were advancing apparently unstoppably across the desert towards Egypt, and Cairo was rife with rumours and alarms. Manning was jittery and fearful. She was constantly anxious about illness and was indeed frequently unwell. Concerned, Smith suggested that it might be best if she returned to England, but she retorted "Wherever we go, we go together. If we return home, we both go. I won't have the war separating us. End of story." Her father had made her a firm believer in the British Empire and the benefits it had brought the world, and Manning was a patriotic Briton, confident of ultimate Allied success. In Egypt, she confronted the fact that British occupation had never been popular. Smith quickly discovered the Anglo-Egyptian Union in Zamalek, where he drank and talked politics and poetry. As usual, he was well liked, and according to Lawrence Durrell often had a string of disreputable friends with him. Manning was much less popular. Durrell described her as a "hook-nosed condor", whose critical manner was unappreciated by many who knew her. Manning was incensed that the British Council did not immediately find a job for Smith, whom she considered one of their most brilliant teachers. She took her revenge by writing scurrilous verse about the council's representative, C. F. A. Dundas, later immortalised as the ineffectual Colin Gracey in Fortunes of War. Manning's characters were often based on real people though she never drew precisely from life. Her mocking portrait of the British Council lecturer Professor Lord Pinkrose was loosely based on Lord Dunsany, sent to occupy the Byron Chair of English at Athens University in 1940. She also resented that Amy Smart, wife of Walter Smart and frequent patron of artists, poets, and writers in Cairo, paid so little attention to her and Smith; she later took revenge in a similar way. In October 1941, Smith was offered a post as lecturer at Farouk University in Alexandria. The couple moved from Cairo to share a flat with fellow teacher Robert Liddell. The Germans regularly bombed the city, and the raids terrified Manning, who irritated Smith and Liddell by insisting that all three descend to the air raid shelter whenever the sirens wailed. Almost immediately after her arrival in Alexandria came devastating news of her brother Oliver's death in a plane crash. The emotional upset this caused prevented her from writing novels for several years. The air