Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  It had worked occasionally, in the past. But this temptation was far more urgent than mere lecherous imaginings. The threat to my chastity was much more immediate than those visions of Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe which assailed me nightly in my lonely bed. I struggled to conjure up small talk, which I had never been much good at. Even large talk would not come to me. I put both my hands on the table in front of me, in the hope that Rita would do the same. She did not.

  I said as loudly as I could above the hubbub around me, ‘You must be looking forward to getting together with your husband again. Is he in an infantry regiment?’

  She grinned. I could feel the hand beginning its work again. ‘Royal Army Service Corps, Kevin is. Rissoles, arseholes, sausage and chips. That’s what other soldiers call it. Well, they do when they’re looking for a fight.’

  I nodded. I was familiar with the insult to my own corps. ‘Rissoles, arseholes, egg and chips,’ they called the RAEC. Army wit was neither subtle nor varied. But I hadn’t expected to hear such vulgarities uttered by a lady. And still less had I expected a lady to take the lead in sexual foreplay. It would be afterplay, very shortly, unless I could find some means of escape.

  What I would have willingly imagined in private was giving me severe problems in this real situation. I said with all the volume I could muster, ‘Anyway, you’ve got married quarters. I’m only national service, so there’s no chance of that for me.’

  ‘Aaah, you poor lamb! And you in the prime of life, too. You must be missing your girl something terrible. I can tell you are!’ And as the caller directed our attention to what he declared must be the last bingo cards of the evening, Rita’s expert right hand became more active and her voice dropped again into her urgent sexual whisper. ‘Yes, I can tell how you’re missing her, sarge. And she’ll certainly be missing this!’

  Rita was an expert stroker, so much so that she brought from me an involuntary ‘Bloody Hell!’ Why had the university not thrown up women with this sort of attitude and this expert touch over the full three years of a BA degree? They called it higher education, but it had never included this. The Catholic Society might have attended to my spiritual needs, but it had never offered me anything as remotely exciting as this in the temporal world.

  And my neighbour’s next words confirmed that this was merely a prelude. ‘Six months I’ve been without it, sarge!’ Rita muttered urgently into my ear. ‘And you’re the lucky lad who’s going to get the benefit!’

  I think I gave an involuntary moan. It seemed to be against nature as well as highly ungentlemanly to reject this. It was a more generous female approach than I had ever encountered before. I closed my eyes and said hopelessly, ‘You should save this for your husband, you know. Kevin’s the one you really love. You’ll be glad you restrained yourself, tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Restrained!’ I wouldn’t have believed that so much contempt could have been hissed into that single word. ‘I’m gagging for it and so are you, Jimmy boy. And by God, you’re going to get it!’

  I had no arguments left and was conscious only of her expert hand. I fell back on the Irish Christian Brothers and the feeblest argument of all. ‘But I have religious scruples, you see, Rita.’

  It was the first time I had dared to use her name, but it had no effect. The lady ignored what I said completely and stroked more vigorously. She whispered into my now very hot ear, ‘And you newly married and missing your girl and with a cock like a table leg. We’ve fallen on our feet here, both of us!’

  The last card of bingo was almost complete. A couple of minutes at most would see it over. And then I would have to stand up with my member rampant.

  Like a table leg, Rita said, and it felt like it. There had been a lot of the cheap local wine drunk all over the room. I would probably get a round of applause. I closed my eyes in horror at the thought, and slid both hands beneath the table in an attempt to defend myself. Rita seized the left one eagerly and transferred it the short distance to her upper thigh. Before I realised fully what was happening, my fingers were against silky gusset, then suddenly within the dampness beneath it.

  I gasped in shock and watched helplessly as my pencil rolled across the table. I thought desperately of Blackburn Rovers’ hairy centre half, but he was no match for Randy Rita and her expert dexterity. My pencil was returned to me from the other side of the table with a quizzical look.

  I said frantically, ‘Help me check my card, will you please, Rita?’ Then I seized her arm roughly and dragged her expert hand back on to the table. Ignoring any double meaning, I widened my eyes and cried, ‘I’m no expert at this! It’s my first time, you see!’

  ‘But I’m sure you’ll come again and again!’ said Rita. Fortunately for my continence, she was at this point overcome by a combination of too much wine and the excellence of her own wit. She descended into riotous laughter, with her face flat against the table. After a few seconds she raised her head and looked at my card and then at me. ‘Near miss, that one was!’ she said, and collapsed again into raucous giggles.

  I did not feel able to stand up from the table until everyone else had done so and I had run through the Rovers’ entire defensive formation. Fortunately, everyone now seemed to be concerned only with getting out of the huge hangar as quickly as possible.

  Everyone, that is, except Rita. She took my hand and led me out behind the crowd, despite my urgent warnings that people would be watching her. There was nothing save starlight to illuminate our actions now. The result was that I was soon supporting the entire weight of a sturdy woman, with her curls against my face and her thighs clamped tight around my leg. She uttered a series of obscene commands and instructions into my ear, against which my Catholic upbringing offered but the flimsiest of defences.

  I was aroused and Rita knew it. Her strong right hand resumed its ministrations and she repeated, ‘Come on, big boy!’ with increasing urgency, as if that was a military command to which I must surely respond. I was certainly on the verge of obeying her orders. My chastity was about to be breached. Breached most violently and comprehensively.

  It wasn’t the Virgin Mary who intervened to save me. Even many days later, when I had distanced myself from the moment, that seemed an impossible explanation. Nor was it my faith. Faith was important, the clerics had insisted to me, when I had thought hope and charity more attractive. But faith didn’t help me here. Indeed, my faith had been much shaken by my eight months of army experience.

  What saved me was that Rita was reclaimed at the eleventh hour by her companions. Probably at a minute to twelve, as far as I was concerned. They took her by both arms and pulled her aboard the army truck which was to deliver their all-female party back to their temporary quarters outside the camp. I consigned her to her transport with an overwhelming sense of relief. I waved a thankful farewell, ignoring her bawdy shouts from the tailgate as the vehicle pulled away into the night.

  As I stood in the darkness and watched the rear lights of the lorry disappear through the gates, my relief was swiftly replaced by the overwhelming sense of an opportunity forsaken. It was a most unworthy feeling and it did not reflect well on me, but it was a very powerful one.

  I never saw Rita again, and nor did her like present herself to me for the rest of my service. She disturbed many of my nights in the weeks which followed. I tried without any success at all to dismiss images of the fortunate Kevin and the hours of vigorous sexual activity which must now be enlivening his nights in the married quarters at Famagusta.

  I followed a troubled post-bingo night with breakfast in the sergeants’ mess. A sergeant in the Warwicks with whom I’d established a temporary rapport came across to join me as I contemplated my bacon. ‘You look a bit pale, Jim. Did you go to the bingo last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’

  ‘No,’ said my older companion. He munched his cereal thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Bloody dull, bingo, don’t you think?’

  *
r />   I had now been in the transit camp for seven weeks and had still not seen an officer from my own corps.

  A story reached me in the sergeants’ mess that I was destined to follow the first waves of attack into Suez. I would be part of a communication team there; our main mission would be to run a forces’ newspaper. This information arrived mysteriously and without confirmation, via a grizzled staff sergeant in the Signals Corps who had been in the army since 1941. He nodded sagely and tapped the side of his nose when I asked him to confirm his source. I have to this day no idea whether my informant knew anything concrete or was indulging in informed speculation.

  If there was such a plan, it had obviously been aborted with the ignominious withdrawal of the British forces from the Canal Zone. I awaited orders with an increasing conviction that I had been forgotten. The weather had broken at last. Rain dripped intermittently through the bullet holes in the roof of the tent and I moved my bed a foot to avoid it. A corporal from the Pioneer Corps eventually made a crude but quite effective repair with a needle and a leather shoelace, but he moved on before I could thank him for his efforts.

  Four days after the bingo evening, RSM Turnbull called me again to his office. I was expecting another assignment in my role as ‘buckshee sergeant’, but he told me to stand easy and selected a single sheet from the mass of paper on his desk. ‘I have a posting for you, Sergeant Gregson.’

  I felt a sudden trepidation, when I had expected only relief. The transit camp abruptly seemed secure and predictable, almost safe, when set against the unknown adventures which a posting elsewhere might bring. The news that was coming now would shape my army future, leading me on to danger or to security. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  I think there was the faintest of smiles on the face of the man at the table, as if he understood all of this without it needing to be stated, as no doubt that vastly experienced man did. ‘You are to be transferred to the Army Education Centre at Dhekelia. Dhekelia is one of two large permanent barracks on the island. You are very fortunate to be going there. Report to the guardroom at zero eight hundred hours tomorrow morning. Transport has been arranged for you and for three other NCOs.’ He looked up into my young, inexperienced face with what seemed almost like affection. Then he spoke less formally. ‘You’re a lucky man, Sergeant Gregson. Dhekelia is a good posting.’

  I never knew whether RSM Turnbull, who seemed beneath his gruff exterior to have developed some concern for me, engineered this move. Officially, it could have had nothing to do with him, but RSMs were powerful men. I did not know whether it was this man’s initiative or just pure chance which was now directing me southwards.

  Eight

  The truck was waiting outside the guardhouse when I arrived there with my kitbag at five to eight on the following morning. My companions were a corporal and lance corporal in the Royal Engineers and a bombardier from the Royal Artillery. The four of us regarded each other without much interest. We were bound for three different destinations and we didn’t feel any common bond, apart from a relief to be leaving the transit camp behind.

  The truck rocked along minor roads with many potholes, which made for slow progress. In Britain, we would have slowed down as we approached housing, in the interests of safety. Here the driver sped up as he passed through villages. These were the points of maximum danger, where an EOKA sniper might take a potshot at a lone British army vehicle. The regulations stated that troops could respond to hostile fire, but must never fire the first shot. That was the disadvantage of being not at war but merely policing the island.

  We didn’t speak much to each other, but gazed out at the landscape and gave particular attention to any groups of its denizens. We knew it was unlikely that we would be attacked in daylight, but we knew also that the rocking of the truck as it sped over largely unpaved roads and through many potholes made the possibility of accurate return fire from the truck remote.

  We dropped our lance corporal off first. We had travelled for an hour, so I decided that the camp must be about twenty-five miles south-west of Nicosia. Apart from a wooden guardhouse by its gates, I could see nothing here but tightly packed rows of tents. The lance corporal slung his kitbag over his shoulder and muttered a goodbye to his fellow-sapper as he left. It was the only communication he had offered since he had climbed aboard.

  I glanced at the two men left with me and said to the bombardier, ‘I used to be a gunner myself. I trained down at Tonfanau, on the Welsh coast. I expect you know it. I was going to be a radar operator, at one time. I spent a lot of hours peering at little moving dots on a green screen and trying to decide what they meant. That was before I got my transfer to the RAEC.’

  The bombardier looked at the RAEC flash on my shoulder. ‘Rissoles, arseholes, egg and chips,’ he articulated clearly and dispassionately.

  I looked at him evenly, but he refused to catch my eye. ‘I had the chance of a transfer to the RHA, but I turned it down.’

  I thought this a fitting riposte to the RAEC insult. Only artillerymen like the bombardier would understand it. The Royal Horse Artillery was the elite regiment in artillery circles, the one RA men spoke of with bated breath, even when listing their own battle honours. It was an outrageous lie, of course: a national service gunner would never have penetrated the RHA. And the bombardier wouldn’t believe me, but that hardly mattered. I’d responded to his hackneyed army insult. The three of us watched the still-parched country bouncing past us and didn’t speak again.

  I had somehow broken my cheap watch during my desperate rejection of Randy Rita. I lost all count of time and felt rather sickly as our journey proceeded. Even the main roads were mostly unpaved. And even after the sporadic autumn rain, the few vehicles ahead of us threw up high clouds of dust; our experienced driver took this as warning to keep a considerable distance behind them or to risk asphyxiation. With little possibility of overtaking slow-moving country vehicles, progress was slow. It was well into the afternoon by the time I lost my two remaining companions.

  I thought I heard Limassol mentioned as the second man left, but I had never seen a map of Cyprus and my knowledge of its geography was minimal. He disappeared into a sea of tents, a much more extensive one than either of the camps we had visited earlier. I climbed into the passenger seat beside the driver for this last stage of my journey: no junior rank could tell you to piss off when you had three stripes on your arm.

  ‘We should get there before dark,’ said the RASC driver. I noted a sudden nervousness in this previously laconic man. I knew why from what little I had picked up in the sergeants’ mess at the transit camp. Drivers were sitting ducks for any gunman, because they had to concentrate on the hazards of narrow, unpaved roads and on negotiating their sudden twists in towns and villages. Statistically, the chances of being attacked were small, because not many Cypriots were actively hostile. But the shootings when they came were almost invariably during the hours of darkness, and usually fatal.

  Perhaps the driver followed my thinking, for he said wearily, ‘I’ve got a billet for the night at Dhekelia when I’ve delivered you, sarge. I’ll get a few drinks and a game of darts in the NAAFI and a proper roof over my head for once, with any luck. Then I’ll drive back to Nicosia tomorrow. Decent skive, really.’ He belched appreciatively at the prospect. A ‘decent skive’ was the army aspiration of every ranker.

  Not long afterwards, I sighted what looked like a sizeable modern town about half a mile ahead of us. ‘You’ve fallen on your feet here, sarge,’ said my driver as we drew nearer.’ He glanced at the RAEC tab on my shoulder. ‘Takes brains to do that, I expect.’

  ‘Takes luck, you mean! You know the army better than that,’ I said. I realised now that this was not a newly built local town but the extensive modern camp with permanent quarters which I had been promised. The buildings were newish, solid and clean, and my spirits rose as we drew nearer to them. The men in uniform near the gates looked smarter and more alert than the troops at the transit camp. It looked as
though the bullshit factor would be higher here, and I wasn’t good at bullshit. But even that thought failed to depress me.

  The clock over the door of the guardroom by the entrance told me it was five past five. I needed to report to the education centre and register my arrival. The sergeant at the gates looked at me curiously as he directed me to the place. It was a sizeable building. A notice above its main door told me that this was the ‘Regional Army Education Centre’. That presumably meant that troops came in from the area around us as well as from this large camp itself. The doors were securely locked and there was no sign of any RAEC personnel.

  The driver drove me another three hundred yards and deposited me outside an impressive sergeants’ mess. I found a quartermaster sergeant who had actually been notified of my arrival, the first time I could remember such an event in the army. He led me up a flight of stairs to the first floor, then along a lengthy, well-lit corridor to the room allotted to me.

  ‘Unpack your stuff and make yourself at home. Grub’s from six-thirty. Anything you want to know, I’ll be in the bar downstairs.’

  This small, pleasant, well-appointed room felt unreal after my tent with the bullet holes. ‘Thanks, sergeant.’

  ‘It’s George. You’ll find it’s mostly first names, in the mess.’ He grinned. ‘When we’re off duty, we’re allowed to be mates.’

  ‘I’m Jim. Thanks for all this.’

  ‘No sweat, Jim. See you later.’

  My own room. I could scarcely believe it. For the first time since I had joined the army, I would sleep alone. There was hot water at the turn of a tap. There was a mirror on the wall and a wardrobe and a little chest of drawers. Like being in a hotel, I thought.