Free Freya Stark by Caroline Moorehead

in Crete there had been a serious defeat of the Allied troops. Her transfer requested by Cornwallis, Freya now prepared to set up her Brotherhood in Iraq, though in a somewhat muted form, as Freya felt the country was not ready for anything as specific as Brotherhood cells.
    In mid-October Freya found a house in Alwiyah, the Hampstead of Baghdad, modelled on British Indian army cantonment lines, with detached single-storey bungalows set among lawns and oleanders. Pamela Hore-Ruthven arrived to help her, and later, after she left, Peggy Drower, a fluent Arabist and the daughter of old Baghdad friends of Freya’s. Once again, Freya set them a punishing routine. Occasionally they felt like slaves, Freya having decided that office grind was not for her. There were meetings to set up, the news to be gathered and sifted, a bulletin to be written and copied. Most time-consuming were the ‘Qabul’,the ‘At Homes’, a regular feature of Baghdad life, to which ladies simply went along uninvited and ate cakes, and which Freya and Peggy Drower used as occasions for pro-British chat. One week, Freya noted that she had attended thirteen. After the Brotherhood took serious root, there were also trips to set up cells among the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.
    Against this background of continual occupation, Freya always found time for reflection. ‘Very few people who think much seem really convinced of personal immortality,’ she wrote to Cockerell. ‘I myself … came to the simple faith that what had no beginning could have no end … When I was so near death once or twice the cold and bleak prospect frightened me: since then, however, a strange reassurance has come and I
think
I could no longer feel that fear: I know that in moments of great ecstasy even in this life you cease to be “personal” at all: your whole being is merged and loses itself as it were, even in such daily things as the loveliness of a sunset or a rose: if such is the loss of personality, and I believe it to be so, it does not seem to matter.’ She was to repeat this, often, later.
    As in Cairo, wartime life in Baghdad could be very pleasant. Though something of a backwater, the city was full of soldiers and provided a centre for Britishintelligence, which soon gathered to it many friends of Freya’s, and many others who were to become friends. ‘It is so nice’, she remarked, ‘to be mate and not skipper …’ There was Adrian Bishop, in charge of the Special Operations Executive, Teddy Hodgkin, Aidan Philip and Stewart Perowne, now posted as information officer to Iraq. There was the embassy itself, with Vyvyan Holt as Oriental Secretary. In the early mornings horses were brought to the door of the little pink villa in Alwiyah and Freya rode out into the desert with Stewart Perowne, or her young paying guest, Nigel Clive. At weekends there were picnics by the river, with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, who took their mongoose with them to swim. And there were always parties. Freya, never dull, was capable of great, enjoyable frivolity. Robin Maugham, visiting Baghdad, was taken to dine with her. ‘I had imagined a rather gaunt, tough traveller,’ he wrote in his autobiography,
Nomad
. ‘I found a small, sprightly lady … with her head on one side like a bird, inquiring, with clear, piercing eyes beneath fine brows.’
    This was a good time for Freya. She had a steady income, her health was good and she had been made temporary Attaché at the embassy. It was fun to have the Prime Minister, Nuri Pasha, to dinner and to discuss military strategy with Jumbo Wilson;reassuring to learn from the ambassador that what she was doing was important. Rightly, she could feel appreciated, able at last to exercise some influence on policy. (Even if she was also short of funds. She wanted £9,300 for her committees. Stewart Perowne, her superior, refused to authorise payment for anything he had not approved. Freya got her own back by putting down a new typewriter under