By Joan Bruhier
Beads! Among the baskets heaped with colourful spices that had drawn my eye as I wandered past the street vendors’ tables, I’d spotted one full of tiny glass beads, all dusky pink and mauve, and mixed with fragments of stalk and leaf. Beads were my thing. This was 1974 and I was on the hippie trail in Morocco, sleeping on hotel roofs from Chechaouen to Marrakesh. Along the way I’d discovered ghassoul, an amazing, skin-softening mud, when I bathed in a village hammam, my skinny white body provoking much staring and giggling among the plump, brown regulars; and been surprised to recognise the herb being brewed up by a hotel-keeper in the Rif mountains to treat my cough as none other than pennyroyal, my Yorkshire grandmother’s favoured remedy for “women’s troubles”.
I’d pitched a borrowed tent on a ledge above the Atlantic in a near-deserted bay and lived on bread, dates, walnuts and Edam; and from a beach encamped by enough long-haired young Americans to populate a small city, I’d hitched with three Spaniards (one called Jesus) to Paradise Valley (was it a real place?) to see thousands of almond trees flowering on the mountain slopes. Now I’d fetched up in the seaside town of Essaouira, where, on this sunny March day, a celebration was happening. Men in djellabas drummed, piped and twanged unlikely instruments on makeshift stages, while demurely black-robed women ululated wildly, hands hiding their mouths, eyes gleaming. I drifted to some tables outside a hotel where glasses of hot, sweet spearmint tea were being poured from an ornate metal pot. The hotelier was friendly and spoke French. I’d graduated in French before dropping out, and we chatted. Today, he explained, was “La Fête du Roi”. It was an important holiday, and his mood was expansive. He ushered me into a large room thronged with people, where I was plied with sweetmeats and sprinkled with rosewater.
I commented admiringly on the exquisite, deep-orange markings decorating a young woman’s hands. The friendly hotelier beamed… And so it was that I found myself being led up the wooden staircase of a large, shady “maison des femmes” to an upper mezzanine floor, where the diminutive Madame Mina (still beautiful at 70-plus, and still better able to sit cross-legged on the floor for several hours) applied the henna paste, slowly, intricately patterning my fingers, hands and wrists, and finally wrapping them in strips of cloth. These stayed on for two days, so I couldn’t undress or wash, and had to be fed. But at last I unwrapped a pair of hands that were a work of art, and which remained beautiful – and a talking point – long after my return to England. Just back? It seems like yesterday.
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