Chapter Five

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The Saudi-American Forum is very pleased to present "Honey and Onions" by Frances Meade.  This delightful memoir of the early days of Americans working and living in the Kingdom - in ten chapters - will be presented one chapter per week.  

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Previous Chapters:

• Author's Foreword & Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four

HONEY & ONIONS: A MEMOIR OF SAUDI ARABIA IN THE SIXTIES
BY FRANCES MEADE

CHAPTER FIVE

1996

The Ambassador's residence is brightly lit as we arrive for a reception.  Among the several hundred guests from many countries are diplomats and representatives of the military as well as a large group of businessmen -- the majority of them American. We know quite a few, but most of them are total strangers who may have been living in Riyadh for years but whose social orbits have never intersected with ours.  We may never see them again or at best we will all turn up at the same reception next year, and we will still be strangers.

The western community numbered about a hundred and thirty-five when we took up residence in Riyadh -- more than half of them American.  There was, of course, a much larger group from the rest of the Arab world and a few Asian families, but it was a small pond in which to swim, and we were very much aware of and involved with one another.  To be a foreigner from the western world was to be a privileged guest in the Arabia of the sixties and quite inadvertently we lived very public lives.

Most servants were Sudanese, and family activities were freely circulated on their grapevine.  After my bout with dysentery, I couldn't go anywhere without a sympathetic servant, hitherto unknown to me, patting his stomach and raising an inquiring eye at me as I came through the door.  The easy way to deal with this concern for my health was simply to pat my stomach in return and nod reassuringly.

The drivers, if Ali Harbi was any example, gave all the shopkeepers a rundown on our private lives by way of introduction whenever we ventured downtown.  I came to realize just how much the local populace knew about us the first time I ever took a taxi.  I had revisited the Yamama Hotel, to visit a friend from the States whose husband was in Riyadh on a short business trip. Somehow, Ali Harbi and I got our signals crossed, and when I was ready to leave, he was nowhere in sight.  Without a telephone, I couldn’t even call home to see if he was there, so there was nothing for it but to summon one of the taxi drivers from the garden in front of the hotel. Naturally, I tried to give him directions, but he waved me to silence and simply drove me home with nothing required of me but two riyals at the end of the ride. On a later occasion, I remember being asked, over the purchase of a kilo of carrots, the amount of my husband's salary and feeling only surprise that there were some areas of personal data that Ali Harbi was not privy to.

Of course, we stood out in the landscape -- our clothes, our languages, ourselves, all so different from our hosts.  In the best tradition of Saudi hospitality, we were not only tolerated but became wards of the public at large.  All one needed to do was look helpless, and offers of assistance came from every quarter.

One morning when I reached the souk, a group of shopkeepers rushed to meet me urging me to follow them in order to deal with some emergency that I could not understand but that clearly required my presence.  Rounding a corner, I found a sizeable crowd standing in front of the Kuwait chest dealer's stall staring upward.  I followed their gaze and beheld one of the Ford Foundation ladies, a dear little soul built like a beach ball, who had climbed a stack of chests in order to check on the condition of the lid on the topmost one and remained there unable to get down. Here was an instance in which the available public found itself collectively unable to help.  They were all men and not one among them could bring himself to touch the foreign lady who crouched some eight feet in the air squeaking piteously for any kind of helpful intervention, divine or otherwise.  I was otherwise. It was with great relief that they made way for me to get through and climb to her aid.  It occurred to none of them, nor to me, that they might end up with two stranded females and loud expressions of approval greeted the successful descent from our own little Everest.  Only the proverbial helping hand had been needed to give her the confidence to come down, and the souk had extended one by rallying their resources to provide a suitable intermediary.  One more responsibility to the unpredictable foreigners had been discharged.

We were terribly spoiled by the attention we received, and I felt that being a member of my particular minority was not at all bad.

Our social lives really began with the move to the villa.  The girls were taken up almost immediately by the western teenage contingent who ranged in age from twelve to eighteen.  This seemingly incompatible age group was, in the context of the Riyadh environment, quite the opposite -- necessity breeds all kinds of compromise, and their small group was a solid one. The boys were the couriers of information about the group's plans since they had the freedom of the streets, and, with a couple of exceptions, all the houses were located somewhere in Malaz within walking distance.  They came, they ate, they played a few Beatles tunes and then they were off to the next stop to spread the word about whatever activity was in the works.

Patty and Susie had a wonderful time that August and September. There is nothing more satisfying to the young than to be part of a crowd, particularly one that gathered on almost a daily basis and partied on many a night.  The fact that all of this had to be highly organized and entirely under parental supervision seemed not to detract from a social life that was far more active than it had ever been in the States. It promised to be a mass exodus when school started, but meantime, the pack spent every day together at one house or another or on trips to the souk.

Most of the teenagers, including the youngest members represented by Patty and the British Brigadier's son, would go off somewhere to boarding school in the fall.  Only two would remain in Riyadh to become the entire eighth grade of the new Riyadh International Community School, an amalgamation of two smaller groups.  To my children, the whole concept of boarding school had been just another bizarre aspect of the eighteen-month adventure in Saudi Arabia, but now among their contemporaries, it became simply an extension of life in Riyadh.

The majority of their friends would go to Beirut, some to the American Community School along with them, some to the French Lycée, and others to Broummana in the mountains, so when the time came to take them back to Beirut for the start of school, the girls were not only fully prepared for this next big step but looking forward to it. 

It was great to have another holiday in Beirut checking in at the grand Phoenicia Hotel.  This time Dick was along to escort us that evening to Junieh, and the delights of the Casino with its spectacular stage production.  Horses galloped on a treadmill emerging from clouds of simulated fog, dolphins cavorted in a huge tank onstage and dancers descended from the ceiling enclosed in elaborate jeweled flowers.  We were determined that Susie and Patty would have a  night to remember before school took over. Of course, we did a lot of shopping too for the bedspreads, curtains, towels, and all the other paraphernalia that going to boarding school requires, as well as the all important visit to the orthodontist. We also opened a bank account for them.  The uncertainty of mail between Beirut and Riyadh added to the isolation imposed by our lack of telephone communication made it necessary to leave them with a sum of money sufficient for their needs for the whole semester.  For the first time, they were going to have to assume the responsibility for paying their own bills and managing their money -- an arrangement that has stood them in good stead throughout their lives.  Along with an excellent education, Beirut gave them a unique experience of independence that few children of their age could lay claim to.

With normal parental misgivings, we took them to the school, met their respective roommates and went back to our hotel, promising to pick them up at five o'clock for dinner and a fond farewell since we would be returning to Riyadh the following day.  However, the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon, and a blithe voice reported that a lot was going on, and they'd rather stay at school if we didn't mind, and they'd see us when they came home for Thanksgiving holiday in November. It was a taste of our new role in their lives.  Feeling slightly jilted, we went back to Riyadh as a couple rather than a family and faced up to a different style of living.

Being newcomers had proved to be far less difficult in Riyadh than in Arizona.  Since the community was so small, we all knew not only one another, but the many Saudi friends of friends and the circle of our acquaintance broadened to include them.  Everyone made us feel very welcome, and frequent invitations arrived.

They arrived, of course, by hand since only a privileged few had telephones, a questionable advantage with nobody to call but each other and even that was a tortuous process involving the operators, or centrals, in the various parts of the city.  They might or might not make the connection or, having done so, were likely to break it off if a woman answered a male caller.  So, it was left to the drivers who jolted back and forth across the unpaved streets of Malaz to bring tidings of social events to come and wait for the written responses.

Any kind of activity at the gate was now a welcome signal that we had a visitor, a note or an invitation, all of which enlivened our days.

The local differences in the interpretation of the time of day remained a problem.  After our experience with tea across the street, we thought we had caught on but found that we had more to learn.  Riyadh was on Greenwich Mean Time plus three hours -- GMT+3 -- but Dhahran on the east coast, where the American Military Headquarters was located, was on GMT+4, so the Mission followed the time there.

Arabic time, reckoned from sunset to sunset with what we thought of as the following day starting as soon as the sun went down, could be expressed in two ways.  It was simple to comprehend the invitation that specified two hours after sunset on Tuesday, but one that merely invited you for Tuesday at two o'clock could be interpreted as lunch on Tuesday or dinner at eight on what to us was Monday evening.  Think about it.

I loved it.  Even though I ran the risk of arriving unexpectedly on the wrong day at the wrong time, I found it exhilarating to have to give some thought to what would be perfectly routine at home.

When we moved to Jeddah, we discovered that there was still another clock running; the American Embassy had invented a diabolical alternative known as Sun time.  This was exactly twelve hours off Arabic time and I never understood it or its purpose.  Apparently, I was not the only one as it was soon abandoned. In any case, I was hooked on the new and different in every aspect of living in Riyadh, and the cosmopolitan character of its social life delighted me. For the first time, I was meeting people from all over the world in the normal course of daily living.

We came to know and appreciate many new acquaintances of various backgrounds; even among the Americans, we found an exotic family of native Hawaiians, and our nearest western neighbors were the British Brigadier, advisor to the Saudi National Guard, and his family.  Our doctor was a Pakistani with a German wife, and early on, I met a young American woman who was married to a very distinguished man of Saudi lineage who had commanded the palace guard in Baghdad before the revolution, a fine horseman and the only man I've ever met who could jump his horse over a jeep.

The charming wife of the French UN advisor was not only among the first to have us to dinner but a frequent souk companion, sharing with me her interest in and knowledge of Bedouin jewelry.  Her husband, a great camper, once took all the young people on a memorable overnight trip to the dunes, an excursion somewhat dampened by the discovery the following morning of snake tracks winding between the sleeping bags.  After such a bonding experience, it is not surprising that our children remained good friends for years.

Many of our new friends were the parents of our children's cohorts -- French, Greek, Italian, English and Welsh among them.  It was everything I had ever hoped for not only for myself but also for the girls whose abrupt immersion into a mini United Nations had proved to be a turning point in their social consciousness.  At an age when peer groups are at their most homogeneous and conformity is the highest goal, they found themselves in a circle of such diversity that differences in culture and nationality enhanced their new life in ways that they could never have imagined.

Our tight little society was a larger replica of the youngsters' group.  We depended on one another for friendship, information, assistance, hospitality, and any recreation that existed outside our own homes.

The three Aramco villas, the closest thing to a compound that existed at the time, formed a focal point for the community; the families shared a swimming pool and squash court not only with each other but also most generously with the rest of us.

As an outpost of Um, Aramco -- Mother Aramco as the oil company was known, not entirely in jest -- their lives were lived on a slightly different plane.  Although geographically removed from the company’s vast headquarter town in the Eastern Province, they remained very much a part of the Aramco world, a long established and highly developed subculture in Saudi Arabia.  They were supplied by the company stores and received the same perks as their counterparts in Dhahran.  To the rest of us who depended entirely on the local economy, they were clearly living at the top of the Riyadh heap, but we regarded them more with admiration than envy.

They were people who were fun to be with and whose creative talents produced such imaginative diversions as a black-tie scavenger hunt on Wazir Street during Ramadan with the full cooperation of the Saudi shopkeepers.  Equally unforgettable was the farewell party to which the guests of honor were brought standing in a flower-decorated donkey cart, looking very much like French aristocrats on their way to the guillotine in a tumbril pulled by an unusually well-washed and rather confused donkey.

A Friday afternoon at the Aramco swimming pool might well end with a mass migration to the airport to meet the Boeing from Beirut whose arrival was always a source of entertainment.  At the very least, someone we knew might be returning from a weekend of the diversions with which that city was abundantly supplied; the peak of expectation would be the appearance of a new foreigner who would start the welcoming cycle all over again.  This was a regular Friday activity for Saudis as well, and the airport terminal was crowded with the curious.

In the next couple of years, the new Pepsi factory would be built, and a good portion of the airport crowd would choose this as a Friday alternative and gather in Al Ahsa Street to watch the bottles go around.

Before we knew it, the winter holidays had arrived, and the girls were back in town for the first time, having elected during the November break to go on the school trip to Turkey -- what could be more appropriate -- rather than home to Riyadh.  Their social activities were once again in full swing as were ours.

The whole community was bursting with plans for decorations and celebrations, calling for a great deal of ingenuity in utilizing what was locally available in order to simulate the corresponding holiday spirit at home.  While there was no snow, there was plenty of cold weather to put us in the mood, and little stands selling roasted chestnuts and ears of corn sprang up on downtown street corners lending a festive note to the season.

Dealing with the cold proved to be just as challenging as the cooling problem had been during the hot weather.  The method of choice was the gas heater on wheels fitted out with a small butagaz bottle.  When lit, this provided a circle of warmth about six feet in circumference and a cheerful glow of flickering flame, but the occupants of the room had to cluster in the immediate vicinity to benefit from the heat.  Outside the magic circle was a distinctly polar region. 

Fortunately, since they made no demands on the short supply of electricity, one could employ as many of these mobile fireplaces as needed, but since it was dangerous to leave them on unattended, only occupied rooms could be heated, which meant an icy trip to bed after a cozy evening in the living room. 

Up until the holidays, we had seen no evidence of formal occasions, and I was beginning to think that I had been badly misled and put to a great deal of trouble for nothing, but sure enough we were invited to a black-tie evening to see the new year in, and the tuxedo finally made its debut.  Out of the closet it came and down to the highly recommended tailor it went to have the trousers shortened -- I had been remarkably accurate in describing Dick's measurements, and the rest of it fit very well indeed.  Dick picked up the finished trousers, brought them home, and in the bustle of the season's activities, simply hung them back in the closet without bothering to try them on -- a bad move.  We didn't realize how bad until the night of the party as we decked ourselves out in our finery and got our first look at Dick in the finished product.  The trousers were the correct length all right, but the outside seams instead of lying flat at the cuffs were somehow turned out and up.  He looked like a walking pagoda.

It was obviously too late in the game to do anything about it, so we simply went to the party hoping that it would be sufficiently crowded to hide Dick's lower extremities as we mixed and mingled.  We needn't have worried.  The formal dress on display ranged from the Brigadier's gorgeous dress uniform complete with silver spurs to the elegant silk tunic and jodhpurs of our Pakistani doctor with many equally colorful variations in between.  The tuxedo crowd simply disappeared into the background, and Dick's ankles remained incognito for the evening.

The following afternoon it was our turn to have the community come to us for an open house in honor of the new year.  The interior of the villa had been repainted; every wall and sliding door was now a snowy white, turning our orange and blue color scheme into more of a bold statement and less of a bad dream.  The time had come for some large scale entertaining without having to worry about the effect of our living room on the sensibilities of our guests.

We were looking forward to a real holiday, complete with eggnog made with half-reconstituted Sealtest milk in lieu of cream, which was of course unavailable.  I had struck a bargain with the cook at the Mission for a variety of finger foods in exchange for some frozen beef tenderloins. (The Mission was not permitted to purchase meat on the local market, and their commissary supply did not run to filet of beef frozen or not.)  The girls and I had made some sweet things, and Mohammed had prepared a number of his specialties, including stuffed grape leaves and had mobilized a platoon of Sudanese to do the serving.  It all seemed suspiciously simple.

What I had not counted on was the advent of Ramadan the same evening.  I knew, of course, what Ramadan was, having read all about it in the company handbook, but the impact of its arrival was beyond my comprehension.  About five o'clock at the height of the party, I suddenly realized that a number of guests were serving food and drink and not a servant was in sight.  Everyone else had known exactly what would happen at sunset and simply took over from the absent Sudanese.  We did not see them again until they had finished their evening meal somewhere off the premises and long after the guests had left.

This was a good lesson in rolling with the punches, and I was not easily rattled on such future occasions as the time Mohammed came into the living room full of dinner guests to inform me that we had run out of cooking gas some time in the last hour or so and the roast was raw. We simply carried on with a rather lengthy pre-dinner hour while he and Dick left to purchase a new gas bottle.  Everybody understood and waited patiently for whatever would eventually come out of the kitchen.

What usually did come out of our kitchen was a lot of very good cooking courtesy of Mohammed.  His repertoire was limited to the ingredients we could obtain, but he was used to cooking for numbers of people, and a dinner party never fazed him.  I would tell him how many people were coming, then hand him the inevitable frozen tenderloin and prepare the dessert myself -- cake and pastry were not his forte, and since he couldn't read, I had no way of steering him onto new recipes.  His culinary specialty was sauces, all superb, and I felt not the least bit put upon having to prepare my kind of dessert.

He carried the meal the rest of the way, summoning help from his compatriots so that on the night of a party, my kitchen would be bustling with strange Sudanese all engaged in meal preparation, who would later emerge turbaned and elegant in their long robes to serve dinner in very stately fashion.

Stateliness was Mohammed's style. His standards of entertaining were immutable, and our table was set European style with the dessert implements at the top, no matter how I tried to modify it.  My success is demonstrated by the fact that to this day I set the table with the dessert implements at the top.  Other skirmishes were fought and lost, and his ways became ours.

Coffee in the evening was always demitasse and served in the living room whether or not there were guests.  No more sitting at the table comfortably chatting about the day's events over coffee for us; we were shooed into our colorful living room and seated so that our after dinner cup could be brought in on a tray and sipped in a civilized manner.

We went along with him, not wishing to be found less socially acceptable than his former employers, whoever they may have been -- we had never even asked for a reference -- and allowed him to bring us up to his level of gracious living.

The girls were very fond of Mohammed and called him their nanny because he had strong and freely expressed ideas about proper behavior.  Audible whining, complaining or, horror of horrors, insolence to me or Dick would bring forth a thunderous, "Batty!" -- there being no letter P in Arabic -- or "Susu!" from the kitchen. The instant results of such admonitions were guaranteed to warm the heart of a parent.  Their friends who became too boisterous were frowned upon, literally, an imposing sight given the tribal scars, and door slamming was not tolerated.   But he missed them when they were at school and always tried to have special dinners for them when they came home.

He treated us all with the same care and concern that one would expect from a family member, and I was the recipient of his kindness when I came down with a raging fever just after Dick had departed for a field trip in the desert.  Mohammed sent for the doctor, and all one night while I was delirious and half-conscious, he sat by my bed with a bowl of ice water and cold cloths to apply to my head.  Every time I opened my eyes, there he was, and to me, there could have been no more comforting sight.  I can never forget him and his kindness.

There were opportunities to reciprocate on the rare occasions when he was sick and, like most men, immediately assumed a moribund posture as if teetering on the brink of death.  I found him once in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea, lurching from table to range as if each step might be his last and told him to go back to bed -- that I would fix his tea and bring it to him.  He limped to the door, clutched the doorframe, then turning back with a gesture that required only a lace handkerchief to duplicate a dying Camille, murmured, "Itnein sukkar,"("two sugars") before making a dramatic exit.  It was a magnificent performance, and I was more than happy to play my part.

I learned a great deal of Arabic from Mohammed, although it was a long time before I found out that it was an Egyptian dialect not used among Saudis though understood by them.  In any case, it was more important to me to make myself understood by Mohammed, who was part of the household, than by anyone else, and I would often turn to him to interpret for me what somebody else was saying.  The fact that he too was relaying the same information in much the same Arabic struck neither one of us as redundant, and oddly, I could always understand him.

Ali Harbi also contributed to my education, and I must have sounded to the shopkeepers like a very peculiar hybrid with my strings of words acquired from such disparate sources as Sudanese and pure Bedouin.  I was quite smug in my use of Ali Harbi's Arabic word for carport, qruj, until one day I heard what I was saying and realized that it was simply a corruption of garage.  We were all learning from each other, and we were often surprised.

Life in Riyadh was a series of discoveries for us foreigners.  There were, after all, no guide books, no English language newspapers, and no organized orientation groups.  Television was just being born, and nobody owned a set.  You just had to discover Riyadh for yourself as you went along. There were lovely surprises like the triumphal arches. Periodically, these brightly painted structures would be erected at intervals along the Airport Road to celebrate Eid Al Fitr as well as the arrival of heads of state from other countries.  They not only lent a convivial atmosphere to the city but gave advance notice that someone of importance was about to visit, and we would all try to be out there to see King Faisal go by with his guest. 

Other discoveries proved more lasting.  On a picnic with friends in Wadi Hanifa, the children all went off exploring after lunch and came racing back with news of a deserted city with hundreds of ruined buildings; they had found Dir'ya, whose existence we had never heard of.  It took us a good deal of time and enquiry to find out that it was not our exclusive find but a cornerstone of Saudi history.  Our Saudi acquaintances simply accepted its existence as part of their heritage but had never made a particular point of mentioning it to us.

In some ways, we not only discovered but also invented our own Riyadh. We gave descriptive names to streets and landmarks that either had no names (or none that we were aware of since there were no street signs) and successive generations of foreigners have done the same with new names conferred as the reference points have changed.  The Aramco villas were on Sinalco Street, but the eponymous soft drink plant has long since disappeared, and it is now Farazdak Street.  Al Ahsa was Zoo Street, but became Pepsi Street when the Pepsi plant was built, and even though the zoo is still there, the Pepsi plant remains predominant, and the name persists. One of my great regrets was the passing of Everything Street and the wonderful Everything Store, an establishment that would, among other sterling services, dispatch a whole watermelon for home delivery by bicycle for four riyals.

The important thing was that we spoke a common language among ourselves that served to orient us not only in terms of geography but identity in a place where we were turning cultural somersaults every day. There was something comforting in the knowledge that you automatically brought a bag of ice to a party and that your hostess would similarly return the favor since both of you knew how difficult it was to boil enough water for a whole evening's ice cubes.

Just as our children did, we needed the sense of close association with those who like us were strangers in a very strange land, and out of this need, came long and lasting friendships.  What we had was community in every sense of the word.  Thirty years later, I could sit down with anyone who lived in Riyadh in 1965 and share a special bond that I share with no one else.  

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