Another photo from my father’s World War 2 album: it’s not a sharp image, but it’s about renewal, and that’s what matters.
During the presence of Australian troops in Egypt, house boats on the River Nile were used for officers convalescing or on leave. Earlier this year I posted a photo of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo where officers also spent time relaxing and renewing their spirits. On the same theme, Dad wrote a poem about time-out for officers and privates, called Seven Days’ Leave, a few verses of which I posted here.
As the Nile flows through Cairo it is divided in two for a short space by Gezira Island. And on this island there’s a public green space with a geometric layout called the Andalusian Garden. It was designed by the architect Mahmoud Zulfiqar Bey in 1929 as a gift to his wife, and was originally used as a roller skating rink by members of the royal family. In 1935 it was opened to the public, and in 1941 when my father was in Cairo during the war he visited this Moorish garden. The park is now protected by a heritage classification. Unfortunately the pool in the photo is now dry, but the terraces are still decorated with coloured mosaics which are not evident in this black and white photo, but photos on this blog site show the beautiful colours of the tiles and the excellent design of the garden.
Thank you Ahmad Omar for telling me the name of this garden. The photo is from my father’s collection which he brought back from Egypt in 1942.
Andalusian Garden, Gezira Island, Cairo, Egypt, 1941
When I saw the themes for this week’s photo challenges, Foreign (WordPress weekly challenge) and Spooky (Ailsa’s travel photo challenge), I knew exactly which photos I wanted to submit. They’ve given me the creeps since I was a child paging through my father’s war album from the Middle East. While I’d linger over photos of pyramids, camels and Arabs, I’d glance quickly at these two, shiver, and turn the page.
The Foreign theme: The photos are owned by me, an Australian, and it depicts a palace built in Egypt in Hindu-style architecture designed by a Frenchman for a Belgian, Baron Empain. The architect, Alexandre Marcel, was inspired by the temples of Orissa in India and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The palace’s sculptures of Hindu divinities, mythical creatures and erotic French maidens are so out of place in this Muslim country that they attract the attention of looters and vandals. The palace is in Heliopolis, now a suburb of Cairo, but at the time of building, between 1907 and 1911, it was a town apart, designed by the Baron out of a stretch of desert he bought from the British colonial government. The Baron is buried under the Catholic basilica in Heliopolis, also commissioned by him, which you can see in a previous post.
The Spooky theme: Where do I begin? Both the interior and exterior of this reinforced concrete structure are crumbling and graffitied. Once decorated by Georges-Louis Claude in the French style, it had frescoes, parquet floors, gilded ceilings, gold-plated doorknobs, Belgian mirrors, and a spiral staircase in a tower sitting on a revolving base. It must have been beautiful. Now it’s bare, the only inhabitants bats and stray dogs. And ghosts. Not only is the palace said to be haunted, but some say Satanic rituals are practised there and that some of the mirrors are stained with blood. The Baron’s sister died when she fell from the tower and his psychologically disturbed daughter died in one of the basement chambers.
Its dark history has kept the palace closed to the public. Since 2005 it has been owned by the Egyptian government which has made a few attempts to find restorers, but plans have always come to nothing. This year, however, the government announced a definite restoration project to transform the palace into a cultural centre…
When my father was in the Middle East he was surrounded by men and nurses. Mostly men. Sometimes they were soldiers in a war; sometimes they were larrikins. (The Australian Oxford Dictionary’s definition of larrikin is ‘a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions’.)
These soldiers look like they’re on a roof. Don’t tell me they’re acting as Bathsheba bathing on the roof and King David wooing her with his flute! Well, then, they’re imitating one of history’s most famous couples. I seem to remember that Bathsheba was beautiful…
Today there are two photo challenges that I can meet with one photo: the weekly WordPress challenge to find a Happy photo, and Ailsa’s challenge to show animal photos. She has posted some excellent animal snaps to celebrate World Animal Day on 4th October: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/10/05/travel-theme-animals/
My picture does for both challenges. It comes from an album of WWII photos that my father brought home in 1941. Beneath this one he wrote ‘Syrian Bint’. The dictionary tells me that ‘bint’ is colloquial and perhaps offensive, but then, its origin is Arabic, meaning girl or daughter. So I’ll leave it as it is.
I have no idea what season it is in my photo (or rather, my father’s photo), but I’m guessing that in this boy’s part of the world it’s always warm enough to climb a tree. In bare feet! The photo suits not so much a foliage theme as a trunk theme. But if the boy climbs for long enough he’ll get to the foliage and more importantly to the dates.
Another photo from my father’s war album. Table Mountain in Cape Town looks like a good place to be solitary (unless you’re with troops on their way to war).
This nurse wears the military uniform of Queensland nurses who joined up in 1940 and 1941 to accompany troops to the Middle East. I don’t know her name but I hope someone sees the photo some day and recognises her.
My father praised the nurses in his poetry. And when he returned home and married my mother, he wanted their first child, my sister, to be named after a particular nurse who had cared for him in the army hospital in Kantara near Cairo.
Everyday life for a soldier in Egypt in 1941 included some pretty unpostable activities: rifle practice, wrecking tanks, sinking ships, covering the bodies of dead comrades in the desert. However, the activity in this photo looks fairly harmless. My father captioned it ‘Shufty’, which comes from an Arabic word for ‘a look’, as in ‘take a shufty at this’.
Three curious things I’ve considered: What are the tubular projections behind the men? What is the Egyptian boy doing? Why is one man naked while all others are clothed?
I found this photo in my father’s album from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the Australian Army. It’s simply captioned ‘Roxy Theatre’, though I’m not sure if it’s in Cairo or elsewhere. Searching online hasn’t turned up anything quite like it.
