Free Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively Page B

Bullock of St. Catherine’s. The statement read: “We consider that this action is morally wrong, that it endangers the solidarity of the Commonwealth, that it constitutes a grave strain on the Atlantic Alliance and that it is a flagrant violation of the UN charter.” I couldn’t be at the meeting, not being a senior member of the university, but I remember vividly the heightened atmosphere of that time, the urgency of the newspapers, the climate of discussion, of argument, and eventually, for many of us, of outrage. For me, what was happening had a personal dimension – here was my own country dropping bombs on the country I still thought of as a kind of home. The Suez crisis was a baptism of fire, a political awakening, the recognition that you could and should quarrel with government, that you could disagree and disapprove.
    Over half a century ago now, Suez, and nicely consigned to history: my granddaughter Izzy “did” it for her A level. I too can read about it, and set what I read against what is in my head still – those autumn days in Oxford, when the talk was all of the names now packed away into the books: Eisenhower, Dulles, Ben-Gurion, Hammarskjöld, Gaitskell, Bevan. And, dominating all, Eden and Nasser. There was a sequence of events – dismaying, startling, often inexplicable events – and plenty of judgments, applause, condemnations, warnings. History has tidied it all up, to some extent – what happened when, and why, the inexplicable is explained. The judgments of history are of course equally various, but one thing does seem clear: there are not many today who defend Britain’s – Eden’s – handling of the Suez crisis. Peter Hennessy has written: “It is rare to be able to claim, historically, that but for one person, the course of history would almost entirely have been different. In the case of Suez, one can.”
    On July 26, 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, declared Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, seizing control of the Suez Canal Company and proclaiming military law in the Canal Zone. Since the conception of the Canal by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, its construction under his aegis, and its opening in 1869, it had been administered under largely French management but with Britain owning forty-four percent of the Company’s shares. The Company never owned the Canal; it owned the concession to operate this crucial waterway that was on Egyptian territory, a waterway that united the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, vital to international shipping – the passage to India, to southern Africa, to the Far East.
    There was a background to Nasser’s action. He was angered by the withdrawal of the Anglo-American aid offer for his Aswan Dam project; Eden had initially favored this, anxious to preempt Soviet influence with Nasser, and in the Middle East generally, but his attitude toward Nasser had hardened, as he came to see him as an enemy of the West. Eden acceded to U.S. withdrawal from patronage of the Aswan Dam. Nasser reacted immediately and conclusively in the one way that he could, by taking over the Canal. Egypt’s Canal would be managed by Egyptians – a step that vastly increased his popularity at home but challenged the West.
    Over the Suez crisis lay the shadow of the Cold War. There was always the fear that Russia would make a move – exploit the situation to exert control over Middle Eastern oil supplies; it is always about oil, then as now – Suez, Iraq – the bulk of European oil supplies came through the Canal in the midcentury. And, more local and immediate, the simmering hostility between Israel and her Arab neighbors. The complexities of the situation have fattened the history books; to distill the international commotion of 1956 into a simple narrative is to leave out most of the surrounding clamor, but I am not writing history – I am trying to sort out what I now know happened and think of it against what seemed at the time to be