Apple Blossom Time (4 page)

‘I’m not so sure it’s only donkey, actually,’ I remarked, watching a little boy lift up his jellaba and squat down at a corner.

Coffee, dung, Turkish tobacco, paraffin, spices, foul water, all mingled into a sort of nasal cacophony, rivalled only by the noise. Donkeys brayed. Hucksters shouted. Engines backfired. Sheep bleated. Shoe-shine boys drummed up custom. Only the black-robed women with firewood or water on their heads were silent, swaying along with the flop-flop walk of a camel through sand.

Little boys ran alongside the truck, banging the side with sticks or the flats of their pale-palmed hands. One, more daring, clung on to the tailboard and peered over the side at the uniformed English women, holding out one hand to us. ‘Father dead, mother dead,’ he chanted in a sing-song voice. It was hard to resist the appeal in his long-lashed brown eyes, but we’d all been warned about beggars, so we turned our faces away. Just as well Pansy wasn’t sitting at the back of the truck, or she’d have emptied her purse for him! He hopped off, yelling something. I was glad none of us could understand, although his gestures were quite plain enough.

Then we were out of the little town and being driven along a wide avenue lined by flame-flowered casuarina trees, where large houses – Home Counties under a blazing sun, equatorial Esher – sat back amongst parched lawns swept by gardeners with stiff brooms. There were swimming pools and shady verandas that made us gasp for long, cool drinks and garden chairs.

None of those for us at Maadi Camp. The ATS quarters were guarded by grinning, armed soldiers, fresh from India. They didn’t say anything as our truck rolled through the gates, but their expressions told us that this was a real cushy billet for a regular soldier!

A genteel, distracted second subaltern with a millboard met us and introduced herself as Miss Carstairs. Her gingery-fair skin was red and blistered and I wondered how she could still burn, considering how long we’d been on voyage round the Cape. We stood in the sun while she briefed us quickly on life in Cairo, which seemed to be a succession of things we weren’t allowed to do: no sunbathing – sunburn would be treated as a self-inflicted wound and punished accordingly (one law for us and another law for them); no travelling through the City of the Dead except on duty and in military transport (as if we would!); no going out in the evening, even off duty, except in uniform; no going to the men’s quarters, even in the day, in any circumstances – or vice versa (from what I’d seen so far, that wouldn’t be a hardship!); no crossing boundaries marked by a round white sign with a black X, which meant Out of Bounds to All Ranks; and no – absolutely no – going to the Berka.

‘It’s not a desirable area,’ she explained and, if anything, turned even redder. We ought to have taken pity on her. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen, but we were young too and the young are pitiless. We stared as blankly as though we had no idea what she was talking about (and I’m not sure that Pansy was pretending). ‘It seems to be a traditional haunt of … of members of the oldest profession, if you take my meaning. Yes, well…’ She looked down at the notes on her millboard. ‘Well, anyway … Corporal Gibson will show you to the stores, where you can collect your bedding. Tea is at 1800 hours. Now – are there any questions?’

Beside me, Vee took a deep breath and I knew what she was going to ask. ‘Don’t you dare!’ I hissed and gave her a nudge with my foot.

‘No? Jolly good. Well, off you go, then,’ said Miss Carstairs, sounding more like a nursery school teacher than a soldier. ‘Duty begins tomorrow morning and there will be a tour of the Museum of Hygiene at 1400.’

Dismissed, we tossed down our packs in one of the huts and took stock of our new home.

‘Well, what on earth did we come all this way for? We might as well be in Aldershot!’ Vee said in amazement. ‘Same old row of iron beds, same old pile of mattress biscuits…’

‘Same old blankets, grey, woollen. Same old cupboards, green, metal, c/w shelves…’

‘Same old view of the Pyramids? Look out here, girls,’ called Grace. ‘Perhaps it’s a little bit different from Aldershot, after all.’

In one direction we could see the minarets of Cairo citadel, needle sharp, and there, to the west and across the Nile, were the tops of the tallest Pyramids. We trooped out onto the veranda. Beyond the water towers, beyond the NAAFI hut, the ablution blocks and the latrines, two triangles stood black against a huge sun that dropped out of sight, sudden as a theatrical lighting effect, while we watched. None of us spoke for a while.

‘Well…’ said Vee at last. ‘That certainly knocks Piccadilly Circus into a cocked hat.’

The last thing that I saw before lights out was Pansy in her blue-and-white striped regulation pyjamas, buttoned carefully up to the neck, kneeling by her bed to say her prayers. Ansty Parva or Maadi, she would never miss them. It was oddly comforting.

For a while that first night I’d lain awake, listening to the noises around me. I’d grown used to the small sounds of sleeping women, particularly these women. For eleven weeks the four of us had been crammed into a cabin designed for two. The captain’s diversionary tactics had taken us from Liverpool, north-west towards Greenland – were we really going to Egypt or was it just another SNAFU – Situation Normal All Fucked Up? We heaved around on the Atlantic and pretty soon none of us cared where we were going, so long as we actually arrived. If two hundred women, shoehorned into cabins, felt ill, God knows how the two thousand soldiers felt, swinging in their hammocks in the airless, fume-filled hold. By the time the ship swung southwards, we were all several pounds lighter.

By now I could distinguish Pansy’s little, whiffling breaths, polite even in her sleep, across the room. Thank goodness for Pansy. She kept me sane when military bureaucracy might have driven me mad. We’d been so lucky to be able to stick together. Vee’s dry cough, which had been so irritating at the beginning of the long voyage around Africa, no longer bothered me. Grace was usually quiet, except now and again, when she’d mumble to herself. That didn’t bother me any longer, either. The other four beds in the hut would soon be filled by the next draft.

A vicar’s daughter, a débutante, a shop girl and me. What an odd collection. Saintly Pansy, motherless daughter of a saintly father. Grace, with her wicked grin and her extra long stride that always clipped the heels of the girl in front when our squad was drilling. Fluffy-haired Vee, whose cap wouldn’t sit straight and whose magnificent bosoms were never meant to be covered by pleated, button-down pockets. And me – skinny, stubborn and far too bolshie to make a good soldier.

We’d been through basic training together, scrubbed ablutions together, polished lino, heaved coal, plastered each other’s blisters, battered each other’s caps into more becoming shapes. We’d stood in line, shivering and half-naked, on FFI, Freedom From Infection parade, to put up with the indignity of a medical officer pulling out our knickers to the furthest limit of the elastic (none of us had a clue to what he was looking for). We’d all had stiff arms at the same time from inoculations against every disease known to man, given by an orderly with a blunt needle and a sense of humour that would have done him credit in the Gestapo. We’d been homesick together, seasick together, put up with the attentions of hundreds of men together, all the way round the Cape, eaten, marched, slept, slapped mosquitoes, laughed and cried together. No wonder we were friends.

I shifted around on the joins of the three-piece biscuit mattress, strange tonight, but soon these lumps would be as familiar as my own bed in Ansty Parva. My tummy was full of mince with a funny little square of pastry that tasted like a mortarboard, carrots, mashed potato, stewed plums and custard – the ideal diet for a soldier in the Nile valley.

It was our first night in a bed that didn’t rock for – oh, ages. How odd it felt, not to be moving, like a mild case of seasickness. No danger of torpedoes here, no need for warship escorts. No air raids either. Cairo wasn’t like a war zone at all. Well, not yet, anyway. Nor could I see that it ever would be, even though the Italians had bombed Maadi before we had arrived. They never got as close as that again. Rommel and his Panzers may have been on their way, with almost legendary verve and dash, but there was still an awful lot of sand between them and Cairo.

I wondered sleepily how Mother and Tom were managing, whether they were safe, whether Grandmother would ever be reconciled to her evacuees from Bermondsey, whether Kate was settling down in the WRNS. She’d been so envious of my posting. I don’t know what she’d imagined – a sort of 1940s
Arabian Nights,
I suppose – a cross between
The Thief of Baghdad
and
The Garden of Allah!

‘I’d give anything for a posting like that,’ she’d said. ‘Almost anywhere sounds exciting compared to Somewhere On The Clyde.’

From what I’d seen so far, we were going to be as closely guarded as a harem. No romantic stranger would be likely to get a chance to gallop off with me to the Casbah – more’s the pity!

Now that I’d stopped travelling, there’d be a chance at last for letters to catch up. The last letter I’d had from Mother had been weeks ago and the news in it already stale by the time I’d received it.

And, in the end, I wondered how many more names would be added to the list on the granite cross in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels. Would mine be there – or Pansy’s or Kate’s? I wondered if there’d ever even be an end.

And then I had fallen into an uneasy sleep in which I had walked down row after row of village memorials – granite crosses bleak on the sweet green grass of England. I was counting the names, but the numbers wouldn’t add up, no matter how hard I tried. I knew I was looking for one, particular name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I couldn’t remember, but it seemed to matter so much. Someone. Somewhere. Someone was missing. A sense of urgency pushed me on. There was so little time. The grass around the crosses was powdered with scarlet petals. I reached Z and then went back to A again – it had to be somewhere, I would recognize it when I saw it – until woken by Pansy’s stealthy movements, as she rose and dressed to begin early shift at the cookhouse. Very softly, she was humming
Onward Christian Soldiers!

*   *   *

Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was supposed to be a secret, one of those military secrets that everyone has something to say about. Everyone knew there was something behind the high fence and the armed guards, but nobody knew for certain what (although you could make a jolly good guess just from the name) and very few people went freely in and out of the gate.

There was a PoW – mostly, though not all, Italian – camp at Helwan, guarded by New Zealanders, rows of tents behind barbed wire and guard towers. Any prisoner who looked interesting would be brought to CSDIC before being shut up in Helwan. In my impeccable shorthand I took notes of the interviews. When I’d slaved over unruly grammalogues in Bournemouth, I couldn’t possibly have imagined the use to which my country would demand I put them.

Brown, dusty and humiliated, the prisoners trooped in and out, to have questions that seemed to me random and extraordinary tossed at them by a long-haired Field Security Corps major, a fluent linguist who had been an Oxford don before the war. He wore his uniform like a woolly cardigan and was supposed not to have a single matching button anywhere on his clothes. Whether or not the questions made more sense after interpretation, I don’t know, but the answers when they came – if they came and often they did not – sounded very disjointed. I think he was too clever for them and, like many clever people, he didn’t have the common sense to realize this.

Major Prosser had been very exercised over whether the Italians ought to be allowed to say prayers for Mussolini during mass. He was so worried that he’d referred the question to a higher authority. Back came the answer, ‘Yes – he needs it!’

The questioning was not physical – we left that to the Nazis. It was more in their line. The Geneva Convention prevented interrogation of prisoners, so we simply asked them questions. They didn’t have to answer. Some did. Some didn’t. Sometimes it only lasted a minute or so. Sometimes, if Major Prosser was convinced there was something to be discovered, he’d bash on.

He never seemed to need to stop to eat or go to the lavatory. The trouble was that he imagined that his staff also had elastic bladders. I cut myself down to one cup of tea at breakfast, just in case. I’d arrive with a fistful of pencils sharpened at each end and scribble on until my hand seized up. Once I didn’t last out and had to make up interesting answers when I came to transcribing my notes the following day. No-one noticed.

It was very hard to look at these men as they shuffled around in trousers without braces and boots without laces and not feel pity. These were the men of Rommel’s terrible Afrika Korps, who’d rolled our advancing army right back to the borders of Egypt, cancelling out all the gains we’d made against the Italians. These were Mussolini’s mobsters, the men who’d gassed whole Ethiopian villages. Weren’t they? At least, that’s what we’d been taught.

But though Greece and Crete had fallen, Tobruk still held out and Rommel hadn’t got around to reserving his room at Shepheard’s – not yet, anyway.

Sometimes I’d glance up from my squiggles and find I was looking at a man dumb with misery. A few were still cocky, quite a few more obviously relieved at being out of the war, but most were stunned by what had happened and was happening to them. Seeing your enemy when he’s trying to hold up his trousers makes hating him very difficult.

I tried very hard not to stare. I didn’t want to be forced to see them as real people. I didn’t have the courage. I was there to take notes. That was what I was good at and that was what I’d do. What made it harder was that I wasn’t supposed to talk about my work, even to the rest of the girls back in the hut. They knew I was a shorthand writer and that was all. They didn’t even envy me my clean hands. Vee thought it was frightfully dull compared with being a driver.