A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  A lance jack with a fancy badge underneath his Signal Corps flash drove me up to it in one of those new Austin Champ heavy jeeps. We parked up about thirty yards from the aircraft corpses, but I could smell the fuel in the air as soon as I got out. There was a foam bowser parked up much closer. The lance jack’s name was Ryan. He said he’d show me the ropes. He fired up a generator motor on the bowser, unhooked a wide flexible hose, and pulled an asbestos hood with a clear screen over his head. It covered his shoulders. Then he fired a flare pistol into one wreck, but I think that was for effect: a box of Swan would have done the job as well. The fuel ignited with a soft ‘whoo-o-of’, and I felt the wall of heat immediately.

  I may have told you already, or I may not, but I have a pathological fear of fire. It’s what happens to your brain when you survive being in an aircraft which decides to sacrifice itself to the Fire God. It happened to me in 1944, and the explosion that followed threw me into a nearby cemetery, and burned my shoulders and face. The face was only lightly grilled and came back to me – but my shoulders still carry the scars.

  Ryan advanced on the heli frame carrying the foam hose, spraying great gouts of fire suppressant foam ahead of him. It seemed to be over in seconds.

  ‘We suppress the fire, guv’nor,’ he explained to me after he’d dragged his hood off. ‘We deprive it of air. You aim at the base of the fire, and advance on it as you suppress it. It will seem to move away from you. All you’ve got to do is follow up, and smother it until it’s dead.’

  He showed me the simple on/off lever for the hose, and then turned to light my wreck up.

  I said, ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? Can I have the hood, please?’

  ‘You won’t need it, sir; you’re going to extinguish the fire, aren’t you?’ Then the airframe went up with another gentle whoo-o-ooshing noise, and the flames reached towards us. What I can remember now is that nasty little bastard of a lance driving and pushing me towards the fire with phrases like, ‘Get in CLOSER – the trouble with you, Mr Bassett, is that you have no fucking guts, sir – closer, sir – get your fucking act together, sir, there’s men dyin’ in there!’ and so on. He called me every name I knew, and a few I didn’t, and was right behind me every step of the way. The barrier of heat was stunning; it stopped my brain from working.

  If you’d asked me, I would have said that it took me ten times longer to extinguish my fire, than he did his. When I finally dropped the hose on the ground I was alongside the smouldering wreck, had no eyebrows and the curl which fell over my brow was frizzled. I could smell my own burned hair. My cheeks were glowing. To tell the truth if my bladder had been more than empty I would have wet myself. Maybe that would have done a better job on the flames than the foam. Back at the Champ Ryan spread some paste on my cheeks and forehead.

  ‘You may lose a layer of skin,’ he told me, ‘but it’s nice to know you can do it, isn’t it?’

  I took a gulp of water from a water bottle he handed me before I replied.

  ‘I suppose so. Did I pass?’

  ‘We’re still here, aren’t we?’

  ‘I was in an aircraft crash once – the bastard thing burned like that.’ I was still pulling in air in great gulps; I must have been holding my breath as I fought the fire, so it can’t have taken all that long, can it?

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘What difference would it have made?’

  ‘I would have made it harder for you, guv’nor – to compensate for the lack of surprise. You knew what was coming, didn’t you?’

  In the mess that night the sergeant on the end of the Two-Kick trick came up to me with a beer for each of us. Like most sergeants he rolled with every punch, and kept grudges. He lightly touched the paste on my forehead: it had set like plaster.

  ‘Got too close to the matches, did you?’

  ‘The bastard teaching me drove me into the fire until my eyebrows disappeared.’

  ‘My baby brother. He must have heard about that trick you lot played on me – I must tell him thank you. Honours even?’ He held out his hand, and we did the shake-it-up-and-down ritual. I got drunk with his people after that – they seemed like a decent bunch.

  At about 2300 hours, after I knew I’d drunk enough to land myself with a hang-over the next day, he leaned across the table and said, ‘Pack yer gear tonight, Mr Bassett. You’re off tomorrow.’

  Chapter Eight

  Hello, Pat

  I stood on the tarmac in the rain apart from the group of National Servicemen and reservists who were flying out with me. It seemed unfair that on the very day that my craven government had agreed to comply with international demands to uninvade Egypt again, they were bunging me on a plane to fly in that general direction. Two people had come to see me off. That was nice. Both were men, and that was disappointing. There’s nothing like a bit of skirt standing at the edge of the runway, waving her knickers as you lift off to fight another day.

  Old Man Halton had greeted Carlton B by saying, ‘Hello, Hannibal. How are things in the Madhouse, these days?’ I took it that the Madhouse was the FO.

  ‘Mad,’ CB said, ‘quite mad.’

  ‘You two know each other?’ I asked.

  ‘From years ago,’ Halton beamed. ‘Our families were close, and Hannibal once asked me for a job.’

  ‘And he said not bally likely,’ the Mandarin told me, ‘so I joined the Home Civil Service instead. Thus I have your employer to blame for everything that’s happened to me ever since.’ The smiles they were banging off, and the way their handshake went on for ever, said that they liked each other as well. ‘I drove down to see Charlie off,’ he added, ‘and to warn him to try to stay out of trouble.’

  ‘So did I. It’s going to keep raining . . .’ Halton looked at the cloud base, and sniffed. Then he treated us to one of his wondrous rolls of coughing. It was like standing alongside a thunderstorm. ‘Do you think we have time for a drink? The transport hasn’t turned up yet.’

  We were hanging around on a Royal Canadian Air Force Base, RCAF Langar, waiting for an aircraft to turn up, and we hadn’t even got as far as Canada yet – just bloody Nottinghamshire. I’d been trucked over in a one-tonner before respectable people were awake.

  Langar was a bloody great piece of old England surrounded by unfriendly Canadian conscripts with unprincipled dogs and big guns: the main Canadian base in Europe. Our Egyptian folly had used up so much of our own runway space that we had to borrow some back from friendly allies . . . and there were fewer of those by the day. As you can imagine, we hadn’t asked the Yanks for help, because none would be forthcoming. I’ve liked almost every American I’ve ever met, but politically they still haven’t got over the Boston Tea Party.

  Eagle Airways, a civilian mob whose trooping contracts Old Man Halton had his eyes on, was doing the needful, but because the government wanted to hide the number of troops we were moving around the globe most movements had to occur from military airfields.

  Browne asked me, ‘What kind of aircraft will you use?’

  ‘I went to Cyprus three years ago on a converted Wellington Bomber – it scared me half to death. I think Eagle uses real aeroplanes – DC-6s or Hastings. Things like that.’

  Halton began to cough again; we’d have to get him out of the rain, so we let him lead us to a small square chunk of a building alongside the watch office.

  At least the Canadians had the ability to surprise: we found ourselves in a rather plush little lounge with a small bar, and a white-jacketed steward. I was a VIP for a day, and I might have known that Halton would have known it was here. I quietly sipped a pint of Ruggles beer, whilst they threw back Rusty Nails like nobody’s business. I hoped the old man hadn’t flown himself here in his Auster, or that if he had then he had the sense to stay overnight.

  He toasted me, and I said, ‘It’s nice of you to see me off, sir, but you didn’t do it last time, so you have me a little worried.’

  He had a twinkly little smile which was always hard
to resist.

  ‘You weren’t my co-director then, now you are – everything was written up in Companies House last week. I decided it was my duty to make sure you leave the kingdom safely—’

  ‘And to lock the door behind you, I should think. I shouldn’t trust him an inch if I was you, old boy – look what he did to me!’ That was CB; he must have thought life was pretty dandy. They both found this uproariously funny, which was brought to a close with one of Halton’s coughing fits, of course. I just had this feeling that I was being had, as the actress said to the bishop.

  ‘Did you hear what happened to my quiet Americans?’ I asked him.

  CB shrugged.

  ‘Gone, but not my department, so I don’t know what it cost them.’

  The old man touched my shoulder and said, ‘Make the most of this, Charlie, take care and safe return. There’s so much work coming in you won’t get another holiday for years.’ Then he gave me a bottle of Scotch as a going-away present. He hadn’t done that before either; maybe he was going soft.

  An RCAF corporal chose that moment to intrude. He shook the rain from his khaki cape, and asked, ‘A Mr Bassett here?’

  ‘That’s me,’ I told him.

  ‘Your carriage awaits, sir. I was sent to find you – everyone else has boarded, and they’re waiting for you.’

  ‘Good show,’ Browne said. Then, ‘Toodle-oo.’

  Old Man Halton nodded. He was holding a handkerchief to his mouth, and I could see it was speckled with blood. Whenever I left him I wondered if I would see him alive again. I nodded back: I liked the tough old stick really. The last thing that Halton said was, ‘June sends her love . . . says she’ll write.’ I nodded, but in my heart I doubted that. Then I turned away to follow my conductor: off into the wide blue yonder.

  Only it was grey, and still bloody raining. The oddest thing about the English, I thought as I climbed the steps into one of Eagle’s shagged-out old DCs, is that despite the weather and our damn awful governments, most of us still choose to live in England. It momentarily brought Bosham to mind again.

  It may have looked sky weary on the outside, but the DC-6 was the plushest transport the government had yet provided for me, and because it was a contracted privateer, Eagle Airways had thoughtfully provided in-flight refreshments – excluding alcohol – and a couple of pretty stewardesses. There was a smattering of banter, but it was quickly blanketed by the two NCOs conducting the draft to the land of sunshine.

  One of the pilots walked through the cabin before we moved out onto the taxiway. He had the word Pilot on the front of his cap, in place of a house badge or crest. I wasn’t so sure of flying with an outfit that needed to give its people hat badges so they knew what job to do. What if he’d picked up the wrong cap?

  I was the only civvy on the flight, and was given a row to myself at the back – I felt good about that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in most news photographs of air smashes, the few recognizable parts of what was once an aircraft tend to be the rear fuselage and the tail. About half an hour into the flight a young woman in an Eagle Airways uniform slid into the seat alongside me, crossed her legs with a whisper of nylon that gave me goose pimples, and lit a Rothmans. She exhaled its fine blue smoke, and said, ‘Hello, Charlie. I love these troop flights – we’re not leaping up and down after the pax all the time, and the company doesn’t mind if we sit down, and get to know the boys.’

  Alison. When I had last seen her in 1947 she had been sixteen, and I had been all of about twenty-three, I think. She had been the daughter of my landlady, on a chicken farm just outside Cheltenham. I had danced with her once at a jazz club down by the river, and my last clear memory of her was leaning against my bedroom door frame in a Jane Russell pose, asking me to marry her. When I’d laughed and turned her down, she had told me, You don’t know what you’re missing.

  I said, ‘Alison.’

  ‘Yes. Good memory.’

  ‘I do now.’

  She screwed up her nose a little as her brain processed my words and couldn’t work out where they fitted. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Know what I was missing. You were right, and I was wrong – I should have married you.’ I thought I’d surrender completely: ‘You look like a film star, simply wonderful.’ She laughed. It was a nice gurgling sound. A couple of the squaddies turned to look back at us. I hoped that they were jealous.

  ‘You remember that? I’m embarrassed. What must you have thought?’

  ‘I’m embarrassed now – I must have been blind as well as stupid. I thought you were going to go to university to shame the lot of us?’

  ‘I did. I did that for Mum – she didn’t want me to end up on the farm. The week after I graduated I signed up for the BOAC trainee scheme. I’d wanted to be an air hostess for ages. What about you?’

  ‘Was I just about to be demobbed to join a private outfit as a radio operator?’

  ‘Yes. I was jealous.’

  ‘I’m still with the same people, but I became their route manager at Lympne, and now by some fluke I’ve been asked to be a director. I still haven’t got a clue what that means, but it will pay well.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll phone you up one day, and ask for a job.’ She leaned over to stub out her cigarette, and gave me a peck on the cheek. Wide mouth. Soft lips. ‘That’s my first break. I’ll have to give the others a hand now. I’ll come back later.’ As she moved I caught a discreet whiff of her perfume, and for a moment a picture of flowers all the colours of the rainbow exploded in my head. I leaned out to watch her walk away from me, along the narrow gangway between the seats, and for a microsecond saw her as she might be naked: I’d never really thought of her that way previously. Men do that sort of thing, and women never stop complaining about it. One of the squaddies also followed her with his eyes, then looked back at me and gave me the thumbs-up. I probably grinned back at him.

  I went back to Cyprus for a late holiday a few years back. It was a reward for growing up. The sun was shining, and on the Greek side the houses gleamed white or faded pink under new coats of wash. A UN truck with a couple of bored-looking French Legionnaires on loan patrolled the Green Line keeping the Greeks and the Turks apart.

  To outsiders like me the Greeks and the Turks appear to be two sides of the same coin, and I like both races a lot. I just can’t understand why they have to keep on inventing new reasons to kill each other. The Israelis and the Arabs are the same, I suppose – more similarities than differences. The problem with the lot of them is that the radicals can’t let go of the characteristics which make them radical: maybe they would have no purpose to their lives without the hate.

  Anyway, when I had last returned it was like any old holiday island in the Med, apart from the swirling knots of drunken squaddies who took over the bars after midnight.

  It wasn’t like that when we slid down the runway in 1956. The first thing I saw out of the aircraft window as we taxied in was a recently burned-out airframe. Smoke was still rising from it: I wondered which poor sod had had the job of putting the fire out. Still, it was nice to know I’d had some practice: welcome to Cyprus, Charlie. The second thing I saw was a lioness lying in the scrubby grass alongside the runway, as we taxied past her. She looked like the Sphinx. I’m sure we made eye contact, but she didn’t budge. I had seen a lioness several times in Egypt, but the doctors told me she wasn’t really there: something to do with stress and alcohol. It was good to know she was back.

  There was only one woman passenger on the flight. A starchy-looking army lieutenant. She gave me three looks while we were standing on the tarmac waiting for our bags to be sorted out. I counted them. The third time she smiled. It was an I know you’re there and stay out of my way smile. She was my sort of size, and had severely cut fine blonde hair. Wide eyes; deep forehead; wide mouth. The distance between us meant that I couldn’t read her flashes. She had the look of someone who was going places and didn’t mind who she knocked over on the way.

  Alison must have seen w
here my attention was. She stalked over and said, ‘I wondered when you would notice her. She asked me to point out a passenger to her.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘This one,’ and she poked me in the chest. ‘Charles Bassett RAF (retired). I’ve never thought of you as a Charles before, or retired – makes you sound stuffy.’

  ‘What is she?’

  ‘A military policeman – are you in trouble already?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. Name?’

  ‘It says Ann Thirdlow on the passenger manifest, but you can’t trust the MPs with names. She could be anybody.’

  Then I paid attention to Alison. I held both her hands, and looked at her. ‘You outgrew me – you grew up to be taller. That’s not fair.’

  ‘We have a three-day stopover. Maybe I could take you swimming, and make up for it. Some of the beaches are still safe.’

  ‘That,’ I told her, ‘I would love.’ I didn’t tell her that I could only swim six feet before I began to drown. ‘But it depends on Her Majesty. I don’t know what her minions have planned for me. How do I contact you?’

  ‘Tony’s Hotel in Famagusta. I’ll be there until Monday – but don’t worry, I’ll be back again the week after.’

  ‘Is that its real name?’

  ‘No. It has a Turkish word with about three hundred syllables and the odd squeal, but everyone knows it as Tony’s. Inside the old walled city – the safest place for Brits is alongside the Turks. The Greeks are scared of them.’ She spotted her bag in the heap coming out of the hold, and gave me another peck on the cheek before she went to collect it. I had that hairs on the back of your neck feeling, which told me I was being watched. A staff car had come out for Lieutenant Thirdlow, and she had paused before climbing into the front passenger seat, to look my way again. This time she didn’t smile. Maybe one a day was all you got. Short rations. I knew immediately that she was one of those people who were unable to laugh at themselves. That was always trouble, wasn’t it?