live, up steep wooden stairs, with a terrace overlooking the harbour. Her two personal rooms were full of hefty Victorian furniture and hung with stately royal portraits. She woke, in a mahogany four-poster bed, to distant muezzin calls to prayer. There was a secretary called Dyllis and a translator called Ali Muhammad.
From her two earlier journeys in the Hadhramaut, Freya still had a number of friends in Aden. They did not give her quite the welcome she hoped for. Gertrude Caton Thompson, travelling back through the city at the end of their winter in Hureidha, had managed to add her own voice to an opinion gaining some ground that, though fascinating and full of charm, Freya as a traveller could be ruthless, too quick to use others and lazy in her gratitude.
Whatever reserve may have been felt locally was soon dispelled by the war. Stewart Perowne put her to writing a summary of the day’s news which Ali would translate into Arabic so that it could be broadcast from a loudspeaker in the square after evening prayer. The news started out as truthful; as reports from Europe grew more worrying, ‘we stressed the celestial city in the distance and pointed out with stronger emphasis the temporary nature of those swamps and thickets that lay in the immediate path’. It was the sort of thing Freya was best at.
Life in Aden was agreeable. Freya rose early, drove out by taxi beyond the peninsula, by windmills and saltpans, and rode around the dunes, skirting the gardens of a Sheikh Othman which smelt ‘like all the spices of Arabia’. Sometimes she saw flamingos. In the evenings, after work, she gave a glass of vermouth to anyone who turned up on her terrace, and they sat watching the lights of the ships in the bay. There were dinner parties in Government House with Sir Bernard Riley, bridge games at the Union Club and dances for the soldiers on their way out to India. Her relations with Stewart Perowne were very cordial; almost flirtatious. On her arrival she had found him ‘long-necked and bald-headed like a young vulture, but with none of that pompous slowness which gives vultures their official look …’To Cockerell, she wrote that he treated her as if she were his wife, always expecting her to be there, but giving her no information to go on. ‘I keep him in a state of mild but continuous exasperation. Do you think it’s a sign of love or hate? It seems quite pleasant anyway.’ To escape the constant work, she insisted on ‘two walks a week in the hills to listen to silence’.
Towards the end of the year, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, then in Political Intelligence, wrote to ask for information, particularly on the Yemen where the Italians and Germans were active. It was the sort of request that appealed to Freya. She despatched one of her most forthright and reasoned letters back, arguing that the British were doing wrong in not taking the Italians more seriously, and suggesting a ‘riposte to every Italian step’. What she proposed to do, she said, was to smuggle a portable projector into the Yemen, with a number of very British films. ‘The idea is to sit there, visit harems, rectify rumours and alter the atmosphere as much as one can from the standpoint of female insignificance, which has its compensations.’
Sana’a, the walled capital of Yemen, was like a medieval European town. The narrow streets were lined with craftsmen, polishing gems and carving daggers; down them wound an endless processionof men leading donkeys and camels. Freya reached the city by lorry, ‘like a new weapon of iron into the bronze age’, with a cook, a servant and three other men, having taken six days up the torrent beds of the northern frontier. She found a state ruled over with ‘religious fastness’ by the Imam Jahya, so that toys showing the human form were confiscated. It was as well that she had thought to hide her projector. There were a number of Italians, who had cornered the medical field, and a small British
From her two earlier journeys in the Hadhramaut, Freya still had a number of friends in Aden. They did not give her quite the welcome she hoped for. Gertrude Caton Thompson, travelling back through the city at the end of their winter in Hureidha, had managed to add her own voice to an opinion gaining some ground that, though fascinating and full of charm, Freya as a traveller could be ruthless, too quick to use others and lazy in her gratitude.
Whatever reserve may have been felt locally was soon dispelled by the war. Stewart Perowne put her to writing a summary of the day’s news which Ali would translate into Arabic so that it could be broadcast from a loudspeaker in the square after evening prayer. The news started out as truthful; as reports from Europe grew more worrying, ‘we stressed the celestial city in the distance and pointed out with stronger emphasis the temporary nature of those swamps and thickets that lay in the immediate path’. It was the sort of thing Freya was best at.
Life in Aden was agreeable. Freya rose early, drove out by taxi beyond the peninsula, by windmills and saltpans, and rode around the dunes, skirting the gardens of a Sheikh Othman which smelt ‘like all the spices of Arabia’. Sometimes she saw flamingos. In the evenings, after work, she gave a glass of vermouth to anyone who turned up on her terrace, and they sat watching the lights of the ships in the bay. There were dinner parties in Government House with Sir Bernard Riley, bridge games at the Union Club and dances for the soldiers on their way out to India. Her relations with Stewart Perowne were very cordial; almost flirtatious. On her arrival she had found him ‘long-necked and bald-headed like a young vulture, but with none of that pompous slowness which gives vultures their official look …’To Cockerell, she wrote that he treated her as if she were his wife, always expecting her to be there, but giving her no information to go on. ‘I keep him in a state of mild but continuous exasperation. Do you think it’s a sign of love or hate? It seems quite pleasant anyway.’ To escape the constant work, she insisted on ‘two walks a week in the hills to listen to silence’.
Towards the end of the year, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, then in Political Intelligence, wrote to ask for information, particularly on the Yemen where the Italians and Germans were active. It was the sort of request that appealed to Freya. She despatched one of her most forthright and reasoned letters back, arguing that the British were doing wrong in not taking the Italians more seriously, and suggesting a ‘riposte to every Italian step’. What she proposed to do, she said, was to smuggle a portable projector into the Yemen, with a number of very British films. ‘The idea is to sit there, visit harems, rectify rumours and alter the atmosphere as much as one can from the standpoint of female insignificance, which has its compensations.’
Sana’a, the walled capital of Yemen, was like a medieval European town. The narrow streets were lined with craftsmen, polishing gems and carving daggers; down them wound an endless processionof men leading donkeys and camels. Freya reached the city by lorry, ‘like a new weapon of iron into the bronze age’, with a cook, a servant and three other men, having taken six days up the torrent beds of the northern frontier. She found a state ruled over with ‘religious fastness’ by the Imam Jahya, so that toys showing the human form were confiscated. It was as well that she had thought to hide her projector. There were a number of Italians, who had cornered the medical field, and a small British
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