Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  Even at a simple shilling a head, it took a long time for the queue to file past my till and install themselves in the tightly packed rows of seats. I collected almost fifty pounds. By the time I had checked it, done my bookkeeping and accommodated a few latecomers, the film was well under way. I sat at the back and enjoyed the antics of Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness and the parrot that kept time on its perch to the rhythms of Boccherini’s string quintet.

  There were roars of laughter, a collective gasp when the railway signal fell on Guinness to conclude his grand guignole performance, applause when the innocent old lady survived and prospered. A thousand troops in an army cinema were transported back to urban Britain, enjoying the best and most eccentric of their culture. For a couple of hours, they were plucked clear of this strange environment, where danger was rare and for most of the time exaggerated, but where those who died did so swiftly and with little chance to defend themselves.

  I told my companions at breakfast the next morning how good the film was. I told them to grab the opportunity to see it on one of the five nights that were still available to them. Pete Sykes, a staff sergeant in the Pay Corps, said, ‘I’m on the cinema duty rota for tonight. Did you have any problems?’

  ‘Not really. It was very busy and I’m sure you’ll have a full house again tonight. If you can grab a corporal to help you, get him to marshal the queue and take the shillings, whilst you keep count of the money. Cash up as quickly as you can and then enjoy the film is my advice. You’ll find it’s excellent.’

  Pete was a quiet, studious man who knew a lot about films. He talked about Will Hay in the thirties and other post-war Ealing comedies. The Lavender Hill Mob was his favourite. I wished I’d met him earlier. He liked books and knew far more about classical music than I did. He was much older than me, but he had some of the same enthusiasms. He confided when we were left alone at the table that he was getting tired of watching his step in the sergeants’ mess. He didn’t like keeping quiet when others were voicing right-wing opinions with which he didn’t agree.

  Like several others in the mess, Sykes had come here from Egypt when the British vacated the country under the original, pre-Nasser agreement. He was spending the last few months of his twenty-two years of service in Cyprus. He would be home and demobbed within a few weeks. He had a wife and two sons waiting for him in Norwich and a job lined up. He was thoroughly looking forward to the rest of his life.

  On Tuesday night, I ate in the mess and was then drawn into a four-hand at crib with three of the most senior members of the mess. These included a cheerful cook-sergeant who probably had a low IQ but who reckoned his crib points faster than anyone I had ever met. ‘Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, fifteen-eight, three for a run and one for his knob.’ The words rapped out like machine-gun fire and his marker leapt down the board. These three had played crib in many parts of the former British Empire. In a vast variety of tedious settings, a pack of cards and a crib board had been portable and rewarding.

  Once again I felt a surge of respect for these men who had seen things I would never see and survived things I hoped I would never have to endure. They were quietly in awe of my learning, pleased and a little flattered that I had made up a four at crib with them. I was grateful to Joy’s quiet but sharply intelligent dad, who had learned crib during the First World War and forty years later played it far into the night with me. I wouldn’t have been able to sit down with these three experienced men without those hours in a quiet suburban house.

  The bar was crowded around us and there was a lively buzz of conversational noise. But when the explosion came, it was loud enough to stop all noise and still all conversations.

  ‘That was big!’ said the cook-sergeant. His eyes were wide with alarm and his crib instantly forgotten.

  ‘The cinema?’ This came from an artillery sergeant who was standing at the bar.

  That thought chilled all of us. The cinema was the place where people were massed together, where a terrorist bomb might do most harm. We moved silently but en masse into the small reception area beside the entry doors of the mess. There were procedures to be observed: you didn’t rush heedless into the night. Thirty or forty senior NCOs would be an excellent target for an ambush. Those anonymous forces in the darkness outside were the enemy now: whatever the politicians said about not being at war, this was a war situation. You were inviting trouble if you did not recognise that.

  We had two CSMs from different units among our number, and the rest of us deferred automatically to them. Arms appeared mysteriously. I carried nothing, but there were Sten guns and pistols around me as we moved through the doors and into the night. Shoot first and ask questions later if you’re attacked: that was the stark message from our leaders.

  There were no men waiting in hiding to ambush us.

  We moved cautiously in what became unofficial ranks towards the cinema, deferring to the army vehicles, which seemed to be screaming in from all directions. It took us some time to cover those five hundred yards.

  The lights of the ambulances winked blue and ominous beside the cinema entrance. There was already a rough canvas screen in front of it, behind which the headlights of a truck were full on and directed at the stricken building. The outer wall and the small entrance doors had disappeared completely. There was acrid smoke, a stink of burnt bricks and a choking of dust. There was also a sickly sweet scent, which was new to me but familiar to some around me: the smell of blood and of shattered flesh.

  It was only now that I realised I had been anticipating the sort of bomb I had ignored on the night of my arrival here. The small explosion that had destroyed a little property and earned me my undeserved reputation for insouciance. There had been no loss of life then, nor any real threat of it.

  This outrage was quite different. It had been designed to kill people, and it had succeeded.

  The medics were here and they were organised. They had been briefed for an attack like this and their response was swift and efficient. The wounded were their priority, not the dead. The dead were beyond help and would wait as long as was necessary. You could still help the wounded. Our grim-faced and willing party from the sergeants’ mess was allowed to give limited help, but our role was largely that of stretcher-bearers.

  The explosion had been at the back of the hall and the casualties were confined to the last four rows. But the place had been filled to capacity and these rows had been as full as all the ones in front of them. The place had been cleared already of the shocked and deafened survivors who were uninjured. The few women in the audience had been further forward. The RAMC corporal beside me was pretty certain that there were no female casualties. That was a blessing, and the only one available to us.

  I had never seen death before at close quarters and I was not prepared for it. Nothing can prepare you for violent and senseless death except experience of it. Many of those around me had that experience. No doubt they were shaken, but they acted as though this was a routine occurrence. I wanted to be like them: it was the best way of helping those in trouble. But the calm they seemed to feel would not come to me. My first senseless, selfish concern was whether I would vomit and disgrace myself. I did not do that and within a few minutes, physical action brought me a kind of relief.

  There were sheets over prone figures at the back of the hall. I found a man whose leg was shattered and turned away as the medics treated it. Then someone helped me to lift the maimed man on to a stretcher and carry him to the ambulance. I didn’t realise until I looked up that my companion was Percy Bishop; I had not even known he was present until then. We worked as a partnership here as we had done in the snooker room, helping a series of shaken and lightly wounded men to limp from the room with arms round our shoulders. The huge difference in our heights did not seem to matter: we used it to cope with whatever wounds the men were carrying.

  Percy was a man never short of a word or a joke. Now he did not speak at all. Eventually he left me and went to enquire about me
mbers of his own platoon of Lancashire Fusiliers, many of whom had been attending this evening’s performance. In truth, there could well have been much more carnage than there was. I heard afterwards that there were three deaths and half a dozen serious casualties, but that was never officially confirmed. I did not want to know more and I heard nothing about funerals.

  The projector’s booth had been largely unaffected by the explosion, though the operator had not been in it at the time and had suffered minor injuries. Now, bizarrely, the film began to play again, at first silently and then with a loud, distorted sound which seemed to add to the horror in the now almost deserted hall. I looked up as we moved a stretcher to see the parrot on the screen, stamping steadily to the strains of its minuet. This had brought roars of laughter on the previous night; now the screen’s humorous image seemed a crazy commentary upon the stark tragedy being enacted beneath it. Someone climbed into the booth and the sound died with a mournful screech.

  We kept out of the way of the medics dealing with the serious casualties, offering help only as directed. The work was concluded, I suppose, remarkably quickly. I spent the last few minutes of it under the direction of a young captain in the RAMC. He was more used to death than me, but it was somehow evident in the few terse words we exchanged that neither of us was a natural army man. He glanced at the RAEC flashes on my shoulders and understood immediately how one so young could have three stripes on his arm.

  We were united as we worked by the fact that we were two men from professions outside the service. The army needed our expertise, but we were not natural army men. We talked as equals in our staccato exchanges, as I would not have done with other captains. It was as though we were not in the army at all, but attending some civilian catastrophe. I accepted orders from him because of his medical expertise, not his rank. I did not even register this at the time, still less analyse it. It struck me two days later, when I was trying to review the events of that awful night.

  We knelt beside an unconscious man with a thick coat of drying blood on his face. The young doctor ran his hands lightly over the twisted body. His touch was as soft and careful as if he were handling a new baby. He said, ‘I can’t find any serious injuries. He may have internal bleeding: we’ll need to ease him onto the stretcher carefully.’ The battery in my torch was failing now. I threw what light it had left onto the battered face; I couldn’t discern much of the features beneath the drying blood. The captain’s expert fingers flicked softly over chin and cheeks. ‘Broken jaw, for starters. Let’s hope he hasn’t lost an eye.’ We slid the canvas of the stretcher beneath him and bore him to the ambulance.

  Not long after this, what my companion called the ‘death truck’ drove away and the last ambulance left. The RAMC captain and I slumped on to chairs, staring at the damaged walls, where a great splash of red was slowly turning darker. Suddenly, I was utterly exhausted and unable to speak.

  My companion looked into my face and produced a mirthless smile. ‘You look pretty grey. Don’t worry, it’s the natural reaction. You’ll feel as if you’re going to collapse, but you won’t do that. What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Jim.’ I didn’t add the ‘sir’, even now.

  ‘And I’m John.’ A small pause, then another forced smile. ‘You’re a bit young for this. You’ve not been sick yet. You did well here.’

  I’d forgotten about my fear of disgracing myself by vomiting. It seemed a long time ago now. I was speaking to myself rather than him as I said, ‘You want to help, but you don’t know what to do. You don’t want to get in the way of the people who do know.’ I looked from the stain on the wall to the floor, to my new friend’s face. ‘You helped me through. I’m grateful, John.’

  There’d been a pause before I spoke his name and I’d had to force myself to use it. We were getting back to normal. Army normal.

  ‘You’re in shock. You might vomit later. When you’re alone perhaps. It’s a natural reaction.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I don’t feel in shock.’ I received only another thin-lipped smile as a reaction. ‘What happened to Pete Sykes?’

  He looked blank. I realised that there was no earthly reason why he should know that name. Fear hit me suddenly, like a physical thing, a stifling grey cloud which stopped my breathing. ‘Pay Corps sergeant. He was running things tonight. Taking the money, shutting the doors when the place was full.’

  The captain looked at me hard, and I knew in that instant that he was wondering how much I could take, how well I had known the man. ‘He bought it, I’m afraid. The bomb was under the table where he was working. He didn’t have a chance.’ He glanced up at me, then down again. I suppose he hadn’t needed to do much of this so far in his short medical life. ‘He can’t have suffered. I don’t think he’d have known anything about it.’

  I didn’t trust myself to say anything for what seemed a long time. Then I said, ‘It could have been me. I was doing that job last night.’ I had retreated from the unbearable to the merely selfish. Unable to cope with sorrow, I was congratulating myself upon my own escape.

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘No, not well. We’d only just met and he was a lot older than me. But I was looking forward to getting to know him better. He liked Beethoven.’

  It was pathetic, that last silly statement about music. But I wanted to say it, because I was suddenly certain that it would have been important to Pete.

  He must have been under one of those sheets. Or blown into so many bits that he didn’t warrant a sheet. I thought of the wife and the two boys in Norwich, who knew nothing of this and were looking forward to his return.

  John rolled down his sleeves and put on his flat captain’s hat, attempting a return to the normal. ‘You should go back to the mess now, Jim. Lock yourself away from everyone. Try to get some sleep. Do you want a lift back?’

  ‘No. It’s not that far. The air might do me good.’

  I heard my mother’s voice now, calm and certain. I was back in my childhood, listening to her telling me what I should do, how I should handle myself. Mum had always said the fresh air would be good for me, when I didn’t want to go out.

  Captain John walked with me for a little of the way. It might have been fanciful, but I sensed that he wished to link arms with me, that he knew how absurdly young I was for all this. I felt now that he wanted to walk with me as if we were two students on the way home from the pub. But he couldn’t do that here, even on a night like this. A man with a captain’s pips on his shoulders couldn’t link arms with a man with a mere three stripes on his arm, even after what we had just seen.

  But John did it. He threw his arm defiantly through mine and looked up at the dark blue sky, at the same stars which had shone down steadily on Alexander at Thebes, on Caesar in Gaul, on Henry V at Agincourt, and now on this small, sordid carnage in Cyprus. Men’s affairs were not significant, but you cared for yourself and for others.

  For four hundred yards towards the sergeants’ mess we marched in step, leaning a little upon each other, feeling our spirits rather than our limbs being supported by the contact. And no one saw us. No one yelled at us to ask what the hell we thought we were doing.

  When the long, dark silhouette of the mess was in view, the medic detached his arm and we stood together for a moment. We looked not at each other but at the building: staring into a human face would have been dangerous for me at that moment. After a few seconds I said, ‘I’ll be all right from here.’ Without looking at him again, I walked steadily on towards the building which was home.

  There were men standing in the mess, talking quietly about what had happened at the cinema. I scarcely saw them. I looked straight ahead, climbed the stairs, walked the corridor which seemed longer than it had ever been before, and shut the door of my room with elaborate, unnecessary care behind me.

  I wasn’t sick, as John had said I might be. I took off my uniform and lay on my bed. After a little while I began to cry, and then to sob. After two hours, I fell asleep
with the wetness upon my face.

  Twelve

  I was more affected by the bomb in the cinema than I or those around me realised. For three days, I went straight to my room after dinner in the mess and did not emerge again.

  I went across to the education centre on the morning after it had happened. I met Major Barker there and realised in the same moment that he was the last man I wanted to see. He looked at me as if he resented my presence. ‘Shouldn’t you be directing your Cyps down at the fuel store?’

  ‘It’s raining, sir. You can’t do much down there once it starts to rain. The ground is hard underneath and wet on top. Your feet slide away when you try to move jerry cans around.’

  Barker looked as outraged as if I’d called the Queen a tart. ‘This is the Cyprus emergency, sergeant, not some sideshow at the Women’s Institute. A little rain shouldn’t affect the movement of vital military supplies.’

  ‘No, sir. I’m sure it would never do that.’

  I was still much affected by the death of Pete Sykes and by the things I had seen on the previous night. I was in the mood for a challenge, but Barker sheered away from the re-stacking of petrol cans. Perhaps for once he recognised dangerous ground. ‘Bad business last night. A bomb went off in the cinema.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Had it exploded one night earlier, you’d have been a sergeant light on your educational strength. You’d have been left with a crisis amongst the jerry cans.’ It sounded like an Agatha Christie title. That thought brought me a nervous laugh.

  ‘You were in the cinema yourself?’

  ‘I was there on Monday night, sir. That was my night on the sergeants’ mess rota. We collect the money and take charge in the cinema.’

  ‘You were lucky, Sergeant Gregson.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I was, sir. Or the poor sods who were in there last night were unlucky. Blown to bits for fuck all, sir.’ I suddenly wanted to shock this self-centred poltroon. Barker at that moment personified for me everything I resented about the army.