Turning Heads

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When Sue and I got to Beirut in 1970, I found it very irritating how people in the street would stop and stare at Sue. Okay, so she was blonde and it was the era of miniskirts. But that still didn’t justify the way pedestrians, cars and even buses would stop when we walked down Hamra Street.

One day I complained about this to the owner of the school where we worked. He laughed.

“They aren’t looking at Sue,” he said. “They’re looking at you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because they’ve never seen a man with long hair before.”

The next time Sue and I walked down the street, I looked more carefully at people’s reactions. Our employer was right. Everyone was staring at me.

Me in 1970

P.S.

A few weeks after this episode, the Barbers Guild of Lebanon passed a resolution condemning long hair on men. The resolution further stated that any men with long hair who came to their shops would have their heads shaved. I take some pride in thinking that I may have contributed to the barbers' resolution. 

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Eating Disorders

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Eating with Libyans was normally an informal affair. Everyone would sit or lie on the floor around a large communal bowl of food. You would sometimes use a spoon but often you would just pick up pieces of the food using pieces of bread or just your fingers. Unfortunately, this relaxed style of eating didn’t always go down well when translated to other cultures.

My daughter Emma used to run into problems with this. She spent the first five years of her life in Libya, and she spent much of that time with a Libyan family that we knew well. So she learned to eat the way Libyans ate at home. This caused problems whenever she went back to the UK, where she would tuck into a plate of spaghetti or even a bowl of ice cream using only her fingers. I didn’t see anything wrong with this but her grandma was absolutely horrified by it.

I ran into similar problems when I travelled from Libya to visit an International House school in Cairo. I was invited as guest of honour to a party at the home of one of the school’s receptionists.

My first mistake was deciding to sit on the floor when I saw there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. The hostess said “This isn’t Libya” and brought me a chair.

Then came the food. This consisted of tiny (1.5 inches across) pizzas. I was handed a pretty china plate with three mini-pizzas on it. I picked up the first one with my fingers and ate it.

Everyone stopped talking. Somebody started laughing. “Look at him. He’s eating like a Libyan,” she said. Then everyone laughed. After this, all the Egyptians proceeded to eat their pizzas the proper (British) way, with a knife and fork.

Sometimes I could understand why Libyans generally disliked Egyptians so much.

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To Protect and Serve

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Christine, one of our teachers in Libya, was walking down a main street in Tripoli. She noticed that a teenaged Libyan was following her. He kept his distance but he also kept making hissing noises at her. She ignored him. The boy kept following.

Suddenly a car zoomed up and screeched to a halt beside the boy. Christine stopped and turned around to see what was happening. To her surprise, a man got out of the car, grabbed the boy and dragged him over to where she was standing.

It turned out that the man was a plain-clothes policeman. He told Christine that she needed to accompany him and the boy to the police station. When she asked why, he told her that she had to bring charges against the boy for sexual assault, so that he could put the boy in prison.

Christine thought the policeman was overreacting. “He’s only a boy,” she laughed. “And he didn’t really do anything.”

“He was harassing you,” replied the policeman. “In Libya we don’t allow men to harass women. We need to put him in prison.”

Christine had visions of the boy being imprisoned for years and having his whole life ruined. So she kept reasoning with the policeman. It took a while but she eventually persuaded him to let the boy go after giving him a stern talking-to.

“Now I will drive you to where you are going,” the policeman told Christine. She said that wasn’t necessary but he insisted. So she got into his car.

The policeman then drove her to an empty building lot and proceeded to try to assault her.

Christine never could see that by insisting the boy was set free, she had effectively told the policeman she welcomed or at least didn’t mind sexual advances from strangers.

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Friday Night at the Movies

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Even back in 1970 Beirut was a very sophisticated city. However, if you looked hard, you could find parts of the city that were still unspoiled. One such place was Le Baron cinema.

Sue, our friend Dereck and I used to go Le Baron every Friday night. One reason for this was that no other expatriates ever went there and so we were guaranteed an authentic Lebanese experience. Another reason was that they always showed two good, full-length action films, usually a war film and a western. It was there that I first saw such classics as “Sabata: the man with gunsight eyes comes to kill”.

One endearing feature of Le Baron was that most of the seats were broken. Some were missing seat cushions, others were missing armrests. So our first task every week was to find three seats together that were largely intact. We would then reach over to other seats, pull off any pieces we needed and add them to our seats.

All the films were in English but they had Arabic and French subtitles. As the other patrons didn’t speak English, they relied on the subtitles and naturally felt free to talk over the soundtrack. So we three had to fall back on reading the French subtitles. We were usually able to follow the main gist of the films, although we would get confused when the translations were a little off-track: for example, when “God” was translated as “chien” (dog).

One of the great things about Le Baron was there was always lots of audience participation. When a western was showing, the spectators would boo the villains and cheer the heroes, and we would boo and cheer along with them. When it was an American war film, things would turn upside down and everyone would boo the American military and cheer the German or Japanese soldiers. Some of the patrons near us would turn around to check that we, too, were booing and cheering appropriately. We never disappointed them.

The very best thing about the cinema, though, was related to smoking. This was banned in all cinemas in Beirut but more or less everyone who went to Le Baron smoked, and smoked a lot: From our usual seats near the back, we could look towards the screen and see the red tips of scores of cigarettes in front of us. Not surprisingly, the police knew about this and they felt obliged to enforce the smoking ban. So at some point every Friday evening a police officer would enter the cinema and walk down the aisle, shouting at everyone to put their cigarettes out. The red tips blinked out row by row as he passed, and by the time he reached the screen nobody was smoking. Then he would walk back up the aisle. And as soon as he passed each row, everyone in that row would immediately light up again. By the time the officer reached the back of the cinema, everything was back to normal and we were watching the film over a sea of glowing red tips.

I miss Le Baron.

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