note in his rendition of “John Peel,” Edward would clench his fists, close his eyes, and bawl out first his annoyance at the mistake and then the correct version. Or that except for the odd use of “you” for “me,” Edward spoke perfect sentences in English and Arabic by the age of fifteen months. Or that his ability to read simple prose was quite developed by the age of two and a half or three. Or that math and music were as natural to him aged three or four as they were to eight- and nine-year-olds. Cute, playful, preternaturally fast and smart, this early Edward enjoyed roistering play with his happy father. I recalled none of this myself, but my mother’s frequent rehearsal of it plus a couple of photoalbums from those years—including an idyllic summer in Alexandria—supported the claim.
None of this, except as regretted memory, was meant to survive the dark days of 1942. We returned to Cairo after the battle of el-Alamein in November, and I went back to GPS, to become a thoroughgoing problem boy for whom one unpleasant antidote after another was devised, until by the age of nine and right through my fifteenth birthday I was constantly engaged in private remedial therapies after school and on weekends: piano lessons, gymnastics, Sunday School, riding classes, boxing, plus the mind-deadening rigors of relentlessly regulated summers in Dhour el Shweir. After 1943 we started to spend every summer in this dreary Lebanese mountain village that my father seemed more attached to than any other place on earth. My parents were at the heart of the entire administered system that determined my time minute by minute and my father’s attitude toward me for the rest of his life, a system that allowed me only the smallest of spots of relief to enjoy and feel that I was out of its clutches.
He managed to combine harshness, unreadable silence, and odd affection laced with surprising generosity which somehow never gave me enough to count on, and which until very recently I could neither dismiss as no longer threatening nor fully understand. But as the core of the disciplinary structure devised for my life emerged out of the depredations of 1942, the danger of not keeping to its various prescriptions produced in me a fear of falling back into some horrible state of total disorder and being lost, and I still have it.
This dangerous state soon came to be embodied for me in the physical and moral temptations of Cairo, which lay just beyond the carefully plotted, rigidly administered routine of my life. I never went out with girls; I wasn’t ever allowed to visit, much less frequent, places of public entertainment or restaurants; and I was always warned by both my parents not to get close to people on the bus or tram, not to drink or eat anything from a shop or stand, and above all to regard our home and family as the only refuge in that vast sty of vices all around us.
Saving me from what was already happening: this was the paradox I lived. The only thing worse, I imagined, was total breakdown, perhaps of the kind my father experienced in the summer of 1942. After that my father began the serious task of reorganizing his business and hisleisure, with a new emphasis on the latter, as his fortunes increased considerably. By 1951, he had stopped going to his office at all after lunch. Instead he started to play bridge, which, seven days a week, every week in the year except when he traveled, became his obsession. He would come home for lunch at one-thirty, eat, then sleep until four, when he would be driven to the club to play until seven-thirty or eight. He might play again after dinner.
After our summer in Ramallah a large number of Ely Culbertson books appeared all over the Cairo apartment, in addition to several solo bridge sets and a new green felt cover for use on the two folding card tables we had. On Tuesday evening my father would go to Philip Souky’s house near the Pyramids to play bridge. When we started to spend
None of this, except as regretted memory, was meant to survive the dark days of 1942. We returned to Cairo after the battle of el-Alamein in November, and I went back to GPS, to become a thoroughgoing problem boy for whom one unpleasant antidote after another was devised, until by the age of nine and right through my fifteenth birthday I was constantly engaged in private remedial therapies after school and on weekends: piano lessons, gymnastics, Sunday School, riding classes, boxing, plus the mind-deadening rigors of relentlessly regulated summers in Dhour el Shweir. After 1943 we started to spend every summer in this dreary Lebanese mountain village that my father seemed more attached to than any other place on earth. My parents were at the heart of the entire administered system that determined my time minute by minute and my father’s attitude toward me for the rest of his life, a system that allowed me only the smallest of spots of relief to enjoy and feel that I was out of its clutches.
He managed to combine harshness, unreadable silence, and odd affection laced with surprising generosity which somehow never gave me enough to count on, and which until very recently I could neither dismiss as no longer threatening nor fully understand. But as the core of the disciplinary structure devised for my life emerged out of the depredations of 1942, the danger of not keeping to its various prescriptions produced in me a fear of falling back into some horrible state of total disorder and being lost, and I still have it.
This dangerous state soon came to be embodied for me in the physical and moral temptations of Cairo, which lay just beyond the carefully plotted, rigidly administered routine of my life. I never went out with girls; I wasn’t ever allowed to visit, much less frequent, places of public entertainment or restaurants; and I was always warned by both my parents not to get close to people on the bus or tram, not to drink or eat anything from a shop or stand, and above all to regard our home and family as the only refuge in that vast sty of vices all around us.
Saving me from what was already happening: this was the paradox I lived. The only thing worse, I imagined, was total breakdown, perhaps of the kind my father experienced in the summer of 1942. After that my father began the serious task of reorganizing his business and hisleisure, with a new emphasis on the latter, as his fortunes increased considerably. By 1951, he had stopped going to his office at all after lunch. Instead he started to play bridge, which, seven days a week, every week in the year except when he traveled, became his obsession. He would come home for lunch at one-thirty, eat, then sleep until four, when he would be driven to the club to play until seven-thirty or eight. He might play again after dinner.
After our summer in Ramallah a large number of Ely Culbertson books appeared all over the Cairo apartment, in addition to several solo bridge sets and a new green felt cover for use on the two folding card tables we had. On Tuesday evening my father would go to Philip Souky’s house near the Pyramids to play bridge. When we started to spend
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