WW2 in the Middle East

WWII in the Middle East
My father was a carpenter, the son of a whole generation of farmers from Sussex and it was a great sadness to him that the farms had been sold and he could not follow in their footsteps. When the war broke out he enlisted with the Royal Engineers and was posted to Aqaba, then in Trans-Jordan.

As a small child, I used to sit and hear stories about the Holy Land and the places he had seen. He had vivid blue eyes and red gold hair and he looked to me like the pictures of Jesus I had seen in books. I thought he was wonderful and when he died at only 59 of a heart condition, I wanted to be sure I remembered as much that he had told me as possible.

He said that men went mad in Aqaba. It was set against the Red Sea with a semi circle of mountains behind and some men found it claustrophobic and went mad to get out. Others, like dad, fell in love with it, with the Arabs and with seeing the places from history that they had read about.

One day when based in Aqaba, he had some days leave and saw a truck heading north and asked if he could join it. It was heading for Petra which was a place few had ever visited and some never heard of. Soon the truck was unloaded and they clung to small train accompanied by Arabs on horseback shooting rifles and yelling and riding alongside. They mounted horses and finally rode through Wadi Musa, the village outside Petra and through the towering gorge to the hidden city. How many times I asked my dad to tell me that story!

He had a chance for a brief look round and then returned to Aqaba. The week before he died he said to me "I wish I could go back. Try and go there. Try and see it all". It took me 30 years to keep my promise to him.

I had inherited some money and decided to go on a trip to Sinai and then on to Aqaba. It was strange to be amongst a throng of tourists, where in his time it must have been soldiers, with the strange Arabic tongue all around and the dust and the heat and the all enclosing mountains beyond just as he had described.

We headed north for Petra in a group of interested and serious tourists. It was magnificent, mysterious and mighty. There was a spirtuality there I had never known before.

In the course of my stay there I was sought out by Ahmad, a tour guide and archaeologist who was the son of the then Sheikh of Wadi Musa. For over 4 years we have had a wonderful romance and he has visited me in England and I have been invited back to Petra and stayed at his home 9 times. His family and the village have given me hospitality and I have got to know the places around, far from the tourist route.

Often we have barbecued in the mountains with a small camp fire and hubble bubble pipes, wonderful freshly cooked food and the stories and sometimes songs of the bedouin, all under the black cloak of the sky with millions of diamond stars. Sitting there in the desert one Christmas Eve I remembered how my father had loved the carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and that I was probably only about 60 miles away from Bethlehem itself. A strange feeling.

An experience like that is one that never leaves you. Ahmad and his family in Jordan will always be close to my heart - not just for what and who they are, and the love and acceptance they have given me, but for bringing back some of my father's wartime experiences to me. I am sure many women have been approached by tour guides out there and been flattered by the prospect of romance but for me there was another agenda. How I longed to tell dad what I had seen and done and how much he would have longed to have joined me.

Dad's stories of Trans-Jordan were amazing to me as a child but I never believed that as an adult, my own experiences as a result of listening to him, would be even more amazing. The bond I feel with Jordan and the Arabs is as great as his was and I feel I have returned to them a small portion of the emotions my father felt for them.

So some World War II stories did not finish with the end of the war, but have spread and infiltrated into our lives even at this distance in time.

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