Life in Cairo is changing all the time. For those of us who live here constantly for many years, the changes may be hardly discernible. But if you've lived here for perhaps half a century and look back all those years, the changes can be brought into surprisingly sharp focus. This week, Hugh Nicol takes readers on a trip down memory lane, as he talks to two long-term foreign residents of Maadi, who between them have lived here for virtually a whole century, about life in the good old days. The fantastic 44 What better person to ask about how Maadi has changed in recent years than Jill Madbouli, an English lady who has lived in Egypt with her husband for 44 years, since the summer of 1966? Jill and her husband have two children and two grandchildren. Jill, who arrived in the country just a few days after England won the World Cup 44 years ago (let's hope they do it again in 2014), originally lived with her husband, Sayyed Madbouli, Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Ain Shams University, in Nasr City. They bought one of the first flats to be built in Nasr City, not far from Cairo Stadium. They lived there for nearly ten years, moving to Maadi in the mid-1970s. They bought a duplex in el-Nahda Street, then moved across the road to a villa, where they have lived ever since. Jill remembers the days of the railway line from Helwan to Bab el-Louq. Where Maadi Tube Station now is, there used to be a man who controlled the level crossing, lifting and lowering a wooden beam with a balance to let the cars across the line, which has now been replaced by the Tube line. "When we first moved to Cairo, we drove a lefthand drive Volkswagen Beetle, a present from my father, who'd bought it new in England for £150. Later on, we picked up a Fiat 128. "Petrol was dirt cheap, but I can't remember how much," says Jill. "So were taxis." Although Jill can't remember how much taxi fares were, a Scottish lady called June Kotry, who was also married to an Egyptian professor, told your columnist (shortly before she was murdered by one of her sons in 2005) that, in 1971, when she and her late husband moved to Maadi, the taxis used to wait at the above-mentioned level crossing. June said that a taxi ride from there to Zamalek cost PT40 – a standard fare. She used to pay PT50. In those days, almost forty years ago, the extra ten piastres was a very generous tip. Also in those days, Hadaaiq el-Maadi was precisely that: the Gardens of Maadi. You could see almost all the way from the northern edge of Maadi to Midan el-Tahrir, because the intervening land was nearly all fields, gardens, trees and flowers. Nowadays, it's all disappeared under concrete. Nor did New Maadi exist back in the 1970s – it was all desert. As for Maadi Digla, it just consisted of the Cairo American College (CAC) and one or two attractive villas. Jill recalls that Maadi wasn't crowded at all. Today, however, the traffic is chaotic and trying to cross the road is very dangerous. Maadi Sarayat (the district in which Jill and her family live between Road 9 and Digla) was all villas. Another sad change is that many of them have been demolished, making way for ugly high rises. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were only two international schools in Cairo: the British International School (BISC) in Zamalek, which recently moved to 6th October City, and the CAC in Maadi Digla. The only posh private school in Maadi was Victoria College. In 1968, Jill got a teaching job at the private Port Said Schools in Zamalek, where the pupils included the children of President Nasser and President Sadat and many of the teachers were British. She was paid a monthly salary of LE60, which was very good at the time. Back in 1966, Jill recalls that a kilo of beef cost PT50 – now it's LE80. The price has increased 160 fold in 44 years! Perhaps even more amazing is that Jill also recalls that it only cost her PT11 (yes, just eleven piastres) to feed her and her husband every day. The PT11 also included household necessities like matches, soap and detergent. Years ago, you could buy beer at the Maadi Club in Cairo. That all stopped when, after a huge brawl involving hundreds of drunken youths at el-Gezira Sporting Club in Zamalek, Egyptian clubs had their licences for serving alcohol withdrawn. One thing that long-term residents of Maadi all notice is that there is now a far wider variety of foreign goods on sales at the local shops; there are also a lot of fast-food joints that do deliveries – something that never happened in days gone by. And, of course, Massoud, the famous grocer's in Road 9, is now owned by Egyptians – it used to be owned by a Greek lady and her daughter. In those days it was known as Dimos. Jill also regrets that Maadi has gone downhill environmentally. The lovely canal in the appropriately named Canal Street has disappeared, as have many beautiful gardens attached to the many villas that have been pulled down, as mentioned above. There's also more rubbish, despite the skips in many of the streets where you can now dump your trash. "The chap who came round with his donkey was fabulous, much better than the new system," says Jill. As for crime, Jill and her family are in a good position, because their villa is located on a main road. However, many of the owners of the villas in the quieter streets now have to employ a security guard. Some changes have been for the better. When Jill and her husband first came to Cairo, they had a ‘Primus' stove that used kerosene and their maid did the washing in a big pot on the stove. Nowadays, they have a washing machine, while the Primus was replaced by a cooker that relied on an anbuba (gas cylinder). They've now got piped gas, so things are looking up.
The fabulous 55 Meanwhile, Clare Abdel-Rahman, whose home is in Rd 11, also Sarayat el-Maadi, has lived here even longer – for 55 years, since 1955, in fact. Clare has three children, as well as four grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren. She is originally from Dublin in Eire and also lived as a child in Boscombe, near Bournemouth, on England's south coast. Her late husband, Fouad Abdel-Rahman, was originally from el-Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt. He worked for the Ministry of Economy, working his way up the ladder until he became Chairman of the Egyptian Reinsurance Company. When they got married, shortly before the Suez Crisis, Clare and her husband lived with Fouad's sister in Hadaaiq el-Qubba for six months, before moving to Cairo. The only place they could afford to rent was a basement flat in Road 12b, near the convent run by the Borromeo Sisters. Her husband at the time was earning just over LE24 per month and the monthly rent for the flat, which was very cold in winter, was LE12. At the time, one of her husband's uncles, a man called Emil Zahran, was living in a house in Road 14 that he'd had built himself and still stands today. When he bought the land to build it on in 1937, it only cost him PT7 (yes, seven piastres) per square metre! Interestingly, the British only left Egypt en masse in 1956, after Suez, not in 1952, after the July Revolution. One of the reasons why property was expensive was because the British insisted that you couldn't build above three floors. It was when the British left that construction began to go mad. The result today in Maadi is skyscrapers all over the place, in many cases replacing beautiful old villas and gardens, as mentioned above. Over the years, Clare has seen many of the villas of her friends gradually disappear. Amazingly, Clare still remembers all the old street names in Maadi. Their home in Rd 12b was just off Palmer Road (nowadays Damascus Street); they then moved to a flat in Williamson Avenue (nowadays Wahib Doss Street); and they finally moved to the flat in a three-floor villa in Rd 11 where Clare still lives today. The building where she lives once belonged to Prince Zaki Halim, who also owned other property in Maadi and was married to a Swiss lady. Clare and Fouad moved in, after it had been sequestrated by the Government. "When we first came to Maadi, there were still a lot of British, like Colonel Cole, who lived in Rd 14 [next door to Fouad's uncle] and Miss Elizabeth Black. They and many of the others left after 1956, although President Nasser said they could stay. But not all of them left by any means," she recalls. As well as teaching English at the American University in Cairo for seven years and also at the Sadat Academy in Ramses Street, Clare worked in broadcasting at Maspero for 20 years. She recalls getting the train (before the era of the Tube) from Maadi to Bab el-Louq for PT2. From there, she would walk all the way to Maspero, stopping off for a breather en route at All Saints Cathedral (sadly demolished in the 1970s and replaced by the new All Saints Cathedral in Zamalek). If she was in a hurry, she could get a taxi from Bab el-Louq to Maspero for PT12 – or PT15 including a quite generous tip. Like June Kotry, she confirms that, for many years, a taxi ride from Maadi to central Cairo cost PT40. Jill says that beef cost PT50 per kilo in the late 1960s. How much did it cost in the 1950s? Clare recalls buying beef by the oqah (oke) from Dimos for PT18. An oke is bit more than a kilo, so a kilo would have cost around PT15. That was for foreigners – most local people shopped at the market in Road 7 (which still exists), where they paid far less for their meat and groceries. Clare also remembers when what is now Metro, the supermarket near Massoud, was a branch of Ben Zion. "We didn't have a car when we first got married. My husband had a season ticket for the train [from Maadi to Bab el-Louq]. When he was transferred to the Ministry of Social Solidarity, he got the tram from Nubar Street [near the Ministry of Endowments] to his new job in Fouad Street [nowadays 26th July Street]," Clare says. Regrettably, the tramline she mentions, as well as many others in Cairo, have been decommissioned over the years. Although Clare says that the crime rates in Maadi still aren't like in the West, she has noticed that crime is on the increase. When she first came to Maadi, she'd cycle to the petrol station in Rd 9, in those days called Socony Vacuum (these days the Co-op). She'd simply leave her bike there leaning against the wall, unlocked, walk to the train station and get the train to work. When she came back in the evening, her bike was still there. In recent years, she's had several bikes stolen. Last year, she went to Alexandria on the train and someone stole her purse there in the crowded station. Just a few weeks ago, she was having coffee with two friends in a nice new café in Rd 9, when someone stole her handbag, that she'd put on the seat right next to her. Clare lost her money, keys, mobile, credit cards and ID. Thankfully, her daughter has a spare key and came round and let her in. A man came round to her flat the following day and returned her keys and ID, which he'd found in the street. "Then there was Mrs Sykes. She lived near me and died last year. She'd been here for over half a century. Her husband died four years before her. She was a very gifted teacher and carried on working into her eighties. Two thugs wielding daggers tried to break into her flat. The good news is that the police caught them," she says. Jill and Sayyed had a Primus stove when they were first married; so did Clare and Fouad, a wedding present from Fouad's sister. Clare always got her husband to light it, as it was a bit temperamental. They didn't have a bath, so they'd fill a large, empty cheese tin with water and heated it in on the stove, in order to use it to have a wash with in a tisht (large plastic bowl). Nor did Clare and Fouad have a fridge; they had to rely on an icebox. Nevertheless, like Jill and Sayyed, they managed to survive. Life has changed over the years for foreigners living in Maadi. Some changes have been welcome, some haven't. But surely that's true of any country. Now what would long-term Egyptian residents in the British capital have to say about life in London?
