Empress Bianca Read Free Page A

alone. Moreover, Harold Barnett behaved towards the Milades with respect, and once Bianca’s father established that his ‘intentions were honourable’, he was happy to give his blessing for the marriage between Leila and the handsome Welshman who had now left the British Army and gone to work as an apprentice surveyor with the Palestinian Railway in Jaffa.
    Harold Barnett was an ambitious man - a trait his daughter would inherit from him. He had no intention of spending his whole life as a railway surveyor, and within two years of his marriage to Leila Milade, while she was producing first one, then another stillborn baby, he studied at night to become a qualified surveyor. By the time Bianca came on the scene, eight years later, her father was a qualified surveyor with his own practice, employing an assistant, a clerk and an office boy.
    It was into this prosperous but solidly middle-class and respectable world that Bianca Hilda Barnett was born in 1930. Because her mother was Jewish, she too was Jewish, and while she, and indeed her mother, shared Harold’s British nationality; from the moment she could remember she considered herself to be more Middle Eastern than English.
    Harold and Leila would never have left their home in Jaffa had it not been for the political situation in Europe after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Harold was worried because Palestine, as a former part of the Ottoman Empire, had been allied to Germany in the Great War, and he was only too aware that the Palestinian people resented the presence of the British who were occupying that country, having reneged upon their promise to the Arabs that they would be given theirfreedom in return for helping get rid of the Germans. Having watched the Pathé newsreels and seen Germany invading the Sudetenland, dismantling Czechoslovakia and, in March 1938, occupying Austria, he said to his wife Leila and his father-in-law Joseph Milade: ‘No Jew or Britisher is safe in Palestine. We must emigrate.’
    To Leila and Joseph, emigration was not an alien concept. The Milades had cousins who had done well in Jamaica and Tanganyika.
    However, Harold opted for Panama, a country where they knew no one, and no one knew them; but it had at least the merit of being totally independent of either Britain or Germany. Moreover, it had the Atlantic Ocean between it and Europe, where Harold was convinced a conflagration was imminent.
    Harold, Leila and eight-year-old Bianca boarded the SS Sao Paulo in Lisbon, Portugal just after England and France declared war on Germany, following its invasion of Poland. They landed in Panama on Saturday, September 23 1939.
    Within two weeks, Harold had rented a comfortable three-bedroom apartment in the South District with a view of the Caribbean Sea in the distance.
    While Harold went from surveyor to surveyor, looking for work, Leila hired a housekeeper who had once worked as a lady’s maid with the Honorary Syrian Consul and so spoke kitchen Arabic. Harold found a job four weeks after his arrival, and they were on their way to duplicating the solidly respectable life they had enjoyed in Palestine. Harold’s energy and initiative were such that it was not long before he was cultivating clients with a view to setting himself up in business on his own: something he did within twenty-one months of landing in Panama.
    Like most eight-year-olds, Bianca was blithely unaware of the pressures governing adult life. Being Palestinian, Leila was inclined to follow the Middle Eastern tradition of letting her daughter know the realities of their lives, of allowing the child to see behind the worries of having to change country. Of having to find an apartment. A car. A school for Bianca. Harold, however, being English and the man of the house, held sway in the British manner. ‘Not in front of Bianca,’ was his guiding motto. As he scurried around town from their room at the Don Pedro Hotel to find the apartment which he