Disaster as the wadi floods

Life in Baghdad gets even more exciting

Nancie enjoyed playing tennis and swimming in the River Tigris. On one occasion the Tigris and the Euphrates burst their banks and met somewhere south of Baghdad and Nancie was able to boast that she had swum in both rivers simultaneously!

The High Commissioner at the time was Sir Francis Humphrys. Nancie met Sir Kinahan Cornwallis and a Major ? who knew T.E.Lawrence. He always came to the fancy dress ball dressed as a Kurdish rebel.

Nancie remembered one particular garden party in the grounds of the German Billet, when the palm trees were decorated with fairy lights. There were banana trees growing in the gardens and the gardener planted some loofah plants to make a pergola. Nancie had never seen anything grow so rapidly. In less than two months the plants were six feet high and they were able to pick the loofahs which were then dried out and peeled, ready for use in the bath!

The great day came when they were to leave to travel home. Not the easy was for them, of course but blazing the trail overland via Kirkuk, Mosul, Nisibin and Istambul.

By this time the family had grown with the birth of James Alexis Neville Holt who was born in Baghdad. He was Nancie's pride and joy and she always considered him her 'first baby'. Mrs Holt employed an Ayah to look after him but Nancie was delighted to share in his care. Deidre and Gay were very attached to her, by now and she to them, but James, known affectionately as 'Jan' always had a special place in her heart.

Mrs Holt was always late for everything and Major Holt was trying to get her to the station on time. She knew the train wouldn't depart without them but her husband was anxious not to delay it unduly. Eventually they all made it to the station and boarded their special carriage. After several hours they reached Kirkuk and got into a car in a convoy headed for Mosul.

Something held up their departure so they were the last car to leave. The first river they came to was too swollen to cross. The other cars had got across before the rain had come and caused the wadi to flood. By this time it was getting dark and Major Holt didn't want them to spend the night there because of roving bands of nomads. The driver decided to risk crossing but as they reached the middle of the river the engine stopped. They were stuck, with the water lapping through the floorboards: Mrs Holt, Deidre, Gay, Nancie and baby James. Major Holt and the driver got out and tried to push the car but to no avail.

Major Holt decided to set off on foot, with the driver, to look for help in the nearest village. Nancie and the others were left in the car, in the dark, in the middle of the swirling river. Had it rained again they could have been washed away. They whiled away the time by eating some cold chicken that they had brought with them. Nancie had no memory of being afraid.

After a couple of hours Major Holt returned with about twenty evil-looking men in Kurdish robes. They manhandled the car out of the river and then scrambled onto the roof and sides of the car. Major Holt had to sweep them off the car, like flies, with his open hand!

In a short time we reached a mud village, which was surrounded by a mud wall, with an aperture in it, serving as an entrance. Mrs Holt stayed in the car with the three children and Major Holt and Nancie entered the main hut; he, to dry his trousers and she to make the baby's food.  In the centre of the hut was a heap of burning wood, with the smoke curling up and through a hole in the roof. All around them were huddled sleeping and snoring figures.  A man brought them some black, Turkish coffee. While they were drinking it and doing what had to be done, suddenly a crowd of women came in. Nancie describes them as 'all the women of the harem'. They were chattering away in a dialect that Major Holt did not understand. They felt Nancie's arms and touched her hair and face and seemed really amused. Eventually, stepping over the sleeping bodies they found their way out of the darkened, smoky hut and back to the others waiting in the car. Nancie had managed to prepare the food for the baby. They slept, or tried to sleep in the car until dawn when they slipped away, hopefully unnoticed.

The night before Major Holt had told the Chief that they would be rewarded once the party reached Mosul. He told them that they had no money on them just in case they were murdered for it, as he knew that some white people had been killed a few months earlier, for their belongings. At least he hoped that they understood his Kurdish!  Halfway to Mosul they were met by a posse of horsemen who had come looking for them. Their non-appearance at Mosul with the rest of the convoy had caused quite a stir. Once safely at their destination they all had baths and the children were tucked up in bed. The adults also caught up on a bit of sleep and realised that they'd had a lucky escape from a very dangerous situation.  Nancie wrote about this in 1976, but her memories of the events were as fresh as if it had happened the day before.

I recently discovered that Major Holt had got into a similar situation not long after he married when he decided to drive from Damascus to Baghdad across the desert with no road to follow. His party set out in a couple of model T Fords with enough water and petrol, they hoped, to get them to Baghdad. In the second car were Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote 'The Little House on the Prairie' and a Travel journalist called B.D.MacDonald.

They got lost and were getting low on both water and petrol. Mrs Holt lost her wedding ring at one point and they spent time searching for it in the sand! Eventually they found themselves only 10 miles from Rutbah. Sighting two men with camels Major Holt approached them. The rest of the party crossed their fingers that these men were not bandits. At night they had slept with rifles at the ready and someone on guard at all times. Luckily the men were friendly and took them to the nearest village where they were able to refill their water bottles.

The unexpected visitors were entertained and a sheep was duly killed and cooked in their honour but the desperately poor Saluba tribesmen were very nervous and feared that bandits might come and attack the visitors while they were in the village and rob them as well, so the visitors were asked to leave after they had eaten. They slept again, in the cars with someone on guard all night, reaching Baghdad safely on the sixth day. There may have been more adventures in the intervening eight years for Major 'Desert' Holt, as he was known, but let us return to Nancie's journey, coming home from Baghdad, in 1930.

The journey was resumed by car the next day as far as Nisibin where they boarded the train to Istambul (now Constantinople). After a couple of hours Nancie was surprised to hear a commotion in the corridor and Major Holt rushed in and covered her with a blanket. He told her she was very ill and she was not to speak to anyone. Poor Nancie was mystified but did as she was told. You didn't argue with Major Holt. He was quite excitable and could be somewhat aggressive.

Later the mystery was explained. Nancie's passport had gone missing and the Turkish authorities wanted to put her off the train. He managed to persuade them that he could get another passport at the next town that the train stopped at. The train was, indeed, held up, whilst he rushed off to the British Consulate to get a temporary passport organised. (It did help that he was in charge of the entire railway network!)

Nancie found out later that the lead driver of their convoy had handed over all the passports except hers. She was very lucky that she had been allowed to carry on with her journey. Major Holt would tease her forever after, saying that the driver must have fancied her and wanted to keep her passport with the photo.

Nancie and the Holt Family spent a few days in Istambul. She remembers vividly seeing a familiar figure on the landing stage as they waited for the ferryboat one day. It was 'Charlie Chaplin', walking about on the pier in his inimitable way. She presumed it wasn't the real one but who knows? Maybe it was!

From Istambul they took the train (probably the Arlberg Orient Express) across Europe, passing through Sophia, Belgrade and Budapest. Nancie remembered being told that Buda was on one side and Pest on the other. She was unimpressed with the Blue Danube and thought it looked very grey and murky. It didn't live up to the romantic 'blue' image at all.

Northern Italy was amazing, she thought, with its huge mountains, topped with snow, and lakes with castles on them, and tiny villages on the mountain slopes.

The journey through Switzerland, at night, with the lights twinkling on the lake below appealed to her more, as the train followed the ' terrifying route round the edge of the mountains'. The route included the Simplon Tunnel where an electric engine took them through.

After a few days in Paris, Major Holt and his wife set off for a month in Spain, leaving Nancie to take the three children back to England. She was accompanied by Major Holt's father who, she said, was in his seventies and not a lot of help. She once told me that she felt she had four children to look after! He was in charge of the tickets. They caught the boat train from Paris to Le Havre and boarded the night-boat for Southampton. James was 15 months old by this time and the girls maybe 7 and 5. Everyone thought she was the Mother and she coped very well, although she missed the extra pair of hands that the Ayah had provided in Baghdad.  They managed a few hours sleep in bunks in a communal cabin.

They were met at Southampton by Major Holt's sister, a Mrs Godfrey. They all set off for Woodbury Salterton, in Devon where Nancie and the children had rooms in a cottage near Mrs Godfrey's house. Nancie's Mother travelled down from Scotland to spend a week with her and, no doubt to hear about all her adventures to date.

Christine Adeline J Holt, the eldest of the Holt children, was called after her Mother, Sophia Adeline Holt, nee Litton. Born in 1884 she was followed by Gabrielle Ines (1886), Alec Horace Edward Litton (Major Holt), 1887, Isabel Norah S. Holt, 1889, Evelyn Maude N. Holt 1890, Kathleen Mary Holt 1891 and Donald Stewart Holt (Lieutenant-Colonel), 1895. Their Father, Horace Henry Holt, was also a Civil Engineer, born in 1856 so would be about 74 when he travelled back to England with Nancie and the little ones. Christine married Brian Godfrey and had two children, Rosemary and Norah.