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 2: I'm going to Aden

My father was stationed at R.A.F. Innsworth, north east of the City of Gloucester. My mother’s family was local. There was not an airfield at Innsworth as this had been an administration centre. My mother and father worked there. It’s where they met and started courting and eventually married and had a baby, me. When I was an infant, our family lived in a prefab in the wonderfully named Frogfurlong Lane which ran northwards from Innsworth to Down Hatherley. Gloucestershire has some wonderful place names!

After that we lived in Singapore and Hong Kong. Upping sticks was quite a normal family event. Living in a different country was not extraordinary to me as a seven year old, not that the concept of another country meant anything much. For me it meant not everybody was white and my family lived a long way off. Plenty enough families came and went. It was all part of life in the Air Force. So when I was told my father had been posted overseas again and we were going to live in a place called Aden, it was life carrying on its normal course of events. All I knew was Aden was many miles away. I was probably excited to know I was again going to a place where it is warm and sunny all the time.

Since our return to from the Far East we hadn’t always lived in the married quarters in Innsworth. For a while we had lived in the neighbouring village of Churchdown. My mother’s parents were retired and they had a house not far from us in the village. The garden backed on to the main line between Gloucester and Cheltenham. I knew my grandfather had worked on the railway. I assumed he lived there because it was nice to remember his former work, not that I ever asked. Most children think life is going to be wonderful and happy and grownups enjoy working. My grandfather’s back garden was one massive allotment. As far as I know, he grew all the vegetables he and my grandmother ate.

I was poor at keeping secrets. I am a little better at it now. I imagine my parents told me when it was safe to do so and everyone who needed to know knew. When I told my fellow pupils at Churchdown Primary school I was going to go to Aden one response was “I wouldn’t want to go there, it’s all desert. No grass.” I wondered how this boy knew as he had never been there, and neither my mother nor my father had told me about that.

© 2012 Gwailo54

Hong Kong, in the 1950s

This photograph I have unearthed, was taken from our apartment in Robinson Road in Hong Kong, probably some time between 1956 and 1959 (I can't remember any longer when my father was posted there). Apart from the fact you cannot see this view from where this was taken (there are so many tall buildings there now) what is really noticeable is the distance between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. It's much less nowadays since all the land reclamation that has taken place.