by John Harris
‘We’ll be all right,’ he reassured her. ‘My chaps are ready for anything.’ Boumphrey frowned. ‘Colonel Craddock don’t think much of ’em, though, and that’s a fact.’
‘Colonel Craddock’s no one to talk,’ she said firmly. ‘He’s not popular with his own men. Father says he’s off his head.’
Boumphrey’s eyebrows rose and she smiled.
‘Not actually potty,’ she explained. ‘Although he has a dreadful temper and when he was younger he was twice reported for using his fists. He’s supposed to be very strong physically – but he was badly injured twice in riding accidents so that, at one time, it was thought he’d never walk again, let alone ride.’
‘Who told you this?’
‘Father. There’s another thing.’ Prudence leaned closer. ‘He’s suffering from arteriosclerosis.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Not sure. But it’s incurable, isn’t it? You end up so you can’t move or something. Father says it’s what makes him so choleric. You know what I mean. Goes off the deep end a bit quick.’
‘He don’t like me, and that’s a fact.’
‘Never mind, Ratter. Other people do. I know they do. They’ve told me so.’ Prudence Wood-Withnell blushed. ‘I do, too.’
Jenno wasn’t listening much to the colonel now. He was going on about politicians and what a mess they’d got Britain into and Jenno was watching Boumphrey and the girl and wondering what her mother, now dead, had looked like. Because, though the colonel was thickset and sturdy with sharp clear features – distinctive colouring and black crisp hair only just beginning to turn grey – Prudence Wood-Withnell was tall, almost as gangling as Boumphrey and just as colourless. Her nose was too large while her eyes were as indistinctive as her hair which she wore in a nondescript style which was neither one thing nor another. She might, in fact, have been Boumphrey’s sister.
‘People keep insisting that Ghaffer al Jesairi’s going to declare war on the British,’ she was saying. ‘Think he will?’
‘Wouldn’t dare.’
‘Father thinks he would.’ Prudence had kept house for her father ever since her mother had died and, because the old man no longer enjoyed entertaining or being entertained, she found herself listening a great deal to his opinions. It wasn’t the most exciting life and there were few highlights beyond an occasional visit to the club. And there, only Boumphrey’s appearances really pleased her because she was realist enough to be aware that most of the men just weren’t interested in her while most of the women pitied her. Only Boumphrey seemed to enjoy her company.
‘Well, he might,’ Boumphrey admitted. ‘But don’t worry. You’ve always got the RAF on the doorstep. If it came to the worst, they’d evacuate you. We did the legation staff and their families from Kabul in 1929. Shifted over five hundred people. We’ve even got the same aeroplanes. Valentias are just an improvement on the Victorias they used then.’
‘Wouldn’t the Irazhis fire at them?’
‘We’ve got a lot of chaps. They wouldn’t get near enough.’
She didn’t really believe him. She’d visited the aerodrome more than once and she knew what a vast perimeter it had. It would need a lot more men than those she knew were available.
‘If it came to trouble,’ she said, ‘I’d have to see what I could do to help.’
‘You’d be evacuated with the rest,’ Boumphrey said firmly.
‘Not jolly likely. If there were trouble, they’d need nurses. That’s what I’d do. I’d be a nurse. Father wouldn’t sit back and do nothing and neither would I. Nursing’s the thing.’
‘They’d have you doing all the dirty jobs.’
She thought about it for a moment with a shudder then braced her shoulders. ‘It wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘I think you’re jolly brave.’
‘Not as brave as you, Ratter. Why are you in Mandadad today?’
‘Jenno wanted to see the colonel. About this feller Fawzi. It’ll be me and Jenno who’ll have to tangle with him if there’s trouble and he thought your father might know where we could look for him. I just came with him.’
‘Oh!’
Her face fell and Boumphrey hastened to reassure her. ‘Also came to see you, of course. Bit worried under the circs that you live so far out of the city. Long way from help and all that. Worries me.’
‘Does it really?’
‘’Course it does.’ Boumphrey blushed again. ‘Wouldn’t like anything to happen to you.’
‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’
Boumphrey’s blush deepened and he became tongue-tied. ‘Well–’ he said ‘–you know.’
She stared at him, her eyes wide. For a brief moment she managed to look beautiful as her own cheeks grew pink and her smile returned.
‘Oh, Ratter,’ she said.
Four
When Colonel Wood-Withnell had extracted his daughter, Jenno stood smoking by the bar for a while but never talking to anyone for long. Among the women was a statuesque blonde wearing a brilliant scarlet dress. She was Christine Craddock, Colonel Craddock’s wife. With her pale hair, the dress drew all eyes to her.
Jenno watched her, his eyes never leaving her as he chatted to the other men at the bar.
‘Crispy Christine’s arrived,’ one of them observed. ‘On the look-out for prey.’
‘RAF chap this time, I’m told,’ Jenno’s next-door neighbour said to him. ‘One of your lot.’
‘Really?’ Jenno looked interested. ‘Wonder who it is? Young Ratter perhaps?’
The man alongside him grinned. ‘She’d eat Ratter alive.’
After a while, Mrs Craddock said her goodbyes and walked outside to her car. They heard the motor start.
‘Entertainment over for tonight,’ the man next to Jenno said. ‘We can all go back to being normal. I often wonder what keeps those dresses of hers up.’
‘Deep breathing, I expect,’ Jenno said. ‘And a lot of faith.’
‘The women don’t approve of her much.’
Jenno grinned. ‘I suspect she doesn’t approve of them much either.’
‘The advantage’s all on her side. She’d stir a bishop.’
It was noticeable that now that Christine Craddock had disappeared the remaining women in the club all seemed to relax. For some time, Jenno moved about among the men and spoke to a few of the women then he crossed over to Boumphrey.
‘Pick you up in a couple of hours’ time,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to call on Ananda Patel, Queen of the Madames. Always well received there. Her place’s one of the best in Mandadad and she likes to be told so. We usually talk about horse-racing. Been known to give me some useful tips.’
As he turned towards the door, one of the men he’d been speaking to grinned at him. ‘Who is it tonight?’
‘Ananda Patel, the queen of them all.’
‘In need of an assistant?’
Jenno smiled. ‘Would you include me next time you went?’
The grin died and the other man turned away hurriedly. Hypocritical bastard, Jenno thought.
Heading for the car, he drove away from the club down the road. The moon was low over the horizon like a great yellow orange in a pale sky. There were trees just beyond the club and, after a while, he swung the wheel and turned among them. A car was waiting in the shadows with its lights off. Slipping from his seat, he crossed to the other car and slid into the rear seat. A pair of arms went round his neck at once.
‘What kept you?’
‘Discretion chiefly.’
‘I thought you’d never come.’ Christine Craddock’s voice was low and husky and as sexy as she could make it.
They made love hurriedly and not very satisfactorily then she sat up and lit a cigarette, the flaring match lighting their faces.
‘For God’s sake,’ Jenno said. ‘Keep that match down! You never know who’s among the trees.’
‘Irazhis, that’s all.’
‘That damn club’s full of Brits,’ Jenno pointed o
ut. ‘Some of them have their servants drive ’em here because they’re often not capable of driving themselves when they go home. People talk.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped. ‘Let them! What’s the matter with you lately?’
Jenno frowned. ‘The war’s the matter with me. It’s what’s the matter with all of us. We all know we’re living on top of a powder keg waiting for someone to light the fuse. If they do, we’re in a hell of a place. Hundreds of miles from help and surrounded by a country full of Irazhis, all of whom would gladly cut our throats.’
‘ I get a bit sick of meeting like this,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s all so unsatisfactory. We should find somewhere discreet we could go to. A house or something.’
‘Here?’ Jenno almost laughed. ‘In Mandadad?’
She sounded petulant. ‘Well, I don’t like waiting like this in the dark. People are suspicious.’
‘One chap in there got too close for comfort tonight. If your husband turned up occasionally it would help. Where is he this time?’
‘Inspecting his bloody soldiers, I suspect. I’m not surprised they hate his guts. He never leaves them alone.’
‘I think he’s getting you down a bit.’
‘Well you haven’t been getting me down much. I wish to God you would. And preferably not in the back of a car.’
Jenno said nothing. He had got into the affair without thinking and there were times when her persistence bothered him. In the closed community of the Lafwaiyah Club eventually someone would catch on to what was happening.
‘I wish to God something would happen,’ she went on. ‘Then he’d be so busy he couldn’t stop me doing what I wanted. At a pinch I could start divorce proceedings.’
‘Why?’
‘So you could make me an honest woman.’
Again Jenno said nothing, suspecting she’d never been honest in her life. She was fifteen years younger than Craddock and the story went that, because he was wealthy, she’d been interested only in his money and had managed to seduce him when she was barely out of school. He wondered how he’d got involved with her, because she wasn’t really Craddock’s type. The place, he decided, and the climate. They said that the equator was the fornicating latitude, but Irazh was hot and people didn’t wear enough clothes, and when a man and a woman danced together, as they sometimes did at the club, it was too easy to get ideas.
‘Would he give you a divorce?’ he asked.
‘He’d be mortally wounded merely at the suggestion.’
‘Don’t you have any feelings for him any more?’
‘Why should I have? There’s nothing left between us. Not even sex.’
She quoted:
‘His sporting days are over,
His little light is out.
What used to be his sex appeal
Is now his water spout.’
Jenno laughed and she giggled. Then she became silent.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No divorce. But if I left him, that’s how it would end up, isn’t it?’ She gave him a sharp suspicious look in the dark. ‘And then what?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean – and then what?’
‘What would your reaction be?’
‘To what?’
‘To the fact that I’d be free.’
Jenno gave a short bark of laughter. ‘I suspect I’ll be in no position to have a reaction,’ he said. ‘This war’s heated up lately. Hitler’s going to go into Greece and we know he has his eyes on Crete, and as far as I can see we can’t stop him taking it. That would bring him a step nearer to us. The next place would be Syria and that would mean he’d got a foot in the door. There’d be nothing to stop him coming here.’
‘He’d never do it.’
‘Dammit,’ Jenno snapped, ‘the bloody place’s already full of German tourists!’
‘I’ve never seen any.’
‘Then you must have had your eyes closed. They wear uniform.’
‘Uniform?’
‘Sports jackets and flannels. And they all carry cameras.’
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ For the first time she sounded nervous. ‘If things start, I mean.’
‘I expect all the women and children would be gathered into the British embassy and all the men would dig around for what weapons they could find and would stand behind the gates with their teeth bared, ready to defend them to the last breath.’
‘Sounds in the best tradition of the British Empire. Women and children cut off, defended by a gallant handful of males as they’re besieged by hordes of hostile natives.’
‘You sound as if you’d welcome it.’
‘I’d welcome anything as a change. What about you? Where would you be?’
‘Certainly not in the embassy. I’d be out in the desert, I expect, with my cars. And Boumphrey’d be out alongside me with his Belles.’
‘A fat lot he could do.’
‘You’re the second person tonight who’s underrated Ratter.’
She stirred irritably. ‘God, you’ve only to look at him! And that half-witted girl who’s drooling over him.’
Jenno didn’t answer. Prudence Wood-Withnell was as shy as Boumphrey, just as awkward and, like him, apparently not very clever. But they seemed to complement each other and, though cynical himself, Jenno found himself hoping they’d eventually make a go of it. They’d be all right, he felt sure. They both had sunny natures and were the sort to put up with each other for fifty years without the slightest trouble, never complaining when things went wrong or they ran short of money. They were suited. They were even rather schoolboyish and schoolgirlish in their conversation with each other but he had a feeling that Prudence Wood-Withnell, beneath her plain outward appearance, was as loyal and courageous as Boumphrey.
There was silence for a while then Christine spoke. ‘Not much of a job for a man with your capabilities,’ she said. ‘Driving armoured cars around. In Britain your contemporaries have been fighting the Battle of Britain.’
‘In which,’ Jenno pointed out gently, ‘most of them, according to the letters from home I’ve received, have ended up dead. They were flying obsolete machines thoughtfully provided by politicians more concerned with getting the vote than protecting the country.’
‘You sound bitter.’
Jenno sighed. ‘Friends dying make you a little bitter,’ he said. ‘People spend a lot of time sneering at soldiers, sailors and airmen, and a lot of clever people back home are now getting publicity because they’ve joined the forces. But they, my love, are the ones who’ll survive. The ones who always end up dead are the regulars who are there when the shooting starts. Because it’s a British tradition to make sure they haven’t the proper means to protect themselves, they’re always the ones who hold the dirty end of the stick.’
She gave him a long look. ‘My,’ she said, ‘aren’t we in a state?’
Jenno frowned. ‘My cars,’ he growled, ‘are twenty years old.’
Five
Number 5 Advanced Flying Training School at Kubaiyah was part of a scheme which had been set up in the twenties. Now that the war had started, a bigger scheme was being organised in Rhodesia, South Africa and Canada, even America, so that eventually, 5 AFTS would disappear. Of that no one had much doubt but, for the moment, there were still pupils there and they had to be trained. As Boumphrey put it, most of the pilots had already ‘wrestled with a Tiger Moth for two falls or a submission’ and were now getting acquainted with the more sophisticated machines which would lead them eventually on to front line aircraft. The air gunners were involved with ballistics – the Fraser-Nash turret and the Browning .303 – and were learning to strip weapons with their eyes shut, while the navigators struggled with drift, and the wireless operators with Morse code and the intricacies of service pattern receivers and transmitters.
Out of the uninviting terrain the RAF had created an oasis in the wilderness. A tall and – so they said – unclimbable steel fence, marked at intervals with concrete blockhou
ses, formed a perimeter almost eight miles in length alongside the river. Inside the enclosure had been built an airfield, half a dozen square blocks of hangars, a water tower, supply and fuel depots and ammunition dumps. There were quarters for the officers, men and pupils of the station, together with a number of civilian employees and their wives and families, and the battalion of Assyrian levies recruited for its protection. Above all and probably most useful, there were a large stock farm which kept it supplied with meat, vegetable plots and fruit trees.
Among the rectangles of mown grass that grew between the pattern of army huts, were beds of stocks, sweet peas and roses, always apparently in bloom. Since the airfield’s establishment, the trees that had been planted had grown considerably and there was now a maze of shady avenues bearing homely English names familiar to everyone in the RAF – Halton, Uxbridge, Cardington – to say nothing of a nine-hole golf course – a little on the flat side, according to the padre, who was its most ardent habitué – a polo ground and a swimming pool. There was also the yacht club on the lake to the south – the whole eight hundred square miles of it – duck, pigeon and grouse shooting, and, this year as a bonus, because the area was on the migratory route of storks from Europe to Africa, a pair of storks with a nest on the wireless mast above Air Headquarters, complete with two nestlings.
Naturally there were drawbacks. The heat was like a blast from an open furnace door and the air pockets over the airfield had to be experienced to be believed. The temperatures could rise to 120 degrees in the shade and 112 degrees was considered cool. Chocolate could be spread on bread like fish paste and, since there were dust storms five days out of fifteen, when the sweat ran it made muddy rivulets on the skin. One unfortunate cook for whom it had been too much had stood under a shower all afternoon to cool himself, only to die as a result in the evening. In winter the storms of rain and flying dust could drag down tents, tear off iron roofs and leave great patches of flood water in the take-off area. In addition, the native labourers, never easy to train, occasionally drove trucks not through the gates but bull-headed through the fence like tanks; and it was always difficult to school the locals to leave things alone. They had different views of ownership from those commonly recommended in British establishments and considered it wasteful to leave around what appeared to be a superfluity of good things to the mercy of moths, rust and flying sand. Irazh was the RAF’s sackcloth and ashes and at some time or other in their careers almost everybody had to endure it.
