... well I wasn’t actually but some people thought I was and that was the story behind my second experience ever in prison – behind bars. (My first was in France – see the story of my train journey out of Paris in about 1969 or 1970.)

Egypt in 1971 was full of the military. Army everywhere – and maybe it still is, I really don’t know.

Even coming into Cairo on the aeroplane from Beirut you could see military encampments all over the place. I suppose they were meant to be camouflaged into the desert but it certainly didn’t work very well because I saw lots of them.

Everywhere was full of soldiers, on buses, taxis, walking around and when I took the train from Cairo to Alexandria there were loads of soldiers there as well.

I was travelling third class and so I sat on a wooden bench in a compartment. Unpadded. Windows wide open letting the sun and wind in and the heat out.

The train was a long journey because it stopped at lots of places. African trains were very slow anyway because they used narrow gauge railway tracks unlike wide gauge which we have in Europe – and I suppose they have now modernised in many parts of Africa.

A young soldier got in and sat opposite me. I suppose he was only about my age – late teens/early 20s.

Nice guy and started to talk to me in broken English. I was unusual in those days because I was European and had very long hair down my back.

He was interested, I suppose, in the standard of life in Britain and started asking me about the prices of various things.

TV? About £80.

Washing machine? I don’t know, probably about £100. (Don’t forget we're talking about the early ‘70s.)

And frigidaires? What? Frigidaires. Frigi-what?

Frigidaires. – Oh you mean fridges! You want to know the price of a fridge! Probably about £100.

I thought no more of it and got off the train at the terminal in Alexandria.

As I walked along the platform carrying my rucksack and wondering where to go, I was suddenly accosted by two armed soldiers and an officer and stopped at gunpoint.

I was under arrest the officer said. No explanation. They took me off in the back of a Land Rover through the streets of Alexandria and I suppose we ended up in an army base and I was put into a prison, searched and then left there for a few hours.

Eventually somebody came to the cell and ordered me out and I was shown into a room with a desk with an Egyptian officer on one side and an empty seat on the other side.
 

“We know who you are” he explained, “why are you here?”

I tried to say that I had no idea what he was talking about and that there was some mistake. The office insisted that there was no mistake.
 

“Why do you want to know about the bridges?” “I’m sorry but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We know you are here trying to find out about the bridges.”

I was starting to get frightened but carried on with my denials.
 

Suddenly, the door opened and a young man was pushed in roughly flanked by two armed soldiers. It was the young guy who had been speaking to me on the train.

Suddenly it dawned on me – “You’re talking about fridges! I was talking with this soldier about the price of goods in England and he asked me about fridges but he said Frigidaires and I didn’t know what he meant and then when I realised I suppose I exclaimed the word “fridges” rather loudly.”
 

I was taken back to my cell. Luckily it was pretty warm because I wasn’t given any blankets and some pretty uninteresting mixture of beans to eat and sweet tea. Ful medames.

I was there all the next day and into the evening and probably about 10 o’clock in the evening I was taken out of the cell and put in the back of a Land Rover and taken through some posh residential areas to a very nice looking house.

I was ushered into a very comfortable office with a rather large gentleman in an expensive -looking dressing gown.

I told him that they had made a mistake and that somebody had overheard our conversation and had misunderstood what was being said.

The gentleman assured me that they do not make mistakes but that they were going to let me go. First of all I had to write a statement describing how I had been treated.

You can imagine that I was prepared to sign anything.

I was then put back into a Land Rover and driven once again through residential streets to a youth hostel which by that time – midnight – was closed.

The soldiers knocked loudly at the door until the youth hostel warden came to the door.

A rapid exchange in Egyptian Arabic and the warden let me in and showed me into a room where there was a vacant top bunk.

I climbed up into the bunk and went to sleep very relieved.
 

The next morning I woke up and climbed down from the bunk only to find that I recognised the guy sleeping underneath me – Simon XXX – who I had last seen a year ago in London and who had nicked my girlfriend.

We went for morning coffee together and talked about old times.

I have no idea what happened to the young soldier. I hope he was all right.

As it happens, I had been in Israel about three months earlier and travelling on a second passport (you could do that at the time) I had the Israeli stamp put into that second passport which I then left with the British Embassy in Amman and asked them to send it to Nairobi in their diplomatic bag, which they did.
I shudder to think what might have happened if I had kept the passport with me and it had been found by the Egyptian authorities – or later on, by the Ugandan army (but that's another story)!