By the time we reached the tiny village looking across the river towards Iran, the presents I’d brought with me for the family - two carefully hoarded months worth of chocolate ration - had melted into a great shapeless mass.  It was not yet Easter, but the sun was already hotter than I’d ever known it back in England.

The journey had been extraordinary. The fact of taking a plane, all the way from London to Basra no less, had been judged so exotic an event that the headmaster had actually announced it in hall to all the boys and staff of the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, where I had been boarding since the start of the year.

Until he was invalided out in 1944, my father’s war, submarines permitting, had mainly been spent commanding a series of tankers crossing the Atlantic.   But by the end of the decade, after some years working first as a publican, then as assistant manager of the Odeon cinema in High Wycombe, he had begun to feel the lure of the sea again. Nobody was yet prepared to offer him any deep-sea work, but he eventually accepted a job with the Basra Dredging Company, based at the village of Al Faw, on the peninsula of the same name which forms the south-eastern tip of Iraq.

This area has often been of great strategic importance, situated as it is on the Shatt Al Arab (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates), with the great port of Abadan a few miles north-west on the Persian side of the Shatt, and the Iraqi port of Basra about the same distance farther on.

A few miles downstream, the Shatt widens out and becomes the Persian Gulf. But where my father was based, the Shatt was relatively narrow and subject to sudden underwater movements of sand and gravel. These caused no problems to the elegant shallow-draughted Arab dhows, but the river-bed needed constant dredging to make it safe for the tankers and cargo boats which passed Al Faw heading to and from the pair of great rival ports.

My father took charge of one of these dredgers in what must have been the autumn of 1950: a pretty thankless and monotonous job for someone used to being captain of a much bigger ship for weeks or months at a time. And I imagine that he was pleased when my mother, and my sister Jennifer, then aged 6, joined him in the early part of the following year, with me due to make the trip in the Easter holidays.

Nowadays the average 12-year-old in Europe must be pretty blase about plane travel. But, back then, things were different. My housemaster, Mr Howard, drove me to what was still called London Airport and entrusted me to the staff of BOAC (the British Overseas Airways Corporation). I was introduced to Angela, who was to be my personal air hostess for the entire flight, and I felt very proud to have this tall, slim blonde in her neat and disturbingly sexy uniform accompany me through the airport and on to the plane.

I think that my plane must have been an ‘Argonaut’. According to Wikipedia, they became part of the BOAC fleet in 1949 and were used for long-haul flights to South America, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East until 1960. (In February 1952, the year after my own trip, ‘the BOAC Argonaut "Atalanta" transported the newly-acceded Queen Elizabeth II back to England from Kenya upon the death of her father, King George VI.’)

Well, I was certainly treated like royalty on board my own particular Argonaut.  Angela checked on me frequently, and I particularly remember how she smiled when, assuming that the neat little tray of juice, cereals and fruit salad was my entire breakfast, I was surprised and delighted to be presented, 10 minutes later, with a second, larger tray containing a huge platter of freshly cooked eggs, bacon, sausages and tomatoes. Yes, freshly cooked from scratch, not zapped in a microwave oven. 

I am not sure exactly when this breakfast was served, since the journey was long and lingering.  As far as I can work out from an internet search, the route actually terminated in Tokyo, with a good dozen intermediate stops, Basra coming about half way along.  And at each stop we disembarked, sometimes spending two or three hours in the airport before taking to the skies again.

The first two landings were in darkness. I just about remember a clear starry night above Zurich, and rain pelting down in Rome but nothing else. It is the approach to Beirut which I have never forgotten.

It was starting to become light, and the sun was rising behind the mountains of Lebanon, when I looked out of the window and had my first sight of the Mediterranean.   As we banked prior to landing I was able to see the full sweep of the beautiful city, a memory which has stayed with me unsullied by the reports of internecine warfare which has blighted the country in recent years.

We walked across the tarmac to the airport buildings through a dazzle and shimmer of heat, to be seated in a light, airy dining room where we were served from huge carafes full of freshly squeezed orange juice.  And as if that was not enough, when Angela suggested we go outside into the sunlight for a while we were joined by one of the pilots who, after a few minutes, took her by the hand and actually, there under the Lebanese sun, proposed to her!  I don’t recall hearing her accept him on the spot, but I do remember thinking, gosh, this is life!

For some reason on leaving Beirut we made a surprise stop at Damascus, but this time there was no dramatic approach, and I was rather more suspicious of the green stuff (pistachio, presumably) on the rather dry cakes we were served than I had been of the orange juice in Beirut.

What I can’t remember is actually being met at Basra airport by the rest of the family, nor the 50 mile or so drive south-east to the little village which was to be my home for the next few weeks.  I do remember how tanned the others were, and being greeted at our house overlooking the Shatt by the two local men who worked for us, Ahmed, our handyman and gardener, and the cook, Abdul, who is the one with Jennifer and me in the photo above.

(‘Abdul’ is the name I knew this handsome, friendly man by; but it was certainly not, as I am now aware, how he would have been addressed by family and friends. That’s because the ‘Abdul’ part of the name translates as ‘servant of’, and the full name would have ended with one of the respectful epithets used to refer to Allah: thus ‘Abdulaziz‘ =  ‘servant of the most powerful’;  ‘Abdulhamid‘ = ‘servant of the praiseworthy’; ‘Abdulrahman‘ = ‘servant of the merciful one’, and ‘Abdulrahim‘ =    ‘servant of the compassionate one’.)

To be continued .............