|
EDITOR'S NOTE
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.
We
hope you enjoy it and you will join
in a discussion of the book [Click
here].
Previous
Chapters:
CHAPTER EIGHT
We are in Jeddah for a few days and have stopped for a fast lunch at
Taco Bell. We might be anywhere in the world eating the same
burritos, but I suddenly realize that we are sitting in the Red
Sea, or at least where the Red Sea used to be.
Jeddah has changed its shoreline and reinvented itself
and its age old partnership with the sea.
The new and spectacular skyline reflects its mirror image
in the waters testifying to that flourishing marriage.
Eighteen
months was the time we were to spend in Saudi Arabia, and it was
almost up, and we were coming to a moment of decision.
Then, in November the decision was made for us.
The
kindly manager who had shepherded us on our first flight had
left, and the company asked Dick to replace him.
It was an offer that was hard to turn down, but the
implication was clear that in accepting it we were committing
ourselves to something more than we had planned on.
The adventure turned out to be a long-term career, and we
have never looked back.
Riyadh
had become our home and our friends
almost an extension of the family.
Short visits to Jeddah had revealed a lifestyle quite
different from that of Riyadh, and it was a psychological as
well as a physical upheaval.
We felt so much a part of Riyadh life that it was hard to
imagine starting over again in another place.
The
girls, who were in Beirut for their second year, were told that
they would not be coming back to Riyadh, but they were not
particularly fazed. So
many of their school friends lived in Jeddah that the transition
would be easier for them than for us.
The
move itself appeared to present no foreseeable problem.
Fortunately, the orange furniture and its fellows would
remain as a legacy to the family that was coming to replace us,
but we had collected a substantial load of personal belongings.
and the company wives in Jeddah had put in requests for Kuwaiti
chests. I had a
wonderful time filling that order, buying several chests at one
clip, thereby cementing my friendship with the dealer, and we
used them along with tin trunks from the souk for packing.
There
were no movers to help out. That was a concept whose time had
not yet arrived. To
move anything anywhere required a trip to the truck souq, and
Dick went down to make the arrangements and set the date for one
of the gaily decorated trucks to pick up our things and
transport them to our future home.
The
new villa had been chosen by Dick on a quick trip to Jeddah and
was reported to be far nicer than our present one, having been
tastefully decorated by the previous occupants in muted colors.
He had bought some of their furniture as well, and I
would shop for whatever else we needed when I got there.
We
were caught up in a flurry of going away parties and farewells
right up to the afternoon before departure when Dick invited one
of the officials from the Ministry to tea.
This pleasant goodbye was rudely interrupted by one of
the gate commotions, which we tried to ignore until Mohammed
appeared to tell us that the truck had arrived to take our
things to Jeddah.
Impossible.
The very cups we were drinking out of had to be packed as
well as our clothes. What
was this ridiculous man thinking of arriving twenty-four hours
early?
We
found out. He had a
load of potatoes already on board, and they couldn't wait until
the next day. I was
equally offended at the idea that my belongings were to share a
ride with the potatoes, but there seemed to be no alternative.
This was when he was going to Jeddah, and we could either
fall in with his plans or try to make other last minute
arrangements.
I
excused myself to go into the bedroom and hurl our clothes into
the open trunks -- I had put off packing them until the last
minute in the hope that they would be that much less wrinkled.
Mohammed
packed what was left in the kitchen, and Dick remained in the
living room with our bemused guest who offered no resistance as
his cup and saucer disappeared but made an early exit
accompanied to the gate by his host in a vain attempt to
approximate local hospitality.
His goodbyes were, I thought, heartfelt.
I
watched as our belongings were piled haphazardly on top of the
potatoes that filled the bottom half of the truck, which then
lurched off toward Jeddah.
That the bouncing of our trunks and Kuwaiti chests wasn't
doing the potatoes any good, didn't concern me, but nothing was
tied down nor was there any cover, and I wondered whether I'd be
reunited with my worldly goods at the other end.
Resignation was the only emotion possible.
A
further complication arose when we discovered for the first time
that Mohammed was an illegal resident and could not fly with us
to Jeddah since he had no documents.
He had been despondent ever since we announced that we
were moving, and we put it down to his reluctance to leave his
friends. It seems
we had made a lot of assumptions when we hired Mohammed, and now
we were confronted by the realities.
The immediate problem could be solved by sending him on
the company plane with Woof, but we had to do something to
legalize his presence in the kingdom once we got him to Jeddah.
It was a tribute to the people in our office there that
this was accomplished without having to send him out of the
country first, but at the time we were exhausted by the
complications he had presented us with.
It
is fair to say that the farewells from the airport crowd and the
subsequent flight to Jeddah washed right over me.
After the confusions of the past twenty-four hours, any
feeling of nostalgia ran a poor last to the relief of being on
our way.
Jeddah
was the big city to us. It
was the center of commerce for the kingdom, and all the foreign
embassies and most of the foreign companies were located there.
In contrast to the strictly Saudi look of Riyadh, its
streets teemed with people of many nationalities, who had been
casually absorbed over centuries of trade with the outside
world, and the atmosphere was cosmopolitan.
There
were housing compounds, organizations and clubs, international
airlines -- none of which existed in Riyadh.
And above all, there was the sea and all the activities
that centered around it.
In
reality, Jeddah was a small city too with unpaved streets,
electricity and water in short supply and very few telephones.
But, its tradition of trade and its history as the port
for the pilgrimage to Makkah lent stature to its image.
Jeddah accepted foreign
ways and customs as an offshoot of its commerce and paid little
attention to the increasing numbers of western residents.
The Hejaz had seen it all long before we arrived, from
the Turks to the sailing ships to the western diplomats who had
established their legations in the forties and even earlier.
And, every year, the world arrived in the form of
pilgrims coming from all over the globe to perform the haj. There just wasn't
very much that could disturb Jeddah's equilibrium.
It embraced change, and the magnificent multi-storied
coral block buildings of the old town were being razed to make
way for the new even then.
So,
here we were and in some ways, it was like moving to a different
country. Certainly,
the climate was nothing like Riyadh's.
The dry desert air that we had thrived on for years in
Arizona before we ever came to Saudi Arabia was replaced by
semi-tropical humidity. It
had shocked me when I got off the plane from Beirut, and I had
the same reaction whenever I came to Jeddah on a visit.
This time, it was November, and the weather was at its
best with cooler temperatures and just enough sea dampness in
the air to give a moist texture to the skin.
This
time too, I had my first taste of what it was like to be the
manager's wife. Everybody
turned out at the airport to meet and greet, and we were swept
off very grandly in a brand new car -- for the first time, one
with air conditioning.
The
new villa in Sharafia was just as nice as Dick had said it was,
lucky for him. It
was one of four, each with its own wall, that sat in lonely
splendor a couple of blocks off the Medina Road.
Jeddah's axis centered on the airport and branched off in
the opposing directions of Makkah and Medina.
The company office compound and the housing compound were
both located on the Makkah Road, and there was a great deal of
speculation as to why we chose to live on the other side of
town. The answer
was simple; the year before, we had spent several weeks in the
compound and had not enjoyed a single undisturbed meal.
This was not a reason we shared with the rest of the
employees, but we never tried compound living again.
The
villa had a pretty garden on one side and a spacious porch
overlooking it. We
now had our bedrooms on the second floor, which were reached by
a very nice marble staircase, and Mohammed had his quarters in a
separate building. We
missed the music system in the Riyadh villa, but that was all we
missed.
Here,
we had pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting and pale gray walls.
The dining room furniture was black lacquer with silk
upholstery and upstairs in our bedroom was a king-size American
bed with a quilted silk spread.
The age of elegance was upon us.
I ended up painting the walls white, and with white
furniture for the living room, I basked in the pleasure of a
relatively colorless existence.
With
our new home came a new cast of characters.
For the first time, we had next door neighbors who were
foreigners too, an attractive couple from Alabama with two young
children and a telephone. We
knew we had moved to the right neighborhood as soon as they came
over to welcome us and extend the use of that magical
instrument. I have
never appreciated an offer of hospitality quite so much as that
one. The fact is
that we very rarely took advantage of it, but just knowing it
was available was comforting.
They became our best friends for many reasons having
nothing to do with the telephone, and our relationship has
endured over the years, in Riyadh as well as Jeddah.
A
more eccentric addition to our lives was the gardener, a
gray-eyed Palestinian of gigantic proportions.
He dwarfed the bicycle he rode to work. And, after he
added all of his gardening implements and a few shrubs and
seedling flats to the load, he appeared to be levitating down
the street on a bed of greenery.
He was the strongest man I have ever known and thought
nothing of hoisting himself and all his paraphernalia over the
eight-foot wall if no one answered the gate quickly enough.
The
garden looked very nice, but it was his garden not ours.
Any suggestion as to change met with a blank stare from
those gray eyes that effectively dismissed such heresy.
We shared his services with several friends, one of whom
was herself a dedicated gardener, and their gardens were
replicas of ours. There
were certain flowers Yusuf approved of and many that he did not.
The placement of bushes or trees conformed to his notion
of landscaping or there were no bushes and trees.
I had the distinct feeling that we existed only to
provide Yusuf with an outlet for his horticultural fantasies.
I
finally asked my gardening friend, a lady of strong convictions,
how she got along with him.
She confessed that she didn't and that he was a daily
irritation.
"Well,"
I asked, "why don't you fire him?"
"I
do," she replied, "but he won't go.
He keeps coming back over the wall and I've just given
up."
So
did I. Yusuf got
along with Mohammed and was coolly polite to Woof, so what
difference did it really make that my only function was to pay
him? I was learning
something about graceful acceptance of the inevitable.
We
discovered at the beginning that we shared the villa with an
undetermined number of geckoes.
These small lizards are harmless, of course, and have a
reputation as voracious consumers of unpleasant insects.
They lived in the recesses for the sliding doors to the
dining room and emerged in the daytime to wander about the walls
and sun themselves on windowsills.
At night, they went home behind the sliding doors and
discussed the day's activities in little chirps.
None of these activities, however, involved the
destruction of harmful insects despite their reputation.
I watched one of them lounging on the living room wall as
a spider strolled by within easy reach of a flick of the tongue.
There was not so much as a half-hearted try; they simply
ignored one another.
Once
again, it seemed easier to accept the fact that we were
harboring a singularly non-aggressive species of gecko and
forget it. Dick
suggested that if they got very big, we could put collars on
them and give them names, but it never came to that.
Despite
the wild life, housekeeping in Jeddah was much easier than it
had been in Riyadh. A
port city, by definition, has access to greater amounts and
varieties of imported foods, and there were many more shops that
dealt in these items. It
was no longer necessary to go to the souk for fresh produce
since there were any number of nearby stalls where it could
bought.
Lebanese
Joe's in Baghadadia was the market of choice as Raji's had been
of necessity in Riyadh, and his stock was both more plentiful
and varied. Our
dinner table reflected the difference, particularly with the
addition of fresh fish from the Red Sea.
Everything
in Jeddah centered around the sea.
Each Friday, there was a mass migration to the beach at
the Creek, a sizeable inlet of the Red Sea, and the compound of
rather makeshift cabins that was the headquarters for weekend
recreation. Scuba diving
had not yet arrived, but everybody snorkeled, and the sailors
among us tacked about in Sunfish, which were little more than
surf boards with sails. The
more adventurous went on along the coast to the open sea to
explore the reef where the water was crystal clear and provided
a matchless view of undersea life.
Even
for the neophyte, and I was certainly one of those, the magic of
the reef dispelled any sense of apprehension, and one could
spend hours in mask and flippers suspended in a mystic world of
color and motion. To
peer down through the pristine water at the great bottom fish
circling slowly sixty to eighty feet below was too unreal to be
frightening.
The
reef was home to marvelously colored corals and other delicate
creatures that looked like underwater flowers.
Huge clams and tiny fish made unlikely bedfellows, but
contrasts in size, texture and color are characteristic of reef
existence. The number and variety of the fish were fantastic, and there
is no more exciting experience than to find yourself at the
center of a school of thousands of minute silver bodies and feel
the shock waves of their passage.
There were wonders to be found even in the Creek.
I remember a luminous moment when I saw the sand below me
shiver and a huge ray shook itself free and flew away through
the water on slowly undulating wings.
Some
of our Filipino employees were skillful spear fishermen and
would often set up a fire on the sand and concoct a great fish
stew. The ingredients were a colorful assortment of reef fish and
the end result was delicious.
Those lazy afternoons
at the beach invariably concluded with a harrowing return to the
city at sunset. The
Medina Road was a normal two-way street the rest of the week,
but by late afternoon on Friday, cars were six abreast racing
along the road and both shoulders.
Any unfortunate who happened to be traveling in the
opposite direction could pull over and wait or try a cross
country route. The
homeward bound roared along at breakneck speed with much
weaving, switching of lanes and blowing of horns.
Aside
from the Creek activities, Jeddah social life centered around
the embassies. The
American Embassy, now the Consulate, was then far out of town,
delightfully situated on the edge of the sea, and the usual
approach was on an angle cross country from the Medina Road
since Palestine Road was only a dirt track and took longer.
Its compound included the Dunes Club with a nine hole
golf course and several tennis courts. Swimming in the salt water pool was reserved for the embassy
personnel, but dances and parties were often held there.
The
British held forth in a beautiful old building downtown on the
lagoon. It was
typical of the old colonial embassies, three stories built
around a central courtyard with verandas on each floor.
It had to have been the British who came up with the hot
weather formal attire for men known as Red Sea Dress.
This consisted of a short-sleeved open-necked white
shirt, worn with tuxedo pants and a cummerbund, putting men for
the first time on a comfort level equal to female evening dress.
Most
entertaining, formal and informal, took place outdoors.
Given the unpredictability of the air conditioning, it
was better to plan for the discomfort of a humid night than risk
the nightmare of ending up indoors without any cooling.
That's just what happened at the Italian Embassy on a
relatively cool night when the power failed, the lights went
out, and everybody ended up outdoors anyway.
However, the Austrians had better luck, and we spent a
memorable New Year's Eve of waltzes under a glittering
chandelier that kept right on glittering through the evening.
There
were plays and concerts, all amateur and all very well done.
Diplomatic receptions in celebration of national holidays
were colorful and glamorous to me, the recent arrival from the
hinterland. What I
had enjoyed in microcosm among our small group in Riyadh was now
available on a much larger scale, and at first, I found it very
exciting to be living in an embassy town.
Two
years later, Dick and I found ourselves sitting on a staircase
at a very crowded reception with four other people whom we knew
quite well. Nobody
was saying anything, we were just sitting until someone remarked
that this was the fifth evening in a row that we had all seen
each other, and it was no wonder we had nothing left to say.
I would never have imagined that I could have too much of
a good thing, but it was true. We began to count the nights we stayed home as golden and
accepted fewer invitations.
All
of this came to an abrupt halt with the June war of 1967.
Here was some excitement I hadn't planned on and
certainly didn't welcome.
The
first inkling we had that war had broken out was a telephone
call to Dick from the airline.
That morning he had put an injured employee aboard a
plane to go to the American University Hospital in Beirut, and
now they were calling to inform him that the plane had been
turned back because of hostilities.
As
the morning went on, the radio reports were erratic and
contradictory, and there was a general sense of confusion.
We heard accounts of imminent evacuation of foreigners
from the various countries involved, but there was no conclusive
information on what was happening.
I
went to the office compound and stayed to see what was
developing. It was
becoming clear that events were moving swiftly and that the Arab
countries had joined forces.
The mood among the
employees was ambivalent. There
had been reports, later proved to be false, that American
fighters were flying cover for the Israelis, and many of the
Palestinians at the office were in a difficult position,
wondering whether in fact they were technically at war with the
company and its American management and if so how to react.
Emotions were very close to the surface, but Dick met
with them and convinced them that the situation was so ambiguous
that the only constructive approach was to carry on with the
work and hang together.
Our
immediate concern was the girls who were in school in Beirut
which was now inaccessible.
Unable to get the embassy on the telephone, we drove out
there to try and find out what was happening.
There was no word from Beirut, but they promised to let
us know as soon as they heard anything.
This was the best we could do, but it was a long night of
worry and second thoughts about having been so nonchalant about
bringing my children to this part of the world. This wasn't adventure; this was a very chilling reality.
The
radio broadcasts had become more coherent and by morning it was
clear that a major battle was being fought and, what concerned
us even more, that the evacuation of Americans was under way
from several countries where civil unrest and actions against
Americans were reported. We
found that we had a Saudi military guard on our gate and another
one at the office compound.
We
went next door to telephone the embassy and were told that an
evacuation was now in progress in Beirut and the boarding
students at ACS had already been flown out.
However, their destination was not known.
The normal safe haven for the Middle East was Athens, but
a recent series of incidents in a couple of African countries
had resulted in an unexpected influx of refugees into Athens,
and some of the Beirut evacuees were headed for Rome. No one, however, knew exactly who had gone where.
There
was no question that I had to find them, but most airlines had
suspended their flights, and I was beginning to feel desperate. Finally, the office found a Pakistani Airline plane
that was scheduled to make a stop in Jeddah the following day on
its way to Nairobi, and they were able to book me on it.
I would then get the first flight out of Nairobi that
went anywhere in Europe and proceed from there.
Our
Jeddah stint was coming to an end.
The company's work would be more easily accomplished in
Riyadh, and it was decided to move the headquarters there,
leaving a small logistics division in Jeddah to supply the
camps. Any
reluctance I might have felt at leaving Jeddah and my teaching
job was canceled out by the exciting prospect of my new position
as principal of RICS.
Jeddah
was interesting, and our life there was a happy one, yet it
always seemed to me to be an interim.
I never felt a real sense of belonging; I lived there but
was never really at home as I had been in Riyadh.
Perhaps, the departure of the children to the States had
something to do with it, I don't know.
I hated the climate and have always preferred the desert
to the sea, so I was delighted to be going back to Riyadh and
looked forward to the move.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frances
Meade is an American who has lived in Saudi Arabia
since 1965.
Born in New York, she and her family moved to
Arizona in the '50s and still call it home.
She has a degree from Mount Holyoke College and
has written and edited educational texts as well as a
monthly magazine column.
|
