Page 74 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

predictions were not fulfilled. The 1945 season was the last flicker of
% Italian style of architecture, not perhaps surprising because it was built
they went for a route inarch, and several times in the year they went into
prosperity from pearls; in the years that followed every season fewer the country ‘showing the flag’, camping each day at a different place;
boats went out to the pearl banks and more men gave up diving as they sometimes, when my son was young, I took him out with me and we
were attracted by steady, better-paid employment on shore and there spent a night in camp with the police. They did a good deal of musketry,
were no young men from Bahrain to take their places. With the in­ many of them being very good shots. When a ship was in port they had
creased revenue it was possible to push on with various development plans shooting matches with the Royal Navy, which the police usually won.
which had been held up during the war, such as providing the town of By the time we got to the fort the road was full of traffic; cars and lorries
Manama with a piped water supply, building new Government odices and enormous buses were taking workers out to the refinery or to the
and improving the hospital where, during the war, over 1300 serving oil field.
men and officers from the Army and the Navy had been admitted as Often on my way back from the fort I rode through the main street
in-patients to the special ward which had been set aside for them. of the bazaar, where the shopkeepers would be opening their shutters,
My daily programme varied very little. In the summer I slept on the for they were not early risers, through the wide archway of the Govern­
roof, even after air-conditioning was introduced into Bahrain, because ment offices called ‘Bab al Bahrain’, the ‘Gateway of Bahrain’, which I
I disliked sleeping in a room with all the windows hermetically sealed and had designed in 1945, into the Customs Square, taking a look at the little
an air-cooling machine gurgling and buzzing in the comer, though I garden in the middle of the square, then to the pier. The pier was a
must admit that air-conditioning made the rooms cool,, but it was a fascinating, lively, noisy place where there was always' something new
clammy coolness. This idiosyncrasy of mine annoyed my European to look at; often there were as many as a hundred dhows anchored off the
staff, who perhaps with some justification believed that because I did not pier and tied up alongside. One saw many types of seamen from the Gulf
like air-cooling myself I was less sympathetic than I might have been ports and from more distant places. There were stocky, dark men from
to their constant requests for more ‘A.C.’ units in their houses. I got up at Sur, below Muscat, wearing ochre-coloured clothes, yellow headcloths or
six o’clock, after Musa, our butler, who was with us for eighteen years, red skull caps—they made the dye in their own country; lean, long-haired
brought my chota hazri—early morning tea. In the compound below my Muscatis with hawklike features, often accompanied by one or two lascivi­
orderly, Bilal, a very dusky policeman from the mounted section, waited ous youths, more like women than men; Persians, wearing tall felt hats,
with the horses. After lighting a ‘Morning Whiff’, a little Indian cheroot, loose, full-sleeved robes, with wide woollen shawls round their waists;
of which I smoked a great many every day, I mounted Oleander, my and Indians from the Malabar coast who came ashore from their big
chestnut mare, and off we started to the police fort. We went by a differ­ sailing ships, which were usually the largest in the port. Their ships’
ent route every day: sometimes along the main road, passing the clock stems were elaborately carved and had rows of windows with brighdy
tower of the American Mission church, past a number of European painted shutters. Often the Indians brought with them little green
houses, most of them singularly unattractive in appearance; past the parrots in cages, to sell to the Arabs. In course of time many of the birds
Roman Catholic church and convent school which had a definitely escaped and now they are breeding in Bahrain. Longboats, full of men
who sang as they rowed, moved between the dhows and the pierhead
by an Italian priest, who afterwards became a bishop; past two Govern­ and coolies shouted and sang as they shouldered heavy sacks, loading and
ment schools where small boys with satchels of books were already unloading cargo of every conceivable kind. I had to dodge between herds
beginning to hang around—they left their houses when their fathers went of skinny cattle and sheep which were driven down the pier by small
to work, long before school time; past the front of the fort with its high, boys who urged on the exhausted animals, which had come all the way
white crenelated walls and four big round towers, one at each comer, and from Persia in dhows, with shrill staccato shouts while the owners
on to the parade ground where the police were marching and drilling. haggled with the Bahrain butchers who were a close-knit community,
When I was in the Army nothing bored me more than foot drill, so notoriously difficult to deal with. All meat in Bahrain was imported ‘on
I tried to vary the programme of the police as much as possible, but it was the hoof’ because there was not sufficient grazing in the country to feed
difficult to make it anything but monotonous. On Sunday mornings .flocks. One enterprising Arab did set up a cold-storage business. It was
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