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British teachers of pupils of early years to secondary level were recruited by KIASAT, an Iranian private schools’ company, following interviews in Headington, near Oxford. On Saturday, 8th September, 1978, we flew from Heathrow to Tehran expecting to arrive there the same day. Our plane, however, was delayed in Rome due to what became known in Iran as ‘Black Friday’ when anti-Shah protestors were massacred in Jaleh Square (afterwards, ‘Martyrs Square’) in Tehran by government troops. As with the Jallianwalah Bagh massacre in 1919 in Amritsah, India, for the British Indian government, the Jalah Square massacre was partially responsible for the rapid decline and collapse of the fortunes of the Shah of Iran and his government which was already under severe pressure. We were put up at a hotel in Rome overnight and continued our journey the next day. From Tehran a group of us, I and four British women teachers, travelled on by car the two hundred and six miles through the Alborz Mountains and along the fertile strip of paddy and tea fields and thatched-roofed farm houses between the mountains and the Caspian Sea to the city of Rasht in Gilan province.
The School
KIASAT (or Kiasat) School, Rasht, was accommodated in a large bungalow on the eastern edge of the city. Opposite the school, across the unpaved lane, were two identical smaller bungalows – in one, the women teachers were accommodated and, in the other, I was accommodated. The school had at this time just fifty-five pupils in six classes, ranging from Kindergarten to Class 5. It was intended that the school would increase each year by one class as the pupils moved up a year. This relatively small number, however, allowed the teachers to work with the pupils individually or in small groups. English was taught as a foreign language and this, too, was done in small teaching groups. The pupils had seven hours a week of Persian (or Farsi, after Fars province, as the national language is known in Iran) in the afternoons, the teaching of which was by two local women teachers trained in the teachers’ college in Rasht. The school staff also included an administrator and a secretary. In Kiasat schools, the work of the principal or head teacher encompassed the academic areas only, leaving the day to day administration to the ‘Administrator’– in our case a rather stern-looking but innately kindly black-suited gentleman. The Administrator, Mr Niazi, who did not speak English, organised the Farsi teachers, pupil admissions and withdrawals, and met with non-English speaking parents.
The school was in its second year of operation. In its first year it had not been a success due, I suspected, to the failure of the then British staff to develop enthusiasm for the project. It was not what they were expecting. They were far from Tehran and, feeling isolated and abandoned, became demotivated and dispirited. Hence parents’ confidence in the school was lost and children were withdrawn. For me and for the newly arrived teachers on the other hand, Kiasat School, Rasht, had the exciting appeal of a new project: it was a new adventure in a fascinating land. It was a project for which resourcefulness, improvisation, and the regeneration of parental confidence were vital if it was to be a success. Above all, it was our school. As I noted below, in my first letter home, we began work much before the school reopened by painting the classroom walls and taking up the many preparatory tasks with enthusiasm. This served to convince sceptical local staff and the Kiasat school authorities in Tehran that, right from our arrival in Rasht, we were very serious about making the school a great success.
31 October 1978
The postal strike here in Rasht has been lifted for the past two months but, even so, letters sent through the post have only a doubtful chance of arriving in England, it seems. This letter is to be taken by a British company employee returning home. Otherwise all is well: the school has been running nicely now for five weeks and is transformed from what it was when we arrived. There has been much to do, of course, from painting the building to selecting and ordering stock and equipment and the many other things necessary for the day-to-day running of the school. We were filmed at school by a camera crew and shown on national television in the midst of our preparations. Not knowing that our conversation would also be recorded, we continued to discuss English rugby in my office, our discussion of which was also broadcast, when perhaps it would have more appropriate to have been recorded discussing school matters.
As I have a class to teach as well as routine work that includes meeting parents daily, I am kept busy. Being responsible for the school has been exciting and professionally rewarding – it is good teaching experience, too, and I have learnt much. As I am Head teacher here, the Principal of this and all Kiasat schools, Mr David Kirkwood, came to visit us last week from Tehran. He is very happy with our work: the morale of the staff is high and this is reflected in the school.
When I am not in the classroom, I sit in my office with its wonderful view of the Alborz Mountains, and plan the development of the school. For example, I have drawn plans of various items for which I have engaged a local carpenter to make for us. These include a climbing frame; 5-a-side goal posts that can also be used as benches or be upturned for children in PE for balancing exercises; entrance hall and classroom display boards; classroom screens; a Wendy house; dolls’ houses; book shelves. I drew the plans mainly from illustrations in the teachers’ early years’ textbooks and added measurements suitable for our spaces. Watching the carpenter bring such things to life fairly quickly from my drawings provides a certain sense of accomplishment and a change in the school.
We quickly collected school apparatus and equipment from the bazaar in Rasht – including items for practical science such as battery cells, wires, boards for circuits, beakers, scales and simple balances (just like those that symbolize justice); and for PE, small games equipment including balls of various sizes, children’s racquets, bats, hoops; and everything appropriate for the school that we are able to find.
A group of British teachers from the Kiasat schools in Tehran came to visit Rasht last week – we put up all thirteen in our two bungalows. They enjoyed our quiet school, went to the wide Caspian Sea beach (an hour’s drive from the city to the port of Banda-e Pahlavi [now Bandar-e Anzali]) and were quite envious of our situation here after the turmoil of Tehran and where, in their schools, classes are overflowing with new entrants. I think they picked up some of our enthusiasm. Morale in Tehran is, understandably, not particularly high at the moment.
The political and civil situation in Iran has not been too good lately, either. I believe that if a democratic governmental system was given a chance to operate, the people would at least have a voice in the country and could show what they think of the present state of things at elections. There are two main groups of dissenting people – the conservatives, led by the religious leaders, and the left wingers who want to establish a democratic republic. The conservatives want to rid the country of Westernization (i.e. all that which emanates from the West – including my school!). However, the problem stems in part from the fact that there is too much money going into too few pockets – everything is expensive while many people do not even have electricity, gas, running water, and so on. The government spends money on expensive armaments rather than on fertilizers and public works programmes.
The demonstrations have at last come to Rasht where people have been out in force in the streets in the last few days – but there is no cause for alarm as far as expatriates are concerned. Things may get a lot worse or just go on and off, as at present, for months to come – or they may quieten down all together. Ms Nasreen, the school secretary, said that that is usually the case here in Gilan province – the ‘Rashties’ (as the city people here are known) wait until they know which way the wind is blowing before they take sides. Unfortunately there is no one party in the country that can speak for the majority. I have seen the results of some demonstrations but I am not yet too concerned - though it will be a great hardship if the school has to close for any length of time.
Anyway, to sum up, for me the sun is shining literally and figuratively today.
By the time this letter was received, the demonstrations in Rasht, which began much later than in Tehran, were met with a violent backlash by the authorities. There were also bombs. We heard one clearly one day in November as school was closing for the day. It was, a parent told us, on the university campus – but we were not to be concerned as “...it was only a small one”.
Counter demonstrations were organized by police agents and the intelligence agency, the feared and abhorred SAVAK (or Savak), that is, the security force designed to protect the Shah with its spies (often eavesdroppers) throughout the country. One such spy was, probably due to his excellent English, responsible for the foreigners in Rasht. The counter demonstrators, generally from the rural areas, were apparently paid to join the pro-Shah rallies by the Savak. Although we were located in a quiet residential area, the pro-Shah demonstrators walking, or riding on tractor trailers, could be heard clearly by us on windless days causing some disturbance amongst the school children.
The Shah, or perhaps the monarchy as an institution, did have, however, grassroots support. When, for example, the statues of the Shah in many of the towns and cities across Iran were pulled down, the Shah was quick to point out that, of their own choice, they had been paid for and erected by the people. Educated Iranians were saying then that no matter the advantages of democracy in the West, it was not possible to have a democratic system in a largely illiterate society like that of Iran due to the people being too easily persuaded to vote in favour of the representatives of the landowners, industrialists, and others seeking to protect their own interests rather than those of the poor.
12 January 1979
I am now in Tehran and in doubt as to what will happen next. As you will have gathered from the news, I could well be back in England very soon.
The events over the past few weeks have been rather exciting. First we finished the school term in the same way in Rasht as we would in a primary school in England except that we were able to hold the school party outdoors as it was a really warm day. The next day we, the four UK recruited teachers and I, set off by bus to Tehran for the start of the mid-year holiday. My colleagues flew to Greece while I took a bus from Tehran to Istanbul. We first though had a few days in Tehran: on one evening of which I and another teacher were lost in the city half an hour from the start of curfew which begins at 9.00 p.m. We had visions of spending a night in jail. However on phoning an Iranian friend we found to our relief that we were quite close to our accommodation at David and Anne Kirkwood’s home and so we arrived back safely there a minute or two before curfew began.
I took a bus from downtown Tehran for the two and a half days’ journey to Istanbul. We reached the Iranian-Turkish border on Christmas Day where we spent a good many hours. The border post is in the middle of the mountain range and is therefore very isolated – so it was a rather dull Christmas for me. However, I did at least have a white Christmas – the weather had broken and there was snow in the mountains. The air was fresh and invigorating after the long haul on the bus. We eventually reached Istanbul after a drive across the Anatolian plateau that I enjoyed but it also seemed as if it would go on for ever.
I spent a pleasant six days as a tourist in Istanbul. I had lunch, in their small university apartment, with a couple who teach at the university in Istanbul. David Kirkwood had sent them an introduction for me. They afterwards took me in their car to see the Black Sea. They spoke of their and their countrymen’s love for their own revolutionary leader, Kemal Atatürk, and the fact that their Quran was written in romanised Arabic characters. I also had a Turkish bath – my first and last – in the traditional stone bath house in the city. I visited the Blue and other mosques, fish restaurants and the travellers or hippies’ restaurant in Sultan Ahmet known as the ‘Pudding Shop’. I also visited the Sultan’s palace overlooking the Bosphorus River including the women’s quarter or harem.
As martial law had been declared in Istanbul, soldiers were everywhere. In fact even on the journey to Istanbul the bus was stopped in the middle of the night by what transpired to be plain clothes policemen searching for drugs and weapons. As I had the front seat on the bus and suddenly woke up on their coming into the bus, and as they wore plain clothes and as one man had a sub-machine gun hanging from his shoulder but pointing in my direction every time he turned to face the passengers, I naturally assumed at first that they were the bandits I had heard lurked in these Zagros mountains.
However, there was no curfew in Istanbul although on New Year’s Eve, on the way to a dance with people I had met, we were stopped by the army four times: I am now getting used to being ‘frisked’ – the hands in the air thing.
I took the bus to return to Iran by the same route I travelled to Istanbul. However, instead of the two and a half days, the return journey took nearer to seven days. We were trapped by a snowstorm in the Zagros mountain range for two days in the worst blizzard I have ever seen. The coach, after a good deal of struggling, finally reached an army post in the mountains. The passengers could barely walk the twenty yards from the bus to the hut - the winds must have been at least ninety miles an hour. The hut was crowded with other stranded travellers and workmen – all Turkish. The only food available were large tins of coffee biscuits supposedly given free of cost to stranded travellers but in good old Turkish tradition the passengers were made to pay for them. So we lived on coffee biscuits and water for two days and also slept on the stone floor of the hut.
What with this and other delays and hold-ups (literally that is – by the army) I was rather later than I intended in getting back to Iran. In consequence, rather than travel to Tehran, I decided to transfer buses at Tabriz and travel to Rasht via Qazvin. The bus had arrived in Tabriz in the early hours of the morning and the bus to Rasht was not until the evening. To avoid the demonstrations in Tabriz I booked into a hotel for the day. What partly prompted that was being stopped in the street by a group of young men who asked the usual question, “Where are you from?” When I said “England!” one man said “Good that you are not from America”, and then made a cutting gesture at his throat. Later, in Rasht, on relating this incident to German professors at the local university, one said, “We are asked the same question and when we say ‘We are from Germany’, they say ‘Good job you are not from England!’ and they make a cutting gesture at their throat.”
When I finally reached Rasht I discovered to my surprise that almost all of the foreigners had been evacuated by an Iranian army plane to Tehran. The Canadians had been earlier evacuated by a Canadian air force plane that took them to Ankara from where I had recently travelled. This I discovered after walking over the crisp dry snow to the homes of expatriates I knew only to find an eerie silence. On peering through a window at one house, I could see children’s toys and other items scattered on the floor and an obviously rushed exit. Not knowing at that time the reason for their absence, it was for me rather reminiscent of the ‘Marie Celeste’ story. I was reluctant to travel to Tehran as David Kirkwood, on the advice of the British embassy, insisted I should, but I finally agreed with him to do so on the condition that I would return to Rasht after reporting back in Tehran. I therefore spent two days in Rasht where in school I telephoned parents to inform them that there will be no school for the time being. I then took a bus from Rasht to Tehran where I am now.
The British embassy had, by the way, been asking Kiasat for my passport number in order to obtain for me a Russian visa so that I could leave Iran on a Russian ship from the Caspian port of Banda Pahlavi – I was rather sorry that I could not do that. I don’t think that the embassy staff were too pleased that I just boarded a bus to leave Rasht after they had put their elaborate evacuation plan into action – but anyway, I am here and safe and sound.
The women teachers who went to Greece for a holiday had returned to Tehran on schedule but due to the increased political tension and, much to their disappointment, they were not allowed to proceed further. They are now in Tehran and are installed in two comfortable flats left vacant by departing Americans. If, and there is a good chance of it happening, things do quieten down, I will go back to Rasht - but we have a meeting tomorrow with Dr Araboff [the owner and managing director of Kiasat and a retired professor of Physics with a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne] which will help in deciding what we will do for the present, anyway. As I think you may realise, it would not be a surprise to anyone if you find me on the front doorstep sometime in the future. If you do, I shall try my best not to be glum and gloomy as it will be a great disappointment to me if the Kiasat operation in Iran folds up – and I shall stay on here as long as I can - so long as the schools are open and as long as we are allowed by the embassy. I will take no untoward risks, of course.
As to the events in Iran and Turkey – I have skipped over these as you probably have better news coverage than we do – but I would say that the people of Iran are individually a very friendly lot and they have nothing against British teachers anyway. It’s just unfortunate that we have landed in the middle of their revolution. Soldiers in the street have even apologised politely to me for the state Iran is in.
By the way, I have spent a lot of time learning Persian and can now hold a simple conversation with less educated Iranians in Persian. They are always eager to help with the language and it helps much in getting to know them too, of course.
I have not had many letters of late from England because of the postal strikes here. I shall try and send this one back with someone leaving for England (they are not too difficult to find these days!).
I shall try and write to everyone, especially as I am now in Tehran which makes it easier to get letters out, and relate my adventures. One thing which I can mention now as I have assured you of my safety (I hope) is that the coach in which I travelled across Turkey from Istanbul came within a fraction of tumbling over a precipice in the snow storm. Needless to say I do not intend to take many more bus journeys in Asia in winter for a long time to come!
In Tehran many people every night did as Imam Khomeini instructed, and that was go to their flat rooftops and, in defiance of the Shah’s regime, shout “Alluha akhbar!” - “God is great!” In the central or main Kiasat School in Tehran I sometimes manned the phone – on the day after the first rooftop demonstration, one American woman, clearly distraught as a result of the night of defiance, crying and shouting at the same time, told me that she is withdrawing her child from school today. I counselled and consoled her as best I could and she ended our conversation peacefully.
At that time of year there are occasionally fierce storms over Tehran with enormous flashes of lightning lighting up the night sky. “The Americans are photographing the city again!” joked one man.
In the event, I did soon return to Rasht, Dr Araboff supporting me in this intention. The official in the British embassy was, apparently, again chagrined but I was happy to leave Tehran and return to purposeful work.
I travelled back to Rasht by bus sitting next to an affable, middle-aged mullah. We conversed politely, I again being told, as I had often been before, that “It is not you [the British and the Americans] we don’t like, it is only your government that we dislike.”
In Rasht, in school one morning I found that Ms Nasreen and the ancient caretaker were both absent from school. When, next morning, I politely enquired why, Ms Nasreen said that a political party, the National Front, had threatened, on the radio the previous night, to close Kiasat School by force if necessary as it offended their political opinions. Nasreen went on to say that she knew they wouldn’t come and therefore, rather than unduly worry me, she chose not to inform me of this announcement. I didn’t ask her the obvious question, but was left wondering for some days thereafter whether to expect one evening a forceful delegation of revolutionaries intending to carry out their threat and, if so, what my response should be. I decided on passive resistance: I would do nothing, neither execute a strategic withdrawal (i.e., run away) nor remonstrate and just sit on the school wall and watch. Needless to say, Nasreen was right and no revolutionaries ever came to the school.
25 April 1979
Rasht has slowly settled down over the past two or three months and is now peaceful again. The government of Rasht and Gilan province is overseen by the local Revolutionary Committee who are also responsible for law and order. The police and army – that is those who took no great part in combating demonstrators - are slowly beginning to function once again. Before Ayatollah Khomeini’s return on the 11th February, many members of the forces acted with unbelievable ferocity when confronted by unarmed demonstrators – rifle and machine gun fire was directed into the crowds. I was a first-hand witness of this on one occasion when I unwittingly walked through a crowd on my way home from the city centre one afternoon only to find that they had been taunting soldiers in the street – who then suddenly replied by firing into the crowd. I quickly realised that I was very nearly alone in the street, the crowd having mainly withdrawn, and I had to run. I was told the next day that two demonstrators and two soldiers were killed there that afternoon.
In fact I ran alongside a high whitewashed wall until I came to a low-level window where the people in the room assisted me in climbing through. I fell on to the floor. The people there were then quite surprised to find that I was a foreigner and a British foreigner at that. They brushed me down and I went on my way. The next day I returned to the place to thank the people there and to see if I could find bullet pock marks on the wall - but I could not. If firing had been directed at me, about which in the circumstances I could not be sure, it had probably gone high and above the wall.
On the morning of 11 February, the night after the overthrow and surrender of the government, Rasht resembled a battlefield. The SAVAK building, a gruesome looking concrete fortress, was attacked by hundreds of men (one estimate was 1500). Apparently many Savakis, as they were known, escaped, but those caught were immediately killed - and killed brutally, and their remains publicly displayed. Thousands of people, including women and children, flocked to see the mutilated corpses in the following days and to walk around the burned and devastated building.
I was revolted by this barbarity and did not go to see this display. However, two German acquaintances, very early in the morning, went to see to the welfare of a colleague of theirs who lived quite close to the Savak building. There they observed and photographed the butchered bodies and described them to me in unnecessary detail shortly afterwards. Their colleague expected the mob to attack and kill him at any time during the night and, as a result, his hair had, they said, ‘turned white’. The man, a German, whom I had met briefly before and after the attack on the Savak had certainly changed in his demeanour and he left Rasht shortly afterwards for Tehran and home. I went to the building after the bodies were removed and took a photograph of the remaining shell: the last major symbol of the Shah’s regime in Rasht had been destroyed.
The minor police stations were easily over run – the central police station had taken a little longer – and then the army and police surrendered on orders from Tehran. I drove around the city that morning with one of my German acquaintance. We passed still smouldering road barricades, crowds of surly looking people, destruction everywhere with the whole city having an air of desolation. At one place we saw a group of teenagers and younger boys in a small procession at the head of which was a boy carrying a stick with a crossbar at the top on which were tied two severed hands of Savakees, that is, members of the Savak, who had been killed at some point during the previous night’s attack on the Savak building. In the centre of the upheld wooden cross was a notice stating, I was informed, words to the effect that the hands (or grip) of the Savak on the people have been severed.
My German friends had an emergency evacuation plan which they now thought best to implement. As the road through the Alborz was blocked at several places, they had decided, following consultation with their engineering company colleagues in Germany, to travel to Baku in Azerbaijan on the weekly Russian cargo and passenger ship that arrived in Rasht each Wednesday. Under emergency circumstances, it was possible to go to Baku without a visa. The Germans asked me to join them to which invitation I at first agreed, but, back at school, to where I went next, Ms Nasreen, the school secretary, implored me to stay as, if I left Rasht, she said, the school was bound to close. Parents also came that day in a delegation to meet me at school to reassure me of my safety and also to ask me to stay. They said that I was safe in Rasht and that Imam Khomeini had clearly stated that foreigners were “immune” politically and were not to be molested. They also said that I can stay with one of the families if I chose, where I would be confident of my safety. I decided then to stay on in Rasht although live in my bungalow alone rather than with a local family as, it seemed to me, my presence may possibly create a problem for the hosts. The ship did not come as expected and as soon as the roads were clear, the Germans left Rasht for Tehran by road. With my decision to stay in Rasht, I was supposedly the last Western foreigner in Rasht, there having been earlier good-humoured badinage between myself and the Germans as to who would stay longest, the Germans or the English.
One parent whom I previously knew quite well in Rasht was a colonel of police. He was arrested by the Revolutionary Committee and sent to Tehran where he was lodged in the ex-Shah’s notorious Evin prison. Fortunately, to everyone’s relief, he was able to convince the Committee that he was merely a traffic policeman and had no part in the oppression and sometimes murder of civilians in Rasht. He was freed and he returned home. The foreigners’ Savak spy was, the school caretaker said, mimicking the action, “cowering in the mountains”. He will soon, the caretaker said, be caught by the new authorities. I was concerned about the welfare of two young women, student members of the Tudeh (Communist Party) whom I knew, the daughters of a bazaar tailor. I was relieved to know that they had gone to the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow (now the People’s Friendship University of Russia) and were therefore safe from interrogation and possible imprisonment.
In the city I met a young Sri Lankan certificated teacher, formally trained in Colombo as a Kindergarten teacher. She was happy to be asked to join Kiasat as a teacher of the youngest children. For the remaining pupils, I was their class teacher and taught them in groups according to their age. This was quite manageable as many families had by now left Rasht for Europe or the USA.
At home at night I occasionally heard gunfire which signified in most cases the execution of state prisoners. I was made inexplicably restless by this and needed to walk in the garden, oddly reassuring myself that, although tragic for the people concerned, it made no difference to them whether I was here in Rasht or in faraway England. Beyond the garden wall there was an extensive swampy area in which frogs on those occasions appeared to croak more noisily than usual.
And then a long period of relative calm ensued during which the school was enabled to proceed peacefully.
From school one day we all, all staff and pupils, including Mr. Niazi in his black suit, went to a Caspian Sea beach for the day. We earlier had discussed whether an armed guard should accompany us – I said no as I had noted that care of weapons did not always conform to best practice and we may be more endangered. Nevertheless, Mr. Niazi had the last word and an armed guard duly appeared on the day we left school. Nothing untoward occurred except that pre-revolutionary life-size caricatures of the Shah and his senior ministers were still hanging, as a terrible warning to the people concerned, from a rope stretched across the road about ten miles from the beach.
We ended the school year in accordance with the Kiasat school calendar and policy, expecting to be back in August to prepare for the re-opening of the school in early September. I planned to return to England, not having taken the opportunity earlier in the year, by ship from Rasht to Baku; by train from Baku to Moscow; by train from Moscow to Leningrad (now, again, St Petersburg); by ferry to Helsinki, the capital city of Finland; a ferry to Stockholm, the capital city of Sweden; a train across the foot of Sweden to the port of Goteborg and a ferry from Goteborg to Newcastle. Then, finally, a train from Newcastle to London.
All of which I successfully did with the exception of the first part: the Iranian authorities would not allow departure by ship and in consequence I flew to Moscow from Tehran before commencing my train and ferry journeys. I stayed at the famous hotel in Red Square with its view of St Basil’s cathedral. The hotel was, then, under communist management with a stern lady at a desk on each floor presumably monitoring the comings and goings of the hotel guests. Sadly, I do not have my notes now of that wonderful journey but I clearly remember, when finally on the train to London in a nearly empty carriage, as we passed through the peaceful and green English countryside, an elderly couple sitting near me, the husband rummaging the Daily Mirror and quietly saying to his wife, ‘’Seems they’ve been having trouble in Iran...’.
“England, my England!”
Postscript
Sadly, the Revolutionary Committee in Rasht closed the Kiasat School in the summer vacation of 1979. A delegation of school parents went to the National Revolutionary Headquarters in Tehran to remonstrate but to no avail. This action by the parents reinforced my view of them as always quietly brave in the face of the immense changes and challenges in their lives and in the lives of their children brought on by the revolution. I remember them all at the Kiasat School, Rasht, with warmth and affection.
Some few international schools in Tehran remained open throughout the forthcoming school year, 1979 to 1980. I joined one such school in north Tehran as Teacher of Class 6. It was a good school and a good year with wonderful students and staff but sadly marred by knowing that this school, too, must close at the end of the school year.
I visited that year, travelling by bus from Tehran, on the first day of January 1980, Hafiz’ Tomb in Shiraz, Fars province, having grown to love A.J. Arberry’s Fifty Poems of Hafiz (1947). My own annotated copy I accidentally let slip in into the Red Sea from the guard rail of the ‘Saudi Moon’, a pilgrim ferry that plies between Jeddah and Port Said, on my return from Jeddah over sea and land to England in 1987. I had been carrying the book amongst others with me on my various travels for more than six years.
A few lines of Hafiz seem to sum up for me the beauty of Iran and the tragedy of Iran in its revolutionary years:
I walked where tulips blossomed red,
And whispered to the morning breeze:
“Who are yon martyrs cold and dead?
Whose bloody-winding sheets are these?”
“Hafiz”, he answered, “‘tis not mine
Or thine to know this mystery . . .”
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