‘This is Teddy Deason,’ Bob told the girls excitedly as his friend shook their hands. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I bumped into him at breakfast at the Helio Hotel – my wife used to be his secretary back home!’
Teddy was handsome, in an older-man sort of way, and distinctly debonair. ‘I hear you two have just arrived in Egypt,’ he told the girls with a smile. ‘Bob thought you might appreciate a tour of Cairo.’
‘You’ll be in safe hands with Teddy,’ Mac chipped in, having clocked the nervous look on Margery’s face. ‘He’s been here for years. Knows the place like the back of his hand.’
Margery and Elspeth glanced at each other, before taking in the miserable sight of the camp all around them. ‘We’d love to come,’ Margery told Teddy.
As the staff car sped towards Cairo, they passed through the city’s smartest suburb, Heliopolis, where Teddy and Bob were both staying in one of the many European-style hotels. As they drove, Teddy told the girls a little more about himself. He was married, a squadron leader in the RAF, and worked in security in Cairo. He had the air of a man of the world, and Margery felt at ease in his company.
When they reached downtown Cairo, Teddy began offering a running commentary on the city and its history. ‘As you can see, the centre of town was inspired by Haussmann’s Paris,’ he told the girls, as they peered out at tall, elegant brick buildings that stood along wide streets lined with palm trees.
They turned a corner and Teddy pointed out of the window at an enormous building with a grand, pillared façade. ‘And that,’ he told them, ‘is the opera house built by Ismail the Magnificent to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal.’
As they drove closer to the town centre, the traffic was becoming heavier. Margery could see a mixture of military vehicles, European cars such as Fiats and Austin Sevens, battered local buses and trams, and tired-looking donkeys pulling wooden carts piled high with vegetables. With the windows down, the assault on the senses was overpowering – a heady mix of exhaust fumes, animal manure and incense.
In among the European-style buildings, the minarets of various mosques provided a reminder of Cairo’s Muslim population, and in the distance Margery could see a huge Islamic citadel towering over the city. The Cairene people, meanwhile, were as cosmopolitan a mix as the architecture suggested, and heads wrapped in turbans bobbed alongside khaki caps, bowler hats and red fezes. Next to the city’s rich European class and large military population, the ordinary Egyptians looked ragged and impoverished. Many of them were begging in the street, and outside the grand hotels native guides in long coats crowded around, in the hope of being summoned by a wealthy visitor.
‘First things first – we must take you to Groppi’s,’ Teddy announced. ‘It’s the most famous tea-room in Egypt, and the ice-cream is to die for.’
The car dropped them off outside a building that reminded Margery of a Lyon’s Corner House back home in England. As they passed through the doors into the glitzy interior she breathed in the sweet scent of patisserie and coffee. After years of rationing, the smell of so much sugar and butter was intense.
Teddy ordered the girls a couple of ‘Marilyn’ ice-creams, a dessert which he assured them was one of the finest in the world. It turned out to be shockingly rich and packed with little pieces of fruit, and as Margery tasted it, she closed her eyes in pure bliss. Perhaps Egypt wasn’t such a rough place after all, she thought.
But if Cairo in the daytime was a pleasant surprise, by night it was something else again. When the sun went down, the city lit up like a fairyland, and for girls who had grown used to black-out Britain, the effect was spectacular.
That evening, over dinner at the Lyset Hotel, the little party debated what to do next. ‘I think it’s time these ladies sampled Cairo’s nightlife,’ Teddy announced, with a twinkle in his eye. Mac huffed and puffed, protesting that he didn’t think it was quite right to take the girls to a nightclub, but it was obvious that Teddy was going to get his way.
The club was a luxurious establishment, with tables and chairs laid out in cabaret style and a raised platform for dancing. Looking around her, Margery could see that the other patrons were the crème de la crème of Cairene society – European men and women in smart suits and glamorous ball gowns, mingling with important-looking Egyptians in traditional Arab dress. ‘Those are our friends the sheiks,’ Teddy told her, following her gaze.
He ordered a round of gin and lemons for the table. ‘This place is where you come to see and be seen,’ he told Margery. ‘In fact, I think you’ve been noticed already – someone just offered me two sheep and a goat for you!’
Margery stared at Teddy, horrified. Then she saw from the broad smile spreading across his face that he was only joking.
Suddenly, the lights in the room were dimmed and the first of the night’s floor acts came on – a belly dancer dressed in a skimpy red costume, embellished with glittering gold sequins. As the woman began to writhe suggestively, moving closer and closer to the tables as she undulated around the room, Margery didn’t quite know where to look. It was a mesmerising sight – although the spell was rather broken when the girl paused to scratch herself midway through the routine.
‘Well, I think we’ve seen enough here,’ Bob said, as the act came to a close, reminding Teddy that the girls had a 10.30 p.m. curfew.
Teddy acquiesced, but not before reminding Margery and Elspeth that, as squadron leader, he had authority to sign their late passes if they ever wanted a proper night out.
By the time Teddy’s staff car dropped them back at the gates of Almaza camp, the two WAAFs were utterly exhausted. They felt as if they had experienced enough new sensations for a lifetime, and as they lay in their little hole in the ground that night, their heads were swimming with the bright lights of Cairo.
The next morning, however, the reality of Almaza seemed grimmer than ever. The heat felt more oppressive than before – unlike anything Margery had ever experienced. It was like a physical weight, dragging you down and making every small action twice as hard as it should be.
Margery found that she had lost her appetite completely, and to begin with she put it down to the high temperature. But soon she also began to suffer from a horrible churning sensation in her stomach, and then she felt a sudden urgency to rush to the loo. She had succumbed to one of the nasty bugs that afflicted most foreign visitors to Egypt – known to the girls in the camp as ‘Gyppo tummy’.
Elspeth helped her to the sick bay, where a nurse gave her a large white pill. ‘It’ll make you feel worse for a while, but it’ll clear your system out,’ she told Margery.
The woman hadn’t lied, and the next few hours felt like pure hell. After her umpteenth visit to the ablutions Margery came back to her hole in the ground and passed out. Elspeth ran to fetch help, and a few minutes later, Margery regained consciousness just long enough to hear the words ‘We’d better get a stretcher.’ The next time she awoke, she was back in the sick bay.
The evil tablets did their job eventually, and slowly Margery began to feel better. But her enthusiasm for Egypt had been sorely shaken.
After more than a week, the recruits were finally assigned to their new camps, and Margery and Elspeth set off together for a place called 107 Maintenance Unit, otherwise known as RAF Kasfareet, which was situated on the Great Bitter Lake, in the Suez Canal Zone. After a hot and dusty 100-mile drive, the girls’ gharry finally drew up at the camp gates, and they got their first glimpse of the sprawling three-kilometre stretch of brick and corrugated-iron huts, aircraft hangars and storage facilities. Outside the perimeter fence at one end, a large control tower loomed over an airfield where planes were being brought in for repair.
As they entered the camp, Margery could see the troops’ billets on her left, and opposite them a little church and outdoor cinema, while straight ahead was the YMCA bar. The camp was well equipped, with a NAAFI canteen, its own football and hockey fields, and even some tennis courts in the distance. The idea was to create
an entirely self-contained world, providing everything the troops could possibly need – a little bubble of civilisation in the middle of an alien landscape. Outside the camp perimeter, the desert stretched for mile upon mile, with nothing but flat, gritty sand and a few low hills off to the west. Margery felt like she had come to the end of the earth.
As the two girls jumped down from the lorry, they were struck by another unsettling realisation: the ratio of men to women in the camp was pretty extreme, with just 100 British and 300 Palestinian WAAFs working alongside over 4,000 airmen. For the lads there, English girls were a rare and special phenomenon, and as Margery and Elspeth made their way towards the women’s compound, which was hidden away behind a high screen, the men gathered around them on all sides, eager to get a good look at them.
Margery was taken to a large brick hut, where she was met by a Scottish corporal called Collie. After living in a hole in the ground at Almaza, having an actual roof over her head seemed positively luxurious, although she noticed that despite the building’s sturdy construction, the desert sand had found a way inside, and a light dusting of it lay all over the floor and beds. ‘We wash the hut down every morning,’ Collie told her, ‘but it gets in all the same.’
Once Margery had dropped off her kitbag, she was taken to the mess next door, where she was surprised to find that all the benches and tables were made of stone. ‘It’s because of the bugs,’ Collie explained. ‘They’re rife out here, and they’ll eat up anything made of wood.’ Margery, who as a child had always avoided her sister Peggy’s camping trips for fear of insects, did her best to repress a shudder.
Since Kasfareet was out in the middle of the desert, the heat there was truly unbearable. Margery hoped that by night-time her hut would cool down a little, but as hour after hour went by it never seemed to. As she tossed and turned, unable to sleep, she felt suffocated by the dry, parching air. Some of the other girls had dragged their little camp beds out onto the veranda, and she decided to follow their example. At least outside there was a slight breeze, but as she lay there all night long beneath her mosquito net she still felt stifled.
The next morning Margery reported to Equipment Accounts. It was a large office near the main entrance to the camp, and was run by an Irish warrant officer who had evidently been out in the desert rather too long. His skin was so weather-worn and darkened from the sun that it looked like ancient leather, and he arrived for work most mornings already well on his way to being drunk. Perhaps, Margery thought, a constant supply of alcohol was the only thing enabling him to face another day at Kasfareet.
Unsurprisingly, the warrant officer did not exactly run a tight ship. In the office most Air Force rules and formalities seemed to have gone by the wayside. The WAAFs and airmen were encouraged to bring their breakfast to their desks if they felt like it, and often the warrant officer himself would come dancing in with a large pile of toast to share around.
It was scarcely a quiet working environment either. To keep themselves awake in the stultifying heat, Margery’s colleagues spent many hours composing elaborate symphonies with the aid of pencils and pens, tapping away on mugs, desks, whatever they could find. A man called Jimmy, meanwhile, who had worked as a dancer in Civvy Street, would occasionally leap up onto his desk and perform a tap number.
Even with the constant entertainment, the heat left everyone in a perpetual state of drowsiness, and the ceiling fans whirring away overhead only seemed to stir the hot air around – as well as agitating the swarms of flies that perpetually buzzed around the room. ‘Now we have a rule here, Margery,’ the warrant officer informed her tipsily when she first arrived. ‘No one is to begin work for the day until they can produce a dozen dead flies.’ Margery found it hard to tell whether or not he was joking, but she noticed that everyone in the room had a fly-swatter close at hand, and they were absent-mindedly slapping away as they worked.
As in any office, the afternoon slump was the hardest part of the day – and the long, hot afternoons at Kasfareet often felt like torture. To keep them going on the final slog to the day’s end, the men and women in Equipment Accounts were visited by a tall, elegant Sudanese boy, who brought them large cups of chai tea. Margery and her colleagues guzzled the stuff down, not just for a burst of caffeine to help them stay awake, but in the hope there was some truth to the idea that a hot drink would actually cool you down.
But the heat wasn’t the only problem posed by the inhospitable environment. Outside the office, the desert periodically asserted its power by blasting the camp with a sudden, violent sandstorm that sent everyone running for cover. Oil drums had to be placed along the sides of the asphalt roads to mark them out, so that no one got lost in a storm.
One day, Margery was caught out on her way across the camp, and suddenly found herself being pelted by heavy, gritty granules of sand. Instinctively, she dropped to the ground and covered her head with her arms so that she could breathe.
The storm whirled around her for about five minutes, and then as rapidly as it had appeared, it was gone. Margery was covered in sand from head to foot, but she was just relieved that no vehicles had come by. She blushed to think that anyone might have seen her adopting such a ridiculous pose, like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
For their first few days at Kasfareet, Margery and Elspeth had been too scared of the large numbers of men there to venture out of their compound in the evenings, but the other WAAFs who had recently arrived had been rather more adventurous. Such was the gender ratio in the camp that by now most girls had an entourage of four or five male admirers following them around at all times.
Margery had no desire to acquire her own gaggle of young men, especially since – after her experience with James Preston – she was convinced that they would probably turn out to be married. But it seemed a shame to spend every evening holed up in her hut, so eventually she and Elspeth decided to brave the NAAFI for a cup of tea.
Sure enough, as soon as they sat down, a small group of lads made a bee-line for them. The girls were apprehensive at first, but as they sat and chatted to the young men, they realised that they were pretty decent chaps. What they were most desperate for was simply news of England, having been away from home for so long. Their war had been a strange one, stuck in limbo at a maintenance depot in the middle of nowhere, far away from any kind of action.
There was one topic that the men were particularly keen to learn about – the American GIs who had arrived in Britain since they left for Egypt, and were now stationed up and down the country. ‘Is it true that they’re over there stealing our girlfriends with chocolate and silk stockings?’ one of them asked Margery.
Margery was well aware that many girls found the Americans irresistible, with their smart, figure-hugging uniforms and aura of Hollywood glamour. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell the men the truth. ‘Oh no, that’s just German propaganda,’ she said, wondering whether any of them would believe her.
One of the lads, a blond chap called Geordie, was swaying slightly on his stool while Margery spoke, and she had a feeling that, like the warrant officer in Equipment Accounts, this was probably his regular state. He had the look of someone who just didn’t care what happened tomorrow, and she realised it was a look she had seen on the faces of many young men at Kasfareet. Despite having been at the camp for several years now, most of them had never ventured beyond the perimeter fence, aside from an occasional swim in the Bitter Salt Lake, and by now they had almost lost the will to live.
But one man in the group seemed different – a tall, sporty chap with brown hair who was called Doug. He had a boyish, happy-go-lucky air about him that seemed to have endured despite the circumstances. When he discovered that Margery came from near Portsmouth, he was thrilled. ‘I’m from Bishop’s Sutton,’ he told her. ‘It’s only 20 miles away.’
Out in the desert, it felt like a miracle finding someone who had even heard of her neck of the woods, and Margery was soon chatting away to Doug, reminiscing about lif
e back home. Before they left the NAAFI at the end of the evening, they had made a plan to visit the camp’s outdoor cinema together later in the week, along with Elspeth and a friend of Doug’s called Norman. The films on offer were generally rather crummy, he warned her, and the projector was always breaking down – but to Margery it certainly sounded better than hiding away in the compound.
Margery and Doug soon developed an easy friendship, and when Elspeth was transferred to 111 Maintenance Unit, a camp 100 miles away in Turah, they began spending more and more time together. Before long, Margery found herself going about with Doug, Norman and their buddies almost all the time, just like the other girls at the camp with their collections of young men. She had never received much attention from boys when she was younger, and to her surprise she found she quite enjoyed all the male companionship.
The boys had organised a camp football league, with a different team for every department, generally named after whoever they supported at home – Spurs, Aston Villa or, in Doug’s case, Queen’s Park Rangers. Out in the desert with little else to do, these team loyalties had become as tribal as those of the actual clubs. Thanks to his height Doug generally played in goal, for a team he had formed with Norman and Geordie, along with a few of their mates. Whenever they had a fixture against another side, Margery went along to cheer them on, and celebrated or commiserated with them afterwards over egg and chips.
As winter approached, the evenings at Kasfareet became colder and the WAAFs swapped their khaki drill uniforms for standard Air Force blue. The daytimes were now pleasantly balmy, not unlike a mild English summer, and Margery found it strange to think that they would soon be celebrating Christmas with the sun shining in a perfect blue sky.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 16