Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  I said, ‘You’re the only girl I’ve proposed to, who I haven’t first slept with.’

  ‘So I’m the first girl you haven’t slept with to say no. Let that be a lesson to you.’

  I grabbed her hand, and laid it on my chest. ‘Feel my heart beat: then you’ll know I’m telling the truth.’

  She laughed. ‘Can’t feel it. You don’t have one.’

  ‘Can I feel yours? It’s underneath your left tit, isn’t it? I’m sure I’d be able to find it there.’

  Now she really laughed, but moved well out of reach. ‘I thought we’d resolved to be a little more mature in our relationships with women, Charlie? Wasn’t it something to do with showing a little more understanding, and respect?’

  ‘. . . and look where it got me. A woman put two bullets in me!’

  ‘Serves you right. I bet you deserved it.’ That was me told, wasn’t it?

  Haye with an e was definitely not going to be the one.

  Four weeks later I was at the school gates in Chichester waiting for the boys to come out. Randall, our Halton Air journeyman, had flown me the last leg from Beauvais to our airfield at Lympne. I phoned Flaming June from there.

  ‘I know I should have called you earlier, but I was in hospital, and it was difficult.’ She didn’t ask why. Her voice came back flat, as if she was talking to the dead. ‘You’ll want your car back.’

  ‘No. I wanted to hear you again. I’ve just landed, and want to see you.’

  ‘You’ll have to let me think about that . . . I’ve begun seeing someone else.’ Bugger it! ‘I’ll call you; one way or the other.’ She promised. I knew she’d keep her word, and I only had myself to blame, after all.

  I had completed the rest of the trip on the rattler. I had last-minute presents from Egypt in my kitbag, and had filled in an hour with a couple of drinks at the station bar. The sun was shining, and it looked like a half-decent summer was on its way for a change. I was even home in time for the Coronation.

  I met another father there: waiting for his children. He worked in the boat yard at Bosham.

  He smiled and said, ‘Long time no see: you caught the sun, Charlie. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Abroad. I was called up.’

  ‘You missed the gales and the floods then?’

  ‘When were they?’

  ‘February.’

  ‘Yes. I was in the Land of the Pharaohs . . .’ I told him.

  ‘Some people have all the luck.’

  Yeah; my leg hurt, my arm hurt and I’d probably shot and killed the most wonderful person I was ever likely to meet. Like the man said, some people have all the bloody luck.

  Last words

  I saw David Watson not so long ago. He isn’t one of those friendly spectres who increasingly inhabit my world. He’s still real, but thin and bent these days – being at least ten years further along the line than me. It was at a squadron reunion dance in Edinburgh and, because I live so near, I couldn’t find an excuse to get out of it.

  After we’d swallowed too many drams he said, ‘There’s something I always wanted to ask you, Charlie.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘What really happened to the money? Did you and that dreadful fellow Hudd make off with it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘But you knew where it was . . .’

  ‘I think so. Probably.’

  ‘Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me.’

  ‘That’s what Hudd said. But first I need another drink.’

  He brought me a large single malt, and watched me top it off with water. ‘Tell me.’ His wife was at the table with us. So was mine, come to that.

  Mrs Watson said, ‘Yes, come on, Charlie. Tell us. David has dined off this story for forty years, and we’ve never known the end of it.’

  I took a hefty swig of Glenmorangie.

  ‘That bloody old Stirling had four extra bomb cells in her wings, didn’t she? Two under each – and we never looked in them. I don’t think anyone else did either. If you find out their dimensions, and work out the space needed for that amount of paper money in parachute containers, I think you’ll find they just about fit.’

  Watson went very red. When old men flush they really flush. I think it’s something to do with the booze.

  ‘But we bombed the bugger! Burned her out of existence.’

  ‘Precisely. Bloody good job too!’ I told him. It was nice to be one up at last.

  I rounded off the night by copping a dance off his missus, which was more than I ever did before. We must have looked comical: me so small, and she’s still tall and graceful. She wore a long, off-the-shoulder silver-grey silk dress, and could still turn heads. As the evening wound down she opened the massive handbag she invariably carries, pulled out her silver cornet, and strolled over to the small band.

  Minutes later she was blowing her heart out – not bad for someone our age. It was ‘Stardust’.

  I danced with my old lady, and the ghosts started to move in. I saw Emily Rea, a Red Cross girl I’d once known, dancing with Glenn Miller. They looked absolutely perfect together. Funny; they’d bought it over fifty years ago. It won’t be bad if this is what it’s going to be like from now on.

  Afterword

  Dancing at the Blue Kettle, cures for hangovers, and other stories . . .

  In 1948 or ’49 two British Army drivers broke into a tank park in Palestine and attempted to steal two 30-ton Comet tanks which they intended to hand on to the embryonic Israeli Army. I don’t know if they were successful – if they were, then there’s a story in that – but, because the Army acknowledges the event, I suspect not. The loss of another Comet in the Canal Zone a couple of years later is less certain.

  It is impossible to spend much time with the Suez veterans – many now in their seventies – without being told the story of how a group of Egyptian thieves, or klifty wallahs, stole and hid a Comet tank in battle order, by the simple deception of building a shack around it. This is not a loss that the Royal Tank or any other regiment owns up to . . . not that they would, perhaps. Red faces all round.

  I recently asked for details of the theft from the Tank Museum at Bovingdon (probably the only place you will get to see a Comet these days), and was told by a historian that this was the first time he had heard the tale. He firmly dismissed it as a military myth. This is curious, because when you sit down with a Suez veteran it is inevitably one of the first tales told to illustrate the Alice in Wonderland world of the Canal Zone in the Forties and Fifties. Maybe the Tank Museum isn’t listening hard enough.

  I have heard three variations on the story so far, and two likely locations – off the Treaty Road close to Ismailia, and somewhere north of Suez. I borrowed the latter for Charlie’s story. I enjoy hunting down unlikely tales, and I love proving experts wrong, so if there is anyone out there with the information to pin the tail on this particular donkey, please write to me. It would be marvellous to add another cock-up to our glorious military heritage.

  Charlie’s first voluntary parachute jump closely mimics my own, at Strathallan in Perthshire nearly twenty years ago. Having been told by the jump master that if I baulked at the command to go he would have no choice but to push me out of the aircraft I shuffled up to the exit with the thought ‘No bugger’s going to shove me out of an aeroplane!’ Thus I left the plane as soon as I was told, but before expected, cut a nice wide swathe in a field of oats a mile from the airfield, and had to walk in carrying my ’chute under my arm. If the farmer is reading this, please accept my belated apology. This was after a briefing which had concluded with a list of things most likely to go wrong with a parachute, so that big khaki nylon dome opening above my head was one of the most beautiful sights I will ever see.

  The passing reference to a soldier hiding behind a tombstone in an English graveyard to avoid the attentions of a German fighter pilot is another family tale. My father, returning for a few days’ wound leave after Dunkirk, was caught crossing a Carshalton or Beddington grave
yard by a ‘tip and run’ raider in a Me.109. Having successfully hit the Carshalton gasometer with his single bomb – it went in one side and out the other without exploding – the pilot decided to take out his frustration on the lonely khaki figure in the graveyard. Dad hid behind the gravestone (allegedly) of a ‘famous poet’, but I’ve never been able to find out which one. This happened before I was conceived, so in a strange way I owe that poet my life, if you see what I mean. I haven’t been to Carshalton for years, but even as late as the 1960s you could see the patches on the gas holder marking the bomb’s impact . . . and I wonder if the German pilot is still alive?

  Dungeness in Kent is nothing like as awful as I make it out to be . . . as long as you don’t mind having nuclear power stations at the end of your garden. The Listening Ears – massive concrete dishes, designed and built between the wars to detect the approach of aircraft – can be found on an island in a flooded quarry at Denge . . . within walking distance of the Pilot Inn. Access to them is managed jointly by English Heritage and English Nature, who allow occasional guided tours in the summer months. The principle of detecting the acoustic signatures of approaching formations of aircraft is a redundant technology – it was kicked into touch by the development of radar in the 1930s . . . however, a Danish artist plans to build another one on the north coast of France, aligned with the Denge dishes . . . so in theory it may one day be possible to exchange words, unsupported by modern technology, with someone standing thirty miles away. It won’t displace the mobile telephone, although why anyone would want to talk to someone in France beats me.

  You can thank Errol Flynn for the aspirin and Coca-Cola recipe for a hangover cure. It appears in several biographies as both a cure and an amphetamine-like pick-me-up. I once made it up for the former reason, but the drink went the colour and consistency of an after-curry diarrhoea, and after the first sip I poured it down the sink. People come up with spurious cures for hangovers all the time, but G.P. Gibson VC relied on a pint of water and half a dozen lungfuls of pure oxygen . . . that sounds close to it for me. There’s only one proper remedy, of course – moderation. I shall have to start acting my age, and drink less.

  The Nigel Balchin novel Charlie found himself reading was The Small Back Room – one of the best novels about the condition of war (beginning with the finest opening sentence) ever written. There are plenty of copies around, so if you haven’t read it yet, get down to your library or bookshop right away, because you have missed a rare treat.

  I have always looked with suspicion on the uncritical support for the state of Israel offered by the United States, and cannot believe that it stems alone from the strength of a local Jewish lobby. There must be more to it than that . . . and that nagging suspicion informed part of this story. Contrast that unwavering support with the way the Americans turned on their old British ally when we attempted to annex the Suez Canal Zone in 1956. The British, French and Israeli conspiracy to seize the Canal was illegal and improper, of course – but if recent Iraqi history has taught us anything, it is that when the USA wants to illegally and improperly invade a Middle Eastern country it isn’t slow to claim our support, and participation. Oh how I wish our prime minister had stuck out his chin this last time, asked, ‘What about Suez in 1956 then?’ and left them to get on with it. Quid pro quo.

  I have never met a man whose testicles were saved by his possession of a ‘goolie chit’, although goolie chits of various types were issued in different theatres of war, and you can still see them in museums today. Goolie is said to be the Hindustani word for testicle . . . although I can’t find it in my Hindustani Self-Instructor (written by Abdul Hamid Khan – ‘Army Language Teacher, Sialkot’ – in 1936, and published for 3/8d: one of my favourite books). Goolie chits were multilingual notices issued to flyers after it was alleged that Afghani, Northern Indian . . . and maybe, later, Kurdistani . . . insurgents passed captured European men to their women, who would geld them, and turn them into house eunuchs. I’m tempted to speculate that the house eunuch was only a forerunner of the role of the young middle-class British male in the twenty-first century anyway. The chits promised a reward for the safe return of their carriers. What this has in common with the mislaid Comet tank is that I can’t find anyone in print claiming to have had first-hand experience of involuntary gelding: not surprising, when you think about it.

  The fact that Brits arriving in Egypt in the 1950s were still being terrorized by old sweats with tales of ‘wogs with goolie knives’ tells us more about ourselves than the Arabs in question. The goolie phrase definitely derived from the Northern Frontier provinces at the time of the Raj – and yet a hundred years later we were still not distinguishing between Afghanis, Indians and Pakistanis . . . and the many tribes of the Arab nations. Am I being unkind to remember that to the average Englishman abroad in the 1950s they were still all ‘wogs’? No wonder it’s now difficult to find a country in the old empire where a Briton is looked on with love, gratitude or admiration.

  . . . but Charlie’s past is, of course, an invented one. I have written before about how I stand before memories – my own, and other people’s – like a child in front of a pick ’n’ mix counter at what was once Woolworths, and take a few from here, and a few from there to mix into the world of Charlie Bassett. The Blue Kettle Club in Ismailia is an example of a memory that belongs to others. It did exist: but I’ve never been there. I have an old photograph of the art-decoish building, and the street on which it stood: a Fordson van stands outside the Blue Kettle’s door . . . although it may have been permanently closed by 1953. It can be found in several of the Canal Zone memoirs. Some have written of it as notorious, or dangerous . . . one as louche and friendly. It was obviously one of those establishments that become mental landmarks – somewhere not to forget in a hurry. Although I have that photograph of the outside of the Blue Kettle, I have been unable to find anyone to tell me what it was actually like behind the front door – so the scenes I set there are necessarily a fiction. If I am so far wide of the mark that I offend anyone’s actual recollections, they must write and put me right – readers do it all the time.

  There is a Turkish restaurant the size of a large bus shelter on a small back street in the Old Town of Edinburgh. It is named Empires, sits opposite my local, The Waverley, and is one of Edinburgh’s hidden treasures. I could commend it to my readers for its cuisine alone – artichoke hearts and meat balls to die for – but it is on Friday and Saturday nights that it comes into its own; when the belly dancer arrives. Liquid beauty made flesh. Dining out is easier these days: many eating houses offer a menu to remember . . . but Empires on a Saturday offers you a dining experience never to be forgotten. You have to take your own wine . . . I rather like that . . . but any Edinburgh reader who hasn’t eaten there should take the opportunity while they can. The ladies from Empires danced effortlessly into this book: it is where the girls of the Blue Kettle crossed the boundary from the page and into life. If you have ever wanted to come face to face with someone from Charlie’s world, pick up the telephone quick, and make a reservation.

  One of the roles I share with Charlie is that of patron saint of lost causes. Show me a forlorn hope, and I’m your man: that’s why Pan Macmillan and I have decided that we’re going to Cyprus with him in ’56 or ’57, to stand alongside the British servicemen trying to keep the lid on that particular can of worms. It’s going to be fun, so why don’t you come along?

  David Fiddimore

  Edinburgh

  May 2009

  The Silent War:

  Charlie Bassett’s Play List

  From time to time I have had letters from readers about the music that catches Charlie’s attention in the course of his memoir. They teach me just how important popular music is for memory. For those of you who are interested, here is a selection of the music mentioned or alluded to in The Silent War and Charlie’s preferred versions . . . in roughly the order they appear in the book. It was the music in the room as I wrote this s
tory.

  Sadly, as far as I know, no one has written ‘The Blue Kettle rag’: I live in hope that clarinet-meister Bernard Stanley (Acker) Bilk MBE, RE (Rtd) – a Suez veteran himself – may one day be persuaded to do so: he’s the right man for the job!

  ‘Beer barrel polka’ – Josef Vejvoda & his brass band

  ‘Blues for Jimmy Noone’ – Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band

  ‘String of pearls’ – The Glenn Miller Orchestra

  ‘What is this thing called love?’ – Tommy Dorsey (vocalist Connie Haines)

  ‘Doctor Jazz’ – Dutch Swing College Band (vocalist Neva Raphaello)

  ‘One o’clock jump’ – Duke Ellington

  ‘Minnie the Moocher’ – Cab Calloway

  ‘Goodbye’ – David Whitfield

  ‘The Beguine’ – Tommy Dorsey (vocalist Frank Sinatra)

  ‘Big noise from Winnetka’ – Bob Crosby and the Bob Cats

  ‘Am I blue?’ – Billie Holiday or Hoagy Carmichael ‘Blue skies’ – Josephine Baker or Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra

  ‘Blues my naughty sweetie gives to me’ – Bob Scobey’s Frisco Jazz Band

  ‘Wild man blues’ – Woody Allen

  ‘So what?’ (from Kinda Blue) – Miles Davis

  ‘Singin’ the blues’ – Tommy Steele

  ‘Ah yaa zain’ – Mohammed El-Bakkar and his Oriental Ensemble

  ‘Mnishebak’ – Mohammed El-Bakkar and his Oriental Ensemble

  ‘Jealousy’ – Ivy Benson and Her Girls Band

  ‘Just a closer walk with thee’ – Ken Colyer’s Omega Brass Band or George Lewis

  ‘Stardust’ – Hoagy Carmichael or Her Ivy Benson Girls Band

  Of the songs listed here, ‘Blue skies’, with its irrepressible optimism, has long been one of my lifetime soundtracks, but I would also commend to your attention the definitive recording of ‘Doctor Jazz’ – made by Neva Raphaello with the Dutch Swing College Band in the 1950s, and the remarkable Mohammed El-Bakkar, whose 1950s recordings are now sought after by modern belly dancers. Last, but far from least, I’ll swing till I drop with the wonderful Ivy Benson, and her All Girls Band or Orchestra. I have some of their recordings, but I would love to hear from a reader who heard them at their dangerous best: what were they like in concert? The music never dies, does it?