by Jim Gregson
‘Of course I won’t, sir. I don’t speak much with RSMs and CSMs – not unless they speak to me first.’ I giggled a little, trying to indicate that this was a joke, or at least a light-hearted observation. Barker didn’t seem to go much on humour. ‘Speaking of education, sir, could you give me some guidance on my teaching duties here? I suppose we have to meet a great variety of needs, with the island so crowded with troops.’
The major looked at me suspiciously. ‘What do you mean by that?’
It seemed to me pretty obvious what I meant. But I didn’t want to offend this dangerous dinosaur. I searched for something uncontroversial on which we might agree. ‘They gave us the latest figures about army literacy and numeracy at Beaconsfield. Quite shocking, really. They confirmed that there is a great need for basic education among our forces. I thought there might be opportunities to do something for the lads who’ve previously missed out on the education system, whether they’re national servicemen or regulars. And of course there will be—’
‘The first thing you should learn is to ignore ninety per cent of the rubbish they fed you at Beaconsfield. The people there have no idea of what conditions are like in the real army.’
I was rapidly revising my opinions of the staff at the Royal Army Education Corps headquarters in Beaconsfield. I had thought during my time there that even the better instructors were unduly conservative and a little out of date in their thinking. In the last twenty minutes, I had decided that they knew much more about education, the army, and life in general than this bright pillar of knowledge in a distant outpost of empire.
I looked around me and said desperately, ‘It’s good to see the excellent facilities we have here, sir. At least the person who designed the set-up of this camp seems to have thought that army education and the people who provide it are important within the bigger scheme of things.’
‘The bigger scheme of things. That’s it.’ Barker seized upon the cliché and ran it round his palate, as if revisiting a cherished poetic phrase. Then he produced his own string of clichés, no doubt culled from official orders and exchanges in the officers’ mess. ‘We are in the midst of a quite abnormal situation. We are policing a troubled island, so that normal procedures and normal facilities are necessarily curtailed. We cannot expect things to proceed normally when we are in an emergency situation.’ He savoured that phrase, which he had delivered to the ceiling, and lowered his eyes to address it more directly at me. ‘An emergency situation, Sergeant Gregson. We are in the midst of what the politicians at Westminster have designated the Cyprus emergency. Education takes a back seat when lives are at risk, and that is as it should be.’
He seemed to be expecting a round of applause. I waited to make sure he had finished before I said, ‘I can see that, sir. But we aren’t at war, are we?’ I thought I might as well use the fact that had been quoted at me so often. ‘I know that there is an emergency and that there are many thousands of troops spread around the island to deal with it. But for a lot of the time they must be sitting around bored. I know what that’s like, from my long stay in the transit camp. We had no educational facilities there, but if we’d had anywhere like this the troops would have flocked in and been delighted to accept whatever we could offer them. And their COs would have been glad to send them. I’m sure that if we made people aware of what we have here and what we might be able to offer to them—’
‘Are you questioning my direction of this education centre, Sergeant Gregson?’ Barker’s eyebrows were beetling. It didn’t add to his attractions.
I had hoped that enthusiasm might meet with approval. I realised now that enthusiasm was a big mistake with this man. ‘No, sir. Certainly not, sir. I was only trying to offer a few suggestions as to how we might make our mark, sir. I do know that—’
‘You know nothing, sergeant. You would do well to remember that when you offer your tomfool suggestions.’
I couldn’t see how I could offer any suggestions, tomfool or otherwise, if I knew nothing. But by now I knew better than to offer this thought to Major Barker, who would no doubt treat it as mutinous. I said glumly, ‘Are you telling me that there are no formal classes being conducted here at the moment, sir?’
‘I’m telling you exactly that, sergeant. You would do well to remember it. You would also do well to remember who is in charge here. And now you can begin your work. I wish you to catalogue the equipment we hold in this centre.’
My heart sank. I’d been looking forward to doing something that might have been useful for a group of soldiers and useful to me in my future career. I’d been hoping to be dealing with people rather than equipment. I wasn’t bad with people, but I’d had trouble with equipment throughout my army career.
I spent the rest of the morning making lists of maps, field compasses, rulers and pencils, none of which seemed to have been used. I counted my way through thirty-eight boxes of chalk: twenty-four white, four red, four yellow and six green. Each box contained a hundred sticks of chalk. Twenty board dusters for the two immaculate slate blackboards were excessive, but no more so than the rest of the equipment here. I was glad to escape to the sergeants’ mess for a light lunch and half an hour of something nearer to real life.
I strongly suspected that an inventory of all this equipment already existed in Barker’s desk, but that only made it more necessary for me to compile my own list accurately. The man who had now locked himself inside his office would otherwise compare my efforts with an existing list and declare me a scrimshanker.
My task was what most other ranks would have deemed ‘a good skive’, but I found it immensely depressing. We were the Royal Army Education Corps and our mission was surely to educate. We had here what I am certain was the best facility on the island. I’d thought that, for the first time in my eight months of army service, I’d be able to offer something useful. I’d thought that I’d reached a place where I might be able to offer some repayment to the nation for what it had spent on my reluctantly undertaken army service. To see this expensive building and this expensive equipment lying unused was very dispiriting.
Major Barker emerged from his office at 1500 hours. He glanced without interest at my closely written lists, set them back on the table in front of me, and looked at me with extreme distaste. ‘You may find that you are temporarily employed on tasks more vital than education, sergeant. We have to use our senior NCOs in the most efficient way possible, during the Cyprus emergency.’
He left without further comment. I watched the new Hillman drive smoothly away and wondered how Barker had acquired such a car. I could have thought of many more worthy recipients, but that wasn’t the sort of list I had been directed to compile.
At the end of the day, I found another RAEC sergeant in the mess. He was older than me. He was also wiser. He was more philosophical than I was about life, the army and the RAEC.
Jack Parkinson had been a miner in Durham for two years before studying for three years at the Slade School of Art. He wanted to succeed as a freelance artist but he had so far found little demand for his paintings. In the light of that, he had been persuaded to sign on for five years during the first months of his national service. He had accepted the blandishments of Mammon, which I had so sternly rejected, but he’d seen a lot more of life than I had.
Jack was attached to an infantry regiment with large numbers in Dhekelia. He was teaching men who had missed out on the education system to read and write effectively, but he did this in a room provided for him in their barracks, rather than in the education centre where I had spent my morning. He was painting a little in his spare time and had even sold a couple of his works to officers.
All this I learned in twenty minutes in the bar. I told him a little about myself, answering his questions almost apologetically, because he seemed to have the military life so much better controlled than I had. I was glad to meet a fellow schoolie but I felt flat and uninteresting compared with the broad-shouldered man on the other side of the table. The glass of w
hisky and ginger looked very small in Jack’s big, competent hands.
‘I hear you’re a snooker player,’ he said.
I wondered how he’d heard that so quickly. But I wasn’t surprised. I was becoming accustomed to the mysterious, accurate grapevines of sergeants’ messes. I grinned. ‘My snooker ability is a little like Mark Twain’s death. Reports of it have been much exaggerated.’
‘It won’t do you any harm in here, snooker skill. I’d go easy on the quotations, though, if I were you.’ Parkinson examined the bowl of the pipe he was about to light up with some care. I envied him that pipe. I knew that if I tried to smoke a pipe here, it would be a mere affectation and immediately recognised as such. Jack went through the pipe-smoker’s rituals with matches and tobacco, puffed contentedly a couple of times, and said, ‘Have you met Major Barker yet?’
‘Yes. I spent most of the day with him.’
A nod and a couple more puffs. There was an aureole of blue smoke around Jack’s head now; it seemed to add weight to his opinions. ‘Barker’s a stupid prat. Or to use the correct army term, a fucking stupid prat.’ Jack considered that verdict, then nodded his confirmation of it. ‘That’s why I organised my own job with the Surreys. You should do the same, if you get half a chance.’
‘Any suggestions?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Sorry. I got my job by chance. I heard a CSM in here complaining about how ignorant modern recruits were, compared with the men he was with during Hitler’s war. I muscled in and offered to help. Barker was only too glad to have me out from under his feet. I’m still officially part of his establishment, but we hardly ever see each other. That suits both of us.’
‘Thanks for the information. If you hear of anything going, let me know.’
Jack Parkinson nodded. He was a competent, well-organised, self-contained man, not at all what I would have expected an artist to be. I never got much closer to him than I was on that first day. Jack was always friendly, but he gave only as much of himself as he intended to give.
*
I determined to keep my ears open in the mess and listen for any possibilities of useful employment. But when I went across to the education centre next morning, I was directed to report to the camp’s large fuel depot. Major Barker told me emphatically, ‘A senior NCO is urgently required there.’
Dhekelia housed fuel not only for the camp but for the forces operating in most of the south of the island. The quartermaster warrant officer to whom I reported offered the opinion that the large field which had been designated as a fuel store would have been much better occupied in growing spuds. He took me to the far end of the field and sourly indicated the eight Turkish Cypriots who were to operate under my direction.
They stood upright, ceased all activity, and assessed their fresh-faced new supervisor. The WO 2 stared back at them. ‘Don’t take any nonsense from the idle bastards!’ he said.
As he turned to leave me, I said desperately, ‘What exactly are we supposed to be doing here, sir?’
‘Ah, you’ve not been briefed.’ He shook his head sadly at the deficiencies of the officer class in general and Major Barker in particular. ‘Well, it’s quite simple really. These jerry cans are considered to be dangerously vulnerable to attack if left here. They therefore have to be moved to the other side of the field, which is considered much safer.’ He looked up at the towering stack of cans beside us, then across the field to the much smaller collection two hundred yards away, presumably the beginnings of a stack that would replicate this one.
I followed his gaze from one to the other and then back to the workforce I had been allotted. He must have caught my unspoken question about the value of the exercise, because he now added with a professional sigh, ‘Ours not to reason why, Sergeant Gregson. Some higher authority has deemed that it must be so, so it is so.’
With this pithy summary of army strategy, he turned and walked resignedly back to his office at the other end of this long field.
Each jerry can contained five gallons of petrol, which made them quite heavy. When my team appeared lethargic under their new direction, I made the mistake of trying to demonstrate to them the speed at which they should be operating. Our only means of transport between the old stack and the new was a truck, which was pulled manually between the two, rather like the sturdy trucks used at that time to transport luggage on major railways stations. I picked up a can in each hand and lumbered briskly towards the truck, then I flung them expertly beside the cans already assembled there.
The Cypriots watched me with their heads tilted a little to one side, a manifestation of their interest. I turned panting from the truck, smiled uncertainly at them, and said with all the stern authority I could muster, ‘Like that, you see!’ They looked at each other, then gave me an uneven round of applause.
It was the language barrier that had driven me to this physical demonstration. Whether or not this linguistic bar was as genuine and comprehensive as they declared it to be, my workforce maintained it with determination. I had none of their language and little prospect of acquiring any. And they remained resolutely opposed to learning any of mine.
The one word I learned from them on that first day was ‘Pushti!’ I knew it was an insult, because it was always delivered with contempt and with an exclamation mark. They never applied it to me, but only to each other. They would nod towards one of their members as he turned away from us and call ‘Pushti!’ after his departing figure. I decided from the gestures with which they occasionally accompanied the word what it probably meant ‘Bumboy!’ but I was never quite sure of that. I used it myself, when I was particularly irritated by their idleness. It was my only insult to them and it constituted a pathetically narrow range of obscenities for a man who regarded himself as a connoisseur of language.
My Cypriots were too intelligent not to realise the futility of the task on which they were engaged. I found after a couple of days that the two who were most contemptuous of it had been here for over two years. During that time, they had transferred these same jerry cans from the very place to which we were now returning them to the site where they now towered majestically above us. Not surprisingly, they were even more cynical than I was about this parable of modern military life.
For me, it was one more of those army situations that were unreal, but which the system said you had to treat with the seriousness of the very real. In an island where danger lurked, I had been alloted a task which afforded me a safe and totally undemanding skive. And my eight workers in turn had to behave as if they were engaged upon a serious task, simply because it provided them with regular and relatively well-paid employment. Master and workers both found the work totally pointless and intensely boring, but that was a small price to pay for such an easy number. In the old military cliché, Sergeant Gregson, don’t rock the boat.
It was a soul-destroying existence. The days dragged terribly and I longed to be doing something meaningful. I don’t know how many of these days passed before that outlet arrived quite unexpectedly. I was called to the education centre by Major Barker, who informed me that I couldn’t shirk for ever and that he had real work for me.
I was to journey each Thursday to a British school near Larnaca to teach the children of servicemen. ‘Instruct’ was Barker’s word, but I was still young enough and idealistic enough to bridle silently at that. I didn’t ask why the children were still there when their civilian teachers had been sent home because of the danger to them in Cyprus. Barker wouldn’t have known why and would no doubt have regarded it as an impertinent question.
Military regulations had been constantly tightened as the Cyprus emergency had become more acute and more men had been killed. All leave to the excellent seaside holiday facilities at places like Akrotiri had been cancelled. You were now allowed out of camp only on duty and you carried a loaded Sten gun for the entire period of that duty. The regulations required that you attached an ammunition magazine to your Sten gun as you passed through the gates on your outward dut
y and detached it only when you arrived at them on your return.
I had heard vivid tales of how these crude-looking weapons were mass-produced for seven shillings and sixpence each. I had also listened to what I am sure were exaggerated accounts of their unreliability. They were likely to explode in your face and cause you more serious injury than you would inflict upon any enemy. They were fine for John Wayne when he was liberating Burma in Hollywood, but not to be trusted by sturdy British soldiers. In view of this, I sat with my Sten gun on my knee and its magazine resolutely unattached on my journeys to Larnaca. It seemed to me much safer that way.
There were only eight children waiting in the little school on my first visit. They were the rump of a much bigger group; the caretaker told me that there had been forty children in two classes a year earlier. I suspected that the army hadn’t been able to place these children back home when the teachers were evacuated. Officers’ children usually got free private boarding education in Britain, if the parents opted for it. The children of other ranks were less privileged and less easy to place.
The ages ranged from six to ten and teaching the children was a delight after the frustrations I had been suffering. They were enthusiastic and they were glad to see me, which was a great start. They undertook every task I devised for them with zeal and energy. They didn’t realise that I had little experience. I was feeling my way into teaching as they were feeling their way into learning, but we got on fine and seemed to be making good progress.
My only previous work with children of this age had been in a slum school in Manchester whilst I awaited call-up for national service. It had been a useful initiation into the realities of teaching in the fifties. As members of staff, we had bought shoes for children who were sent to school in bare feet. The skill had been to find second-hand shoes that were serviceable but well-worn – anything too smart would have been instantly pawned by opportunist parents.
