Open Writing

I can hardly contain myself. It is a Friday, and a week yet to the end of the Summer Term, but I am going on holiday tonight, and arriving back a week late too. I am being allowed eight instead of six weeks vacation to sail to Egypt to meet family not seen for 10 years. I`d left the land of my birth on a troop ship, as my father was demobbed from the RAF at the end of the War.

I am 13. I am beyond excitement as 4 pm looms, for my paternal grandfather is arriving from Goole (my father`s birth place) to take us to Doncaster Railway Station, as we don`t have our own car.

Looking back now I can still taste the anticipation, but recall very little of the train journey to London, Victoria, where a memory of bustle, but nothing else, lingers. I can`t even remember much about Southampton, except boarding the ship, and my father talking to a young handsome, fair, curly-haired steward from Hull, who remained the steward to our table for the nine days we were aboard .Hardly any time at all, compared to the other passengers, who would be afloat for six weeks on their emigration journey to Australia.

I can vividly remember, however, that a strange buzzing in my ears, with Southampton still in my receding view, was to herald, unbeknown to me at that point, two days of debilitating sea sickness, from which I was not to recover until after the Bay of Biscay had been traversed.

From that point on I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, especially as on the first day of my restored good health I met, in the makeshift swimming pool , one of identical twins, my sort of first boyfriend. I got the two boys totally muddled up on at least one occasion, and thought it very risky that our parents couldn`t see us holding hands between our deckchairs. Of course the usual promises to write weren't fulfilled, and I never did hear from Australia.

For some reason, although we had a four-berth cabin, my father was not billeted with us, because at our first port of call, Malta, a Maltese girl joined my mother, sister and me to occupy the empty fourth bunk. I liked her, and the Maltese people generally when we went ashore. All I can remember of Malta at that time, was long sun-baked streets of town houses, with little old ladies in black making lace, and the fact that my sleeveless blouse was considered not demure enough to enter a church, until a borrowed scarf covered my shoulders.

Our next port of call was Pireaus on the Greek mainland, where we visited the temple of Diana and the Parthenon in Athens. A Greek policeman, shouting at me for picking up a stone at the Acropolis, was to be the pre- cursor of a catalogue of incidents that would be the pattern of this holiday almost from the beginning. As we docked at Port Said there was great excitement aboard ship as to us actually arriving there, as just on the previous day President Nasser had seized the Suez Canal which we had just travelled through.

In ensuing unrest during our time there natives threw a shovel of earth at the windscreen of the car we were travelling in. On walking across a waste piece of land something hit the back of my head with such force that, had I not been wearing a large sun hat, I expect the assumed stone could have really injured me.

On another occasion, at a relative’s house, overlooking a basket ball court, we suddenly had to put out all the lights, halting the floodlit game as in the eerie blackness we were vaguely aware of bombs being dropped by the British Government in retaliation for the seizure of the Canal.

Things became so heated that my parents decided on an earlier return. All that could be had, in the panic, was a Greek boat going only as far as France. It was just our luck that relations with Cyprus were also not too happy at that time. I`m sure my mother, overhearing Greek conversations to tip the Englishman overboard, took the threat seriously, unbeknown to us children at the time. My parents’ embarrassment must have been acute when on a subsequent occasion she spoke to them in fluent Greek, and they realised she was in fact Greek.

With very little money left. and a promise to deliver a present to a relative when we reached Marseilles, I remember only dark, sinister French dockland streets,
and a journey across France by train sitting on a suitcase in the corridor outside the toilets. Getting out of Egypt in a hurry had meant no proper bookings for us, but just a determination to get home.

Get home we did, and in spite of disasters I have very happy memories. Prior to our visit, Yaya, my Greek grandma, had requested our measurements and I had waiting for me on arrival five of the most wonderful dresses of my teenage years.

The first evening there, in warm jasmine-laden air, I wore a white floaty Juliet type dress with blue piping, unfortunately set off set with white ankle socks and sensible double barred & buckled white shoes. Unheard of at home, I was allowed to stay up very late but not to dance with the handsome swarthy young man who requested the first ever dance of my life.

I remember the train journey on wooden slatted seats along the banks of the Nile, from Port Said to Cairo, seeing the feluccas, and the Fellahin and smelling the earthy smell of the fertile plain. The teeming overspill of humanity clambering onto trams, and mothers unashamedly feeding their babies wherever and whenever needed.

A journey to Alexandria, my actual birthplace, where there was no tide, and the green, larger than expected waves of the Mediterranean. A camel ride, the Pyramids, the museum at Cairo, with its numerous rooms of artefacts and mummies.

Across the remaining five years of school various staff would from time to whisper to me “ Has your father finished all his connections with Egypt now?” To which I always bemusedly replied, “We only went on holiday.”

Today people fly all over the world on holidays and have doubtless seen the places I speak of, and many more besides, but looking back across almost 50 years to that twilight time, between childhood and adulthood, I have memories of meeting with relatives, some of whom subsequently I was to never see again. I had a glimpse of my Alexandrine Greek relations; my mother`s side of the family, the Greek part of who I am.

As for the rest, I have mostly been my father`s daughter. The down to earth, stubborn- streaked Yorkshire lass. I have returned to my Yorkshire roots to live out my days, but in part of me buried deep, like the treasures of the Pharoahs, lie the remnants of two other cultures. Tapping into them put me in the right places but just at the wrong time.