Have you ever met a Gulf brat? They are the British expatriates in the more liberal Arab nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. They are tanned, overdressed and speak in a strange accent which is equal parts Queen’s English and transatlantic twang. This tribe of shrieking, spoilt children is the product of an upbringing of housemaids, obscene expense accounts and an uneasy sense of where they come from. I was one of them.

In 1993 my family left Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, in order to begin a new life in a then obscure desert state called Dubai. With its smattering of expensive hotels and exclusive golf and sailing clubs, Dubai had ideas of grandeur which seemed laughable, stretching as they did beyond the miles of empty desert which used to surround my primary school. My father had taken a job as a Risk Consultant for a company contracted to Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC). Back then, oil was Dubai’s primary source of national income. There were many Western companies only too happy to cash in on the relative inexperience of the Royal Family in business matters, as the United Arab Emirates only became a unified nation, rather than a colonial outpost, in 1971.

At the age of five, I was sent to one of the two British primary schools that existed at the time. Requirements included a full British or Commonwealth passport, so my classmates of around 15 children consisted of row upon row of white, blonde, blue-eyed, middle-class offspring of the upper tiers of international consultancy and accounting firms. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone lived in one of three neighbourhoods: Jumeirah, Umm Suqeim or Jebel Ali. We learnt the British curriculum. We celebrated Christmas with a decorated tree and a turkey. On the weekends we went to the Emirates golf club, the one all the other Brits went to, and had tennis lessons while our parents played on the intensively irrigated and perfectly green fairways.

There were a couple of notable exceptions to the Commonwealth rule in my primary school. There were two princesses from the Maktoum family, Dubai’s Royal Family, in my year: Fatima and Mariam. Fatima once told me she had a zoo in her house. I told her she was a liar and that it was “not very nice” to lie. The truth is, the poor girl did have a zoo in her house. When I visited Dubai a couple of years ago, we drove past twin skyscrapers with an ‘M’ on top of both the beautiful steel and glass structures. My companion pointed them out to me, “Mariam Towers. Remember her? They were a present for her 16th birthday.”
There was always an inevitable feel of a completely alien culture to Dubai, which the expats indulged and despaired of in equal measure. No bacon sandwiches in your hotel for breakfast, for example; the call to prayer from loudspeakers across the city five times a day, every day; no consumption of food or drink in public whatsoever for the entire month of Ramadan. Christmas came every year, but however many baubles you put up, you could escape the fact that it was 25C outside (those chilly winter months) and that snow is about as likely as a decent cup of tea.

However, the standard of living is so high that most people are understandably eager to set aside minor annoyances and get on with living like royalty. In Dubai, you will pay no taxes. It rained three times in the eight years I lived there. The beaches are stunning, and driving over cliff-like sand dunes in a 4×4 is simultaneously the most terrifying and exhilarating memory of my experience in the desert. For my parents, it was about parties, parties, parties. If you’ve got a housemaid at home, why not go out four or five nights a week? Galas, horse races, rugby matches, hotel openings; Dubai’s social scene has grown out of the need for networking. It is capitalism in its most naked form.

That same naked capitalism is also very apparent in Dubai in the form of the rigidly controlled class system, the dark underbelly of the seemingly miraculous way in which skyscrapers shoot up in two months. If you get up at around 6 a.m. in Dubai, when the sun swells over the horizon from Sharjah and cars begin to pile up on the Al Wasl road, you will see hundreds of trucks, half covered by tarpaulin, with 20 pairs of eyes staring at you from two benches in the back section of the vehicle, wrapped in ragged scarves and tattered makeshift uniforms. These are the workers who have built Dubai from scratch, whose pitiful wages have caused controversy in a country where five star hotels are the norm, where everyone is so pathetically ostentatious about their money. My mother would frequently hear knocks at the door and open it to find a thin, desperate-looking man saying “water, water” over and over. We would always oblige. Being thirsty in the midday heat while toiling away on a yet another luxury apartment complex, forbidden to take regular breaks, was the reality of life for these men. The Indian subcontinent provides most of the labour for Dubai’s construction projects, and similar patterns of nationality apply to every sector of work. The people who work in retail are Filipino, the Europeans are in charge of the finance/consultancy sector and the Americans deal with most of the natural resources, buying up oil and getting involved in commercial shipping.

I was lucky to attend a secondary school, Dubai College (DC), which was run on a more international basis than my primary school. In my year there were French, Dutch, Iranian, Lebanese, Serbian, Pakistani, South African, Japanese and Malaysian pupils. This cosmopolitan mix was in great contrast to my school in Britain, where the five or so girls from ethnic minorities were pulled out of classes every year to go on the front of the admissions brochure. Racism was simply unheard of. It is difficult to be racist if there are equal amounts of people from all around the world in your class, and I have never been in such a culturally rich and tolerant environment since.

We were taught compulsory Arabic from the age of nine, and by the time I was thirteen I could have sung the call to prayer to you, which we recited in front of the class. In this country, that would be massively controversial, but you always felt like a guest rather than a citizen in Dubai. That could have been something to do with the extremely strict visa system, the fact that until 2002 you couldn’t buy property unless you were an Arab national, and the lack of any civil liberties whatsoever. The latter point sounds very sinister, but because Dubai is not ruled by a tyrant, the results, at least for us, were amusing more than anything. The English language newspaper in Dubai, the relentlessly cheery Gulf News, only ever had one story on the front page: whoever Sheikh Mohammed had had a lunch and a ‘state meeting’ with the day previously. There would be a picture of his Highness and his guest shaking hands, and the ‘story’ underneath would be mostly taken up by their full names and title, for example the last ruler was always cited as Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai. We all just called him Sheikh Mo. Furthermore, because Dubai is a liberal Muslim country, magazines like FHM were still for sale, but all the topless photos were scribbled out, by hand, in permanent marker before they hit the shelves. Equally, films containing sex or sexual references were cut, so no car scene in Titanic, which was rated a G (general, British equivalent of U) in Dubai. This half-hearted acceptance of Western values brought the British people I knew closer together, forever reminding you of how different a certain situation would be at home.

The enduring memory of my time in Dubai, especially of fellow Britons, is generally how happy everyone was. The look of the faces of most people was one of slightly delirious disbelief at their massive good luck. When people talked of home, it was usually negative. Most spent their summers in Britain, and that was when you realised you were spoilt. I remember my sister making an offhand comment: “Look how small the houses are,” as we touched down in Manchester one July, and my mother going ballistic, ranting about how we had been ruined by people pandering to us all the time, and how snobby we all were. I think she was paranoid, and I feel incredibly lucky to have lived with such a massive array of people at so young an age.