Read The Levanter for Free Online Page B

consulted I would have chosen to stay at the English school in Alex, or, failing that, go to the one in Istanbul where there were family friends; but my mother wouldn’t have Istanbul - unlike Grandfather Howell she is very anti-Turk - and anyway my father’s mind was made up. War or no war, I had to go through the same prep and public school mills as he and his father had.
    Not all my father’s ideas were so fixed, however. After the move to Alexandria the whole character and direction of our business began to change. This was father’s doing and he was quite deliberate about it. He had sensed the future. Some things remained - the coasters and the bigger ships that later replaced them had nearly always been profitable - but from 1945 on, when the war in Europe ended, the whole emphasis on the trading side of our business shifted from bulk commodities to manufactured goods. During those postwar years we became selling agents throughout the Middle East (after 1948, Israel always excepted) for a number of European and, later, some American manufacturers.
    This change had a direct effect on my life. The first of these agencies of ours was that of a firm in Glasgow which made a range of rotary pumps. It was my father’s realization that it is difficult to sell engineering products effectively when the buyer knows more than you do about them that made him decide on a technical education for me. So, instead of going from school in England to Cairo University, a transition to which I had been looking forward, I found myself committed to a red-brick polytechnic in one of the grimier parts of London.
    At the time, I am afraid, my acceptance of this change of plan was more sullen than dutiful. Born in Cyprus when it was a British colonial possession, I held a British colonial passport. By the simple process of threatening me - quite baselessly, I later discovered - with the prospect of National Service conscription into the British army unless I enrolled as a student in London, my father had his way. It wasn’t, I know, a nice trick for a loving father to play on a son; but I can admit now that, as a businessman, I have had no reason to regret that he played it.
    One way and another, then, I learned a lot from my father. He died in 1962, of a heart ailment, eighteen months after we moved our head office to Beirut in Lebanon and registered our second holding company in Vaduz.
    The testing time for me, as the new head of our business, came the following year, when I had to make my first major policy decision.
    It was that decision, made almost nine years ago, that started me on the road which has proved in the end to be so very dangerous.
     
    Our Syrian troubles had started in the early fifties when Soviet penetration of the Middle East began. In Syria it was particularly successful. Friendship with the Soviet Union grew with the rise to power of the Syrian Arab Socialist Renaissance movement, later to be known as the Ba’ath Party. They were not communists - as Sunnite Muslims they could not be; they were, however, Arab nationalists committed to socialism and strongly anti-West. The Ba’ath program called for union with Egypt and other Arab states, and rapid socialization of the Syrian economy.
    In 1958 they got both union with Egypt and, at the same time, the first of their socialization measures, “agrarian reform.” In that year an expropriation law was passed which stripped the Agence Howell of all but eighty hectares of its irrigated land. We had held over a thousand hectares. As a foreign-owned company we received “compensation”, but since the compensation was paid into a blocked account in the state-owned Central Bank, it didn’t do us much good. We were not permitted to transfer the money out of the country, we could not buy foreign currency or valuta, and we were not even allowed to reinvest or spend the money inside the country without permission from the Central Bank. It was in limbo.
    They let us keep the