The pictures that have emerged of Kabul's burnt-out buildings and battle-scarred streets are impossible to reconcile with the city I remember half a century ago. But even in those days Kabul showed signs of suffering from warfare. Most of the original town buildings, including the great bazaar, the fortress of Bala Hissar and quantities of houses had been destroyed by the English in one of its Afghan wars. The subsequent construction during the 1920s of the grandiose palazzo that was the British Embassy was an act of imperial arrogance.
After so much had been blown up and pulled down, what was left was a mixture of flat mud-roofed houses, bazaars, and one or two newer suburbs. At the end of a great avenue where a few tumbledown buildings were all that remained of King Amanullah's planned city was his unfinished palace and parliament buildings at Daul Amam, which had remained untouched for 30 years.
Kabul was undistinguished, an overgrown village between two bare hills, recalling Robert Byron's description of "a Balkan town in the good sense of the term". In the shadowy bazaars among all the shop booths and chaikhanas, Afghanistan's people gathered in harmony.
Unshaven men wearing embroidery, brocade leather and sheepskin under huge white turbans went about unhurriedly. The medley included squint-eyed workers from Hazaristan, descendants of Ghenghiz Khan's pillaging armies, Uzbegs from the north and quarrelsome Pathans with glittering unreliable smiles carrying guns and roses and walking about in twos, hand in hand.
The burka was as much in evidence as it would be under the Taliban. Everywhere were soft moving cotton sacks rippling through the streets, sky blue, ox blood, fawn or aubergine.
We were constantly being told of the burka's two functions: it put all women in public on an equal basis (a plain rayon burka would cover the most expensive clothing) and it kept women, men's personal property, from being coveted by other men. But there were predictions that it would soon be discarded, and this happened to a large extent under the Communist regime.
A public letter writer would be squatting in the dusty street writing at the dictation of a wrapped-up woman, a boy would be selling sherbet kept cool with blocks of dirty ice brought down from the mountains, a funeral procession would pass, the corpse wrapped in a sheet. There was a smell everywhere compounded of decomposing piles of fruit and vegetables, excrement and wafts from the fetid jueys or drains. Boys ran about with baskets collecting dung and droppings for fuel and fertiliser.
On Children's Day shopkeepers paraded their children in front of their premises. A small boy's face would be peeping out from under an enormous turban of Bokhara silk, his eyes made huge by Khol. Rows of little girls with braided hair wearing jewellery and bright silk dresses had their faces powdered white round their dark eyes and a zarnik on their foreheads, while their podgy hands were tattooed or painted with henna. For the time being they were the objects of universal attention before they were bundled away.
April was a month of pale blue skies and the rustle of kites, a season of floods when the snows melted and lambs were being born in the wintry fields of the Hindu Kush. Outside the city the earth turned green and fruit trees were in blossom. Nomads, their women unveiled, would return from the Indian sub-continent with their long strings of camels, stopping for a short time in Kabul on their way to Hazarjat.
A favourite pastime was the picnic, perhaps in Pagman on the edge of the mountains, where the homes of the rich are now in ruin, or beside the tomb of Barbur, the first of the great sextet of Mogul emperors. He had adored Kabul writing "the climate is extremely delightful an there is no such place in the known world". He deserved his memorial, a pavilion erected in a garden in 1640 by his grandson, Shah Jehan, a place for all to enjoy with its plane trees, view of the river and hills covered with roses and meadows filled with the same kind of flowers that the emperor recorded in his commonplace book. I wonder how much it has changed.
Spring quickly turned into summer. The earth cracked as dust storms obliterated the streets and settled inches thick on the valleys and hills turning them from green to brown giving off heat like coal fires. The highlight of the summer was Independence Day which celebrated a victory over the English in the third Afghan war in 1919. For a week the city closed down while tribesmen piled into Kabul to enjoy the festivities and watch military parades and the fly past of the air force's three little planes.
For the winter months snow lay thick, covering the hills and blocking up the roads, replenished each morning by a fresh downfall. Few lorries could reach the capital and food and fuel got scarce. Fuel would be kerosene or bundles of sticks weighed on brass scales and sold half a dozen at a time.
The city grew quiet, the silence broken by regular slaps and plops as snow was shovelled from flat roofs onto the heads of passers-by in their heavy posteen coats. Telegraph poles came down and life came to a standstill, no buses or cars, no tongas or horse, no music shrieking out of tea houses. The only activity and noise came from the lane where blacksmiths hammered out metal stoves from piles of discarded kerosene cans. Life might be harsh in those pre-hippy pre-druggy pre-Russian pre-Taliban days, but there was an exuberance and vitality among Kabulis that made their city memorable. It is fitting that today as music returns to the bazaars, one of the songs composed by the exiled Farhad Darya being played over the loudspeakers and radios is Kabul Jaan, My Sweetheart Kabul.