Once It Was the Land of Smiles

Down the road from us, just three or for doors away, lived two sisters, Brenda and Pamela, more-or-less the same as ages as me and my brother respectively. We were never especially close to Brenda and Pamela, but we knew them from a very young age, and they were also cousins of my friend Roger Renvoize, who lived further down the street on the other side of the road.
So though we never socialised with Brenda and Pamela as teenagers, we would always say hello if we saw them in the street.
I don’t know what happened to Brenda, but Pamela married a Turkish Cypriot, Ismet. She had a son who was called Osram, or Oblong, or something Turkish, I cannot remember exactly what her son’s name was. Pamela stayed in the area, in a flat in the same street, a few doors along from where she grew up.
That was all very fine, and I still said hello to Pamela whenever I happened to see her pushing the pram on her way to the shops, until . . .
Until I was told that I mustn’t. No, I mustn’t, it would be to her detriment for me to do so, for Ismet had told her that whenever she had to speak to a man she must lower her eyes, she must never speak to a man socially, and if she went to a friend’s house she must never go inside if that friend’s husband was at home. For Ismet was a Muslim.
And it was even stricter than that, Pamela was not to tell me herself that she could no longer even acknowledge me in the street, she must tell my wife who would pass the message on. Which she duly did.
This led to something of a pantomime whenever I happened to see Pamela, with both of us acting out a part like the dame and the crocodile who had fallen out over a triviality and march past each other in a kind of exaggerated huff, while the audience falls about laughing, except that there was no audience, and with Ismet being a Muslim, it was no laughing matter.
Aside: In Denmark one of the first sizeable immigrant groups of modern times was Greenlanders, who by introducing a different culture were the subject of criticism for the perceived erosion of the Danish way of life. I heard a Danish man on the radio listing some of the effects of this, and he said in a deadpan and monochrome voice: ‘The Greenlanders laugh a lot, while we Danes do not laugh a lot’. In other words there was prejudice against the Greenlanders because they were too jolly! Bringing it up to current-day time and place, for Greenlanders read Brits, and for Danes read Muslims (oh, and reverse the host-guest positions – why did I ever start on this?) :end of aside.
Now you would think that this strict regulation, whereby the wife of a Muslim man is forbidden from looking at a man other than himself for more a split second, would be seriously counter-productive, for if you are going to get a smack in the mouth for as much as a glance, you might as well go for the whole works, since the outcome would be the same. But who am I to know? And anyway, religion and logic – different planets.
And you can see poor old Ismet’s point. His mates in the café would have said, ‘I saw your misses waving at some geezer the other day, and going into his house a couple of hours after he went in himself’, and Ismet would be overcome with cultural Muslim embarrassment and shame. It’s very likely that that was exactly what happened. Logic doesn’t come into it.
I don’t know what eventually happened to Pamela, whether she stayed with Ismet and if so whether she managed to stay out of marital trouble. She was not a highly educated girl, she was a nice, down-to-earth, ordinary person. Trying to do her best, she had made her bed and now she knew she must lie on it.
Pamela’s wish for her son, Osram or Oblong or whatever his name was, was that he should work in an office. ‘I don’t mind what he ends up doing’, Pamela would say (in the days when I was still allowed to talk to her), ‘But I just hope he gets a good enough education that he can work in an office. That’s what I want. If Osram works in an office, I shall be happy’. I, too, do so hope that Osram ended up working in an office. Osram, are you out there?
Dave