Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘So what do we do for the next two days?’

  ‘I thought we’d all eat together in the Petty Officers’ Mess, sir; seeing as there’s just the few of us?’

  ‘OK by me.’

  ‘Brekker’s in about twenty minutes, then. You might wish to familiarize yourself with the radio shack, sir, in the meantime.’

  ‘I suppose I might,’ I sighed. ‘By the way, shall we switch off the Navy and the RAF for the weekend? My name’s Charlie . . .’

  ‘And they call me Taff, sir.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Taff.’

  ‘And you, sir.’ You could never tell these bloody Regulars anything.

  The port may not have known that we were there, but the bloody Gyppoes did. When I came back on deck from the radio room a quarter of an hour later, having mastered nothing other than the cooling fan on the ceiling, a large friendly Arab was beaming down at me from the mole. My first wog: Wog One. He was smothered in a long dirty robe – thick white and rust-coloured vertical stripes. It hadn’t seen the inside of a wash tub for about a year, or maybe that was just my prejudice showing. He showed his teeth as he smiled. There weren’t many of them, either. He gestured to a handcart of fruit behind him: both he and his wares had appeared as if by magic. His eyes sparkled.

  ‘Buy oranges?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Dates. Fresh dates: no flies.’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Firmer this time, Charlie.

  ‘HMS Wallflower. Flower-class corvette. One thousand and thirty-one tonnes. Eighty-five crew. One brave captain. I love the British Navy.’

  ‘Good for you, chum.’

  ‘You buy oranges now?’

  I was to learn that this was a reasonably characteristic conversation between a British serviceman and an Egyptian entrepreneur. A matelot saved me: he climbed through one of the bulkhead doors and onto the deck, wiping his hands on a grey dishcloth that looked filthier than Wog One’s outfit. He smelt like a cook. In size, the Egyptian outnumbered us both by about two to one.

  The AB squinted up. ‘Wotcha, Ali. Wotcha got?’

  ‘Oranges, Captain. Fresh dates. Figs . . . and olives. Good olives. Greek.’

  ‘Firty oranges.’

  ‘Five piastres.’

  ‘One piastre.’

  They settled for two . . . and that was a characteristic transaction. Two lessons on my first Egyptian morning, and I hadn’t set foot on shore yet. Cookie also bought most of the man’s olives.

  I turned to ask him, ‘You call him Ali. You often buy from him?’

  ‘Never seen him before in me life, sir. I call all the wogs Ali – saves time. Ali Baba, see?’

  I looked back at my first Egyptian again, but he was gone. Simply vanished. There was half a mile of empty narrow stone jetty on either side of us – it was like a bony finger pointing from Port Said into the Mediterranean. It was now completely empty, and there was no cover.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  The cook shook his head. ‘They do that all the time.’

  ‘How did he do it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a mystery.’

  The Captain came back on Sunday afternoon. I happened to be on deck as he stepped on board. He turned to face the bridge, put down his suitcase, and saluted rather smartly. I happened to be in his way so I saluted back.

  He smiled and said, ‘No, you don’t have to. It’s what we do every time we board a commissioned ship.’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘Damned if I know. I must have been told once, but I’ve forgotten. Feeling better?’

  His tropical whites were immaculate: they almost gleamed. One of the benefits of a trip home, I supposed. He had a wavy line beside the straight gold ones on his epaulettes: so, a reservist like me.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’d make a very good sailor as long as we stayed tied up alongside.’

  ‘And I get sick each time I climb into an aeroplane. Odd, what?’

  ‘Most people do, sooner or later: it depends on the type, I find.’

  ‘Thanks for minding the shop. My wife sends her thanks as well – promises you tiffin if you find yourself down there. I always say An unexpected home leave is an unexpected pleasure: points all round. Anything happen?’

  ‘Egyptians trying to sell us things; no one else came near us. I’ve put copies of the radio signals in your cabin. You’ve been warned for some time next week.’

  ‘Good. We’ll move up to the basin tomorrow, and declare our presence.’

  ‘Did they really not know we’ve been here all weekend, sir?’

  He produced a gentle smile. Apparently he approved of whoever was running the naval side of the port. ‘Oh, they knew all right. Just looked the other way. It’s accepted practice – it suits everyone.’ I thought about Cyprus; that seemed to be the way things were done out here. ‘Thought we’d have a little party tonight: welcome you to Egypt and thank you for our weekend off. I know my people are keen.’ Party. Now that was a word I understood.

  I was hung-over the following morning. The Wallflower’s ward room wasn’t short of pink gins, and then before I turned in the NCOs wanted to toast me in grog . . . which is over-proof rum diluted with water until it has the consistency of a sweet-tasting paint stripper. It’s absolutely fucking deadly. When I woke up the clothes I had passed out in were sticking to me, and we were already alongside the quay in the Port Said basin.

  I needn’t have worried about reporting because a young Navy medic came to collect me from the ship. It was already hot, and he drove his jeep fast. With the windscreen laid flat on the bonnet we were cooled by our own passing. There was a thin steel girder with a cutting edge mounted vertically on the jeep’s front bumper, supported by a couple of metal stays. It must have reached clear six feet above the ground.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I shouted.

  He shouted back. ‘The fucking wogs string wire across the roads neck-high to a motorcyclist. We’ve lost several dispatch riders that way. A major hit one in his jeep last month, and took the top of his head off: he drove into the base hospital with his brain showing.’

  ‘Did he make it?’

  ‘Yeah. He was a Brown Job major, like I said, so the general consensus is that although he lost most of his brain, nobody will notice.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘PMO, sir: Port Medical Officer.’ Balls, had I caught something already?

  I hadn’t, as it turned out, and what’s more the War Office didn’t want me to. The old PMO, a kindly-looking retread with tufts of white hair and wire-framed glasses, had to explain:

  ‘We had a signal about you, Pilot Officer. Although you were given your Tab One and Tab Twos, and most of the rest in the UK, before you left, some dozy doctor forgot to check your medical record. You haven’t had the separate yellow fever vaccination, and we can’t let you loose until you have. Roll your sleeve up now, there’s a good chap.’

  While he was preparing me for the ordeal he observed, ‘I was in the Royal Veterinary Corps once. Before the war, that was . . . in Afghanistan and Iraq. I learned my trade injecting donkeys’ bums, and whipping their goolies off.’

  ‘You came down-market, then, sir. What happened?’

  ‘I transferred to the RMC because soldiers and sailors don’t kick or bite as much as donkeys. It’s noticeably safer.’ And while he was saying that he gave me the jab in my upper arm. He had a nice touch, and I didn’t even feel it. At the time. Then the orderly took me out to a sand-coloured bus devoid of regimental flashes, and as I got on, pulling my kitbag after me, an RASC lance jack handed me my transit order in a sealed envelope.

  ‘Where am I going?’ I asked him.

  ‘Down Treaty Road and Canal Road, sir . . . about seventy mile.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Spinney Wood Camp, sir, just outside Ismailia. It’s the RAF Comms HQ. I expect you’ll be posted on from there. Most of the RAF lads end up at Deversoir or Fayid. You aircrew, sir?’

  �
��Sometimes – if I can’t get out of it.’

  ‘That’s the style, sir: you shouldn’t have joined up if you can’t take a joke. Don’t worry; the Army’ll get you there.’

  Whenever someone feels the need to offer me reassuring words before I’ve asked for them I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I accepted an old aluminium water bottle from him. I could hear fluid that I hoped was water sloshing about in it, and something else that rattled. I’d heard tales about the Army putting chemicals in the water to suppress men’s natural inclinations, so I hoped it wasn’t that. Meanwhile I had a headache which was not improving – I ought to have asked that doctor for an aspirin. On the upside I was heading for Ismailia, closing in on an exotic dancer with a reputation for improvisations that could bring a tear to the eye. So life wasn’t all bad.

  I was wrong, of course: it bloody was.

  They tell me that your first visual impression of the sweep of Egypt seen from the Treaty Road stays with you for ever. Mine didn’t.

  The road is a dark thread of tarmac parallel to the Canal, and literally within spitting distance of it. It runs as straight as a Roman road, skirting the salt beds of Lake Manzala, and on south to Canal Road and Ismailia. To the west – that’s on your right if you are travelling south – the desert stretches off as far as you can see. The sky is a washed-out blue, because the intense sun robs your eyes of their ability to concentrate colour. It looks like a place where nothing normal can live. I didn’t see much of that, though: after about ten minutes I began to shiver. I wrapped my flying jacket, which I had been toting over my shoulder, tightly around me and squeezed into the corner of my seat. I probably passed out soon after that.

  Nobody noticed, because my few fellow passengers – mainly old Canal Zone sweats – had settled down to sleep themselves by then. Apparently someone finally pointed out to the driver, after the stop at Gordon Camp was behind us, that an RAF officer at the back was stubbornly resisting all attempts to rouse him. Gordon Camp was about fifty miles south of Port Said – the last stop proper before Ismailia, and the complex of camps around it. I suspect that my driver wasn’t alerted before then because nobody wanted the bus delayed before it reached their own stop: your British squaddie is nothing if not practical. The driver decided to press on: any other decision would have probably earned him a thick ear anyway.

  My next proper memory – and there are a few others, mainly fragments of faces and murmurings – is of waking up in a white room with a curved ceiling, and knowing immediately that all was not well. It felt like the inside of a long Nissen hut, because it was the inside of a long Nissen hut. I’m not that fond of Nissen huts: they remind me of being forced to get into a Lancaster bomber and fly all over Germany while our German brothers were meanwhile doing their level best to kill me. I was aware immediately, though, that this wasn’t a bad dream or a flashback. Nearly everything else in the long narrow room was white as well. I knew that white: I had woken up in a bloody hospital before. After twenty minutes, a woman came to stand alongside the bed. I felt too ill to even care whether she was plain or a looker. She took my pulse. Why do nurses always do that? Even when you roll them on their backs they can’t resist the urge to take your pulse. It must be some sort of programmed reflex they develop when they’re still in training.

  ‘Welcome back, Pilot Officer. The doctors were worried about you.’

  ‘Did they blow up the bus?’ My voice was cracked and hoarse, and my mouth was dry.

  ‘No. Why do you think that?’

  ‘I missed one in Malta, and the Maltesers blew it up. I thought this might be God having a second go at me.’

  She smiled. ‘Nothing as dramatic as that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then what happened to me?’

  ‘The doctor will explain. Are you thirsty?’ I nodded my head. ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’ It was cold water sipped slowly through a straw: the best drink I ever had in my life.

  I said, ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Why don’t you sleep then?’ She picked up my limp wrist again, and I knew exactly what she was about to do. Maybe they just like to keep in practice.

  The next morning I was lifted onto a trolley, and my bed sheets and mattress changed. Two male orderlies sponged me down with cool water: they can’t have enjoyed it as much as I did. I drank a cup of very thin tea, and ate half a slice of bread and jam. Then I went to sleep again.

  I awoke feeling reasonably alert, and because I was reasonably alert quickly noticed the Port Medical Officer from Port Said standing alongside the bed beaming happily down at me.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you’re not dead. I haven’t killed a patient yet, not even a donkey . . . and didn’t want to start with you.’

  ‘I would find it hard to disagree with that, sir.’

  He pulled over a chair. It creaked when he sat down. An overhead fan nearby clicked as it revolved.

  I asked, ‘What happened to me?’ My voice was stronger.

  ‘I nearly did for you with a yellow fever jab, that’s what.’

  ‘You gave me yellow fever?’

  ‘I hope so. That’s the principle of the whole process.’ He grinned and looked younger. ‘We give you enough dead yellow fever antigen for your body to produce the necessary antibodies against the real thing. The dead virus wasn’t a problem, but what we had it in was.’

  ‘Please explain.’

  ‘The vaccination you were given wouldn’t last ten minutes after it had been manufactured unless there was a preservative in there to stop it going off. We need it to live in a fridge for at least a year. There was something in the preservative that your body didn’t like. You had an allergic reaction to it that nearly killed you.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A compound of mercury.’

  I reached over to a small bedside cupboard, and took a swig from my water through a straw. It didn’t taste anything like as good as the day before – now I fancied a beer.

  ‘When I was at school, we were taught that mercury was toxic – a poison.’

  ‘It is, but in minute concentrations it is also a magnificent preserving emulsifier for vaccines, and it doesn’t do most people any harm at all.’

  ‘But I’m allergic to it?’

  ‘Right. If ever you spill any of it on your skin in the future you have to promise me you’ll run for the nearest nurse.’

  ‘Will they know what to do?’

  ‘Probably not, but at least they can hold your hand while you die.’ It’s curious, but I miss those old service doctors now: they called it the way they saw it. ‘Have you seen your arm yet?’

  I shook my head. He unwrapped a mile of bandage from around my left upper arm. Nothing hurt up there, so I had been wondering about it. My newly exposed arm was half as thick again as nature intended, and bruised to the colour of uncooked liver. There was an open abscess the size of a joey – a threepenny bit to anyone as old as me – at the injection site, and visible cheesy pus inside it. It smelt bad.

  ‘That’s not gangrene, is it? You won’t have to cut my arm off?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It’s fine. It’s just pretending – looking for sympathy.’

  ‘It won’t get much.’

  ‘It will tomorrow – when it will itch like hell, and you will be unable to scratch it. I’ll get one of the nurses to dress it again, and then I’ll toddle off. Must be close to lunch time. I’ll come by again in five days.’

  ‘I won’t be out by then?’

  ‘No, but near enough. Ta-ra.’

  Welcome to Egypt, Charlie.

  The nurse was a tall, well-built young thing – a Queen Alexandra’s: one of the famous Grey Mafia. She was in her twenties. She had dark hair bleached several shades by the sun, luscious lips and broad shoulders. Taller than me; but, again, that’s not difficult. She must have just come on duty because she still smelled of soap, and not perspiration or stale perfume. She could also tie a pretty mean bandage.

  I asked her, ‘When can
I get up, and wander around?’

  ‘I put your clothes into the laundry. They should come back tomorrow; you can get up then.’

  There was a row of tall metal lockers across the room; I reckoned one would be mine.

  ‘That’s all right. There’s a couple of spares in my kitbag. I can get up today.’

  She shook her head, ‘I’ll make some inquiries, but nothing came off the bus with you. I’m sure of that. Certainly no kitbag.’

  It took a couple of seconds for the penny to drop. Then I realized that my fellow bus passengers had not only kept me on the bus long enough to nearly bloody kill me, they’d robbed me blind into the bargain. My third lesson from Egypt taught me never to turn my back on a fucking soul. Charlie would be turning up at his next station the way he’d arrived at several others – with just the clothes he stood up in. My flying jacket was draped over the back of a nearby chair; at least they’d left me that . . . I wondered if they’d found the small pistol in it yet. Then I began to laugh.

  Florence Nightingale went all po-faced on me, and asked, ‘Did I say something funny?’

  ‘No. Sorry. I just realized that all of my kit’s been nicked. I almost went out of this world as naked as I came in, didn’t I?’

  She gave me a funny look and said, ‘The PMO told you how touch-and-go it was then? I didn’t think he would.’

  ‘He didn’t; you just did . . . but don’t worry – I won’t tell on you.’ She must have felt foolish, because she blushed. ‘It just makes me even gladder to wake up and find people who look like you around. Dead and gone to Heaven.’ Her blush was even deeper now, but I thought I might have made a friend.

  Before she walked away from me I asked her the old classic, ‘Nurse, where am I?’

  She smiled. Everything back under control. ‘Not dead and gone to Heaven for a start. I’ve lots to do, so stop messing me about.’

  ‘I’m not. I mean it . . .’

  ‘You really don’t know where you are?’

  ‘No: nobody told me.’

  ‘El Kirsh.’