Landlocked Islands: Two Alien Lives in Egypt: Two Alien Lives in Egypt

By Anna Cachia and Pierre Cachia

This is a highly unusual and beautifully written book. It is the double memoir of a mother and son, Anna and Pierre, and the story takes us from Anna's childhood in Russia and subsequent arrival in Egypt in 1901 to Pierre's enrollment at the American University in Cairo in the late 1930s. It is fascinating, therefore, not only as a personal account of an interesting group of people but also as a social document that portrays a segment of Egypt's society in the first forty years of the twentieth century.

As a personal story, it is a rewarding insight into the early formation of a leading, well-known, and respected Arabist. His mother's account of her own early life and tragedies reveals a remarkable woman we would wish to have known.

As a social document, it gives us a rare perhaps unique picture of the life of foreigners in Egypt who were not part of the elite, privileged, ruling class, revealing much about the choices that were available to them in education, career, marriage, and social mixing.

Landlocked Islands thus offers the social historian a study of some minorities in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century; it also opens up the whole question of expatriate life in Egypt. But, above all, it is an entertaining and intriguing tale, a book that one constantly finds oneself eager to pick up and read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781617972355

Book preview

Landlocked Islands

Landlocked Islands

Two Alien Lives in Egypt

Anna and Pierre Cachia

The American University in Cairo Press

For

Mary, Peter, Jamie, Michael, Katy, Robbie, Elizabeth,

tracing some turbulence in their genes . . .

with love, Grumps

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini

Cairo, Egypt

http://aucpress.com

Copyright © 1999 by Pierre Cachia

Some of the occurrences in Pierre’s childhood have also been recounted (to

serve different purposes) in Colour, Culture, and Consciousness, ed. B. Parekh

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1974) and Paths to the Middle East, ed. Thomas

Naff (New York: SUNY Press, 1993).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior

written permission of the publisher.

Dar el Kutub No. 8380/99

ISBN 978 161 797 235 5

Printed in Egypt

Contents

Prologue

Part I: Pierre’s Lines of Descent

1    The Cachias

2    The Axlers

Part II: Anna’s Memories

3    Childhood

4    Independence

5    Marriage to Dubos

6    A Housewife in Fayyum

7    The Humble Folk

8    The Extended Family

Part III: Pierre’s Formation

9    Childhood

10   Sohag

11   Cairo

12   Retrospect

Selected Reading

Index

Prologue

Pierre Cachia

The European communities that thrived in Egypt in modern times were a curious phenomenon: alien minorities that were not disadvantaged but privileged, for most of them were not subject to Egyptian law and virtually all enjoyed the prestige of belonging to a culture that was widely held—even by many Egyptians—to be superior to the local one.

The studies that have appeared deal only with particular groups, and besides draw only on the experiences of communities in Cairo or Alexandria, which were large enough to be virtually self-sufficient. My family, on the contrary, lived in a succession of provincial towns where foreigners were so few that—by choice or of necessity—we were thrown into much closer contact with Egyptians. There were borderlines nevertheless—lines not so clearly delimited as a division between land and water, but lines stubborn enough to create a sense of isolation. This is how, an insider myself, I came to feel that I dwelt on a landlocked island.

Such ‘islands’ would repay close study, but it is nothing so ponderous that is attempted here. In fact, like Topsy, this book has just growed. It started when—for reasons which will eventually emerge—I inveigled my mother Anna into writing down incidents from her early life in Egypt just as they sprang to her mind, in no particular order and without attempting to develop any particular thesis. What she produced I have treasured for many years because of what she revealed about herself and the society she knew.

If it was a trap that I laid for her, I was soon caught in it. My curiosity about my forebears was roused, and I woke up to the fact that I knew remarkably little about them. What is more, I could have known a great deal more if I had troubled to question my father while he was still alive. How easily is family history lost!

By the same token, I realized that my children, born and brought up in Scotland, knew next to nothing about my background, and that busy as they were with the proper concerns of youth, they were no more curious about my childhood than I had been about my parents’ or grandparents’. Yet they—and now my grandchildren too—might one day develop the aging person’s interest in the past, and it might then be too late to ask me. It is with them in mind that I have tried to put together a record of my early years.

What is offered here, therefore, are reminiscences of a mother and a son who lived modest lives as British subjects in Egypt during most of the first half of the twentieth century, reminiscences which bear witness to what it was like to dwell within a landlocked island. They also catch glimpses of the wider panorama beyond. They may therefore be of interest to the general reader and may also be raw material for the social historian.

Part I

Pierre’s Lines of Descent

Chapter 1

The Cachias

Prolific but constricted to a tiny archipelago, the Maltese are marked by fate for errantry. I suspect that their children grow up with the unspoken assumption that they may end their lives in totally different locations and in vastly different circumstances from the ones they were born in.

The surname Cachia, pronounced Kakeeya, is fairly common in Malta, but its derivation is something of a puzzle. One guess is that it comes from the Greek root that gives us such words as ‘cacodemon’ and ‘cacophony,’ but this I hastily reject if only because no other Maltese name betrays a link with Greek. Another theory is that it was once the Italian ‘Caccia,’ meaning ‘hunt,’ that the Knights of Malta who kept records in French altered the spelling, and that when Italian influence reasserted itself the pronunciation followed the Italian practice of using the ‘ch’ digraph for the sound of ‘k’; but this seems to me unlikely and unnecessarily tortuous. My own surmise is that like most Maltese words the name has an unexalted but not objectionable Arabic origin, ka’kiya being a collective term for ‘cake-makers.’

About my great-grandfather Antonio Cachia, the only firm information I have consists of two dates, that of his birth and that of his marriage.

Even the first of these data I owe to a vagary. The youngest of my uncles, Emile, turned Mormon late in life, and since his church believes in ‘baptizing the dead,’ he was motivated to search for records of defunct relatives in order to usher them into the Mormon heaven when they were no longer capable of clinging to their more conventional faith. He nevertheless recognized that the Roman Catholic Church was the best keeper of registers in the past, and by dint of patient inquiries of parish priests in Malta he discovered that the church in the village of Vittoriosa, although badly damaged during the Second World War, had a record of the baptism of one Antonio Cachia in 1816. This was taken to be our ancestor, but Uncle Emile went on ferreting for more potential Mormons and discovered that another Antonio, born of the same parents, had been baptized in the same church three years later. Presumably the first Antonio had died and his parents, taking the newborn to be God’s way of restoring what the locusts had eaten, had given him the same name.

Going through my father’s papers after his death, I came across the same Antonio Cachia’s marriage certificate. He had been united to a Maltese girl in a church in Alexandria, in 1854.

What had induced him to emigrate to Egypt of all places, long before the British had any authority, or even much influence, in the country? There was a vague tradition in the family that he had been a cigar-maker, or more probably a carpenter. Was there a sufficiently large Maltese community in Egypt to create a demand for the kind of cheroot favored on the island? Or had he been a ship’s carpenter, attracted to a country that was then busy building a navy? Yet he had settled not in Alexandria, but in Cairo.

It is known that, in an effort to implant new industries, Egypt’s ruler Muhammad Ah Pasha imported European craftsmen, some as early as 1816 to man a new silk factory. And not long ago, an American colleague who was researching Islamic crafts uncovered a fact more directly relevant to carpentry. The fine wooden latticework known as mashrabiya that was used to curtain off the windows and balconies of Muslim homes so that women might look out and not be seen was, in the late nineteenth century, made not solely by Muslim craftsmen. Perhaps because examples of it were exhibited in Europe and some concession had to be made to European taste, Italian and Maltese cabinet-makers were called in for the purpose. The date when this is attested is somewhat late, but that does not preclude the possibility that the practice had started earlier. The likeliest surmise therefore, is that this is what brought my great-grandfather to Egypt. It gives me great satisfaction to ponder on the likelihood that from the start my family had forged a link with the local culture.

At all events, the family prospered. My grandfather Joseph was a white-collar worker and a prominent member of the Maltese community in Cairo. I have no recollection of him, for he died the year I was born; but he was by all accounts a sweet man, gentle and shy and of the greatest probity. Although he ended his career as an employee of the Tanta Water Company, he had spent many years as chief accountant of the Jewish business family of Cattaui. At one time the firm fell on evil days. He was told that it could, no longer afford his salary and that it would not be held against him if he sought employment elsewhere, but he preferred to take a severe cut in income rather than desert it. My mother thought that part of the reason was that he was too shy to entertain the thought of going around begging for a job, but the Cattauis appreciated the loyalty that was at least part of his motivation, and when business picked up again he was well rewarded, so that he acquired a pleasant villa in Zeitun, now an industrial suburb of Cairo but then a pleasant residential area. What I remember of the property is that it had a jasmine hedge, the perfume of which provided a delightful welcome when one was yet a good thirty yards away from the gate.

Of my grandmother I have first-hand if not copious memories, for we lived in another town, but spent a few weeks almost every year with her. These visits were a matter of duty rather than pleasure, for she was a sour-looking, sanctimonious prig. At the time I was expected, she very much wanted me if a girl to be named after her: Adelaide. But my mother had already put her foot down against a practice that perpetuated names long out of fashion, and would allow her children to be burdened with names that had family associations only at two removes from the one destined to come into everyday use. So it was that my elder brother was called José Robert Theodore, and I Pierre Jacques Élie.

Like most foreigners in Egypt my grandmother knew French and colloquial Arabic, but by preference she spoke Maltese with the few who understood it, and Italian with the fairly wide circle of relatives and friends who often assembled of an evening on her vast veranda. I used to listen intently to their chatter and picked up a good deal of Italian as a result, but until the war took me to Italy many years later I refused to speak it. The reason is that I have a very mild speech defect: a difficulty in rolling Vs. This did not show in French or English, and I could get over it in Arabic because it has no consonantal clusters; but in Italian my mispronunciation seemed abominable to me!

Incidentally, my grandmother lived to the age of eighty-four, yet she never saw the pyramids of Giza. They were easily reached, by tramcar a good deal of the way; but they had stood there for thousands of years, so they could wait for her visit until next year, or the one after, or the one after that . . . .

The member of that generation that I knew best, because she ended her life in our household, was my great aunt Marie. She was my grandfather’s sister, and had been widowed very soon after her marriage; in the pages that my mother has contributed to this book is a record of the humiliations she suffered as the family’s poor relation. To me she was as perfect an example as one can hope to have of the saying that to the pure all things are pure. Deeply devout, she sang church hymns and naughty French songs with equal solemnity, totally unaware of the double entendres. One of her favorites, I recall, celebrated the winds playing with women’s skirts so that one caught a vision of Allah’s Paradise. One paradise was much like another to her—and no one had the heart to disabuse her!

My Father’s Generation

My father was the eldest of four boys, all of whom attended French schools, French being the lingua franca of the foreign communities in the country, and a good grounding in the language opened doors to clerical jobs at a time when manual work was looked down upon.

The most enterprising and ambitious of the brothers was my Uncle Tony. He learned English well and tried, with some success, to blend with the English in manners and dress. His greatest moments of glory came during the two world wars. In the first, as a corporal in the Pioneer Corps, and in charge of a gang of Egyptian workers building the railway that was to serve the advance into Palestine, he received both British and Egyptian decorations for placing the safety of his men above his own, although his version of the story was that during an enemy air attack, he lost his temper when one of the laborers stupidly remained standing in the open, so he got up, went to him and pushed him down. In the Second World War, he was commissioned, served both in Abyssinia and in Libya, reached the rank of major—an uncommon attainment for a Maltese—and ended as town major of Tripoli, where he died of typhoid fever.

Both my other uncles wandered about the world and eventually settled in England. I met my uncle Mario, also known as Mac, only once, in a poor quarter of London, and he struck me as having become as rough as his neighbors.

My youngest uncle, Émile, who survived until 1988, was a gentle soul always on the lookout for a cause to which he could give his all. My mother told me that as a young man he had been eager to marry a consumptive girl, and was foiled only because death outraced him. It was a great pity that he had no children, for he would have been a most devoted father, and I believe it was because the Mormons demanded sacrificial service from him that he ultimately joined them.

For all that most Maltese are almost bound to emigrate, they tend to retain their identity abroad. The three generations of Cachias born in Egypt never became Egyptians, and of those who came to Britain only Uncle Emile temporarily Anglicized his surname to Cashier, hyphenating it with McCree, his mother’s maiden name having been Magri!

The Maltese émigrés also tended to marry only other Maltese, but my father’s generation fell from grace in this respect. He married a Russian, Uncle Tony first a Maltese then an Italian, Uncle Mac an Englishwoman, and Uncle Emile first a Frenchwoman then—much later, at the age of eighty-one—an Englishwoman. Yet the younger two remained childless, and contrary to the general trend, the next generation—mine—included only three males to perpetuate the name.

My Father

Born on 8 December 1888, my father was christened Francescus Conceptus Emmanuel Antonius Marius. The Conceptus unit in this impressive list celebrates the fact that his birth coincided with the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The other three were added to please various relatives at a time when the notion of family embraced uncles, aunts, and cousins many times removed.

I knew him as a short and stout (though not flabby) man, swarthy and heavy-featured. He was not as immediately likable as my mother, largely because he was inconsiderate in little matters.

At the table, he often piled food on his own plate, literally without thought for others. This could be embarrassing when we had guests, and in the days when his social obligations as a senior bank official made it necessary for us to employ a cook, Ahmad—quite the strictest disciplinarian in the household—would take the serving dish round to him and tap the bottom of it with a ring on his finger when he judged that my father had had enough. On one occasion, the signal did not register so Ahmad gave two loud taps, whereupon my father quite unself-consciously ladled most of his helping back onto the dish!

Time meant nothing to my father. He was reputed to have turned up at the bank on time only once in more than thirty years’ service—and that was on a Sunday! Even when he was manager and had a flat directly above the office, he was often more than half-an-hour late, and that meant that even the clients could not be attended to, for the safe could be opened only in his presence. Later still, when he had retired in Edinburgh, he measured day and night by his very erratic hours of sleeping and waking, and more than once Mother had to stop him either hammering away at some carpentry task or else mowing the lawn at four o’clock in the morning.

He could be good fun with us children, and converse entertainingly and stimulatingly with his friends, although inclined to labor his jokes excessively. He also had a fair measure of worldly wisdom not devoid of originality. The best example that comes to my mind is that he devised a few ‘swear words’ for us children to use in our quarrels, and these were so absurd—two that I remember were ‘Fishtingli’ and ‘Caracash’—that our anger evaporated even as we used them.

Yet he himself was very short-tempered, and when roused could rage loudly and violently. Mother instituted a convention whereby if she rubbed the side of her nose, we children were warned that he was in a bad mood and was not to be crossed.

At his worst, he could be unreasonable and self-opinionated. On the few occasions when we went on holiday by the seaside, he almost invariably exposed himself excessively to the hot sun, and advice to the contrary only drove him to further excess. On one occasion, he got so badly sunburnt that he broke into ulcers that took fully three months to heal.

Though his graces were few, his virtues were many. His life was a succession of big sacrifices for the sake of his family. As a young man, he had fancied himself as a painter; what I have seen of his work reveals no great talent, but the fact is that it was for our sakes that he renounced this, took on a bank job that he initially abhorred, and sentenced himself to a career in the provinces for no other reason than that it increased the family income. He stretched out his resources by making all our big toys himself, with the loving care and attention to detail that betokens the perfectionist. And I discovered only after his death that he had gone into debt to see me through college.

His love ran deep. On the day in 1943 when I was due to leave base camp to join the fighting forces in the Western Desert, he spent several hours on the route I was likely to take on the off-chance of catching a last glimpse of me. And I have never seen such emotion in a man’s eyes as when, on the eve of my departure for Scotland, I told him and my mother that—whatever befell me thereafter—they had supplied me with enough happiness in my childhood to last me the rest of my life.

He was also an immensely conscientious worker whose favorite saying was: Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. I have mentioned how reluctantly he started on his banking career. He told me that—in days when manpower was cheap—his sole occupation during the first three months of his employment was to account for the postage used by the bank; this meant entering into a ledger the name and address on every envelope sent out, and the value of the stamps stuck on it. He survived the boredom only by setting himself daily targets of speed and efficiency. And because he was not one to do things by halves, he abandoned painting altogether to dedicate himself to his work, and became an outstandingly enterprising and successful bank manager.

He was also a good boss, indeed exceptional in one respect: he wanted his subordinates to understand what they were doing rather than have them blindly follow a routine, so he took pains to explain why things were done in a certain way and he shuffled them around so that each should know how his work meshed with that of others. In time, it was noticed that the men he trained did well when transferred to other branches and earned quick promotion. So it was that when he reached retiring age (which was 55!), he was kept for another three years at the bank’s head office to run a school for new recruits.

Alas, mastery of banking routine was not the same thing as financial sense. At the end of his employment, he had earned not a pension but a lump sum of about four thousand Egyptian pounds. The prospect of living off this for the rest of his life at a time of rocketing prices was none too reassuring. He trumpeted that he did not want his money to lie rotting but to work for him, and he decided to go into the taxi-running business. In vain did family and friends counsel caution, pointing out that he was entirely without experience in this field, and did not even know how to drive a car. He had worked out on paper that he could not possibly fail. He bought three cars and engaged six drivers to keep them on the road most of the day and night. With no one man in charge of a particular car, maintenance was skimped, and Father lacked the technical knowledge to keep a check on this. And what his paperwork had not shown was the brazenness with which the drivers would run the cars but not the meters, and pocket the fares. Even when he decided to stop throwing good money after bad and arranged an auction to sell the three cars, the potential purchasers who had been his competitors formed a ‘ring’ to keep the sale price absurdly low. In a matter of three years, more than two-thirds of his nest-egg had drained away.

The future looked black, especially as in the aftermath of the Second World War, Egyptian nationalism was reaching a peak of xenophobia. Since their children had all scattered, the obvious thing for Father and Mother to do was to leave the country as well. I had just started on a teaching career in Edinburgh by then, but both my brother José and my sister Viviane had settled in Australia and that was where they decided to go. It was to say good-bye to them and to help them with the formidable formalities of emigration that I spent the summer of 1952