‘Oliver, then. Pilot Officer Oliver Nansen; lost but not forgotten.’
‘Oliver then . . . and Oliver, can we agree that if you don’t call me dearie again, I won’t try to make your life a misery in return?’
‘Yes, master.’ He suddenly reminded me of Bozey’s three-legged dog, and I realized that my life was about to become a little more interesting. The other thing you need to know, and I know that this has taken longer to write than I intended, is that that occasion was my introduction to one of the best men I ever met. Life deals you funny cards, and then it’s up to you to play them as well as you can.
Chapter Ten
Blue skies
A few days later I was out in the blue, riding the passenger seat of an old Austin K5 radio wagon. The driver was a short, tough Ordnance lance-jack who looked as if he’d been in the desert since puberty. Like Nansen’s, his flesh, where it was exposed to the sun, was a deep coppery red. He also appeared to know what he was doing. What surprised me was that most of the bull disappeared once these types drove off into the sand. I called him Roy, but he never called me Charlie. Everyone else called him Trigger, but that was because his last name was Rogers: you work it out. We deferred to the sergeant in charge of the patrol – only we all called him Sergeant; even me, although I technically outranked him. Like my driver, he knew what he was doing; I didn’t.
The K5 had a steel cab, but what Roy referred to as ‘hollow legs’ – he meant that she had a lightweight three-ply body on top of her chassis – which meant that all of her weight was in the right place, even if the radio shack on the back wouldn’t stop a bullet. I had a Sten on the floor between my feet, and above my head was an open observation hatch: I could stand on my seat, and fire my gun from it if I had to. I practised a few times scrambling from sitting to standing, looking out with my gun in my hands.
That amused Roy. He said, ‘Full marks for trying anyway, but don’t do it until I say so, and try not to shoot the Sergeant: he’s the only one who can find his way around out here.’
Sergeant Clare: just like the countryman poet John Clare, who I mentioned earlier. The sort of man you respect before he even opens his mouth. I had been standing beside the K5 in the Deversoir compound when Clare and his little convoy drove up. He was a passenger in the old jeep that led it. I had my pack and bedroll at my feet, a pipe in my mouth, and had been looking the other way. First impressions count, so I hope I didn’t look too much of a tosser. I was protecting my bonce with my oldest service peaked cap – it had faded to an indecent light grey by then – but I couldn’t hide the fact that I’d spent too long out in the Gyppo sun already. My elbows, knees and forearms were peeling.
I returned Clare’s salute sloppily – I’ve never been any good at them. He slid smoothly out of the jeep with, ‘Sergeant Clare, sir. Would you mind if we got cracking? You’ve had your station briefing; I can give a field briefing the first time we stop.’
‘Fine, Sergeant. Do I drive this thing, or just ride in it?’ I put my hand on the K5’s flank, and speedily took it off again. You could have boiled a kettle on it.
Clare smiled. ‘Ride in it for the time being, if you don’t mind. Have you driven a four-by-four before?’ I liked the alliteration, but shook my head. He continued, ‘I’ll show you how it works later on, but for now Driver Rogers will take her.’ A small man not much bigger than me had jumped down from the back of one of the two Bedford QL lorries that made up our company. ‘Mount up with him, and we’ll talk later. I want to be across the Canal by midday.’
He turned away, but walked back to me as I was about to climb up into the cab – it was nearly four feet off the ground. ‘Just one last thing, Mr Bassett. In a normal army in normal times, we would be said to be going out on what would be described as an armed patrol. This is not a normal army, and these are not normal times. We are not officially at war with Egypt – it is just an unfriendly power – so what you are about to be engaged on is called a scheme, not a patrol, goddit?’
‘Yes, Sergeant. I understand.’
His voice dropped about ten decibels. I think that Rogers was probably the only other person in earshot. Clare continued, ‘No, sir; I don’t think you do. What I am saying is that you are definitely not to kill anyone until I tell you to. Understood?’
‘Yes, Sergeant. Now I understand.’
It was as I climbed up into the cab that I saw the Sten that Corporal Rogers had placed in the foot well.
He said, ‘Welcome to the Sons of the Desert, sir. I’m Roy Rogers.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Roy. I’m Charlie.’
‘OK, sir.’ He nodded to where Clare was getting back into his jeep. ‘Don’t take any notice over what the Sarge just said. Just start shooting as soon as I tells you to; and I want good body shots every bleedin’ time, capisce?’ We were all using the word now. Too many bloody Eyetie film stars in the world, weren’t there?
We could have driven an hour up the Canal, and crossed on a swing bridge, and been seen by all the world and his mother, but Clare turned out to be too canny for that. We drove out of Deversoir, down to the Bitter Lake shore, and loaded up onto two landing craft. LCVs they called them, and I managed to cross the lake without getting seasick. It took about twenty minutes to load the two lorries onto one of the LCVs, and the jeep and the K5 onto the other. I got the feeling that Clare was not going to let me out of his sight for a while. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have trusted a desert novice not to fuck something up, either. We passed two flat-tops moored about fifty yards apart. One of them had about thirty bored-looking squaddies in shorts sitting on it. They waved and jeered as we chugged past. We got a few of Winston’s salutes as well.
‘Swimming lesson number six,’ Rogers informed me. We’d just been given the OK to smoke, and were leaning over the side.
‘What?’
‘It’s how they teach you to swim out here. You get a week’s light duty, but you’re expected to attend the swimming pool – like the RAF pool at Abu Sueir – for five consecutive days. Then they take you out to two barges – usually on Lake Timsah – and get you to swim from one to the other in PT half kit. That’s swimming lesson number six. If you don’t drown your record is marked that the Army’s taught you to swim.’
‘You won’t catch me doing that. I can’t stand water. I can’t breathe in it.’
‘You don’t have to. Your head’s underneath it most of the time, so all you have to do is remember to keep yer mouth shut.’
I had never been any good at keeping my mouth shut. That was probably written into my record somewhere as well.
The Sergeant was sitting in the well of the craft with his back against its side. His beret, already thick with dust and the other shit in the air, was tipped over his eyes, and his easy breathing suggested he was asleep. He’d adopted this position as soon as he was satisfied that the jeep and the K5 were properly lashed down. He didn’t even stir when I joined him. After about five minutes of the gentle buffeting of the vessel, my chin dropped to my chest too, and my eyes closed. I could cope with this: like a bleeding holiday camp. I opened my eyes again when he spoke to me. I don’t know how long I’d been dozing.
He suddenly asked, ‘What do you think of Egypt so far, Mr Bassett?’
‘It stinks.’
Then he surprised me by asking, ‘Literally or metaphorically, would that be?’
‘Both, Sergeant.’
He grunted and stopped speaking. Had that been a test question? If so, had I given the correct answer? My eyes closed again. When I awoke Trigger was whistling Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue skies’. I still have the Josephine Baker recording of that, and when I play it am immediately transported in my mind to two small ships bobbing up and down on the Great Bitter Lake. Three quarters of an hour later everyone started to move around again, and ten minutes after that we were driving up onto a stony shore with a few scrub trees. Then I realized why Moses led his people out of Egypt. It had nothing to do with the persecution of the tri
be of Israel, and nothing to do with God promising them another land. It was because Egypt is such a horrible fucking place to begin with.
There were ten of us. Two in each vehicle cab and two spare. The others were all Ordnance Corps according to their flashes, but the RAOC conceals a multitude of sins; these bastards could have a hundred homicidal skills or none at all. The two spares did most of the domestics.
The land rose and fell, but always in gentle slopes, and even the valleys were shallow stony places. We ground along open scrub desert and old camel tracks – sometimes where they crossed each other was marked by an old rusted oil drum: once one was even holding up a canted original English country road sign. It had three arms. One read Ifold 3 miles, another Loxwood 2 1/3 miles and the last one said Horsham. All this in the middle of the fucking Egyptian desert, east of Suez. What joker had carted it all the way here? I’ve wanted to go to Loxwood and Ifold ever since, and never made it. I wonder what’s there.
We stopped in some low ground after noon, and rigged tarps out from the sides of the lorries, for a little shelter from the sun.
‘You pays your money, sir, and takes your choice,’ Clare told me. ‘Either we sit on the top of a ridge and can be seen for miles around, or in the troughs, which are a degree or so cooler, but from where we can’t see anyone creeping up on us.’
I asked myself who could possibly want to creep around out there anyway, but wanting to appear interested, observed, ‘You could always put a lookout up on the ridge.’
Rogers looked up from his char, suddenly alarmed. He shook his head, but it was too late.
Clare said, ‘That’s what I usually do, Mr Bassett. I was wondering if you and Rogers’d do first stag when you’ve finished your char. I’ll send someone up for you after an hour.’
Trust me to bloody well walk straight into it.
As we were trudging up the slope, toting a Bren gun and two spare magazines, I apologized to Rogers. We had a half canteen of water between the two of us, and that was supposed to last an hour.
‘My fault. Sorry about that. I should have kept my gob shut.’
His upside-down smile turned quickly to a rueful grin, ‘You’ll know better next time, then, won’t you? You’ll have to watch the Sarge; he can be a bit cute.’
He had dipped his handkerchief in a water bucket before we set out, and wrung it out over the same container so’s not to waste the stuff. Then he spread it over his neck and tucked it under the back of his black beret. I copied him. The damp cotton clinging to my neck, as we climbed, was bliss. We were only twenty feet or so above the trucks when we settled down. I’d always imagined deserts to be dunes of rolling sand. Not this stuff, however – just staggered low ridges of stone and coarse ground rolling away to the north and east for ever. It was an uninviting grey plain of absolutely fuck-all. A few scrubby plants looked dead until you were close to them, and then realized that they were still just clinging on to life . . . and it was so hot I thought I couldn’t breathe.
‘Breathe through your nose,’ Roy instructed me. ‘That will cool it just enough for you.’
At the far end of my line of sight, the desert shook and shimmered in a haze that joined it to the sky. A snake moved from under a stone about six feet away from us. It was less than a foot long and as thick as a finger. A brown, rough-scaled body and a flat triangular head. I’d had a decent relationship with a snake once: this one looked meaner.
‘Desert viper,’ Trigger told me. ‘Bad buggers; they can kill you.’ When I raised a large rock to crush it he held my hand back, with, ‘But that ain’t no reason to go killing it. Watch.’ He tossed a small round pebble close to its head. The snake arched its neck and hissed violently, but then beat a hasty retreat. I eventually lost sight of it. He continued, ‘They’re as shortsighted as fuck. It probably never even saw us; so it never meant you no harm.’ We settled down to keep watch in opposite directions, propped up against a couple of the larger stones. ‘Tell me if you see any flies,’ Trigger told me.
‘OK. Why?’
‘Show you later.’
Clare was as good as his word. We were relieved within the hour.
Trigger sat under one of the awnings with an old copy of TitBits. I crawled inside the wooden radio room on the back of the K5. It was shady in there, but even with the back door and the vents open it was as hot as hell. I felt exhausted and quickly dozed. Maybe sleeping a lot was what Egypt was about. The last thing I heard before I dropped off was Roy sniggering at some of the dirty jokes.
Clare got us moving again at 15.30. If there was now coolness in the air, I hadn’t noticed it yet. He had me call in before we set off. My call sign was Morecambe, just like Watson had threatened, and the Morse strip I had to broadcast was D980BETT571. On the second day the 1 was to change to a 2, and so on. I wasn’t in for one of Watson’s listening watches until the next night, when we were up closer to the old Palestine border.
I wanted to leave the radio pre-set for the next scheduled call in, but the Sergeant cautioned against it. He had me scramble the tuning after each session, in case the truck was captured by the opposition, and they could see at a glance what profile we were using. I suppose that was more professional, but to tell the truth all they had to do was sweep the wavebands until they found us anyway – time-consuming, but more or less fool-proof. I wasn’t all that sure who the opposition were anyway. The wogs or the Israelis? We’d fought both in the last couple of years. If they both decided to come after us at the same time, I couldn’t see us remaining in the Canal Zone for all that long.
Each of the vehicles had a roll of barbed wire hanging in front of its radiator. I found out what it was used for when we stopped at dusk a few hours later. We were on one of those messed-up camel tracks, going through a wide flat depression, when Clare called a halt. He pulled the group off the road, and they parked the vehicles up like a wagon train circling against the Red Indians – only about ten feet apart. And that’s exactly what we were, so perhaps the old tunes are always the best ones – because they proceeded to string the barbed wire between the trucks. One of the spares – a young national serviceman named Cyril – dug a latrine in looser soil a few feet outside our mobile fortlet, and the other lads dug a few shallow ‘scrapes’ in the surface inside it. These might have just provided a bit of cover if the bullets had started in at us. After an hour, Clare inspected our defences, and declared himself satisfied. Everyone relaxed, and Roy lit a desert stove to start a cook-up.
The desert stove is a small, cut-down oil drum full of sand, doused with petrol and oil and allowed to burn: you can boil a billycan on it in minutes. Desert rations were eight tins of bully chopped fine, with an onion, and dropped in a saucepan with eight tins of baked beans . . . and each plate accompanied by a couple of doorsteps of bread without butter. All washed down with a bottle of warm Stella we weren’t supposed to have. We sat around the stove as the air cooled. I hadn’t expected such a wide variation in temperatures, and was now glad of the sweater that Nansen had told me to take along.
One of the squaddies remarked, ‘Roll on tomorrer. I can’t wait for me egg.’ This seemed odd, because I knew that we had none.
The sky went black, and you could see a billion billion stars. A tall, thin 24-monther picked out the constellations we were not familiar with – he was going back to be an astronomer – and Clare eventually chipped in to explain how to use some for desert navigation. Rogers sang a folk song called ‘The Lincolnshire poacher’, and revealed he had a singing voice as pure as a choirboy’s. A couple of guys told bad jokes; another described his home town in Devon on market day. Clare was going to have us away early the next day; not long after sun-up, so we soon began to get our heads down. The Sergeant was the only one to sleep in the open, under the sky. The rest of us split for our transport. Rogers slept in the K5’s cab, and I bunked down in the radio shack.
I was one of the last to leave the warm shroud of the stove. As I did, Clare looked up, gave a twitchy little smile
and said, ‘You did all right, Mr Bassett. I think you have the makings of a soldier.’
All I did was wave back to show I’d heard him . . . and I had one of those odd moments when your brain suddenly notices I’m happy here, and says, Don’t forget this.
I was awoken the next morning by a persistent buzzing noise. When I opened my eyes I registered that I was bunked on the floor of the radio room, and that half a dozen flies were formation-flying close to its roof. They were noisy little buggers. I watched them doing half-rolls to land upside down on the ceiling near the ventilator. The laws of physics tell us that is an impossible manoeuvre, but flies never study physics, do they? They only fly.
Then I remembered something Roy had told me, yawned, stood up and hammered on the wall of my shack, which was also the back of his cab. He opened the sliding window between us and yawned back at me.
‘Yeah, what is it?’
‘You asked me to tell you when I saw any flies. There are some in here with me now.’
I have to admit old Roy could move when he had to. By the time I had climbed down, he was standing stark-naked, Sten in hand, at the wire between the K5 and the next truck in the circle – one of the QLs as it happened. His bottom was absurdly white. He was studying the progress of an Arab leading a donkey, who was approaching us along the valley floor.
‘You can cover your cock up, Roy.’ That was the Sergeant’s voice. ‘. . . I’ve watched him coming. I’m sure he’s on his own.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘And hurry it up, there’s a good lad. That big black bag on the back of the ass probably contains his woman.’
I’d been sleeping in my shorts anyway, so it was less of a problem to me. I joined Clare at the wire to greet our visitor. He was a tall, thin million-year-old Arab man in an unusually immaculate djellaba.
He smiled at Clare and said, ‘Salaam aleikum, Sergeant.’ He had a wonderfully modulated English drawl: right out of the top drawer. Wherever you go, they speak better English than you do. George Sanders sounded like him.
Silent War Page 17