Spectrum - 1965 - Southgate County School

leaves and heaps of sugar—or vanish to the mosques
five times daily as their Moslem religion demands. At
noon they curl up by the roadside and sleep. Women
work all day in the fields in almost unbearable heat,
using stone-age implements. Peasants travel by donkey
and by foot, the woman walks while her husband rides.
Sometimes the donkeys are loaded with massive bundles
of hay or coal, but it is the women, bent incurably double,
who carry these same loads if they have no donkey. It is
women who sit with their cheap goods in the market
place and at the hotel an elderly woman was cook, maid,
cleaner and porter single-handed. All women wear
yashmaks so a man never sees her face before their
marriage. If he doesn't like it he "gets rid of her" and
chooses another.
We went to an international football match against
Spain, which seemed very strange as it was the middle
of June. I was the only woman in the crowd of two
thousand. The looks of surprise and amusement, we
received, showed plainly how strange they thought Pete
was to take me with him. How could a woman possibly
understand it? Why hadn't I been left sitting on the
ground outside with the other wives who had accompanied
their husbands on the expedition?
Everyone dressed in long robes. High class women
in grey or black, men in brown and peasants in yards of
red, white and blue striped sheeting or towelling, colours
to ward off evil spirits. Babies were tied to their mothers'
backs in cotton slings. Many adults and all children were
shoeless, little boys often had no pants or trousers and
everyone's clothes were tattered.
The hospitality amazed us. Bus drivers, sweet sellers
and street vendors whom we met greeted us and slapped
us on the back when we saw them again. The hotel
charged nothing for the drinks and medicine (normally
an exhorbitant price) which they provided when I was
sick. (A result of the fascinating but very oily cooking.)
I think it was worth it though, just to eat in a restaurant
hung with carpets and furnished with soft, low couches.
French speaking students would spend hours with us
taking great pride in showing us round. Aided by
cigarette bribes, one of them persuaded a haughty young
Arab to take us bare back on his pony along a muddy
river path, and another Arab, to pick fresh figs from his
tree for us. They were succulent, purple fruits so different
from the dried, brown, shrivelled variety which we know.
When we unwittingly offended a man, the crowd,
attracted by his yells, smilingly indicated that we should
not worry and pulled us from his grip.
We communicated by sign language, met English
folk only in Tangier, read no newspapers, heard no wireless,
swam from glorious empty beaches. We saw camels,
snake charmers and lizards, and a tortoise on the hillside
dead from thirst. But my most powerful memories are
of shrivelled, pleading hands lifted from beneath bowed
heads, of children with no toys at all, of men blind, or
with one arm or leg, of a woman begging in the market
place for her fevered child, and the police post for handing
out bread. Medicine was a wild dream when they
had not even enough money to buy food.
BV JANET COOK 4C
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