By the middle of June our town had undergone its annual transformation from sleepy Moroccan village to thriving international resort. Boats and jets disgorged tourists, and the town beach, at noon, became a carnival of reddening flesh. At night the Boulevard, closed to traffic, became the ground for a great passeo, while on the Mountain the warm nocturnal air brought our damas de noche into bloom.
Certain incidents those early summer weeks, though quite small, even insignificant in themselves, and later overshadowed by more vivid events, seem in retrospect to suggest the tensions that were then building up in certain quarters of our town.
The stones that had hit Laurence Luscombe one May evening became more than an odd occurrence to those of us who drove daily through Dradeb. Sometimes we felt we were running a gauntlet as teenage boys shot rocks at us from vantage points on the roofs. For a while it became an adventure to drive through at night. We'd close our windows, hold our breaths, and sigh relief when we reached the Jew's River unscathed. But after a while the fun wore off. Camilla Weltonwhist, on her way home from a party at the British Consulate, received a nasty gash on her forehead when a stone shattered the window of her Rolls. We felt anger on her behalf but were reconciled soon enough. We learned to accept these bombardments, as we did the Socco pickpockets, as part of the price we paid for living in Tangier...