Improbable Women: Five Who Explored the Middle East

23. To the End of the Road

253 23 To the End of the Road Flora Stark died in California in November 1942 while Freya was still in Baghdad. The Ministry of Information had asked her to travel to the United States on a lecture tour, but she felt that it would end the nascent Brotherhood in Iraq and she put them off for a year. Had she gone at the first request, she would not have been there in time, and this was the last of her immediate family: her sister, father, and mother were gone. When she did leave Baghdad, it was with Stewart Perowne, driving on a somewhat roundabout trip through Syria, Lebanon, Palestine , and Transjordan to Cairo, where she then flew along the north coast of Africa to Algiers and spent ten days, during which she managed to meet and be very impressed with General Dwight Eisenhower. In October she and five thousand troops with a few other women and children embarked on the converted liner Aquitania bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. On the third or fourth day Freya had an attack of acute appendicitis and was carried off the ship on a stretcher in Halifax. Describing the event in Dust in the Lion’s Paw, her autobiography from 1939 to 1946, she says that “my cortege appeared like the funeral of Sir John Moore at Corunna, surrounded by shadows and rain. The five thousand looked down in silence, the stretcher bearers stumbled on.”1 General Sir John Moore was, of course, Hester Stanhope’s love, the loss of whom launched her on her epic journey. After a fortnight Freya was walking, and by the middle of November she was beginning her assignment. Her task was to step into the controversy over the future of Palestine and to defend the stew of British policy that was generally 254 • Freya Madeline Stark unsatisfactory to the Jews or the Arabs. To the history of the McMahon -Hussain Letters, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, the British had added The White Paper of 1939. The latter promised a Palestinian state in ten years with governance to be shared by Jews and Arabs. In the interim, Jewish immigration was to be limited and would last only five years during which the Jewish population would have reached approximately one-third of the total population of Palestine. No further immigration would be allowed without the approval of the Arabs. This of course countered the implications of the Balfour Declaration, depending upon one’s definition of “homeland” for the Jewish people. The pro-Zionists were perturbed, but the Arabs were not thrilled by the paper either. So Freya’s job was to try to win the hearts and minds of influential Americans in support of Britain’s management of the Mandate. Given her intense fear of public speaking, this lecture tour drew heavily on her reserves of courage. On at least two occasions she remarked that she would much rather be doing something she really enjoyed such as fighting alongside the Italian guerillas. She lectured to students, military personnel, businessmen, and groups of influential people. She gave lectures at the War Department and to the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA). In the course of the tour she was introduced to a large sample of the day’s Who’s Who in America, which included such people as Elsa Maxwell, Henry Luce, Clare Booth Luce, John Gunther, and Dorothy Thompson. Her activities caught the attention of the Zionists, and questions were raised about her in both the U.S. Congress and the House of Commons. Pro-Zionists were assigned to follow her across the country and raise questions. This does not seem to have posed too big a problem for Freya, whose low tolerance for sentimental inaccuracies and whose combative nature were a potent combination. The white paper position on limiting immigration was a major target as was the idea that immigration should not take place over the objections of the inhabitants. When asked where the Jews were to go, Freya observed that there was more than enough room in the United States. By the end of June the ordeal was over and Freya To the End of the Road • 255 returned to England, sharing the honeymoon suite in a flying-boat with the only other woman aboard. Fr eya’s f ir st and onl y at t empt at marriage seems to have been...