Inebriates of Arabia

The take-away burger that was picked up for me each day from the Mall of Dhahran usually had the consistency of hessian mixed with reconstituted corrugated cardboard. The only thing in it that tasted like something resembling actual food was the gherkin and I never ate that anyway. With no nutritional value, the burger was an edible time-bomb and as I chomped down and swallowed a chunk it would hit my stomach like a hammer striking an anvil and once there it would release its daily dose of delayed-action constipation. The half-gallon bucket of coke that accompanied the burger was packed with so much sugar that if I finished it I would most probably have been sent tumbling into a diabetic coma. Sugar was in everything in Saudi Arabia. The diet coke over there contained more sugar than a regular coke in the UK. And I suspect that even sugar itself had extra sugar in it.

I didn’t mind the constipation because it was usually short lived because the home brew wine and beer I drank in the evening counteracted the effects of the burger and gave me the runs.

Living on a compound in a dry country forced the men (and women) to be every bit as resourceful and creative as the POWs in Stalag Luft 13. Almost everyone made their own wine on the British and multi-national compounds throughout Saudi Arabia. One option available to satisfy the average Westerner’s raging thirst for alcohol – unless they wanted to run the risk of buying the real stuff in Bahrain and smuggling it over the King Fahd Causeway into Saudi Arabia (something that was not recommended) – was to make their own. In order to make this dream a reality, a team of anonymous dedicated drinkers from the Aramco compound produced a secret underground ‘cookbook’ that contained recipes, complete with the ingredients required and comprehensive instructions, on how to make every kind of alcoholic beverage imaginable.

Those that didn’t make their own bought it from people who made wine on an industrial scale and sold it with their own labels attached. Others made sidhiki (or sidh, as we called it), a locally distilled moonshine that tasted a bit like rum when mixed with coke. To make whisky they infused the sidh with Jack Daniels Wood Chips for about three months and then filtered it. I remember a party I went to at a friend’s house one night. He had constructed a Heath Robinson-like still out of a 20 litre water container, a heater and some lengths of plastic tubing. I, along with the other men, naturally gravitated to the kitchen. The still was positioned on top of a fridge-freezer and every time the door was opened and closed the still would vibrate and a small amount of distilled alcohol would run down the inside of the container and deposit itself, via a plastic tube, into a receptacle underneath. We were transfixed, amazed at this magical transformation, and we looked on like children in wide-eyed wonderment as our friend turned water into whisky, and all we could think of as we gazed in awestruck amazement was, “We are not worthy! We are not worthy!”

An American doctor from one of the large oil companies used to make and sell his own sidh throughout the Eastern Province. I met him at a party one night and he explained the process to me. “Most people tend to filter the sidh two or three times. That’s why a lot of it is rough and makes your heart race. If you drink enough of that stuff you’ll go blind. I filter my product seven times before I take it to Saad hospital to have it tested.”

I was intrigued. Saad hospital was run by the Saad Group, who owned the compound I was living on at the time. It covered a vast area in Al-Khobar and was decorated inside with marble floors, fountains and fish ponds. One floor of one of the buildings was a ‘Ladies Centre’, a female only area where ladies could relax without wearing their black abaiyas, and where they were offered manicures, pedicures and massages by women from Thailand and the Philippines on less than minimum wage.  

“I take in a sample of each batch I make and test its purity,” the doctor told me.

“Isn’t that a bit risky? Aren’t you worried you’ll get caught?”

“No. Most of them don’t know what it is and the rest either don’t care or they want to buy some from me. You’d be surprised to learn just how many of our Arab friends drink the stuff. There’s underground bars all over Saudi. They’re like the speakeasies in prohibition times.”

Making sidh on an industrial scale could, however, often be a dangerous business. One man on one of the compounds in the Eastern Province converted his store room into a micro-distillery and supplied the entire compound with his home-made hooch. One morning he received a phone call from his wife complaining about a strange smell emanating from the store room. He assured her that it was nothing to worry about, but asked her to check on it anyway. When his wife opened the store room door the still exploded, setting fire to the house and killing her instantly.

Making wine was easier and safer. All the equipment you needed was an empty 20 litre water container, a length of plastic tubing, 20 x 1 litre bottles, a balloon pricked with a pin and a cork large enough to securely fit into the neck of the water container. Here’s the recipe (or at least what I can remember of it):

Ingredients

·        18 litres of Danya red or white grape juice

·        3 kilos of sugar

·        1 pack of instant Yeast, preferably wine yeast bought from Wilco in the UK and smuggled back into Saudi.

Method

1.     Heat 3 litres of the grape juice and add the sugar. Stir until all the sugar dissolves. Once dissolved pour this into the 20 litre water container. Add the rest of the grape juice and top up with a little cold water. Sprinkle in the yeast and give the container a good shake. Make a hole in the cork and feed a short length of plastic tubing through it. Attach the balloon to the end of the tubing and place the cork into the neck of the water container.

2.     Leave for 10 days in a warm place. The balloon will inflate as the sugar turns to alcohol. Once the balloon stops inflating, syphon the liquid into the bottles, taking care to leave any sediment behind and secure the tops.

3.     When bottled, start another batch.

4.     It will be ready to drink three weeks after bottling.

Parties on the compounds usually started on Wednesday at about 6 in the evening and went on until the early hours of the morning (weekends in Saudi ran over Thursdays and Fridays) and it was standard practice to bring along three or four bottles of your home-made wine. These were required not just for the process of getting inebriated, but also to involve yourself in the impromptu wine tasting sessions that went on throughout the evening. Wine makers were justly (and sometimes unjustly) proud of what they produced and took any and every opportunity to show off their products to their fellow vintners. Red wines were the most popular because they were more consistently drinkable. White wines were more difficult to get right and were therefore produced by the more experienced wine makers, whereas any idiot could make a decent red wine, even on their first attempt.

These party-going wine connoisseurs swapped recipes with each other and marvelled at the quality of each other’s products. I overheard one woman say, “I like my red wine sweet, so I add a bottle of concentrated Ribena to the grape juice.” Others would proclaim that their wine was better than any you could buy in the UK. This was, of course, blatantly untrue, as any trip back to the UK would prove. Drinking wine in the UK is a pleasurable and relaxing experience, designed to tickle the taste buds and excite the palette, whereas drinking home-made wine in Saudi took a certain degree of effort – the first couple of mouthfuls often turned your face inside out – and was designed exclusively for guzzling and the singular pleasure of getting completely pissed.

Making sparkling wine was even easier. All you had to do was buy bottles of apple juice or grape juice with the Grolsch type stoppers from the local supermarket, flip up the tops, sprinkle a few grains of yeast into the bottle, replace the tops and then wait three weeks. The sugar in the juice (remember – everything in Saudi has sugar in it) would turn to alcohol and you had a perfectly drinkable, strong-ish cold beverage. The only thing you had to be careful of was not to put too much yeast in each bottle otherwise they tended to explode!

After eighteen months of being out there the team I worked for was moved to another compound that was run by a well-known British aircraft manufacturing company. I won’t mention the name of the company. Instead, I will just refer to them as ‘the company’. The new compound had something that the old compound didn’t have.

Bars!

Bars that sold everything, including the real stuff, although many of the ‘old-timers’ stuck to drinking the home-made sidh and wine. Business for these bars boomed. Industrial scale home-made wine manufacturers prospered by selling their products to the bars in huge quantities.

There wasn’t much to do on the compounds and therefore drinking became the primary pastime for a good percentage of the Brits in Saudi Arabia and, considering that it’s a dry country, I have to admit that I think I drank more alcohol there than I did all the time I was stationed in RAF Germany in the 1970s.

The problem with indulging in this pastime was that you tended to put on more than a little weight. It was called the ‘Saudi pound’ and the beer bellies on some men grew exponentially with the number of years served, especially if that was exacerbated by a lack of exercise. I must admit that I was guilty of this and drank far too much than was humanly acceptable and consequently had a belly that could have doubled as a shelf.

Many of the wine-makers were so proud of their creations that they would often talk about continuing their illicit hobby when they returned to the UK. Personally, I doubt that very much. I left Saudi Arabia three years ago and, as well as losing all the weight I piled on over there, I can categorically state that I’d much prefer pay £4.50 for a decent bottle of Shiraz from Sainsbury’s, which I could fully enjoy rather than have my face turned inside out by the first gulp of the sub-standard home-made hooch I used to make in Saudi Arabia.

I took a £4.50 bottle of Shiraz to a party, where someone asked me what life was like in Saudi Arabia.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I was drunk most of the time.”

Cheers.  

Dinger

I first met William ‘Dinger’ Bell in Saudi Arabia in 2009. I was part of the MOD Saudi Arabia Project and, along with the rest of the team, had just moved to the recently opened BAE super-compound just outside Al-Khobar. There wasn’t much there to begin with, but it did have something the previous compound didn’t have – bars. Bars that sold alcohol. Real alcohol. And that’s where I met Dinger, sitting on a stool at the bar of the Causeway Club. He was ex-navy, a Scotsman, and he liked a drink. He was scruffy, a little overweight, balding on top and what hair he had was straggly and unkempt. I had no idea how old he was, but he did have one quality that made you look past the first impressions you may have had of him– he was funny. He had an innate sense of humour that was refreshingly infectious. He was always happy to see everybody he met and despite recovering from a wrecked marriage I honestly can’t think of a time when I didn’t see him with a smile on his face.

I remember him being overjoyed when he was invited to sit on the top table on one of the Burns’ Nights I’d organised, even more so when he was sat next to Dai, the British Trade Officer, who had a bottle of whisky concealed under the table, which he freely shared with Dinger.

Dinger seemed to be consigned to the role of the eternal singly, forever sat at the bar in his shorts and scruffy T-shirt. But that was before he met a striking Zulu woman called Regina Thusi. Within a couple of weeks of meeting Regina he’d had his hair cut. Gone were the scruffy T-shirts, replaced by smart collared shirts. He lost weight. He looked like a new man. He looked twenty years younger. Regina was good for him and over a short time it was obvious that he was totally in love with her as she was with him. She had seen something deeper in Dinger that other people may have missed.

They were still together when I left Saudi Arabia in 2014 but I followed his new life on Facebook as he and Regina travelled to her home in Africa and she to his home in the UK. It was clear to everyone who read their posts that they were deliriously happy with each other. They were a perfect couple, ideally suited to one another.

It is with great sadness, then, that I discovered this morning that Dinger has just passed away. I can only imagine how Regina must be feeling right now. The pain of losing her soulmate must be terrible and my heart goes out to her. She has lost a wonderful, generous and caring partner.

Even though I haven’t physically seen Dinger and Regina since I left Saudi in 2014, the news of the world losing such a lovely man is still a terrible shock.

May you rest in peace, my friend.

When William Met Edith

When Sean Edwards, William Owen and George Pickup arrived in France in the autumn of 1917, they were met by a gruff sergeant, who gave his personalised life-expectancy predictions to all the young men that joined his platoon. He delighted in watched their bum-fluffed faces drop as they realised how ephemeral their lives had become. In civilian life he'd spent much of his time at the race track, obsessively studying the form of the horses and calculating the odds that would give him the highest possible return on his stake money. He'd been very successful at this and it seemed only natural to utilise his unerring eye for winners and losers on the battlefields of France. As the war dragged on his predictions became frighteningly accurate and, by the time George, William and Sean arrived, the sergeant was able to predict, sometimes to the exact minute, when the new arrivals would be turned to mincemeat by German gunfire.

“Two weeks,” he say to Sean upon his arrival.

            “Sarge?”

            “Lanky streak of piss like you. I’ll give you two weeks.”

            Sean Edwards was brought up on the cobbled streets of Warrington in a world of alcohol, violence and religion. His mother had a capacity for gin that was at odds with her slender frame and demure manner, whilst his father, in stark contrast, was a teetotaller with a religious zeal that bordered on the pyschotic. His neighbours called him ‘The Bible Basher’, and with good reason. Behind closed doors he used his fists to hammer home Christ’s teachings to his sozzled wife and terrified son in order that they might be granted eternal salvation in the kingdom of heaven. He was a lunatic, driven insane by poverty and religious obsession. At the tender age of sixteen Sean saw the war in France as his only escape from the madness he was trapped in and so, in the late spring of 1917, he enlisted into the army and was never seen by his family again.  

            The men in Sean’s platoon nicknamed him Tiny because he stood head and shoulders above the rest of them and so presented an obvious target to even the most cross-eyed of German snipers. But, as luck would have it, the sergeant's prediction about Sean’s imminent demise was embarrassingly inaccurate although, ironically, he was dead right about the two weeks.

            Fourteen days later the three friends found themselves detailed to repair and deepen a low-lying trench their platoon was manning. To avoid being caught by the occasional bursts of machine-gun fire and the ever attentive sniper the men had to stoop down whenever they went from one place to the next. This made their task all the more difficult and uncomfortable. It had rained almost every day since their arrival at the Front, miserable, driving, bitterly cold rain that turned the churned up soil into slimy mud that poured into their trenches and made moving around almost impossible. Duckboards had been laid out but they only lasted a few days before they sank into the mud. Everything sank into the mud: weapons, helmets, men, horses, even tanks, or so they’d been told. The mud was everywhere. It was in their hair, caked on their uniforms. It clogged up their rifles so they wouldn’t fire. It was in their food, even the water they drank tasted of it.

            “Bloody bastard,” said Sean, as he hoofed another shovelful of the sticky mud over his shoulder. “I hate this place. Officers, sergeants. They're all the bleeding same.”

            The three men had been given this odious task by the platoon sergeant as a punishment for not saying the word sir enough when they were questioned by their Commanding Officer during a routine kit inspection.

            “I hate that bloody sergeant and I wish he were dead,” said Sean, burying the blade of his shovel into the wet earth.

            The words tripped easily off Sean’s tongue and although he didn’t know it when he said them, they were about to become prophetically true. A few minutes later the sergeant came to check on their progress and as he stepped into the trench the blade of Sean’s shovel accidentally caught him on the shin bone. The sharp knock inflicted by the shovel's blade caused the sergeant to cry out in pain, thereby giving away his position to Corporal Klaus Weber, one of the many crack German snipers concealed two hundred yards away in the wreckage of no-man’s-land. This unfortunate accident, in itself, should not have presented a problem, but the sharp pain that careered up the sergeant's leg made his body stand involuntarily upright. At this point a well-aimed bullet from Corporal Weber's Mauser K98 penetrated his skull. The three men digging the trench were at first oblivious to what had just occurred and they just stared with curiosity at the sergeant, their minds attempting to fathom out what was so different about what was so familiar only moments earlier. The penny finally dropped when they noticed the small hole that had appeared in the sergeant's forehead. His eyes were wide open and unblinking and the three friends were rigid with fright, as he stood over them, his eyes staring at some non-existent point on the horizon before his dead body slumped forward into the trench like a sack of potatoes. They cowered, gazing in horror at the large hole where the back of the sergeant’s head should have been and then the air around them exploded with the sound of gunfire. 

            From that moment on George and William felt safe whenever they were around Sean. They regarded him as their lucky charm, staying as close to him as humanly possible without making themselves appear unmanly. They’d heard rumours about some of the Officer Corps’ unnatural sexual preferences and didn’t want their proximity to Sean to be misconstrued as something they might regret when they found themselves alone in the presence of an officer with an unhealthy interest in young men. They spent the rest of the war together and led a charmed life. Sean found it amazing that the three of them had lived through it all without so much as a scratch, whilst most of their comrades were either dead or wounded.

            Sean put his ability to survive down to one thing, and one thing only – blind luck. He’d been at the right place at the right time. Fortunately George and William had been there with him and so had been protected from harm by his invisible aura of invulnerability.

            But it was not to last. A few weeks after the Armistice, when the three men were ready for demobilisation to England an invisible enemy that had been ruthlessly wiping out troops on both sides finally caught up with them.

            It killed Sean Edwards without mercy or compassion, penetrating the cells that lined his upper air passages. There it reproduced and mutated, infecting other cells along his respiratory tract before spreading deep into his lungs. Antibodies were produced but the invader changed its chemical composition and began to affect his heart. Sean Edwards died of broncho-pneumonia two days before his eighteenth birthday.

            George and William were amongst the lucky ones that survived the ravages of the Spanish Flu and they returned to England in the February of 1919. In a rare moment of compassion, after they'd been handed their discharge papers, two military policemen drove them to the railway station where they gave them some cigarettes to share on their journey home.

            “See you, lads,” said one of the MPs. “Look after yourselves and stay out of trouble.”

            “What you going to do now, Bill?” George asked as the two men watched the vehicle drive off into the distance.

            “Haven’t got a clue,” said William, looking back at the dirty grey Railway station.

            When he enlisted into the 2^nd East Lancashire Regiment during a recruitment drive in Dublin his fiercely republican father immediately ostracised him from the family for collaborating with the British and ordered him never to darken the door of the Owen family again. With the war at an end William couldn’t go home even if he wanted to.

            “Why don’t you come home with me for a while,” said George. “You know, till you find your feet. There’s plenty of room. Mam and Dad won’t mind. There’s lots of things to do in Blackpool and to be honest I’d like the company.”

            “I don’t know, George,” said William.

            “My sister’ll be there.”

            “What’s she like?”

            “How should I know? I haven’t seen her for two years.”

            William looked down the empty road, nodded and sighed. “Ah, what the hell,” he said picking up his bags, “I've got sod all better to do.”

***

George and William arrived in Blackpool on a cold day in the February of 1919. As the train pulled into South Shore Station George's parents were waiting for him on the heaving platform, dressed in their Sunday best clothes and waving frantically to catch his attention. When he caught sight of them George opened his arms and his mother rushed forward, elbowing her way through the crowds, and threw herself at him. He embraced his mother, breathing in her sweet perfume, and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel her sobbing. “Thank God! Thank God!” she said, as he held her tightly in his arms. His Father, never being one to display his emotions in public, simply extended his hand and said, “Welcome home, son.”

            “Where's Edith?” asked George.

            “She's at home making sandwiches for us all,” said his mother.

            William tried to keep a polite distance away from the family reunion but George would have none of it.

            “Come on, Bill, don't be a gooseberry,” George said. “Mam, Dad, this is who I wrote to you about.”

            “Pleased to meet you, Mr and Mrs Pickup,” said William offering his hand.

            “Never mind all that,” said Mrs Pickup, wrapping her arms around him. “Call us Mam and Dad. George wrote a lot about you and Tiny, so while you're here you're to look upon us as family. Alright.”

            “Alright,” said William, treating his surrogate Mother to a warm smile.

            “What a lovely smile you've got,” she said. “You'll have our Edith swooning like a schoolgirl when she sees you.”

            And Edith did swoon when she saw the handsome young soldier who spoke with a soft Irish lilt. She stood as close to him as she could, without making it look obvious, as they were eating the sandwiches she had prepared.

             Mr Pickup took a swig of tea and then slammed the cup on the table. “Bloody Hell, this calls for a real celebration,” he said, “tell you what Vera, me and these boys’re going down the pub.”

            Mrs Pickup rolled her eyes. “You’ll not be long now, will you? I don’t want you rolling home drunk at all hours.”

            “As if I would,” said Mr Pickup.

            “As if . . .” his wife echoed.

            Mr Pickup took his son and William to the Halfway House. It was his local and he was well known by the landlord as being a good customer. The landlord poured three pints and told Mr Pickup that they were on the house. George lifted his pint and said, “A toast. To Tiny. May we never forget him.”

            It was the first pint of many.

            William was tired after the long journey to Blackpool and only wanted to have a couple of pints and leave it at that, but he hadn’t counted on Mr Pickup’s persuasiveness and by closing time his vision was blurred, his speech incoherent and he could hardly stand up.

            “We’d better get you home, me lad,” said Mr Pickup, taking hold of William’s arm just as he was about to slide off the bar. “Come on George, give us a hand.”

            George and his father carried a near comatose William home and, quietly as they could (but not quietly enough), put him to bed in the spare room.

            “You bad buggers haven’t got that poor boy drunk, have you?” whispered Mrs Pickup as her husband climbed into bed.

            “Can’t take his drink,” said Mr Pickup, “but he’s a good lad all the same.”

            When William woke up the next morning his head felt like someone had been hitting it repeatedly all night long with a club. He felt sick and his mouth was as dry as a camel’s arse. He had no idea where he was at first but as the haze cleared and his memory started to return he realised that he must be in George's house. He carefully put his hands under the bedcovers and felt around and then thanked God that he hadn't pissed the bed. He looked around the room. There was an old dressing table with a mirror directly in front of him and his clothes were folded neatly over a chair in the far corner. Had he done that? He couldn't remember. The last thing he could recall was Mr Pickup buying him another drink at around eight the previous evening. Everything after that was a complete blank.

            His hazy recollections of the night before were interrupted by a soft tapping on the door, followed by a light, feminine voice. “Are you decent?” the voice said.

            He looked down at the covers to make sure nothing that shouldn't be sticking out wasn't sticking out. “Err, yeah,” he replied. “You can come in if you like.”

            He caught a whiff of perfume before Edith entered the room. “I've brought you some tea up,” she said smiling at him.

            “Thanks,” he said, taking the steaming mug of tea from Edith's tiny hands. “You don't know how much I need this.”

            “You're welcome,” she said shyly. “Oh, by the way, my name's Edith.”

            As she left the room, Edith closed the door and leant back on it. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, her breathing was hard and fast and she felt hot and light-headed. She brought her hand up to her breast and let out a long, barely audible sigh.

            William found work as a projectionist at the Old Coliseum Picture Theatre and on the day he received his first pay packet he asked Edith if she would go out walking with him. Mr and Mrs Pickup were delighted with William’s interest in their daughter. They’d liked him from the moment they’d first set eyes on him and when he finally plucked up the courage to ask for Edith’s hand in marriage he was already regarded as a member of the Pickup family. 

            William and Edith were married a year after he became a permanent member of the Pickup household. After the wedding they went to the Tower Ballroom where the orchestra, boasting an illuminated tap drum with effects, led by J. Woolf Gagg, performed an evening’s programme of three waltzes, three lancers, a foxtrot, a two-step and three novelty dances. The newly married couple swirled around the dance floor like they were supported on air and by the end of the night they were so exhausted they collapsed on the bed in their hotel room, wrapped in each other’s arms. Sex was the farthest thing from their minds that night and the next day they caught a train to Morecambe where they spent their short honeymoon in a small hotel. William didn't much like the place, there wasn't much to occupy his mind, but he was with Edith and that more than compensated for the lack of excitement. And when they finally consummated the marriage Edith didn't, as her mother had suggested, lie back and think of England. She thought, instead, of her husband's warmth and the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

***

And that is the story of how my grandparents met, fell in love and got married. Well, maybe. As far as I know none of what I wrote about them actually happened. I have no idea what my grandfather did during and immediately after the First World War so I made it all up. He rarely spoke of his experiences in the two world wars he was involved in, especially the First. The trauma of it all silenced a great number of the veterans who were unfortunate enough to have suffered through it. I knew he came from Dublin and I knew one of his friends died from the Spanish Flu shortly after the war ended, but that’s about it. And my grandma was actually from Burnley but as I know next to nothing about Burnley I changed the location to Blackpool where I grew up. But that’s just the way of true stories. They are unreliable and so you can tailor them to whatever you need them to say. My grandparent’s life together may or may not have started the way I described it, but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I do know one thing though and that is they fell in love with each other almost immediately and they loved each other for the rest of their lives. And that’s good enough for me.