4.1 Poverty, Gossip and Intrigue

I am asking you, the reader to go back in time to before Bird had his frustrating experiences living at Jahili. Those were the days before air conditioning and modern conveniences, a time when life on the Trucial Coast was really hard.

It was a time when men rode on camels, or donkeys, or went on foot to travel between the towns, villages and oases of the Emirates, or as one used to say in those days ‘the Sheikhdoms.’ The staple diet for most people consisted of their own products, dates from the oases and milk from the camels. They also enjoyed salted and dried fish while rice, tea, coffee and sugar were imported and were of variable quality and availability in particular during the World War years and for some time after. Those in the desert were familiar with the various herbs and they enjoyed delicacies such as birds’ eggs and truffles which were available in season. Water wells in the desert varied from brackish to good quality drinking water in the Liwa oasis and in the oases on the mountain foreland. In the coastal towns there was easier access to imported goods including canned food, but they suffered from very bad water from their wells and they imported costly drinking water, sometimes from as far away as Bombay.

Rain was God's blessing in this parched land and even the raindrops falling into the sea were believed by some to be the origin of the pearls. And it was these products of the oyster that men went to seek, under terrible working conditions during the hot and humid summer months. Hundreds of the men sailed out to suffer hardship for months at sea to dive for pearls to satisfy the vanity of mankind and adorn the necks of the ladies in Bombay, London and Paris.

While these men were on the pearl banks they left their families at home in Liwa or if they lived on the coast many of their families fled the summer humidity going inland to the oases. There the temperatures were higher but the humidity was low and they enjoyed the luxury of fresh fruit and vegetables and above all, sweet fresh water. The decline and collapse of the pearl industry deprived men of a very significant part of their livelihood and there was no alternative employment possible in these lands of parched desert and barren mountains.