I boarded the north-bound train in vague preoccupation.
‘A bad thing! Do you really think it a bad thing? - why so? -’
‘I think they will neither of them do the other any good.’
‘You surprize me! Emma must do Harriet good:’
We came to Ismailiya and ran on along the length of the Suez Canal. We reached El Qantara on the border, where Arabs ran up and down the platform shouting ‘Eggiz, George! Eggiz an’ bread!’ ‘Money change your money!’
‘Oh! what a sweet house! - How very beautiful! - There are the yellow curtains that Miss Nash admires so much.’
On along the Mediterranean coast, on a railway which no longer exists; on to El Arish and Khan Yunis, all sand and white, chow-like, vagrant, ownerless pie-dogs, the kind that licked Lazarus’s sores, I expect.
‘Walk home! - you are prettily shod for walking home, I dare say. It will be bad enough for the horses.’
Gaza and points north. Never a stream to be seen along the narrow coastal strip. We came to Ramleh and Lydda, and here, for some forgotten reason, I got off the train and went up to Jerusalem by military lorry.
‘Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.’
At Pal. Base, in the King David Hotel (blown up and destroyed by the Irgun Zvai Leumi in 1947) I presented my credentials and was posted to a Petrol Depot sited near the ruins of Ashkelon, on the Philistian Plain, not far from Gaza.
‘What’s Gaza like?’ I asked the orderly room sergeant.
‘Well, it’s like all these wog towns, you know, sir: couple of shit-bins and a camel.’
I spent the night in Jerusalem before travelling back south.
‘Oh! but indeed I would much rather have it only in one. Then, if you please, you shall send it all to Mrs Goddard’s - I do not know - No, I think, Miss Woodhouse, I may just as well have it sent to Hartfield -’
No. 2 Petrol Depot was, in effect, nowhere. It was a camp of Nissen huts and petrol stacks on the bare plain. It had a major O.C., a captain and three subalterns, of whom I was one.
The plain truth is that for the next year and more I did, in effect, nothing. For all military purposes I might just as well not have been there. To this day I do not know with any clarity what was the precise function of No. 2 Petrol Depot. It certainly was not to maintain a regular supply of petrol to the advancing 8th Army, for at that rate it would have been humming, and it was not. There was a branch railway line leading away to the main line (the one I had travelled up), but only about four or five times during the year I spent at Al-Jiyah (as the place was called) were we required to load a train with petrol cans for the desert.
Our petrol all came by pipeline from Iraq via two mysterious staging posts known as Mafraq and M4. Most of this Iraqi petrol went direct to Haifa, but it kept us topped up as well. We stored bulk petrol in tanks, though not very much of it; and this went out to local recipient units in Bedford tanker lorries - a regular but small business. And then there were the storage stacks, which was what the depot was really all about. At intervals on the face of the open plain had been dug about twenty shallow pits, each about half to a quarter of an acre in size. These were roofed over with corrugated iron and stacked with the standard four-gallon containers known as ‘flimsies’, filled some with petrol and some with diesel. They were flimsy, too. They were almost of the consistency of foil: you could easily dent them with your hand. And of course they were prone to leak. Inspecting for and removing ‘leakers’ was a continual chore: and only marginally worthwhile, too, it always seemed to me, for of course you could spot only the ones on top or on the edges of the stacks. If you have a stack of cans numbering twenty by twenty by ten high, you can conveniently inspect and get at only 780 out of the 4,200 - a few more on the top, perhaps, if you’re conscientious enough to tilt the outer ones and look in. The raison d’être of ‘flimsies’ – which were universal throughout the Middle East Force – was that they were cheap and disposable. (Beaten flat, they came in handy for all sorts of jobs - surfacing, patching, roofing and the like.) Throughout the year 1943, however, they became more and more widely recognized as wasteful and more trouble than they were worth, because they were so frangible in handling and spilt as you poured from them: also, in stacks, the lower ones tended to buckle under the weight of those on top. As the 8th Army advanced westward, they captured plenty of Jerricans, the stout, lid-locking, lipped-for-easy-pouring, grooved-for-firmer-stacking cans of the Germans. Soon the British were making them in imitation, and by the time the Normandy campaign opened in 1944 they were universal. (But by then I was no longer in petrol.)
‘The stacks’ required us - the R.A.S.C. personnel - to have along with us no fewer than three very different sorts of people. The first were the white, dog-handling military police. There were about eight of these, lance-corporals mostly, and there were two to each dog - Alsatians. The dogs, I was told, were trained by some civilian genius in Haifa. They were impressive; instantly obedient, coats sleek and shining, fangs gleaming. They had been trained to detest and try to seize any Arab who might come near. It was a sight to see one, with its masters, passing a group of home-going Arabs. It would become aggressive; bark, growl and slaver, up on its back paws, straining at the leash to get at them. On the other side of the road the Arabs would cower, sometimes actually crying out with fear, imploring and cringing in their terror. At night, at irregular hours, the dogs would make rounds of the stacks, and also of the spare tyre and tool store. They had names like Tex and Grab and Punch and Jock.
But these were not enough to keep the top brass at Pal. Base sleeping quietly in their beds at night. We also had a company - about 150 strong - of East African Pioneers, whose job was to stand sentry on the stacks by day and night. They had English officers: a gentle, rather ineffective but pleasant major, very much a civilian in uniform, who once showed me a photograph of a pretty, dark-haired girl who he said was a prostitute of his acquaintance in Alexandria. If I fancied he would give me her telephone number. Captain Rawlings, their 2 i/c, I came to like well. He was devoted to his men, obviously enjoyed his job and was becoming fluent in Swahili under the tuition of his interpreter, Corporal K’booy. (The black soldiers spoke no English and came from several different tribes, each with its own lingo. Swahili was their lingua franca.)
These East Africans, simple, ingenuous people straight from their villages, were mad keen on soldiering. Spit and polish was the breath of life to them; so was drill. They were proud to be serving Kingi Georgie. As you went among the stacks, they would give you a butt salute like a pistol shot, which could be heard four hundred yards away. Their audibility was not confined to butt salutes, either. It was an odd phenomenon. At night, widely dispersed among the solitudes of the stacks, they could converse with one another without raising their voices over considerable distances. Their voices were quiet, unexcited, resonant and very deep, with plenty of vowels, and for some reason carried further than any European’s: quite as far as the next sentry. I became used to the sound, low and intermittent; it came to form, for me, an integral part of the plain by night.
Thirdly, there were the Arab labourers. Their job was, quite simply, humping. They humped cans of petrol and diesel and drums of oil. It was astonishing how much humping there was to do, considering that we were not an operative depot committed to 8th Army’s desert campaign. There must have been something like six or seven hundred labourers all told, for I know it took me three hours to pay them their poor little weekly pittances; sweltering, with a nasty headache, under the corrugated-iron roof of an open-fronted shack, while they waited outside, squatting in the hot sun.
They were surely among the poorest men in the world. They had bare feet and awful teeth. They wore dirty head-turbans and filthy, ragged garments soaked in petrol, oil and diesel. Diesel is caustic, and I have more than once seen an Arab labourer’s back raw with diesel burns. No doubt they had some sort of better clothing at home, but they had no clean water or regular means of washing. They smelt more of diesel and petrol than of their own sweat and dirt. A large number always had suppurating, yellow-oozing eyes; not one of them, under medical inspection, would have been passed fit by European standards. They were not idle, for they worked in gangs of about twenty, each gang under a leader or rais, who was responsible for them. (I never learned how an Arab became a rais: they were usually men, to all appearances, of slightly better social standing, and cleaner, since they themselves did not labour, but only organized and ‘encouraged’.) At the top was the ‘boss rais’, a young Arab of about twenty-five, dressed in clean khaki shirt and shorts and able to speak English pretty fluently. His name was Ahmed Mohammed Mudhorn, but he was universally known as ‘Aussie’, having once been interpreter to an Australian unit temporarily in the locality. Aussie had a short way with protesters or complainants. He would put his hands on his hips, push his curly head forward and bellow, asking unanswerable questions, calling pejorative names and pouring out invective until the wretched victim, usually old enough to be his father, was dazed into acquiescence.
By gum!, though, those half-starved, poverty-stricken Arabs could work; and, amazingly, with a will. I have never forgotten one evening during the summer of 1943, when there was a train to be loaded which had to go up the desert that night. For sweltering hours they humped and loaded, while the red sun slowly sank towards the unseen Mediterranean and little nocturnal creatures, mice, crickets and the like, emerged, cautiously and at a distance, for the night’s activities. Corporal Goldie, a cheerful young Cockney, was in charge, standing tall on a rail truck, pointing here and there and commanding the raises in soldiers’ Arabic. ‘Ta’al hinnah’, (come here) ‘ ijjri’, (run) ‘staimah shwire’ (wait a bit) and so on. At last, in near darkness, the exhausting job was finished and the train driver began to get up steam. Then a funny thing happened. Spontaneously, the Arabs began to dance. Some plucked flowers and put them between their teeth, joining hands, singing and capering. El zarbed, the officer, (me) was drawn in and found himself hop, skip and jumping, taking each rais by the hand and twirling round. (It was not unlike some sort of English country dance, really: take hands, round and back, with everybody clapping and stamping.) The train steamed slowly out to cheering and cries of delight, pelted with flowers. It didn’t matter, then, who was the white officer or who was the exhausted, impoverished Arab labourer. We just all knew we’d loaded the damned train and, most movingly, it stirred these simple men to genuine delight and self-congratulation.
They were all thieves, of course. Who’d blame them? But it is odd, and you never quite get used to it, to live in a society where literally everything, however worthless, is liable to be stolen. Once, we made a bit of a rifle range, out on the plain. All it had in the way of artifacts were some rough target-frames (flimsies again) mounted on sticks. They were stolen. For what, I wonder? In my billet, on the shelf, I had a Hohner chromatic mouth-organ in its box. The mouth-organ went, but the box was left as it was, so that I should be less likely to notice the theft at once and start enquiries. Also on that shelf was my army ‘emergency ration’. These were standard issue: everyone had one. They consisted of a block of horribly unpalatable chocolate mixed with meat extract, in a tin fastened at the side with a kind of clip. They were deliberately made unpalatable so that no one would want to eat one unless he were in extremis. Well, my emergency ration was removed from the tin and the empty tin left unsullied and unblemished: only when (and if) you picked it up did you realize that it was empty. I recall, too, having to sit on a court of enquiry into the theft - the brilliant theft - of a dozen heavy lorry tyres from a windowless, padlocked hut surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. No one man could have carried one of those tyres alone; that’s how heavy they were; and the wire wasn’t even cut.
You might have thought that these hungry, diseased, begrimed, unwashed men could hardly be either religious or respectable: you would be wrong. It was impressive to see them turn with dignity towards Mecca and pray, standing upright with folded arms and intermittently prostrating themselves, and then kneeling with foreheads to the ground for a few seconds before rising again. They fasted - fasted! - too, if you can believe it. During Ramadan - a period of a lunar month - they ate and drank nothing from sunrise till sunset, and did a full day’s work into the bargain, though plainly the sides of nature could hardly bear it. Incidentally, they also refrained from sex during that whole month. They were, if you like, devout. Talk to one, and you soon found yourself respecting him as man to man. Our soldiers treated them, as a matter of course, with insults and contempt, frequently calling them ‘wog bastards’ and the like to their faces. I used to do my best to stop this, but the soldiers’ dislike, contempt and lack of any least desire to understand Arabs made it impossible.
The camp was always open to raids by pie-ards, the feral dogs of the plain. (No Arab will touch a dog, let alone keep one.) They are ‘unclean’; wild scavengers, wily, wary and vigilant. They would come to the swill-bins by night, in packs of as many as ten or twelve. They could knock a bin over and get the lid off, no matter what we had done to make it impossible. My mental picture of a pie-ard, though they came all sorts, is of a big, white, fluffy animal rather like a chow. By day they usually came singly, day being much more dangerous for them. I took to shooting them with an ordinary Lee-Enfield rifle loaded with .303: I kept it in my office. Sooner or later an Arab would come dashing in with a cry of ‘Fe kelp, sidi, fe kelp!’ (‘There’s a dog, sir!’) and I would grab the rifle and sally forth. All too often the cunning dog would make off in time, slinking quickly round a Nissen hut or sagaciously putting some human beings between me and itself. But I wasn’t a bad shot and I got quite a few. I aimed at the head, because if you hit it that killed them dead. You couldn’t do anything with them, of course. You left them for the kites, which soon closed in. Pie-ards, however, continued to be a great nuisance in the camp on the unfenceable plain, upsetting swill-bins and even stealing the Arabs’ sorry little mid-day bites from wherever they had left them.
The insects were, as they say, something else. There were malarial mosquitoes, as there were everywhere in the Middle East. We all slept under mosquito nets and took mepacrine daily. But much more frightening were the scorpions. I understand now that no species of scorpion is actually lethal, but nevertheless the sting is dreadful. These particular scorpions were not very big, some two-and-a-half inches long, and coloured grey-yellow like the sand. The great fear was that you might inadvertently put your hand or foot on one while, for example, rummaging along a shelf or getting into bed. They liked a cranny among books or papers, and they liked blankets. All beds’ legs stood in individual pots of paraffin (made out of flimsies). Nevertheless, one night when getting into bed Driver Hills, a decent lad from Harpenden, felt a scorpion move near his foot. He whipped his leg out on the instant and it struck him only glancingly. He was in hospital for a week.
The akrebah were almost worse. They are the local centipedes. In colour they are dark red, sort of maroon. They are long - fully six inches - and, with the legs, nearly an inch broad. They have a forked tail which is a sting. Moreover, each foot (and there are many) is a sting in itself. If you find one on you and strike at it or brush it, it immediately drives each foot into you. They have to be cut out in hospital, and you are ill. They, like the scorpions, also dislike cleanliness and paraffin. All the floors were cleaned often with solutions of paraffin: to me the smell is the smell not only of Horris Wood but also of No. 2 Petrol Depot. What akrebah do is get up into the roof. All the roofs of the Nissen huts were of pitched corrugated iron. During the wet season the rain pounded and drummed on them all day and night. Every now and then an akrebah, making its way upside-down across the smooth corrugated iron, would lose its footing and fall. They could easily fall on a human beneath, and would then immediately dig in with their feet. I never saw it happen, but I’ve seen some near misses; frightening. They were very hard to kill. I once stamped one flat and threw it out of the door of my billet. In the morning it was still wriggling. After that I always used to cut them into pieces with a pair of scissors.
The flies were indistinguishable in appearance from our houseflies in England: but they bit. They would alight on your stockinged leg (we all wore shorts, of course) and you couldn’t feel them. A moment or two later you felt the ‘bite’, which was a little like that of an English horsefly, and went on irritating in a similar manner.
The hornets were magnificent creatures, like huge wasps. One morning I was riding back from Gaza on a motor-cycle when I suddenly felt a terrific sting at the interior top of my right thigh. I swerved but didn’t stop. I had got back to camp and was having a drink in the mess, sitting in a chair, when the hornet came crawling out of my shorts onto my knee: having stung once, however, it didn’t sting again. Perhaps it wasn’t used to the victim not dying.
The praying mantises still please me in memory. They were big - about four inches long - and green or brown in colour. I believe they could change colour to fit their surroundings. They couldn’t hurt you, and they weren’t afraid of you. If you sat one on the table it would remain still: but then, if you moved your finger from side to side in front of it, it would turn its head back and forth, watching it with its big eyes. They preyed all right: they preyed on moths. The moths were big, too, but I don’t know what kind. Along the front of the verandah of the officers’ mess Nissen hut was a trellis, up which grew flourishing, thick ipomea (morning glory). The mantises used to crouch just under the bell-flowers. When a moth, at evening, came to a flower, the mantis would grab it with its two forelegs, holding onto the foliage with its four others. The moth would flutter and struggle. I have seen yards of the creeper shaking in commotion as a battle was fought out. Sometimes the moth got away, but not as a rule.
One thing I have not forgotten is the orange grove near my billet. There are - or used to be — a great many of these groves in southern Palestine, the hinterland of Jaffa (Joppa), Tel-Aviv. In plan they were square, the plain offering no features in its flat expanse to dictate otherwise; and I suppose two acres or so in extent. Orange trees are very beautiful. They are about as big as small apple trees - or these ones were, anyway - and symmetrical, with glossy, dark-green foliage, very thick. They all seemed exactly the same size and shape, so that the grove had a formal, slightly unreal quality, as though some giant’s child had set out rows of beautiful toys from a box. In May, when they bloomed - greenish-white, waxy and multitudinous - the scent was more poignant and beautiful than words can describe. It was heavy and sweet, yet at the same time as fresh as running water. You never became tired of it. It is the most beautiful smell I know; more beautiful than frangipani, even. All the way down to Gaza stood these groves, and the spring air was laden with scent. I wonder, are they still there, nearly fifty years later? They must have known many vicissitudes during that time.
In Gaza one day, needing a leather belt, I bought a very ordinary, broad one, with a plain brass buckle, in an open-fronted, penthouse-flapped Arab shop. I hadn’t time to bargain.
‘K’dish?’ I asked the elderly Arab squatting on the stone floor.
I can see him now, looking up at me with a beady eye, not unfriendly; but here was a white zarbed, and they didn’t happen along every day.
‘Sabatash,’ (seventeen), he said softly, drawing out the syllables.
I gave it to him. Seventeen piastres were the equivalent of 3s. 6½d. in those days. (That would convert at 17p.) I still have the belt, so it hasn’t proved bad value.
During the summer there were almost daily trips for the soldiers to swim in the sea, about two miles away. The beach and the sea were as featureless as the plain, the level sand shelving evenly down into the shallow water for as far as could be seen in each direction. There was a fair roll of surf, though, with quite an undertow as it slid back: you were helpless in it for the few seconds during which it dragged you. As a fairly experienced swimmer, knowing what I was doing, I used to enjoy this; but there was always the possibility of someone drawing in a lungful. The rule was that every swimming party had to be in the charge of an officer, and take with them a rope and a whistle. One afternoon our party had stopped off en route to pick up some other ranks from, a neighbouring unit. I was sitting in the cab with the driver. They came out and jumped into the back of the lorry, and the following dialogue took place between their senior N.C.O. and ours.
‘All set, then, Bill? Got the rope, ’ave yer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got the whistle?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got the f—g officer?’
‘Yeah, ’e’s in the front.’
‘O.K., let’s go.’
While we were coming back from this trip, an unusual and rather bizarre little incident took place. We were coming through Majdal, the local village, when our lorry was brought to a halt by a commotion in the road in front. A male donkey, led on a rope by its Arab owner, had come to a halt more or less opposite a female being led the other way by an old, black-clad woman. The donkey refused to budge for any amount of beating. While Driver Porritt blew his horn and revved his engine impatiently, it became - and this was remarkable - a dangerous, savage animal in heat. It actually seemed to grow in size, frothing at the mouth and lashing out with its hooves. It shed its burden, kicked its owner into the ditch, stick and all, and rushed across the road, barging the shrieking old woman out of the way. The soldiers began cheering and giving a running commentary. The female was acquiescent, merely breathing heavily, hung-down muzzle drooling into the dust. With bared teeth, raging and frenzied, the donkey did what it wanted, taking not the least notice of the blows raining on it from the old woman’s stick as well as its owner’s. It didn’t take very long. When it had finished, it shrank and turned back into an ordinary, patient, ill-used little Arab donkey standing resignedly on the sand, while its owner whacked it a bit more for good measure. Yet I thought, as we drove on, that I detected a certain look of ‘Well, try and take that away, blast you!’
Most nights the sodden, be-winged major O.C. (for he had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War) and the other officers would set off for the distant open-air cinema, to see Abbott and Costello, or Alice Faye, while I contentedly sat at home as orderly officer. In Tel-Aviv I had been able to obtain all the other Jane Austens (except Persuasion). The night was quiet as few nights are today: no traffic, no wirelesses; only the light breeze and occasionally the low voice of an African sentry far out on the stacks.
Sometimes, having told the mess waiter more or less where I would be if anything happened, I would walk through the Nissen-hutted camp and out into the vast, unvarying plain. It was easy to stroll gently onwards, for the ground was as flat as can be imagined; never an undulation, never a bank, not even an occasional hollow. Away and away it stretched, eighty miles to Beer-Sheba, where I had never been. Could it, perhaps — legendary Beer-Sheba - be three shit-bins and two camels? It was refreshing to be in such solitude, in the scented night; but it was easy to feel homesick, too, alone under that great, unbroken hemisphere of sky. Yet precisely there lay the consolation - the stars. They were, over most of the sky at any rate, the same stars as at home, and I would look for Orion and Sirius, Leo and Gemini, Perseus and what Thomas Hardy calls ‘the great, gloomy square of Pegasus’. It reminded me of Robert Graves’s poem ‘Are you awake, Gemelli?’, about the soldier looking at the stars: except that that’s so cold, and this was warm enough to make you sweat, even standing still among the dry, crackling haulms (for the plain had little or no grass, only tough, foot-high stalks of flowering scrub).
Now and then I managed to go to Jerusalem, where I had made Arab friends. It was a beautiful city, quiet and jasmine-scented at night; and in the morning you would wake to hear from the street outside the approaching, stylized cry of the news-vendor. ‘Fal-as-teen Po-o-ost! Fal-as-teen Po-o-ost!’ I had a nice, kind-of girlfriend. I say ‘kind-of’ because our meetings were inevitably infrequent and nothing ever passed between us but a kiss. Her name was Georgette Khouri (‘Khouri’, I rather think, means ‘tailor’ — Taylor) and her father, who was dead, had been a don at Jerusalem University. I continued writing to her for about four years.
On Christmas Eve, 1942, I went out to Bethlehem, all empty; and it snowed! (I assure you it did.)
During May 1943, a private soldier called Ron Coomber and I made an expedition to Petra by way of Amman and Ma’an. In those days, of course, Petra was far, far away and utterly desolate. We saw what Burckhardt, the ‘modern’ discoverer, must have seen in 1812 - the silent, shard-strewn valley, the rose-red, maroon and sand-yellow carved façades, the split, pagoda-centred pediments, the flowering oleanders (though poisonous, they made good mattresses), the peacock-blue lizards on the red rock, the few scrawny Bedouin smoking camel-dung all night beside their glowing, camel-dung fire. (They seemed never to sleep.) There is a ruined Crusader castle high up on one of the hills. I wonder how the garrison used to feel in the thirteenth century?
All through this year I kept up my attempts to join Airborne Forces. It was fruitless: nobody wanted to know. I very much doubt whether my applications ever got beyond Pal. Base.
Meanwhile, Muriel Shaw (who, not hearing from me, had written to my father in England for my address) had come up from South Africa to take up a mysterious job in Cairo. We corresponded regularly and once she came to Jerusalem on leave, with her brother, who was also stationed in Egypt - at Heliopolis. So at last I met G. D. Shaw, a real, live, published Faber poet. I remember giving a dinner party, with the Shaws, some Arab friends and what wine the house could manage - several bottles of sparkling red burgundy. The visit was all too short; but it was reassuring, back on duty on the great Gromboolian plain, to know that at any rate as good a friend as Muriel was in Cairo.
All through 1943 the 8th Army continued their victorious advance: through Libya, through Tunisia; into Sicily, into Italy. And now British units were being returned to England for the Second Front. Palestine was emptying. We had a new O.C., a vain, coarse but good-natured fellow called Betton (not his name), who did no harm as long as you flattered him.
We received our orders to leave Al-Jiyah and entrain for Egypt. It so happened that Major Betton had to go into hospital for some sort of treatment; he would be rejoining us before embarkation for England. (The Med. was clear now, of course, and we would be sailing home direct, via Gibraltar.) With typical egocentricity and vulgarity, he devised a formal ‘handing over command’ parade (there isn’t one prescribed) in which he, of course, played the leading role. It was embarrassing: Salute: salute. Loud shout: ‘Captain MacLeod, I hand over the Unit - to YOU!’ Salute: salute. Mac. hadn’t been briefed on what he was supposed to do now, so he simply marched the blokes off. I expect it might have been past Betton at the salute, only he hadn’t thought of that.
Back on the railway; through Gaza, past Rafah, out of Palestine and into Egypt. My black cat, Ramadan, travelled with us. He was a great favourite with everybody and I was sorry to think that I should have to leave him in Egypt. In the event, Muriel ‘placed’ him with the Yacht Club at Gezira and I learned later that, as cats do, he had settled in quite happily and forgotten all about No. 2 Petrol Depot.
It was at the Base Depot in Egypt that I at last had some good luck mixed with the bad luck about my Airborne efforts. Army-wise, it makes a rather quaint little story. The Base Depot was under the command of a certain Colonel Sinclair, a white-moustached, Great War-medalled veteran who looked very like C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers. You knew exactly where you were with him: he was a soldier (like Marian Hayter’s father: all these have I observed from my youth up). I tried my airborne spiel on Colonel Sinclair, stressing the ‘young officer fretting for action’ stuff. It just so happened that a day or two later, on his rounds of the camp, the Colonel dropped in on an Army Bureau of Current Affairs session (in plain English, a talk with the men about the news), which I was taking. I gave him the old ‘Party - party ‘shun!’ Smart salute. ‘No. 2 Petrol Depot, sir. A.B.C.A. session on Japan’s role in the war!’ ‘Right; carry on, Mr Adams, please,’ replied the Colonel, and stayed for the rest of the period, at the close of which he said a few complimentary words. He was clearly on my side.
The next day I managed to get a recreational day pass into Cairo. Once there, I telephoned Muriel and took her out to lunch. Over the coffee, I told her about Colonel Sinclair and my recent efforts.
Muriel looked very carefully all round and then, in effect, behind the curtains and under the carpet. Then she said ‘Richard, are you quite sure about this?’ I assured her that I was, and asked her why she asked.
‘Because that’s what we do.’
‘Who? Do what?’
Muriel came clean. Since her arrival in Egypt she had been a member of a high security organization. What they did was to train volunteers for liaison with the Resistance and for sabotage in Yugoslavia, including, of course, parachute training. Then they dropped them and kept in touch with them by radio.
‘But where do you come into it?’ I asked.
‘I do the high-grade cypher: teach it to the trainee agents and then keep in touch with them after they’ve gone off. Until they no longer come up on the wireless, that is. That’s why I asked whether you really wanted to do it.’
‘I still want to; although of course I realize that if you’re taken prisoner you get shot.’
‘’Bit more to it than that. They - talk to you first.’
I replied that the whole idea was very frightening, but nevertheless I’d still be glad of her help. Actually, this disclosure of Muriel’s had taken me unprepared. Hitherto, I had always thought in terms of joining Airborne Forces proper - the red berets. This sabotage cloak-and-dagger stuff I’d never contemplated. Yet here was the opportunity, and I felt I ought not, after all my posturing, to say ‘Well, thanks very much, but I don’t think I quite meant that.’
I walked back with Muriel to her place of work and found myself talking to one Captain Proudfoot. (That was not his name.) I explained my situation.
‘It’s a pity your unit’s on the point of embarkation,’ he said at length. ‘But never mind: I think I may be able to keep you in the Middle East a little longer. Leave it with me.’
Next morning, back in camp, I received a summons to the adjutant: not our adjutant — the Base Depot adjutant. I went into his office, stood to attention, saluted and remained at attention. At the other end of the room sat Colonel Sinclair, pretending to be absorbed in some papers.
‘You went to Cairo yesterday?’ began the adjutant.
‘Yes, sir. I had a day pass.’
‘But while you were there you went to see - well, you saw someone called Captain Proudfoot, didn’t you? Who gave you authority to do that?’
I drew breath. Ho hum.
‘Well, sir, may I explain the circumstances?’
‘Yes, do,’ he replied, in the tone of someone who would be glad enough to have them explained.
I told him the tale, conscious of Colonel Sinclair silently emanating ‘not-disapproval’.
‘Yes, well,’ said the adjutant finally, ‘that’s the worst, of course, of doing things unofficially.’
‘I didn’t plan it, sir: I simply took the opportunity.’
I can’t remember the rest, but apart from anything else, of course, the adjutant was in the position of dealing with someone who was seeking - well, excitement - while he himself was not. (No doubt he had a wife and children: I entirely applaud him.) I emerged with testicles intact.
Later, like Falstaff - or rather, not like Falstaff - I was sent for soon, at night. Colonel Sinclair said he was very sorry that they couldn’t help me. They had tried. No way but I must go back with my unit. But he would write a letter for me to take with me.
Such a letter! It was everything that such a letter can be: gentlemanly, respectful (never know who it might get to), ‘in my opinion’, ‘in my experience’ (very wide, implied), warm, avuncular: implied reference to the Prime Minister’s policy of encouraging people who wanted to pursue the war actively. ‘Have observed on duty and talked to this young officer’, etc., etc. ‘I reckon you’ve cooked your goose all right,’ said Captain MacLeod, with whom I’d always got on well.
The voyage home was uneventful. All I can really remember about it is that over Christmas - for we had Christmas 1943 at sea - I sang tenor in the drummed-up carol choir. To this day I can never hear what Laurie Lee calls ‘Wild Shepherds’ without remembering that Christmas.
We disembarked in England and were sent to another depot at Bridgend in south Wales. All I can remember about Bridgend is a church with an eighteenth-century memorial stone to a blacksmith, and an epitaph verse (by the then Vicar, perhaps?) which labours the farrier metaphor in memorable style. ‘My iron is cold, my bellows is (sic) decayed -’ Blacksmiths are, somehow or other, endearing people. ‘Felix Randal’ is one of my favourite poems, and a lot of other people’s too, I suspect.
A day or two after we got to Bridgend, Captain MacLeod strolled into my billet. ‘There’s a posting in for you, to C.R.A.S.C., 1st Airborne Division. You leave us tomorrow, for Lincolnshire.’