2018 Visit to the Houses of Ainab by Ann and Susie Kerr

Visit to Ainab, 9 September 2018

Dear Ainab friends and relations,

I’ve been in Lebanon with my mother for a little more than a week, tagging along while she goes to AUB Board meetings but also lucky enough to venture outside of Beirut.  Today, our last day, we had saved to go to Ainab to see what we might find, prepared for the worst!  

A friend loaned us her driver for the day so we went in style, in her car, with a minibar in the back seat.  He had no idea where Ainab was but my mother advised him to ask for 'the American hilltop' and sure enough this rang bells.  Having not been there for some 38 years, I was not in a position to give directions.  However, I did have a strong instinct about inclines, gradients and views, and somehow, believe it or not, we urged him up the correct turns and tugs and knew we were headed up the right hill.

At the top, lo and behold, the Crawford and Dodge/Dodd houses stood in front of us, and the ruins of the tennis court to our right.  We were ecstatic!!  The Crawford house has been renovated very tastefully and is clearly inhabited, with a locked gate out in front. 

Also, a new driveway leading to a new property out of view, complete with a porter's lodge/guard house at the entry way, has been installed between the Dodge/Dodd and Kerr/Kennedy houses.  So cars would pass across the top of the hill to reach the driveway.   We must have seen about twenty or thirty walkers in the space of ten minutes.  We knew we had several hours of work to do and carefully declined invitations from many walkers to come have coffee at their nearby houses. 

A Syrian refugee had got a job helping to guard the new house.  He was anxious that we not go wandering into bad places and advised us to be careful about ammunition lying around.

We first inspected the Dodd/Dodge house:  the path leading up was just as I'd remembered it, and then the porch to the right reminded me of having English literacy lessons one spring or summer when we must have rented it for a short stay.  It was also on that porch, when I was about seven, that my Dad suggested I go upstairs to fetch my mother's sunglasses for her, and I refused on the basis that it was unfair.  The other memory is Melissa and Simon dropping tomatoes off the roof when other people (I won't say who) were sitting below.  

A distinctive lamp was still hanging over the porch (we saw an identical one at the Cliff House a few hours later) and what we could see through the broken windows was not too bad.  Clearly it had been lived in again since the last time I saw it, trashed, in 1977 or so.  Apart from the Crawford house, it was the best preserved. There were no add-ons, though the arches had been filled in.

We were extremely excited all the while…

Then on to inspect the Crawford house from afar.  Very nice with a garden area out in front. Someone is enjoying living there.  A trashed car in the parking area.

And on to the tennis court which we couldn’t wait for.  Though it looks like someone has dumped a giantic load of big stones all over it, surely Mother Nature has simply pushed the stones up and out of place – with the asphalt (?) long gone.  There are plenty of volunteer pines making an attempt to establish themselves, but along the perimeter of the court are old established trees in clean lines delineating boundaries.  The seating stones are gone; a perimeter wall to hold up barbed wire was erected along the Kerr/Kennedy-facing side. 

Each time we gently climbed the accessible bit of wall to get over, we’d say to each other, Do be careful of the barbed wire. 

My mother celebrated her 84^th birthday two weeks ago, and we were both dressed demurely in skirts with bare legs – so the main challenge was avoiding getting cut by thorns and tripping on ivy and thorny bushes of various sorts which are invading the whole place.  As my mother kept saying, after the overwhelming filth of almost everywhere (except the AUB campus), it was wonderful to see nature taking over. The trees were magnificent and we listened to the pines in just the way I remembered.

Walking over the tennis court with its many thorns was the most physically challenging aspect of the visit, and we did it twice – but there were other challenges to come.  We found our way to the Kerr/Kennedy house, which had a substantial, tasteful two-story addition on the Beirut facing side, so the front door was lost.  The terrace had been enlarged, but we needed to be careful of some extremely deep holes (not sure if we saw a well, or if that would make sense).  Someone had thoughtfully covered the offending hole with an empty ammunition box.  Electricity supply to the house had been done haphazardly.

Clearly someone else had visited not long before, as we found bits of a fresh orchid flower on the terrace.  We circled the house looking in broken windows, saw the fireplace, kitchen, a new bathroom with tiles.  The extension had decorative stone on the outside suggesting much care.  Ivy is on the march and much of the outside has been covered. 

On to the Crow house – but we must have erased from our memory the strange, cement modern structure that I vaguely remember seeing or hearing about at some point.  It had been adopted for some military purpose. Sandbags and graffiti. Does anyone remember this? 

(Picture interruption!)

Tennis court

 Crawford house

 Dodd/Dodge house

 Inside the Crow house

 Kerr/Kennedy house

 Leavitt/Landis house foundations

New friends - walkers enjoying the hilltop.

We crept on.

We explored the ‘new’ Crow house that we’d stayed in back in 1980, when one night a militia surrounded the house with their gunfire trying to coax us out.  It was abandoned.  The original Crow house was accessible: front door wide open, which was quite creepy given the fact that that the main room had been totally taken over with sand bags, including room for cover within the room, in the form of two separate cubby holes.  Outside it was almost impossible to get to the terrace due to all the overgrowth, but we did it.  Every step everywhere involved avoiding those thorns and myriad trip hazards. 

When you are 84, do remember to carry bandages and anti-bruising treatment cream with you at all times. We’d left our supplies in the car and by now my mother’s legs were impressive looking.

Where was the Gordon/Leavitt/Landis house?  The instinctive route was not available, again due to vegetation.  I should mention what seemed to be new trees: oak and eucalyptus.  Lots of oak, and lots of acorns.  I searched for snobar but the season was apparently over.  Anyway, we decided to retrace our steps and approach via the tennis court. This was not as easy as it sounds.

It began to rain, believe it or not, but we were in high spirits. Nevertheless, it was impossible to rush due to the thorns and trip hazards, so we walked the most intricately delicate walk I’ve ever experienced in my whole life, holding down and holding aside the tiniest deadliest vines and thorns. 

We’d had tree cover until the tennis court, and at that point the rain increased in intensity.  We knew we couldn’t leave without finding the Gordon/Leavitt/Landis house – what would Josh say??

At the far end of the tennis court we planned which rocky/thorny installation would be least difficult to pass through, and proceeded ever more carefully.  We glimpsed some kind of clearing through the trees and vegetation, and then the vestiges of the wall of a house under what appeared to be hard standing (interrupted by holes that we needed to avoid falling into).  Our conclusion was that sadly, the house was no more, but clear evidence of it was under our feet and we thought it would still be possible to hold an art exhibition, and art lessons for that matter, in such a lovely place.

Our mission to see the Five Houses now complete, we could not rush back through the pouring rain to the waiting car, but made our way gingerly across the tennis court once more.  The final hurdle, literally, was the chain across what must have been a space large enough for a car to pass through, to reach the Kerr/Kennedy house if necessary.  Artificial knees have to be lifted in certain ways to get over such chains and my mother found the right technique.

Then back to the car.  We were soaked to the skin.  We found our way to the Cliff House, which was fully booked, though the manager found us a table that no one wanted because it was a bit wet from the rain.  My mother took charge and ordered a hubbly bubbly, which had two pieces of charcoal to keep us warm, and I at the age of 59 took my first puff.  We downed a small bottle of Arak and left nothing of our meza. We laughed so hard and cried at the same time. Three hours later we staggered out to the car, and back down to Beirut just in time to stroll on the Corniche at sunset, where the old Gordon House looked exquisite in its new Morocco restaurant incarnation.  Apart from the gazillion of pieces of litter lining the roads and floating in the sea, it was perfect. 

Here’s to the Dodds’ stay in Shemlan next year!!!

Much love to all,

Susie and Ann