden in what is now Yemen. Aden is a port on the southern end of the Red Sea at its juncture with the Indian Ocean. I remember a lot more about Aden. We swam in the Indian Ocean at a beach that had shark nets. These were built of chain link fence set on concrete columns out into the water to form a safe enclosure. I spent a great deal of time wearing a mask and flipper (even in those days I was an inventor, one flipper works better than two for most purposes) looking at the incredible profusion of marine life there. I remember swimming along inside the shark nets looking through the fence at sharks ten feet long just on the other side. I spent a great deal of time fishing with a piece of line and a hook over the sea wall on the other side of the road from the American Consulate. I used dough for bait, and caught fish as fast as I could pull them in. Aden is located on the slopes of an extinct volcano, and inside the crater is Crater City. The rim of the volcanic caldera (a low walled wide crater left after a volcano explodes) has been fortified repeatedly by different civilizations and has ruins of these fortifications all over it. Below is a picture of me in my frogboy outfit, circa 1954. Note the shark net leading out to the diving platform.
Next we spent another period in Washington DC, actually in Raymondale, Virginia.
Baghdad
From there we went to Baghdad. I was thirteen at the time. I remember when they first opened the door of the plane after we landed. I had the impression that someone had opened an oven in which a dead horse was being cooked. It was nearly 120 degrees F. and there was a dead horse just off the runway near the plane. By this time, I was able to perceive a lot more about how different it was in the Middle East than it is in America. We lived in a house that was not far from the American Embassy. However, shortly after we got there, the Embassy moved to a new location on the other side of the Tigris River. After that we were isolated to a great degree. The house was brick, two stories, and it had a walled garden around it. The doors were all heavy steel industrial doors with two half inch deadbolts on the inside. I mean all the doors, even the bathroom door. All the windows were barred by heavy steel bars. The roof was flat with a wall around it. It was in essence a little fortress. All the houses were built this way, not just ours. It was the level of security that was considered normal in that place and time.
Between houses there were some lots that had not been built on. In all of these there were adobe huts connected by little narrow pathways taking up all the room. In the lot next to our house more than a hundred people lived in these huts, which were called Sarifas. These people had no supply of water and no sanitation facilities. My father ordered the garden gate left open during daylight hours so they could get water from one faucet in the garden. This faucet ran from dawn to dusk. People came from miles away to fill five gallon kerosene cans with water, because it was very unusual for anyone to give them water, or anything else. My father overlooked the tap they had on one of our garden lights to give them a little power. They had the whole place wired to that one light, and the wire was smoking hot all the time. Needless to say their voltage was a bit below the normal 220 volts. What did they do for sanitation? Well they just squatted down in the street. Fortunately the sun dried up such things quickly or there would have been an epidemic of who knows what.
When we put out our trash, they had a hierarchy to go through it. They used absolutely everything we threw away, if nothing else for fuel to cook on. The women who lived there went out at dawn with big pieces of cloth and searched for anything to burn so they could cook. Baghdad is a desert, and little grows there. Not much but a thing we called Camel Thorn, a kind of succulent leafed thorny plant that sprawls on the ground in little whispy patches. There wasn't much of that because goats, horses and camels ate all of it they could find. But when these women came back at night, they usually had a bundle of what we would call tinder, tiny bits of dry Camel Thorn and who knows what. These bundles were usually six feet in diameter wrapped up in the cloth. Then they would fire up mud ovens that were shaped like little bee hives and bake flat bread by sticking the dough to the inside of the heated mud dome. They did this every single day, or they didn't eat. We had dogs in our garden, and occasionally one of their chickens would come over the wall to scratch for bugs. I remember a time when one of our dogs caught one of these chickens and tore it up. The people came to our gate wailing and crying, begging for the torn up chicken to be given back. That's how poor they were. They felt guilty that their chicken had been scratching in our garden eating our bugs. Their infant mortality rate was more than seventy-five percent.
Social services were limited to say the least. One thing the Government did, however, was to drive around every few months and throw poisoned meat out on the street to control the wild dogs. These were not like our dogs, they were starving and desperate, and they hunted in packs. Small children were their favorite prey.
In America there are a lot of things we just take for granted. One of them is our birth certificates. Once we are born and registered, we have to be accounted for. If we disappear, the Government will hunt for us till they find one tooth to prove we are dead. They'll spend any amount of money to try to find out why we died and to bring anyone who might have killed us to justice, even if it's fifty years later. In Baghdad, there were no birth certificates. Nobody could prove you ever existed if you disappeared. The Government couldn't care less about it unless you were someone with influence.
There were three levels of Civil Authority. There was the regular Police, a few guys wearing white uniforms with pith helmets that directed traffic here and there. There was the Secret Police, a bunch of thugs wearing green uniforms who kept watch on the enemies of the Regime and made people disappear. And there was the Regular Army who were the ones who kept the peace. This they did by having emplacements at most significant intersections. In Baghdad nobody would have paid any attention to traffic lights, so there were traffic circles at any significant intersection. In the middle of these were little military camps with a sandbagged emplacement of two or four machine guns. They usually had a tent in the form of a cloth stretched on a few poles for shade. On either side of the bridges across the Tigris River there were huge traffic circles a hundred feet across. In the middle of these they had British Centurion tanks dug in with the guns pointing up the deck of the bridge. I saw people gunned down in the street by soldiers or the Secret Police. Everyone pretended not to notice. I remember one time I was going on a gazelle hunt with a bunch of Iraqi military officers. They had actually invited my father, but I went instead. One of the Generals was late, and when he arrived he was laughing up a storm. His enemies had come to kill him, he told us, but the idiots got the wrong house and killed his neighbors instead.
There were three coups in the four years we were there. You could tell when it was beginning to happen because you'd begin to hear a popping sound in the air. (Rifle fire.) You had to get to a safe place quickly and just wait till it was over. For us it was our house all by itself on the wrong side of the river. I went up on the roof to watch as jets dive-bombed buildings or artillery shells came down blowing up houses more or less at random. Once a Volkswagen bus came racing down a street where some friends lived. It almost made it to the corner, but an armored car got to the corner first, and with one shot from the cannon blew it to kingdom come. Saddam Hussein was a nobody then. His only claim to fame was an assassination attempt on the Dictator, an ambush where they machine gunned the Dictator's car. Miraculously the Dictator lived, and they put the car, a station wagon, up on a concrete ramp as a monument. The thing looked like woodpeckers had been working on it. The day became a national holiday, Safety and Rejoicing Day they named it. Shortly after we left, Saddam Hussein took power.
Needless to say, going back and forth between this world and the good old USA kind of left me doubting where reality was. My conclusion is that reality is a local phenomenon. In every place you go they know the Big Truth. If you speak ill of the Big Truth, they're liable to tar and feather you. Only thing is, the Big Truth is different everywhere you go.
Everything I have written on this page is my absolute first hand experience, not altered or embellished in any
way whatsoever.
Tommy Atkinson.