Christopher Hampton: My Egyptian paradise

Juliet Rix
The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010

Christopher Hampton was five when his family moved to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. It was 1951, and the start of a golden era in his life. But it wasn't to last. Five years later, it was violently "bust apart" by the Suez crisis, as Hampton – playwright, screenwriter and film director – puts it.

Alexandria – Alex – in the 1950s was a wonderful place to be a child. Hampton's father, Barney, worked for Cable & Wireless, the British communications company, which at that time posted people across the empire. "My parents had no money, but a very luxurious lifestyle with a company car and servants. You were liberated to live your life and they dedicated theirs pretty much to pleasure," says Hampton. His mother, Dorothy, was "mysterious, self-contained, imbued with pre-war British restraint and devoted to the family". His father got home from the office most days early enough for a family outing.

"They were athletic, physical people … great goers-out," says Hampton. They enjoyed the expatriate lifestyle to the full: swimming, sailing, dancing and sport. They did not read much and weren't very interested in culture, but three times a week the family went to one of the city's vast art deco cinemas. "Alex was noisy," recalls Hampton, "full of street vendors," and extremely multicultural, with not only Brits and Egyptians but also Armenians, Greeks, French, Americans, Maltese, Finns and Lebanese. "Everyone spoke several languages, even the beggars."

Hampton bought eucalyptus sweets from Basso, the Egyptian who ran the small shop outside their house, and waved to Bella, the fat Greek woman opposite who never left her apartment. "She had a little dog and a big basket. She would lower the dog down so it could pee and order her groceries by yelling in Greek at the top of her voice. The shopkeepers put the things in the bucket and paid themselves from the money." Hampton watched all these goings on from his bolt-hole in the family garden 10 feet above the road. From this polyglot environment, came his enduring interest in languages.

It was the family servant, Ibrahim, who inspired Hampton's interest in writing. "He was sort of family but easier to talk to, less constrained by [his parents'] need to say the right thing to one's son – more subversive." They hung around the kitchen together, drinking Coca-Cola and occasionally whisky – Ibrahim drank the whisky, getting the young Chris to top up the bottle with water. So it was to Ibrahim that he went when he had to write a five-minute play for homework and couldn't think of a story. "All right," said Ibrahim enthusiastically, "you have three men in the desert, they have treasure … " Soon Hampton had his own ideas.

"My father was very encouraging of my ambition to be a writer," he says. "I just don't think he envisaged the kind of writer I became. I think he thought the world needed another Rider Haggard."

Hampton's brother Robert, known as Bob, who is eight years Chris's senior and now a retired accountant living in Crete, was away at school for most of Chris's childhood. In those days, C&W only paid for children to join their parents once every three years, so when Bob did appear, Chris saw him as "an interloper". At the age of eight, he found his 16-year-old brother terrifying. "He was like them – very sporty. I was the odd one out in the family, this small boy with thick glasses who read all the time."

Against convention, the Hamptons decided not to send their younger son to school in Britain but to keep him at home. "My mother had suffered enough when my brother went away and I was getting a very good education in Egypt."

But they had not foreseen the Suez crisis. There had been trouble in Egypt not long before, during the 1952 revolution. The young Chris had been spat on at school, thumped and called names, such as "filthy English". As tension mounted in 1956, he was cornered in the school lavatories by an Egyptian boy, but didn't tell his parents. Other Britons were fleeing the city but Dorothy refused to disrupt one of Bob's rare visits and hoped the trouble would blow over. "She thought it was a storm in a teacup," says Hampton.

Then one day, his father came home from work and said they had to leave Alex immediately. By this time, there were no ships left. There were rushed goodbyes to Ibrahim – who gave each boy a fez to remember him by – and the family caught a train to Port Said. A passing Australian liner was radioed for help and Dorothy and the two boys were driven out by launch to clamber aboard, while Barney stayed to do his job in the city.

Chris enjoyed the voyage. It was only later that he realised he had been sailing away from his childhood.

In England, aged 10, he was sent to prep school. He describes it as brutal, and he hated his time there. His father sent Bob and Chris cables describing the madness of the crisis: the RAF bombed his office and hit the church next door killing the verger, just one of a "series of catastrophic mistakes" that infuriated and shocked the family. "My parents were middle-class Conservatives, and they felt their beliefs betrayed."

At school, meanwhile, the young Chris was summoned to the headmaster's office to explain his "unpatriotic" views about the country that had been his home since he was five. Meanwhile, his brother Bob, by now at naval academy in Devon, had the fez Ibrahim had given him confiscated and burned in front of the whole school. "In Egypt I had been too English," says Hampton. "In England I was quasi-Egyptian".

As the crisis worsened, his father was given 24 hours to leave Egypt. The family's belongings – from furniture to photograph albums – were loaded into a cargo ship. In a strategic move to block the canal, the Egyptians sank a number of vessels, among them the one carrying the Hamptons' possessions. "My mother was very stoical, but it hurt," says Hampton. The abruptness of their departure and loss of their belongings sharpened his feelings of a paradise lost. Afterwards, his parents were posted to Hong Kong and Chris remained at school in England. The golden age was over.

In 1991, Hampton, by then a successful writer, was asked by Richard Eyre, who was the director of the National Theatre, to write a play for the 35th anniversary of Suez. He researched the subject but found nothing new to say: "Everyone already knew it was a monumental balls-up."

But this particular political blunder had had a profound effect on Hampton's childhood and he suddenly found the memories flooding back. Eyre was persuaded to take something more personal, and Hampton's only autobiographical work, White Chameleon, the story of his family's years in Alexandria, was the result. With the play in production, he returned to Alexandria for the first time since he was 10.

The east end of the city was full of "Romanian-style cold war apartments" from Nasser's post-Suez era, he says, but the west end was hardly touched by anything but time; even the art deco cinemas were still there. He found the house where he had grown up - it had become a girls' school. As he was walking nearby, remembering the eucalyptus sweets he used to buy each morning, he got a surprise. "This little bald chap came out of the shop and said, 'Christopher!' – it was Basso."

Going back, he says, "was overwhelmingly emotional. I was biting my lip all the time."

Hampton's father died long before the play was performed, but his mother came to see it. "I was very anxious … and almost immediately she started to weep." Did she say what she thought of the play? "She was not one for bestowing compliments," he says, "but she kept coming back [to see it] again and again. It meant much more to her than anything else I'd written."

A new version of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t32mb" title="White <00ad>Chameleon">White Chameleon, by Christopher Hampton, can be heard at 2.30pm today on BBC Radio 4