Of love and hope
Deepika Gurdev

High Tea in Mosul
by Lynne O’Donnell. Cyan. Pages 213. US $21.95

They arrived with a suitcase in their hands, with the men they’d fallen in love with. It was to a land they’d soon grow to love. It was a journey, they hadn’t quite imagined. There were no potatoes. Unthinkable. Like so many others, they were journey women. Is it an ordinary story?

Not when you put two Englishwomen in an Iraqi landscape, one that in the years to come would be marred by war, violence and conflict.

Pauline and Margaret’s journey into this world began when they fell in love, got married and followed their Iraqi husbands back to Mosul, which was their home for almost 30 years when journalist Lynne O’Donnell met them.

It started with a High Tea, served with love, hope, anticipation. It blossomed into a friendship, sounds familiar? Then like a true friend, Lynne narrates this story that could have easily run the risk of being a mushy surviving the war tale with the deepest conviction.

She goes all out to protect the identity of one of her characters and that of her family because freedom has meant "Iraq is no longer a safe place
to live."

With the access she has, Lynne takes you into their world, a world that sounds so much like yours and mine: "Sometimes they would make cakes, whatever was their speciality...and they’d brew pot after pot of tea while they bellyached, and moaned and gossiped, and laughed...and play Scrabble, drink coffee and reminisce. And at the end of the afternoon, they’d go back to their own homes, in time for their children to come in from school, to get them started on homework...knowing that no matter how tough things got or how lonely they sometimes felt, they weren’t alone; they had friends who saw things the same way they did, who would look out for them, who loved them. And so, for a little while every now and then at least, the burden of being a foreign wife had been eased and everything felt better."

It is details like these, it is in those fleeting moments of normalcy captured in a time when everything else is falling apart, that make High Tea in Mosul stand out. The war changes everything, death threats, kidnappings, ransoms, movements curtailed and the final straw inflicted by the Operation Iraqi Freedom—all of this is evocatively captured.

Lynne was among the first Western journalists to enter Mosul after it fell to US troops in April, 2003, and she takes you through the most sweeping changes there through this story.

It’s impossible not to love it. Her characters are strong, they are resilient and they teach you almost everything there is to life along the way: "I do not regret anything. Life is what you make of it. You have good and bad experiences and you learn from both. I think regret is a wasted emotion."

If you think that resonates, then go ahead, read the book and don’t leave without heading to the High Tea in Mosul blog, http://www.highteainmosul.com/blog/, where the most recent entry in the Dohuk Diaries tells you that potatoes are back. Life does come full circle, slowly but surely.

HOME