Free Freya Stark by Caroline Moorehead Page B

soldiers. She liked their ‘impression of calmness and efficient leisure’. She paid attention to what they said, and made allowances for them that she would never have made for civilians. She looked for the soldier-scholar in them all. She saw it in Wavell and in General Wilson, whose eyes, she once said, were like those of an elephant, ‘small, shrewd and wise’. She was, said her friends, very like a soldier herself, thinking tactical thoughts and strategies of Empire.

CHAPTER SIX
    Freya’s talents were now widely recognised to lie in propaganda, or, as she preferred to call it, persuasion. Among the generals she had become a celebrity – General Smuts was said to know parts of her books by heart – and at the Ministry of Information she had acquired a reputation for being able to talk to ordinary people in such a way that they believed what she said. There was something in her manner, stern, uncompromising, full of charm, using words that rang out with conviction and unmistakable probity, that was very attractive. From Cairo, Wavell was on record as saying that the Brotherhood had played an essential part ininternal security and done much to lessen sabotage against the Allies in Egypt. What was more, Freya now had a wider following. For some time she had been writing regularly from the Near East for
The Times
, articles that upheld Britain and her role as moral guide in a confused world. The time had perhaps come to give her a new audience.
    By 1943 there was a strong agreement in official circles in Britain that the Zionists in Palestine should be helped as far as possible, but only with the consent of the Arabs. Finding this historical attachment to the Arab world so entrenched, the Zionists had been shifting their campaign to the United States. They were now fighting Malcolm Macdonald’s White Paper of 1939, in which he had proposed limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 in the next five years, and after that only if the Arabs agreed. Freya, whose understanding of the Arab position was thought to be acute, was now asked to go to America to lecture on the Middle East – largely on the premise that Americans had very little idea of what it was really like – because the Zionists were currently making British policy in Palestine much harder to enforce. Freya herself, having watched American interest in the area grow with that in oil, thought the time right.
    She was not, perhaps, the most obvious of choicesfor the task, for all her travels and understanding. Freya had never been to America and her one encounter with the new world in Canada had left her a little scathing of its culture. More important, she had never been admiring of the Jews. From Haifa, in the summer of 1931, she had written to her father: ‘I don’t think anyone but a Jew can really like the Jews: they so obviously have no use for anyone else. Their manners are horrid compared to the Arab; and I felt, by the end of a day among them, that it is far better to be a Jew among the Philistines than an unlucky Philistine among the Jews.’
    The tour started with a by now customary set-back to her health. Far out to sea, crossing the Atlantic on a crammed troopship, the
Aquitania
, Freya developed appendicitis. By the time she was carried to shore by stretcher at Halifax, through heavy rain, with the troops lining the railings watching, the appendix was rupturing. She was immediately operated on in the Halifax infirmary and, surviving by her usual combination of robustness and tenacity, she was soon sitting up and writing letters, tended by nuns. Though she lamented that she had lost a month, by November she was in New York, building up to a schedule of tea parties, lectures and dinners that would have crushed many younger and healthier women. The city enchanted her: ‘I can’t get over theexciting beauty,’ she wrote, ‘the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s