Next Stop, England

For as long as I could remember, as a child, I heard my parents say that our family was only in Iran on a temporary basis. We had been stateless until I was 10, and my feeling was that the world was open to us and we could go wherever we wanted to, once we decided where that would be. I had no notion of geopolitics and the impossibility of such free access to the world. It seemed to me that we had ended up in Iran by accident and that our destiny was elsewhere, somewhere less fraught for me as a girl, in a place that considered me chattel and a target of arbitrary male malice.  By early adolescence, girls (and women) were considered fair targets for men’s harassment and could not walk on the street without being pinched, groped, or attracting prurient comments.  I was entering that stage in my life, where my fairly carefree access to the streets of Tehran were hampered by unwanted attention. 

I knew it was difficult to leave Iran, since in the past, my stateless father had to bribe and cajole to obtain a laissez passez every time he went abroad on business, but I thought everyone had to do the same.  (A laissez passez was a temporary permit to travel abroad, literally meaning let pass.) I assumed we would end up in the west eventually.  My parents admired Britain, and in a more indulgent way, the U.S., with its exuberance and optimism.  I personally was opting for the U.S., since I was going to an American school.  I considered the U.S. an extraordinary place. On learning about Mount Rushmore at about the same time as I was learning about erosion in the fourth grade, I thought the U.S. was so special that God had caused erosion to carve out the presidents’ faces on the mountain. My American school was run by missionaries so God was decidedly part of the curriculum, especially with my zealous fourth grade teacher.

At recess one day at the beginning of sixth grade, I saw my mother arrive at school and disappear into the administrative office.  I kept expecting to be pulled out of class to go home, or to get some explanation for my mother’s presence at school, but that didn’t happen.  That night, my mother informed my older sister, Stella, and me that we would be leaving for boarding school.  I had no inkling that this was being considered and was quite taken aback, not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, I liked the idea of leaving Iran and exploring the rest of the world, but on the other, I expected to leave as a family, not to be sent to boarding school alone.  I had never left Iran before and had only left Tehran itself a half a dozen times.  

My father was in England on business, and it seemed he had decided to enroll us in a boarding school a client of his recommended, St. James’s School for Girls.  I was never sure what prompted him to do that.  Was he trying to impress his client? Had he been considering this option for a while? Had my parents discussed this?  I didn’t know. My mother said that she thought it would be a good experience for us; she had seen movies of girls in boarding school and they were having so much fun.  I had no notion of what awaited us, not having seen those movies, but I wasn’t averse to taking my first step west. I recall being apprehensive and excited at the prospect.

As far as I can piece things together after some six decades, this was a decision borne of my parents’ conviction that anything western had to be better than living in the Middle East.  My father was born in Iraq when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was a decided improvement when Iraq came under British rule and a decided deterioration when the British departed.  The fact that the policy of genocide of Jews that started in Europe was now embraced by most Arab countries, I think, persuaded him that getting the family out of Iran, even piecemeal, was the right thing to do.  It was. Even though Iran is not an Arab country and was at that time welcoming to refugees, it was a Moslem country with allegiances which may not always be friendly to Jews, as the 1979 revolution proved.  

Preparing Stella and me for the change that was about to take place in our lives would have been helpful, but I don’t think it occurred to my parents that any preparation was necessary.  At the time, I don’t think I felt I needed any explanation either.  As far as my parents were concerned, we were being afforded a liberating opportunity, and details weren’t important.  Besides, my parents didn’t have any details.  It became clear after Stella and I were in England for a while, that my parents really didn’t know what they had committed to either.  Going to boarding school in England was good, and that was all any of us needed to know.

That week was busy with shopping for appropriate clothing, getting passports and visas, and making travel arrangements.  By now, we had become Iranian citizens and could travel with a passport rather than a laissez-passez.  I asked my mother to book us on a route that made the most stops; I wanted to visit as many countries as possible before arriving in London.  She informed me that landing in an airport was not like visiting a country, and that landings and take-offs were the most nauseating times in an airplane (on propeller planes, this was certainly true).  Nonetheless, we ended up with an itinerary that, as I recall, stopped in Istanbul, Rome, Dusseldorf, and finally London (airplanes had to refuel frequently). I suspect that in 1958, there were limited choices in airline travel from Tehran to London, and we had to take what was available. The Istanbul airport was not too different from the Tehran airport, small, smelly and overused.   I loved the Dusseldorf airport for its cleanliness and shops with bright lights and unblemished fruit in immaculate stores.  It felt like I had finally arrived in a western country that was clean and orderly. Stella and I almost missed our connection as we wandered through the terminal and didn’t recognize our name being pronounced in German, asking us to report to the gate.  Finally it seemed like we had been on the ground for too long and we asked a uniformed lady when the plane to London was due to leave.  She hustled us to the gate and onto the plane for the last leg of our trip.

My father was waiting for us at the airport when we landed in London late at night, and he took us to his hotel for the night.  It was too dark to see much, but in spite of my fatigue, I was exhilarated to be there.  Waking up the next morning, I noticed that it was darker outside than it would have been in Tehran, with its reliably sunny days.  London was overcast and damp.  We had breakfast in the hotel dining room, and I had corn flakes for the first time, followed by bacon and eggs.  I wanted to take a shower but needed shampoo, so my father told me to find a drug store and sent me out to buy some. On the sidewalk outside the hotel, I saw no shop that looked likely, so I stopped an older woman and asked her where the nearest drug store might be. 

She peered down her nose at me and asked, “Drug store? Do you mean chemist?”

“Yes, chemist.”

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from Iran.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s in the Near East, near Turkey,” I tried to enlighten her.

“What language do you speak there?”

“Persian.”

“Oh, you mean you’re from Persia,” she corrected me, as though I was too ignorant to know where I was from. 

“Yes, that is the old name for Iran.”

She sniffed at me. Clearly Iran had been remiss in not asking her permission before changing its name.  I wasn’t sure she was ever going to direct me to the chemist, but I waited.  Finally she pointed towards a store and I was only too eager to make my getaway. 

In spite of my encounter with this keeper of the empire, I was exhilarated to be out on a London street by myself.  I had a fair amount of freedom in Iran, since my mother would send me out to do the occasional grocery shopping or other errand.  I even took the bus to go to the small store-front library a few miles from our home, run by Americans, but the ever-present harassment by men of any female in public made all outings unpleasant.  Here, people ignored me, a sensation that I loved.

Later that day my father took us to Harrods to order our school uniforms, navy pleated skirts, blue and gray striped shirts, navy cardigans, navy knee socks, navy and gray ties, navy belted overcoat, boaters for the summer term, and navy cloches for the winter term.  I thought these outfits were quite hideous and I really didn’t want them, but realized that they were what I’d be wearing for the foreseeable future, my first sense of the impending restrictions on my new life.  

That evening we went to visit a distant aunt of my father’s, Auntie Hannah, who lived with her daughter, Moselle.  Her son, Bertie, used a room in the house for an office, but had his own flat.  This family ended up being our salvation while we were in England, taking us in and caring for us way beyond what would have been dutiful even for the closest of relatives.  Auntie Hannah looked ancient, bent over and dressed in a loose long dress and a kind of turban on her head. Aunt Moselle and Uncle Bertie looked to be older than my parents, although Aunt Hannah called her son Baby, as he was her youngest.  We had tea with them in their parlor on Finchley Road.  They had their television on and I found myself mesmerized by it and too distracted to follow the conversation.  Television was just being tested in Iran, so very few people owned one since there was nothing to watch except when a show was aired to test the system.  Auntie Hannah’s family had lived in Burma (Myanmar) and had moved to England after World War II.  Before that they had lived in India, as many Iraqi Jews did. So even though we were related, we had never met before, as was the case with most of my relatives. 

On our second day in England, we boarded a train from Paddington Station to take us to Great Malvern in Worcestershire, the closest depot to the school in West Malvern.  As we drove up in the taxi, at the first glimpse of the school, my heart sank.  It looked like the most forlorn, gloomy place on earth, a glowering gray stone building with small leaded windows, cheerlessly overlooking a vast wood, and surrounded by the Malvern Hills, which made it even darker in the waning daylight.  The structure’s previous incarnation, I later learned, was as a monastery, complete with cloisters that encircled it.  It may have been an appropriate place for monks to contemplate, but it hardly fit my mother’s description of a gay school where young girls would be romping gleefully.

We were greeted at the door by the headmistress’s assistant who showed us into the office where Miss Anstruther presided over a pot of tea.  She fit the place perfectly, with deep-set eyes, a hawk nose, a small pursed mouth and a jowly chin.  She was tweedy and wore the low-heeled lace up shoes that British women of her generation seemed to favor.  She appeared to be kindly enough, but the whole situation was forbidding and so very severe. Her office was dim and wood-paneled with a desk at one end and a couch and coffee table where we had our tea.  I did not want to stay. 

After tea, my father took his leave. The sound of the door closing after him was the sound of a prison cell closing, and as it turned out, that was prophetic.  English boarding schools thrived on conformity, and achieved that by limiting freedoms, and the first freedom to vanish, was the ability to leave the place except on rare planned outings.

Because school had already started for the term, Stella and I shared a small room.  Normally, we would have been separated and assigned to large dormitory rooms that were occupied by five or six girls of about the same age.  Unpacking in the room, I felt so dispirited that I could barely keep my tears back, and I did not cry easily.  Stella and I looked at each other, bewildered; I wondered how my fantasy of escape from Iran had deteriorated into this grim reality. 

Soon, a young French woman came to the door to take us down to evening tea and prayers in the large hall that served as the dining room.  She was an assistant matron, working in England for a year to improve her English.  She looked as dispirited as I felt, and as I got to know Mademoiselle better, I learned that she felt she had made a mistake in accepting this job.

Tea was served in the dining room on about twenty long tables set in rows below a dais at the end of the room where the headmistress and other staff sat.  The dining room was paneled in wood and was quite dark, despite the long windows on two sides. Being late September, the light this far north faded early, so even at 5:00 it was already dusk outside. I can’t remember much about that first meal besides the feeling of being lost among the mass of girls and feeling displaced and insignificant.  First we had to thank God for the food we were about to receive, then sit in unison and wait for the food to be served.  There seemed to be rituals of etiquette that eluded me, like waiting for the person next to you to ask you if you’d like some butter or salt; one did not ask for anything to be passed, unlike what my table manners specified at home.  Before starting to eat, I was supposed to ask the people on either side of me if they wanted butter or salt, and so forth.  It seemed like so much tentativeness before one could actually eat. Not that I felt like eating.

After the meal was cleared, we turned our chairs to face the high table while Miss Anstruther made some announcements, then everyone knelt to pray.  At the missionary school in Iran, we prayed in the morning, but no kneeling was required.  I found the kneeling disturbed me more than the repetitive praying, and eventually refused to kneel, which did not ingratiate me with Miss Anstruther.  I had wanted to leave Iran because I felt too tethered there, yet here I had to perform in lock step with 200 other girls and give up any semblance of individuality.

My first day at St. James was distressing and crushing, and it was a long few months before I got used to being there. Instead of the freedom I had anticipated, I was more confined than ever. Yet this experience of going to school in England turned out, in retrospect, to be one of the most formative events of my life. Despite the strictures, I soon had to learn to fend for myself, to acquire an independence that was not just freedom to be, but a kind of independence that equipped me for life.  I had to quickly learn the skills to make it on my own, and it has been a lesson worth learning.