Two lives for a princess. In the public eye, the pre-Revolution belle of the ball. And in private, the post-Revolution secretary behind an obscure office desk in Switzerland. Princess Nevine Abbas Halim recalls her bittersweet memories in her recently released memoirs. She opens her heart to Gamal Nkrumah "The family had one great drawback: all the princes and nabils considered at one point or other that they or their fathers should have reigned. The present incumbent was considered useless but to help him was not even envisaged. They had much more fun insulting him in private and telling ghastly stories about him without realising that they were digging their own graves, cutting off the branch on which they were sitting." A notch above the rest of the family, the King was projected as the tragic scapegoat of some picaresque novel. His womanising, if anything, added to his dubious mystique. "Going to nightclubs and running after girls was no crime. He never drank alcohol and never ate pork. The general public did not blame him for his women. They did sense, however, that he seemed to not to care about his people and his country, that he purposely made himself unpopular." The family was awash in s ex scandals -- the King's mother, too, was infamous for her imprudent promiscuity, but fell short of keeping the headlines well stoked. Things finally came to a head, and King Farouk abdicated at the age of 32 in 1952, an annus horribilis as far as the whole lot was concerned. "His mother seemed to take pleasure in embarrassing him. Queen Nazli was deprived of her title and money. She is rumoured to have become a Roman Catholic. For the mother of an important Muslim monarch to become Christian was a great humiliation for him." The author shies away from spelling out the lurid details, but she paints a graphic picture of the lives and times of her progenitors, their follies, and internecine infighting. Her invective accords few redeeming features to the fatal blunders they committed. Their worst faux pas, in her opinion, was that they all fancied themselves chiefs in the family, with no Indians. "To be a prince, you must have a reigning king," the author poignantly points out. In short, she concedes that King Farouk was skating on thin ice. Her Royal Highness Princess Nevine Abbas Halim has weathered many storms. A genital defect of the heart, that entailed surgery at the age of 27, a broken marriage, a revolution that stipulated the confiscation of all her family's property and possessions, and the resultant poverty -- indigence in exile. She left Egypt in 1961, worked as a secretary in Switzerland until she retired in 1994, and now lives between Alexandria and Lausanne. She never re- married. "Marriages fall apart. Practically everyone I knew has divorced. Children here and there, and lots of half-brothers and sisters." The disclosures in her recently released diaries were not designed to rattle the contemporary Egyptian political establishment, scandalous though they are. She comes across as being apolitical. These gripping revelations are, however, a particularly passionate, at once honest and heartfelt, exposé of her uncommon birthright. "I cannot remember when I saw the King last. Probably in a nightclub," she says morosely. The disparity between the lives led by royalty and commoners was too large and the consequences too devastating for the country not to get embroiled in the July 1952 Revolution. After several bouts of soul-searching, she has come to the conclusion that the excesses of "the Family" and some of its members' confusion about the morality of their vocation systematically undermined the basis for "the Family's" wellbeing. Staying the course as storm clouds hovered above them, the Egyptian aristocracy became firmly West-facing, and sought shelter in a European ethos far from the estranged subjects they ruled. "My grandparents' generation was religious, my parents' generation was at best agnostic, but essentially atheist and thoroughly Westernised." The author is candid: "I have a good working knowledge of Islam," she smiles sipping her beer. Princess Nevine was particularly fond of her paternal grandmother. To this day, she speaks fondly of her beloved Granny. She, like her contemporaries, presented European culture as the standard of civilised behavior. "Granny was the main pillar of our existence." "At the death of her daughter from diabetes, just a few months before the discovery of insulin, she was heartbroken. When I was born, some of that love was transferred to me. She was very religious, but never discussed her faith. She had no alcohol or pork in the house, but she knew that her son and daughter-in-law drank and probably ate ham, but not suckling pig. She had taught us the two most important Muslim prayers, but went no further. She sent us to visit the mosques of Cairo." Egypt's on-off royal romance barely conceals the curious persistence of an entrenched culture of cronyism. The government of Egypt had no strong policies for coping in a crisis. The glamour of royalty offers hope for a country steeped in failure. The pro-British Wafd, the nationalist party, fought the Monarchy to the bitter end. Both met with equally tragic ends. Never was so despicably wrong a horse backed with such obtuse obstinacy. The imperceptive stubbornness of the ruling clique led the country to ruin. The author, no doubt, underplays the good sides to the July Revolution. Some motley of bizarre characters in contemporary Egypt now beat the drum for the return of the monarchy. A soap opera, first aired two Ramadan's ago, brought Egyptians and their Royal Family back into each other's arms. The mysterious attraction of the otherworldliness of Egypt's royal family continues to draw ordinary Egyptians born long after the dissolution of the monarchy. The fascination with the relationship between rulers -- sometimes regarded as foreign despots, sometimes as tragic and romantic figures -- and their lowly subjects endures. The secret truth is that ordinary Egyptians have not yet become accustomed, six decades after the demise of monarchism in Egypt, to being the strong party in this relationship. Meanwhile, muddling through without money, but with vestiges of antiquated aristocratic morals, it began to dawn on the unfortunate members of the Royal Family who survived the Revolution that they were mere mortals. "We are fighters. We understood that some of our misfortunes were of our own making, but we are survivors. We are, after all, originally from the Caucuses and the Balkans," the author told Al-Ahram Weekly. "My father was the great grandson of Mohamed Ali Pasha by his younger son, Halim Pasha. The Great Family Feud began with Halim Pasha and Dad's maternal great-grandfather, Prince Mustafa Fazil, when Ismail Pasha received the right to male primogeniture from the Sultan as opposed to the old system of the eldest male in the family inheriting the throne. It would have been Prince Fazil and Halim Pasha's turns to reign. Ismail Pasha suspected them of plotting against him, sent them into exile and confiscated their property." Profits may have been pushed too hard in the bad old days. The ruthless exploitation of the Egyptian peasants, the long-suffering fellahin, by the landed aristocracy and loose ethics was a deadly combination for the Family. The author makes that clear in her highly readable memoirs. A notable exception was her father, characteristically the black sheep of "the Family". The author sings her father's praises. "We children loved him utterly, nothing he did or said could be anything but perfect," she says. However, her memoirs are hers, not his. Hers is no indiscriminate defence of her father as a controversial political figure in a particularly difficult period in Egyptian history. This is what it all boils down to: "I don't want this to be my father's book, I want this to be my book," she told the publisher in no uncertain terms. "He is difficult to size up. He did not keep a diary. Although we found lots of notes, they are not really helpful in reading his thoughts. He is all in nuances, in some situations straightforward, in others a complete mystery. He'll never tell you what he really thinks of you, except on the rare occasion when he loses his temper. And, even then, how sure are you that it was not deliberate?" Her father was a political animal, she simply isn't. She defers to a liberal disposition out of conviction. "There were lots of sexy bits and pieces that were edited out," the publisher added. The final outcome is eye-popping, zestful and seductive, all the same. So much for bounded ambition. Princess Nevine's memoirs can be easily dismissed as thin stuff. She wished to tell her tale as it was. Her life as an Egyptian princess ended when she left the country in the early 1960s. She has returned often since, but "I am a tourist in this country now," she says. "We discussed the cut off point and I was convinced that she was right," her publisher, Sherif Borei, chipped in. "My word, this is good lasagna," she abruptly changes the course of conversation. I steer the discussion back to her father. "My father helped Sadat at some point, you know. And, Sadat was courteous enough later on in life; he paid for the funeral, the doctors' fees, and he let us stay in the house in Alexandria, Schutz." A quintessentially aristocratic mansion, which has fallen on hard times, Schutz is now home to Princess Nevine when she visits Egypt. She retains a few erstwhile and faithful servants whom, she discloses, replenish her with news about contemporary Egypt. "The country and the concerns of its people still matter a great deal to me." The dreamlike world of her youth holds many youngsters enraptured. The lifestyle they led was akin to the most glamorous of soap operas. "I was flirting with both Salah and Shehriar's elder brother, Burhan. After Salah made a fuss about this two-timing, I agreed to marry him," she recalls nonchalantly. "Mummy came over for my wedding, bringing my silver, crystal and china inherited from my Great Aunt Nazli Halim, but cleverly left it on board the ship and took it back with her." This is the magical stuff the author excels at. She has a dry sense of humour. "Married life was quite nice to begin with. The marriage continued well until the husband of one of my best friends pointed out to me that his wife and my husband seemed to dance an awful lot together. And there went the marriage. I became jealous of every female in sight, and seeing this, Salah pretended to flirt with anything in a skirt. I reciprocated. Too many good- looking men and beautiful women, alcohol, parties, dancing, all that is required to ruin a marriage," she muses. "I began taking piano lessons at the Tiegerman Conservatory. I did not qualify to being taught by the maestro himself, but had a lovely lady, Madame Marianos, who took me on. She was Greek in spite of her name," she smiles wryly deadpan. She never claimed academic credentials, but she was enrolled at the American University in Cairo (AUC). "I was quite a curiosity at the AUC because I was the only member of the Royal Family at university." She got to bed at 5am, started cutting classes. "I found economics and sociology horribly dry and boring. I managed to pass by just reading the summaries at the end of each chapter. I never had the patience to read all of it. Philosophy was pretty confusing, English a bore," the Princess recalls. "I worked harder than at AUC, but cannot pretend to being passionately dedicated to the piano. I always had difficulty reading music and hated solfége," she chuckles. "Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis," Ralph Waldo Emerson is reputed to have said. And, Nevine appears to have lived by this saying. The very name Nevine, which today is a fairly common name, was rarely heard in Egypt before the birth of Nevine Halim. Her memoirs are equally concerned with the frivolous as much as with the serious. "Queen Nazli, free from a possessive, stern husband, was linked to various well-known men and her lifestyle became scandalous. The King was quite unable to control his mother. The two queens came to hate each other. Queen Nazli had chosen Safinaz Zulfikar thinking she would be a submissive daughter-in-law. The two queens quarreled continuously and complained to the King. The poor man did not know where to turn, and when he did turn to her, it was the beginning of the downward path." The descent followed the Revolution, but the truth of the matter was that the rot had begun much earlier, during the reign of King Farouk's father Fouad. It was King Fouad, who on 4 July 1922, issued a royal decree establishing a hierarchy of the royal family and categorising the aristocracy according to their kinship proximity to the King. Politics, too, played a part. "This rankled my father all his life. He had no money. His cousins, Mohamed Ali Ibrahim and Ismail Daoud, inherited fortunes and were very generous, but Dad was a proud man and he blamed his father," Princess Nevine admits. The King stripped her father of his status as a noble, rendering him a mere effendi, thereby making him all the more popular with the workers. The author's father founded the Egyptian General Federation of Labour, and the King never forgave him for that. He was in and out of prison. Prince Abbas Halim's incarceration, trials and life struggles were covered obsessively by the Egyptian tabloids. Despite his fondness for labour causes and lowly rank among the royals, he suffered the same fate as did all the others. "After the revolution, Dad's life was over." Prim yet enraptured, lost in her world of tinsel and tiaras, Princess Nevine prefers to dwell on seductive topics such as one aristocratic glamour-puss or another. "Kadria Zaki, called Tata, Nawal Tousson's beautiful elder sister, described her first ball at Princess Chevikar's. Her parents told her not to go near the King. But that was not counting on the King, who had a honed eye for beauty. He manoeuvered to be the last with her at a Musical Chairs game. Result: she had to dance with him." "The queen had not yet appeared, but Tata described how gorgeous she looked as she descended the stairs. There were no Paris models, but the local dressmakers were well up to the task." But then, there was no cost whammy in those days, "the Golden Days" as the author calls them. Ever the height of ladylike elegance, Princess Nevine came for the interview in the slimmest heels, dressed like the royal she is. We page through her book, looking at the fascinating photographs of fairy-tale princesses. The most gorgeous, we readily agree, was Fawzia, Empress of Iran, King Farouk's favourite sister. "He and my father were on very bad terms," she reflects on Farouk. His reign then seemed far from perfect. She knows better now. The regime that succeeded the King's was far worse. "I suppose what angers us the most is how such a promising boy could ruin everything not only for himself and his immediate family, but for the rest of us and for the people of Egypt." This is a subject that she takes seriously. "I was in Rome when he died, on my way to Salerno to see my sister, who was to give birth to her first child. I went to the King's apartment in Parioli to pay a visit of condolence to his children. I found a shrine to Egypt. Nothing of value, but all Egyptian." The author, in spite of the pain and impoverishment prompted by the Revolution, insists that she does not bear her tormentors any grudges. "Queen Farida threatened to have him buried in Saudi Arabia if Nasser refused to let him be buried in Egypt." That was to no avail. "Later, under Sadat, he was buried in the Rifai Mosque where all rulers are normally buried." "The King was in a critical, delicate situation. He was only 22 years old with no devoted friends or advisors, and the antagonist is Great Britain. Taking this into account, he managed surprisingly well during the war years," Princess Nevine notes. A photograph of Prince Abbas Halim in German officer uniform catches my attention. "Daddy went to school and military academy in Germany and was in the prestigious Uhland regiment when the War broke out. This regiment was made up of foreign princes and aristocrats, as well as Germany's cream of the cream. The Kronprinz was the Commanding Officer, I believe." The author has no qualms about that chapter of her father's life. "Most of the Royal Family and a majority of Egyptians were pro-Axis because we were simply anti-British." We proceed from the First World War to the Second. By June the war in North Africa was going badly for the British. The Germans took Marsa Matrouh, on the western Mediterranean coast of Egypt halfway between Alexandria and the Libyan frontier. Nevine quotes her grandmother's diaries: "The Americans living next to us are said to have left. The Jews also. [Granny's landlord, Mirzah Pasha, was Jewish]. They say that Ades and Benzion [large Jewish-owned department stores] are selling with 30 per cent rebate to liquidate everything and that the government has stopped payments by the banks. Panic. British HQ has been moved to Sudan." The Royals, nevertheless, seemed to have a ball of a time. "The Queen visited Granny again on 21 October as did Queen Nazli on 30 October. She had visits from other members of the Royal Family. Crown Prince Mohamed Ali was a great friend as was Prince Youssef Kemal. Through these visitors and especially through my mother, Granny had a very good idea of what was going on. The newspapers were unreliable as they were full of propaganda. For war news, she had Radio London and Radio Berlin. Granny may have been pro-Axis, but she was no fool and would no more swallow Germany's lies than she would those of the Allies." Wars, and the Revolution, took their toll on "the Golden Days". "There was a party for poor children in the Palace gardens, where they could play, receive food and clothes. It was a particular trait of the King's to invite the poor to his special parties." The King's days were numbered. "He knew about the planned military coup, even the names of the Free Officers." "Daddy went to see him at Ras Al-Tin Palace, begging him not to sign the abdication paper, saying he'd bring the Labour Party into the streets. The Navy and the Royal Guard were also faithful to the King." Princess Nevine cut through the cliches. "The Americans were in favour of the Free Officers, having written off Farouk as a loser." It was a Revolution that blasted through the 1950s like the Sputnik mission, but the relationship between the Free Officers and the aristocrats became more prurient by the day. "The new rulers began to throw their weight around. They had no idea how to govern a country, scarcely surprising, and mistrusted all members of the ancien régime." Nevine has few good words to say about Gamal Abdul-Nasser. "He was a past master in the art of propaganda and got out of the worst situations with brio." Yet, Nevine and her sister Ulvia married in the year of the Revolution. Ulvia's wedding was in February and Nevine's in August. "My brother was too poor to get married. My father told him he was born a prince and now must learn to live like a gentleman. My brother struggled hard to make ends meet." Her sister fancied the future was invented to spoil the present. "Ulvia's daughter married into the Boutros Ghali family and now lives in Rome. Her nephew lives in his father's hometown, Naples." With Ulvia and her Italian husband in Alexandria, Nevine in Switzerland and their brother, Mohamed Ali, in America, the family fell on hard times. Like the rest of the Royal Family, they were stripped of their possessions. Still, the paparazzi insisted on ruthlessly pursuing them. "In Alexandria today, there is a museum which pretends to display the jewels belonging to the Mohamed Ali family. There is nothing much in that museum. The really good pieces were stolen at the time of the Revolution. I know for a fact that one officer's wife showed up at a prestigious French jeweler's trying to sell a necklace belonging to a member of the Royal Family." Dairies of an Egyptian Princess: Nevine Abbas Halim, (2009) by Princess Nevine Abbas Halim. Zeitouna, Cairo
