Our house was spacious and airy, one of half a dozen or so built by the Basra Dredging Company for expats like my father. I had a room to myself on the upper floor, and my favourite moments of the day came as I sat reading at my little desk, looking occasionally towards the Shatt Al Arab to marvel at the almost constant passage of craft heading up and down the river.

On the other side of the house we had a lovely little garden, with mature trees, bushes and shrubs providing much needed shade.  Here’s a photo of my mother, just 40 at the time (though, for many years to come, to me she remained an unchanging 35). 

It’s a shame that we only have black and white photos of our time there, as I have nothing to remind me of the extraordinary range of colours that I can just about recall. What I do remember is my delight at learning that the flower with the voluptuous red petals and arrogantly protruding stamen was called ‘hibiscus’, a word as romantic to my ears as ‘Baghdad’ which, in those days, carried only exotic, innocent connotations: the world of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Caliph, Haroun-Al-Rashid.

In fact, I asked my father if there was any way we could go to Baghdad. Sadly, I had to settle for our occasional trips to Basra, a reasonably acceptable second best, since the colours and sounds were enchanting, though certain aspects of the city - notably the impassive faces of young children, their features almost obscured by flies - were rather more unsettling.

Apart from these trips, where we stayed overnight in a government rest house (the equivalent of an Indian dak bungalow), there was little for us to do.  My mother would take Jennifer and me to the rather murky swimming pool where she would patiently try to teach me to swim, a feat which I only achieved the day when, her patience finally exhausted, she chucked me into the pool and - spluttering and gasping - I managed to doggy-paddle my way to the side.

There were no other European children staying in Al Faw, and it was made clear to me that I should have nothing to do with the local lads; so I spent a fair amount of time, when not reading, keeping my little sister amused. I remember her astonishment when I decided to see if the phrase ‘hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement’ was more than just metaphorical. Well the answer is ‘yes’.  Break an egg at midday onto a flagstone exposed to the heat of early summer in the Middle East and it fries quickly and satisfactorily, no oil or butter required.

Abdul was a dab hand at cooking eggs; could, in fact, come up with a very acceptable full English.  But what I looked forward to were the days when he was let off the leash and allowed to cook something from his own repertoire of southern Iraqi dishes. More often than not he would lovingly prepare for us what he called a ‘murag’, a kind of stew typically centered around lamb, chicken or fish, with vegetables such as aubergines, chick peas or lentils, together with various peppers and spices, including paprika, the whole usually sweetened by a scattering of currants or raisins.

I have never been averse to trying new food (and, a few months later, would discover southern French cuisine with something approaching exaltation), so this aspect of my time in Iraq was one of the high spots of my stay.   Sadly - and I can’t put it off any longer - the last part of my stay didn’t include any spot which could be described as anything other than the lowest of the low.

I had been allowed to add an extra two weeks to my Easter holidays, since the head had agreed that a stay abroad was of educational value.  Well, I did learn a lot, though not in the way he had been expecting.

It started just a few days before I was due to fly back. My mother woke up in the middle of the night with a dreadful stomach ache, which got worse as the morning wore on.  The local doctor was sent for and, finding that her abdomen was extremely tender, diagnosed appendicitis. The problem was that the nearest hospital was some 50 miles away.  By the time she was examined at Basra the diagnosis had changed to one of peritonitis, so a simple removal of the appendix would not be enough.

If you google ‘peritonitis treatment’, you will typically find something along the lines of

The initial treatment for peritonitis involves injections of antibiotics.The course will usually last 10 to 14 days.

Of course there were antibiotics in 1951, but a much more limited range than is available nowadays (and, I imagine, that the range available in southern Iraq would have been even more limited).

I have no idea how she was treated. All I do know is firstly that she looked so dreadful when I went to visit her in the hospital that they hustled me out of the room pretty sharpish, and, secondly, that she managed to pick up another disease while staying in the hospital: diphtheria.

Nowadays, in Western Europe, diphtheria is as rare as leprosy or the Black Death. In 2008 (according to the NHS website) there were ‘just six cases in the UK - all imported’. But my mother’s generation of children came too early for the mass ‘immunisation’ against the disease. In 1940, just before the programme was introduced for the whole of the infant population, ‘there were more than 60,000 cases and 3,283 deaths from diphtheria in the UK’. My sister and I, part of the lucky generation, had been treated as a matter of course; so the chances of our becoming infected were just about nil.

My father was vulnerable, however; so were Ahmed and Abdul. So were our adult European neighbours. So were the local Arabs. So were everybody, except Jennifer and me.  

There is much that is vague in my memories of what happened next, so I will try to specify where I feel that my memories are accurate. The first thing I am certain of, since it involved a word that was new to me, was that we were quarantined. I knew that this meant we couldn’t, for example, go to the swimming pool (despite the intense heat); in fact we couldn’t go outside the house or garden. But I can’t remember if our servants were around or if meals were cooked for us, or if it was I who had to cook for Jennifer and me.

The thing is, you see, that I simply have no memories of my father being around at this time.  So, are my most vivid memories only of the days he was away on the dredger (though wouldn’t he have been quarantined as well, and forced to stay in the house with us)?   Or was he sent somewhere by himself?  What I do remember was so traumatic that I never raised it, either with my father (in the remaining 11 years of his life) or with my mother, who died peacefully in her sleep some 53 years later.

It was a torridly hot night, with the wind moaning through the trees and my mother lying in her nightie on a sweat-soaked camp bed, unable to bear so much as a sheet over her, producing some croaking words through that part of her windpipe which wasn’t inflamed, or whatever it was.  My sister, presumably, was asleep in her room. My father, as I say, was nowhere around; and the servants, at the best of times, went to their own homes at the end of the working day.  So I, the 12-year-old man of the house, was alone with my mother.  And what she was asking me was to look up something in the big home medical compendium we kept on one of the bookshelves, in those faraway days before the word ‘google’ existed.

I brought it up from downstairs, and turned to the D’s.  I wasn’t sure exactly how to spell ‘diphtheria’, but there weren’t too many entries starting with ‘di ..’, and I found it quickly enough. I started reading it aloud, as my mother wanted, hesitating over the longer words but doing my best, until I came to the part where the dry words explained what would have to be done if the airways were completely blocked and the patient was unable to breathe. I hesitated over a word, the pronunciation of which I now have no problem with: tracheotomy.

I’ve just googled ‘emergency tracheotomy’ and this is the first thing I came across.

If someone is choking and the Heimlich Maneuver doesn't work after 3 successive attempts then a tracheotomy may need to performed, by trained medical professionals.

Get someone to look at a clock/watch and call out the minutes (e.g 60 seconds have passed so they shout "1 minute"). Don't forget the rule of 3: 3 minutes without oxygen means brain death!

Find the cricothyroid membrane (soft spot on the throat), cut it open in a up/down motion. To find this, find the Adams apple, or larynx. Below this is a second, smaller bump. The valley between the two is the spot to cut.

Spread the tissue (skin etc) apart horizontally

Avoiding blood vessels and glandular tissue puncture the cricothyroid membrane with a knife (very carefully and transversely) (or you could use a sharp pencil or ball point pen), to enter the trachea. The depth of the puncture should be just sufficient to gain access to the airway. No more than a half-inch or about 1.25 cm.

To maintain the opening to facilitate breathing, a soda straw or tube was [sic]placed in the opening. A ball point pen casing is also a good tube. (Elapsed time - three minutes)

Get the victim to hospital immediately where further treatment can be provided.

Now there was nothing quite as detailed as that in our medical book. It just said something along the lines of:

A cut will have to be made in the airway (the trachea) to allow the patient to breathe.

And that was just about that. But I realised that, if she was unable to breathe, if her airway closed down completely, it was up to me, a 12-year-old boy, to go down to the kitchen, find the sharpest knife in the kitchen, then hope to God that I managed to find the bit of Mummy’s throat that had the air pass through it rather than the bit that was full of blood.

And that’s all I can remember.  I don’t know who arrived when and what they did. I assume that she didn’t end up choking. But that’s all I know for certain.  I can’t remember anything about my time in Iraq afterwards, or the journey home, or what I said to my teachers and the other boys when I finally got back to school. What I do know is that I didn’t tell anybody about that night, with the hot wind howling in the palm trees and the person dearest to me in all the world lying on her camp bed and me learning what I might have to do to save her.