Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  He continued. ‘There’s a band over from the UK on at the cinema tonight: I got you a couple of tickets so you could take Daisy. Not my kind of thing.’ He handed me a flyer for the Ivy Benson All Girls Orchestra. I didn’t know how well orchestral music would go down with the troops, but the all-women element would guarantee a decent crowd. Maybe I’d misjudged him. Maybe not.

  As I left he said, ‘Get your things together; you’ll be off in a few days.’

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t urgent, sir.’

  ‘It is now. There are some other sods out there looking for it. You’ll be off as soon as Hudd gets here.’

  ‘Where is he at present, or aren’t I supposed to ask?’

  ‘Where the hell do you think Australians are most of the time? Bloody Australia of course! Best place for ’em! Sometimes I think you’re a bit thick, Charlie.’

  I looked in on Daisy as I left him, handed her an envelope on which I had printed her name, but said aloud, in case Watson was looking, ‘Could you post that for me?’ and, ‘See you tonight if you want to hear this band.’

  ‘Love to, Charlie. I’ve run out of books and magazines.’ I wondered if she’d realized what she now had in her hand: she hadn’t run out of pictures to look at, anyway.

  She played ‘Jazz me blues’, and the notes from her silver cornet fell around the open-air camp cinema like silver raindrops. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.

  This was the new cinema, built closer to the centre of Deversoir, and its periphery was patrolled by cops during the shows. The old one had been built too close to the fence line, and too low apparently, so the wogs kept lobbing hand grenades into it, and spoiling the films. The WD never likes to admit a mistake, so the first counter to that had been to put a wire fence around the top of it, but the Gyppoes responded by using old-fashioned slings to get the grenades over the top. It’s a nice picture: a people’s army taking on a mechanized military monster with the same sort of sling David used against Goliath, and forcing a retreat. The Gaza Palestinians are using exactly the same slings against Israeli tanks today.

  Watson had done us proud, of course; we had a seat in the front row on the end of a line of staff officers, and what goes around comes around, because Dr Jazz spotted me as soon as she came on stage. She winked very obviously at me as she sat down, and from behind me a great roar went up. Someone behind dug me in the back, and someone else patted me on the shoulder.

  Daisy whispered, ‘Does she know you?’

  ‘I met her once, in Croydon of all places. She became intimately acquainted with my bum. People usually go to Croydon to die of boredom.’

  ‘I come from Croydon. I went to grammar school there.’

  ‘In which case I take that back. With you and Dr Jazz both recommending it, it must be the most interesting place in Blighty.’

  ‘Is that her real name?’

  ‘No: I never learned that. She was a doctor at my medical. Later that night I caught her playing jazz in an old pub named the Dog and Bull – it’s wonderful how pub names stick in your mind.’

  That was all we had time for. They kicked off with ‘I cover the waterfront’, and the boys went totally mad. I suppose that I’d earlier associated the word orchestra with classical music. I couldn’t have got further from the truth. These girls played jazz and swing so hard that Major Glenn Miller himself would have snapped up any of them for his USAAF band. I can recall now looking up at the soft night sky, and those billions of stars, and letting the jazz wash over us, and making a mental note to create some memories of the night. They played ‘Ladybird’ and ‘Jealousy’. Thousands and thousands of honeyed notes surrendered to the night sky. I wondered what it sounded like from beyond the camp’s boundaries – out in the blue.

  The doctor herself actually sought me out in the beer queue at the interval.

  She said, ‘Sarah Drake,’ as she held out her hand. ‘We were never introduced before. The girls call me Ducky.’ She knew my name, of course, and I introduced Daisy, who looked a bit overawed.

  I asked Sarah, ‘What happened to doctoring?’

  ‘It can wait. If you had to choose between this, and sticking needles in hairy bums all day long, what would you do?’

  ‘I see your point. Depends how clean the bums were, I suppose, and whether I liked inflicting pain. I even thought you were a bit of an Irma when I met you. You’re a very good musician, you know.’

  ‘I know darling; you don’t have to tell me. How do you think I got the job? What do you do over here anyway? I remember you were a radio operator, but I haven’t seen any aeroplanes since I’ve been here.’

  ‘I skive mainly, but we do have a few kites if you know where to look for them.’

  We’d arrived at the counter, and I paid for six beers. They could have been larger, but at least they were cold.

  I asked Ducky, ‘How many shows are you doing?’

  ‘Three in the camps, one in a Kiwi transit camp up in Port Said, and a few of us are playing at an embassy reception in Cairo next week. We’ll catch up with the main band in Cyprus, and do a couple of shows there.’

  ‘Busy schedule.’

  ‘Not busy enough: most of the girls in the band will be pregnant by the end of this tour, if they’re not careful.’

  ‘But not you?’ I chanced it.

  ‘Trust me, darling, I’m a doctor.’ And I’m Charlie’s Aunt!

  ‘You fancy joining us for a drink afterwards?’

  ‘Sorry, Charlie; some old wing commander’s already booked me. Nice meeting you again, though. Nice to know the jabs I gave you kept you alive.’

  The stage bell was ringing for round two. I said, ‘The one you didn’t nearly killed me.’

  She frowned and said, ‘Say again . . . ?’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll tell you next time.’ We split. Crowds of KDs swirled between us, and Daisy and I concentrated on getting our seats back without spilling the beer.

  I said, ‘You were a bit quiet, Daisy.’

  ‘She’s very glamorous: I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘She sits down to pee, Daisy: just like you. I shouldn’t let any of the rest of it bother you.’ I was reverting, wasn’t I? The magic dust must have been wearing off.

  Daisy was quiet, but as the beautiful band filed back on stage she whispered, ‘Sometimes, Charlie, you can be absolutely foul.’ Me and my big mouth, I hoped I hadn’t lost my only ally in Watson’s camp.

  It didn’t stop her giving me a goodnight peck on the cheek after I’d walked her back to her quarter.

  ‘Thank you for a lovely night, Charlie. Just for a few hours it was like being back at home.’

  ‘You’re not still mad at what I said?’

  ‘Of course not . . . and thank you for giving me my photographs back.’

  ‘What photographs?’ I asked, and stole a real kiss before I left her there. It seemed to me that the taste of her kiss was still on my lips when I climbed into Hudd’s bloody aircraft the next morning.

  It was another Varsity, with an especially modified passenger door to enable the passengers to jump out. To jump out three thousand feet above the ground, that is. It was a very pretty aeroplane, but you won’t be surprised to learn that it was hate at first sight as far as I was concerned. It was painted a washed-out tawny colour on top, and a washed-out bluey colour underneath, and the two colours sort of washed into each other: I’m sure you get the picture. It had Australian national markings, in order to comply with international law, but they were so small that you had to look for them. I thought it was a serious sort of aircraft.

  Hudd’s man hawked like an Arab and said, ‘Triffic camouflage, mate: no one can see us up there.’

  ‘They won’t have to, will they? There will be just us and the mountains and a few thousand goats. But they’ll hear us coming for miles.’

  ‘You Poms always find something to whinge about; you know that?’

  I was still digesting Hudd’s briefing. The Varsity door slid open
instead of being hinged, and it had been enlarged. All I had to do was sit on the ledge, and roll forward when they told me to. And I didn’t have a plonker to pull. I was hitched up to the aircraft on a static line which deployed my parachute after I was in clean air. That was the theory of it, anyway. If the main chute didn’t deploy, I had a small emergency job on my chest, and I could pop that by hand. If I could find a hand. The really silly bit was a package the size of a kitbag tethered around my ankle. It was supposed to hang six feet under me as I fell, and hit the ground before I did. Hudd cautioned me about getting tangled up in it as I rolled . . . and, because of the extra weight of course, I was going to fall a lot faster than I had before.

  ‘Piece of piss,’ Hudd said after he had finished explaining.

  ‘No, Hudd, pissing myself is what I will be doing on the way down.’

  ‘I’ll make sure I’m not underneath you then, mate; so you can jump first. You’ll be all right, Charlie. I had you investigated when your name came up.’

  ‘What do you mean investigated?’

  ‘I got some pals to ask some of their pals a few questions. They said you were all right. One RAF copper called you a homicidal Englishman. You really shoot one of your officers a few years back?’

  ‘Nobody’s supposed to know that. The bastard went mad, and tried to kill me. What was I supposed to do, lie back and think of England?’

  ‘Keep your hair on, mate. You can shoot as many of the bastards as you want as far as we’re concerned.’

  ‘But you’re an officer yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah; but I didn’t start out that way, did I? And it still don’t feel right.’

  That did it. It broke the tension in me. I stuck out my paw and shook his hand.

  ‘Then I’m your man, Mr Hudd. I thought I was the only one in uniform who felt like that.’

  ‘Christ no, Charlie. There’s bloody thousands of us. Mount up now, before you make me cry.’

  What was that song from the 1930s? ‘Here we go into the wide blue yonder’. The bastard composer must have written it for me.

  Daisy was standing at the end of the airstrip waving to us with a coloured scarf. The Varsity’s twin Hercules radials blew sand all over her, and for a moment I lost sight of her. When I picked her up again, I could swear that bloody lion was sitting meekly alongside her.

  The Varsity bounced a couple of times on its short nose-wheel as the pilot ran her up against her brakes, and then he let her go. She was a smooth old bitch, even if I say so myself. When was that? About 10 o’clock on an April morning in 1953. What I was thinking about as we became airborne was my old man, and his Redcoats go home! and I smiled. He would be having his breakfast just about now . . . if he wasn’t in jail again.

  ‘Ya gotta remember, Charlie,’ Hudd’s man yelled in my ear. ‘Sit with ya feet over the sill, hold ya sack in ya lap, duck down an’ roll forward. Once yer outa the ship let go of the sack an’ its weight will pull ya upright. Then the ’chute will open with a bang. You jumped before ain’t you?’ I nodded. He added, ‘Piece a piss.’

  Second bastard to tell me that in a few hours. We were droning over brown mountains. We had been droning over brown mountains for hours. Some of them still had snow on their boots.

  I yelled back, ‘What if we get split up?’

  ‘We won’t. You’ll jump first, an’ we’ll steer our ’chutes to land near you. Piece a piss.’ We’d have to do something about expanding his vocabulary if we got away with this.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting on the sill, clutching that bloody kitbag to my chest. My feet were out of the aircraft, and were being swept sideways by the slipstream. Someone who called himself ‘the jump master’ was crouching behind me, and I was literally shaking with fear this time. The only concession to safety was the silly thing like a racing cyclist’s helmet I had on my bonce. A small red light came on above my head; I tucked my chin into my chest, and waited for the tap on my shoulder. It never came. The bastard behind me pushed my head down further, and rolled me out. Cold air on my cheeks. Tears dragged out. I let go of the sack. Jerked upright . . . and then that other bloody jerk as the parachute snapped open with a pop, and the canopy crackled above me as it sorted itself out. Three jumps so far, and the parachute had opened properly each time. I tried to calculate the odds of the next one going wrong, and couldn’t.

  Peace. Cold right hand because I had lost my glove. Brilliant blue sky. A few puffy white clouds sailing like yachts above me. I looked around: Hudd’s man was literally only twenty yards away. He grinned, and actually took one hand off his shroud lines to wave. That spun him away from me, and I watched as he straightened his shrouds, and used his deadweight as a pendulum, to bring himself back. By twisting my head to look over my other shoulder, I could see Hudd above me, and over to the left – not much further away. He had his knees and feet together, just like in the book. I tried to copy him.

  Only minutes later, it seemed, the sack attached to my right ankle hit the deck, followed by me. I rolled once before it dragged me into a shallow gully and wrapped me up in my shroud lines. The parachute continued to billow above me like a captive balloon. If you’ve jumped you’ll know what I mean: we’ve all been there at least once.

  As I landed, I distinctly saw a small snake wriggling to get away from me: my shadow passing overhead must have spooked it. It must have mistaken me for an enormous bird of prey. It looked like one of those small desert vipers. As I sat up, I saw similar flashy movements in the clumps of scrubby hard grass around me. So I shouted,

  ‘Snakes!’

  Hudd’s head poked over the edge of the gully. He said, ‘Shut up, Charlie. You’ll scare them. Just watch where you put your hands and feet an’ you’ll be OK. Stand up now.’ I stood, feeling a little foolish. ‘Now bend, pop your sack, and hand its strap up to me.’ The sack had a snap release from the leather strap that had secured it to my ankle. I bent down and did as he said. Looking for those tell-tale shapes in the grass, I saw one. It was a yard from me, and watching me with beady yellow eyes.

  I knew a rattlesnake named Alice once, and rather admired her uncompromisingly vile temper, but we always outnumbered her so that was OK. Now the boot was on the other foot, and I didn’t like it. The bloody things were all around me. I handed Hudd the line attached to the sack, and he hauled it up to where he was standing. Then he reached a hand down and pulled me out.

  Hudd’s man was sitting in the scrub a few yards away. He had pulled his arm out of his jacket sleeve, and had split his shirt sleeve up to the biceps. He was injecting himself. He was giving himself an injection in the back of his hand, and then another high up on his arm.

  ‘Antivenom,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Snake bit.’ He showed me two small puncture marks on the back of his hand. The skin around them was reddened to the size of a sixpence. ‘Bit right through me glove. Feisty little beggars ain’t they?’

  ‘Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘We’ll soon know if I’m not, won’t we? Wonder what they taste like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If we run out of food, we can eat them,’ Hudd said. ‘I ate a Brown Snake once. It tasted like a gamey old chuck. Can you two get yourselves sorted out? I want to get moving.’

  We each had a pack in the sacks that had come down with us. Theirs looked bigger than mine, but I had two. I had a second small canvas pack into which was built a small radio and a Morse key. It weighed just over a pound and had a range like an albatross. I liked it so much that I’d already decided to keep it once the show was over. My other pack looked much smaller than theirs. It contained food and water for a few days, a first-aid kit I hadn’t been briefed on, and changes of socks and smalls; Hudd had been insistent on the socks. It also contained my small pistol and fifteen spare rounds – but I hadn’t told them about that.

  We each wore long KDs, rubberized lace-up ankle boots and an old US-style leather flying jacket – Hudd said no one had ever made anything better
for the field. Quite like old times for me: I’d owned one once, but I didn’t tell them that either. Each of the jackets had a goolie chit stitched into it, and for the nervous among you I’d better explain what a goolie chit was. A goolie chit was (and maybe still is for all I know) a notice in a local language addressed to anyone who might find or capture a distressed airman, telling him that a reward was offered for said airman’s safe return – with his balls still hanging where they should be. Goolies was said to be the Hindustani word for testicles: hence ‘goolie chit’. The RAF is nothing but thorough, so they gave me another on printed paper, headed up with a jolly-looking Union Jack and translated into Arabic, Kurdish, French and Greek. I’d rather have taken my chances with the Arabs and Kurds than the Frogs, but this isn’t the place to go into that.

  There was one other thing. If the goolie chits didn’t prove all that persuasive, we each had a big .45 in a canvas holster around our waist, and Hudd and his man had Stirlings. I felt as if we should be asking directions for the OK Corral.

  Hudd took a bearing with an old marching compass, and we set off on a goat track, up a slope of stony ochre-coloured ground overlaid with that same rough sawgrass. All around us were mountain tops, and they seemed steeper and more oppressive the higher we climbed. That was interesting: my logic told me it should have been the other way round.

  I reckoned the snake venom and antivenom were taking their toll of Hudd’s man. He didn’t complain, but I could see he was sweating pints, so after half an hour I called, ‘Drink, anyone?’ to give him a breather.

  Hudd, who had been leading, swung round with an angry look on his face.

  But he took in the situation immediately, wiped his forehead on his sleeve and said, ‘Yeah. I’m parched. Five-minute bums down.’

  We had dumped the jump helmets; the snakes were welcome to them. Both the Aussies favoured wide-brimmed bush hats, but I’d brought my Jerry canvas desert cap. It was just the job. Hudd looked a bit askance at it, but didn’t say anything. Sitting down wasn’t all that dangerous: most of the snakes were in the gullies, and there were fewer the higher we climbed.