Iran From Four Feet

Prologue

My brother Peter and I came to live in Tehran because my father was working as a civil engineer for a company called Binnies. Dad was helping to design a desalination plant to be built on the Persian Gulf at Shahbahar. We arrived in Iran in January 1975 travelling from Hong Kong.  Frances our sister was born on 5^th April 1975.  We left Iran in April 1977 and moved to London.  Mum looked after us but also found time to do some English teaching for three Vietnamese children who lived in the ground floor flat.  She found Tehran far more frustrating than the rest of us because then, and I guess things haven’t changed that much, you had to be a man if you want to get anything done.  However we did seem to get a lot done, and travelled round the city with ‘Thunder Taxis’.  We did wonder whether they were thinking of 'Lightning' rather than 'Thunder', but thunder was fine.  My parents were indebted to their friendship with the Arpees.  Janet Arpee was my mum’s midwife when Frances was born.  Steve was our priest.  Jonney, their eldest son was our baby sitter, and Dave was a constant source of ‘bad influence’.  He was really kind to us boys, cooking us American pancakes and showing us how to dive into their pool swallowing a floating mulberry in the process.  Another important friend was Tong Ng, a Chinese engineer from Hong Kong.  We visited the Tehran Chinese restaurant together and he taught us how to make, and play table top football with bits of card.

Certainly the return to England was a sharp jolt.  I wasn't used to being ‘picked on’ and must have been a bit of an oddity with my American accent and lack of football knowledge.  I was disappointed that my classmates in England knew so little about other countries, and indeed, seemed to have very little interest.

Thinking back, I feel that the enriching experience of the time we spent in Iran far outweighed any of the negativity I experienced upon our return to England.  We were also able to have a different perspective on a wonderful nation that was to suffer so much in the years to come after the revolution.

Roofscape of Tehran with Damavand in the background

Iran From Four Feet

Slipping hooves sent a small rock fall spinning down into the ravine.  Gripping tightly to our saddles we watched Peter, with not a glimmer of fear, dig his heals into ‘Pegasus’ and urge him on 'faster, faster'.  My Aunt dismounted at the bottom looking deathly pale, her eyes were wild and frantic, not dissimilar to those of the mules themselves.  My brother had the look of someone unconvinced that he had had complete value for the ride.  However we all agreed it had been an unforgettable experience.

During the spring of 1975 Aunt Lis visited Tehran to support the family at the time of my sister’s birth.  She had an adventurous spirit, which matched the aspirations of her young nephews.  The Tehran bus system offered a reasonably predicable mode of transport given that our Farsi was limited to daily shopping.  We recorded the number of the bus, got on and travelled to the end of the line.  That day we travelled north through the steep rise of the city streets.  The effect of spring’s evolving changes unwound along the avenues of plane trees as we climbed through the city’s boulevards.  The bus terminated at the foot of the great mountain range which defines the northern backdrop to Tehran.  There to our joy was a chair lift.  As most of the snow had melted we found that it had closed for repairs.  However within seconds a man appeared offering to take us to the head of the valley by mule.  Our intrepid aunt agreed and from there we started our tightrope traverse of Niagara.

Lis received many tributes and accolades from us boys.  We shared her understanding that for the young, there is a basic need to put life through its paces, much the same I would imagine as a person receiving their first new sports car.  Her letters were always multifaceted and written in code.  For example the code for Farsi was a person gazing through binoculars.

We had had previous adventures with Lis.  She visited us when we lived in Hong Kong and took us on an adventure to the island of Chung Chou.  Lis told us a serialised story about a boy called James.  Chung Chou had a pirate’s cave and we set out to find it.  Mercifully the island is not large, and after a walk of about a mile we found a cave in the cliffs over-looking the South China Sea.  Both Peter and I went into the cave to explore.  I certainly expected to find some sort of treasure, though perhaps only a remnant.  There was nothing to be seen although I did detect the distinctly familiar odour of ‘public connivance’.

Lis also took us to a magical fair.  I remember we had a meal in a cafe that was complete guesswork on her part.  It seemed quite edible though I remember she whisked us off when it started to get dark.  Much later we were told that the fun fair doubled a brothel by night.

‘James’ transferred locations when we did and continued to do amazing things in Iran as he had done in Hong Kong.  Years later when James had grown up, Lis married him and he became our Uncle.

Our first residence in Iran was the Iran Hotel.  It was actually an unassuming place as I remember, with very few guests. Peter and I had our first view of ice from our first floor window.  We spent some time gazing at the glazed surface of a garden pond, before resuming or fight.  The Iran Hotel provided us with much unintended entertainment.  We enjoyed watching the dining room being papered with bright red and green paper embossed with golden zigzags.  Sadly a number of rolls were put up the wrong way round adding to the crazed effect.  If I return one day to Iran I hope to stay in the hostel to once again experience that nightmare of dissonance.  Perhaps also I could return to our old room to look behind the radiator and discover whether I am able to fish out the thunderbird space pod I dropped down the back and spent much time straining and stretching to reach.  Childish memories have a wonderful ability to be rekindled by sounds and smells.  A sound from the Iran Hotel that has come back to me at various times is the ‘plong, plong’ of the saloon doors by the staircase up t the bedrooms.  This sound is appreciated in the Jack Tattie film ‘Monsieur Elou’s Holiday’.

Our school was the best ever, ‘The Henry Martyn International Christian School’.  The teaching was largely in English.  Sadly Farsi was only taught to the Iranian Children.  Every morning we had an assembly in the corridor of the school around the Head’s office.  I remember the Head at one assembly confessing that the ‘English’ children would complain about this next song because we have to sing ‘sheeps’ to make it rhyme.  That was a sure invitation to get the English children involved in a minor semantic protect.

It is a truism to say that in most countries any attempt to eat restaurant creations from one’s own native cuisine in ‘asking for it’  With English fare not standing high in the national cuisine ratings, the Iran Hotel’s attempts at reproducing a sandwich were a predictable disaster.  Our packed lunch for school tended to be a plastic bag full of white crumbs, after the slices had disintegrated, with the filling floating to the top.  In the beginning everything came with carrot jam and gherkins.  I am now a keen gherkin eater but then the fillings only filled the bin.

When we first joined The Henry Martyn School, Peter and I were aged six and seven.  The older children felt like teenagers, although they were about ten.  Most of the children were Americans families working with the Iranian military.  There were a number of Filipinos and a mixture of Europeans. My teachers were American, Australian and Indian, and all were immensely creative.  My first teacher was called Mr Priddy and he was also the Head.  He was famous for beating both Peter and me for misbehaving in class. Peter was beaten for being mean to another child.  The stick snapped across his bottom, which somehow reduced the pain and humiliation.  I was beaten for throwing a paper aeroplane across the classroom when Mr Priddy was just re-entering the room.  It is perhaps sad that these memories seem to have dwarfed memories relating to his creative and adventurous qualities, but that is the nature of violent acts.  

Mr Priddy got our class to produce a book called the ‘How to Make it Book’.  We each described how to make something with illustrations. I think I described how to make a paper aeroplane, with painful consequences.  The only other contribution I remember clearly was how to make a clay pot.  This was by rolling out a long sausage of clay and winding it round like a coiled snake.  It was presented to us by ‘Ruth’, a lovely American girl who was probably the first to stir emotions, though not on the same scale as those produced by the cane.

Mr Priddy organised the school trip to a mountain nature reserve to the north of Tehran. We stayed in two large tents.  I was reasonably concerned that the other children might notice that Peter and I were sleeping in blankets folded into sleeping bags joined with nappy pins from Frances.  I carefully chose the blankets were the safety pin heads were not plastic animal heads.  The dreaded discovery never occurred.  The school was amazing for the lack of bullying and teasing while we were there.  I remember being told that the plants we were camping on didn’t mind being trampled on and indeed when we left, our activities would result in new growth as the ground would be churned up as though fertilised by a herd of animals.  I don’t remember going to the toilet at all and my mother noted that e washed without unwrapping the soap she sent us with.  As a camp we all went trekking.  In the searing heat we saw snakes, a black bear, an Ibis and two scorpions.  These we greeted with fear and aggression.  One was butchered by eight flailing camping knives.  It’s a wonder that no one lost a finger.  The other was dispatched by getting it to sting itself on its back by tickling it with a twig.

A host of transit vans collected us children from every suburb of Tehran.  Behaviour on our bus was not good, and on a number of occasions the driver had to stop and implore us to stay in our seats.  There was a tradition on the buses was to sing American ‘anti-school- songs, which I guess didn’t help maintain the peace.  It was on the back seat of one of those buses that Peter and I got our first close up look at a vagina.  This was of course a reciprocal arrangement.  The driver must have been puzzled by the sudden period of hush during the drive.

Our first flat was on Thirteen Street near to the military mosque.  The call to prayer has always seemed a normal occurrence to me.  The flat’s main feature was its spectacular view over the Mountains including Damavad, a volcano of classic proportions.  The landlord lived in the flat beneath us.  My parents felt that every time they paid the rent be went and bought a new carpet.  His flat certainly was ‘wall to wall’.  In the summer we could see the families of Tehran taking refuge from the heat by sleeping in big beds on their flat roofs.  If the wind was in the wrong direction, most people knew that the stifling heat indoors was better than being covered in oily smuts from the refinery on the edge of the city.  In the winter the snow fall was so heavy that there was a risk that these same roofs might collapse.  Young men patrolled the streets with snow shovels offering to clear snow off the roofs.  This process involved launching great wheelbarrow loads of snow down on to the streets below with muffled thuds, warning passers-by to be wary. 

During the Islamic festival of Eid, Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice Ishmael to the Lord is remembered.  In eastern countries where bureaucracy fills a different realm, people are allowed to ritually slaughter sheep in remembrance of this vindication of faith.  Thirteenth Street not only provided us with superb views over the mountains, it also enabled Peter and me much to our mothers displeasure, were able to observe our neighbours string up a ram slit its throat and let the blood flow.  It actually flowed into their empty swimming pool.  We imagined the whole pool would eventually fill with blood, but i didn’t.  The carcass was skinned and we missed out on subsequent events.  Our landlord was Armenian.  The Shah of Iran allowed many Armenians to settle in Iran after Turkish massacres and Soviet domination of Armenia.  They invited us to join them at a church festival where we feasted on stuffed vine leaves.

My parents became concerned for the safety not only of the internal fabric of the flat, but also for their newly acquired daughter Frances, so we moved to a downstairs flat with a swimming pool and garden.  Peter and I were keen roller-skaters and the old flat with its marble floor, made an ideal rink.  We found that Frances too enjoyed skating.  We pulled her behind us in her bouncy chair at great speed.

I remember the day Frances was born.  Lis came to collect us from school.  We were in the sun filled entrance hall to the school.  We both knew that she would be a girl.  I wanted her to be called Ruth (for some reason), but Mum and Dad wanted Frances, after the hymn writer Frances Ridley Havergill.  So she became Frances Ruth.  We later called her 'Wizzy', and 'Wonker', after Rol Dhal’s Charlie and Chocolate factory.

The second flat was luxurious. The owners lived in the basement and forwent the use of their swimming pool.  I think I can remember Dad encouraging them to use it but perhaps their reluctance was to do with the fact that it was filled by snow melt from the mountains and even in the heat of summer retained an icy edge.

It was in this flat that we learnt about the power of incentives for good behaviour.  Jonney Arpee was our baby sitter.  He was said to always need us to be absolutely quiet to enable him to study in the evenings.  We found this hard to believe as whenever we came out of our rooms he would do number games with us.  We had to think of a number between one and ten.  He would then tell us to divide it, add this, take this away etc.  Then he would tell us the number we had left.  I have often mused over the sum that might be employed to create this convergence.  Many years later we met in England when Jonney had been invited over from America to sort out jumbled mobile phone frequencies in the M4 corridor.  I wondered whether he was doing his same old number tricks in reverse.  Anyway, and I am sure he would have done just as well if we had disturbed him, we were strictly forbidden to disturb him.  We determined that in order to win our reward, we would not leave our rooms, not even to go to the loo.  Peter resolved to keep a handy plastic bag, fill it, and throw it out of the window into the Landlord drive.

Iran is a wonderful place to be a child.  Not only do shopkeepers serve children in their shops first, there is a general communal responsibility for the care of children.  Naturally Peter and I felt it quite unfair that while we were sent to the local chops every day to buy bread and cheese, our parents slumbered in bed.  Often we had to wait in the bakery for the loaves to be baked.  The standard loaf in Tehran was the Babari.  This is similar to a long wide slightly leavened baguette.  It is delicious when hot and is stale, like baguette, by the end of the day.  Often not much of it reached home for breakfast.

The Henry Martyn School sat on top of a basement church hall.  The school yard was always a great place to be.  Invariably anyone who wanted to could join in a game of kick-ball.  This was rounders with a football, and a foot rather than a bat.  In the winter we set up ice slides. At the Zoroastrian New Year Norruze, staff set up traditional fire jumping ceremony for us to take part in.  Tumbleweed was collected from the countryside and small fires were set in the manner of ‘leap frog’.  Licensed pyromania is part of most cultures but I can’t remember having such a ‘hand on’, or rather feet through, experience anywhere else.

As with most cities, Tehran was a mixture of ‘mud and stars’.  The mud was evident in the winter when everything looked grey and cold.  The gardens all died and the trees lost their leaves.  Only the multitude of sparrows kept the place alive.  Thousands upon thousands of sparrow filled the plane trees that lined the boulevards.  They rose in swarms and their chirping created a mesmerising cacophony of sound that seemed to fill the world.

We visited the bazaar a few times.  There was only one thing I wanted and the bazaar was the place to find it.  Flags, maps and aeroplane livery have always been a secret obsession of mine.  In those days it wasn’t so secret and I was able to purchase my own Iranian table top flag complete with gold braid and a big shiny brass base. 

The north of the city was where wealthy people hung out.  The summers were cooler and many houses had swimming pools.  The climate changes rapidly between winter, spring and summer.  Lis came during the two weeks allotted to spring.  We visited a friend in the north of the city.  Lis became famous for diving into their pool, rapidly surfacing, exiting and exclaiming “the blood in my veins has frozen, turned sideways, and stabbed me”.  Even in the height of the summer when the paving slabs in the garden burnt our feet, our pool was freezing, but this of course didn’t stop us boys living in it.

The mountains in the north of Iran have some of the most dramatic geology it is possible to imagine.  Great vertical roller coasters of strata fall dramatically through dry scree slopes into lakes below.  The ridge of less eroded strata stand out like the backbone of some enormous dinosaur.  When we used to go up to the mountains for a picnic, Peter and I had great fun surfing down the scree on sheets of slate.  Our driver, Ali, was kind and good fun to be with. He used to show us where to find thistles with edible roots.  When the root was pealed it tasted like artichoke heart, which shouldn’t have been much of a surprise.  Once Ali took us on up through the valley over the top and down to the Caspian Sea.  As we went over the top the world changed.  On the Tehran side the mountains were dry and bare.  On the Caspian side they became so verdant that long creepers hung down over the road.  The Caspian was like any sea I guess.  I regret messing around with Peter’s facemask.  I took it from him in the sea.  Then threw it back to him.  We searched for a while but without the facemask we hadn’t a hope of finding it.  My poor brother had to be the forgiving type or we would have come to serious blows.

On one memorable occasion we went for a walk in the mountains with a friend called John Forrest.  The walk followed a long irrigation canal lined by willow trees through an otherwise dry valley.  At the head of the valley was a stunning and refreshing waterfall. Seated near to the cool spray from the waterfall were about forty students.  As we drew closer we realised that our group was the source of some amusement to them.  One of the students was waving a stick in the manner of a baton and conducting a song of ridicule in our direction.  John was the first to surmise the meaning in this merriment.  He was wearing a smart white pair of shorts he had bought recently in a Tehran supermarket.  He realised that wearing them, as he was, in their uncovered state could be likened to strolling across the Yorkshire Moors in ‘y’ fronts.

Famous Bridge in Isfahan

We went to Isfahan twice during our time in Iran.  The first time we went was with Lis.  We flew in a little Air Iran jet.  Isfahan is a beautiful city but naturally the things we liked best were unusual, like being ushered by a mosque attendant up a flight of stairs on to the roof from where we had an impressive view over the famous royal square surrounded by two mosques, a place and the bazaar.  What more could a Shah need?  We also went up the ‘shaking minarets’ which really swayed.  On the way back to Tehran I had to put up with sitting next to a very smelly mullah.

The second visit was with a church party. This visit also included a trip to a rural village made of mud brick flat roofed buildings.  Each roof had a great stone roller to hand.  Every year the roofs are replenished with mud and rolled flat.  The family of the home we visited wisely took the money and kept out of the way.  We saw how they all slept on a carpet in one room around a paraffin burner.  Seeing this house rekindled a distant memory of visiting our bearer’s house in Pakistan which had a courtyard, donkey and two rooms at the back.  I must have been about three but the memory is still vivid.

The villages in the dry central region of Iran are supplied by water from the mountains.  Catching the water before it disappears has always been a challenge in near desert landscapes.  In Iran the qanat is an amazing feet of engineering.  Water is taken underground by tunnel to the villages.  The progress of the qanat is clearly visible as vertical shafts punctuate its length.  From the air this gives the impression of a long line of bomb craters trailing off into the distance.  Qanat engineers must be fearless.

Qanats crossing the desert

The other structures of not in the rural areas were the enormous round dovecotes, again made of mud brick.  The interior is mucked out every year to provide fertiliser for the fields.

Pigeon Tower

Peter and I had to find lots of ingenious ways of occupying ourselves during the church trip.  We were not keen churchgoers at the time.  I remember we discovered that the large thorny leaves of a succulent plant in the hotel garden readily adapted into sabres and could inflict real injuries.

We also travelled to the Southern city of Shiraz.  This is a city famous for poetry and Persepolis.  Our parents were dismayed that Peter and I weren’t interested in Listening to the cassette guide to the historic palace sacked in error by Alexander after a night of revelry and high spirits.  We preferred to race round the site at break neck speed though we did slow down when a desert rat came out of its hole in one of Xerces burial chambers.

Pesepolis

Pesepolis

Persepolis was ok but for us kids there was hardly anything there.  None of the buildings had roofs and the most you could make out that it actually had been a building was a few window frames and some extraordinary high pillars.  One of the capitals was in particularly good condition.  Most had been severely damaged when they had fallen on that fateful night of fire.  Ironically the capital that was in the best condition was one which the craftsmen had spoilt.  Instead of dragging it away, or chipping it to bits, they had buried it on the spot.  The mythical beasts carved on the capital are now the logo of Iran Air.

Mr Jenner was my second teacher at school.  He was a creative Australian.  Every day he would produce us a new worksheet which he produced on an old bander printer.  We spent some time just sniffing the alcohol that is came dripping with.  Our class that year could easily be split into Americans and Europeans for quiz specials.  I remember asking my mother why the American children always seemed to need to brag about their country.   Mum explained that America was a new country that needed to attempt to create a cohesive culture to bind its disparate population together.  The way they did this was to make out that they were the best at everything.  Subsequently boasting from my class mates was easier to cope with given this context.

I remember being astonished to see Mrs Hilton, a large American teacher, openly cry in the playground after Carter beat Ford in the US presidential election.

The transatlantic quizzes Mr Jenner conducted were tense affairs. I remember being able to answer two crucial questions at a critical face saving stage.  The first was ‘what is the smallest city in England?’  I flippantly retorted ‘London’, knowing this would be wrong.  ‘Correct’, of course the city of London is the famous ‘square mile’.  The second gave Europe an unfair advantage as Mr Jenner asked what the capital city of Scotland was.  I said Glasgow, and was given the mark, when it is actually Edinburgh.  Perhaps I should have stuck with London, but that’s controversial.

Another novel classroom activity that we were introduced to was a mock trial.  I was the classes first criminal.  My crime was a real one having been caught pushing in to the lunch queue.  I remember the indignity of having my character and conduct discussed openly in the class, especially in front of Josey and Vi.  Needless to say the jury found me guilty and my sentence was to be made to run around the playground two times. Mercifully the whole class decided to join in with the punishment.

My final year at Henry Martyn was with Mrs Das and Mrs Timms.  Mrs Das got us to do a project on our national countries and present them to the class.  I did mine on Hong Kong being a little confused about my origins at the time.  Mrs Das did her own presentation on India.  She brought a spare sari in for a volunteer to wear.  No one would try it on so I did.  Mrs Timms got us to give Valentine cards to all of the opposite sex in the class.  I made two special ones for Josey and Vi.  I even put kisses on their chairs so that they would sit on them.   To my horror I found I got special cards back, but not from Josey or Vi.  Two other girls were interested in me.  I was definitely not interested in them.  At home in my bedroom I had made a special ‘I love Vi’ sign by my bed, attached to the wall with a red ribbon.  It was fortunate for the poor girl that we didn’t travel to school on the same minibus.

The End

First thing you see when you arrive at the airport.  at the top is a room with a bit of moon rock given by USA to Iran.
Not sure if it is still there.