Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  ‘That is dangerous talk, sergeant. Not in the proud traditions of the RAEC,’

  ‘I thought the RAEC was here to educate and enlighten, sir. It strikes me today that this island could do with some enlightenment. On both sides, if we are to avoid repetitions of last night’s episode.’

  ‘Watch your tongue, sergeant! That sounded very close to sedition.’

  ‘It’s more or less what my MP at home has been saying, sir. British soldiers will go on being killed until our politicians get together with Archbishop Makarios and thrash out a solution.’

  Barker bristled with anger. In my mood on that morning, I found it an agreeable reaction. ‘And who is your MP, Sergeant Gregson?’

  ‘Barbara Castle, sir. You may have heard of her. She a well-educated and well-informed lady. She’s also a highly conscientious constituency MP.’

  ‘A red! I thought as much. And you have the impertinence to quote her ill-informed views on the situation here.’

  ‘Mrs Castle is not a red, sir. And not ill-informed. She’s one of the few MPs to have done her homework before expressing her views. She’s planning to come out here and see what’s happening. Which is more than can be said for her Conservative opponents who want us to tan the Archbishop’s arse.’

  I was releasing many of the thoughts I’d chosen to keep to myself in the mess in a deliberate attempt to bait this booby. I knew it was dangerous, but at that moment I didn’t care about that.

  ‘This sort of talk is prejudicial to good order and army discipline. I could have you on a charge for it.’

  I almost told him to do that. Last night’s events were tempting me to cast caution away on the nearest wind. Just in time, I backed off a little. ‘I thought we were above politics in the services, sir. I thought we let the people in Parliament get on with policy and that we were merely the forces which implemented their decisions.’

  ‘And that is exactly what we are doing here, sergeant. Implementing the policies of the government of the day – which I would remind you is firmly Conservative. So don’t think you’re entitled to strut about in my education centre and air your leftist views!’

  He had a point. I was secretly amazed that I could have conceded the debating advantage to this posturing buffoon, but it seemed I had. I said more quietly, ‘Perhaps I’m getting carried away, sir. I lost a friend last night.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sergeant Gregson. But it’s a good thing that you are speaking to a man with my perspective, or you’d be in the guardroom and stripped of those stripes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t greatly miss them at the moment, sir.’

  It was my last bit of defiance. I was suddenly weary of conflict. Barker recognised my deflation. I stood sullenly in front of him as he said, ‘Think yourself lucky that I am choosing to take this no further, Sergeant Gregson.’ He waited for a penitent reaction, but got none from me. He seemed to be searching his rusty imagination for further threats and rebukes, but he didn’t come up with any.

  I knew the system well enough by now. I realised that he didn’t really want to get rid of me. That would reduce his establishment and thus his status, with little chance of a replacement during the present crisis. He came up only with what seemed at the time a vague and petulant warning. ‘We shall have to find you some sort of gainful employment, sergeant. We can’t have you skiving your days away on that fuel store field forever, can we?’

  ‘No, sir. I think I’ve exhausted my creative abilities, as far as jerry cans are concerned.’

  I’d been on the point of telling him about the classes I’d organised for the senior NCOs seeking the ACE Class One, but I now decided against it. Instinct told me that it was better not to let this idiot’s hands anywhere near something of quality. I was quietly proud of what I and those very experienced men were achieving, and I sensed that letting this clown anywhere near it might jeopardise our success.

  ‘We want hard work from you, not creative abilities. This is the army, Sergeant Gregson.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Perhaps you could offer that thought as a recruiting office slogan when you return to Blighty, sir.’

  Major Barker was certain that he was being mocked. But he wasn’t sharp enough to pinpoint the insulting phrases. He seemed to be seeking desperately for something which would afford us a ceasefire. He chose quite the wrong thought. ‘At least we weren’t dragged into last night’s happenings. We should be thankful for that.’

  I looked at him with open contempt, careless now of my own welfare. ‘You weren’t involved last night?’

  ‘No. Well, I heard the explosion. No function there for the RAEC, I thought. No use getting in the way of the professionals.’

  ‘No, sir. I’m sure the rescuers were much better off without you.’

  ‘Leave the medics to get on with it, I thought. Give them the chance to earn their money, for once.’

  ‘It’s a point of view, sir.’

  ‘It’s the right point of view, sergeant. Education is our business. We must remember that.’

  ‘I see, sir. But didn’t you say on my first day here that “Education takes a back seat, when lives are at risk”? Has something happened to change that, sir?’

  ‘I’m sure I never said any such thing, sergeant.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  Both of us knew he had said exactly that. Both of us knew that I was being deliberately defiant. In the grip of emotion, I didn’t much care about the consequences of my insolence. But however contemptible he was and however much I might prevail in this verbal fencing, Major Barker was the man with the power. It was foolish of me to neglect that army reality.

  *

  It was the highly practical Percy Bishop who dragged me out of my emotional pit that evening. ‘You look as though you’re somewhere else, Jim. It’s time you were back with us.’

  ‘I’m OK, Percy. Just quiet, that’s all.’

  ‘You need to get back to normal. The way to get over things like Tuesday night is to drop back into your normal routine and make life as dull and repetitive as possible.’

  I said flatly, ‘That makes sense. I’m sure you’re right.’

  Percy looked up and down the bar to make sure he wasn’t overheard. ‘That’s what my CO said to me when I lost two of my best friends in the push towards Paris in 1944: get back into some sort of routine with your pals who are still here. Thirteen years ago now. Sometimes it feels like yesterday.’

  I felt immediately guilty. The bomb in the cinema was a very minor sideshow to anyone who been through the Normandy landings. I was being self-indulgent if I let it affect me, now that it was in the past. I forced a smile and said, ‘Our classes will help. I have to concentrate, when you blokes are buggering me about in there!’

  Percy grimaced, recognising the effort I was making. ‘Routine for you means winning money at snooker, Jim. I need my partner on form, because I’ve already offered these two lads three blacks start! And we’ve got a couple of quid on it!’

  The stakes were meant to shock me back to the realities of mess life and I understood that. I was grateful even as I said, ‘Not tonight, Percy. I’d let you down tonight.’

  I hadn’t recognised that the RASC Staff Sergeant George Armstrong was behind me until he said softly, ‘Percy’s right, you know. You often play snooker in the evenings, so that’s routine for you. That’s what you should be doing now.’

  I listened to Armstrong when I had been determined to resist Percy. For some reason, the crown above his three stripes and the burn scar on his face gave extra weight to his words. I stared hard at him, seeking desperately for words to lighten the moment. ‘You mean you fancy the stakes, George.’

  He grinned at me, recognising that he’d won. ‘Well, what if I do? You can’t refuse us the chance to get some money back, after what you and Percy have taken from us over the last few weeks.’

  I glanced at Percy, who gave me a quick nod and said, ‘And we’ll take some more tonight, won’t we, Jim? Put your money where your
mouth is and select your cue, George!’

  The two of them were right, of course. I’d spent a difficult hour in my room trying to write to Joy. I’d been struggling to give her a suitably distanced account of what had happened on Tuesday night, but I hadn’t made much progress. Without breaching military security, I wanted to allay any alarm for Joy and her family: I wasn’t sure what would have been reported in the UK. In fact no account of the incident appeared in England. Nor did I ever hear any details of interments or of the progress of casualties in Dhekelia. There seemed to be a tacit agreement to ignore the happenings as far as was possible. No doubt that was the best tactic to preserve military morale.

  Now, as I was forced to crouch over the brilliantly lit green baize and concentrate on the to and fro of a mere game, my gloom dropped away from my shoulders like a heavy coat and I became the old Jim, acerbic in words and effective in cue skills. I suppose it didn’t reflect well on me morally and showed how shallow I was, but that is what happened.

  The odds and the opposition forced me to concentrate as hard as I’d always done, as Percy and George had intended. The three old hands who were with me knew nothing about Petrarchan sonnets or iambic pentameters, but they understood a lot more about life and its challenges than a raw young sergeant who was almost straight out of university.

  The pattern of the game was a familiar one. Percy potted the balls and I defended grimly when my turn at the table arrived. George Armstrong was following me. He was a decent player and my role was to frustrate him. He said resentfully as he prepared to play for the third time in succession from the bottom cushion, ‘You’re the Trevor bloody Bailey of snooker, you are, young Jim!’

  I gave my first genuine grin of the evening. As a cricketer, I was pleased to be compared with ‘Barnacle Bailey’, who had held out all day to frustrate the Aussies and give England a precious draw in 1953. I said rather sententiously, ‘I’m just playing for the team, George. Percy’s the Denis Compton who plays the strokes and wins us the frames. I just save ’em!’

  As if in response to this, Percy skipped round the table and compiled a swift thirty break. His partner congratulated him enthusiastically and his opponents followed in more muted fashion. He sat down and said, ‘Quite easy done, George! That’s what schoolies used to say, when I was a lad in the classroom.’

  There was a variation from the norm at the end of the frame. I was left with a simple brown which should have clinched the frame for us and left the opposition needing snookers. Faced with my first positive shot after twenty minutes of careful safety, I missed it. George Armstrong stepped in and potted the last four colours in sequence, clinching a win for his side.

  ‘Good break, George!’ I said loudly as the black disappeared, almost too anxious to be first with my congratulations.

  I was sure that it was the right result on this occasion. I paid up, drank my final rum and coke, refused to wait an hour for the table to play a return match, and retired to my room. Once there, I extracted two pound notes from the nest egg I had accumulated against defeats like this. Then I successfully completed the letter to Joy which had been giving me so much difficulty.

  My sharp young ears had heard Percy saying as I left my snooker companions, ‘He’s not a bad lad, young Jim.’

  I decided that was the ultimate accolade for a schoolie in the sergeants’ mess.

  *

  Twenty-four hours later, there was another casualty in the two-year black farce that had swallowed me up.

  I wasn’t involved in it. I knew nothing about it until six hours after it had happened. I was having a leisurely breakfast and easing myself into Sunday, wondering if I could get much enjoyment from yet more playing of Scheherezade on the record player in my room later in the morning. Sunday breakfast was always quiet in the mess. I had a table to myself and was appreciating the solitude.

  A sergeant from the Warwicks sat down heavily opposite me. I’d seen him before but scarcely spoken to him. He had the eager air of a man who wished to impart sensational news and needed an audience. I was the only one he could find at this moment. He looked at me intensely and said, ‘You haven’t heard, have you?’

  I really didn’t want anything sensational at this hour on a Sunday morning. But I strove to look eager rather than apprehensive. ‘No, I haven’t heard. What is it?’

  ‘Major Tarleton. You know him?’

  ‘Yes, I know the bastard. He threatened to put me on a charge when I was overnight orderly sergeant. Stupid drunken bugger!’ I wasn’t being my normal cautious self. I couldn’t think anyone in the mess would have much time for the egregious Tarleton; I was also asserting my status as a member of the mess: if you didn’t spurn officers like Tarleton in here, you weren’t a proper sergeant.

  The Warwicks man nodded his confirmation of that. ‘The sod’s always bloody drunk. He goes out and gets his end away with that corporal’s wife most nights. Then he comes back looking for trouble.’

  I nodded, eager to join in as an equal. ‘You don’t need to tell me anything about bloody Major Tarleton. He’d have had me on a charge, if he hadn’t been so pissed he was falling over. He said he’d have me stripped of my stripes and in the guardroom.’

  The man opposite me nodded delightedly. This was the best kind of build-up for his news. ‘Why’d he do that, Jim?’

  ‘Because he was blind drunk and feeling free to be the unpleasant sod he is. He didn’t give us the password. I checked he was alone in that Standard Vanguard he drives and then told him to drive on. He said I should have shot him for not delivering the password. I ended up almost wishing I had done!’

  ‘George Armstrong did.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Shot the bastard! Last night. He was orderly sergeant and bloody Tarleton came through without giving the password. George asked him twice and got no answer. When the daft sod just drove forward past the barrier, George bloody shot him!’

  The Warwicks sergeant repeated it, as though he needed to convince himself. His normal life was dutiful but dull. He was both shocked and delighted by this shooting, filled with admiration for the boldness of the man who had perpetrated it. He repeated joyously, ‘He bloody shot him, Jim!’

  ‘Bloody hell! Is Tarleton badly hurt?’

  ‘Very badly! He’s fucking dead!’

  *

  Killed by friendly fire, the old hands in the mess said. That would be the official verdict. They were doubtful about what would be relayed to the next of kin back in Britain. As little as possible, in the view of these seasoned men.

  But even for them, this was startling and new, so that there was much speculation. There were tales of how a few particularly unpopular NCOs and the odd officer had been shot by their own men in the last couple of days of hostilities in Europe in 1918 and 1945, but these had no more than rumour status and had grown in the telling over the years. This was different: no one was disputing the fact that a sergeant had confronted a British major head on and shot him.

  I could see the victim vividly in my mind’s eye. A violent, pantomime idiot, with his uniform unbuttoned, his tie askew, and his face getting redder with each of his ridiculous threats. And now the pantomime had turned to melodrama and he was dead. And his killer was George Armstrong, RASC staff sergeant, doughty snooker opponent, and a driven, secret man. A man who had said that he would do this. I could hear George’s words from a fortnight ago when I’d told him about Tarleton as clearly as if he was voicing them now. ‘I’d have shot the bugger!’ he’d said.

  I could see George now, clasping his drink in both hands, touching the burn scar on his forehead, insisting unsmilingly that he was serious whilst we laughed at the idea.

  I couldn’t think what to say when Percy Bishop and the other snooker players joined me later in the day. They seemed as shaken as I was. One was an RASC sergeant who had worked under Armstrong’s direction in the workshops. He said, ‘They wouldn’t let me see George. His CO and the WO 2 in charge of the workshops have been in to
see him; they’re the only ones who’ve been allowed into the glasshouse, so far.’

  That very warrant officer came over to us now. He nodded at me as he sat down at the table, though I was sure it was the others he wanted to speak with. He was a thick-set man with slicked-back hair and a small black moustache. He’d no doubt put in a lot of hard graft to rise to his exalted rank and didn’t approve of three stripes being handed out so easily to schoolies. Fair enough. I maintained a resolutely low profile with men like him and spoke only when I was spoken to.

  Now he was anxious to talk with his contemporaries. ‘There’ll be a court martial,’ he said tersely.

  ‘Bound to be,’ said Percy. ‘Shooting an officer sets you up for the high jump. Shooting an officer dead…’ He broke off and shrugged his broad shoulders helplessly. He didn’t know what shooting an officer dead set you up for.

  The WO 2 wasn’t a snooker player. He looked at me analytically, as if he had me under a microscope and was dubious about the quality of his specimen. ‘You could be called as a witness, Jim.’ There’d been a little pause before he’d used my name, and we both knew he’d had to force himself to do it.

  ‘Jim won’t let you down,’ said Percy stoutly.

  I was grateful for this automatic defence. But I’d rather he’d been able to say that I had no connection with George Armstrong, that I was outside all this. I said cravenly, ‘They won’t want me. I’m just a schoolie. Not a proper sergeant.’

  It was what all of them said, when it suited them. So why not use it in your favour, to keep you out of things like this? Courts martial were army things, nothing to do with me. So why did I feel so cowardly, when I was just quoting their own ideas back at them? I said with a touch of shame. ‘I want to do whatever I can for George, of course. But they wouldn’t take much notice of me, would they? I’m only national service.’