One day, Margery was excited to receive a letter from her sister Peggy, who was now based only a couple of hundred miles away in Palestine. With some leave coming up, she had decided to visit her little sister and see how she was getting on in Egypt.
Not long afterwards, Margery was nearing the end of her day in the Equipment Accounts office when Peggy appeared at the door. Instinctively, she leapt up from her seat and ran over to embrace her, but then, remembering that, as a Queen Alexandra Nursing Sister, Peggy was technically an officer, she quickly saluted instead.
Peggy returned the salute a little awkwardly. ‘Oh God, I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she told Margery, as soon as they were out of the office. ‘I can barely tell my right arm from my left!’
Margery took her sister over to the NAAFI, where they sat and chatted over a cup of tea. It felt strange seeing her all the way out in the desert, and as she looked into Peggy’s eyes she noticed that something about her was different. She seemed far from her normal robust self – a bout of illness she had picked up at work had left her thin and frail – and Margery found the change in her rather alarming. After all, Peggy had always been the tough one in the family.
As the two girls talked, Margery realised that life in the Middle East had been a struggle for her sister. One of the hospitals she had worked in had been little more than a collection of tents, and when it rained the nurses would get covered in mud from head to toe. At another, she had been responsible for picking away the infected skin of men suffering from impetigo.
Clearly the work was beginning to take its toll on Peggy. ‘I’m so homesick, Margery,’ she said wearily. ‘Aren’t you? What I wouldn’t give to be back in North Wallington right now!’
Margery nodded, smiling sympathetically. But the truth was that she hadn’t felt homesick for months and she was enjoying her life at Kasfareet.
When Margery learned that she was being transferred to another maintenance unit, she was disappointed – and once the whole story came out, her disappointment turned to anger. One of her fellow corporals had recently been sent to Turah, the camp 100 miles away where her old friend Elspeth now worked. But apparently the new posting hadn’t agreed with her, and with tears in her eyes she had begged the wing commander to be allowed to return. Now Margery was being sent in the girl’s place.
‘But I don’t want to go either!’ she replied desperately, when she was informed of the news by a WAAF officer. She knew that the wing commander was fond of the other corporal and wouldn’t have made the switch for anyone else.
But Margery’s complaints fell on deaf ears. ‘I’m afraid this is over my head,’ the officer told her. ‘The wing commander’s made his decision.’
After work, Margery went to watch a football match with Doug and the other lads. She didn’t want to spoil their evening, so she waited until the game was over before she delivered the bad news. When she told them about the wing commander’s soft spot for the other corporal, they were furious. ‘That just isn’t right!’ Doug exclaimed, uncharacteristically vehement. Beneath his anger, Margery could see he felt utterly despondent.
‘Is there anything we can do?’ asked Norman helpfully.
Doug’s face brightened a little. ‘Well,’ he said, turning to Margery, ‘you could tell them we’re getting married.’
‘What?’ Margery exclaimed, unsure if she had heard him correctly.
‘Let’s get married,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it, Margery. If it’ll help.’
She looked at his boyish, handsome face, staring at her earnestly. Everyone at Kasfareet loved Doug – he was good-natured, funny and caring, the kind of man any girl would want to marry. But Margery had deliberately never let him get too close to her. What if there was another side to his personality, she asked herself, one that only came out at home? In the desert, the lads were in a state of suspended boyhood, with their food, clothing, housing and entertainment all taken care of by the Air Force. There was no way of knowing for sure whether, back in England, Doug would be the same man he was here.
Margery returned Doug’s gaze for a moment, before turning away with a laugh.
A few days later, on Valentine’s Day, an orderly sergeant came and told her that it was time to go. Doug and the others were at work, so she didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to them.
The sergeant packed Margery’s bag for her, and helped her up into the cab of an air-freight gharry. As it trundled off into the desert, she watched her life at Kasfareet fade into the distance.
111 Maintenance Unit, otherwise known as RAF Turah, was a smaller camp than Kasfareet and was nestled at the foot of a range of large rocky hills to the south-east of Cairo. When she arrived, Margery was greeted by the beaming smile of her old friend Elspeth. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased you’re here!’ the Scottish girl told her cheerfully. ‘Come on, I’ll show you to the tents.’
Following Elspeth across the camp, Margery was surprised to discover that the canvas sleeping quarters seemed to have brickwork incorporated into them. ‘The walls are so we can open the flaps in the summer, without getting caught up in a sandstorm,’ her friend explained as they went inside. ‘The storms around here are a nightmare, and the sand gets into everything at the best of times.’
Looking around the tent, Margery could see that Elspeth wasn’t exaggerating. The sand was everywhere, and when she scooped up a handful she realised it was different to the kind she was used to – finer and paler. ‘It’s the limestone,’ Elspeth explained. ‘There’s a quarry just the other side of the hills.’
Now that Margery looked more closely, she could see that even Elspeth’s hair was lightly dusted with the white powder. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ her friend reassured her. ‘It’s the bugs you want to look out for here.’ She gestured around the tent, and as Margery’s eyes adjusted to the dark she saw that the legs of the beds were standing in little tins of paraffin, designed to keep the insects, which were hopping around all over the floor, from crawling up into them.
Margery left her kitbag in the rather unappealing sleeping quarters and set off in search of her office. She had been told that it was in a cavern somewhere up in the hills, but fortunately a gharry was on hand to drive her there. She wasn’t sure what she thought about going to work in a cave, but when she got there she realised that the choice of location was very wise. Compared to the camp down below it was blissfully cool, and there were no bugs to be seen.
Margery was in charge of the Equipment Accounts office for the entire maintenance unit, and she even had some staff at her disposal – two WAAFs and an Egyptian boy, who soon began showing her the ropes. ‘What are these?’ she asked one of the girls, pointing at some strips of sticky tape attached to the walls, with dates written on them by hand.
‘We have to inspect the caves for cracks every few days,’ the girl replied. ‘Each time we find a new one, we stick a bit of tape across it, so we can see if the rock keeps on moving. That way we’ve got a bit of warning before the cave collapses completely.’
‘I see,’ Margery replied, not exactly reassured by the explanation. She tried to push the idea of being crushed to death at her desk to the back of her mind, and got on with some work instead.
That night over dinner in the mess, Margery got to know some of her new colleagues at RAF Turah. One among them stood out in particular – a tall, manly looking girl with cropped blonde hair who spoke with a heavy German accent. Margery learned that her name was Anne Schilling, and that she had come from Germany to Palestine before the war because her husband was a Jew.
The other girls from Anne’s tent all seemed to be giving her a wide berth, and several of the men at the camp regarded her with outright contempt, pulling a variety of unpleasant faces as they walked past her. To Margery it didn’t seem fair – even if she was German, she was clearly no fan of Hitler.
Suddenly, Margery heard a scream from a nearby tent, and a few seconds later a young WAAF rushed in, trembling. ‘Are you the new corporal?’ she asked desperat
ely.
‘That’s right,’ Margery replied. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘There’s a scorpion in our tent!’ the other girl squealed.
Margery looked at her. ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ she asked.
‘Come and kill it for us,’ the young woman begged her. ‘Please!’
Since childhood, Margery had always hated bugs and creepy-crawlies, and the idea of getting up close to a scorpion filled her with dread. But as the only NCO present, she couldn’t really dodge the responsibility. ‘Does anyone know how I should do it?’ she asked the other girls.
‘It is not so hard,’ Anne Schilling replied confidently. ‘You must take one of your shoes, hold it by the toe and bring the heel down on the creature’s head.’
Margery nodded slightly, before reluctantly following the young WAAF back to her tent. Once they were inside, the girl led her to where the scorpion had been spotted, lurking underneath a kitbag in the corner.
As she carefully lifted up the bag, Margery steeled herself for a scary encounter. But up close the scorpion turned out to be far from terrifying. Margery had envisaged a great black thing the size of a crab, whereas what she found was a small, pale specimen, only an inch or so from pincers to tail.
In a matter of moments, she had whipped off her shoe and brought it down on the unsuspecting bug. ‘There you go,’ she told the young WAAF triumphantly. ‘Nothing to worry about!’
After that, whenever one of the creatures needed dispatching, it was Margery who was summoned to do it. Somehow the girl who had once been terrified of creepy-crawlies had become the camp’s resident scorpion slayer.
Compared to Kasfareet, which had its own bars and sporting facilities, as well as plenty of opportunities to make friends, Margery found life at Turah rather dreary and confined. She enjoyed the chance to catch up with Elspeth, but the other girls at the camp were no substitute for Doug and his mates.
It didn’t help that the girls at Turah seemed to spend a lot of their time in a state of high anxiety. A little way from the main entrance, along the road that ran down to the local railway station, was a small encampment of East Africans, who were employed by the RAF to guard against opportunistic thieves. They had a large searchlight which they kept pointed at the camp after dark, and if a girl went to the loo in the middle of the night the bright beam would follow her there and back.
‘I can’t bear it,’ one of the other girls told Margery, after suffering this indignity late one evening. ‘It’s like they’re stalking you wherever you go.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Margery replied. ‘They’re protecting you. If anything, you should feel grateful.’
But Margery’s confidence in the East Africans’ good intentions didn’t last long. One day, a WAAF staggered into camp in a terrible state. Her hair was matted with blood and there were heavy gashes all over her head. When she was questioned, the girl said that she’d been attacked by one of the men camped out by the road. By the time Margery saw her in the sick bay, the medics had shaved her hair off completely so that they could stitch her head back together.
From then on, the WAAFs were warned to avoid the road that ran past the encampment after dark, and even Margery felt a chill when the beam of the searchlight caught her on the way to the loos late at night.
After a week at Turah, Margery was desperate to see Doug and the rest of the gang, so on Saturday morning she got up early and headed over to see the warrant officer responsible for granting leave. In her hand was a 48-hour pass that she had brought with her from Kasfareet, but when she showed it to the man, he was unimpressed. ‘There’s no leave until you’ve been here a month,’ he told her brusquely. ‘Pass or no pass.’
Margery was still stinging with indignation at having been sent to Turah in the first place, and the man’s refusal to let her visit her old friends felt like another slap in the face. So, believing that she had every right to take the leave she had earned, she decided to break camp for the first time since she had arrived in Egypt.
She waited patiently outside her hut for one of the gharries that made regular tours of the base, picking up and dropping off WAAFs and airmen at their various posts. When it arrived, she got in quietly and sat up right against the front, where she hoped that nobody would notice her. She knew that when the vehicle reached the end of its loop, it would have to turn around in the road outside the camp entrance, and that would be her moment to escape.
Sure enough, after the gharry had completed a circuit of the camp, it went right out past the guardhouse and then began to turn around in the road outside. Margery seized her chance to make a discreet exit, silently slipping out of the back of the vehicle as the driver was completing the manoeuvre. Then she ran down the main road as fast as she could, hoping that she hadn’t been spotted.
It was a busy road, and Margery had no trouble hitching a lift to Kasfareet. She arrived there just in time for a late breakfast – Doug, Norman and the boys were still asleep on the veranda outside their hut, and when Margery turned up with steaming plates of bacon, eggs and toast, they could not have been more delighted to see her.
Margery spent the whole weekend hanging out with the boys, just like old times, and by the time she’d hitched back to Turah on Sunday evening and sneaked back into camp, she was feeling much better about her new posting. It was near enough to her friends that she could see them regularly, and – as several of the boys had pointed out – it also had the benefit of being much closer to Cairo.
In fact, as the weeks went on, Margery found herself spending more and more time in the capital city. From Turah, Cairo was only a short train ride away, and there were regular gharries back to the camp from the local station, so the girls didn’t have to risk encountering the East Africans on the road late at night. Margery began making the journey several times a week, and soon she was a regular at some of the city’s most popular hotspots for British expats and service personnel – among them Lady Kilearn’s yacht, which cruised up and down the Nile every day serving delicious tea and cakes, the Tedder Club, where the Air Force’s lower ranks could relax over a plate of egg and chips, and Café Groppi, home to the famous ‘Marilyn’ ice-cream.
When Doug wrote to tell Margery that he was due a 48-hour pass of his own, she was determined that he should make the most of it and let her show him around Cairo. He had never been to the city before and was a little apprehensive about venturing so far away from Kasfareet, but she promised to take good care of him and after a bit of arm-twisting he agreed to give it a go.
They met at the YWCA, where Margery had booked herself a room for the night. Although officially she wasn’t supposed to be seen in anything other than her khaki drill uniform, she had changed into a dress she had made herself, having purchased some cotton material with a pretty palm-tree print from a local market trader. She had also bought a packet of henna and, with the help of the other girls in her hut, had managed to dye her hair a brilliant red. When Doug saw it he was evidently impressed. ‘All the boys love a redhead,’ he joked.
The YWCA was housed in an old marble palace with magnificent gardens, and was one of Margery’s favourite spots in Cairo. As she and Doug sat outside eating together, waited on by elegant Sudanese men, they could almost have been a couple sharing an exotic holiday, rather than just two off-duty Air Force personnel.
For dessert, they feasted on delicious sweet cakes with coffee. ‘Make sure you keep an eye on your food,’ Margery warned Doug. There were sky hawks circling overhead, and she had seen plenty of customers lose their meals to a sudden swooping raid.
That weekend, Margery and Doug spent hours walking around Cairo, snacking on sugared almonds as they traipsed through the busy streets. On Saturday night, they headed to a palatial, air-conditioned picture house to catch a movie starring Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin. It was a far cry from the grotty camp cinema at Kasfareet.
When they parted the following evening, Doug thanked Margery for showing him such a wonderful time, and b
ack at his camp he obviously raved about the experience to all his friends, because she soon found herself giving tours of the city to several of them as well. First up was Geordie, who she took to see an orchestral performance at the NAAFI lounge and a film called Broadway Rhythm at the picture house, but before long Doug was sending a whole string of young men her way. Somehow, Margery realised, she had become the Air Force’s unofficial holiday rep in Cairo.
Certainly, there was no one else who could have shown the men around with more enthusiasm. Margery had truly fallen in love with Cairo, and every weekend she would happily while away hours there on her own, sipping chai tea in the YWCA gardens or wandering around the giant marketplace and soaking up the atmosphere.
Rather than waste money on train fares, she had increasingly taken to hitch-hiking to and from the city. One time she persuaded Elspeth to come with her, although her friend proved to be a rather anxious traveller. It didn’t take long for them to catch a ride, but it turned out the driver wasn’t going all the way, and when he dropped them at a crossroads in the middle of the desert, Elspeth began to panic. ‘What if no one comes along?’ she asked Margery anxiously.
‘Don’t worry,’ she replied. ‘They always do.’
But Elspeth was not reassured by Margery’s words, and after an hour had passed with no sign of a vehicle in either direction, she was growing increasingly distressed. ‘Someone’s going to find our skeletons out here,’ she moaned. It was approaching the hottest part of the day, and the girls hadn’t brought any water with them.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 20