10. Cairo is Unutterable Things

Cairo and Mesopotamia 1914–16

When the black and white taxi deposited me in Ezbekiyya Square, Cairo, I had some difficulty at first in spotting the Grand Continental Hotel. I suddenly realized that it was the dismal, mouldering heap opposite the Ezbekiyya Gardens, half hidden by a row of very drab shops. In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I had seen a picture of the place as it had been in 1914, embossed on the head of a letter written by T. E. Lawrence, and it was difficult to equate this mildewed tenement before me with that great colonial chвteau whose guest-list – A. & C. Black’s guidebook for 1916 had assured me – once read like a page out of the Almanac de Gotha. That grand world of Egypt’s belle йpoque, when Cairo had been a fashionable winter resort rivalling Nice and Monte Carlo, was lost, hidden like the hotel itself beneath the seedy faзade of a hectic modern city. In the dark lobby, a fly-blown man with a two-day stubble showed brown teeth when I pressed him for the price of a room: ‘This place hasn’t been a hotel in ten years,’ he said. In what had been the Front Desk Manager’s office – a place of peeling paint and faded velvet upholstery – a wizened man called Khalid groped in some filing cabinets and brought out a colour postcard of the hotel as it had looked ten years previously: precisely as neglected as it looked now, I thought. ‘They said it was beyond repair,’ he told me. ‘They couldn’t use it as a hotel any more, so they turned it into offices.’ There was no chance of me seeing the rooms upstairs, he said, but he would show me the downstairs area, and, fetching a great ring of keys, he led me like a gaoler across the lobby and unlocked a steel flange nailed across the dining-room doors. The room was astonishingly vast, with a plush carpet, once wine-red, perhaps, but now faded and rotten and covered in rat-droppings and bits of plaster fallen from the ceiling. ‘I was a bellboy here in the old days,’ Khalid said. ‘Kings and Princes used to come from all over the world. It was the best hotel in Egypt.’ He showed me the fine frescos of ancient Egyptian gods and Pharaohs which adorned the walls. ‘Italian artist,’ he said. ‘Done more than a hundred years ago.’ Lawrence must have known them well, I thought, for the Grand Continental had been his base for nine months from 1914 to 1915, and he had taken breakfast, lunch and dinner in this room almost every day. In the lobby, you could see the remains of a travel-agent’s kiosk, a worn-out sign announcing Nile cruises, and a jeweller’s shop, and Khalid showed me what had been the bar – though all that was left were the mirror-mosaic shelves where the bottles would have been on display. ‘Here they had whisky,’ he said, and I imagined the great and good of Cairo in 1914 – Ronald Storrs, Bertie Clayton, George Lloyd, Aubrey Herbert, Stewart Newcombe and others – nursing their drinks and turning over in their eminently civilized heads their dreams of Empire, their dreams of the Arab Revolt.

I walked out of the lobby into yellow sunlight and a swell of traffic, and trudged around the perimeter of the Ezbekiyya Gardens, which stood directly opposite the hotel. They had been closed to the public ever since a girl had been raped there in broad daylight, Khalid had informed me. Through the railings, the gardens looked faded and unkempt, but on 15 December 1914, when T. E. Lawrence took up his quarters in the Grand Continental, they were the showpiece of the city, bursting with exotic shrubs such as Australian beefwood, Madagascan flame and Cuban royal palm. Lawrence found Cairo very much alive. Though war with Turkey had been declared two months earlier, the news had done nothing to diminish the appeal of its winter season, and the frenzied circuit of receptions, masked balls, dinner parties, picnics, gymkhanas, race meetings and tennis parties went on unabated. The high points of the season were the glittering galas orchestrated at the Sultan Hussain Kamil’s Abdin Palace, and at the British Residency at Qasr ad-Dubbara, where Sir Hugh Mc-Mahon had recently succeeded Lord Kitchener as British Agent. There were other gaieties and amusements aplenty for the gentleman with time on his hands. He might play a round of golf or even some polo at the Khedivial Sporting Club on Zamalek island, sip coffee at two piastres a cup at Groppi’s or the Cafй Egyptien, quaff Bass ale at the Savoy Buffet, ogle the prohibited but no less risquй performance of Ghawazi dancing-girls at the Eldorado, join a moonlit donkey-ride to the Pyramids at Giza, or enjoy a comfortable weekend’s snipe-shooting in the Nile delta.

Imminent war had lent a certain dash to the figures of British officers residing in elegant hotels such as the Continental and Shepheard’s, and eligible subalterns were much in demand among wintering dйbutantes. After dark, dozens of stiff-backed young men in tailored uniforms and highly polished Sam Browne belts and boots, with forage-caps worn at the regulation angle, would float like peacocks through Ezbekiyya. Second-Lieutenant Lawrence did not appear to belong among these magnificent editions of British manhood. Small, long-haired, dishevelled, he was so far from possessing a military bearing that he rarely looked at anyone directly in the eye. Indeed, he claimed that he would not even recognize his own mother if she arrived unexpectedly, and had perfected the art of talking for twenty minutes without revealing that he had no idea whom he was talking to. Certainly, he did not emulate the sartorial style of his military peers. His trousers were slack and unpressed, his buttons unpolished, his pockets usually undone, his Sam Browne belt, if worn at all, was worn loose and dangling. He often wore the insignia of different ranks on either shoulder-strap, so that it was impossible to tell at any given moment whether he was a humble Second-Lieutenant or an unlikely-looking Lieutenant-Colonel. His cap was worn askew, with his straw-coloured hair protruding from beneath, and was not even graced with a badge – the ultimate snub to military convention, and the visible expression of his conviction that he was a ‘civilian in uniform’. In place of carefully bulled boots he wore patent-leather evening shoes, and a blood red tie instead of a khaki one. His future commanding officer in the Hejaz, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Joyce, would later write of his first encounter with Lawrence that he recalled only ‘the intense desire on my part to tell him to get his hair cut and that his uniform and dirty buttons sadly needed the attention of his batman’.¹ His lack of cap-badge led him into difficulties for which he seemed to have a bizarre relish. Once, while attempting to cash a cheque at Messrs Cox and Co. in Cairo, for instance, the manager inquired as to his unit. ‘Haven’t got one,’ Lawrence replied, without elaborating. The manager then had the Army List brought. ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ Lawrence told him, ‘my name is not on it, but I should like to have my cheque cashed.’ Finally, as Lawrence refused to produce any references, the manager regretted that he would have to cable to Britain before he could cash the cheque.²

Lawrence tended to saunter rather than march, and ignored all salutes given to him as assiduously as he ignored his superior officers, speaking to everyone, whether senior or junior in rank, in the same matter-of-fact, studious, eccentric, pedantic Oxford tones. He gave the impression, carefully cultivated, in fact, of being a misplaced and absent-minded Oxford don who had somehow drifted into military uniform, and actually referred to the Intelligence Department as ‘the faculty’. He made no secret of his disdain for regular army officers, for red-tape military bureaucrats and for public-school hunting-shooting-and-fishing hearties, though he still took a certain snobbish pride in telling his mother that he was working alongside ‘Lord Anglesey, Lord Hartington and Prince Alexander of Battenburg’.³