Page 75 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

much patronized by the Europeans, but at first the Arabs did not buy The vegetable and fruit markets were colourful and animated but the
meat from it. Subsequently others followed his example.
On the quay were enormous green glass flagons filled with rose-
water, bales of fine carpets from Persia, sanitary fittings—rather rudely
exposed—and heavy machinery from Britain, silks from China and
Japan and enormous, large, showy American cars. Bahrain is a transit
port for Saudi Arabia and its trade depends to a great extent on the traffic
between the two states, so it is essential for the prosperity of Bahrain that
the two countries should be on good terms with each other.
On Wednesdays I usually rode back by the open market which was
held every week in Manama, where the village people brought their
» produce to sell. One could buy rough, unglazcd pottery from the village
of Aali, live chickens, rabbits and pigeons, all kinds of second-hand
»
clothes and junk, baskets and mats made from palm fronds, incense-
burners from Rafaa, hand-woven cotton material from the villages near
• Budeya and sometimes donkeys and cows, though these were usually
sold at another open market which was held on Thursdays at Suk al
Khamis, opposite the mosque with the two minarets, the oldest Moslem
building in Bahrain, on the road between Manama and Awali. These
weekly markets reminded me of the Caledonian Market and the market
in Portobello Road, in London, but the vendors were Arabs, not Jews.
Many of them were women and they all knew me well. When I stopped
for a minute on my pony, wrinkled old black women would call greetings
to me with many enquiries about ‘Omm Hamed*—the ‘Mother of
Hamed’—my wife.
For many years I collected old Oriental china, which occasionally
appeared in the second-hand shops in the bazaar. It could be bought at a
reasonable price, after much bargaining, until the Americans began to
take an interest in it and spoilt the market. It was brought to the Gulf in
the days when Chinese junks made the long voyage from their country
to Basra. One morning, when I was riding past the market, an old woman
screamed out to me that she had got a beautiful piece of china, ‘a real
antique* which she knew I would like to buy. I reined my pony and
stopped to see what it was. After digging about in a heap of rubbish which
surrounded her, upsetting a coop of squawking, scraggy hens in the pro­
cess, she produced her treasure, holding it by the handle and waving it
over other people’s heads. It was a late Victorian bedroom utensil, taste­
fully decorated in blue and white. I have heard that pots de chambre are
now sought by collectors of Victoriana. I think they could find quite a
number in the bazaars of Bahrain.
*3<5
stallholders always had a grievance. The markets were the personal
property of the Shaikh so when I appeared the tenants bombarded me
with petitions and complaints. The market was cither too hot, or too
cold, or there was too much light, or they needed more light, or they
tried to inveigle me into taking their side in the endless war which was
wa ged between them and the Municipal authorities, who were supposed
to keep the place clean. The Municipal people, in their turn, were full of
complaints about the vegetable-sellers; certainly the markets never did
look clean.
Once a week, in the summer, the police used to go out in lorries to
bathe at Idari, the Virgin’s pool, one of the biggest and deepest fresh­
water springs in Bahrain, a mile or two from Manama, and I often rode
out to meet them there. Idari was a show place. All visitors were taken
to see it. In 1926 it was a dirty, messy place with muddy banks where
gardeners took their donkeys to be washed and much of the water
escaped through the sides of the pool and ran to waste. I had the basin of
the pool repaired, thus obtaining a better supply of water for irrigating
the gardens, and I built steps and a cement platform on the edge of the water
and rebuilt the tumbledown mosque which overlooked the pool. I put a
little pavilion with steps leading up to the roof, where there was a diving
board, and I had a coffee shop built, with an open roof, close by. Round
the pool I planted flowering trees and shrubs and I made a garden on one
side of it full of oleanders and crimson and brick-red bougainvillaea—the
ordinary purple bougainvillaea was difficult to grow in Bahrain. Behind^
the garden, across a stream, there was a magnificent date-garden where
the tall grey trunks of the date-palms stood like pillars against the dusky
depths of the date-grove. When the sun shone the water in the pool was
brilliantly blue and as clear as glass; it came up from the spring with such
force that a diver could not reach the source. Large fish, which looked
like carp, swam slowly round the pool. Nobody molested them because
the Bahrainis did not eat freshwater fish; they preferred sea fish, and of
these they had a wide choice. Many years ago a Danish scientific ex­
pedition came out to the Gulf, at the request of the Persian Government,
to report on'the possibilities of canning fish; they found between three
and four hundred different species of fish. South of the mound on which
Idari was situated there was a stretch of low marshy land which the sea,
coming-in through a distant creek, just covered when there was a very
high tide. Often on summer mornings there was a mist and the pale land-
scape of still, silver water, palm trees rising out of the grey mist and a
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