by Jim Gregson
Suez was too contemporaneous a development for an official view to have been promulgated. But there had been trouble on the island of Cyprus for some years now, and the colonel instructing us took pains to emphasise how patient and understanding we British had been there, in the face of the provocation offered by Greek Cypriots to British rule in a British possession. My friend who had kept wicket and encouraged my aggression on the cricket field asked if the Greek Cypriots did not have some kind of case, in view of the history of the island.
He received a very long stare from the colonel, who then took a deep breath and gave him further instruction. These mistaken people were being badly led. They had been persuaded that they wanted union with Greece, when they were quite plainly much better off under benevolent British rule. The authorities had been much too patient, in the colonel’s view. They would have been better advised to give these Cypriot johnnies a severe arse-kicking in the first place. That would have shown them what was what and who was in charge.
But the damned politicians thought they knew best, as usual. They’d positively encouraged dissent, in the colonel’s view. The result was that this bloody Colonel Grivas and his bloodthirsty terrorists were killing British troops. And we weren’t even at war with them. We were merely policing the buggers, so that we couldn’t mount the full-scale offensive which would drive out the murdering bastards for ever. And now this bloody Archbishop Makarios had brought religion into it. He’d been parading himself about the island and sanctioning Greek-based violence against British troops, until he’d been removed. And yet the man claimed to be some kind of Christian.
The colonel was breathing hard now: we could hear it clearly in the silence that followed his account of recent events in this remote place at the other end of the Mediterranean. In the nineteen fifties, air travel had not yet shrunk the globe, so Cyprus still seemed an enormous distance away from us.
It was announced on the twelfth of July that Cyprus was to be given a new liberal constitution and ‘guided towards independence’. This would be conditional upon the abandonment of terrorism, Prime Minister Eden said. Far better to blast the buggers to kingdom come, according to our colonel, but you could only do what the politicians allowed you to do. The army in Britain was always subject to the government and that was how things should be. The colonel thwacked his stick against his thigh and nodded, but he didn’t sound convinced.
I found the Cyprus discussion interesting, but it seemed quite divorced from reality as far as we were concerned. I was more interested in the random facts I registered from the talks we were given about British armaments and the British taxes which financed them. The modern H-bomb was now a thousand times more powerful than the atom bombs which had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only eleven years earlier. Such ‘progress’ did not come cheaply. Of tax collected in a Britain still recovering from that world conflict, more than a third of every pound was spent on defence.
A country still impoverished from Hitler’s war and still in hock to the Americans was spending vastly more on armaments and fighting personnel than on any other single item. With a genuine curiosity, I asked how much of this would be saved if national service were to be abolished. The major who was addressing us glared at me and informed me that such insolence would be punished severely if it was repeated.
It was a reminder that the army retained the right to be blinkered in the national interest. Towards the end of August, Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared that the Suez dispute was ‘a matter of life and death’ for Britain. By the twenty-ninth of August, British and French troops were massing in Cyprus, in preparation for an invasion of the Canal Zone.
At the headquarters of the Royal Army Education Corps in Beaconsfield, discipline was appropriately fierce in the face of this national emergency. After sewing the three bright new stripes of a sergeant carefully on to the arm of my uniform on the previous night, I was directed to take charge of the Roman Catholic church parade on Sunday morning.
The Catholic contingent consisted of one private from the cookhouse and one private who was a medical orderly from the RAMC. I marched the duo with ringing commands over the three hundred yards from the parade ground to the gates of our Wilton Park camp. Once outside and on the public thoroughfare, we collapsed into unseemly laughter, abandoned our marching, and walked the mile to the Catholic church like the civilian parishioners we were to join there.
Things were more serious within the camp. We newly elevated sergeant/instructors were waiting impatiently and nervously for our postings. But we were held at Beaconsfield. After a week, the wait became official; the news was announced that we were to ‘await developments’. This was a scarcely veiled reference to the situation in Egypt and the increasing possibility of war. For the first time since I had entered the crazy world of national service six months earlier, I had to take serious notice of the greater world outside my closed and manic army experience.
There was one pleasant aspect of this hiatus in my military progress. I was able to see my fair and faithful Joy much more often. I hitched-hiked the two hundred miles north to see her at weekends on a series of thirty-six-hour and forty-eight-hour passes. I stayed with her in her house in Sale, outside Manchester, where her parents were kind to their daughter’s determined but frustrated suitor. Joy and I waited impatiently for our elders to go to bed, then clasped each other passionately on the settee before departing chastely to our separate bedrooms. It was intense but frustrating.
It became more so when I returned to camp to find my companions greeting me with graphic suggestions about the violent sexual activity which they were sure had dominated my weekend. I grinned weakly: protestation of my celibacy would only have increased the physical gestures that accompanied their coarse imaginings.
There were two key landmarks in my army career during September 1956. The first one stemmed from a map-reading exercise which took me through twelve miles of the pleasantly rural country around Chalfont St Giles. I found map reading easy and enjoyed my successful progress. But the boots which had so consistently refused to gleam during my Royal Artillery days were unyielding as well as dowdy. My new sergeant’s feet were extensively blistered and rather bloody by the time I returned to Wilton Park.
I attended sick parade the next morning, where even an RAMC major who had examined many thousands of blisters was impressed by my collection. He pricked the blisters and doused them with antiseptic, allowing himself a brief smile of relish at my winces. He congratulated me upon my reluctance to scream and said screaming was quite permissible in these circumstances: he had attended serious road accidents without seeing things more shocking than my feet. He then wrote me out a precious medical chit which carried the words ‘This soldier is excused boots on medical grounds.’
The chit didn’t say for how many days. I took it to the medical orderly in the anteroom, who turned out to be the very man I had supposedly marched to the Catholic church for Sunday mass a few days earlier. I grinned at him and said, ‘He hasn’t said how long I’m to be free of those bloody boots.’
My fellow papist and national serviceman inspected both the chit and my face. He then said, ‘I’m out next Monday. Four days, and I’m finished with this lot.’ He heaved a deeply satisfied sigh, confident that I would appreciate the significance of his impending demob. Then he took my chit and inserted a single word at the end of the first line, in a passable imitation of his officer’s scrawl. When he handed it back to me, the precious sheet carried the message ‘This soldier is excused boots permanently on medical grounds.’
I carried away my prize and studied it from many angles during the evening. The ex-guards sergeant major bawled me out fiercely for wearing my own shoes around the camp the next morning. I produced my chit. The moustachioed-one eyed it disgustedly, then sent me with my message to the quartermaster’s store. That seasoned veteran shook his head sadly, but the look he gave me held the grudging admiration which old army hands reserved for those who had successfully
played the system. His issued me with two pairs of ‘shoes black, size eleven’ and informed me without animosity that I was a jammy bastard.
I carried my note and my shoes through the rest of my army service. My tender feet were preserved in relative comfort and I escaped many parades. On all major parades, bullshit was the order of the day and shoes were not pukka. I kept the chit locked in the most secret compartment of my bureau for long after I had left the army, in case I was ever recalled to the defence of the realm. I was seventy-four when I decided that my precious and now historical note could no longer be of service to me. I consigned it reluctantly to my garden bonfire and watched the flames lick around its edges with a sharp pang of nostalgia.
The second key and completely unforeseen event of that September, more important than even my precious ‘Permanently excused boots’ chit, was my marriage to Joy.
We had planned between ourselves to marry as soon as my national service was completed, in the spring of 1958, though we had not yet broken the news to our families. But it was confirmed in the middle of September that I was to be posted overseas for the rest of my service. I was to go to Cyprus, and then perhaps to Suez, depending on how hostilities there developed. Joy and I would be separated for the rest of my army service.
There was the possibility of a silver lining to this painful disjunction. I hatched a plan.
My pitiful private’s wage as a national serviceman had been almost doubled with my promotion to sergeant. I now collected almost three pounds each week. But I saw greater financial possibilities. The marriage allowance for those who embraced matrimony was forty-nine shillings a week: £2.45 in the decimalised currency which was still sixteen years ahead of us. I calculated that if Joy and I let this accrue in a bank account whilst I was abroad, we would have just over £191 by the time I returned happily to civilian life. I could surely save another nine pounds from my princely sergeant’s pay, which would give us two hundred pounds. That was the necessary deposit for a house in which we could really begin our life together.
I travelled north on a thirty-six hour pass at the weekend and put this plan rather breathlessly to Joy. To my secret surprise and delight, she accepted its logic immediately. More importantly, she agreed to help me to sell the idea to her parents. She set about doing this whilst I journeyed another thirty miles north to Blackburn to convince my mum and dad of the excellence of my plan.
Our four parents were bewildered but amazingly compliant. It helped that my mum and dad had found Joy a source of great delight and were delighted to accept her as a daughter-in-law. I am sure that Joy’s parents had more reservations about me, but my girl swept them away with the force of her conviction. It helped that both our fathers had served in the Great War and endured the ‘land fit for heroes’ which followed it. Each of them voiced an admiration for any scheme that would get the better of the army financially.
I saw my local Catholic priest and arranged for an emergency marriage licence, which obviated the necessity for the banns to be read in church on three successive Sundays. Back with my unit on Monday, I arranged an appointment with my commanding officer. Once I was allowed to stand at ease and state my business, I asked for compassionate leave to allow a midweek marriage.
The CO nodded gravely. ‘You’re a bloody fool, Sergeant Gregson. How far is your girl up the duff?’
‘She isn’t sir. We just want to get married before I go overseas. The marriage allowance will build up into a nest egg whilst I am abroad. We hope to have the deposit for a house by the date of my demob.’
There was a wealth of experience in the sigh of the CO. ‘Have it your own way, sergeant.’
I wondered back in the billet if I should have gone along with the suggestion that Joy was pregnant. I was suddenly fearful that my request would be denied if they believed she wasn’t. It didn’t matter. The CO was plainly convinced after thirty years of experience that the only possible reason for a hasty marriage was that there was a bun in the oven.
He pointed out that the whole of our intake was on forty-eight hours’ notice for active service, so that forty-eight hours was the maximum leave he could allow. Providing that we were not ordered abroad in the next few days, this randy sergeant would be given Tuesday and Wednesday of the next week to make an honest woman of his bed-mate.
I made an excited phone call to Joy and set the marriage wheels into swift motion. I would leave the camp as early as I was allowed to do on Monday afternoon, hitch-hike north, sleep the night at Joy’s house, and greet my parents and a small family party prior to the wedding at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. There would be an informal reception at Joy’s house. We had been allotted the remaining tier of her elder sister’s wedding cake; Marie had been married with more notice and greater ceremony six weeks earlier.
As soon as was decently possible, I would carry my bride away to a one-night honeymoon in Chester (very important: Joy to make the booking). With consummation achieved, Sergeant Gregson would hitch-hike back to his unit on Wednesday, whilst Joy returned sadly to Sale and to the teaching post she had secured after her summer graduation at the University of Manchester. It all sounded very rushed, apart from the one-night honeymoon, which I hoped would mystically elongate itself into an eternity of connubial bliss. I had remained an optimist through all my dismal army experiences.
I was surprised by the energy and efficiency with which I had planned and achieved all this. I had a powerful driving motive, of course. I had spent three years trying every ruse I could think of to visit the forbidden areas of Joy. Now the opportunity to explore them legitimately had suddenly presented itself. I had seized it, you might say, with both hands. For perhaps the first time in my military service, I felt pleased with myself.
*
Things ran like clockwork, apart from the honeymoon.
We had a beautiful sunny day for the wedding. My parents spoke for many years afterwards of the hours we spent in Joy’s dad’s splendid suburban garden. I think he was pleased after the bewildering speed of the build-up to entertain visitors on his lawn whilst the bedding plants in his borders still provided a blaze of late-summer colour. Joy and I smiled at everyone and were genuinely delighted to have them with us. But we slipped away to the station and the train to Chester as soon as we reasonably could.
The one-night honeymoon, with both partners virgins, followed a predictable course. It seemed to me miraculous that female underwear, which had denied me entry for so many years, could be removed so rapidly and easily when the wearer was willing. There was then much activity and very little sleep. I hitched back with a dazed smile to Buckinghamshire and collapsed on parade next morning. The new Mrs Gregson made the shorter journey to her home, then hastened to the doctor with the routine bout of cystitis.
In October, I boarded the first aeroplane I had ever seen at close quarters and flew on an emergency flight to Cyprus.
Five
I flew with dozens of other fresh-faced and equally bewildered lads in uniform on a Douglas Skymaster from Southend.
Civilian airlines had been conscripted to assist in the swift transfer of the troops now being moved in huge numbers to the eastern Mediterranean. We were told nothing about our intended assignments, but it was plain to us that we were destined for Suez and for war. Cyprus was the nearest British base where troops could be assembled for the proposed assaults.
Air travel in 1956 was still a great novelty. Neither I nor any of my companions had ever been on an aeroplane before. The few army veterans who were with us had journeyed to postings all around the world, but always by sea. We studied the huge propellers with interest and boarded the plane with considerable excitement. Fourteen hours to Cyprus, we were told, including a two-hour pause for refuelling at Malta. Take-off time was to be 11 p.m. and conditions for flying were favourable. We would be able to get our heads down for the night as soon as we were airborne.
I dozed uneasily through the darkness whilst the engines throbbed steadily. My first clear me
mory of flying is of looking down in brilliant dawn sunshine upon an island set out like a relief map on a vivid blue sea below me. A glamorous air hostess appeared beside me: it would be half a century yet before these exotic creatures were reduced to the anonymity of ‘cabin crew’. She told me confidently that this was Sardinia. I watched it move away in slow motion beneath me; one was then much more in contact with the world being traversed than is the case with modern high-flight and rapid jet travel.
It was the only moment of drama or beauty on the flight. We saw nothing of Malta save the airport and a few walls of Valetta which were still pock-marked from wartime bombing. We were pretty tired when we landed at Nicosia, though we had scarcely moved for fourteen hours. I gazed round me eagerly as we left the plane, anxious to register my first impressions of this strange and exotic island which had suddenly become a reality for me. There was nothing to be seen apart from clouds of dust from vehicles and khaki figures scurrying like ants in different directions.
An RASC driver with a corporal’s stripes on his arm arrived two hours later to collect us. He looked at my pristine stripes and the RAEC flashes on my shoulder quizzically, then addressed the weary men who were to be his cargo. ‘Transit camp for you lot. Pending active service in the invasion of Suez, that will be. Mud and fucking bullets.’ He delivered the last phrase with evident relish. I’m sure he had no idea what was to happen to us. Information always put you one up in the army, so people often pretended they had it when they knew nothing at all. RASC drivers were particularly expert in the practice.
There was a hold-up on one of the main streets of Nicosia. One side of it was strewn with rubble and we had to queue to pass along the single lane that was left. ‘Toffee-tin bomb yesterday,’ explained our knowledgeable driver, as he eased his big truck through with inches to spare. ‘One killed, seven injured. The sloppy bastards can’t even clear the road up properly.’ This seemed to outrage him more than the carnage. This man would surely make an excellent London cab driver when he left the army, I thought.
