Page 776 - Belgrave Diaries(N)_Neat

out onto the veranda to see it like a small boy, I went with him and he said to me "have you any money" I
said "no" so he handed me some silver from his pocket to turn for luck. He seems to be well acquainted
with English customs. He said his prayers on the carpet in a corner of the drawing room like Shaikh Hamed
always does when he comes here. Loch's cousin, Mrs Thomson, came to tea and was evidently very
interested by meeting the Shaikh and by talking to Mohammed Yatim who happened to sit next to her. His
English is very good indeed but his appearance is unprepossessing. He has a bad reputation here among
the Arabs as they say he drinks and eats pork.

Thursday 29th [December]

The first day of Ramadan, it is a month I like very much as there is little work in the office and I have time to
do things which I put by all the year to be done in Ramadan, the servants however are very tiresome and
seem half alive all the time. Major Holmes and the Shaikh left by plane, I got a wire from Holmes to say he
was going to England direct. Motored in the afternoon and in the evening we went to a dinner party at the
Russells. It was very well done and great fun, there were about 20 people and they had extremly well
organised progressive games and dancing in the intervals. They also had a sort of sketch acted by Steele
and one or two others which was quite amusing.

[No earlier entries available for 1933]

Thursday May 4th 1933

My typewriter out of order again, a great nuisance. The office was shut owing to Muharram. Dr & Mrs Holmes came to
dinner & after dinner he and I went down the town and visited all the Matems, it is the biggest night of the Muharram
celebrations and always an interesting thing to see. First we went to the Persian Matem where we sat on the roof and looked
down into the hall which was brilliantly lit and full of people. We were rather early but we saw a new feature which has been
introduced this year, all the boys of the Persian school marched in dressed in black with sawdust on their heads (which kept
on slipping down their necks and tickling them) and they sung some verses and some of them recited, it was a gloomy
performance but the small boys seemed to enjoy it and surreptitiously dropped things down eachothers necks. We visited all
the Matems but on the whole the standard of the preaching was not as good as usual, only one of the mullahs was really good
and he was extremely dramatic and made his audience sob and cry. As they all have so little money this year they were
unable to hire professional preachers from Persia or Iraq and the local talent is not up to much. We stayed until the
procession had finished, this was better than usual as they had illuminated all the effigies and things which they carry with
electric light. One of these things is a great model of a mosque with golden domes and minnarets carried by half a dozen
men, this had little lights on each dome and looked really fine. We saw several of my staff taking part in the show, they are
always rather embarrassed when they see me looking on. Its a wonderful sight this procession at night, torches, horses,
camels and hundreds of men beating their chests all in & out among the narrow lanes of the bazaar.