Small Wars (3 page)

Chapter Three

Even up in the hills, the walls of the village houses were covered with graffiti. Some of it was in poorly spelled English, although any schoolboy could have read the Greek: ‘
BRITISH OUT. EOKA. ELEFTHERIA I THANATOS – freedom or death. ENOSIS – union with Greece
.’

The trucks crawled as the road got steeper. The engines whined, and sometimes the tyres skidded where the roads were still running water from the heavy rain. The villages were built onto the sides of the steep foothills, and the fields beneath them were stepped to make them workable. Hal could see the three-tonner ahead full sideways now, because the road had taken a sharp bend to get around an outcrop before disappearing into trees. The trucks ground and toiled up the steep incline and around the long corner.

This was how many of Hal’s days were spent, patrolling the villages, conducting searches. At least there was more to do than in Germany where he had been in his office most of the time, signing papers concerning the minutiae of the movement of supplies, or overseeing exercises and patrols that were almost uniformly without incident. The glory of the regiment had been demonstrated mainly in the boxing ring, and the silver cups that were awarded decorated the officers’ mess wherever they were sent. He had envied James, whose first posting had been to Eritrea, and whose letters, almost gritty with desert sand, were full of action.

Hal’s father had gone into the Great War a lieutenant and come out of it a major. His uncles – those who survived – had had their promotions the same way, in the big conflicts of big battles. His grandfather had fought in both Boer wars, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Treherne – Hal had kept his medals in his room when he was a little boy. In Germany, Hal’s regiment had spent a year living in a palace formerly occupied by Nazi generals. There had been a gold banqueting hall. His first office was a music room and his desk Louis Quinze. It wasn’t Ypres. Now, in Cyprus, England was fighting to hold her territory, and Hal could serve her in some small measure.

As the last of the convoy made the turn, the road forked, with one narrower part going into the trees and the other climbing up to the left.

The sky was white, the tops of the mountains were hidden. If they went higher they’d be in mist. They took the wider, left-hand turn and the first village they came to was compact, with a café in its centre.

The men in the café all stood up and watched as two trucks stopped and the others and the Land Rover drove on through, nearly touching the houses on each side, the soldiers holding their Sten guns and staring back at the old men.

The second village was more spread out along the road with no clear centre to it. The two three-tonners pulled over and Kirby stopped the Land Rover close behind them. Hal got out and met Lieutenant Grieves, who had climbed out of the truck in front of him.

‘Mandri, sir.’

‘I’ll try and find the chief. You can get going when I come back.’

Hal took Kirby and went to look for the village headman.

He found a bar that was set back from the road with a ragged tree in front of it and metal chairs stacked against the outside wall. Kirby pushed open the door for him, and Hal stepped inside, taking off his cap and looking around. There was a good smell of Greek coffee. At a table in a corner, five men stopped playing dominoes to look at him.

‘Good morning,’ Hal said in Greek, and the old men nodded and said good morning back.

Hal asked for the
mukhtar
and was told he lived next to the church. He thanked the men and left. As he walked back past the trucks he was aware of Grieves watching him and scowling; he was impatient and bored with waiting and the men were bored too. Well, they could wait some more: relations with the Greeks must be respected.

There was nobody on the street and just a girl staring from the darkness of her house as he and Kirby walked to the church. In the crooked square, a small boy stood by the corner with muddy feet and Hal felt the presence of the people inside the houses without seeing them.

He chose the larger of the houses next to the church – although it was still a pretty rough-looking dwelling – and knocked. The door opened, and a woman in a black dress, holding a broom, greeted him. Hal asked for the
mukhtar
and was shown into a parlour to wait.

The walls were plastered but the floor was stone and there was a damp chill in the house, with no sun to warm it up. Hal put his cap on the polished table, which was the only piece of furniture in the room. Kirby, standing in the street outside, coughed and lit a cigarette, and the
mukhtar
, who was in his fifties perhaps, with dark skin and a moustache, and the voluminous Greek trousers that many of the men in the villages wore, came into the room. ‘Yes?’ he said in English.

‘Good morning, sir. My name is Major Treherne.’

The man nodded. Hal didn’t think he hated him, but he couldn’t tell; it was often hard to tell but it was an important thing to know, to understand how much danger there was. ‘I ask permission to search the village houses for suspected terrorists,’ he said. It was a sentence he used often.

‘You’ll do it with or without my permission,’ said the
mukhtar
, in thickly accented English.

This was true. If they had intelligence beforehand they skipped the asking of permission.

‘If I must,’ said Hal. ‘There are many terrorists who use their families to shield them. I come here as a courtesy to you.’

There was a silence while the
mukhtar
looked at him – Hal thought there was every chance he was a terrorist himself. Then, ‘You may,’ he said.

The soldiers’ searching was methodical and polite, embarrassment rather than belligerence characterising their entry into people’s homes. Hal moved back and forth between the groups. It was so routine as to be tedious, but there was always an undercurrent of tension – at least, it was important to stay sharp. He was only needed if something had been found, or if there was a problem, so when Private Francke came to fetch him, he followed immediately.

Hal stood in the tiny house and looked at the wreckage.

The table was on its side. A pool of olive oil moved silently over the floor from a cracked jug. The food cupboard had been emptied and jars shattered. The bedding, which he could see in the back room through the door opening, was tipped onto the ground and the mattresses bayoneted in places. There was china on the floor, too, mostly broken. Hal moved his boot away from a small plate painted with birds and olive branches. ‘I don’t see what you called me in here for, Francke.’

‘It’s the empty tins, sir. Who needs that many tins?’

Hal looked at them. There were ten on the floor near the door into the back room. ‘I can’t arrest somebody for some empty tins. What sort of people are they?’

‘Cyps, sir.’

‘Yes, Francke – how do they
seem
to you?’

‘Dunno, sir, pretty browned off.’

‘And?’

‘An old couple, sir.’

Most of the lads showed an instinctive tact in the dealings they were required to have with the locals, even while calling them wogs and Cyps, but Francke was a bully, and had probably been one all his life. Hal didn’t know the names of all the men in the company; it was the ones who turned up in his office on a charge who stuck in his mind. Francke was one of those.

‘Francke.’

‘Sir?’

‘It seems to me you’ve gone about this with undue relish.’

‘Sir?’

‘You may have heard the phrase “hearts and minds” bandied about in regard to this campaign.’

Francke gazed at Hal densely.

‘It’s been hard to miss, Francke. It’s been the backbone of what we’re trying to achieve here. This island is under British sovereignty – that means protection as well as rule. We are here to root out terrorism and to protect the population from it, not to give people a grievance and send them scurrying for the hills to grab a bomb with which to murder the next squaddie they see. In other words, this,’ he gestured to the room around him, ‘
is too fucking heavy-handed. Do you understand me?
’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘This is
no good
.’

‘No, sir.’

Hal sent Francke ahead of him out of the house. He picked up the olive-branch plate and put it on the table and then he went out into the street.

About fifty villagers had been herded into the square and were being guarded by Ellis and Trask, who looked embarrassed. A woman was shouting angrily in Greek that Hal had no hope of understanding. Another woman joined in the shouting, some of the men too and the soldiers answered in English, as you might talk to animals, conciliatory and threatening at the same time.

Ellis and Trask squared up to them, gripping their Stens in both hands. Sergeant McKinney stood nearby, with his legs wide apart and his chin jutting out, overseeing the whole thing with an air of comfortable immovability.

Lieutenant Grieves came towards Hal out of a side street with two other soldiers. He hadn’t exactly been distinguishing himself with his leadership qualities in the last two hours; Hal hadn’t seen him since the damn thing started. ‘There you are, Grieves. Put those people in the church.’

‘Sir.’

Grieves went off – shuffled off, thought Hal. The WOSB must have been having a slow week when they’d made him a lieutenant, a sneery grammar-school boy with chips on both shoulders and Bolshevik tendencies. No one liked drinking with him and he was hell sober. Hal had nothing against National Service boys as a rule, but Grieves, with his too-civilised-for-soldiering attitude, counting the days to demob, irritated him.

It wasn’t a big village, no maze of streets and blind alleys to contend with, just the houses along the road and the square, and more houses in a modest sprawl up the hill with rutted goat tracks leading to them. Most of the villagers were in the church and every house searched.

Hal looked into the back of the truck where a Greek boy, the one arrest, was sitting with his head in his hands. He was flanked by Tompkins and Walsh, who were sharing a fag. On the sandbags at their feet was a muddy stack of EOKA pamphlets, two good-sized clasp knives and a piece of piping, crudely welded closed at one end.

The boy looked sideways through his fingers at Hal.

Hal picked up the piece of piping, pushing the leaflets with it. They were familiar to him, distributed by EOKA in their thousands, and although he couldn’t read the Greek, he knew the meaning: ‘
We have nothing else to do but shed blood.
’ He examined the pipe, then put it down on the floor of the truck again. ‘Are these yours?’ said Hal to the boy, who didn’t answer. ‘Tompkins – was the pipe in the same house?’

‘Yes, sir, he had it hidden up in the fireplace.’

‘You’re sure it was this boy’s house?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘His mum was there.’

The boy looked about nineteen. Old enough to know better.

Hal looked around him at the valley, where the mist was shifting, and then up the hill towards the church. He could see the people drifting back to their houses, and the rest of the soldiers coming down the hill towards him, lighting cigarettes and talking.

He looked back at the Greek boy, who hadn’t moved. ‘On you go, then,’ he said to Tompkins. ‘Good.’

Tompkins nodded and shoved the boy along into the dark of the truck, to make room.

Kirby was smoking in the Land Rover, with his collar well up, and hunched down in the driver’s seat.

‘Kirby. Come,’ said Hal, and Kirby got out. He was a knock-kneed, heavy young man, whose every movement was reluctantly forced from clumsy limbs.

He and Hal started up the hill together towards the
mukhtar
’s house, as the trucks rattled away from them.

Hal stood in the parlour, the
mukhtar
’s housekeeper – or wife, or mother – poked the fire and the
mukhtar
maintained his silence.

‘What’s the name of the man we arrested?’

‘He’s a good boy.’

‘Name?’

No answer.

‘You’re not doing him any favours.’

‘Your soldiers have damaged property here today. They have destroyed houses. They distressed the women.’

‘Any complaint you have can be made in writing to the British High Commission,’ Hal said.

The
mukhtar
spat. The woman looked at the spit shining in the firelight on the stone floor.

Hal said, ‘Are you going to give me the man’s name?’

‘No.’

‘Then thank you for your time and co-operation,’ said Hal, and turned to leave.

Kirby let him go out and then followed him. The door of the house closed behind them.

‘Fucking cheek,’ said Kirby, as they walked away. ‘You could do him for that, sir.’

Hal laughed.

The two platoons were back in Episkopi at dusk. Tompkins and Walsh marched the Greek boy off to the guardroom, with Walsh carefully carrying the evidence. Hal didn’t think about him again, but went to the mess and had a drink, then Kirby drove him back into Limassol, to Clara and the girls, with Hal sitting up front and both mostly quiet, comfortable with one another.

Chapter Four

Clara lay against Hal in the close darkness. The blankets on the bed never seemed quite dry, but they were warm and heavily tucked around them.

Obedient to convention, the first bed they had ever shared was on their wedding night, in a hotel in the New Forest, to be near Southampton for the boat back across the Channel the next day. Hal, newly promoted to captain, only had a few days’ leave and they couldn’t have afforded a longer wedding trip anyway. The hotel was accurately, but still somehow misleadingly, described as ‘an old coaching inn’, and had been recommended by a friend of Hal’s. It was a disappointment, and the bed most disappointing of all. The room had uneven, poorly covered floors. Clara’s going-away suit hung neatly in the wardrobe as their every tiny movement was announced through the pipes, boards and hollow bulging plaster of the cold building, a wedding night broadcast to the world at large.

It had not been everything the four years of their engagement had promised. Before that viciously creaking bed, four years of writing letters and visits – far too short, far too infrequent – when they had kissed incessantly. Clara’s family saw a tall, cool-faced young soldier, plainly uncomfortable in their presence but somehow needing their daughter badly enough to stay in various cheap boarding houses and bed-and-breakfasts to be near her, never going anywhere else, always faithfully there, while Hal and Clara, alone in knowing what they were together, frustrated themselves kissing. His fingertips on the pulse of her neck, her lips on his knuckles, his thumb on her temple, her hairline, his arms circling her – they had been in a long daze of need for one another and that hotel, that room, that bed did not deliver them from it.

But the night had its own success because Hal and Clara had, almost despite themselves, a deep affinity. In their love and flirting, they liked to point out their differences, but their observations were similar, as if they had been brought up together some forgotten time and only now found themselves with contrasting lives. They easily made a world to inhabit when they were together. They played within it. They had not slept all night, the night they were married, had boarded the boat bright-eyed with dazzled exhaustion and strange joy, and every bed they had been in since then – all more satisfying than that poor beginning – still had a little of that first bed in it, those first long hours of their free companionship.

This bed, like that one, rested on an uneven floor. There was some light coming from the bulb at the top of the stairs so the outline of the door glowed.

Her head was under his chin and he couldn’t see her face, but he could see the shape of the blankets over her body and feel her pressed against him inside the warm bed, her head fitting well into the hollow there. He was holding her hand. He could feel her wedding ring and the small diamond next to it under his thumb. He didn’t think they needed a bigger bed. He liked to be so close to her all the time and not miss anything. When she spoke, he felt her voice in his chest, through her back. ‘This bed is definitely tipping towards the window.’

‘It’s the floor I think,’ he said.

‘Did you try to prop it up?’

‘I tried!’

‘I wake up all squashed against you –’

‘And me almost on the floor –’

Then the bulb on the stairs went out with a small popping noise and there was total darkness.

‘Hal!’ She had whispered his name so he couldn’t feel her voice any more.

‘Just the bulb,’ he said.

‘It’s too dark.’ There was absolute blackness around them. ‘The girls –’

‘I’ll see to it.’

Then there was a very dull boom, almost too deep to hear. It shook the windows of the house. Clara sat up suddenly, and Hal was out of bed, finding his lighter in the dark. He flipped it open and Clara blinked at the bright flame.

‘Here.’ Hal handed her the lighter and pulled on his trousers. He took his pistol.

She closed the lighter and burned her fingers doing it.

Neither of them could see anything at all now. He listened. There were engines in the street and running footsteps. He couldn’t tell if the footsteps were coming to their house.

He left the bedroom, went fast down the stairs, with his hand against the wall for balance, and stopped at the door. We’ve got to get out of this house, he thought. It’s completely impractical.

The feet were running past the house, not to it, and he heard sirens and realised that the light going out had nothing to do with the bomb – if it was a bomb – and he opened the door a little way, with his pistol ready.

‘Hal?’ said Clara, from the bedroom.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened. I’ll bring a bulb.’

He heard her getting off the bed – the springs were noisy – then he saw the glow of the lighter as she left the room to check the twins.

He went to the kitchen. Moonlight was coming into the back of the house. There was no bulb in the kitchen drawer, but he found candles and took three plates from the cupboard above. He went to the front of the house again and up the stairs to where Clara was sitting on the end of the girls’ bed. She had Hal’s lighter on the floor in front of her, still burning. The girls were fast asleep.

Hal lit a candle and blew out the lighter, which was too hot to pick up. He dripped wax onto the saucer, stuck the candle down and lit the other candles, and while he was doing it Clara started to cry.

Hal had finished lighting the candles. He didn’t move now, just stayed kneeling on the floor with Clara crying, thinking how much he hated it when she cried, and not knowing what to do.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He got up from his knees and sat next to her on the bed. The three plates of candles lit them both quite brightly from underneath and flickered on the cot bars. Hal put his arm around Clara and felt her softness. ‘It was just a fright,’ he said.

Then there was banging on the door, very loud – Clara jumped. Hal stood up and left the lighted room.

‘Yes,’ he said, going down the stairs.

‘It’s Kirby, sir.’ Hal opened the door. ‘They’ve bombed the bloody police station in Hellas Street.’

‘I heard it. I’ll come now. You were fast.’

‘I can be.’

‘Just a moment.’

Hal shut the door again, thinking how much he liked Kirby, and ran up the stairs. ‘I need to go. The police station has been bombed.’

Clara was just where he’d left her with the girls still sleeping. She looked at him bleakly.

‘It’s all right,’ he said deliberately, having to explain, ‘it was nothing to do with us,’ and he closed himself off from her.

He went into the bedroom, put on his jacket, his cap and his boots. He didn’t go back into the girls’ room but holstered his pistol as he went down again.

‘How long will you be?’

She was at the top of the stairs.

‘I’ve no idea.’ His hand was already on the door. He didn’t want her to say anything else, and she didn’t. ‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’

Hal left and shut the door behind him.

Clara sat down on the top stair because her legs were shaking. ‘Buck up and don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said, in a whisper.

She got up, and took a candle from the floor of the girls’ room, placing the others out of reach on the table. She went downstairs, with the small flame throwing shadows against the walls of the house, and drew the chain that Hal had screwed onto the thin door for them a few days before.

The dark kitchen was behind her, with the glass out onto the courtyard uncovered. She turned to it. The curtain wasn’t closed over the door. She went into the kitchen and the tiles were rough under her bare feet. She put the candle on the counter, and picked up the table, having to stretch her arms as wide as they would go to grasp both edges, leaning forward unnaturally. She carried the table with tiny steps, holding her breath because it was heavy, trying to be silent. She put it against the back door; she pressed it up snugly, feeling the horror of being observed from outside. She pulled the curtain across the glass, it was stuck behind the table, it wouldn’t close properly.

She left the kitchen and went up to sit on the bed, with the girls sleeping, tucking her legs under her and wrapping her arms around her knees. The house was empty and evil around her, hiding itself, no protection from anything that might come. It was a nothing house; she couldn’t hope to be all right in it.

The sleeping children near her had peace all around them, like a shield, and she edged closer to them. She felt very guilty for being comforted by the presence of defenceless babies.

She didn’t want Hal to see the table against the back door because then he’d know how silly and frightened she was. Perhaps she could put it back before she unbolted the door for him when he came home. She didn’t want him to think she wasn’t coping. She thought of him setting off not just fearlessly, but with relish, to see what could be done, and smiled. Her girls slept on. His daughters had inherited his colouring; perhaps they would grow up with his fair outlook, too, perhaps his courage. A shutter banged – first loudly, making her jump, then again in sluggish repetition – and a dog began to bark. She thought of Hal’s belief in her and how she loved his admiration. She hugged her knees again, listening to the dog barking, the rumble of engines and a distant alarm bell ringing. She closed her eyes, clenching her jaw tightly. Words of hymns often helped. It wasn’t God, she didn’t think; she wasn’t sure what it was. Determinedly, in the prison of her mind, she sang:
‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven, to his feet thy tribute bring, ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven –
’

The police station was burning. Two Turkish Cypriot policemen and a Royal Military Policeman had been killed. Another Turkish Cypriot officer had his legs blown off, and would die before morning. A double victory for EOKA then: both Turks and British successfully targeted.

The soldiers were trying to keep people back, forcing the staring crowds into a semi-circle, and the fire engines, RMPs and other troops trying to fight the fire had to force their way through.

Hal had his men evacuate the nearby buildings and make the area safe; there was no point getting into it with the locals now, and revenge was an empty concept to him. Whoever had pitched the bombs into the police station was long gone, congratulating themselves on victory in some distant safe house or mountain camp.

The breeze grew stronger and Hal could smell the salt on it. He thought of it blowing the smoke inland over those dark sheltering mountains.

The fire was loud and the roaring flames were fanned by the sea breeze that came between the houses, like a draught sending flames up a chimney. Inside what was left of the police station, the plaster ceiling and wooden frames cracked and crumbled. The three dead men and the wounded one had been taken away before the fire took hold and were peaceful, or lying quietly at least, in the hospital. The fight was to keep the fire from spreading, and it took until dawn to do it.

The early morning was mild and grey, long streaks of smoke mixing with the cloud in the sky over the town. There would be days of activity as the bombers were sought. They would not be found. Somebody might be found, somebody else, another terrorist, another sympathiser.

The rubble of the police station was still smoking. The soldiers left the streets to the morning traffic, and people going to work made the day normal again.

Kirby left Hal at his door. He only remembered Clara when he opened it and the thin chain snapped tight. ‘Clara!’

Clara had fallen asleep leaning against the wall, with her neck stretched uncomfortably. She woke up with small hands on her face and Meg saying, ‘Mummy,’ then a few moments later Hal’s voice downstairs.

She wrapped a blanket around herself and ran down. She went as fast as she could to the table and dragged it back from the door.

‘What are you doing?’ said Hal, laughing, shut out.

Clara slid back the chain and he stepped inside, smelling smoky with a dirty face. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes of course.’

‘Good. Two Turks bought it, and an RMP – bloody bastards. I need to get cleaned up. I’ll have breakfast at Epi. CO wants to see me.’ He went loudly up the stairs.

‘Hello darling!’ he said to Meg, cheerfully, and Clara went up after him, gently rubbing the soot from her hands where she’d held his arm.