When the Going Was Good Read online

  ‘What did he ask?’ chatter the others.

  ‘What did the guide answer?’ they want to know.

  ‘How did the bulls die?’

  ‘How much did it cost?’ asks another. ‘You can’t build a place like this for nothing.’

  ‘We don’t spend money that way nowadays.’

  ‘Fancy spending all that burying bulls …’

  Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I longed to declaim, dear ladies and gentlemen, fancy crossing the Atlantic Ocean, fancy coming all this way in the heat, fancy enduring all these extremities of discomfort and exertion; fancy spending all this money, to see a hole in the sand where, three thousand years ago, a foreign race whose motives must for ever remain inexplicable interred the carcasses of twenty-four bulls. Surely the laugh, dear ladies and gentlemen, is on us.

  But I remembered I was a gate-crasher in this party and remained silent.

  I drove down to Helwan for a couple of nights.

  We went to Masr el Atika, Old Cairo or Babylon, the Coptic settlement built in the days of persecution within the walls of the old Roman garrison station. In this constricted slum there are five medieval Coptic churches, a synagogue, and a Greek Orthodox convent. The Christians seem to differ in decency very little from their pagan neighbours; the only marked sign of their emancipation from heathen superstition was that the swarm of male and juvenile beggars were here reinforced by their womenfolk, who in the Mohammedan quarters maintain a modest seclusion. The churches, however, were most interesting, particularly Abu Sergh, which has Corinthian columns taken from a Roman temple, Byzantine eikons, and an Arabic screen. It is built over the cave where the Holy Family – always troglodytic – are said to have spent their retirement during Herod’s massacre of the innocents. The deacon, Bestavros, showed us over. When he had finished his halting exposition and received his tip, he said, ‘Wait one minute. Get priest.’

  He hurried into the vestry and brought out a patriarchal old man with a long grey beard and large greasy bun of grey hair, obviously newly awakened from his afternoon nap. This priest blinked, blessed us, and held out his hand for a tip; then, lifting up his skirts, he tucked the two piastres away in a pocket and made off. At the vestry door he stopped. ‘Go getting bishop,’ he said.

  Half a minute later he returned with a still more venerable figure, chewing sunflower seeds. The pontiff blessed us and held out his hand for a tip. I gave him two piastres. He shook his head.

  ‘He is a bishop,’ explained Bestavros, ‘three piastres for a bishop.’

  I added a piastre and he went away beaming. Bestavros then sold me a copy of a history of the church written by himself. It is such a very short work that I think it worth reproducing here with spelling and punctuation exactly as it was printed.

  A BRIEF HISTORY

  of

  ABU SARGA CHURCH

  By

  MESSIHA BESTAVROS

  ABU SARGA CHURCH

  This Church was built in the year A.D. 1171 by a man whose name was Hanna El Abbah the secretary of Sultan Salah-El-Din El-Ayoubi.

  The Church contains 11 marble pillars each containing a panting of one of the apostles and one granite pillar without capital, panting or cross alladvig Judes who betrayed our Lord.

  The alter for the holy comminion contains 7 Maszaic steps (the 7 degrees of bishops). The screen of the alter is made of carved ivory.

  On the North of wich were are tow nice penals of carved wood: one shows the last supper and the other Bethlehm. On there Southern sides St Demetrius, St Georges and St Theodore.

  The cript was cut out of a solid rock 30 years B.C. Mearly which was used as a shelter for strangers. When the Holy Family moved from Jernsalim to Egypt to hide themselves from King Herod they found this cript where they remained until the death of King Herod.

  When St Mark started preaching in Alexandria at 42 A.D. and we the Pharos who embraced the religion of Christ used this criot as a church for a period of 900 years till this church built on its top. On the other side of the cript you can see the fount where Christian children are baptised by emersion in water for 3 times. This church contains manu Byzantian painitings of the 9th & 10th centuries.

  MESIHA BESTAVROS,

  Deacon.

  I left Port Said in the P. & O. ship Ranchi for Malta. On leaving Egypt, as a final nip of avarice, one is obliged to pay a few shillings ‘quarantine tax’. No one seems to know anything about this imposition, what statute authorized it and how much of what is collected ever finds its way into the treasury, or what bearing it has upon ‘quarantine’. Many residents maintain that it is purely a bit of fun on the part of the harbour officials, who have no legal right to it whatever.

  Thanks to the kind offices of the local manager, I was able to obtain a second-class berth. The residents in Port Said said: ‘You meet a first-rate lot of people travelling second class since the war. A jolly sight better than in the first class, particularly on the ships from India – the first class is all nouveaux riches. You’ll find second class on the Ranchi as good as first class on a foreign line. My wife travels second class when she goes home.’

  But my motive really was less the ambition to meet nice people than to save money. After my extravagances at Mena House I was beginning to get worried about money, so I thought of an ingenious device. Before leaving Cairo I wrote – on the notepaper of the Union Club, Port Said – to the managers of the two leading hotels in Valletta, the Great Britain and the Osborne, between whom, I was told, there existed a relationship of acute rivalry, and enclosed a publisher’s slip of Press cuttings about my last book; I said to each that I proposed to publish a travel diary on my return to England; I had heard that his was the best hotel in the island. Would he be willing to give me free accommodation during my visit to Malta in return for a kind reference to his establishment in my book? They had not had time to answer by the time I embarked at Port Said, but I went on board hoping that at Valletta I should experience some remission of the continual draining of money that I had suffered for the last two months.

  The Ranchi was advertised to sail some time on Sunday and was expected early in the afternoon. On Sunday morning she was announced for nine o’clock that evening. Finally she came in well after midnight and stayed only two hours. During those two hours the town, which, as usual, was feeling the ill-effects of its Saturday night at the Casino, suddenly woke again into life. Simon Arzt’s store opened; the cafés turned on their lights and dusted the tables; out came the boot-cleaners and postcard sellers; the passengers who had stayed on board through the canal came ashore and drove round in two-horse carriages; those who had left the ship at Aden for a few hours at Cairo, and had spent all that afternoon on the quay in a fever of apprehension that they might miss her, scuttled on board to their cabins; half the residents of Port Said had business of some kind to transact on board. I went down to the harbour in a bustle that was like noon in the city of London. The sudden brightness of the streets and the animation on all sides seemed quite unreal. I went on board, found my steward and my cabin, disposed of my luggage, and went on deck for a little. The passengers who had done the Suez-Cairo-Port Said dash were drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, and describing the pyramids and Shepheard’s Hotel. ‘Two pounds ten, simply for a single bed and no bathroom. Think of that!’ they said with obvious pride. ‘And we rode on camels – you should just have seen me. How Katie would have laughed, I said. And the camel-boy told my fortune, and we had a coffee made actually in the temple of the Sphinx. You ought to have come. Well, yes, perhaps it was a little exhausting, but then we’ve plenty of time at sea to make up for it. And there was the sweetest little boy who cleaned our shoes. And we went into a mosque where the Mohammedans were all saying their prayers – so quaint. And would you believe it – at Shepheard’s they charged 15 piastres – that’s over three shillings – for a cup of early morning tea, and not very good tea at that. You ought to have come, Katie!’

  Before we sailed, I went down to my cabin and
went to bed. The man who was sharing it with me, a kindly, middle-aged civil engineer, was already undressing; he wore combinations. I woke once when the engines started, dozed and woke again as we ran clear of the breakwater and began to roll, and then fell soundly asleep, to wake next morning on the high seas with a hundred Englishmen all round me, whistling as they shaved.

  We had cold, sunless weather and fairly heavy seas during the next two days. I rather wished that I had gone first class. It was not that my fellow passengers were not every bit as nice as the Port Said residents had told me they would be, but that there were so many of them. There was simply nowhere to sit down. The lounge and smoking-room were comfortable and clean and well ventilated and prettily decorated and all that, but they were always completely full. On the decks there were no deck-chairs except those the passengers provided for themselves; the three or four public seats were invariably occupied by mothers doing frightful things to their babies with jars of vaseline. It was not even possible to walk round with any comfort, so confined and crowded was the single promenade deck. Children were everywhere. It was the beginning of the hot season in India, and the officers’ wives were taking them back to England in shoals; the better sort lay and cried in perambulators; the worse ones fell all over the deck and were sick; these, too, appeared in the dining-room for breakfast and luncheon and were encouraged by their mothers to eat. There was an awful hour every evening at about six o’clock, when the band came down from the first-class deck to play Gilbert and Sullivan to us in the saloon; this visitation coincided exactly with the bathing of the elder children below; the combination of soap and salt water is one of the more repugnant features of sea travel, and the lusty offspring of sahib and memsahib shrieked their protest till the steel rafters and match-board partitions echoed and rang. There was no place above or below for a man who values silence.

  The other passengers were mostly soldiers on leave or soldiers’ wives, leavened with a few servants of first-class passengers, some clergymen, and three or four nuns. The valets wore neat blue suits throughout the voyage, but the soldiers had an interesting snobbism. During the day, though cleanly shaved and with carefully brushed hair, they cultivated an extreme freedom of dress, wearing khaki shorts and open tennis shirts and faded cricket blazers. At dinner, however, they all appeared in dinner jackets and stiff shirts. One of them told me that the reason he travelled second class was that he need not trouble about clothes, but that he had to draw the line somewhere. On the other side of the barrier we could see the first-class passengers dressed very smartly in white flannels and parti-coloured brown and white shoes. Among them there was a youth who knew me hurrying back to contest a seat in the Conservative interest at the General Election. He kept popping over the rail to have cocktails with me and tell me about the lovely first-class girls he danced and played quoits with. He cost me quite a lot in cocktails. He often urged me to come over and see all the lovely girls and have cocktails with him. ‘My dear chap,’ he used to say, ‘no one will dare to say anything to you while you’re with me. I’d soon fix it up with the Captain if they did.’ But I kept to my own bar. Later this young man, in his zeal to acquit himself splendidly before the first-class girls, clambered up one of the davits on the boat deck. He was reported to the Captain and seriously reprimanded. P. & O. ships are full of public school spirit. He did very badly indeed in the election, I believe, reducing an already meagre Conservative poll almost to extinction.

  Just before luncheon on the third morning, we came in sight of Malta. There was some delay about landing because one of the passengers had developed chicken-pox. There was only one other passenger disembarking. We had to go and see the medical officer in the first-class saloon. He had infinite difficulties about the pronunciation of my name. He wanted to know the address I was going to in Malta. I would only tell him that I had not yet decided between the two hotels. He said, ‘Please decide now. I have to fill in this form.’

  I said I could not until I had seen the managers.

  He said, ‘They are both good hotels, what does it matter?’

  I said, ‘I want to get in free.’

  He thought I was clearly a very suspicious character, and told me that on pain of imprisonment, I must report daily at the Ministry of Health during my stay at Valletta. If I did not come the police would find me and bring me. I said I would come, and he gave me a quarantine form to keep. I lost the form that evening and never went near the Ministry of Health and heard no more about it.

  We went ashore in a lighter and landed at the Custom House. Here I was met by two young men, both short, swarthy, and vivacious, and each wearing a peaked cap above a shiny English suit. One had ‘The Osborne Hotel’ in gold on his cap, the other ‘The Great Britain Hotel’. Each held in his hand a duplicate letter from me, asking for accommodation. Each took possession of a bit of my luggage and handed me a printed card. One card said:

  THE OSBORNE HOTEL STRADA MEZZODI

  Every modern improvement. Hot water. Electric light. Excellent Cuisine.

  PATRONISED BY H.S.H. PRINCE LOUIS OF BATTENBERG AND THE DUKE OF BRONTE

  The other said:

  THE GREAT BRITAIN HOTEL STRADA MEZZODI

  Every modern improvement. Hot and cold water. Electric light. Unrivalled cuisine. Sanitation.

  THE ONLY HOTEL UNDER ENGLISH MANAGEMENT

  (a fact, one would have thought, more fit to be concealed than advertised).

  I had been advised in Cairo that the Great Britain was really the better of the two, so I directed its representative to take charge of my luggage. The porter of the Osborne fluttered my letter petulantly before my eyes.

  ‘A forgery,’ I explained, shocked at my own duplicity. ‘I am afraid that you have been deluded by a palpable forgery.’

  The porter of the Great Britain chartered two little horsecarriages, conducted me to one, and sat with the luggage in the other. There were low, fringed canopies over our heads so that it was impossible to see out very much. I was aware of a long and precipitous ascent, with many corners to turn. At some of these I got a glimpse of a baroque shrine, at others a sudden bird’s-eye view of the Grand Harbour, full of shipping, with fortifications beyond. We went up and round, along a broad street of shops and more important doorways. We passed groups of supremely ugly Maltese women wearing an astonishing black headdress, half veil and half umbrella, which is the last legacy to the island of the conventional inclinations of the Knights of St John. Then we turned off down a narrow side street and stopped at the little iron and glass porch of the Great Britain Hotel. A little dark passage led into a little dark lounge, furnished like an English saloon bar, with imitation leather arm-chairs, bowls of aspidistra on fumed oak stands, metal-topped tables, and tables with plush coverings, Benares brass work, framed photographs, and ashtrays stamped with the trade-marks of various brands of whisky and gin. Do not mistake me; it was not remotely like an old-fashioned hotel in an English market town; it was a realization of the picture I have always in my mind of the interiors of those hotels facing on to Paddington station, which advertise ‘5s. Bed and Breakfast’ over such imposing names as Bristol, Clarendon, Empire, etc. My heart fell rather as I greeted my host in this dingy hall, and continued to fall as I ascended, storey by storey, to my bedroom. The worst of it, however, was in this first impression, and I think I am really doing my duty honourably to the proprietor in warning people of it and exhorting them not to be deterred. For I can quite conscientiously say that the Great Britain is the best hotel in the island. I went later to look at the Osborne and felt that I had done better than H.S.H. Prince Louis of Battenberg and the Duke of Bronte. The food at the Great Britain was good; the servants particularly willing and engaging. One evening, being tired and busy, I decided to dine in my room. At Mena House, where there were hosts of servants and a lift, the dinner was brought up in one load and left outside the door; at the Great Britain every course was carried separately up three flights of stairs by the panting but smiling valet de ch
ambre.

  Before I left, the proprietor of the hotel asked me, rather suspiciously, what I intended to say about him.

  They had had another writer, he told me, who had come to stay as his guest; he wrote for a paper called Town and Country Life; he had written a very nice piece indeed about the Great Britain. They had had the article reprinted for distribution.

  The proprietor gave me a copy.

  That, he said, was the kind of article that did a house good. He hoped mine would be as much like that as I could make it.

  It began: ‘The beautiful and prolific foliage, exotic skies, and glorious blue waters, a wealth of sunshine that spells health and happiness, and the facilities for enjoying outdoor sports, all the year round, are a few of the reasons that has made Malta so popular. Picturesque scenery, and people, complete as fascinating an array of attractions as the heart of the most blasé, could wish for.’ It continued in this way for a column, with the same excess of punctuation; then it gave a brief survey of Maltese history and a description of the principal sights, for another column. Then it started on the Great Britain Hotel. ‘No expense,’ it said, ‘has been spared to make the Public Rooms as comfortable as possible … the Management boasts that its meals equal in the excellence of its food, cooking and serving, those served at London’s hostelries and restaurants … special pains are taken to see that all beds are most comfortable and only best material used …’ and so on for a column and a half. It finished: ‘The luxuries of modern civilization have all been embodied in the building and organization of the Great Britain Hotel, Valletta, Malta, where the visitor is able to revel in the joys of a healthy happy stay amidst the fascinations of a modern palace set in Nature’s own setting of sea and foliage, and here are to be obtained sunshine and warmth the whole year round.’