The other pupils on the Long Course (a year until the Intermediate Arabic exam, and then a further six months before the Higher) were a mixed bunch, in every sense. The core was made up of my fellow fast-stream Arabists and me. Back then, the idea of any of us ever actually becoming an ambassador seemed impossibly remote. But in time we all did, using our Arabic too, heading embassies in Amman (two of us), Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Kabul, Kuwait, Riyadh and Tel Aviv. One of us ended up as ambassador in Brasilia, another in Rome. One of our main-stream colleagues – and the best Arabist of our year – became Britain’s last ambassador to Qadhafi’s Libya.
Others on the course included a handful of young spies pretending to be diplomats. There was a group of main-stream members of the Diplomatic Service. They were rather older and more experienced than us, and had been selected for Hard Language Training as they approached mid-career. The FCO would extract real value from their Arabic, working them hard as consuls and vice consuls and commercial and management officers – the backbone of our posts across the Middle East – for the next two decades. Australia, New Zealand and Japan also sent students to MECAS, as did one or two of Britain’s more international banks. Partners – mostly women in those days – were encouraged to join in the lessons and, if they paid, sit the exams. Mixed in background and ability we certainly were, but united in our eager anticipation of working lives to be spent in and on the Arab Middle East.
Our teachers were the most interesting element of the MECAS community. Some were Lebanese, some Palestinian, mostly they were Christians, from many of the different Churches which populate the Levant. The Palestinians in particular had known tough times, leaving homes and possessions behind in the disaster of 1948. The Lebanese had more recent tales of suffering. But few of our teachers let the bitterness of their personal experience of what Britain and the West had failed to do for the Arabs of the Middle East infuse their teaching. Instead, they each exuded real pride in their language and literature, and were eager for us to run linguistically almost before we could walk. Like all good teachers, they found fulfilment in the achievement of their pupils, for whom they showed genuine affection, and unlimited patience.
We struggled. First with the alphabet, then with the rules of an unfamiliar grammar and a strange new vocabulary unrelated to any language any of us already knew. For me, as a recently lapsed classicist, the elegance of Arabic grammar was a delight. It was learning and relearning lists of words that was such hard work. The effort to produce even half-elegant script reminded me of the humiliations of learning to write, some twenty years earlier. But two things gave us hope that we would one day master what in those early days seemed like an impossible language. First were the course materials, tried and tested on a generation of Foreign Office Arabists: the MECAS Word List, the MECAS Grammar and The Way Prepared – a set of fifty political texts of graduated difficulty, showing their age even in 1978, but giving us clues to how the West’s relations with Arabia had evolved since, it seemed, the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The second comfort was the logical key to a Semitic language: the root system. We marvelled at how three consonants could be used to derive every noun, verb and adjective associated with a particular human activity. The root for ‘writing’ for example – k, t, b – enabled you to find the words for everything from a book to a library, and much else in between. The twelve forms of the verb made the active and passive voices of prep-school Latin seem lame: Arabic verbs could be engineered to operate reflexively, causatively, intensively, co-operatively, among other things. A further delight, half remembered from ancient Greek, was the number between singular and plural: the dual, usually denoted by the suffix -ain. Thus, the root for ‘ruling’, or ‘possession’, is m, l, k. To rule is malik, a king is the active participle maalik, and two kings are maalikain.
Being paid, much more than we had received in London, to study all this in a beautiful village in the mountains above Beirut made us all feel incredibly lucky. So did the expeditions we mounted at weekends, idling in the bookshops of Beirut, swimming in the ice-cold mountain river at Jisr al-Qadi, marvelling at the Ottoman delights of the summer palace at Beiteddin, relaxing with wonderful fresh food and Lebanese wine in the Palmyra Hotel at Ba’albek after visiting the massive temple of the Sun God.
But there was trouble in Paradise. As each of us was to see, at different times and in different places in our careers, little in the modern Middle East is as delightful as it may at first seem. Beneath the sun-bleached surface lie deep wounds. Conflicts past are always present. The sand is too often stained with blood.
And so within days of our arrival the tensions between the parties to Lebanon’s civil war started to rise again. After a few weeks, we were told that we could travel only in tightly restricted areas. In what was to become a wearily familiar ritual in later years, we found ourselves receiving a daily security briefing. We started to hear small-arms fire at night, distant at first, and then disturbingly close. The Syrian soldiers manning the checkpoint in the village snapped from sleepy insouciance to dangerous menace. They detained some of our students, briefly and for no real reason. Israeli aircraft began to buzz Beirut, breaking the sound barrier high above us, just to remind everyone north of the Litani River who was top dog, and top gun. Then the Syrian Katyusha multiple-launch rocket batteries (known as ‘Stalin’s Organs’) in the valley behind the mountain started to fire over us, towards east Beirut. The huge oil tanks in the port caught fire, sending a fat column of thick black smoke high into the air.
Suddenly, the Foreign Office’s judgement that it had been safe to reopen MECAS looked wildly over-optimistic. We worried not about our safety, but that we would be forced back to London. Absurdly, we petitioned Britain’s impossibly elegant Ambassador in Beirut, Sir Peter Wakefield, saying we wanted to stick it out. But we were told we had to go. MECAS would close, without announcement, and re-form in London. Everyone, including the teachers, would be evacuated. We were bitterly disappointed, but the tide of violence rising rapidly around us had a compelling logic of its own.
And thus, almost five weeks to the day after we had driven up the mountain, we were driving down again, this time in a longer convoy, adorned with a Union flag (for safety, we said, but really for our morale), before racing up the Beka’a Valley to the northern crossing point into Syria. MECAS closed, with a whimper, never to reopen. Its spirit lingers on, in an alumni association and in the memories of a generation of British and allied Arabists. Somehow, our sudden surreptitious departure from Shemlan seemed a kind of metaphor in a minor key for the recessional in which we would play a part for the following thirty years.
We made it back to London in record time, and were soon regrouping in the ramshackle premises the Foreign Office found for us – Palace Chambers above Westminster tube station, already condemned for demolition to make way for the new Parliamentary building. It was there that over the next fifteen months we finished our formal Arabic training. It was there that we mounted a morale-raising Christmas pantomime only a month after our return. It was from there that some of us heard Airey Neave’s* car explode as he drove up the ramp of the Commons car park in March 1979. And it was there that we wondered what difference Mrs Thatcher and her Government would make to our working lives, as she took office just five weeks later.
From Palace Chambers we were twice sent out on ‘language breaks’, to Syria. On arrival in Damascus, by British Airways Super VC10, we were each given £200 or so in dirty Syrian pounds, and told to go away for three weeks. The only conditions were that we were to keep away from each other, and to talk (and think) nothing but Arabic. Within Syria we could travel where we liked. How times have changed.
And