Olivia Manning - Greece and Egypt

Greece and Egypt

Manning was subject to anxieties bordering on paranoia throughout her life. She had good reason to be concerned about Reggie, however, who travelled from Romania to Greece on the German Lufthansa airline – Lufthansa planes were sometimes diverted to Axis countries. He arrived safely, however, bringing a rucksack, a suitcase full of books, but no appropriate clothes for work. Reggie relaunched his hectic social life, but his wife interacted little with the expatriate community, focussing instead on her writing. Nevertheless, this was a happy time for Manning; "Romania is abroad," said Manning, "but Greece is home". Manning had her admirers, including Terence Spencer, a British Council lecturer who acted as her companion while Reggie was busy with other activities – he later appeared as the character Charles Warden in Friends and Heroes, the third book of The Balkan Trilogy. Soon after their arrival, Greece entered the war against the Axis.

In spite of early successes against invading Italian forces, by April 1941 the country was at risk of invasion from the Germans; in a later poem Manning recalled the "horror and terror of defeat" of a people she had grown to love. The British Council advised its staff to evacuate, and on 18 April Manning and Reggie left Piraeus for Egypt on the Erebus, the last civilian ship to leave Greece.

For the three dangerous days of the passage to Alexandria the passengers subsisted on oranges and wine. On board with the Smiths were the novelist Robert Liddell, the Welsh poet Harold Edwards, and their wives– the Smiths shared a cramped cabin with the Edwardses. Mrs. Edwards had brought with her a hat box full of expensive Parisian hats, which Manning kept placing in the passageway outside the cabin, and from whence Mrs. Edwards kept returning it. The two were not on speaking terms by the end of the voyage, but Manning had the last word: when Mrs. Edwards later opened her hatbox she found that Manning had crushed the hats with a chamberpot.

Arriving in Alexandria, the refugees gratefully devoured the food provided by the British military, but learned that the swastika was now flying over the Acropolis. Manning's first impressions of Egypt were of squalor and unreality: "For weeks we lived in a state of recoil". From Alexandria they went by train to Cairo, where they renewed contact with Adam Watson, who was now Second Secretary at the British Embassy. He invited them to stay at his Garden City flat that overlooked the embassy.

Though nominally an independent country, Egypt had been effectively under British control since the late nineteenth century. With the outbreak of war, and under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, the country was under virtual occupation by the British. At this stage in the war, the Germans were advancing apparently unstoppably across the desert towards Egypt, and Cairo was rife with rumours and alarms. Manning was jittery and fearful. She was constantly anxious about illness, and was indeed frequently unwell. Concerned, Reggie suggested that it might be best if she returned to England, but she retorted "Wherever we go, we go together. If we return home, we both go. I won't have the war separating us. End of story." Her father had made her a firm believer in the British Empire and the benefits it had brought the world, and Manning was a patriotic Briton, confident of ultimate Allied success. In Egypt, however, she confronted the fact that British occupation had never been popular. Reggie quickly discovered the Anglo-Egyptian Union in Zamalek, where he drank and talked politics and poetry. As usual he was well liked, and according to Lawrence Durrell often had a string of disreputable friends with him. Manning was much less popular. Durrell described her as a "hook-nosed condor", whose critical manner was unappreciated by many who knew her.

Manning was incensed that the British Council did not immediately find a job for Reggie, whom she considered one of their most brilliant teachers. She took her revenge by writing scurrilous verse about the Council's representative, C.F.A. Dundas, later immortalised as the ineffectual Colin Gracey in Fortunes of War. Manning's characters were often based on real people though she never drew precisely from life. Her mocking portrait of the British Council lecturer Professor Lord Pinkrose was loosely based on Lord Dunsany, sent to occupy the Byron Chair of English at Athens University in 1940. She also resented that Amy Smart, wife of Walter Smart and frequent patron of artists, poets and writers in Cairo, paid so little attention to her and Reggie; she later took revenge in a similar way.

In October 1941, Reggie was offered a post as lecturer at Farouk University in Alexandria. The couple moved from Cairo to share a flat with fellow teacher Robert Liddell. The Germans regularly bombed the city, and the raids terrified Manning, who irritated Reggie and Liddell by insisting that all three descend to the air raid shelter whenever the sirens wailed. Almost immediately after her arrival in Alexandria came devastating news of her brother Oliver's death in a plane crash. The emotional upset this caused prevented her from writing novels for several years.

The air raids became intolerable to Manning, and she soon moved back to Cairo, where in the winter of 1941 she became press attaché at the United States Legation. In her spare time, she worked on Guests at the Marriage, an unpublished prototype for The Balkan Trilogy, as well as short stories and poetry, some of which she sent to Stevie Smith in the hope of getting them published. Over the years, Stevie had brooded over Manning's desertion of their friendship to marry Reggie, and around this time her jealousy took an overt form; in 1942 she wrote a poem entitled "Murder", in which a man stands beside a grave and admits, "My hand brought Reggie Smith to this strait bed – / Well, fare his soul well, fear not I the dead". In subsequent reprintings, the name "Reggie Smith" was replaced by "Filmer Smith", veiling the allusion, but Manning found out and was furious.

During her time in the Egypt, Manning became a contributor to two Middle East-based literary magazines, "Desert Poets" and "Personal Landscapes", founded by Bernard Spencer, Lawrence Durrell, and Robin Fedden. The latter sought to explore the "personal landscapes" of writers experiencing exile during the war. The founders, like Manning, maintained a strong attachment to Greece rather than an artistic and intellectual engagement with Egypt. In remembering the departure from Greece, Manning wrote "We faced the sea / Knowing until the day of our return we would be / Exiles from a country not our own." During their time in Egypt and Palestine, Manning and her husband maintained close links with refugee Greek writers, including translating and editing the work of George Seferis and Elie Papadimitriou. Manning described her impressions of the Cairo poetry scene in "Poets in Exile" in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon. She defended the writers from the claim of a London reviewer that they were "out of touch", suggesting that their work was strengthened by their access to other cultures, languages and writers. Her review was much critiqued by those featured, including Durrell who objected to Spencer's poetry being praised at his expense.

In 1942, Reggie was appointed as Controller of English and Arabic Programming at the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem; the job was to begin in the fall, but in early July, with the German troops rapidly advancing on Egypt, he persuaded Manning to go ahead to Jerusalem to "prepare the way".