Aden: Thanks to my unknown readers

At the moment I have no more Aden material, and I would like to thank those of you who have followed me for all or part of the journey. Now I have finished everything and had time to reflect, here a re she musings arising from my Aden blogging.

Blogging on this website provides me as the blogger with statistics. Some are useful. Some are interesting, such as the ability to know where visitors to the blog have come from. This includes some ghastly search engines in Russia which are not really that. I wish I could eradicate these from my figures. 

Nevertheless, on the plus side I am flattered by the large number of visits from the UK, which is really my target audience as I imagine most people interested in my life in Aden would be there.

However, I am very curious about the handful of visits from the Yemen. Here's hoping the interest is from ordinary individuals like myself and not any state or commercial organisation. If it is anther "man in the street", whoever you are (singular or plural) thank you for being intrigued enough to visit my blog. I wish you and your country peace and stability, especially given the recent turmoil. If you are from Aden, then my wishes are more heartfelt still.

My nomadic childhood has left me with more than one place that I think of as "home". In the 50s I grew up in Singapore and Hong Kong, where being surrounded by ethnic Chinese and Malay was a normal everyday experience. On my first return visit to both places after 30 years absence I felt strangely at home. Its not easy to explain to somebody who grew up in the same place how normal it feels to go back somewhere and feel more comfortable as part of a minority of the population. Home is many places to me. Singapore, Hong Kong, Aden, Gloucester, Cottesmore are all my very early homes in my time of childhood and innocence. I have a bond with them all. 

I fear I have lost my opportunity to visit Aden, given the current political and religious turmoil in the world. I cannot adequately express how much I would love to see Ma'alla, Steamer Point, Elephant Bay, Crater and Khormaksar again and see how much has changed or stayed the same. Youtube has been useful, but not all the videos posted are very good. Too many of modern Aden are more about the persons in the video than the place, but such is the vanity of humans! 

I regret very much not returning to Aden before the recent religious divisions between Islam and the rest of the world surfaced. I feel my presence would not be welcome in certain parts of the world, but I do not mean that all Islamic countries are forbidding to me. For instance, when I was in Penang I felt most welcome by the locals I came in contact with. One abiding memory is of school children saying "Welcome to Malaysia" to us. I understand they would have been encouraged to do this, but a child's generosity of spirit is a precious gift, which more adults could do worse than try to rediscover within themselves. Given a less than happy previous experience in Kuala Lumpur, the people of Penang more than adequately made up for that experience.

However, after that digression I shall return to the topic of religious division. To me it feels as negative and pointless as the Protestant and Catholic divisions in European history, or the Christian behaviour of the Middle Ages which effected a superiority it did not deserve. Then the Arab or Moorish culture was far more advanced than the so-called Western civilisation. One only needs to visit Granada and see the palace of the Alhambra and the gardens of the Generalife to realise how more advanced that society was compared with the regressiveness of the regime of "los reyes catolicos". In my blog about Crater I commented on the Cisterns of Tawila. To this day I still think they are a marvel. I can still remember how awesome (I use that word not in its modern guise) it was as I walked around. You really need to be ignorant or blind to reason not to acknowledge the cleverness of mind and sophistication of a society that brought them into being.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in my case, my absence from Aden has made me realise how lucky I have been to revisit Hong Kong and Singapore more than once. The memories I have of Aden are mainly positive, but the negative memories were due to the British presence outstaying its welcome. I am sure had I been a native of an occupied country my feelings would not have been too dissimilar. Whether I would express my displeasure I don't know. I thank my lucky stars I can express my opinions, which was not always an option open to the Adeni.

Aden: Random Memories 9: Crater

Probably the best known part of Aden for most British people would have been Crater, and for the wrong reasons, ‘Mad Mitch’ and the Argylles and his iron fist policy. I am not making any claim as to the rights and wrongs on either side, but we must always be mindful that the various outposts of the British Empire were there for strategic and commercial interests, and the military was an important part of that jigsaw.

Crater was so named as it was the remnants of a volcanic crater. It’s not exactly the most romantic of names or reasons, but functional. Memory tells me Crater was chaotic and something of a dump. I felt less safe there than anywhere else in Aden. One of the few memorable visits there was my mother buying rings. Seeing the craftsmen at work working with pinpoint accuracy impressed me tremendously.

Our cars in Aden were a Fiat 500 and later a Fiat 600. The first was white and the second was grey. A rare photo of my father (it was his camera!) at the wheel of one of our Fiats. A rare photo of my father (it was his camera!) at the wheel of one of our Fiats (posted in an earlier blog).

One day my father took the car for servicing and I went with him, not knowing the adventure that lay ahead. I am pretty sure the garage was on the edge of Crater and consequently on the edge of the dead volcano’s crater walls. We started to climb up. As we got higher, the wind was noticeable and the temperature dropped so by the time we were on the very rim we were in the cloud (not that there was much of it) and everything felt damp. My father pointed out to me where we had been and where we were going. We made the descent and arrived home, back in the more or less 100˚F in the shade. 

The main attraction in Crater was the Cisterns of Tawila. They were hundreds even possibly thousands of years old. It was most likely the first time I learned that my Western culture and tradition was not necessarily the most advanced throughout history. Although the complex of tanks and walkways may seem smaller to me now, were I to revisit Aden, I am sure I would still be amazed and impressed by the construction as well as the ingenuity of the older Arab culture.

There’s also something noteworthy. Round the area of the tanks is vegetation, maybe not masses of grassy lawns, but it wasn’t ‘all desert’. So much for what my friends at Churchdown knew about anything.

There was only one way in and one way out of Crater by car from Ma'alla and that was the Crater Pass. Even back in the early 60s in Aden, cars were becoming more commonplace and decisions were being made around the needs for vehicles. Crater Pass was narrow, it was clear it had been hewn out of the crater wall. On the rim of the crater there was a wall either side of the pass linked by a bridge. To enable a better flow of traffic, the gap in the crater wall had to be widened, and consequently this meant the bridge had to go.

The scheduled day of demolition arrived. My father and I watched the explosion. The noise was the loudest I’ve ever heard. A huge cloud of dust hung in the air. As it cleared, the bridge was no more. How long the wall had been there, I do not know, but to this day, I am amazed at man’s ingenuity at solving problems, until it comes to the motor car. Whatever is needed to get somebody from A to B in the fastest possible time and with the greatest convenience is paramount, irrespective of the consequences. As I write, the 2011 Party Conference Season is reaching its final days, and the Tories want to raise the speed limit on motorways, even though this is likely to increase pollution and result in more lives lost. This is, I believe, called policy making.

© 2012 Gwailo54

The Nomad

If there is one part of British society that seems not to have been made part of a so-called "reality" TV show, or mini-season tucked away on BBC4 it is the families that lived overseas as the Empire shrivelled and Britons were not so welcome in parts of the world.

One such place was Aden. BP families were in Little Aden, and the service families in Crater, Khormaksar, Ma'alla and Steamer Point (as we called in those days). In Ma'alla we lived almost cheek by jowl with the locals. We had the posh flats on Ma'alla Strait, they lived in the back streets.

Since the British were unceremoniously expelled from Aden, it seems little has happened to improve the lot of the native population. Of course they have enjoyed advances in modern society. So has everybody else to a greater or lesser extent. Since the British left Aden, it has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons. Like many other Britons, I am proud to say it once was home to me for a short time.