by John Harris
But the beach we remembered was no longer deserted. There were umbrellas there now and English girls in bikinis who somehow made it not quite the same, and in the end we went to a bar. But even that was full of tourists, and the belly dancer looked as old as we did, with arms like thighs, and thighs like a brewery horse’s back, and the kus-kus we ate tasted sour in spite of the peppers.
We went back early to the little hotel Migliorini had found for us, faintly deflated, and began to dig into our cases and kitbags – Houston’s, I noticed, the original one, still with names like Alamein, Sicily and D-Day marked on it to impress the newcomers we’d met in Germany.
My own wartime shorts had long since worn out chasing the girls round the beaches of the Costa Brava, but Morena, who was sharing my room, had managed to dig out an old khaki jacket with two rows of faded ribbons still on the left breast, at least two of them more than merely campaign stars.
‘Where the devil did you get that?’ I demanded.
‘It’s my old blouse,’ he said with a slow shy smile. ‘I’ve kept it ever since. Sort of good-luck charm. You know how you do.’
It was bad enough seeing Morena in his old blouse, but it was a far worse shock when Houston appeared in the Arab head-dress he’d been in the habit of wearing to impress the Wrens in Alex, a little frayed and faded round the edges now and marked with the folds of years of lying in moth-balls at the bottom of a drawer.
He’d had a disappointing day. The girls in bikinis hadn’t been interested in him and the woman he’d tried to shoot a line to in the bar about his desert days had turned out to be the widow of a tank colonel who’d got a double DSO and a few other decorations for gallantry and had ended his days happily keeping chickens with the war forgotten, and Houston had finished up a little drunk and full of bitter bawdy comments on her figure. He looked now as though he’d brought out the head-dress merely to bolster up a sagging confidence in himself, as though it were a reminder of the days when slim-legged girls hadn’t winced at his jokes and gone off to search for something with a more up-to-date line in beachwear.
‘Good God!’ I said as he put his head round the door.
He looked sheepish. ‘There was nothing to touch ’em,’ he explained with a defensive grin. ‘Not for keeping the dust out of your mouth.’
‘What did young Nimmo say?’ Morena asked.
Houston frowned. ‘Oh, him!’ He gestured angrily. ‘He fell off the bed laughing.’
Morena grinned. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t look the same now, somehow.’
Morena was right. It didn’t. During the war Houston’s face had been coated with dust and drawn into lines of strain and sleeplessness that had quite obscured the absurdity of the headgear, but now it seemed to drown him and he just looked like part of the chorus from a revival of The Desert Song.
He seemed to know it wasn’t right, but he was defiant about it. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I’m wearing it.’
We were still discussing it when Nimmo came in. He was smiling and I guessed he’d come to tell us about Houston’s head-dress. The day had gone better for him than the rest of us because he was younger and he’d been able to pick up one of the girls in the bikinis and later one of the tourists in the bar, taking her into the garden after it got dark. He looked a little put out at first when he saw us all together, then he saw the faded ribbons on Morena’s blouse and couldn’t resist the dig.
‘Zulu War?’ he asked gaily.
Morena had been a brave man but never boastful, and I knew he’d never put up the ribbons just to impress us. They’d simply been there when he’d taken the jacket out of the drawer he kept it in, probably with a great sense of pride, and he gave Nimmo a quiet stare that took the smile off his face.
‘Oh!’ Nimmo edged backwards towards the corridor. ‘Sorry! I’ll go and hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line or something and leave you old soldiers to fade away together.’
His words grated because, somehow, I knew how he felt. There was a secretive compact between Houston and Leach that irritated me, something I couldn’t explain that had set them talking in low voices in corners on the ship or at night near the tent, something that set them aside and made them seem childish and conspiratorial, and Houston’s constant references to the war had had a strangely annoying effect.
When they’d gone I noticed that Morena had taken out his penknife and was cutting the stitches that held the ribbons in place on the jacket. Knowing Morena, I guessed that he’d never intended them to remain there, but there was something angry in the way he slashed at the thread, as though he, too, had seen Houston through a magnifying glass and found him not quite the man he’d believed him to be.
He looked puzzled as he pulled the ribbons away from the material, and a little worried too, as though he were wondering what he’d let himself in for. For a moment he held them in place against the breast of the jacket staring at them, then he looked at me.
‘Zulu War,’ he said, his voice a little shocked, his eyes a little hurt, because it had suddenly come to him, too, that El Alamein to Nimmo was as far away as the Somme and Waterloo.
He sat for a moment in silence, then he stuffed the ribbons into the kitbag and tossed the blouse down on the bed.
‘I never realised it was as long ago as all that,’ he ended slowly.
Three
The Sahara always triumphs over the Mediterranean and when we left the scorching winds were sweeping over the land inshore. The khamsin was blowing with parching dryness and great clouds of dust were coming up towards us, and although we were still in cultivated country with plenty of greenery about, wisps of sand were blowing in little feathery tails across the tarmacadam. The thermometer was already well over a hundred and I could feel the sweat running down between my shoulder blades as I drove.
‘Christ,’ Leach said longingly, ‘what wouldn’t I give for a nice cold beer!’
There were already dark patches on his shirt under his arms and down the middle of his back, and he seemed to be feeling the heat – Leach, who used to slave with a shovel all day just to show off his strength!
His nostalgic words started me thinking, because I could still remember the heat down by the Qalam Depression. We’d lived then on a drop of water a day per man and I found myself wondering if we still could.
We turned south out of the town, down towards the desert, passing a dead pi-dog stiffening in the road, and an old rusting bus which had overturned in a drainage ditch. Its wheels had been removed so that its axles looked like amputated stumps, and the panelling had been ripped from the framework, leaving the skeleton like a heap of ancient camel bones. As we passed the squalid native shacks of sack and kerosene tins, I noticed the traffic had changed from cars to shoals of trucks and petrol lorries coming up from the south, and broken-down buses heading for the market with shrieking horns and cargoes of gesticulating Arabs.
‘Christ,’ Houston said, ‘they’re all on wheels these days instead of on camels.’
We began to run through an amazingly rich growth of vegetation which I didn’t remember because it was all new and post-war, with bright green fields of groundnuts separated by windbreaks of cypresses, so that it looked a little like Provence. There were tamarisks and wispy eucalyptuses, and dirty villages brightened by oleanders, figs, almonds, vines, lemons, oranges and pomegranates. But no date palms. Not yet.
As we cleared the town, I was very conscious of a lifting of the spirits, a feeling of a holiday beginning so that we were like a lot of kids from an orphanage on their first trip to the seaside. I’d noticed it first as we’d left Dover, but now it was so marked as to be almost an emotion, the same feeling we’d all had years before when we’d first felt the hot air of the desert.
Houston’s pale eyes grew bright and he began to make a running commentary on things as we passed, and then, from somewhere at the back of his sluggish memory, as though it were an instinct almost, Leach began in his heavy hoarse voice to sing the old son
g we’d always sung as we’d left the base at Siwa – ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!’ It brought back memories of a slender and youthful Judy Garland looking like a wistful elf, with clouds of dark hair and big eyes, and that curious emotional constriction of the throat we’d all felt as we’d left wartime England, a saddened nostalgic feeling that we might never come home again.
By the third day we had begun to settle down a little, shuffling ourselves uncertainly into our new roles, and I began at last to see the first signs of the old comradeship we’d enjoyed so much.
The old songs began to pop up as we followed the coast road to Benghazi, from where we were to drive south-east in the direction of Siwa. We’d decided on this deliberately in spite of the extra miles. Going to Tripoli had saved the long sea journey from Marseille and the run along the coast would give us the chance to bed down together and work out what we needed in the way of extra stores before we entered the desert proper. After three days we would know just how much we were using in the way of fuel and rations and how the vehicles were behaving, and we could iron out the snags at Benghazi before we left civilisation.
Benghazi was still one of the ugliest towns between Tunis and Egypt, with a lot of unbuilt open spaces from which the sand blew into the eyes with every gust of wind from the sea, and it seemed to have more than its share of lean cats and scavenging dogs and more than its complement of flies. It didn’t seem to have grown any bigger or any more attractive than when I’d last seen it. Arab music still wailed from open windows even over the sound of motor horns and there were greasy finger marks across the lurid new cinema posters, and donkeys tied to trees between the racy American cars. We decided to eat in a little restaurant we remembered, and the Italian owner, spotting we were English, immediately offered us eggs, bacon and chips. It was just as if someone had rolled back a curtain.
‘We had eggs, bacon and chips last time,’ Morena said with a grin.
‘It was raining then, though,’ Houston added. ‘And there was hail. I didn’t know it could hail in Africa. Even the mud seemed to be flying in the wind.’
‘I’d got desert sores all over my ’ands.’ Leach took up the story. ‘We’d just come all the way up from the frontier. I got into an argument with an Aussie. I laid ’im out. He’d got a better greatcoat than mine, so I took it and left ’im mine.’
Houston’s face was suddenly sharp-angled and grim. ‘They expected brass bands and a military parade when we arrived,’ he growled as an unexpectedly bitter memory arose. ‘The mayor turned out in a tricolour sash. They didn’t think much of us when they saw us and they didn’t clap much.’
As he spoke, I caught sight of Nimmo’s face, half-amused, half-contemptuous. At first he’d listened to Houston’s stories eagerly, like any youngster hearing of something exciting beyond his own experience, but to Houston the war had been the only event in his life and he always tended to go on just too long about it and now Nimmo endured him with a blank face as though he only half believed him.
Houston had sat back, his eyes distant. ‘Wouldn’t mind nipping on to Tobruk before we turn south,’ he went on slowly. ‘Just to see what it looks like. Just to see how it’s changed.’
‘Chap told me,’ Leach said, ‘that it was just a village built out of old ammo boxes. ’E was ’ere in 1955. He said the Arabs was making a fortune out of scrap – petrol tins, guns, vehicles, tanks even. They broke ’em up by digging out the land mines and detonating ’em underneath with petrol-soaked rags. He said the casualties was a bit ’igh.’
He looked round at us to see if we’d enjoyed his story, then he scratched at the end of his nose, which had begun to peel with the sunshine, and gave a low guffaw. ‘He said they was so bloody keen on scrap it was dangerous to walk about at night in the town because they’d even removed the man’ole covers.’
‘Wouldn’t mind going back, all the same,’ Houston said again. ‘Just for a laugh.’
From Benghazi we drove through splendid avenues of eucalyptus planted years before by Italian colonists, following the undeviating monotonous ribbon of the coast road towards Agabia. The surface was good and free from pot-holes, and, with the bus in front of us jammed to capacity with fat veiled women returning from market, and vegetables and hens and even sheep, what lay ahead of us all seemed very straightforward.
Only the road seemed to hold any element of danger as wisps and eddies of sand streamed across the tarmac to form dunes, so that there was always the possibility of running into a wind-blown drift and careering off the hard surface. We kept passing gangs of men at work clearing it, and near Braq the encroachment had buried several mud houses to first-floor level and the palm trees were almost submerged by the advancing sand so that the fronds stuck out like carrot tops in an allotment.
We stopped the night at Agabia before setting off south and east the next day. It was our last night in civilisation for a while, but the hotel wasn’t the type to offer much comfort. It was still lit by oil lamps and the white walls were covered with finger marks and patches of grease. The tables in the restaurant were covered with oil-cloth and on the wall of the entrance hall there was a picture of the Sphinx with Welcome to Egypt written on it in English. There was a jukebox and a few bedraggled flowers in a rusty container that looked like an HE bomb case, and there were a few tourists, too, travelling along the coast to Egypt, all Americans from the airfields they’d established along the coast.
They were singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ to one of their number, and the woman on the next table to me was relating some anecdote to her friend – ‘She’s just celebrated her silver wedding, dear. Do you know what that means? It means she’s been married twenny-fi’ years. Just think of that. Twenny-fi’ years with the same guy’ – and somehow it stuck in my throat. Not because they were Americans or because they were enjoying themselves, but because they made the place different, like the Welcome to Egypt signs and the heavy bright-blue lorries carrying petrol and stacked bales of halfa grass that pounded past on the road outside every few minutes, their tyres screaming on the hot tarmac. It might just as well have been a pull-in bar outside Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
The landlord spoke English with a guttural accent and it turned out he’d been in the Afrika Korps and had returned to marry an Italian girl and set up the hotel.
‘I bet we met you,’ Houston said enthusiastically. ‘I bet I shot at you more than once.’
Nimmo shoved at the fatty-looking mutton on his plate and frowned. ‘Pity you didn’t kill him,’ he muttered.
The whole family turned out to see us off the next morning, as the pink fingers of the sun rose out of the mist, and the landlord gave us two bottles of wine just for old times’ sake.
‘Never again,’ he said earnestly.
‘Never again,’ we agreed, jammed full of sentiment.
We shook hands all round, and then his wife brought out a tray of warm beers, and we drank them there alongside the vehicles like stirrup cups before we set off south, the Land Rover leading this time, the lorry just behind.
We began now to see a few faded signs in German that were relics of the Afrika Korps and here and there a battered Volkswagen of wartime vintage, then we passed a long Roman arch, its tall columns gold and long-shadowed in the early sun, and a Fascist victory column with its eagle marked with bullet-holes where the Aussies had tried to shoot off its head. There were palms that were still disfigured by shell-splinters and fields of white crosses where men had died, the geraniums at their feet like new blood on the dusty earth, then we entered the desert at last, and I found my heart was in my mouth, not with fear or doubt, but with the same indefinable emotion that comes to you when you go back to an old school or look on the face of an old love, because you remember it with fondness and don’t want it to be spoiled.
We were all itching to get away from civilisation because it was in the desert that the adventure really started and because we felt that there the irksome irritations we’d felt and t
he disappointments that things were so different would fall away.
We were all glad when we stopped in the evening to stretch stiffened legs. The sky was beginning to show every shade from pink to lavender, with the curtain of the night rising from the east. The vanished sun had been a red ball of fire hanging on the lip of the desert and with its disappearance the plain seemed to be shifting, a changing waste of orange and lilac, and the two vehicles were the only two moving objects in the whole world.
We pulled on to a patch of pinky-red gravel off the track by a deserted village with derelict wind pumps and new dunes and prepared to camp for the night. There were a few Arabs among the broken buildings, not in them but camped in tents in the gardens, and we bought eggs and cheese from them while Houston brewed the tea on the stove.
Nimmo was cooking a bully-beef stew in the back of the lorry and we could catch the odour of it already over the smell of the hot engines. We were all hungry and it seemed delicious.
It was then that Morena surprised us by digging into his kit-bag and producing his mouth-organ, the same old instrument, and the way he got across the heartbreak of ‘Lili Marlene’ sent the whining notes floating thin and reedy and lost on the clean air, and started the memories flooding round us, almost tearful, so that it was all there again, just as it had been twenty years before.
‘This is the time I always liked best,’ Houston observed. ‘The cleanness, the smell of grub cooking, the silence.’
As he spoke, the high raucous notes of a modern jazz group started as Nimmo appeared from behind the lorry with his transistor, and the mood vanished at once.
‘For God’s sake,’ Houston said angrily. ‘Wrap it up!’
Nimmo looked up, startled, and grinned. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘We’ve got to have a bit of civilisation, haven’t we?’
