A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘And you?’ I asked Pete.

  ‘They paid me.’ And he shrugged. I believed him too. Pete would do anything for money, except, I thought, shave off his silly little Douglas Fairbanks moustache. The trouble with bastards you’d served with was that old ties died hard: ask any serviceman. They only asked a favour in the first place because of what you had been through together, and they didn’t ask it unless they guessed you’d play along. I knew that they wouldn’t have told me the worst yet. I asked, ‘What’s the rest of it?’

  ‘Maybe a hundred armed GCs up there who’ll guess we’re coming. Whether they decide to do anything about us will depend on whether Grivas wants to cause trouble this week – he likes to keep us on the hop.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We leave from your hut before light tomorrer, so we’re getting out of here in a couple of hours. Check the kit, and a good night’s sleep.’

  Pete gave a dry little chuckle. ‘Just like operations, Charlie. Berlin next stop.’ I hoped not. Two of the guys who’d flown in Tuesday’s Child with us had never made it through the war. Pat coughed. He had something more to say.

  ‘An’ don’t tell your bird what we’re up to. Stay schtum.’

  ‘She thinks I’m going to be around until tomorrow.’

  ‘So surprise her!’ he said nastily. ‘She’s only a whore.’

  That’s when the second thing happened, because I realized immediately that she was no longer an only anything: she was rather special. I felt my chin lift, and something must have shown on my face because Pat immediately dropped his gaze and looked away.

  I had a brief, involuntary mental glimpse of all the girls I’d dated since I first met Grace in 1944 – and there weren’t as many as you’d think. What I realized was that although I’d kidded myself from time to time, I hadn’t had anyone really special since Grace had gone. Steve was out shopping and hadn’t returned before we split, so the practical problem solved itself. We crept away like thieves, and I felt like one.

  Chapter Twelve

  Let’s Hear It for the Dead Men

  Pete and I slept with our small packs made up, and our clothes laid out – both placed on adjacent bunks ready to go. He hadn’t been wrong: it was like old times. Sleep was a long time coming, and I remembered the sounds we used to share in the airfield Nissen hut we called the Grease Pit in 1944. I listened for Marty’s snores, but Marty was dead. When he was drunk he would sleep under his bed, with his arms around an empty bomb casing. The Toff, our mid-upper gunner, would sometimes whistle quietly between his teeth until sleep claimed him: I always knew that, like me, he would have been looking at the ceiling. The Toff was dead as well. Eventually I heard Pete say, ‘G’night, Charlie,’ and roll in his bed to face away from me.

  ‘G’night, Pete.’

  Let’s hear it for the dead men.

  Pat woke us with a muffled tap on the wooden door. That’s not quite true. Both of us had been awake and waiting for it, and had heard the vehicle arrive a minute before. We had a nondescript four-wheel drive Humber one-tonner, with a canvas tilt over the back: the windscreen had a makeshift wire-mesh grille. She was probably originally army green, but was filthy dirty with that Cyprus dull dust, which had softened its lines. It had once had UN markings and a serial number, but they had been daubed over with a dirty green wash. The steel cab had a round metal port, like a dustbin lid, over the passenger seat, and there were thin mattresses in the wagon bed under the tattered canvas.

  Pete and I climbed over the tailboard, and lay in the back beneath the tops of the metal side panels, a .5 cal heavy machine gun between us. It was set up, and ready to go – all we had to do was lift it onto its mount. When I looked up I could see that the inside of the canvas tilt had been lined with chicken wire – with a bit of luck any hand grenade would bounce back to its thrower, and give him a surprise.

  ‘I jus’ realized something,’ Pete said as he closed his eyes, and prepared to doze.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ain’t gonna be a comfortable drive, is it?’

  I grinned in the half-light. It was good to be back with him.

  Warboys drove. In the SAS they do a lot of things back to front – the officers do a lot of the driving, and carry loads as heavy as their men’s. It seems to work for them. Pat Tobin sat alongside him. Under his sheepskin jerkin his unit flashes had disappeared, so he looked like me, and as I glanced into the cab before I mounted up I saw a Bren propped up behind his seat. Part of me felt the old adrenalin rush, the other part asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing.

  Two hours later we were back in the lower Troodos, and it was beginning to get colder. Warboys pulled up under a tree which spread a wide low canopy over a sharp climbing bend in the mountain road. Pete and I got out and stretched. We both pulled on our flying jackets, and mounted the machine gun so it had a field of fire over the tailgate.

  Pat Tobin stood on his seat and mounted the Bren on the port above him, and handed me and Pete a Sten gun apiece each with two spare mags. When he got back in his seat he cradled his own Sten in his lap.

  ‘I don’t know if I could get to the Bren in time,’ he told me, ‘but it discourages the natives to see it up there.’

  We got back in the wagon bed and hunched down, and Warboys put it into gear.

  I don’t know how far we got into the Troodos on that trip, but at noon we were still climbing along roads that were barely more than goat tracks. It was bright and chilly.

  He pulled off the road again just as we crested a saddle; there was a small village spread out immediately beneath us, white houses, freshly painted, clustered around a village square with a small church on the far side. We all dismounted again. I asked, ‘Do they know we’re here?’

  Warboys muttered, ‘For certain. Mechanical noises travel for miles in the mountains.’

  As if to confirm his observation a black-robed priest, wearing one of those tall boxy hats, came out of the church and looked up at us. My previous idea of priests had them swinging smoking censers, and wearing strings of black juju beads and crucifixes. It’s hard not to conclude that there is something seriously wrong with people who face the world with an image of a horribly executed man around their necks.

  This one was different: instead of a crucifix he had a pair of binoculars around his neck. He looked at us through them long enough to be doing a head count, and then walked back up the two steps into his church. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. A minute later the church’s single, tinny bell began to toll. I’ve heard cow bells which sound like that in the Pyrenees.

  Still Warboys held us back.

  We watched the houses disgorging their inhabitants – play people, dolls. Some were larger than others, and some were faster. Warboys waited until they had all gone into the church. One boy was late, raced across the square, and had to hammer on the door for admission.

  ‘OK, chaps,’ Warboys told us. ‘Now we go.’

  We tore down the track into the village so fast that I was sure we’d break a spring over some of the embedded boulders we jumped over. Warboys raced the truck in a tight circle around the square, and came to a halt with me and the .5 which Pete squatted behind, facing the church door. Pete had been the rear gunner of Tuesday’s Child – I know, I’ve told you that already. He was always very serious about heavy machine guns, so putting him on the trigger had been an obvious choice. The bloody scientists would probably call it natural selection, and use the fact to prove that the apes we descended from were basically homicidal. I knelt beside him with a Sten.

  Time stopped.

  Not only were Pete and I facing the church, it left us facing the four guys and a girl ranged across the square in front of it. I don’t know where they came from. The men stood like the sheriff and his three deputies facing the bad guys in a bad Western film. I also knew that Pete would drop them if they so much as twitched without permission. It was in his nature.

  They were in full EOKA dress uniform: filthy dirty
sheepskins, sweat-saturated woollen shirts, and baggy trousers which hadn’t seen a tub in ten years. Ammunition belts worn across their bodies. One beard, one moustache with four days’ stubble, and one spotty teenager with a twitch – I’d have to keep an eye on Pete. The girl was about six years old, and had a grubby face. She carried a dirty white scrap of a flag on a short stick. The beard had an old German machine pistol dangling from one hand, the moustache had a rifle, and the spotty kid with a twitch had a small pistol. The priest, remarkably, had simply a smile. He wore a full-length priestly black number. Coco Chanel would have loved his sense of style.

  I heard and felt Warboys leave the wagon. He left his door open; a little cover against a back shooter, I’d guess. He moved up alongside us, but not into the machine gun’s field of fire. I noticed that the boy had a black eye, and there was a recent red blow mark high on the moustache’s cheekbone. Warboys spoke first; so cool you’d have thought he was announcing the guests at a mess dinner. English.

  ‘Hello, Adonis. Everything OK? No problems?’

  Eventually, after a lifetime, the priest replied, ‘Hello, Tony. Yes, everything is fine. As we agreed. Everyone is pleased to see you.’ That was a turn-up for the book. If Makarios had been telling the truth all this time, the villagers must have been the first GCs to be pleased to see an Englishman in about ten years. Warboys failed to respond, so the priest added, ‘If there was an ambush it would have been sprung already. My friends here,’ he indicated the three fighters, ‘are here to save face, nothing more.’

  ‘S . . . o . . . o.’ Warboys drew the sound out. ‘You have something which belongs to us, and we agreed a price for her return.’

  ‘We did.’ The priest looked a bit shifty. ‘But we have to talk about the money again. My friends here, and my villagers, have been unable to agree the sum.’ So, we were here to do a hostage exchange, and the first EOKA men I had seen in the flesh were going to shake us down.

  ‘Then keep her,’ Warboys said tersely.

  The priest looked agonized. He spread his hands, and said, ‘Please, Tony.’

  Warboys sounded doubtful.

  ‘We agreed one hundred pounds sterling, Adonis, and you shook hands on it.’

  ‘I did. But these are poor people, Tony. Farmers and peasants. They could only raise thirty-five.’

  That was interesting. Something was slightly arse about face here.

  Pete leaned over and whispered, ‘This is curious. I think they are paying us to take the woman away. Do you understand it?’

  ‘No more than you do.’

  Warboys hadn’t said anything, so the priest continued. ‘This is so important to them, Tony, that Leonidas has led two of his captains down here to meet you. You can select one as hostage to ensure your safe passage out of the hills. You must take this girl away – she is disturbing the village. She will not choose. Men fight over her.’

  Leonidas was a famous EOKA killer and leader. Like many of the successful EOKA men he had taken a field name from the ranks of the Greek heroes. What ill could befall the leader of three hundred Spartans? If he had come to supervise the exchange in person something very serious was going on here.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t kill her, and have done with it,’ Warboys observed. His voice was low-key. Disinterested.

  The moustache spoke for the first time. Good English, but a gravelly voice born of a love of tobacco.

  ‘And start a civil war, Englishman? There are men who think they are in love with her already. Read the classics – do you think Greeks learned nothing in Troy?’

  Warboys let the ensuing silence drag on a bit. Negotiation was obviously one of his strong points. Then he sighed and said, ‘OK, Adonis. Just this once, in memory of our past friendship – for thirty-five pounds I will take Leonidas’s hand on it, and take the girl.’

  The priest momentarily looked as if he was about to cry, but he was made of good stuff. He said, ‘Thank you, Tony. I will not forget this.’ Then he looked at his feet, almost as if he was ashamed.

  Warboys moved towards the three armed men, his right hand extended for the ritual handshake. He wasn’t taking any chances though: his left arm rested on his Sten, which he wore over his left shoulder on a sling. Moustache stepped forward, and held out his hand, but Warboys ignored it. He moved to stand in front of the boy, offered his hand and said, ‘Hello, Leonidas.’

  ‘Hello, Lion.’

  I suppose that there wasn’t all that much difference in their names. The boy seemed to change almost as we watched him. He stopped twitching immediately, and straightened up from the slouch. Even his spare frame seemed to fill out. Not a boy: a man then. Maybe he was in his mid-twenties. He smiled a spiteful smile, handed his pistol to the priest and took Warboys’s outstretched hand. Two enemies; eye to eye. I had seen this sort of thing before – and it always ended in tears. I suppose everyone on the square knew then that Leonidas was going to take the long ride down the mountain with us. His two older captains looked anguished, but they didn’t protest – he had them completely under control, which impressed me.

  Warboys asked ironically, ‘Where is she, this demon?’

  ‘She is besieging a farm.’ Leonidas shrugged. ‘Fifteen minutes. No more.’

  ‘You will accompany us?’

  ‘Of course. I gave the priest my word.’

  Pat and Warboys handcuffed Leonidas’s hands behind his back before they helped him into the back of the wagon with us. It was a tense moment. Anger and devastation crossed the faces of his men and the priest, but words got us through – they often do.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you free to get your hands on the machine gun,’ Warboys explained loudly to Leonidas. ‘This is just a precaution.’

  ‘Not necessary.’ The terrorist sounded scornful. ‘I promised. I gave my word.’

  ‘I often give my word, but I have found that there are promises . . . and promises. I’m sure that you understand. I have also promised.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To release you unharmed when we are finished . . . now, get in.’

  Pete pushed him down on one of the mattresses, and had him lie there. I wished the wagon had been larger because he smelt terrible. As we pulled away through the village onto a track which descended into a shallow upland valley I turned to look at him.

  He must have read my face, because he said, ‘Your soldiers chase me from cave to cave, and tree to tree for a year. I stink because I have nowhere to wash. What did you expect, an old-fashioned brigand chieftain in silks?’

  He did not need to direct us, for the track led to only one farmstead – a low house with a Roman-tiled roof, a muddy yard and a couple of long, low barns. Warboys repeated the trick with the Humber. He drove it into the yard, made a circle and came to a halt with us facing our exit, and the machine gun facing the farm. I don’t know how the others felt, but I was ready to fill my trousers. I felt naked, and exposed to any madman with a gun. Leonidas told me, ‘Tell him to switch off the engine.’

  I relayed that to Warboys through the small open window between me and the cab.

  ‘Why?’

  Leonidas heard him, and replied, ‘I will call to them. They will come out for me. They are too scared to come out for you – British soldiers have been this way before.’

  Warboys let the engine run for about three minutes before he turned it off. I ran another of Julie’s songs in my head: ‘Why Can’t We Just Be Friends?’ It seemed appropriate. I could hear Pete breathing deeply through his nose. He always did that if he thought he’d have to pull the trigger. Into the silence, and it was a silence – even the birds and the beasts had shut down – Leonidas spat out a few loud sentences in fast colloquial Greek. Even if I had known anything of the language he would have spoken too quickly for me.

  I tried Julie London again: ‘Calendar Girl’ this time. Then the door of the farmhouse creaked open, and another small girl in a dirty, shapeless dress came out to face us. Bravery is a characteristic that manifest
s itself early in Greek Cypriot women. Like her predecessor she was carrying a large stick which had a grubby piece of white cloth tied to the top . . . someone had obviously rehearsed them. Then an old woman in formal black weeds followed her out into the open. She had reached that ageless stage for Mediterranean working women when she could have been anything from eighty to four hundred and forty years old. Her voice sounded strong. Commanding and harsh. I asked Leonidas what she had said. He struggled to sit up, with his hands still cuffed behind him.

  ‘She asked if you have come to take away the she-devil.’

  ‘Tell her yes.’

  The old woman gave him a couple of sentences. An even older man – in his six hundreds maybe – came out and stood behind her. He walked with a stick, and his face showed pain with every step. I asked our tamed terrorist, ‘What did the woman say?’

  ‘She asked if I was Leonidas, and then went on to complain that my father still owed them a debt from two years ago. How could I be a famous bandit if my family cannot pay its debts?’

  I heard Warboys snort, ‘How much?’

  ‘A few hundred mils, probably, Lion – maybe two pounds sterling, no more.’

  Then the old man began to shout and wave his stick, so I asked, ‘What’s all this about? Where’s the girl?’

  ‘They are bringing her. The old man says she has ruined them. His sons have fallen out, and refuse to work. His daughter has run away to another farm.’

  The old man hobbled closer. Pete tensed and cocked the .5 with a loud mechanical click. Leonidas said, ‘You are in no danger. Not if I am here.’

  When he had approached close enough for his purpose, the old fellow pulled up his trouser leg to show a livid red and purple bruise on his shin. I noticed that he had marks on his face, and maybe the makings of another bruise. He looked as if he had been in a barney.

  ‘Some of my people sold the girl to this family,’ Leonidas explained. ‘She is young and strong, and spirited. Once she was broken they thought she would make a good wife for their youngest son. Instead she hurt the old man – you can see. She marked anyone who went near her uninvited. He wants his money back.’