by Jim Gregson
It hadn’t rained here for four months. The result was dust. Dust in great quantities, which made what I had been told was a beautiful island look very arid, especially after England’s green and pleasant acres. Clouds of it rose high behind every vehicle on the unpaved road we now travelled. Choking billows of it drifted on the slightest wind; fine particles of it filled your eye-sockets; if you spoke at the wrong moment, grit clammed up your mouth. We drove between high posts into the transit camp. Tents in a variety of sizes stretched as far as the eye could see, with very little ground between them. I struggled with rifle and kit bag towards the tent I had been allotted as my billet, spitting out dust and feeling a dauntingly long way from lush green England and my beloved Joy.
There were forty thousand troops on the island, of whom some thirty-six thousand were under canvas. Without the twin demands of the Suez situation and the unrest in Cyprus, there would have been around four thousand here. In more tranquil times, Cyprus had been one of the most highly coveted postings for regular soldiers. Now accommodation, even tented accommodation, was desperately overcrowded. Those in command had the familiar army problem, which was now accentuated by the vast influx of national servicemen to the island. There was no actual fighting and no official war as yet (Cyprus was merely being ‘policed’), so what did you do with all these young men and all this energy?
In huge sections of the island, you couldn’t even conduct the large-scale practice military exercises which were the infantry commander’s favourite response to boredom in the lower ranks. Much of the land was populated by Greek Cypriots, who were likely to be anti-British and dangerous. A small but significant minority among them were likely to seize any opportunity to ambush British troops or to fling bombs into their encampments.
The safer area for exercises was in the Turkish zone of the island, the Turks being almost without exception pro-British and anti-Greek. On the day after my arrival at the transit camp outside Nicosia, scores of infantry units were dispatched to various spots in the Turkish zone for unspecified manoeuvres, in an attempt to relieve the almost impossible pressure on this teeming centre of military comings and goings. Sparsely populated and difficult agricultural areas saw more human activity than they had witnessed in centuries.
I narrowly escaped involvement in these exercises. It was not yet clear to whom I was to be attached. No regiment had claimed this isolated schoolie, and no senior RAEC officer had surfaced to assign me to any duties. The colonel who was dispatching large numbers of troops on these mysterious troop exercises informed me that this was an emergency situation and that I should expect to be used as a senior NCO, not as a sergeant/instructor. But on being shown my ‘excused boots’ chit, he plainly felt that a man who did not wear boots could be neither an efficient killer nor a suitable victim. He never returned to my tent to claim me and inform me of my duties, as he had assured me he planned to do.
My strictly limited experience of manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain did not seem the best preparation for action against Colonel Grivas and his growing gangs of ruthless terrorists. Or was this an army of freedom fighters, fighting for a democratic majority in an island which historically and geographically had strong Greek ties? It was much safer not to entertain that notion, even as an unvoiced conjecture; it would constitute mutiny or treachery if it reached the ears of hard-pressed officers.
I shared my tent in the transit camp with three men of lower rank. That was unusual in the rank-conscious army; it was evidence of how overcrowded the transit camp was. There was barely room for four beds and none of us had a locker. We lived out of our kit bags as necessary, but we could not unpack. Everything here was temporary. Each of us might be moving at any time and without any prior notice, but none of us knew where or to what purpose.
I was sitting alone on my bed in the tent, enjoying a few moments of unwonted privacy and reading a book, when a bizarre incident occurred. There was the sharp crack of a gunshot. There was nothing unusual in that: there was an almost continuous rattle during the day from the practice range beside the camp. This was where a succession of different regiments took turns to sharpen their marksmanship for whatever assignments might eventually be allotted to them.
This crack, however, sounded unpleasantly close. I realised after a moment that there were two neat holes in the upper part of our tent, one on each side of the apex of its roof. A few seconds later, a breathless corporal poked his head through the flap of the tent and gazed at the four beds. ‘Any casualties, sarge?’
‘No one hurt here. What the hell’s going on?’
‘Silly cunt left his safety catch off, didn’t he? Only dropped his bloody rifle and grabbed at it, the daft sod!’ The corporal came into the tent and inserted his finger first in one bullet hole, then in the other, as if he required physical confirmation of the path of the errant missile. ‘Good job you weren’t standing up sarge, innit?’
I rose gingerly to my full height – I could only stand comfortably upright in the middle of the tent. The corporal was right. Had I been standing upright beside my bed instead of sitting on it, I might well have been posted abruptly into the next world. My Catholic education, which now seemed increasingly distant, told me that my eternal soul would have passed on to a better world than this sinful and highly flawed one. But my body insisted that it would like to enjoy the pleasures of this world for many years before my soul passed on to the next.
I grinned weakly and said to the corporal, ‘Ah well, no damage done here. Least said, soonest mended eh?’ I don’t think I was trying to be brave. I think my thoughts were already with the unwitting perpetrator of this outrage, who might be a hapless national serviceman like me. The corporal gave me a withering look and departed without further comment.
An hour later, a young lieutenant from the Warwickshires appeared to tell me that the errant private was in the guardhouse and had already been charged. I would be required to give evidence at his trial in due course: the accidental discharge of a loaded rifle was understandably a very serious offence. A Turkish Cypriot civilian would be along later in the day to repair the holes in the roof of our tent.
No one ever asked me for my evidence, and no repairer ever came. That was par for the course in our confused and crowded world. But it still did not rain, so we merely accepted the extra ventilation in our tent as an advantage.
I heard at about fourth hand that the man who had forgotten to apply his safety catch had been given six months in the glasshouse. I was never sure whether this was fact or army rumour translated into fact. With a constantly changing set of companions around you in the closely pitched tents, nothing was certain save what you witnessed at first hand.
A captain to whom I took an instant dislike appeared in the tent next morning. I sprang to attention with my head against one of the bullet holes. The officer looked around our temporary home with extreme distaste, as if surveying the detritus of a major sewage disaster. He made no comment, but banged his swagger stick twice against his thigh and said, ‘Sergeant Gregson?’
‘Sir! Sergeant Gregson present and ready for duty!’ My affirmation of my rank and identity was stentorian.
‘You are a senior NCO. You should be acting as one. We are in the midst of a military emergency here, you know.’
I did know. I also knew a welter of other things. I knew it wasn’t my fault that no one had so far called upon my services. I knew that I hadn’t asked to come here. I knew that the only notable event for me so far was my near-death from one of our own bullets.
I had by now sense enough not to voice any of these thoughts. I wasn’t going to risk a charge of insubordination. Even with stripes on your arm, you were paid to obey, not to think. A whole succession of senior ranks had been deployed to implant this single vital concept within me over the last seven months.
The captain seemed to be disappointed by my silence. It gave him nothing to bite on, when his face told me that he wished to be unpleasant. He eventually barked, ‘I require your assistanc
e. You will present yourself outside the main guardroom at eleven hundred hours.’
‘Sir!’ my thunderous monosyllable rang out over the puzzled heads of a thousand men beneath the canvas of the transit camp. The captain’s wince gave me a childish pleasure.
Bellowing was one of the few army skills I had mastered. The sound had to begin deep within the stomach, our guards sergeant major at Beaconsfield had told us. I had experimented and found that I could produce an impressive volume, without the tendency towards a high-pitched scream which beset lesser practitioners. When I became a sergeant, my decibels were often a useful talent to disguise my deficiencies elsewhere. My turnout was never the smartest; my lanky build determined that I always had a uniform designed for a man of my height but four stones heavier. But I could drill squads and mount overnight guards and present troops for inspection with an effortless volume, which bewildered my fellows, made privates spring to fearful attention, and impressed the authorities.
An hour later, I was being driven out in a lorry through the gates of the transit camp, for the first time since I had entered it nine days earlier. We drove some four miles, to a road block that had been set up on the outskirts of Nicosia. Our task was to search all civilians moving into the city and relieve them of any weaponry they carried. Unless we were convinced of their innocence, the offenders should then be arrested.
I was placed in charge of the road block, without any previous experience or any briefing as to what was required. The grizzled staff sergeant who had been manning the post was delighted to hand over to me. He was too relieved to be rid of the work to look with the regular’s customary contempt at my RAEC flashes or pristine stripes. Without any precise idea of what my duties were, I observed as much as possible and spoke as little as possible. The men responding to my sparse instructions had done this work before and they did not know how green I was.
In truth, the task of the road block was simple enough: to prevent the arrival in Nicosia of arms which might be turned upon British troops. It was rather like being a customs officer, except that we were looking not for contraband but for deadly weapons. It was serious stuff, because you were conscious that anything you missed might be used later in the week to kill or maim one of your colleagues in uniform.
A variety of vehicles, most of them ancient, struggled towards our barrier and drew up in the familiar clouds of dust. It was boring work, for both searchers and searched, but necessary, and we treated it as such. Some of the younger men we searched looked like cartoon cut-throats, with dark flashing eyes and sinister smiles. But in two hours, we discovered nothing sinister save for an ancient pistol beneath the shirt of an apologetic old countryman.
There was one considerable drag upon our efficiency. Like most army oversights, it proved crucial to the whole enterprise. The rule itself was reasonable enough. Unless you had a woman officer in attendance or WRAC personnel under your command, you could not search women. I hadn’t seen a woman in uniform since I’d arrived on the island, nor had I expected to do so. Attitudes then were more chivalrous as well as more sexist; women, and even army women, were not then generally expected to appear where there was physical danger.
But this made the diligent work we were conducting almost useless. There was no woman officer available, nor had there been throughout the day. In the face of this absence, all we were permitted to do to investigate the many women who passed through our road block was to pat the top of their hair gently. Presumably there was a forlorn and rather pathetic hope that one might locate a small pistol or a knife beneath a mound of dark hair.
A long procession of Greek Cypriot women subjected themselves readily enough to this procedure. Many of them had smiles which I was sure were mocking and the younger ones seemed to me to carry an amused contempt in their dark and clear brown eyes. Young and old wore long, often voluminous skirts. Beneath them they could be concealing bombs, small arms, even in some cases rifles. They and we both knew this. This led to an increasing air of absurdity as the afternoon grew hotter and the queue grew longer. I patted heads gently and avoided eye contact with a series of attractive women, whilst they smiled beguilingly into my still innocent face.
I was bold enough to raise the futility of the exercise later in a crowded sergeants’ mess, where I usually spoke as little as possible. There was a surprising measure of agreement among these practical men. The uselessness of road blocks was no one’s fault: there just weren’t enough women officers in Cyprus to go round, and you needed women when you were trying to deal with any unrest which extended to civilians.
Two men were shot that week on ‘murder mile’ in Nicosia.
I had been in the transit camp for twelve days when I received my first letter from Joy. She had in fact written each day and put all the notes into a single envelope whilst she waited for an address for me. When she had one, her news reached me surprisingly quickly. I read of the trials and rewards of her first teaching post, in a Catholic grammar school in Lancashire. She was teaching English throughout the school and A level Latin to a few girls scarcely three years younger than herself. Not much more than a year ago, we had been fellow students. Now her vivid, slightly breathless account of her life seemed to belong to a different world from the one in which her new husband was floundering.
On the day before she posted her letter, the Hungarians had risen against Soviet oppression in Budapest. They were being ruthlessly quelled as she wrote. Joy had apparently thought it better not to worry me with this, even though what was happening in Hungary made her concerns with her new work seem rather petty. How near and yet how far away the new Mrs Gregson seemed, I thought, as I lay on my bed and completed my third reading of her letter. I liked to think of Joy as Mrs Gregson, though it still didn’t seem quite real.
Our news in Cyprus was carefully filtered. We heard nothing of events in Hungary until much later. It wasn’t until I eventually arrived home that I found that the Soviet leader Kruschev had threatened to release rockets into Cyprus as the Suez situation deteriorated, and thus provoked a nervous near-collapse in my fearful mother in Blackburn.
On the day after Joy’s letter arrived, I landed in disciplinary hot water once again. I had written to her, concealing how far away from her and how bereft I felt under a light-hearted account of my experiences in Cyprus so far. It was three days after I had sealed and posted my official army envelope that I was called in front of a Major Hornchurch. He had a large, florid face and a small, carefully trimmed moustache. He looked very fierce.
He was holding my letter in his hand and he came straight to the point. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Sergeant Gregson?’
My first reaction was outrage that my letter to Joy should have been opened and read by this Blimpish figure. I was relieved that I had not declared any of my more passionate fantasies on paper. I said stiffly, ‘I was writing to my wife, sir. We were married not long before I flew out here. I was letting her know that I had arrived in Cyprus safely. I was trying to give her a light-hearted impression of what life was like for us here.’
I think I hoped to appeal to fellow feeling by the use of that ‘us’. I failed signally in that. Major Hornchurch bristled visibly. That was an interesting but not a reassuring phenomenon for me. He said, ‘You have given away details of military deployments and army action to anyone who cares to open your letter.’
I couldn’t think what he could mean by that. Then recognition belatedly hit me. ‘The road block, sir? I didn’t give any details of where it was conducted in my letter. I can’t see that anything I wrote could be of any possible use to the enemy.’
‘We don’t have an enemy, Sergeant Gregson. We are not at war here. We are policing an important British base in the Mediterranean.’
Why then was it necessary to open and read a man’s intimate correspondence with his new wife? I prevented myself from asking him that just in time. Hornchurch looked like the sort of army officer who wasn’t strong on logic, and who wouldn’t reac
t kindly to its use. I stood tall, looked straight ahead and said, ‘I was careful, sir. I’m sure I didn’t incorporate any information which might have been of use to those opposed to our interests.’ I was rather pleased with these gobbledegook phrases: perhaps I was learning the correct army linguistics.
The major looked down again at my harmless letter. ‘You are critical of army procedures, Sergeant Gregson. You question the strategy involved in a manner that is very nearly mutinous.’ He bristled again and I felt genuine alarm. I didn’t like the mention of mutiny. I couldn’t recall anything in what I had written that would remotely justify the word, but a glance down at Hornchurch in his chair showed me that he was certainly not joking. His colour had moved towards puce.
Understanding came to me eventually. ‘You mean the way I described the road block, sir? That was just light-hearted and anecdotal. I think I said no one was to blame. All I did was to point out that it was ineffective because we couldn’t search the women who came through the barrier, sir. We didn’t have the necessary female officer at the scene to make the searching comprehensive. It needed to be comprehensive to be effective, sir.’
‘Farcical! That is the word you used, Sergeant. Farcical! And you applied it to a well-planned and well-executed British army operation. Have you any idea of the lift that word would give to enemy morale?’
I wanted desperately to remind him of his contention a moment earlier that we didn’t have an enemy. But I bit my lip, stared straight ahead, and said, ‘No, sir.’
‘Had I not intervened, you would have given away our position, our tactics, the state of our preparation, and the nature of the forces we are able to deploy. An enemy tactician could have seized your letter and drawn all sorts of information from it.’
