Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  For me, isolated and seemingly forgotten in the teeming transit camp near Nicosia, the collapse of the Suez adventure left the situation even more confused and my personal future even more uncertain. I hadn’t seen an officer from the Royal Army Education Corps since I’d arrived in Cyprus. I was commandeered occasionally by officers of various regiments who needed what they usually called a ‘buckshee sergeant’ to act as the senior NCO in charge of some minor military assignment. I was detailed as orderly sergeant in charge of the guard on a couple of nights, which at least offered employment. It also enabled me to enjoy the illusory peace and silence of a tranquil Mediterranean dawn, with the pink disc of the sun changing to orange as it climbed a pale blue sky.

  I also supervised two more road blocks on the main road from the south into Nicosia. The first of these was as boring and unproductive as the one I had previously been assigned to. In the absence of any female in uniform, I patted a succession of female heads and endured a series of taunting smiles. Most of the civilians were docile enough, waiting as patiently as British people in the inevitable queues. One or two of the more hostile women gestured mockingly down at their long skirts, as if challenging us to investigate what might be concealed beneath them.

  There was no danger of that. I gave clear orders against it, and British soldiers obeyed orders. But we didn’t enjoy the contempt of the locals. The tailback of vehicles grew longer, under the still-warm autumn sun. Most of my sweating assistants thought this some sort of result – any activity that inconvenienced the ‘Cyps’ must surely be a good thing.

  My final road block was more interesting. This was a direct result of the presence of a woman officer. I had set up the barrier and been directing my men for a little over two hours when a squad car arrived, drove past the steadily lengthening line of vehicles, and stopped beside me. A WRAC captain sat in the passenger seat. She was a squat, cheerful figure, with keen grey eyes, which took in the whole of the situation quickly as she climbed out of her transport. She returned my smart salute and instructed me to ‘Carry on, Sergeant!’ as briskly as any male officer.

  My prejudices were the unthinking and in-built ones of 1956. It felt strange to salute a woman officer, but I was concerned to get it right. She looked me up and down and said, ‘At ease, Sergeant. My name is Captain Danson and my instructions are to assist at this road block. What’s the form here?’

  An officer who was prepared to concede that she didn’t already know everything? Who was prepared to acknowledge that a mere NCO might be able to brief her? Who spoke of assisting, not directing? The WRAC leapt up in my estimation as I welcomed this novel approach. ‘Your presence here is much appreciated, ma’am.’ I’d almost said ‘sir’ in my eagerness. ‘With you here to supervise the operation, we shall be able to search women as well as men.’

  ‘Necessary, is it, that? I didn’t think there’d be many women taking pot shots at our lads.’

  ‘It’s very necessary, ma’am. Without a woman officer here, the most any of us can do is to pat the top of the women’s heads. They’re well aware of that and many of them are laughing at us. They can conceal whatever they like beneath their clothing and know that we can’t do a damn thing, whatever we might suspect.’

  Captain Danson looked at the line of waiting females, allowing them to see the smile which slowly spread across her stolid features. ‘So now that I’m here, it’s skirts up and knickers down and see what you can find, is it? Bit like a mess dance with you lads, really. Let’s get on with it, then!’

  I hastily suggested that she should take over the roadside hut which was our base here, so as to afford her activities a little privacy. Captain Danson and her female driver went to work with a will. I cheerfully channelled all the women in her direction and sent my corporal down to the end of the line of vehicles to make sure that none of them slipped away in the face of this increased vigilance.

  I noted with pleasure a new apprehension in the faces of the drivers and passengers waiting beside the line of vehicles.

  Our search of the males in the queue was no more productive than it had been earlier. We located one curved and vicious-looking dagger in the next three hours. It was a formidable implement, discovered beneath the shirt of a man of around fifty. He had wild hair, a spade-like beard, and a single flashing brown eye. His resignation and his few phrases of English suggested that he had been questioned before. He claimed that he lived in a hill village and was pro-British. That was why he needed the knife, he said. You had to be prepared to defend yourself against these wild young pro-Greek fellows. He flicked a glance back over his shoulder for dramatic effect, as if he feared attack from the rear at any moment..

  I was pretty certain that he was exaggerating the danger. I’d hammed it up a little myself, in the amateur dramatics which were a part of that civilised world I had left behind, and his fearful air was as convincing as that of a Shakespearean yokel. But basically, I believed this man, who might have stepped out of The Four Feathers or The Lives of a Bengal Lancer or any other tub-thumping British Empire film. He probably did feel threatened, though it would have needed Sir C. Aubrey Smith to handle this with due solemnity.

  I confiscated the dagger, as my orders said I must, but I wrote the man a receipt for it. He kissed this extravagantly, waved it at the men waiting behind him, and secreted it in an intimate recess of his person. I felt an unexpected affinity with the ageing ruffian: he was behaving like a British soldier receiving a medical chit stating that he was permanently excused boots.

  At four o’clock, I gave the signal to lift the road block. I watched the traffic filing past unhindered for a few minutes, staring into the dark eyes of the drivers and trying to detect which of them looked relieved. Then I went to compare notes with Captain Danson in the hut which had been her headquarters. As I had hoped and expected, she and her single assistant had collected considerably more than I and my five men had.

  There were four more daggers of varying lengths, plus what I would describe in my report as a small cutlass. But it was the firearms that were more lethal and more interesting, and there was a varied haul of these. There were three pistols dating from World War Two: one British, one German, and one Italian. A pleasing international balance. These pistols must all have interesting histories, none of which would ever be revealed. They were well-preserved and well-oiled and quite certainly in working order.

  There were also three Sten guns, none of which looked very old. It was difficult to be certain of the age of Sten guns. The Enfield rifle I had been allotted had 1917 clearly stamped upon it, but Sten guns were much cruder implements and did not carry dates. Captain Danson (‘It’s Beryl in here, Sergeant, and Captain Danson out there’) examined her booty with interest. Two of the Stens appeared to be British army, and recent. Had these weapons been taken from British army personnel who had been killed? (EOKA didn’t take prisoners, or hadn’t done so far.) Or had some treacherous idiot in one of our armouries been selling arms to terrorists?

  I took a deep breath. ‘Will you raise that question in your report of our work today, ma’am?’ I couldn’t bring myself to call my new friend Beryl, despite her invitation. I was the least professional of soldiers, but the training I had endured was too strong for that.

  She gave me a crooked, comradely, curiously masculine smile. ‘Your report, Sergeant. It was your road block. I was only here for half the time. Any credit which accrues from this lot should come to you.’ She looked wryly down at the assortment of arms upon the table. ‘But I’m quite prepared to write an ancillary note reinforcing whatever you wish to say and raising the questions which we’ve agreed should be raised.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m sure it would be helpful if you did that.’ I knew that any suggestion of skulduggery in the armoury was likely to be dismissed as treasonous if it came from me, whereas an officer would have to be treated seriously.

  ‘I’ve arrested the women who were carrying the Sten guns. At the moment they’re admitting nothing and pret
ending to understand nothing. We’ll probably have to release them in a few hours. What we really need to find out is where those Sten guns came from and where they were going to. I don’t suppose we ever will.’

  I said grimly, ‘If you hadn’t been here, they’d have got through. By tonight, they’d have been in the hands of fanatics prepared to use them against our troops.’

  I made that note at the end of my report and used it to emphasise what everyone knew, that road blocks were useless without the presence of a female officer to detect weapons beneath female clothing. I dumped our collection of trophies in the guardroom to be recorded and then transferred where appropriate to the camp armoury. Then I delivered my report to the adjutant.

  I was never given any answers to my queries about how the Cypriots had acquired British army Sten guns. But I was summoned to the adjutant’s office two days later. There I was told that I had questioned army policy and invited dissension in the ranks by my comments about the inefficiency of road blocks. Any repetition of such views would result in serious charges and possible reduction to the ranks. I was bold enough to say that the female officer in attendance had agreed with my views. I didn’t give her name and I wasn’t asked for it. I was told that the warning I had just been given had resulted from my report, which was my responsibility.

  I knew I could only invite more trouble by further argument, so I saluted and left. In retrospect, I decided that this had been no more than a ritual bollocking. The adjutant knew I was right, but he had to go through his spiel about damaging the morale of the troops. Both he and I had been driven into the sort of charade the situation demanded. I considered myself by this time something of an expert on military bollockings.

  Nevertheless, I was human enough to be depressed by this one. I felt that we had for once done a good job on the road block, and that the result for me had been the threat of a charge. I never saw Captain Danson again. That depressed me as well. In my father’s favourite phrase of dismissal, she was no oil painting. But she was the first army officer I had met who had seemed both human and humane.

  *

  And still I waited in the transit camp to see what would happen to me. It seemed increasingly likely that I was to be trapped here for ever, or at least for the duration of my service. I was like a character in Kafka, an insect crawling amidst a bureaucracy I did not understand. My occasional excursions through the gates of the camp were no more than illusions, suggestions of a wider world beyond my reach, which were dangled before me and then removed. I was trapped like a fish in a tank, swimming in and out of familiar arches and watched by agencies I neither saw nor heard.

  Imagination is understandably discouraged in the army.

  There was little recreation when you were off duty. The sergeants’ mess was invariably vastly over-peopled, crowded with a constantly changing personnel. I couldn’t get a seat or find a kindred spirit. Everyone around me was a career soldier, superior to me in both years and experience. They were interested in their military careers. They wanted to consolidate their existing sergeant ranks (some of them were not ‘substantive’), then move on to staff or colour sergeant, or even on to the exalted ranks of Warrant Officer Class 2 and Warrant Officer Class 1, the peak of promotion for a non-commissioned officer.

  RSM Turnbull was a Warrant Officer Class 1. He was tacitly acknowledged as the senior figure in this constantly changing firmament. He smiled at me occasionally from the other side of the mess. The oldest and most senior man in the mess chose to acknowledge the youngest and most junior. Quite unexpectedly, the only schoolie in the mess had this at least in this favour in this place where he trod so carefully.

  There was nowhere to go outside the transit camp when you were off duty. Nicosia was an increasingly dangerous place; more and more of it was placed out of bounds for military personnel. I went a couple of times to the military cemetery and stood for a few minutes beside the grave of Billy Beecham with its simple wooden cross. They were depressing interludes, for I could not move my thoughts beyond the waste of a young life. Billy had been curiously innocent, despite what my Catholic education told me about brothels.

  I wondered who had shot my friend and what ideas had driven on the hate behind the bullet. Probably someone as young and as ill-informed as Billy. Probably someone persuaded to the task of killing by forces as faceless as those which had uprooted cheerful, harmless Billy Beecham from Preston and brought him to be killed in this distant and hostile place.

  Two nights later, I went to the weekly bingo night, held in a vast, empty hangar which was crammed with tables and chairs for the evening. This was a popular entertainment, designed to embrace all ranks in harmless social exchange. There were civilians here as well as soldiers: wives with their husbands, wives waiting to join their husbands, even a few daughters. It was considered good for morale to ignore the normal army obsession with rank here. Even a few young commissioned officers slummed it nervously with the rankers for a couple of hours. I wondered if they had been directed here by their seniors, but I was probably unduly cynical; this was surely innocent enough entertainment.

  A sprinkling of the tiny number of regulars who had married quarters appeared tonight in civilian clothes. It brought another element of confusion for me, when I was already finding the whole evening bewildering. I had never played bingo before; I found myself surrounded by women who knew it intimately and were eager to introduce this fresh-faced innocent to its pleasures. Some of the older hands still called it housey-housey, a name I remembered vaguely from my childhood.

  I filled in my card diligently as the numbers were called. A woman at my elbow assisted eagerly whenever my pencil hesitated over the numbers and the mystical assignations given to them by the man yelling out the news, as tumbling balls were delivered from the specialist machine upon the distant rostrum. It was a strange but not an unpleasant experience. I won nothing, but came near enough to fuel the vicarious excitement of my female companions at the tightly packed table.

  I had a single beer, then switched to the cheap, free-flowing and potent local wine, which was rough-edged, but not too bad if you swigged it quickly. It had the welcome effect of making you cheerful, your company pleasant, and the repetitious pleasures of bingo almost exciting.

  It was during the final stages of the evening that I found myself with more at stake than bingo success. My neighbour was now gesturing more vaguely at the numbers on my card with her left hand, whilst beneath the table she clutched my genitals with her right. This was a totally unexpected experience for me, who had been brought up in the secure belief that young ladies did not do such things.

  Certainly nice girls didn’t take this troubling initiative, and still less nice women. I had considered the woman whose warm right thigh had been pressed tightly against my warm left one for the last hour a nice woman. Now she was encouraging me to revise that opinion.

  My ideas of womanhood had been conditioned by a prolonged indoctrination in the virtues and the other-worldly beauties of the Virgin Mary. What was happening to me now was definitely of this world, not that other one. Three years of pre-marital wooing of Joy had prepared me for resistance in women, not cooperation. And still less for this outright assault on my virtue. Perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I had not. I was far too modest and far too naïve for that.

  Modesty was one of the few qualities urged upon us by the Irish Christian Brothers. One or two clerics had shown an inclination to clutch my teenage testicles, but no female had ever ventured there. Nice women simply didn’t do that sort of thing, even in my fantasies.

  I was pleasantly inebriated, which added to the peril of my situation. This wasn’t as straightforward as the Irish Christian Brothers had indicated that it would be. When you had impure thoughts, you prayed to God for forgiveness and took cold showers. They hadn’t said anything about ladies who urged impure thoughts upon you, when you were already randy with drink. The clutching had shocked and dismayed me. But when it was replaced by gentle an
d lengthy stroking from the same practised female hand, the effects were even more disconcerting.

  Beneath the table, I now had to contend with not only a shameless and exploring female hand but a large and urgent erection.

  ‘You’ve got a full house here, ducky!’ a breathy voice whispered into my left ear.

  For an awful moment, I missed her double entendre. I thought she meant that I had a winning bingo card. The horror of standing up to claim my prize with an erect and out of control penis struck me with stunning force. Glancing down at my abandoned card, I realised that I was nowhere near winning at bingo. But my loins below the table were threatening a crisis. I grinned stupidly and whispered, ‘Not now! Please, not now!’ into the mass of dark curls beside me.

  At that moment, the game achieved a much lesser crisis than the one that was threatening me. Someone yelled ‘House!’ on the other side of the room and the people on my table relaxed in disappointment. This meant that they had time once again to speak with their neighbours. I removed the hidden hand from my member with infinite care, then commiserated in sickly fashion with the woman on my other side. She pointed out to me how near she had been to victory. I tried not to contemplate how near I had come to a very different sort of climax.

  I couldn’t risk standing up yet. Yet I needed to do something to prevent the resumption of the assault upon my virtue. I breathed deeply and turned to address the source of my embarrassment. ‘Is your husband here tonight?’ I asked, in a cheerful and unnaturally loud voice.

  ‘No. I’m on my way out to meet him. In Famagusta, that will be. That’s if they ever find transport to get us out of this bloody place.’

  Rita was in her late twenties, I reckoned. She had a mass of black curls and rounded, pretty features. She clearly had a very good bra: Joy had educated me a little in these things, in her brief period as a married woman. In the more direct and honest army term, Rita had excellent knockers. My member was stirring again. I tried hard to think of Blackburn Rovers and their blue and white shirts and their prospects of promotion to the first division. That was the antidote to impure thoughts I had developed over the years. But it didn’t seem to be having any effect in this most desperate of situations.