Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – Much of 1941 was purely chaotic as far as our war effort in Egypt was concerned. We didn’t get a really good field commander until Montgomery was appointed in the summer of Forty-two. People were incredibly slack and disordered. It was as if all our brisk Anglo-Saxon purposefulness was too easily undermined by the prevailing outlook of a host nation whose roots went back so many times longer than our own. We seemed to become infected with a kind of Pharaonic inertia broken by intense panics over trivia. Strange military units proliferated, often working at cross-purposes. I suppose Cairo’s being so far removed from Europe and even from the battlefields of Cyrenaica, plus the ready availability in the shops of all the things that were most rationed or unavailable in Britain, produced an unreal atmosphere. Personally, I’ve always thought that was the year we British lost Egypt for good, if indeed we had ever had it. It culminated in early 1942 with Sir Miles Lampson, our Ambassador, surrounding Abdin Palace with military vehicles and marching in to demand that King Faroukh sign his own abdication. Unbelievable when you think about it, especially in view of the Treaty we had signed in 1936. But well before then relations had decayed to the extent that there were graffiti all over Cairo saying ‘Long Live Rommel!’ while drunken Allied soldiers were carousing through the streets singing parodies of the Egyptian National Anthem with words like ‘King Faroukh, King Faroukh/Hang your bollocks on a hook!’ and ‘Queen Farida, Queen Farida/Of all wogs you are the leader!’

  – Meanwhile I had been approached by the publicity section of the British embassy who wanted me to ditch SOE and come and work on a counter-offensive against what was called the ‘Whispering Gallery’ of pro-Axis sentiment in Egypt. So I did. My job was to run a group of a couple of dozen Egyptians who could go around spreading anti-Axis sentiment. I’m afraid wars, like politics, really are conducted at this level of banality. Still, there was undoubtedly a lot of leeway to make up where our public image was concerned. Apart from the ubiquitous slogans extolling Rommel there was much café debate as to whether the estimable Mohammed ’Ider, as they called Hitler, mightn’t be just the man to help Egypt obtain its independence, given that both the French and the English had become the manifest enemies of Islam by infamously reneging on their words of honour in the Arab countries they occupied.

  – I must say I enjoyed the work. Besides being something of a challenge it enabled me to get back on the street and use my Arabic, even though the line I was supposed to promote was not the one I would have chosen. But there were plenty of other advantages, including living in Cairo and not having to shoot anyone. I knew perfectly well I should be wasting my time trying to convert any of the hard-line nationalists but most ordinary Egyptians were quite easily swayed. I had no doubt that if ever the military tide turned and we looked like winning, the Rommel notices would be torn down overnight and replaced by posters welcoming the Allied effort. Not many months previously I had seen the pastry chefs of Alexandria hastily re-icing their cakes so they now smirked up from the patisserie windows saying ‘Well played, Tommy!’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ to passing British and Anzac troops. Suddenly I was free to use all sorts of old contacts even as I established relations with interesting and potentially useful people passing through the embassy. Good parties in the evening, too. And being assigned to a strange section that was neither military nor quite diplomatic also had its uses. Technically, I was listed as a Services Officer, which conveyed absolutely nothing to anyone.

  – Perhaps because this was Egypt, war or no war, we none of us worked very hard and I was even able to push along the pornography sideline in my spare time. I had whole batches printed up from the trunkload of negatives I’d retrieved from my flat in Alexandria. It seemed like too good an opportunity to miss because Cairo was crawling with servicemen on leave or stationed in dusty camps on the outskirts. In the evenings they would roar into town, heading for the red-light district. As luck would have it one of the main zones, known popularly as ‘the Berka’, was quite close to Petron’s printing house in Mousky which I was still using and where so much of August’s pre-war stuff had already been processed. ‘The Berka’ was really a street named Wagh el Birket, and the area enclosed by it and another called Shari‘ Clot Bey was surrounded with signs put up by the military warning that it was out of bounds to all ranks. That didn’t stop a lot of sex-starved soldiers fresh from the deserts of Cyrenaica invading the Berka en masse, gazing up at the whores on the lines of balconies overhead and shouting their offers. Or else they went to the nude cabarets in Darling Street where the famous ‘donkey trick’ was a must for those who hoped to see a slice of life before they died in the desert. From a commercial point of view all I needed was to keep Petron churning out the prints and have them run over to the Berka by kids with handcarts. The one thing I will say is that we maintained our quality. This wasn’t the normal over-exposed, blurry, off-centre rubbish that passed for ‘feelthy pictures’. Ours was well printed and sharp and priced accordingly. Both Petron and I did very well out of it and I even opened an account for August and deposited quite decent sums that I was looking forward to presenting him with when the war was over. Alas, in late 1942 I learned he’d been murdered. Poor August. He was a talented fellow and I’m sure he’d be tickled pink to know how his stuff goes on turning up even today. As always, it’s quality that tells.

  – These boozy, brawling troops did absolutely nothing to make our propaganda job any easier. They crashed and smashed around town, horrifying the locals and offending every conceivable Islamic decorum while singing outrageous songs about the Egyptian royal family. Not that you could blame them much. These were lads who only days before had probably watched their friends burn to death in the desert as their tanks were hit and brewed up. What was Egypt to them but beer, whores and time off from a murderous campaign? The Embassy and the brass-hats and all the Oxbridge intelligence types winced and moaned and demanded that officers hold their men more in check, but it only farther served to point up the great division in Cairo between the real soldiers who were actually doing the fighting and the rump of high-ranking layabouts who pushed paper and had mysterious jobs with long luncheons. I have to include myself in this group, I’m afraid, at least from the perspective of those shattered and bandaged men in dust-stained battledress. There were a lot of pointed epithets in circulation to describe us: ‘The Gabardene Swine’ and ‘Groppi’s Light Horse’ being two of the least offensive.

  – So it dragged on until Montgomery arrived and the Battle of El Alamein was won in October 1942 and it was clear to everyone that the tide had turned for good. We felt it at once in Cairo and in exactly the way I had predicted. Street opinion changed virtually overnight. Rommel’s name vanished from the fly-posters and ‘Mohammed ’Ider’ was no longer bandied about in Groppi’s and the Arabic-language press as Egypt’s potential saviour. The Eighth Army pushed on westwards to Tripoli with the retreating Italians hastily mining and ploughing up their airfields before they abandoned them. I remember some RAF pilots singing a song they’d made up about half a dozen wretches they’d caught making concentric whorls with their ploughs on Castel Benito airfield just outside Tripoli (‘Benito’ after Mussolini, of course). Some wag had fitted new words to ‘One Man Went to Mow’, and the song went:

  Six men came to plough, to plough Castel Benito;

  Six men, five men, four men, three men, two men, one man,

  No man with no plough,

  Work now finito.

  Of course one needs to hear this yelled in chorus with beer mugs banging on the top of a mess piano to get the full flavour of the times. I’m afraid my heart went out to those poor Italian devils who’d been stuck on their bulldozers in the middle of that expanse of sand as the patrol overhead peeled off in leisurely fashion to strafe them and turn them into a comic song. In any case by May the following year there were no more German or Italian forces left in North Africa except as PoWs. The war gradually withdrew from Egypt, receding to Europe and the Pacific. A year after El Alamein al
most to the day, Italy had surrendered to the Allies and declared war on Germany, a move that may indeed have been pragmatic but which looked to us like abject turncoatism. But at least the pastry-cooks of Alexandria could stand down and give their nerves a rest and for most of us it was pretty much over, too.

  – You could hardly say I’d had a distinguished war. The only thing I’m proud of in those years was keeping an eye on Mirella’s family. They soon left Renzo’s flat. Pleased as he’d been to see his sister and her two children safe and sound, the fact was that Uncle Renzo was not cut out for family life. He was particularly irritated by his little niece wandering around the flat asking, ‘Why isn’t Kostas better yet?’ He was more than happy to help them out financially just so long as they went away and allowed him to go on with his bachelor existence. I’m sure his Italian contacts in the Palace and the diplomatic service made it possible to find them temporary accommodation and my recollection is that they moved around quite a bit in Cairo for the next eighteen months or so. They were in an anomalous position, poor dears. Mirella’s status in the Italian diplomatic service was hardly senior, anyway. Until Mussolini was strung up and the Italians changed sides the Boschettis really existed in a kind of limbo. Mirella had applied for repatriation when they arrived in Cairo but in 1942 most of North Africa was a war theatre and we had neither the time nor the transportation to spare for enemy non-combatants. The entire Mediterranean was equally in the grip of war, and not even hospital ships were guaranteed safe. So the Boschettis stayed. They were hardly alone. Cairo was full of people of various nationalities whose lives were temporarily stranded. The Boschettis simply became part of this floating population although they did have to report each week to an office in Garden City and were not allowed to leave Cairo. Nonetheless, these involuntary detainees did contrive to have a surprising amount of social life. Even their children’s education went on after a fashion. Ad hoc schools were formed and people gave lessons as and when they could.

  – It felt as though something had happened between Mirella and myself. Well, after all I was officially the enemy. On the surface, at least, she was still full of my praises for having saved their lives, as she kept putting it. For a while I wondered if in the course of her party-going she might not have heard some gossip about me, about some of my shadier contacts and activities. By then I suppose I had acquired a small reputation in Cairo as a mystery figure. Not an éminence grise, exactly, since I was hardly eminent. But a certain gris quality unquestionably hung about some of the company I kept, particularly people like Etienne, the French aristo who was still living aboard his Cleopatrine dahabiya on the Nile. He, incidentally, had proved his anti-Vichy credentials by keeping open house for such members of the Free French as shared his tastes. In fact it was later revealed that he had a secret transmitter on his houseboat which was used to pass messages to Free French troops in the field. Etienne was the first man in Cairo to learn of the fall of Bir Hakeim in mid-1942 when Rommel took it from the Free French after a vicious engagement. That was the battle, by the way, in which Richards was killed: the unfortunate fellow I’d spied on in that Suez brothel years earlier. The rest of the time Etienne spent as he always had, his pleasures unaffected by the war, at least so far as I could observe as an occasional guest. ‘Monsieur Python’, his favourite from Tanta, had long since been retired, a geriatric at nearly seventeen. He had been replaced by another child of only slightly less awesome endowment. It was on Etienne’s houseboat that I regretfully concluded that I am at best a failed voluptuary. I am not by nature an orgiast although, being an impostor, I can impersonate one fairly convincingly for an evening.

  – Maybe after all it wasn’t my reputation that was influencing Mirella’s attitude towards me. Certainly she was happy for Adelio to go on seeing me, although opportunities were not that frequent. I think she might have nursed a grudge about my treatment of her friend the Hungarian Count. We had no news of him for a while and I wondered if he had still been standing outside Mirella’s house when a stick of bombs blew the building apart, in which case he was now surely numbered among the saints. Then I learned he had been arrested as a spy and interned with his fellow Nazis in Adelio’s old school, which numbered him firmly among the sinners. So Alexandria’s pre-war gossip, which had always languidly assumed that foreign gentlemen of leisure were spies, had been spot-on after all. I mentioned his arrest to Mirella in case she hadn’t heard on her own grapevine, and although she evinced relief at his safety I’m quite certain the news of his profession came as no surprise to her. I have no doubt they used to feed each other information. Towards the end of the war we heard officially that Count Bathory-Sopron had been killed in a brawl in the prison. Germany was collapsing in on itself and it was a time of bitter recriminations. As for his flashy car with its weird-looking double front wings, that was stolen from outside my flat after I’d brought back my stuff from Alexandria so I spent the rest of the war without a car like everybody else. Presumably the Delahaye spent the duration hidden in one of the many garages tucked away that the RAF didn’t convert into workshops and has probably been through a succession of salerooms ever since.

  – Then the Boschettis heard that Tenente Giulio Boschetti had been killed early in November 1942 while serving in the 102nd Italian Motorised Division. A week later news came that he hadn’t been killed after all but merely taken prisoner by New Zealanders. But a month after that the original news of his death was confirmed. ‘I wish he’d make his mind up,’ said Adelio with an apparent callousness I found slightly shocking. Yet he was now nearly sixteen and it was obvious that all sorts of resentment and anger lay behind the remark so I said nothing. I think it’s fair to say that Adelio never quite recovered from his father’s absences and his mother’s infidelities and whatever teasing he had had to suffer for them at school; but there were other things I knew much less about. Anyway, it was from him I learned that invaluable lesson never to pass judgement on what members of a family do or say to each other.

  *

  As Jayjay falls silent and slowly levers himself to his feet I can see how ill he is. It is not just that he is visibly tired after talking for a couple of hours. He has suddenly acquired a slight detachment of manner very hard to describe exactly. Maybe towards our end the very familiarity of our own history wearies us. Surely we have recounted it too many times, if to nobody else then to ourselves, endlessly reworking and editing until it is a coherent narrative that fits more or less comfortably with the rueful self-honesty we acquire (how late!) in the run-up to eternal silence.

  ‘Like a dream‚’ Jayjay says, not for the first time, laying a much rubbed envelope on the table before me.

  I open the brittle paper carefully and shake out the batch of black-and-white photographs. Considering they were taken over half a century ago they are in excellent condition and were obviously skilfully printed. The outdoor setting in that vertical desert light normally makes for dull pictures, the sky a cloudless blank, the sea a featureless ledge halfway up the frame, the shadows too black. From them Adelio stares back at the lens or off into the distance with various tones of grey carefully preserved in the shadows cast by his hair and the angles of his body which has the undernourished, birdlike look of certain children beginning puberty. Despite all that Jayjay has said about him I am unprepared for the intensity of Adelio’s haunted expression in one or two of the photos and the effect is not dispelled by a couple in which he is obviously laughing at something Jayjay has said. In one, the sun flares off the windscreen of the tiny far-off Fiat parked in the shade of a ruined wall that might once perhaps have been a lighthouse. In another, there are the thermos flasks and beach towels of fifty years ago. Adelio’s touching, slightly ragamuffin face is frozen on the far side of that crevasse of time.

  ‘Another first,’ says Jayjay. ‘The first time I’ve broken my promise to him. Until now, no-one else has seen them.’

  ‘They’re very affecting,’ I concede, slipping them back in the envelope. ‘
I only wish we could use one of them.* Don’t you have any more photos of this period, Jayjay? It might help if we could illustrate this story of yours.’

  ‘I have hardly any that you can use‚’ he says sadly. ‘Almost everything was lost in one of my many moves when I had a good deal of stuff in store and the warehouse burned down. That was in England, incidentally, in the fifties. I also had some pictures from the Eltham days which turned up in the attic of Beechill Road when Dad died in 1949. Most of those went in the same fire. It’s a shame, but it can’t be helped. We will just have to rely on your graphic prose. But here’s an odd thing. I shipped a couple of tin trunks of belongings back from Egypt after the war but they failed to arrive. Things were chaotic at the time, of course, and I assumed they were gone for ever. But several years later they were found in the steamship company’s office in Naples, of all places, unharmed and still with the original lading bills. They sent them on and when they finally came I must say I opened them with a fair amount of curiosity since I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was in them. Well, most of it was junk, although quite reminiscent junk. You know, clothes that looked like someone else’s. All the linen was yellowed from the constant dust in Egypt. One only noticed it back in Europe where white comes up such a different shade. In addition to that, and right at the bottom of both trunks, I found these pictures of Adelio and the remains of my pornography archive dating from 1936, including a lot of August’s work. I’ll show you them sometime if you remind me but I fear if you can’t use Adelio you certainly won’t be able to use much of that stuff, not unless you want your book to become the first biography to be impounded by Interpol. Incidentally, James, I want you to promise there will be no photographs of me in your book.’