11. Lebanon late summer 1956

I had begun to think I'd dreamed that summer camp in Lebanon. It's nearly 60 years ago and sometimes my day and night imaginings get mixed up. So I was relieved when I checked on the web to find that there WAS an earthquake in Lebanon in 1956, with its epicenter near Sidon.'

Sidon is a place I remember, on my route to the damaged village we helped rebuild. According to my internet check, the earthquake killed 136 people and destroyed 6,000 buildings, though not all in one place. The village where we worked was called Laba'a, between Sidon on the coast and a hilltown called Jezzin. near the Litani river I got to Lebanon on a Turkish ferry from Genoa to Beirut. One sunny deck is much like another and I'd got quite accustomed to summer passages across the Mediterranean. The year before I'd sailed back and forth as a deck passenger between Marseilles, Algiers and Oran. This year it was Beirut via Alexandria.

Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it overlays and blurs perception. Once we can take things for granted, we don't register them with the same detail and intensity. We save our conscious mind for new threats and challenges. I remember bits and pieces, chance encounters from various sea crossings, but not which came when or on the way to where. As with ferryboats, so with ruins. There must have been damage to see in that Lebanese village but I don't remember it. By the time I got there, the worst of the rubble would have been cleared and the wounds no longer raw. The only death I heard about was somebody's uncle, from old age. But my indifference to the damage may also have something to do with bomb sites in wartime London. I was quite used to rubble and gaps between buildings.

Not everything's a blur. Some images stand out, though not for any obvious significance:.

• a baker's daughter, sitting on a stool by little outdoor fire. Over the fire is a smooth metal dome. I'm taken with the face and figure of the girl who twirls the dough into a sheet across her arms. She flattens a lump between her hands, then hands and fore-arms dance as they stretch it wide and flat. Her skin glows and she smiles, quite unembarrassed, when she sees me watching. When the dough has become a thin white mat she flips it over the dome to cook.
• A scorpion crouches in one of the six holes in a hollow concrete block. IAs nervous of us as we are of it.
• A mute sea laps on Sidon beach, slashed across by a tail of setting sun. On a headland up left is the silhouette of what I'm told is a crusader castle Behind me trundle battered 'service' cabs, old US saloons and station-wagons that pick up passengers along the coast road.
• A cluttered littlel shop near the AUB (American University of Beirut) sells me some cheap swimming trunks. Two triangles, stitched beneath and clipped at the waist. I feel cheated when I'm turned off the university beach because there's not enough of them.
• Dogs howl outside our tents at night. No wonder 'kalb' – the Arabic for dog – is such serious abuse in Arabic, though in Egypt dogs were gods.

The day I got to Lebanon, one of those 'service' cabs picked me up on the road out of Beirut. I had no map but knew roughly where I was going. It seems odd now that we came with no training or introduction. All I knew was the name and rough location of the village, and that a rebuilding project had been organised by American University Alumni – whatever that meant – and our European SCI (Service Civil International).

The road south from Beirut ran along the seashore. 'Warm are the still and lucky miles...' That was W.H. Auden but this bit of coast was not so lucky. The Americans, who rightly pulled the plug on the Anglo-Israeli-French Suez adventure, were soon to send in US marines, storming up the beach to be met by Lebanese ice-cream vans along the coast road. The base established by the US troops was subsequently blown up by suicide-bombers – 'the cowards' as some of their enemies described them.

Before and during those summer months in Lebanon I had no inkling of local tensions or wider conflicts, though I noticed that some of the 'service' cabs had little crosses or virgins swinging over the dashboard, and some didn't. (What did they have, prayer beads, or Koranic inscriptions?) This was 1956, the year of Suez attack, but I knew nothing much about Colonel Nasser and the nationalisation of the Suez canal. I may have taken a stand against war and been in at the start of the Algerian independence struggle, but I hadn't begun to put the pieces together. The Litani river valley, epicentre for our earthquake, was later to become the front line in a war with Israel.

At my tribunal hearing in Reading – where conscientious objectors' claims were judged - a notable on the bench remarked on my ignorance. If they hadn't given me the benefit of the doubt, I might have gone to prison or joined the navy in time for the Suez landings. My father had served in the wartime navy. He told me how the 'panic-stations' alarm was sounded when enemy aircraft were sighted, how his shipmates fought each other to get on deck, and how, in Alexandria, children greeted them with the words 'fuck off'' – which they took to be English for 'hello'.

I think I knew that Lebanon, like Algeria, had been ruled by the French. My school French, brushed up in Algiers the year before, was more useful than English in Lebanon. It didn't occur to me to learn Arabic, buy a guidebook or local newspaper, but I enjoyed the intercontinental buzz of Beirut, variety of colour and clothes, trailing flowers over balconies, cheap drinks, tasty food and Latin rythms.

I lived in the present, there and then. Many months on the move had cut me off from newspapers and radio news. I hardly thought of home or wrote to my family. Phone calls and cables were for emergencies and I'd not suffered any. After years of boarding school and compulsory weekly communication, letter-writing had lost any charm it might have had.

Looking back, now that writing has become a crutch to my consciousness, I wonder what I did with my experience before. How much can we understand or remember if we cant put it into words? Or images, or images in words... I didn't keep a diary, and there was nobody to tell about what happened from day to day. So I'm left with fleeting glimpses of tents and half-built walls, golden beaches and a golden girl, a shady cane-break where we stopped to rest and talk one day.

As in Algeria the previous summer, our tents were pitched beside the building site. Our team was half Western (European and American), half Arab (Lebanese, Egyptian and Palestinian). One sponsor who came and visited was a Lebanese businessman and politician called Emile Boustani. He had his own Black Cat construction company and airline Village notables kow-towed to him but with us he was genial, and informal ,in lightweight trousers, leather belt and short-sleeved shirts. He sat on a straw mat with us as village tributes piled up in front of him - chicken, cakes, fruit – which the Big Man passed on pointedly to us.

As in Algeria, we worked early and late, avoiding mid-day sun. In Lebanon I don't remember feeling the heat , we were further inland and higher-up. With Boustani and AUB funding, we were well-fed and in good health. A boy with a donkey came round with an earthen water jar and a little round spout from which to hit or miss our mouths. I doubt if it would be possible now to assemble such a mixed team in a Lebanese village. Then it took me a while to distinguish between Muslims and Christians. For all I knew or know, there were Jews as well. Differences that emerged as we talked added to the interest and pleasure we found in each other's company. It helped that we had something useful to do together.

The technical side of the building was decided for us but we organised our own camp life,. Our job was not to rebuild from the ruins. Then as now, construction was quicker and cheaper from scratch, on a greenfield site, though in this case the earth was already dusty brown. We dug and laid concrete foundations, then fetched and carried hollow concrete six-trous blocks - light to carry and easy to handle. I cant remember what the roofs were like, if only because they were not yet on when I left.

I could have asked Makram, the young engineer in charge. He was almost one of the team and had the plans in his tent alongside ours. Years later, I had to give more thought to roofing. In Wales I built a couple on our smallholding and back in Algeria after the independence war, roofing was a problem we never solved. Villagers left homeless by French regroupement, - ethnic cleansing/concentration camps - insisted on traditional flat roofs. But the forests that once provided beams and joists had been felled for firewood or to deny cover to fellagha. We had no money for imported steel and concrete, though later it occurred to me that these materials might have been a more useful than unskilled foreign volunteers.

In Laba'a, the plans were already agreed and it was not ours to reason why. Our job was barrowing blocks, sand and cement, mixing mortar and getting it onto the masons' boards before it dried in the sun. Sometimes I wished I could be up on the scaffolding laying blocks along a line. Most of the masons were local men, but one young Egyptian, Arabic-speaker, athletic and quick to learn, got promoted to join them. The nearest we got to drama on the ground below was when somebody got stung by a scorpion while picking up a block. I got there in time to see the foreman pick up a stick and smack lightly at the puncture spot, like a playful teacher with a ruler.

Scorpions, like adders, are not mostly as dangerous as they're cracked up to be. People like to dramatise, even welcome risk. In a book called Jungle Green (Arthur Campbell 1953) about British exploits in Malaya, I read that boy-mahouts would compete for killer-elephants. On British building sites workers sometimes scorned helmets and harnesses, and later sneered when EU regulations cut the weight of cement bags. How can a man be a man if health and safety rules? What's to live for if nothing's to die for, and where do I stand?

In Lebanon as in Algeria, there were several women in the team but their job was mainly to cook and cater. In what was still an Arab country, we were already breaking new ground with boys and girls camped out together... That was easier then when secular nationalism trumped traditional religion, veils were coming off not on.

We felt like a band of friends, which seemed quite new to me. There was a handsome young Greek from Cairo. Larger than life, he wore a neat dark beard and championed Rhetoric. If I remember, he argued that truth was whatever most people could be led to believe; the word WAS God if you could find the logic and imagery to make it stick. It helped his case that he looked like a classical god himself.

Poppy - we never called her Poppea - had another lovely head. She had been working as an air-hostess when air travel was still an exclusive business but never made a thing of it:. A waitress was still a waitress at ten thousand feet. She had a slender neck, bright eyes and tight dark curls you could have cut in stone. (Carved hair works much better than carved eyes: you can almost hear snaky locks hiss, but whoever got petrified by looking stone Medusa in the eye?)

Poppy was witty and good natured. So, in a softer more ebullient way, was Haifa, a young Palestinian woman who once stubbed her cigarette out on my arm. What can I have said? What was her history and how did I cross her? Haifa was fair and buxom with waves of red hair. Her lips would tremble before she laughed and she was quick to match or deflate Greek rhetoric. I've no idea how I provoked her. It wasn't until years later, living with a gay black American (David du Bois) in Cairo, that I was forced to question some of my own presumptions. When I came across his obituary a few years ago, it said he went on to edit the Black Panthers' magazine.

There was another Palestinian called Azmi, probably a scholarship-student. He seemed less affluent, more diffident than the rest of the AUB lot and it was he who first alerted me to Palestinian history, He took a group of us home with him to a refugee camp, Ain Helweh (?). His family lives in a garage-sized house with thin concrete walls and mattress-couches that served as beds at night. After our tents, the house felt cool and homely, interior walls and ceiling not white- but blue-washed, sky blue. We sat round a low table or mat for mint tea, followed by big hot dishes that everyone dipped into. Weeks later, after some roundabout questioning, I reckoned our meal must have used up the family's meat ration for a month. Azmi would get cross when I said reflex 'thank yous' for this or that. 'Brothers don't thank,' he said.

Before we parted at the end of my time at the camp, Azmi gave me a book called 'Palestine is our Business' (Burrows Millar, Westminster Press, 1949), I had seen a little of French Algeria and just about remembered post-war recruiting posters in the UK for the Palestine Police: upstanding chaps in boy-scout uniforms, sick of civvy-street. Azmi's book lifted the lid on British colonial rule and I couldn't help believing it. An insight on the British mandate brought some dirty washing nearer home. Was 'our business' in Palestine and other British territories a sort of family business? I had two grandfathers, an aunt and several uncles who had made a living in India, black Africa, distant islands and Sudan.

That was a passing shadow, with no bearing on my conduct in Lebanon or for many years afterwards. Only after the US and UK invaded Iraq, did I return to Palestine for a closer look Here in Lebanon I was intrigued by what seemed to be a layer-cake constitution, with positions alternating down from Christian President through Muslim Prime Minister to a marble-cake of religious and tribal parties in parliament. The arrangement seemed quite reasonable, more like the French Assembly roundabout than our two-party ding-dong at Westminster. One day we were invited to a tall French town-house in Beirut. As we sipped from our coffee cups, we looked out between half-closed shutters on the sun and shadow in an elegant tree-lined street. Paris a la Libanaise. Back out in the street, we dropped into a little cafe-bar, a few steps down from the pavement, the sound of music wafting up. My pocket money stretched to a cool drink or two a week..There were no other customers about, and the waitress-hostess seemed content to pass the time of day with us. She taught me some cha-cha steps – rocking forward, side and back on a space the size of a handkerchief – then when the record changed I took her through a couple of jive turns. It came easily, felt close, warm and natural, No holds barred or strings attached.

The Beirut I recreate in my mind has a lozenge of central park, near the sea front but not along it, with traffic turning round it and main roads leading off. When I check on a satellite view, that could be any one of several 'squares'. Did I walk round it, take it in from a street-map or spot it from the air, later when we flew overhead on a day-trip to Jerusalem? The world population has grown threefold since the 50's and Beirut can't be far behind, even without the flood of refugees from Syria. What's left of what I might have seen? Were some relics of colonial Beirut frozen in time like the pride of Imperial London: SW1 etc.

My uncertainty washes this way and that. Our Lebanese building site no sooner takes shape in my mind than it morphs into others before and since, one on the outskirts of Algiers, another on the Manchester overspill estate where I went to live and work in the 70s. Maybe we fall back on a simplified repertoire of found or given archetypes. Like children with paint on paper: Man, Woman, Tree and House, four windows, door and chimney – even if the real chimney came down years ago. For larger spaces we may adopt a standard frame, landscape or portrait, foreground, background, left and right. Surviving fragments of memory are slotted in to order like mosaic chips... At my prepschool, I got laughed at – in a more or less friendly way – for writing something to the effect that rivers in northern Russia weren't much use for navigation because they flowed upwards and got frozen from the top, blocking the way to the arctic sea.

The barking dogs outside our tent were true to life, facts on the ground and I did crawl out to throw stones at them. Dogs, like people, may lead double lives. Trusted household pets - guard-dogs, hunting dogs - revert to older feral forms. The howling wolves and hyenas on our building site were probably mild house-dogs in their other lives. In Partington, Manchester, the space behind our new council house became a sort of free-range greyhound track when all the dogs around came out to play. The ill-assorted pack ran wild at night and sometimes in broad daylight, within yards of our back doors. Rumours spread of bites and indecent assaults, mothers grabbed their prams and push-chairs, whisked their children back indoors.

Some of my best friends have been dogs. Sammy, the first of these, was a curly black-haired labrador who must have been as big as I was when we met. I don't remember him ever howling, biting or mounting us children, but he abandoned ship around the end of the war. According to Mary, my mother, two ladies up the road fed him cake, and didn't pull his hair, so he went to live with them. I do remember Mary, howling once, when she got the phone call about her younger brother's death. It seemed to me she felt pain differently from us, or perhaps it was just that she wasn't brought up a boy. She would squeal or yelp when she broke a finger-nail, cut a finger or banged her shin. But during the flying-bombs, she seemed so calm and cheerful we could not be afraid.

The howling outside our tents got on my nerves. When I hurled the stones, I wanted them to find their mark. Mostly they clattered on the stony ground, but once I scored a softer thump and, yes, a yelp. Then silence, sleep tinged with of guilt, but no tell-tale bloodstains on the ground next day.

Hell has no fury like a man or woman scorned - put down, let down or simply taken by surprise. Persons, places, pets or things - we like them to stay as they were, where they were and true to type. When they change, then so may we we, a different side of us comes forth. Young men – mostly men - who tattoo LOVE and HATE across their fists may have a point. 'If the right one don't get you then the left one will' (Sixteen Tons, Merle Travis 1946 and Tennessee Ernie Ford). Don't take us for granted, they say. Love hurts anyway.

Back to building.. Our Egyptian Icarus in Lebanon had his counterpart in Manchester, their twin silhouettes atop a single scaffold, quarter of a century apart. In Manchester c.1981, I combined a part-time M.Ed degree with a six-month government bricklaying course for unemployed. The bricklaying instructors were natural teachers. They couldn't explain the motions of wrist and hand as they rolled and spread the mortar, but we could watch them do it, take it in and try it for ourselves. Again and again, when we got it right, we knew how it looked and felt. The same with ski-ing, tennis, dancing, a mix of observation, empathy and mime Older circuits by-pass frontal lobes, linking limbs and conditioning reflexes with no distinction of 'yours' and 'mine'.

When I saw Van Gogh paintings in Amsterdam – I almost said 'in the flesh' - what moved me was the dance of brushstrokes imprinted in the paint. Rapid stabs and dabs, rythmic, repeated and varied. At a London exhibition of VG paintings and letters, I found him comparing his brushwork to a violin bow. Rolling and spreading mortar was a bit like that, but I was slow to pick it up. I made up for lost time when we got to laying bricks. In a life I'd spent months laying out and pasting lines of print, 'artwork' so-called for a litho press. Now, words to bricks, I'd got an eye for intervals, verticals and parallels. Our Manchester prodigy was a long-haired fee spirit from Liverpool. While most of us built and rebuilt basic walls, he worked his miracles, Roman and Gothic arches, corbelled eaves and dog-tooth cornices. Our tradesmen-teachers combed their repertoire to keep him busy for another day

What did our Lebanese foreman think of us? Playboys, gilded youth? Makram, the engineer, was patient and friendly, with his sunny smile and floppy cowboy hat. He came from Dhour el-Chuweir, another Christian village to the north, and may have qualified at the American University,. Later I learned that Dhour el-Chuweir was renowned for its traditional masons, and the boyhood home of Edward Said. Makram didn't criticise or order us about, perhaps he left that to the NCOs, foremen and masons made of sterner stuff.

Out of working hours we got to know some families in Leba'a. The baker must have noticed my admiration for his daughter and took me by surprise as I passed his bakery one day. What I understood him to say – his French perhaps no better than mine - was 'Would you like to marry her?' The girl was nearby. I wondered if she'd heard or understood. Was she in on it, or was it just a joke of his? I mumbled something like 'What can I say?' or 'How could I say no?'

Another family we got to know a bit better because a grown up daughter spoke good French and seemed glad to talk to us. She wore sober European skirts and dresses and like a Chekhov sister, she seemed to long for something better somewhere else. It was her uncle who died while we were there, but she showed little emotion when she invited us to the village for the funeral. On the day, we cleaned up and went down to watch if not join the procession to the church. Among the mourners were a group of women in black, who wailed and tore at their hair. Among them was our modern-minded friend and guide.

In a Camus short story, Exile and the Kingdom, an expat engineer watches a ritual religious procession in South America. He's looking out for a fisherman he'd met out drinking the night before. After surviving a shipwreck, the fisherman had vowed to join the procession and carry a boulder to a hilltop shrine. The engineer watches the procession pass, is turning away when when spots his drinking companion, stumbling under the weight of his stone at the very end of it. Then fisherman falls and fails to get up. Gladly thy cross-eyed bear... The young engineer steps into the road. Fit again after a good night's sleep at his hotel, he heaves the stone onto his back. Fisherman at his heels, the foreigner follows the crowd to the top of the hill, drops the builder at the chapel gate. The fisherman's family are there to meet them. They invite the stranger in without ado and sit him down to eat with them. Copains, companions, friends with whom we break our bread.

Who said 'If he hungers, feed him; if he sleeps, cover him; if he leaves, forget him' ? An Icelandic saga perhaps.

The next outing I remember was an unlooked-for grace. A group of us went walking near Jezzin. When the sun got hot we found shelter in a clump of tall reeds, the sort used for windbreaks, sunshade roofs and screens. 'Raised in a canebreak by an old momma lion...' was another line from 'Sixteen Tons' but here there was no threat or sweat. What we got was just what we saw, a little oasis of dappled shade and welcoming dry ground.

Chaste dejeuner sous l'herbe. We reclined entwined between each other and the straight, smooth canes. Companions from here, there and everywhere in the middle of nowhere. I don't remember if we'd brought drinks or sandwiches, but time stood still. For an hour or two we talked and laughed as though we'd known each other all our lives. I wonder if any of us kept in touch, or remember that lucky break. By then I'd given up taking addresses, it seemed an empty gesture when I knew I'd never visit or write to them.

Our trip to Jerusalem was more obviously notable. It arose from a bit of cheek and quick thinking on the building site. Boustani, the contractor and airline boss, was touring the work-site. 'Well done, lads,' he said. 'Keep it up and you'll deserve a prize.' On his next visit, an American volunteer – I don't remember his name - called down from the scaffolding, 'What about the prize?'

'What about what prize?'

You said...'

Did I say prize?'

'Jerusalem,' said the American off the top of his head. 'Trip to Jerusalem.'

'Did I say that...OK, I'll see what I can do.'

A few days later we were given a date and time to be at Beirut airport, to be met by a Black Cat plane.

Arab East Jerusalem was part of Jordan then, set against an expanding Israeli West. We landed at nearby Kalendia airport, drove to the old city and spent the day visiting markets and Holy Places. I was happy with all the sights, sounds and smells of the market, haggling for bits of leather, blue glass or olive-wood. Not so happy when the haggling resumed in the Holy Sepulchre. I may no longer have believe in God or Jesus by then, but I liked the Christ who kicked the money-lenders out of the Temple yard. An unctuous usher took my arm to see me a place where the rock split when Jesus died. Before unhooking the cover, this attendant held out his palm. It felt like 'What the Butler Saw' on the pier. Back in the sunlight, taxi drivers were scrabbling for our fares to other sacred sites.

My next visit to Jerusalem was in 2003, by which time Arab East Jerusalem, the old city, was a ghetto in what Israel claims as its undivided capital, Kalendia no longer an airport but the mother of all checkpoints. What was left of the field was cut across with a trench to stop it being used as a rat-run round the checkpoint barrier. Across the trench was a plank, with Palestinian taxis lined up on either side. Passengers got out of one cab, teetered across the plank, and got into another on the far side..

The reception we got from people in Lebanon 1956 was warmer than I'd found on the Algiers camps the summer before. Algeria had been on the verge of war. Unlike Algeria, Lebanon had never been heavily colonised by France. Indirect rule allowed a semblance of mutual respect, and traditions of hospitality survived. We may have even benefited from our visitor status. There was no mass tourism, hippies were unheard of and the AUB was Ivy League or Oxbridge in the Middle East... For whatever reason, we were kindly received by several Lebanese families and no-where shunned..

First Azmi's home in the refugee camp, then a weekend with engineer Makram and his family in Dhour el-chueir, a resort village up the long hilly road that leads from Beirout towards Baalbec and Syria. On our way up, the hairpin-bends gave us a succession of sea and mountain views, a string of villages and way-side cafes. Each seemed more enticing than the last, with outdoor, canopies of vine or bougainvillea. Cloudy arak on ice, strings of lights and more ch-cha-cha, intercut with songs in Arabic.

I'd hardly begun to think about cultural and religious differences, but I did realise in Dhour el-Chuweir that Makram's family was Christian and Ramzi's Muslim. Ramzi was an AUB student and fellow volunteer, his family had a newly built holiday home on the outskirts of the village. Makram's family were more modest and deeply rooted. They put us up in a rambling old house half-hidden by fruit-trees and creepers. Ramzi's family was richer, flashier, no old vines or creepers yet but bright sunblinds. There were also pretty bright sisters who made us welcome and changed their dresses several times a day. Perhaps, once we were in the village as Makram's guests Ramzi's family couldn't be outdone. That suited us, though sometimes back at the camp I had found Ramzi a bit pushy - I got my own back one day by pushing him backwards into a wheel-barrow. Makram also had two sisters, less flamboyant than the girls at Ramzi's house. There the father was in charge, while at Makram's things seemed run by women. When we woke up, mother and aunts were already busy. Before breakfast they were in the kitchen preparing lunch, stripping little leaves off stalks for salad or soup. Mealtimes were a pleasure, informal with hot and cold dishes and conversation between.

One afternoon, after a long midday meal, we went for a walk round the village. At some point we branched off the road, uphill across a field now bare of crops, short-cut to a vantage point above. Once off the road, the ground was stony, steep and dotted with scrub. I had been trying, hesitantly, to make conversation with Makram's elder sister. Her name was Laila, acquiline, proud or shy. I wasn't sure she wanted to talk to me but gathered she worked as a nurse at an English hospital in Beirut. The English Hospital, perhaps. Laila was older than me, and I felt she might have more important things on her mind. As we climbed the rough ground, I noticed she was having difficulty. She'd probabpy come out expecting a stroll round the village, in light sandals or slipper shoes. Now her feet were slipping backwards out of them. She looked up and saw me watching, half-smiled, and carried on as best she could. She did not complain but slipped back again. I held out a hand. After moment's hesitation she took it, with a look that seemed to say 'Alright, if I must.' If the ground had not been stony, strewn with sticks and thorns, she might have kicked off her shoes. Instead, unwilling to turn back, she took a firm grip on my hand and got the traction she needed to stay in her shoes. I admired the strength and slenderness of her hands, hoped she wasn't put off by the size and sweat of mine.

By the top of the slope, we talked more easily. When we got to the road above, she did not immediately let go. The distance between us had gone. For the next day or two we were all back and forth between the two houses, bright surfaces at Ramzi's, quieter at Makram's. I didn't have much more talk with Laila but when we came to say goodbye, she asked me to come and visit at the English hospital. I think she mentioned that the English – or Scottish? - matron would like to meet me too. Again, what could I say? I felt honoured, excited but didn't know if the opportunity would arise. I said I would try.

And I did, as soon as we got another break. Did I phone, or write? I found the hospital and Laila greeted me in the hall, graceful in her uniform. In this setting, she seemed more confident, radiant. The Matron had obviously been expecting me and Laila left us together while she went to change. I had the feeling this mother superior was sizing me up, but she may just have welcomed the chance to talk to a young English visitor. If she was indeed Scottish, I probably told her about a work-camp I'd been to in Govan, Glasgow, a crane-view of the dock at night, and Sunday morning in Harmony Row, the cobbles sparkling with broken glass.

How did Laila and I pass our time around the hospital? No idea, except that by now, the shyness was on my side. I had become adept at new encounters, in arguments and practical arrangement, the shallows of flirtation and social chat. But I had no capacity for more intimate, intense or slow-burning relationships I was glad to see Laila again and glad that was pleased to see me. I found her beautiful, dark hair, pale skin, vivacious now. But

I did not know what she expected of me. She said I could stay. I said I would like to but might have to get back. As deciding-time approached, she asked me again. Perhaps there was a guest room and she took it for granted I'd sleep in that. But I wasn't sure, didn't ask and this seemed serious. I was used to teenage kissing and groping, I'd shared a bed but never made love. In those days it was almost expected, for young men to make advances, press on until women said no. Now I was faced with what seemed like an invitation, from someone I had come to admire and respect. Laila was older than me, seemed to know what she was doing. But perhaps not, perhaps she too was on new ground, taking her life in her hands.

I took fright, out of my depth, longing for the light flirtation of the Ramzi sisters and cast iron convention to save us from misunderstanding or mishap.

Laila might have shown me to a guest-room, kissed me goodnight, perhaps, and welcomed me to hospital breakfast in the morning. But rightly or wrongly I felt a rubicon had been crossed on that hillside when she took my hand. Did I mislead her in any way, then let her down, or have I been making something out of nothing all these years. Would Laila even remember, if she's still alive? I've put orr writing this for fear of compromising her.

Late afternoon at the hospital, I made my excuses and left. We never met again or wrote to each other. Back at work I saw Makram, as usual. He was friendly as ever, but this wasn't something I could talk to him about. The family may have been Christian, but they were also in an Arab country, with honour and duties to mach. A couple of years later, a younger sister, Najla, came to London to train as a nurse. She had my address and I took her out for a meal. This sister seemd sexier, more worldly-wise than Laila. She'd clearly made plenty of friends and was as uninterested in me as I was in her.

On the way back from the hospital in Beirut, I stopped for a while on Sidon beach. What I bought this time was not a bikini but two bottles, of pop and gin. As the sun set, I swam in my underpants and drank. Warm water, warm sand, warm cocktail and setting sun. I fell asleep. When I woke it was dark, but not too late for a service cab back to the village. The one that picked me up was already full, but the passengers pushed up to make space for me. The diesel engine laboured, soft springs swayed around bends until my belly got the better of me. The driver stopped to let me out, waited with engine running as I walked back. Out of sight along the verge, I hoped. When the retching stopped, I straightened up and stood alone for a few moments in the cool air. Cicadas resumed their refrain as I climbed back in among the other bodies, arms and legs. More tolerance than sympathy, perhaps, but no hostility, contempt. Next day, back at camp, was another day of course, the sun rose and I made it back to work.

I've been writing, rewriting and setting aside these last few paragraphs for the past two years. Get in close, said Cartier Bresson... But Louise Brooks, silent star of Pandora's Box, said she couldn't write her autobiography because it would have been untrue without the sex at the heart of things. She was raised in the Mid-West and the bible belt was still too tightly strapped for that, she said. For me the difficulty is only partly with my own modesty. To put it at its simplest, we dont fuck ourselves, our bodies overlap. Not just bodies but the stories we come in and out with. You cant just mind your own business, or mask out your oppo when you let the light in on yourself. People often write novels because they cant tell the truth, but that seems a bit of a cop-out too, and too much like hard work.

NOTE

I found the stuff on Louise Brooks, in an Observer colour supplement , an unusually sensitive and respectful article by Kenneth Tynan c.1979: ( http://www.freewebs.com/everybreeze/tynan.html )

Brooks was in her seventies when Tynan sought her out, living alone and largely forgotten in a small appartment. A bit like the dancer-turned-writer Jean Rhys before her reincarnation in 'The Wide Sargasso Sea.' The title Brooks chose for the book she never wrote was 'Naked on my goat,' a glimpse of youth and age from Goethe's Faust.. The goat-rider is a young witch, bare, immaculate and beautiful. The old witches who watch her pass intone 'You're young and tender now, but you'll rot, we know you'll rot.'

Brooks would not write her own story but turned to books for company. She said her reading took her back to her mother's knee, her mother's voice and touch. Mary, our mother, used to read to us. At bedtime it was often a sort of reconciliation for me, washing away anxieties and arguments. One summer afternoon, on an idyllic little lawn in Somerset, she overestimated our capacity and read to us from Spenser's Faery Queen. I lost track but found myself looking up her skirt. I looked away, then back into the dark between her legs. Perhaps I could never leave well alone, perhaps we got off to a bad start, it took most of our lives before we could embrace whole-heartedly,