Emails from the edge... two friends who broke past the barrier of war and peace

...Yesterday my husband came home terrified because someone had been killed right in front of him. The man – not yet dead – rose and started running blindly till he collapsed in the middle of the street. This was in addition to 23 other bodies found in the neighbourhood.

By the way, when is your birthday? Are you a Libran?

Love,

May

Bee Rowlatt was working as a producer for the BBC's World Service in London back in 2006 when she was asked to find "ordinary Iraqis" who spoke English to talk about the upcoming elections.

A contact put her in touch with May Witwit, an English Literature lecturer at Baghdad University. May was prepared to be interviewed, and proved to be outspoken about how the invasion of her country had wrecked so many lives.

She says that as a widow who had remarried but had no children she had little to lose and had a responsibility to speak up about how much worse things were after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, even if they had not been so great under his rule.

Bee, then 36, and the blunt, wry, hard-smoking 48-year-old May hit it off, and began to correspond by regular emails – a relationship that flourished and became deeper with each week, between two women whose lives were so very different but had collided through force of happenstance.

May delighted in teaching her all-female students about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen, taking them into a world long ago and far away from carnage in the street, curfews, food and petrol shortages, power failures and stories of friends and colleagues who "disappeared".

For eight or 10 days at a time May, a Shi'ite Muslim, and her Sunni Muslim husband Ali were trapped in their apartment because of the gunfights in the street between sectarian forces.

As the situation around her worsened, May clung more and more to the relationship with Bee, a mother-of-three who was born and grew up in York. Bee's tales of morning sickness, PTA events, baking cakes, picnics on Hampstead Heath, trips up north to visit her mother and the ups and downs of married life were like a life raft to May.

Bee says she sometimes felt her messages to May were trivial, full of banalities. To May, that very ordinariness was a godsend.

"They (the emails) were my only contact with the outside world," says May, who could go for weeks without hearing from or seeing friends living only a mile or two away. Early after the invasion, phone lines had been dead for 18 months.

"I loved hearing the details of Bee's life with Justin, her husband, and their little girls. I would close my eyes, imagining what it was like to be them." She describes Baghdad as having been a liberal, secular Arab society until the troubles began, with women walking and driving about without headscarves. By 2006, the religious extremists in charge said women seen in public without their bodies and heads

completely covered would be beheaded.

"Life had got worse under economic sanctions, of course, but after the invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein, many rights were taken away, especially from women. Extremists took power, and they wanted to make our country more like Iran."

She described to Bee how she tried to teach students about human rights, but their response was blank incomprehension. "I believe that if you want human rights and democracy then those ideas have to begin at home.

"My female students didn't understand what I was saying about marrying someone they chose because, although they are encouraged to study and become professional people, their personal lives are run by their fathers, whose word is law."

May had become estranged from her own family because they disapproved of her choice of second husband.

For Bee, it was an enormous eye-opener to hear about the awfulness of everyday life in a city under siege. "As a professional, you try to remain impartial, but at work you can see the story in terms of body count – which is important – but maybe not enough about the everyday effects for ordinary mums, dads and children over there.

"I was horrified by a lot of what May told me, and whenever there was a new report of an explosion in Baghdad I would worry until I heard from her again," says Bee.

As time went on and life in Baghdad became more dangerous and

circumscribed, May was desperate to get out. A "death list" of so-called subversives like academics was known to exist, and May heard

from a good source that her name was on it.

Not knowing who else to turn to, she asked Bee for help. Bee discovered the charity CARA, the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. CARA agreed to sponsor May and Ali to come to the UK so that she could study for a PhD. But 30,000 had to be found to cover living expenses.

May didn't have the money and nor did Bee, who nonetheless felt a great deal of emotional responsibility for May and Ali's safety as weeks and months went by. A light-bulb moment led her to send copies of the hundreds of emails she and her friend had exchanged to a literary agent in London. He very quickly closed a publishing deal with Penguin.

"I did it behind May's back and thought she might go ballistic because the emails had become very intimate at times," says Bee. "But I couldn't think how else to get a lump of money. She didn't go mad at all and thought it was fantastic. After that, my mum, my mother-in-law and Justin and I found ways of putting in the rest of the cash."

After many setbacks – one lasting many weeks thanks to a spelling mistake – in October 2008 May and Ali travelled to London via Jordan and received a joyful welcome from the Rowlatt family.

May is now half-way through her PhD at the University of Bedfordshire and lives in Luton. She works part-time as a translator to pay the bills. She and Ali enjoy the anonymity of life in Britain, but as she says: "Iraq is in my heart... I would like to go back if it could be as it was before. But things are deteriorating there..." She may have to return to Iraq, if she can't find a job, possibly teaching, after finishing her studies.

Naturally, she follows news coverage of Iraq, and watches Iraqi TV stations. She has also been paying close attention to the hearings of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain's role in the invasion of Iraq.

"I don't understand how they thought they could decide what happened to the lives of millions of people in another country. I don't believe they thought about or cared about ordinary families. Regime change could have happened, as it has elsewhere, by more indirect means." May says it's thought that more than 1.5m Iraqi women have been widowed since the invasion.

May and Ali have spent two Christmases with the Rowlatts in London, and Bee and May see each other and email in between – messages that still discuss everything from the Middle East to problems with men and hair straightening.

Everyday life in Luton thankfully involves little drama, says May. "I still marvel at how people here have complete freedom. British people are very lucky. I think that every day."

n Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad – The True Story of An Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit is published by Penguin, 8.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232

or visit www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage costs 2.75.