A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

Saudi Arabia was on a self-imposed radio silence, or the lazy so-and-sos hadn’t bothered to get out of their tents that morning. All my radios gave me back was a reassuring hiss of static. I switched from aerial to aerial now and again, but was unable to tempt them – so I grabbed a couple of year-old Picturegoer magazines from a heap on a small table in the empty Allied suite. Brigitte Bardot was all at sea with Dirk Bogarde – when was he going to make a picture about what was going on in Cyprus? On the cover of the other one Jayne Mansfield was posing again: I knew she was a film star, but couldn’t for the life of me name a film she’d been in.

  Just before the Spamwiches came round the telephone alongside my radios rang. It hadn’t done that before, so I probably looked stupidly at it for a few seconds before I lifted the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Bassett?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gate here, sir. You have a visitor.’

  I wasn’t expecting one.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A young lady in blue, sir. Very fetching.’

  ‘I’ll be right over.’

  Wouldn’t you have done the same? It had been a pretty slow day so far.

  Stephanie. Steve. As pretty as a Gainsborough. Royal blue summer dress which flared from the waist. No stockings. Flat sensible shoes. A small blue car which almost matched the dress was parked a few yards from the picket gate. The corporal talking to her moved away as I reached them. We spoke through the wire. I said, ‘Nice dress. Very nice, in fact. It looks expensive.’

  She smiled and pouted at the same time.

  ‘Not very. It’s from Gor-Ray. I bought it in New Bond Street the last time I was over.’

  ‘I could pretend that I know what you’re talking about, but I won’t. All I can say is that it’s very nice.’

  ‘And that will do nicely. Will they let you out to play? I have a picnic for us in the car.’

  ‘No, I’m stuck here until Pat picks me up at four – one of the rules.’ I beckoned the guard over, and asked him, ‘Can my friend come in? She’s brought me a surprise lunch – it would be a pity to waste it.’

  He looked doubtful, but made a friendly decision. His face cleared.

  ‘Civvies aren’t allowed in, sir, but just this once I’ll let you use the seat under that tree over there. By the MT workshop. I can see you from there, so if anyone asks I can say that she was never out of sight.’

  The tree was a low twisted thing with a wonderful dark canopy of flat leaves which rustled against each other in the breeze. The seat beneath had been constructed around it: you sometimes see things like that in the gardens of stately homes, or parks, don’t you? We made our way to it after she had retrieved a picnic basket from the car, and had been let into the compound. I asked her about the car.

  ‘I knew a French colonel. He left it for me when he went home – something to remember him by. Why do these stupid men always want me to remember them?’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Charlie. I’ll miss the car when I have to leave it behind. It’s famous.’

  I squinted at it. It didn’t look famous to me – one of those little four-seat Renault 4 CV saloons, with the sloping back.

  ‘Famous for what?’

  ‘She was in the Le Mans sports car race in 1950, and finished twenty-fifth. I sometimes imagine my little car chasing all those big racing cars for twenty-four hours, until they all drop out one by one . . . and Antoinette is still going strong at the finish.’

  ‘Antoinette?’

  ‘She’s a small car with ideas above her station.’

  She had been unpacking the lunch. That tasty Turkish flat bread, two cheeses – one of which was white and gluey – leaves which looked like lettuce, but weren’t. Two bananas and a couple of bottles of Keo. I wasn’t supposed to drink on duty either, but what the hell; it had been quiet. Steve read my mind as I hefted one of the bottles in one hand, and made a decision.

  ‘I’ve never had a girlfriend with a man’s name before.’

  ‘And I’ve never liked a proper Charlie as much as I like you. Why do you think I’m here?’ Then she added, ‘Call me Stephanie if you like – my family did.’

  ‘No. I like Steve. It will do for me.’

  ‘And I like Charlie. I could never call you Charles.’

  Our sentences were merging into one another. I looked at her. She had a smear of soft cheese at the edge of her mouth. I made a mental mark; one of those events to remember. Memories which warm you when you are an old man. You see, I wanted the meal to go on for ever.

  I didn’t know when I would see her again. I promised to make it as soon as I could, and that satisfied her. No protests; no upside-down smile. Unless you counted the one on my face as I fingered the wire on the picket gate as I watched her drive away. The blue of her car was picked up in the dust. I watched until it disappeared, and trudged back to the ops block suddenly browned off. De Whitt looked up from his desk.

  ‘Not a peep from your lot, Charlie, but the Orthodoxies found, and then lost, a Red sub in the Black Sea. Can you give them a hand to chase it?’

  Better than doing nothing, I supposed. As I walked over to the army operators I messed the words around in my head, and wondered if there were any black subs in the Red Sea. That brought a tune, and a song with it. Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep is the Ocean’. I liked Frank’s version. It ached with love.

  I did four days on the trot, and then Watson called me into his shed at the end of a shift. He was in another of those unnerving grateful moods, and said, ‘Thank you, Charlie, well done,’ before I’d even closed the door on the veranda behind me. Second thank you in a week. Maybe he was going soft on me.

  ‘Thank you for what, sir?’

  ‘The last signal you intercepted – thirty-five seconds’ worth, if I remember. The intelligence people have come back to say that it told them a tank division was moving up to the border. Fancy a snifter?’

  ‘Which border? Haven’t they got several?’

  ‘Nobody knows, apparently. I sometimes wonder if intelligence is as intelligent as we give it credit for, but they’re pleased with us anyway. Cheers.’

  Two hefty straight-sided glasses of ouzo, topped off with water and ice. Just what the butler ordered. He flapped one hand vertically up and down. It was a signal to me to sit. Watson speared me with a glance across the top of his glass.

  ‘Want to go flying again?’

  ‘No, sir. Too dangerous.’

  ‘Good-oh, knew you’d be up for it. Cheers.’ We cheered again.

  I asked him, ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘One of the army’s funny little Austers, like that one you found in the Troodos a couple of weeks ago. Pretty aircraft.’

  ‘Doing what? I’m not going treasure hunting again. People shoot at you when you’re treasure hunting.’ Three years earlier he’d sent me into the mountains of Kurdistan looking for a military aircraft full of money. It’s not a bad story, but it has a sad ending – I should try it some time if I was you. Watson wagged a long finger: I was forgetting the sirs again, and that made him unreasonably touchy.

  ‘Officially you’ll be flying an RX 108 up a few thousand feet to see if the extra height gives you better range with a trailing aerial. We’re not sure that when our Middle Eastern neighbours go quiet that they’re actually quiet. Maybe it’s atmospherics – one of the bods at Cambridge thinks that sandstorms out over the desert shut down our long-range listening capacity.’

  Why didn’t these buggers ever listen to what they were told? I sighed, and shook my head.

  ‘They just stop broadcasting, sir, believe me. I can recognize the difference between bad signals and reception, and a complete absence of them. Sometimes they just don’t talk . . . usually on Fridays and Saturdays, when they’re mostly talking to their God instead. Or maybe they simply get into a huff with each other.’

  ‘You know that, Charlie, and I know that. Unfortunately the dumb scientific class that now
runs our world doesn’t . . . so they want it proved to them. That’s where you come in.’

  ‘You said, ‘Officially . . . that officially we were flying one of the radios higher than the aerial array. I take it there’s an unofficial angle to this jaunt as well.’

  ‘Yes. You’ll fly a Cook’s Tour around the island afterwards, sweeping for EOKA signals – can you believe that they still don’t know how many sets the opposition has out there, or where they are?’

  ‘Will they shoot at us?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised – especially if you get too close.’

  ‘Bugger.’ I held my glass out for a refill. It was always best to take advantage of the wing commander when he was in a drinking mood. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  ‘Hidden glory, and the satisfaction of knowing you’ve served your country.’ Then he belched. I didn’t respond, but I expect my face said it all. Watson grinned a foxy grin and continued, ‘What if I gave you another couple of days off first? That do?’

  I raised my newly charged glass to him.

  ‘That’s more like it . . . sir.’

  If you think about it we’d probably both got to more or less where we wanted to be. I asked him, ‘I take it somebody does monitor my targets when I’m not there.’

  ‘Course they do. Didn’t we tell you?’

  ‘Yes, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Who?’

  ‘That’s for me to know, and you to speculate. Don’t ask awkward questions, Charlie. Weren’t you told that as well?’

  I had been, of course, but my nose was bothering me. Watson knew that, and smiled like an angel on a thunder box. He wasn’t going to bloody tell me.

  ‘What the fuck do you call that?’

  Pat was showing me some transport. After all, what else do you do when you’ve been given an unexpected day off, and everyone you know is working? He said I could go off for a stooge as long as I kept my wits about me, and a pistol within reach, and offered me a vehicle to get around in. When we got down to the MT section he showed me an old one-and-a-half-tonner which looked as if it had been in more battles than Field Marshal Montgomery. It just so happened I’d driven it before; in Egypt. It was Watson’s favourite transport, and I’m sure he dragged it around the world with him.

  ‘Mr Watson’s little Bedford. Nice old bus.’ He gave it a hefty thump on its front wing to prove its worth, and I tried to ignore the heavy flakes of rust which fell out of the wheel wells and onto the concrete floor.

  ‘I expected a car.’

  ‘I’ve only got one – a Humber Hawk, an’ that’s out. Mr Watson’s gone visiting.’

  ‘What about the Land Rover, and your Austin Champ?’

  ‘Sorry, Charlie. We need the Land Rover, and the bloody Champ’s in the workshop again. It’s gotta Rolls-Royce engine which is exac’ly no bleedin’ good. I bet Rolls is ashamed of what Austin done to it.’

  ‘So I get to ponce around in a 1940s land crab?’

  ‘You could always stay in an’ read. Wotcha gonna do, anyway?’

  ‘I thought I’d slip in to David’s place for a late breakfast and then maybe drive up to those ruins at Salamis de Whitt is always going on about.’

  He gave the suggestion some genuine thought.

  ‘That should be all right for the first time we let you out alone. The knack is not to let the GC get close to you. They like to be near enough to knife you in the back, or shoot from so close you get muzzle burns. OK? And seriously – take someone wiv you if you gets the chance. Better safe . . . an’ all that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Pat. I’ve got the message. I won’t do anything stupid.’

  I ran over all the rules he’d been laying on me, on the road to Famagusta – every time I rode with him he gave me a different tip, and they accumulated with a drip-drip consistency. Even someone like me eventually understood that this was becoming a dangerous little island for those who flew the Union flag. I can remember some of his lessons even now: Always tell someone where you’re going, and Don’t go into a Cyp shop on your own, even if you know the people in it. I expect there’s some old sweat in Basra or Afghanistan telling our boys the same things today.

  Parking a square canvas-covered truck in Yassine’s small courtyard was a manoeuvre fraught with difficulty. David himself came out onto his steps to supervise. He watched me scraping his gate columns.

  ‘Next time bring something different, Charlie.’

  ‘It’s all I could get. Don’t you like the British Army in your car park?’

  ‘British Army, no problem. Fucking great truck, big problem. Who else can get in here now?’ It was actually a small truck; he was just making a point. He also made me smile, and of course he smiled back. ‘Next time come in a jeep.’

  ‘We don’t have any.’

  ‘No problem – I sell you one.’ He would too.

  He offered me breakfast, but I put him off at first.

  ‘I’ll go up and see Stephanie. Will that be OK?’

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie, I’m not her keeper. Knock on the door – it’s always best.’

  When I knocked on the door of her room there was no immediate response. I did it again, and heard someone mumble and begin to move.

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t expect you.’

  ‘I didn’t expect me myself. I’ve been given a day off.’

  She yawned. After a longish pause – enough time for the usual Glenn Miller intro, and a few bars – she said, ‘Why don’t you go down and have some breakfast? I’ll clean up, and see you in fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘OK.’

  She didn’t say anything, but I knew there was a guy in there with her.

  I ate poached eggs with Yassine in an alcove off the bar. Figs. Coffee. Yassine travelled the Middle East with the best coffee makers in the world accompanying him.

  ‘All right?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I may have embarrassed her.’

  ‘You will find out – she will tell you.’

  A tall, thin guy in light khaki drills – KDs – came down the stairs, and walked out through the front lobby. He was carrying a blue UN beret scrunched up in one hand. He didn’t look at us. Steve appeared five minutes later. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail, and she hadn’t any make-up. It took years off her. The first thing she did was kiss me. Yassine smiled to himself, and looked away. The second thing she did was say, ‘Next time, phone up to my room from here. OK?’

  ‘OK. You’re not mad?’

  ‘No. I think I’m pleased. I just need to get used to the idea of having a boyfriend, that’s all. You are my boyfriend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am. Want some breakfast before we go out?’

  I smoked a pipe, and David smoked a long, thin cheroot. We both watched her eat. I don’t think I had been happier. But I was confused. The fact that I hadn’t told Watson that I hated flying in small aircraft moved to the forefront of my mind. I was confused about that as well.

  We took her racy little saloon – its engine revved like one of those new petrol-driven lawnmowers. Yassine asked if I would mind if he had the Bedford moved to a closed garage that he kept around the side of the hotel. Steve drove north out of Famagusta through a gap punched in the Old Wall. One of the Byzantine emperors had needed an inappropriately large gate.

  It’s the sort of structure tourists are photographed alongside to prove to their neighbours they’ve been abroad – it’s a bloody horrible-looking thing, if you ask me. As we curled through the old streets her small car attracted more than an occasional wave: she was obviously as well known as Pat Tobin.

  ‘I take my passing clientele to their shops,’ she told me. ‘They buy me expensive souvenirs by which I am supposed to remember them for ever. After they ship out, I take the gift back to the shop, and collect half the profit. Then the shop sells it again. I have received one allegedly Byzantine candelabra three times from three different men – it’s back in the shop
right now.’ She swerved to avoid a lazy dog, and swore. We were still new enough for me to find her directness endearing.

  ‘What will we do in Salamis?’

  ‘Explore the ruins, paddle in the sea. Make love in the undergrowth if you like – undergrowth is a lovely word, isn’t it? Just made for lovers. First we must stop at Ekrem’s shop.’ When she was excited Steve spoke at top speed, as if each conversation was a race.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Picnic. We’ll get hungry and thirsty out there.’

  Ekrem’s shop was in the shadow of the gate, but just outside the Old City. The UN had a station alongside it with two French Hotchkiss jeeps parked up outside. Nothing much seemed to be happening. There was a chain and a lock on the UN’s front door.

  The man Steve greeted was a tall, heavy fellow in his forties, I’d guess. He had a moustache big enough to swing on, and, if his face was in a cup, black enough to hide where it ended and the coffee began. His hair was thick and black, but thinning on top. She went on tiptoes to kiss him; one cheek after the other.

  ‘Ekrem, this is Charlie. He is dear to me.’

  ‘Like a brother?’ The man had a deep, sonorous voice. I could smell the morning coffee on his breath. It was like confronting a grizzly bear.

  ‘No, not like a brother – nor like the other men I have brought to you.’ He wrinkled his forehead. He might have been expressing surprise: I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. ‘So don’t cheat him.’

  ‘What do you want today, Perihan?’ he asked.

  ‘Lunch. Something we can eat and drink in the fields.’

  Then he turned to me, and held out his hand. ‘I am Ekrem.’

  ‘I am Charlie.’

  ‘You like Cypriot bread, Charlie? New bake.’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Cold meats? Cheeses?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Then come into my cave.’

  I don’t know how thick the walls of Ekrem’s shop were. It was dark in there, and cool – almost damp. The scents of a hundred different foods competed for space. It wasn’t a process you could hurry. When Steve pointed to something that was past its best Ekrem would shake his shaggy head. If she persisted – as she did with some pickled artichoke heads – he would look sad. As if his best friend had died. But it was all a performance – as were his ecstatic sighs when she chose right. She bought as much food as my mother would have done in a week in the 1940s, and then stood back for me to pay for it.