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‘She’d arrived at her heart’s desire. Joe was here on the quay, somewhere in the hustle and bustle. To be seen and held and embraced.’ This is Ailsa Roberts, who with her daughter Nia arrives in the troopship, The Empire Glory, at Port Said, to join her RAF sergeant husband in the British military occupation of the Suez Canal Zone. It’s 1949. Into Suez is a tragedy of married love and of casual racism in the years leading up to the Egyptian Revolution and the notorious Suez Crisis.

It’s curious to reflect that the lines of Into Suez were unknowingly laid down half a century ago, when as a small child I sailed to Egypt with my Air Force family. My earliest memories are rather of Egypt than of Wales: they are intense, brilliantly colourful, with a filmic, almost hypnotic power. But despite the power of these memories, for decades Egypt seemed another world altogether, as if I had dreamed it. Although I’d set novels in other haunts of my nomadic childhood – Scotland in Arms and the Girl, Germany in The Element of Water – it never occurred to me that Egypt could provide such a setting.

For what does a girl of three comprehend of the world around her? What had I actually gleaned of Egypt? As far as I was concerned, the Middle East was a giant sandpit, specially constructed for me and the lad next door to excavate with our buckets and spades – an unusually hot outpost of Wales. A child’s world is both circumscribed and contextless. It is enclosed in the cwtch of a mam’s arms, under the extended wing of a dad who guarantees overarching safety. What lay beyond this sanctuary of family was unknown. And yet children reach for knowledge – and I have often felt that the memory I shall set down next represents the moment at which, with one foot in the bliss of ignorance, my baffled mind reached out towards the recognition that the world was neither built around me, nor my race, my family nor our religion.

Our wire-meshed bedroom window at Fanara, a military camp near Ismailia, framed a stretch of desert. After lunch I was always grumblingly put to bed for a siesta. No sooner was the bedroom door closed than I’d bounce up to stand at the window, sucking my thumb and glaring moodily out at the sand. The memory is this: a robed Arab was walking alone out into that desert. His dignified, erect figure got smaller and smaller, walking in a straight line.

That’s all really. But he held my attention. Questions bubbled up. Where was he going? What did he want? Who was this person? Curiosity itched in my brain. That question persisted throughout the years to come. I can see him still, through the wire grid: the memory evokes dawning consciousness, a moment in which I become myself, thinking for myself in so far as this is granted to three-year-olds. I seem in retrospect to have been examining a perspective beyond the frame of parental interpretation and even of permission. My gaze was directed beyond ideology, at that human being, out there, whose face I was never destined to see and to whom my elders might have yelled, Imshi! Yalla! if he came too close: Go away! Clear off! I was told he was dirt poor; his children would be diseased; they could expect to die young. They lived in mud houses with mud furniture: Ych y fi! None of this clarified what I wanted to know.

This memory, simple but filmic, is the soul of Into Suez, standing for the whole novel. It represents knowledge forlorn of insight, fascination replete with mystery: in its seed are packed both questions and imponderables. During the Gulf War of 1990-1 and the Iraq War of 2003, I seemed to see him again and thought: Does nothing change? I am old enough to remember the ‘Suez Crisis’ of 1956 in which, after President Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, the British Empire entered into a scandalous conspiracy with France and Israel to invade Egypt. They were sent packing by America. And that seemed to be the last strangled roar – or bray – of the British Empire. But in the Iraq War, the West again invaded an Arab country. I marched with over a million people in protest through London. It was all happening again. I thought of what Doris Lessing writes in her autobiography: Are we a people who cannot learn? I found myself returning in imagination to Egypt and beginning to write.

Other memories surfaced: they came thick and fast, of hailstones big as ping-pong balls whacking down on the naked, calomine-whitened shoulders and sun-bleached heads of me and my pals as we built sand castles; of vendors in the souk calling out their wares: Pri-ee-mus! Bot-bot-dee-li-ay! Of khaki white men with guns, watchful and ubiquitous. Of emaciated donkeys, their ribbed sides wounded with many beatings. Of a middle-aged Sudanese man, infinitely gentle, who looked after me while my parents took a dip in Lake Timsah. These memories and especially ‘my’ Arab offered a well of ink in which to dip my pen, time and again, when the labours of researching historical fiction floored me. For if fiction is about anything, it is about the mysterious complexity of individuals, the life they lead together, what happens to them. The links that bind and the conflicts that separate us.

I was born into a world of casual racism and imperialist prejudices. Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War was on its knees. Into Suez opens in the year after the declaration of the state of Israel; two years before the outbreak of the Egyptian ‘Troubles’ in the winter of 1951. At that date, British families were evacuated. Those who remained lived behind barbed wire and guns; they could have not have moved freely around the real Egypt as my characters needed to do. The Palestine crisis lay then and lies now at the root of Middle Eastern troubles. A novel is neither a political statement nor a work of history: writers have to do with common human clay. But character belongs to place and time. In 1949, Britain was bankrupt victor, its Empire in decline. The Cold War had broken out. Our small island made of coal and surrounded by fish quit its Mandate in Palestine but hung on to the Suez Canal Zone, the artery of Empire and a colossal arsenal. The declaration of the state of Israel had led to ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arabs, killing and exiling hundreds of thousands. They’d flooded into the Arab countries, their destitution stoking the fire of impending revolution.

Into this maelstrom I brought my characters. Ailsa Roberts, a vividly intelligent young Englishwoman, sails east to join her Welsh RAF sergeant husband, Joe, in Ismailia, at the heart of the disputed Canal Zone. On the voyage out on the troopship Empire Glory, Ailsa transgresses class norms by forming an intimate friendship with Mona, a renegade officer’s wife. She befriends Hedwig Webster, the German wife of an English airman, and Irene White, a timorous woman married to Joe’s best pal, Chalkie. They alight in a tumultuous world of casual British racism. My job was to make the reader care about these people, warts and all. Their blemishes are symptomatic of their culture, class and period. Joe Roberts is a study in working class conservatism. An unlettered son of the Swansea steel mills, Joe’s tragedy is that of a humorous, emotional and (according to his own lights) honourable young man struggling in the throes of his society’s racial and misogynist prejudices, at once victim and agent. All the characters of Into Suez are twisted out of true by their complex inheritance. The crime that is the climax of the novel is later buried under layers of amnesia: Nia grows up thinking of her father as a war hero. I gave Nia a frame narrative: in the early years of the twenty-first century, she sails the Suez Canal in the wake of her parents to find the truth about her long-dead father, the ‘war hero’.

There was so much to grasp in order to imagine the ‘world’ of Into Suez with any confidence. Reading sometimes brought a wonderful sense of enlightenment. I am so glad to have met, on the page, the Egyptian writer, Ali Salem, humorist and humanist, a sharp observer of the modern world, a one-off job if ever there was one. His A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors recounts a car trip for which he took a lot of stick in his own country. His wisdom is salutary:

I viewed the [Oslo] agreement as embodying a rare moment in history, the moment of recognition of the other. I exist, and you also exist. I have a right to live, and this is also your right. It’s a hard and long road, ending in freedom and human rights of the individual, a road strewn not with roses but with struggle and patience …
There is no end to the pain felt by most people when you
suddenly raise their curtain of illusions and lies.

I exist and you also exist: that really speaks to me. Surely this is what ‘my’ Arab taught me as he walked away into the shimmering desert heat. No lesson proves more salient or more exacting, on the human and writerly levels. The cost of transgressing taboos against fraternisation with the enemy, as the characters in Into Suez learn, can be your freedom or your life.

Read the first chapter of Into Suez here

Further reading...

Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

Parthian Books

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