Memories of Iraq
James Willsher talks to Diana Maseyk, now 81, who spent her early childhood and twenties in British-ruled Iraq.
Diana Maseyk, aged 3
Her earliest memory of Iraq is singing Ring-a-Ring-o’-Roses as a child on the flat roof of her family’s apartment in Baghdad, overlooking a river. She remembers seeing a boy with a tray of buns on his head. Diana was sent back to grow up in England, but returned nearly twenty years later, for a stay of six months. Her father, Colonel Arthur Sargon, had first come to Iraq in 1915 fighting the Turks during the First World War, in the Maharattas regiment, for which he would be awarded the DSO. He would stay on for 32 years, occasionally visiting England, and would receive the OBE for long and distinguished service.
When Diana returned to the country as a young woman, he was head of police in Basra, though when she was a child Colonel Sargon had been head of police in Baghdad. After the First World War, the League of Nations granted the former Ottoman regions of Basra and Baghdad to the United Kingdom for administration, later adding Mosul, to complete the modern-day boundaries of Iraq. Independence was granted in 1932, but nine years a later a new leadership’s links to Germany and Italy – as well as fears over oil supplies – led to invasion in 1941 by British forces. Occupation continued for six years.
December, 1947. Diana set off on her own from Liverpool on a ship that carried her as far as Port Said in Egypt, where an obliging army officer took her to a party Cairo, before taking a train to Haifa, which was then in Palestine. From Haifa a bus journey to Damascus, past the Sea of Galilee. In Damascus local regulations required curtains to be drawn across the windows of the bus. Then a journey across the desert in another bus. There was a breakfast held in a tent, where travellers sat cross-legged eating hen’s eggs. The drivers were all Arabs, but spoke English. Most of the journey was on a huge, famous highway stretching between Beirut and Baghdad. Flat and empty desert, no palm trees. She remembered a fellow passenger leisurely picking his teeth with a toothpick.
On reaching Baghdad a day later a kindly English judge waited with Diana an hour for her father to arrive. From Baghdad they took an overnight train to Basra. The heat was fierce, with temperatures in the 90s. Basra was known as the Venice of the East, criss-crossed by canals, a city where the Biblical rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates meet and were used for irrigation. Palm trees everywhere. On arrival at the hotel by the airport, where her father and mother Hilary lived, Diana was presented with an enormous birthday cake, some of which she ate for breakfast before stowing the rest under her bed.
