miserable most of the rest of the time. We were timid children and our paternal
grandmother, who lived with us, frightened us even more by telling us, when we were
naughty, that soon we would go to school where we would be straightened out pronto.
Happily, the drama was not repeated at the G.P.S. Nafsika went quietly to Mrs.
Whitfield’s kindergarten and I was put in a class called Transition A. Both classrooms
were on the last floor above the assembly hall. My teacher was an elderly woman
called Mrs. Lee. Years later, at the English School, I had her husband as a teacher in
Applied Art where he taught the “intricacies” of fretwork and wood carving as
gravely and as pedantically as if he were instructing us in the use of a cyclotron. A
large, corpulent, and placid man, he formed with Mrs. Lee one of those oddly
mismatched couples where one wonders at the dynamics that brought them together.
Mrs. Lee was tiny, skinny and a bag of nerves. I think, perhaps, she was the most
feared teacher at school. It did not take much to have her start punching your shoulder
or vigorously trying to detach your ear. Mercifully, I did not have as many shoulder
punches or pulled ears as some of the other boys did. In fact, I think she rather liked
me. I was quiet, well behaved and did good work with plasticine. And if you will
forgive a tiny bit of boasting, I once fashioned a blue elephant that elicited a “well
done” from her and had the whole class of aspiring pre-teen artists queue up to have a
look. So, don’t be surprised at my erudition, my artistic vein goes way back!!
Our headmistress was Mrs. Wilson, a stocky Englishwoman of normal height
with well groomed graying hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. There are Englishmen
whose provenance one can not infer and others like Mrs. Wilson who could be
nothing else. She was always well dressed with stylish high-heeled shoes. Stern but
polite and smiling, she was respected by the other teachers and held in awe by us, the
pupils. At one time we lived in Zamalek in a building owned by my father. It was a
lovely airy flat with a large veranda and at the time there were practically no cars
circulating on the street below. There was a lovely villa next to our building with a
huge garden and the girl of the family living in it, rode a large tricycle inside the
garden. I learned to ride a bicycle that year and felt far superior to be rushing around
on two wheels rather than three. Secretly, I hoped she would ask me inside, one day,
so I could tackle the ups and downs of the footpaths in the spacious garden. I had
other reasons to feel superior at that time. Our wealthy neighbors had a chauffeured
limousine on standby but my father bought a surplus British army Jeep, which he
renovated and enjoyed taking us for short drives. It was open-air on top without a
hood and without doors. It was a ball and I imagined everyone looking at us
enviously.
We lived through the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in that flat but apart from the loud
bang of two bombs on the Abdine Palace and the frequent blackouts with the columns
of white light searching the skies for enemy aircraft, nothing troubled our existence.
We left the house a year later and moved to a flat in town because the flat in Zamalek
had no elevator and we lived on the fourth floor. In the nineties, I went looking for it
and I almost could not find it. It was hidden, almost cowering, overshadowed by huge
apartment blocks on every side, one of which took up the whole area of the lovely
villa and garden next to us. No need to add that I found no space to park my car. In
those days, Mrs. Wilson must have lived nearby because often, in our leisurely walks
on the empty streets, we met her promenading her two daschund, sausage-like dogs.
She always smiled and addressed us a polite greeting.
In every school, in every organization there is almost always a busybody. In
truth, during the English period, the English School did not have one. After the Suez
war of 1956, when the school administration was taken over by the Egyptian Ministry
