Then she grabbed her shot-gun (and rounds of shot) and patiently waited for the rats to approach the sheet with the barley.
The white sheet enabled Violet to make out the creatures quite easily under the night sky. She eventually killed off all of the unwanted house guests by early the next morning.
Al-Rashed continued, “Dame Violet was actually quite a respectable hunter and won shooting contests with sheikhs”. That is, once they had agreed on occasion to allow her and her husband to join them on a hunt or in a shooting match.
In his recent article “Umm Saud: Forever a Part of Kuwait”, Ahmad Al-Khaled wrote: “One aspect of Dame Violet’s life which seems to have enamored her to the Kuwait people was the fact that even after her husband died in 1959, she continued to live in the white plastered house on the Gulf for over 30 years. She came to Kuwait as a wife, but she stayed on here as a member of her community/family.”
Dame Dickson loved the hospitality of the desert Bedouins so much that she once stated, “I think Bedu hospitality must be a response like ships meeting at sea.” These sort of warm words and her eventual command of local Arab dialects enabled both Mr. and Mrs. Dickson to endear themselves to the peoples of Kuwait from their earliest days here.
In short, Al-Rashed emphasized, the Dicksons treated people with equal respect, regardless of their origins. They respected the Kuwaitis, Beduin, and other neighboring peoples in both tone and in deed.
For all these reasons, one other special Kuwaiti name of endearment attributed to the elderly British women--who had observed Kuwait’s transformed from a small pearling and trading village on the Persian Gulf to a major modern oil power--, was the name “Hajjiya”.
This is unusual term of endearment for any Muslim to give a Christian Westerner because a “Hajjiya” is typically used only to denote a woman who has performed the Haj, i.e. a woman who has traveled to Mecca and faithfully performed her Muslim duties. The name “Hajjiya” also thus implies a great reverence for Umm Saud.
TRUE STORY THAT OUTDOES GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZFor this historian (and lover of literature), the best narration of the evening of November 8th by Mrs. Al-Rashed at the AWARE CENTER about the Dickson family and Kuwait was the tale of Mr. Dickson’s famous Desert Tree Dream.
It is a magical tale retold now over several generations here in the Gulf.Mrs. Dickson was aware that many of her husband’s dreams tended to portend good fortune for Kuwaitis and her family, so when her spouse awoke her excitedly one night. She obliged in getting up and immediately writing down in great detail the Colonel’s detailed dream..
This dream occurred in 1937. In it, the Colonel dreamt of a bungalow in the desert with a single sidr (cedar) tree next to the structure. In his dream, he and his wife were living out in the middle of that desert in the isolated bungalow. As far as the eye could see, there was no other large plant life.
As the dream proceeded a dust storm came and threw sand and dust all over the bungalow—piling it up next to the windows. When Mr. Dickson and his wife looked out early the next morning, they saw that the dust storm had created a hole straight down many meters into the sand next to the lone standing Sidr tree.
At the bottom of the deep hole was some sort of stone table. On the masonry was a woman’s mummified body.
Later, in his classic book, THE ARAB OF THE DESERT, Col. Dickson recounted his thoughts in the dream, “Clearly the storm had unearthed an ancient tomb.”
The Colonel soon called some servants to rebury the body. However, moments later, the “gruesome” body suddenly came alive!
The now-revived women said that after a thousand years sleep she was hungry, wanted to wash up, and needed a warm set of clothes.
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