Single Journey Only: A Memoir by Ursula Owen

Author:Ursula Owen [Ursula Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784631888
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Published: 2019-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

By the time we came, Nasser had established a major programme of reform – for women’s rights, for workers, for the transfer of wealth from rich to poor. But there was a cost to some of our friends who came from ancien-régime families. They lost much of their property but also many of their rights as citizens and this despite the fact that they were often sympathetic to the egalitarian aims of the regime.

And there were plenty of reminders that we were living in an authoritarian state. Nasser’s presidency was in some ways a golden age of culture, in theatre, film, poetry, radio, literature, music, comedy, producing singers such as Umm Kulthum, with her unmistakable rich contralto voice, whose monthly concerts were well known for their capacity to clear the streets of some of the world’s most populous cities as people rushed home to tune in, and writers Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner, and Tawfik el-Hakim. But intellectual and cultural life was closely monitored and censored. For foreigners like us, life in Egypt was easy and delightful and though we were also being watched we were small fry and of little interest to the government. Our phone was tapped; when we picked up the handpiece, there was a loud whirring sound from the East German tape recorder. Our mail was looked at and occasionally censored – I was careful what I said when I wrote home. We were aware that the Mukhabarat, the secret police, eavesdropped on conversations, so were careful about what we said to friends in cafés such as the famous Groppi. But as foreigners we only had to be careful. For Egyptians these issues were serious matters of survival or the risk of being sent to the dreadful Tora prison in southwest Cairo.

Roger and I developed a daily routine for work, walking up the main street, first encountering the small boy who had registered where we live and knew he’d get some money from us every morning, across the Qasr El Nil Bridge, the mist coming off the Nile at the beginning of a fresh Cairo day. And then to Tahrir Square, a traffic nightmare of old cars, buses and donkey carts and into the university.

Lunch was back at home, at about 2.00 p.m, usually soup or stew, prepared by our maid. At first we had resisted having a maid, finding the idea of having a domestic servant alien and difficult. But we’d been strongly advised to hire someone, helpful for us, people said, and giving a wage to someone who needed it. So eventually we found an older woman, a mother of two, who was motherly to me and made most of the decisions about her work without my having to instruct her.

After lunch, the siesta. I loved lying in our bedroom with the hot sun coming through the window, making love and going into a deep sleep; followed by starting again in the early evening, when we usually went out. I loved this double start to the day, the afternoons in our apartment, the long evenings.

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