Page 77 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

surrounded by pleasant well-carcd-for gardens full of semi-tropical trees It seemed to me that some of the Awali residents hibernated through-
and shrubs and bright with English annuals in the spring. The twisting out thc hot weather. One never saw them outside as they rarely set foot
roads are shaded by tall trees, casuarinas, tamarisks and the mesquitc bean
tree, which I introduced into Bahrain some years before when I brought
a bag of seeds from Lidia. Now there arc almost too many of these trees
in the country. But Awali has spread. It now has a population of over
1600 European men, women and children and the town has extended
below the high ground over a vast area which is intersected by wide,
straight roads lined with brightly panned prefabricated bungalows of
i identical size and shape. So similar are the streets that I usually got lost
if I was trying to find a house in one of them, for although every street
has a name the names are never used. The lives of the inmates of the new
houses are very exposed to the public eye as there has not yet been time
for trees to grow and gardens to be made which afford some privacy. The
new part of Awali is referred to by the superior people who live up above
as the Depressed Area*. A solid wire fence surrounds Awali with access
by three gates, on which there are guards; this is necessary for various
. reasons but though there are no restrictions on the comings and
goings of the people who live inside, or their visitors from outside,
yet some of the inhabitants of Awali certainly develop a ‘shut-in’
feeling.
The houses are comfortable and the company provides good fur­
niture but there is an inevitable sameness about their interiors, which I
found depressing. All the houses have the same furniture, many have the
same curtains, or drapes’ as they are called at Awali, American style, and •
I used to notice, identical pictures on the walls of different houses. They
were coloured prints of old Spanish buildings in California’. I discovered
the reason for this when a firm which made tools for the oil industry
. began to send me every year, at Christmas, a calendar, a little booklet
% containing improving sentiments and quotations from poems and a j t
picture of an old Spanish building in California’. The pictures were
quite attractive but by then I was somewhat sated by seeing them on so
many walls so I did not put them up in my house.
Every house and office at Awali is air-cooled and the newer houses
are built with low ceilings and rooms which, in comparison to the stone
houses in Manama, are very small, but this is necessary to facilitate the
;
process of air-cooling. When twenty or thirty people, smoking cigars and
cigarettes, are assembled for a cocktail party in a small air-cooled house
the atmosphere becomes solid. In the winter the houses are heated
by the same process.
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beyond their air-cooled houses and offices, although the company
provides facilities for most kinds of sports—tennis, football, swimming,
sailing, golf and even archery. Most of the junior people at Awali keep
no servants but their kitchens arc very up to date, with gas cookers,
electrical appliances and labour-saving gadgets. Shopping is a simple
matter, 1 the company’s commissary stocks everything which is necessary;
it is like a self-service store in England, with much the : same type of
clientele. The commissary is the daily meeting place for what are now
referred to as ‘housewives’, and from the commissary gossip radiates to
every corner of Awali and sometimes as far as Manama.
The majority of the European BAPCO employees are British with a
large proportion of Scots and men from the North of England, but most
of the key posts are held by Americans. After all, BAPCO is an American
company, although it is registered in Canada! The style and tenor of life
at Awali is completely different from that in Manama where local
affairs play an important part in life and work. Many of the people who
live at Awali have only the vaguest idea about how the country is run;
most of them, if asked, would say that they supposed that Bahrain was
some sort of British colony or protectorate. They have little contact with
the local Arabs, except with the labourers with whom they work, and
only a very few men can speak any Arabic. Their lives are regulated by
the siren which calls them to work. Their hours are different from those of
Manama; they lunch at eleven-thirty and have supper at six o’clock, after
■ which they go to ‘the pictures’ or listen to the wireless or watch television
—the American Air Force and Aramco television programmes from
Dharan, in Saudi Arabia, are received in Bahrain—or they play darts or
billiards at the club or take part in the many local activities such as the
amateur dramatic society which puts on a number of plays every year. In
fact life at Awali is very like life in one of the ‘new towns* in Britain.
The sun sets at about five o’clock in the winter and if Marjorie and I
had been for a drive we got home about then and had tea by the fire in
the drawing-room. The idea of tea and hot scones in front of a fire in the
Persian Gulf may sound strange to people who have never been there in
the winter. I then retired to my upstairs office to work. In the summer I
often rode in the afternoons, with one of my friends, sending the ponies
I to meet us in the country. There were good places for riding; when the
tide was out one could canter along the firm wet sand on the shore as far
as‘ the old Portuguese fort or along the narrow paths, which had little
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