Contact! by Jan Morris

hefty freak or prodigy, a handless painter or a three-legged man, his whole body shaking with the vibration of the drill, and the very air about him shuddering with its noise. He pauses in his work as you approach, but the supervisor gives him a flicker of his torch, and he is off again, smiling broadly through his dirt.
    Merciless fish
    At sea in the Caribbean an elderly sailor pointed out to me the dark shadow of a shark, loitering beside the hull of our ship, and this is what he told me: ‘It’s got no marcy, no marcy at all. Big blue fish, so you can’t see ’um in de water, he’s sly! No marcy, see, not a drop of marcy!’
    Nanny talk
    The nannies of the London park were there in their battalions, elderly complacent nannies and perky young ones and hard old professionals with starched faces. ‘So I said to her, I said, “No, madam, it is not and never has been my job to make the tea…”’ ‘It’s never been the same since Lady Sarah passed over but, there, times have changed, haven’t they, dear?’ ‘No, Jeremy darling, keep away from the doggy, dear…’ ‘“Give him his tea?” I said, “I haven’t been looking after children for thirty years without knowing when it’s teatime,” I said, and with that I walked out…’ ‘Try rubbing his back, Mabel, that usually brings it up, doesn’t it, dear?’
    Chief of the Egyptians
    Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, lived blamelessly with his buxom wife and five children in a modest Cairo house that was plain to the point of ugliness. No rude or ranting orator greeted me there, behind some big officious desk. On the contrary, the Chief of the Egyptians was relaxedand friendly, in shirtsleeves, his vest showing between the buttons, and he gave me coffee and talked pleasantly and intelligently for as long as I liked. Nasser like to call himself the first indigenous ruler of Egypt since the Pharaohs, and he was indeed a genuine through-and-through Egyptian, born of peasant stock on the banks of the Nile. ‘What a reasonable sort of man,’ I said to myself as we talked across the plain deal table, sipping thick chamomile coffee from cups edged with blue roses and gilt.
    I was not deceived, though. For many long years Nasser led an underground revolutionary movement, and I knew he had talents of deception and conspiracy of a very high order. His horizons were limitless, and he liked to talk about circles of power, national destinies, the interventions of fate and that sort of thing. The hours slipped smoothly by as he expounded his theories, the coffee cups came and went, until at last the President rose from the table, his sandals flip-flopping across the linoleum, to see me to the door in his shirtsleeves and wave me goodbye into the night. The sentries saluted obsequiously.
    Anglo-Sudanese
    Good living is a Sudanese tradition, but it came as a disagreeable surprise to me in a Khartoum bar one evening to meet a young Sudanese, just down from the university, drunk not in the Sudanese but in the British manner; facetious with the sweaty banter of his British companions, not with any African drollery, with his tie loosened precisely as theirs was and a cigarette sticking to his lower lip. Hisgrandfather had charged across the plain at Omdurman, brandishing a spear and screaming, but when this modern Sudanese slurred into the maudlin it was the maudlin of smoky pubs and potato crisps. I was shocked. But the British administrators of the Sudan have a wonderful knack of making you feel slightly ashamed of yourself, and I thought of that unlovely young man when I later read in a pamphlet of theirs: ‘A new nation is being born, and in the difficult world of today the new arrival needs all the sincere sympathy and disinterested help you can give or get it.’
    I blushed: but it did not matter, for all the electric lights had gone out.
    An exotic
    Sen