Apart from a full mile and a half of wire, I had a couple of two-man foot patrols, who met in the middle for a fag before they turned back, and two ramshackle observation posts. One of those was on top of a water tank, standing about twelve feet off the ground – it was supposed to cover a couple of stores buildings. I sat in a satellite guardhouse in touch with the outliers by a twenty-year-old radio telephone. Naturally, it was a useless piece of junk: because you wouldn’t send the British serviceman into a hostile country with decent equipment, would you? He might win a battle or something, and that would never do.
When I looked at the home receiver set – it was like a small, portable telephone switchboard – I could actually see the sharp blue flare of sparks from two of the wires at the back. They were continuously shorting across. I was surprised that the fucking thing hadn’t electrocuted someone.
Before he left me Cox pointed at it and said, ‘You can talk to your people on that if you like, sir, but you’ll find there’s massive interference, and you have to listen very sharply. It’s often difficult to make out what’s said. One of the squadron technical officers says it’s the atmospherics in this part of the world.’
After Cox left, Hoskins told me, ‘I wouldn’t touch it if I was you, sir. You get electric shocks off it all the time.’
I could hear the generator wheezing away outside: if the bloody system was connected to that they’d black the entire camp out one night.
‘That’s why you can’t hear what you’re saying to each other on the bloody thing. Do you want me to fix it for you?’
‘Can you, sir?’
‘Piece of piss.’
Hoskins visibly winced: I’d have to watch my language. He was a tall, gangly-looking man in his early twenties. He wore round wire-rimmed spectacles, and spoke with a plummy apologetic tone . . . you knew instinctively that he’d been a clumsy git all his life. He looked too old for a national serviceman. I remarked on that, and he replied, ‘I finished at university first. Then I had to do the call-up, sir. Only six months left to do.’
‘What did you study?’
‘I read English Literature and Divinity, sir.’
We all read English Literature, you prat, but what did you study? Then I remembered that read and studied meant the same thing to these educated types. I was surprised he’d lasted out here so long.
‘What are you going to do with it when you get home?’
‘I want to be a novelist, sir.’
‘No money in it,’ I grunted, ‘. . . and one sir every ten minutes will do, if that’s all right with you. I’d join an advertising agency if I was you, and write advertising copy for them. It’s the future of literature.’
‘Does it pay better, sir?’
‘Not necessarily, but you do get to look at pictures of naked girls a lot of the time.’ I was thinking of the calendar hanging in our tent. The only thing the girl was wearing was a sailor’s cap. Hoskins seemed to brighten up a bit after that. I didn’t. I turned away from him, and made a job of filling my pipe and lighting it. I’d need some tobacco from the NAAFI before long.
The reason I was suddenly a little downcast was that it had occurred to me to set what I’d just said to Hoskins alongside what had happened to Daisy. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t as easy as cause and effect; at least, I hoped not. But there was something there. Some connection that made me uncomfortable. Something to do with the way we talked about women, and our attitude, and what sometimes happened afterwards. I decided to talk to Haye with an e about it the next time I met her. I remembered the old-stager at Padgate who had taught us how to take care of our kit. Attitude, he’d say, holding up a shining pair of boots. Attitude, gentlemen, is everything. Attitude makes things happen. Maybe he was right. But that went for bad things, as well as good things. Maybe that was it.
I asked Hoskins, ‘Did I get you into a spot of bother with the SWO?’
‘No, sir. It’s just that I’ve never been able to stop myself noticing the absurd side of service life. Some of the things we say and do are just plain silly, but we are expected to stand there, and not even smile. Even with two years in, I can’t do that. The NCOs hate me; I’m always getting caned for it.’ Not literally I hoped; they’d been supposed to stop flogging soldiers years ago.
‘Can you drive, Hoskins?’
‘Yes, sir. Do you want me to drive you?’
‘No. I want you to drive yourself.’
A cloud drifted across his face as he adopted the expression that clever people use to disguise the fact that they haven’t a bleeding clue.
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘I want to make good this shit-heap of a telephone they’ve left us with. That will take me about twenty minutes, once I’ve got the stuff I need. During those twenty minutes the telephones won’t work. It means that our patrols and the blokes on stag won’t be able to call up help if there’s an emergency. So I want you to drive up and down between them, keeping the comms open in the old-fashioned way – word of mouth. Do you understand?’
He gave me a sudden bright grin. ‘Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, sir. He used runners to stay in touch with Sparta.’
He might have come up with a more encouraging simile.
‘Wasn’t he killed; and all his army with him?’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘So where can I find a pair of scissors, a small screwdriver and some insulating tape?’
It took us longer to find the kit than for me to do the job itself. Once I’d scraped the wires back I could see that they’d been insulated before but that the tape had dried out, cracked into pieces and fallen away. I taped a hand-printed note to the back for good measure, advising them to replace the insulation every three months. It was nice to feel useful for once.
When I lifted the handset and threw the small toggle that connected me to the water tower, the loud and clear response I got from the other end was, ‘Christ, who’s that?’
‘Guard commander, you fool.’
‘But I can hear you, sir.’
‘Of course you can sodding hear me; I’ve repaired your sodding telephone.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
That is the ultimate tragedy of other ranks: they spend half their time apologizing for something they haven’t done.
‘Can you see the jeep?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Flag it down with your signal lamp, then climb down and tell Hoskins to come back; all is forgiven.’
When Hoskins came back in, bringing the smell of the desert with him, the first thing he asked was, ‘Forgiven for what, sir?’ One of these literally literary types.
We were sipping char from big ally mugs when the telephone jangled at me. It was the furthest patrol. Whenever anything goes wrong on a stag it’s always at the place furthest from you. I flipped the right toggle and lifted the handset, but before I could hear anything being said we could both hear the man screaming at the other end. There were no actual words. Just screams. Fuck it. Hoskins grabbed the Stirling and ran for the door. He used the words that had just crossed my mind.
‘Fuck it! C’mon, sir. Let’s go . . .’ Then he shouted back to an open door behind me in the office, ‘Mind the phone, Toby.’ It was the first time I realized that there had been anyone else there; he must have had his head down all along.
I let Hoskins drive. He wasn’t all that good, but he was fast, and that’s what we needed. The only thing he said on the drive was, ‘Fucking wogs!’ He’d obviously been in this movie before.
At one point he clipped a guy-rope of a tent at the end of the tent lines, and dragged the damned thing with us for a few yards before it broke free. He was moving so fast that we were out of range of the shouts from the tent’s occupants within seconds.
The field telephone was on a telegraph pole at head height, inside the wire at the inner ditch, at the northwestern corner of the camp. Beyond it was the wire, the outer trench and hundreds of miles of fucking desert, lit up by the occ
asional small circle of one of our lights. Not that it was dark: the black sky above us was a sea of stars. Hoskins was out of the wagon before me. He crouched by the jeep, making a very low target. I thought he looked as if he knew what he was doing, so I copied him.
He whispered, ‘Where are they?’
There was a point to his question because the telephone handset attached to the box attached to the telegraph pole was dangling free. It had not been replaced. In fact it was even still swinging to and fro, although there was no hint of a breeze. The guard was not in sight.
‘Where are they?’ Hoskins whispered again. I could see he was scanning the desert for movement, and the wire for gaps. There were neither.
When he said it the third time he spoke louder. There was even a hint of exasperation in his voice. ‘Where the fuck are they?’
‘Down here . . .’ a weak voice replied. It wasn’t mine.
Hoskins and I were virtually on our knees by then. He because he was an efficient serviceman with a healthy respect for his own skin, and me out of sheer funk. We crawled over to the ditch that was on our side of the wire. It was about six feet deep at this point. Two pale faces looked up at us. ‘Down here.’
‘What are you doing down there?’ That was Hoskins of course. He was probably command material but no one had bothered to tell him.
‘Hiding from the lion. Can ye no see it?’
We pulled them out: two terrified servicemen who wanted nothing other than to go home. There was one named Scottie who sounded like one, and there was the other one. The other one didn’t sound like anything, because he didn’t say anything. He was shaking with huge tremors. When he dropped his rifle he let it lie there.
‘Pick it up, son.’ I hope I sounded kinder than the words look. He bent to pick it up, but still didn’t say a word, and wouldn’t look at me. ‘What lion?’ I asked the other.
‘A fucking great lion. It was in the compound. When I turned round, it was right behind us. Tell him, Daniel.’
The other man tried to speak, but his head was shaking and all that came out was a strange sound like ‘Day . . . day . . . day . . .’
‘Don’t bother,’ I told him, and asked the Scot, ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘He could have reached out, and chuffed it under the chin, sir: it was that close. When Daniel jumped straight inta the trench I don’t know who was the more alarmed: me or the lion.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Jumped in after him. Sorry, sir, but I wasn’t facing that fucking thing on my own.’
I let them sit in the back of the jeep and smoke a couple of fags. I called in from the telephone. Toby, whoever the hell he was, said nothing else was happening.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked Hoskins. I know that it should have been the other way round, but you have to let common sense come into these things: Hoskins knew what he was doing; I didn’t.
‘Why don’t you leave me here, sir? I’ll patrol up to the other team, and tell them you said for them to change over with me and take this section.’
‘They’ll know something’s up. They’ll want to know why.’
‘I’ll tell them Dan’s been taken sick; they don’t need to know anything until after you’ve sorted it out. Then you can send Toby out to join me, and we’ll finish the night that way.’ I couldn’t think of anything better. ‘Old Tobe will moan a bit if you give him a chance, sir, so make your orders direct and unambiguous. Don’t give him room to wriggle.’
The last thing I said to him before I drove off into the dark with my two Bravehearts was, ‘I get the feeling that maybe I owe you a couple of drinks the next time we’re off.’
‘That would be a pleasure, sir,’ and he saluted me. I’d have to get used to this saluting lark again.
The shaking man spoke to me for the first time before we left the jeep, right outside my office. He said, ‘Daniel.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ He might as well have said locomotive or coleus for all it meant to me.
‘Daniel, sir: my name. I knew it would get me into trouble one day.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’cha read yer Bible, sir? Daniel in the fucking lions’ den . . . sir?’ He actually didn’t look all that well: in fact he looked deranged. Maybe our excuse would hold.
‘Er . . . why don’t we all go inside and get some char?’
It wasn’t quite that straightforward because SWO Cox was sitting in my chair by the telephone. I sent Toby whatever-his-name-was to link up with Hoskins, and the others through to the galley.
Cox said, ‘Morning, sir. Spot of bother?’
‘Good morning, Mr Cox. Do you always come out this often?’ It was past four in the morning now; didn’t the man ever bloody sleep? He was immaculately turned out, and looked as if he’d just shaved.
‘No, sir. Only when I get a bad feeling. I had a good feeling about leaving you in charge, in fact, but then I had a bad feeling half an hour ago, and I woke up. I get a sort of pins and needles in my thumbs and forefingers whenever something’s going wrong, sir.’
‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes . . . something like that?’
‘Exactly like that sir. Macbeth. Now would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on . . . sir?’ I loved that pause he put before the sir; I’ve used it so many times myself.
‘Certainly, Mr Cox, but first I want a cup of tea.’
I told him about Daniel in the lions’ den. I told him that the guard had seen something that had spooked them. Something they thought was a full-grown lion.
He said, ‘I don’t think there are any lions left in Egypt. I haven’t heard of any, sir.’
‘That’s what I was told when I saw one in Ismailia a few days ago.’
‘Seriously, sir?’
‘Seriously. The Army says that there have been no free-roaming lions in Egypt for at least a hundred years, and that I must have been seeing things. The Army is always right.’
‘Yes, sir, it is.’
I could see something was eating him.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘If our boys spend half the night looking over their shoulders for lions, sir, they won’t see the wogs when they come creeping up on them . . . and the wogs are much more likely to do them harm.’
‘So it would be better if they never found out about the lion our two chaps thought they saw. So it wasn’t a lion: just like mine. They probably mistook it for a cover flapping in the wind, some loose paper and a feral cat. Something like that?’
‘Thank you, Mr Bassett.’ I could almost see the little wheels churning inside his head as he turned the implication over. ‘The two lads will keep their traps shut, if they think their pals will laugh at them for being frightened into the ditch by a cat. ’Specially if I tell them.’
‘Least said, soonest mended.’
‘My thoughts exactly, sir.’
‘Your man Hoskins was pretty useful tonight,’ I told him. ‘He thinks pretty quickly, you know.’ I might as well try to get him off whatever Cox had planned for him. I needn’t have bothered.
‘He’s the makings of a fine airman, sir, although he doesn’t know it yet. It wouldn’t be a bad thing for the service if he opted to stay. Maybe in the Regiment. I intended to speak to him about it in the morning.’ I’ve already told you about these SWOs: you can never bloody tell.
‘I’m going to step outside for a minute to have a smoke, SWO. You might want to inspect the telephone while I’m away.’
‘I told you it was a useless piece of kit, sir.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t. I repaired the bloody thing in fifteen minutes . . . and I’d like you to make sure it never gets into that state again.’ The boot never feels better than when it is on the other foot.
He grinned, and said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He even saluted.
I wasn’t sure any more whether he was supposed to. Maybe he was just taking the mick. Was I still in the RAF? And, if so
, what the bloody hell was it up to? Because there wasn’t much bloody flying going on.
Late the next morning I cycled out to the ditch we’d pulled our bold boyos from, but SWO Cox had beaten me to it. I was there to see if I could find any lion tracks: I reckoned a ghost lion wouldn’t leave any. He was already there with a broom in his hand.
I asked, ‘I don’t suppose that there were any big-cat footprints in the sand, Mr Cox?’
‘Not one, sir.’ He sounded very cheerful. ‘You were right; must have been all in their imagination.’ But I could see his brush marks; they stretched for at least twenty-five yards. I wonder if anyone had seen the SWO personally sweeping up sand in the corner of a camp that was full of the bloody stuff and, if so, what they’d made of it.
I didn’t tell him what I’d found outside my tent when I crawled out of my pit at 1100. There in the dust was a perfect cat’s imprint: four toes and a big central pad. When I bent down to it I found it was as large as my spread hand.
We sipped tea on the veranda of the Men’s Ward just like old friends. Haye with an e and me.
Daisy had reappeared at Deversoir and taken up her duties, but not quite as if nothing had happened. She was still subdued; nothing like her old self. Watson was also back, and we’d both carefully avoided a showdown. I was tossing up whether to mention the Stirling bomber or not. Maybe if I ignored it, it would go away. He said he worried that Daisy’s women’s trouble might be some form of tumour – apparently a woman in his family had died from one. As far as I knew no one had told him the truth, but he could also be double-bluffing me, couldn’t he? When I was around them it felt as if there was a fragile sort of equilibrium which might blow up in our faces at any moment – so I stayed away as much as I could. I got a chit for a day off from him, and bummed a lift up to see Susan.
Silent War Page 24