She was studying history at Bedford College in London when World War I broke out; she did the same, abandoning the course to serve as a volunteer nurse in Bologna, then spending several years growing fruit and vegetables on a small estate her sculptor father bought for her in Mortola, on the Italian Riviera. Back to England in 1923 to resume her studies, in Persian and Arabic now, next-door to Bedford in SOAS.
1927 was the first of the long years of travel, by donkey when not by camel, sometimes in secret - she had taken a job with the Ministry of Information when she started at SOAS, in order to pay her way, but in World War Two they hired her as their Middle East expert, based in the censorship department, so it is possible she was working as an "agent" right from the outset. Certainly the French officers who caught her wandering the foothills of Mount Hermon in 1927, with a Druze guide and an Englishwoman companion, were certain she was spying. And how did she manage to get the three of them released in less than three days, in the middle of nowhere, if she couldn't call for official help?
Questions of that sort provide contours to the biographical map of her life, many of them quite obnoxiously negative. Several of the websites I have looked at simply insult her, demonstrating their own ignorance and bigotry as they pretend to convey wisdom and knowledge. This for example:
"In 1927 she finally made it to Lebanon. She was now in her mid-thirties, single and seeing no meaningful prospects for herself at home. From Lebanon she traveled to Damascus, took more lessons in Arabic and mingled with the locals, to the consternation of colonial social circles. A first dangerous trip brought her to Druze territory, which was under martial law. She could have been murdered."
Read that last sentence again, very slowly, and then look up the Druze in a variety of encyclopaedia (I would direct you to my novel "A Little Oil & Root", one of whose central characters is a Druze, but alas it isn't published yet and so I can't). "She could have been murdered." In London, maybe, where the gangs at that time were truly hideous - and not just the Fascist gangs of Oswald Mosley. But among the Druze? I cannot imagine a safer place anywhere on the planet.
And as to "seeing no meaningful prospects at home", what did she
need any for, when she had her lesbian lover at her side throughout the journey
(she did nearly marry as it happens, a surgeon in Bologna when she was nursing;
but she quickly realised a husband wasn't what she needed, and fled before the
wedding).
But I am roaming down side-tracks and into cul-de-sacs, and we need to stay
on the path that Freya beat. After travelling in the Middle East for seven
months she returned to London to take drawing courses, so that in the future
she could make her own maps. In 1929 she began her next trip to the Middle
East, travelling from Damascus to Baghdad, where she associated with English
diplomats and officers as well as with locals, even going on a desert excursion
to meet the Bedouin, accompanied exclusively by Iraqi nationals, and thereby
"contravening the colonial moral code of the time" (you will see why
I see her as a Mary Kingsley live-alike if
you go to June 3).
Persia next, in
1930, to visit the Valleys of the Assassins, unexplored by Europeans at that
time, and to carry out, officially anyway, geographical and archeological
studies. On the back of a mule, equipped with a camp
bed and a mosquito net, accompanied by a local guide, through the valleys of
the river Alamut, simply to map it (probably it was the fortress-castle in the
mountain that MI6 were keen to know more about). Malaria, a weak heart, dengue
fever, and dysentery plagued her, but she continued her trip and her studies.
Back in Baghdad after her third trip, and now ready to send her book "The
Valleys of the Assassins" home for publication, those same "colonial
circles" were suddenly not berating her at all, but acknowledging her as
an explorer and a scholar to be taken seriously.
1934 saw her en route to the ancient city of Shabwa, hoping to trace the
frankincense route of the Hadhramaut along the Sea of Edom (that's Yam Edom =
Sea of Edom, not Yam Adom = Red Sea: the mistake has been in the English language
for centuries). And explore she did, more extensively than any European before
or since, but this time illness forced her to cut short her trip. But not her
writing about it; three books indeed, "The Southern Gates of Arabia: A
Journey in the Hadhramut" (1936), "Seen in The Hadhramaut"
(1938), and "A Winter in Arabia" (1940). In 1942, acknowledging once
again her significance as an explorer and a scholar, she was awarded the Royal
Geographical Society’s Founder’s Gold Medal - they had already given her a Back
Award in 1933, and she had received the Mungo Park Medal in 1935; a Damehood in
1972 was the culmination of a life of honours.
But not yet of a life of travel. Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen, Egypt,
Iraq and India all followed, studying the land, the people, the culture, and always
making maps, but now for the RGS rather than the MI6. Such was her expertise, returns
to England invariably led to lecture invitations, whether at the Royal Central
Asian Society or on the BBC.
Whether or not she was MI6 before now is a controversial claim, I know; that
she was officially and formally in World War II is a matter of record. Based in
Aden as an Assistant Information Officer for the Ministry of Information, she was
part of the team that created "Ikhwan al Hurriya", a propaganda
network including radio shows in Arabic, designed to get the Arabs to support
the Allies, or at the very least to remain neutral. Later she was transferred to
Egypt, working in Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, undertaking
the same mission, but this time under the aegis of a secret society called "The
Brotherhood of Freedom", and driving a tiny blue car which was
said to be an even greater menace to the general safety of Egypt than Hitler or
Mussolini.
A third transfer in 1941, to Baghdad this
time, but for the same purpose, an Iraqi branch of the Brotherhood, though she
spent most of her time besieged in the Embassy when a group pro-German Iraqi
generals staged a coup. To the US in 1942 for a lecture tour on behalf of the
Ministry of Information - she hated the place, and wrote much about its "soulless
and materialistic culture", in may I call it Stark contrast to the
spiritualism and rich variety of her beloved Middle East.
The last years of the war found her in
India, based at the court of the British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten. Then home, to
Asolo, but still employed by the MI, as a political advisor to build relations
with post-Mussolini Italy. And a fake marriage, to the English diplomat Stewart
Perowne, in September 1947: she was 54, he 46; he was a closet homosexual who
needed the cover of a wife to save his career, she was quite happy to be the
woman with female visitors guesting in the bedroom next to his. It lasted for as long
as he needed it to, which was five years.
And
then off again, to London briefly to learn Turkish so that her trip there would be
fully effective - several splendid books came from the time she spent there:
"Ionia, a Quest", "The Lycian
Shore", "Alexander’s Path", "Riding to the Tigris". In
1968, now a young and sprightly seventy-five who had recovered from all those
annoying illnesses, she made her last expedition to Afghanistan, the visit
memorialised in her book "The Minaret of Djam: An Excursion into
Afghanistan". And one more trip to Persia, another to Iraq - her very last
was to Annapurna
in the Himalayas in 1979, a mere hop-skip-and-jump for an eighty-six year old,
and you thought getting to Ibiza was a strain.
“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”
So today, the inversion of the theme, the overthrow of tyrannies:
the execution of Guy Fawkes in 1606 - but see my essay on this fraudulence on November 5
the abolition of slavery in the United States: the 13th amendment, passed by Congress today, in 1865, ratified on December 6th of the same year, (sadly still awaiting full implementation in most states, today, in 2024) - and see several other entries, especially March 1, June 23 and August 1, to realise just how far behind the rest of the world the US was with this.
And then, among the waxworks in the creative section:
Franz Schubert, composer, born today in 1797
John O'Hara, short story writer, born today in 1905 (not to be confused with Frank O'Hara, poet and curator at MOMA, for whom see March 27)
And in addition:
the première of Anton Chekhov's play "Three Sisters" in Moscow, today in 1901
Luna 9 launched, today in 1966
Apollo 14 launched, today in 1971
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