At Easter '58 I'd gone back for some Easter leave to see my mother in France, and one morning received a telegram there saying, 'Sorry to cut short your leave, but please return at once.' So I took the next plane back to Beirut, where what looked awfully like a civil war was breaking out. It didn't quite get to the civil war stage, though in the 1970s it did. At that time it was really a dress rehearsal for what... for the much, much worse things that happened in 1970. But for about five months the opposition, which was 90% Muslim, was really besieging the Christian President's palace. We lived immediately above the Christian President's palace, so we weren't actually in a terribly good place, and bullets were whizzing around. And for six months we couldn't go out on our lovely terrace at all. And at various moments the Embassy said, 'Do you really think you ought to go on living where you are living?' But I thought there was no real point in moving. It wasn't all that dangerous as long as you kept your head down, you know, and didn't sort of go out on the balcony and that sort of thing, it seemed all right.