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Foreword by PENELOPE LIVELY
Author of Booker Prize winning novel, Moon Tiger; Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived; The Photograph; and other books.
A FAMILY IN EGYPT is a fascinating reflection of life in Egypt over a period of a hundred and thirty years-culminating in the nineteen fifties and so, from the viewpoint of the early twenty-first century, a period piece. Episodic and idiosyncratic, it is also an oblique portrait of a woman-a person of humour, warmth, and infinite curiosity. Mary Rowlatt did not set out to write about herself-far from it-but the text is infused with that bracing personality, so that she lifts from the pages quite as vividly as the Egyptians of whom she writes and the place that she conjures up.
It is a vanished place, for the most part. Cairo and Alexandria of the early twentieth century are barely discernable beneath the concrete and the roaring traffic of today; all the more valuable, then, this testimony of another age. And of the preceding ages; the account of the Rowlatt family's five generation association with Egypt serves up some sharp and telling insights into the changing fortunes of the country, and also the role of foreigners. The book was of course written at a point when the relationship between Britain and Egypt was at a disastrously low point, in the time of the Suez crisis; it is all the more poignant to read of Mary Rowlatt's father's presence at the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, as a little boy of four.
Frederick Rowlatt went on to become Governor of the National Bank of Egypt. Here, I should declare an interest; in 1930, my father, Roger Low, went to Cairo as a very young man to work as assistant to Sir Frederick Rowlatt's successor, Sir Edward Cook. I was born in Cairo three years later, and spent my childhood there until going to England at the end of the second World War. I too was a child who grew up to the sounds and smells of Cairo, whose family home had a garden in which there was a banyan tree with those aerial roots on which you could swing. I knew the name Rowlatt well; in Alexandria there was rue Arthur Rowlatt, along which I walked to the beach when my mother rented a villa there for the summer. And I have a vestigial memory of being taken to a children's tea-party in a beautiful garden, where the hostess was Lady Rowlatt - undoubtedly Zohria, the Rowlatt family home in Gezira.
The Rowlatt house in Alexandria was in Ramleh, a residential suburb of the city when I knew it as a child during the war - a place of elegant villas and of gardens filled with bougainvillea and poinsettias and zinnias and canna lilies and plumbago. When Arthur and Amelia Rowlatt were in Alexandria in the 1860's they used to move out to Ramleh in the summer, then five miles from the city, to pitch a tent among Bedouin neighbours. I was last in Alexandria in 1990. By then, the villas and gardens had been obliterated by a sea of low-rise apartment blocks. A hundred and fifty years, during which two successive landscapes have disappeared.
Egypt itself is another country. Mary Rowlatt reminds us of a place in which bilharzia and trachoma were endemic, in which life expectancy for the fellahin stood at around forty. Her book is neither history nor sociology, but one of those intriguing unclassifiable works that often do more to illuminate a time and a place than any calculated enterprise. She simply wrote down what she knew, and what she remembered. The result is a very individual vision of a country and its people, and of what they meant to one family. It is excellent to see it given a new lease of life.
–Penelope Lively
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