ZEPPELINS carrying their deadly cargo floated menacingly above Edinburgh, war raged across Europe and life, once fairly simple and carefree, probably felt altogether more dangerous.
Elizabeth Louise MacKenzie was the 16-year-old daughter of a respectable middle-class Edinburgh family, with delicate, pretty features and, until war struck, a life largely sheltered from hardships.
She was young, smart and increasingly intrigued by the world beyond her strait-laced home city.
And when she first set eyes on a tall, dashing Afghan prince, descended from the Prophet Muhammad, with his strong, proud features and a spectacular curled moustache, her teenage heart beat faster.
"I followed the chieftain's son with my eyes as he crossed the room," she later recalled. "He walked so erectly and looked like the popular idea of a handsome sheikh. He was tall, with finely chiselled features and the air of a swashbuckler."
Social conventions decreed that young bedazzled Elizabeth wasn't supposed to fall head over heels in love with this striking foreigner.
And she certainly wasn't supposed to run off and marry him, convert to Islam and embark on a new life in Afghanistan and India.
As a result, Elizabth's father never spoke to her again, such was the mortification she'd heaped on her family.
The couple's romance was a scandalous clash of cultures, but it forged an East-West bond that stretched much further than a marriage that neither side's family had particularly welcomed.
And even now, as the 50th anniversary of Elizabeth's death approaches, this daring and loving pair's determination to overcome international, social and religious divides has, perhaps, more relevance than ever before.
Elizabeth died from cancer, aged 60, on August 15, 1960. Her body lies in the historic Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, her devoted husband buried by her side. Their final resting places are just a few hundred yards from the graves of some of the latest Afghan conflict's most recent soldier victims.
Elizabeth's death marked the final chapter in a remarkable life that stretched from Edinburgh to the wilds of the North-West Frontier.
There the Khyber pass cuts through the Hindu Kush mountains, connecting Afghanistan with Pakistan. It's where, even then, the Pashtun people â€" the main ethnic force within today's Taliban â€" raged bitterly against the British occupation of their nation.
That Elizabeth followed her heart to embark on such a thrilling adventure as a memsahib would have been enough of a challenge for most women.
But she and her husband, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, great-grandson of Afghan warlord Jan-Fishan Khan, would also spend the rest of their lives trying to build bridges to unite West and East and create a more enlightened understanding between their cultures.
Elizabeth tried to do just that in an acclaimed book, My Khyber Marriage: Experiences of a Scotswoman as the wife of a Pathan Chieftain's Son, which she penned under an assumed name, Moray Murray Abdullah, perhaps to save the blushes of her Edinburgh relations.
In it, she wrote passionately of her experiences as a white European wife in a war-torn foreign land, from arriving at her husband's home fearful she was to find herself part of a scantily-clad harem, to gazing in wonder at the fine embroidery and silks worn by her mother-in-law. "The East is not a land of sweet-do-nothing inhabited by handsome, wealthy sheikhs lying in wait to lay hands on white women," she wrote.
While Elizabeth dispelled popular myths surrounding Eastern life in that and her second book, The Valley of the Giant Buddhas, a travelogue based around the Buddhas of Bayman which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, her husband Ali Shah, a British Foreign Office diplomat and acclaimed author, was also producing dozens of works and giving lectures to build links between East and West.
Their unlikely union would even go on to deliver a second and third generation of descendants who have strived to forge stronger understanding of the area. Among them is their granddaughter, documentary maker Saira Shah, whose acclaimed 2001 film Beneath the Veil coincided with a new wave of British and American presence in the region which, to bloody cost, continues today.
None of which could have been known to young Elizabeth's head as she stood at an Edinburgh University reception nearly a century ago and gazed in awe at the striking young man at the other side of the room.
"It was 1916," she wrote. "Trainloads of troops kept leaving. The streets of Edinburgh were full of injured men. Everybody was doing something, some war work."
She was grieving the loss of her brother in the war, while working at a depot making flags to sell on street corners for the war effort, some days toiling from 5.30am until 6pm.
An invitation from Edinburgh University for flag sellers to attend a reception was a cause for much excitement for her, less so from her father.
She was allowed to go for just two hours. She arrived to find herself overwhelmed by a sea of unknown faces of various nationalities. Among them was the man who would eventually capture her heart.
"To me, he was the principal actor on the stage," she reflected.
Once introduced, he brought her tea and chocolate cake, confessing to the blushing Elizabeth how he preferred his own country's green tea.
Then, as if in a forewarning of what she might come to find in her future life as his wife, he added: "Moreover, we are men of the sword and do not care for sugar buns."
They left together and continued to meet for strolls in the Braid Hills or tea in a café overlooking Princes Street Gardens.
Their blossoming romance was a carefully guarded secret. And when her father found out, it seemed doomed as he forced her to write a farewell message to her suitor.
Both families attempted to organise engagements to other parties before, finally, word came from the east that, if Ali Shah could promise his father that Elizabeth would become Muslim and had the fighting spirit to defend the family fort in times of crisis, he would give his blessing to their marriage.
It was all the couple needed to hear.
Soon young Elizabeth was on her remarkable, lifelong adventure.
My Khyber Marriage by Morag Murray Abdullah is published by Octagon Press. For further details visit www.clearlight.com/octagon
DISTANT NATIONS WITH CLOSE AFFINITY
Marriage took the young Elizabeth to a life she could never have anticipated in 1920s Edinburgh.
She lived in her husband's Khyber homeland and travelled with him across nations in his role as a leading diplomatic figure.
At one lecture in Edinburgh shortly after Afghanistan had won independence from Britain, Ali Shah told the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution of a need to establish "that friendly feeling which must prevail between Great Britain and Afghanistan for the future peace of the world".
The future of Afghanistan depended on the exploitation of its resources, he added, pointing out that there were "close affinities between the Afghan and the Scottish people because they were both Highland people . . . and that in future the people of this country would be the first who would help them".
At another address to the Overseas League in London, he drew further parallels with the Scots: "I have a great respect for the Scots still wearing the kilt," he said. "There is some affinity in the feeding of the two peoples. The Afghans have porridge and broth. They are also intensely fond of money and, like every hill folk, cannot keep it as long as they would like."
He added that Afghans shared the common traits of humanity and though they were warriors by birth and sometimes brigands by profession, the sniper's bullet was "not the emblem of the Afghan race".
The couple had three children. Their son Idries was famed for his books on the Sufi element of Islamic religion.
His three children all became writers, while daughter Saira, risked her life to make television documentary Beneath the Veil, in which she went undercover in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan where she witnessed executions.
Ali Shah died in 1969. Bereft following the death of Elizabeth" known then as Saira Elizabeth Louiza Shah" he vowed never to live in a country where he'd lived with her.
He moved to Morocco and he was killed by a reversing truck. His body was taken to England and he was buried alongside Elizabeth.
Edinburgh Evening News July 20, 2010
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