While Hackett was critical of himself, he was not unquestioning of the army. He remembered a ‘most heretical’ conversation with his squadron commander, who asserted ‘there was no such thing as foreign service in the British Army, only home service abroad,’ and suggested Hackett might apply for a colonial job at the end of his commission. Hackett commented, displaying the analytical thinking he brought to bear on the world, and especially on military matters: ‘I suppose any corporate body when it travels preserves the immunity of its constituents from outside influence to some degree. A regiment seems to do so very largely.’ He also cited the corporate attitude as contributing to his own incompetence:
I do not know in my own mind whether this assumption of complete ignorance is a good thing or a bad. Two years in the Oxford University OTC taught me a good deal about section work and section leading, my two attachments with the Bays taught me something about stable management and … manoeuvres … But here and perhaps wisely absolute ignorance is assumed. The only trouble is I have always been as competent (or as anything else!) as people expect and here consequently I have been grossly incompetent. I started on the wrong leg. But there have been fewer raspberries the last day or two.…
The day’s training ended at lunchtime – ‘half a day’s wages, we always said, for half a day’s work,’ Hackett observed. Occasionally there was a lecture in the afternoon, but for the most part the officers were free to do what they wanted. Shan spent many of his afternoons with his polo ponies. By way of preparation for their tour of duty overseas the officers had clubbed together to purchase a string of 120 unmade ponies, bought from breeders in Australia and shipped to Egypt ahead of their arrival.
Polo was then in its international heyday and greatly encouraged in the cavalry regiments of the British Army, where it served, as it had since its origins in Persia, as a training game for mounted combat. It had been introduced by Muslim invaders into India, where the first British clubs were started by tea-planters in Assam in 1859 and by colonial administrators in Calcutta in 1860. Officers of the 10th Hussars saw a game there in 1866 and immediately formed a club of their own. They played a series of exhibition matches against the 9th Lancers in Richmond Park in 1870, and from England the game was exported to the United States and Argentina, where it became a national sport. By the 1930s big games in Buenos Aires attracted as many as sixty thousand spectators. For British cavalry regiments India was still the place to play, although the game was to be found in even the smallest colonial outpost, and the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars were due to spend five years in the subcontinent after their two-year tour in Egypt. Their aim was to arrive on the broad maidans of India after two years of warm-up matches with a team ready to take on the dragoons and lancers and hussars already there. Not only does the purchase show what the officers of the 8th Hussars thought they would be doing with their time, but also a great confidence in the continuation of the imperial peace; at the beginning of 1934, although the seeds of war had already been sown, there was no reason to suppose it would not last.
Shan’s ponies were both grey Arab stallions ‘with pretty heads and plenty of quality’. They had both played a good deal, unlike Hackett who had never played before. They were cared for by his syce, Dahab, who called both horses ‘him bony’; Shan called them Joey and Kishmul and many other things besides. He spent hours in the ‘polo pit’ – a wooden horse set up so that a player could practise hitting the ball, rather than his pony, with the long flexible mallet. He spent afternoons knocking about on his own, though his ponies had other ideas: ‘Joey had sudden fits of taking charge which lasted just long enough to make me miss a shot each time, and Kishmul, wanting to go on a bit, crabbed away from the ball.’ He practised so much his hands blistered, but all these exercises could not prepare him for the hurly-burly of the game. In his first match he was ‘carried away twice and quite failed to hit the ball except by accident. I didn’t know where to go except when it was too late to go there and got generally cursed.’ Next time out, ‘four incompetent chukkas’ at the Gezira Club, he started by ‘striking the ball the wrong way and then rarely, after that, striking it at all. Seem to be continually in the wrong place or fouling people.…’ He did improve with practice and, though he never won a place in the regiment’s first team, which toured internationally, he played the game with the same energy he brought to everything he did.
After two weeks of ‘withering sobriety’, Hackett was ready for a party, ‘a blind’ as he had come to say. It started innocently enough. On an earlier trip into Cairo, while shopping for a picture frame, he had found a copy of Vanity Fair, but only the first volume. He had sat reading in a cafe, feeling ‘“out of school” and more myself than I had in a long time’. Now he wanted to get the second volume and after buying it repaired to the Shepheard’s Hotel bar where he had arranged to meet a fellow officer. They proceeded to drink seven champagne cocktails. ‘After the fourth I began to feel very well and after the seventh refused to go home.’
Shepheard’s Hotel was usually where such evenings began. It was an institution amongst Cairo hotels, the first to be built there in the European style. Egypt’s opening to European trade and influences under Mohammed Ali attracted a growing number of visitors and in 1841 Shepheard’s opened its doors to them. If Mark Twain is to be believed the hotel was ‘the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once in a small town in the United States’ – if believed, because he then reproduces an extract from his journal about the place, the Benton House, that shows off all his comic flair, and Twain was not known to let the truth get in the way of a good story. His observation that ‘all the donkeys in Christendom and most of the boys in Egypt, I think, are at its door’ is more credible. Whatever its state when Twain visited in 1868, during the 1870s it became the hotel to which the British firm Thomas Cook and Son sent their tourists. In the same year that the hotel had opened, Thomas Cook had organized an excursion by a chartered train from Leicester to Loughborough to attend a temperance meeting, and so gave rise to the modern travel industry. The hotel prospered greatly through this association, expanded, modernized and refurbished in ‘Eighteenth Dynasty Edwardian’. By the 1920s, when trips to Egypt became all the rage in the wake of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, it was simply the grandest hotel in Cairo, a landmark in its own right and a base from which to visit other parts of the Middle East.
In the late afternoon the hotel’s shady terrace was the place to meet. The terrace was raised up to head-height above the level of Ibrahim Pasha Street, and partly covered by a balcony supported on cast iron pillars. Waiters in tarbushes and long white tunics moved between the wicker chairs and tables. A pianist played an upright in a self-absorbed manner. If the weather was too hot, or too cold, mixed company could gather below the dome of coloured glass in the Moorish Hall; the Long Bar was an all-male preserve. In the evening the hotel’s dress code was strictly enforced and male diners had to wear dinner jackets. On nights when the Pharaonic ballroom was opened up, white tie was required. Yet for all its formality the parties held there could become very raucous, and then more often than not the pair of bare-breasted caryatids that flanked the grand staircase would fall victim to some puerile outrage.
For the young officers of a cavalry regiment, the social season gathered pace in February and March as the polo season reached its climax. The whirl of cocktail parties and balls also coincided with the preparations for brigade manoeuvres. The lack of sleep began to take its toll on Shan and as the heat began to mount the regimental exercises became torturous. He recalled ‘days spent in a blind sweating fury of galloping drill’, how he ‘sat on a burning hilltop and watched unfortunate men crawling over sharp rocks’. He continued to do his job ‘almost right, but wrong enough to get cursed for it’. Shan’s youth and energy carried him through, and he even found time to play polo, maintain a considerable correspondence, read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (written only eight years before), and begin learning Arabic.
Hackett chose a comfortable spot from which to reflect on his first three months in the Cairo Cavalry Brigade – a deck-chair aboard the SS Aquitania as she crossed the Mediterranean. It was the beginning of April. He was going off on leave, to Italy for a holiday before returning to England, and the limbo of transit afforded him the opportunity to recall such moments as the morning after the 12th Lancers’ Ball, riding out at six ‘full