hen my 91-year-old grandmother heard the explosion, she thought there must have been an accident at the local hospital. The sound came from the direction of the port of Beirut where, in the 1970s, my grandfather had run the customs office.A daily email with the best of our journalismShe had been sitting on her balcony, as she did every evening, enjoying the cool breeze after a sweltering day.
My grandmother had lived through Lebanon’s civil war, and had a lot of practice at throwing herself under furniture Home was the place where she had lived for four decades. My grandfather and two of his colleagues had pooled their money to invest in an eight-storey condominium – building your own home is common in Lebanon. The three families had 11 children between them, so my uncle and father were never short of playmates.
The decor, like that of many Lebanese apartments at the time, took its cue from French interiors. France had controlled Lebanon from 1920 until 1943 and its cultural influence outlived its colonial mandate. There were beige sofas, beige walls, dark-wood side tables and peach, floor-length curtains. One morning my grandmother looked out of the kitchen window to find two Howitzer guns in the garden below
Did she fear for her safety? My grandmother shrugged. No, she said. Just that her sons would be traumatised. She thought only of them. Her memories of that week are remarkably happy. At one point a French reporter stumbled into the shelter. He had just come from Tehran. According to his sources there were about to be dramatic developments in Iran, which could have implications for the entire Middle East .
In late spring or early summer 1989, my grandmother recalled, a battle broke out in her neighbourhood between the Lebanese army and a Christian militia. The skirmish started in the early evening when she was at home. She hid in the lavatory because it was farthest from external walls.This time she was actually afraid. A bomb exploded in an apartment building across the street. Though she was unharmed, she felt the impact of the shrapnel hitting her building.
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