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When Patricia Holton welcomed two young Arab boys into her home for the summer to oblige their father, a Gulf Sheikh for whom her husband acted as a consultant, she little realised how intertwined their lives would become. During her visits to Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates over the following years, she came to be regarded as the boys’ English mother, known affectionately as ‘Mrs Teacup’. She visited both sophisticated town houses and traditional desert camps, but above all she sat with the women, listening and observing. Gradually, transcending barriers of language and culture, she came to understand something of the background to the traditions which governed their lives, and the problems facing the young people in a society which was opening for the first time to Western influence. In her moving preface to this new edition, Patricia writes of her return to the Gulf after an absence of over ten years, of the adaptations to the 21st century that she sees all around her, and of the continuing love anfd understanding between two very different families that give her renewed hope for the future.