Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  August 5th The rain is ruining the harvest. Poor Daddy.

  August 7th Came home and helped a bit with the harvest … Everyone at home terribly busy and working like blacks – feel awful just being home like this and not really helping like everyone else …

  August 15th Poor Pop with this dreadful weather. The harvest’ll be ruined everywhere. Listened to Atlee [sic] telling us Churchill & Roosevelt had met at sea! Thinking of peace when it comes. Oh will it ever …

  It was just as well for Arthur Street that some of his other occupations could raise his spirits. Pamela’s diary records preparations for the filming of Home Guard activities near Ditchampton Farm, part of Arthur’s war propaganda effort: ‘July 25th Came home for the evening … Saw the rehearsal of Daddy’s home guard stunt which was very good indeed. All along the road from Arch to Bell Inn …’

  Shortly after this Pamela also records a rare, and seemingly extravagant, family day out at the coast: ‘July 28th We all had a lovely day out in Bournemouth … I bought a 9½ guinea red coat which is very breath-taking and I don’t know if it’s awful to have done or not – also a blouse & uniform shoes. The sea was lovely but barricaded …’

  Pamela had to wait several more weeks for further news from David:

  August 18th Came home in the evening to two letters from David!!!!!! Just wonderful – he said such a lot – he’d had ‘the disease’ whatever that is but I hope better now. Poor David. Oh will it ever end. I was thankful to get a letter.

  August 21st We all went to Bristol as Daddy had a broadcast. This-morning I had another cable from David!!!!!! His address is changed to F Battery 4th R.H.A. I wonder what it means.

  Notes

  * The ‘slip’ was a little square type-written form with a space in which departing troops could fill in their future addresses to which their loved ones could send letters.

  * Racing circuit.

  Seven

  Desert Life and a Difficult Decision (August–November 1941)

  During the Second World War, the morale-boosting effect of letters from loved ones to servicemen overseas and vice versa, cannot be overstated. Once David’s regiment had disembarked and made its way to its temporary headquarters, Camp Qassasin near Tel el Kebir, he found four letters from Pamela awaiting him. David’s first letter to Pamela from Egypt, dated 1 July, illustrates their importance:

  My Darling Pamela,

  We landed on the 24th & drove all through the night in charabancs to a camp in the middle of the desert. Next day I was given four letters from you. Darling, they were so lovely & you said so many sweet things that I feel quite unworthy … The first one was written on the 28th just before you went to the hospital & has a lovely picture of you ploughing in it.* I can never really reconcile myself to the fact that you can do that sort of thing …

  David then goes on to thank Pamela for her birthday wishes that had arrived just in time (his birthday was 3 July), and also for arranging to send him ‘some sort of Christmas hamper’:

  It is terrible sweet of you, but you are very naughty to spend your money like that & you must promise never never to do it again. I have really plenty of good food here & it is most unlikely that a parcel will reach me …

  Little did David realise how limited food would shortly become and how welcome such parcels would prove to be.

  He then goes on to describe the camp, the tasks he was currently performing and his impressions of Egypt and its inhabitants in general:

  Just now I am thirty miles from my regiment. I have been sent away to a workshop place where I am spending a week on my own, supervising the camouflaging of all our vehicles – 150 in all. I have to keep the right number coming and going & arrange meals for men & send all over the country for paint. They work all night & I am so busy that I had to steal an hour to write this. My hours of work so far have been from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day. It is pretty grim but I like to feel that I am getting it done as quickly as possible …

  There are so many things I should like to tell you about this country that I don’t know where to begin. The desert is no longer a desert but a sea of sand with tents for whitecaps. There are miles of prisoners’ camps. They look like chickens in chicken-runs with nothing but sand and sun around them. I felt very sorry for them until I found that we are all practically the same and it’s not too bad at all. I can’t cease to wonder at the enterprise of man who can turn all these hundreds of miles of sand into a town of huts & tents with waterpipes & sometimes electricity & showers & even cinemas …

  The people are amazing. The young men & women are very beautiful but terribly dirty. In the towns the city slickers wear coats with very built-up shoulders & underneath a pair of pyjama trousers or a nightshirt. There was a group of natives digging near my paint shop this morning. A villainous-looking man with a huge black moustache, high boots with toes that turned up & with a white skull cap with a towel wrapped round underneath it was standing over them with a huge whip, which he used quite frequently. They are a lazy lot. In the workshops about fifteen will get round a Ford engine to lift it up all looking as if they are practically tearing their muscles off & singing odd chants to invoke Allah’s help as well, lift it up a few inches & drop it on someone’s foot. He then sits looking at you with wide eyes like a child & pointing at his foot. Any two British men could lift the same weight quite easily

  I drove along a most picturesque canal coming here. There were a few hundred yards of the brightest green on either side – then desert. There were long thin bright green birds & men riding on donkeys & camels & wonderful barges …

  One of the unfortunate consequences of the heat and general unhygienic conditions is illustrated in David’s next letter to Pamela, written on 9 July:

  I have got ‘the disease’ today and am lying in my tent on my camp bed in pink pyjamas surrounded by a wonderful mosquito net which I got while away. It hangs from a metal ring above my head & looks like the bed canopy in a Louis quinze bed chamber. Everyone calls me ‘the bride’, but I am feeling very sorry for myself & cannot laugh much. I don’t know what ‘the disease’ is, but I am quite sure that it is caused by the officers’ food being cooked by native cooks. It is nothing serious & everyone gets it; unfortunately I have to walk a quarter of a mile once every ten minutes & I haven’t been able to hold food or water down for 36 hours …

  [This country] is picturesque in parts, but so dreadfully dirty, & of course it is frightfully hot & dusty. There are sandstorms which sweep through the camp in great eddies every afternoon & plenty of mirages. I didn’t think people saw them often, but they are quite plentiful …

  David then reflects on the dangers of separation:

  There is really an awful lot that I still do not know about you. All I do know is that there is no one else at all like you & that I have made an awful mistake in not smuggling you into my tin trunk & taking you here with me instead of leaving you like a ripe apple hanging over the top of the orchard wall to be stolen by the first naughty boy who comes down the road.

  A day later, David was evidently on his feet again and even well enough for night guard duty. In answer to another letter just received from Pamela, he wrote:

  It was a lovely letter and made me very excited getting it. I was up all night driving round the camp shooting Arabs & I stopped at about 12 o’clock to have a cup of tea & lay on my tummy in the desert & read your letter by moonlight. You said ‘Goodnight Darling – I hope it’s a nice night where you are’ & it was the most lovely night with the biggest moon & hundreds of stars. Later there was an air-raid nearby & wonderful fireworks …

  David’s next letter to Pamela, written on 17 July, reveals how their relationship has influenced him:

  You are a great inspiration to me & I think I am rather one to you too in a way. I feel that you would expect a very high standard of character & morals from me & I should set myself one when with you too. I should expect terrific things of you too which you would only have to fulfil by being your natural s
elf. You have the three qualities which I think I value most in life, honesty, beauty & goodness …

  It is not hard to imagine the impact of letters such as these on Pamela, even if several weeks passed before they reached their eagerly awaiting recipient, not always in chronological order. Whilst David’s feelings for Pamela at this time were undoubtedly reciprocated, such letters would have subconsciously engendered in her a sense of obligation to their sender, which would come to be tested in the months – and indeed years – to come.

  The last quoted letter from David also contained some important news about his changed circumstances, for which he explained the reasons in a typically self-deprecating manner:

  As for me, I have left the 72nd. Although I always knew within me that I should never go into action with them, it came as a great blow to me & I hated saying goodbye to my section & the other officers I know so well now & to think that they would be going into action sometime without me. Although we left three officers behind in England the regiment was still four officers over strength & so four had to be sent to base as 1st line reinforcements. In a way it is rather a disgrace to be sent, as though the choice fell on me, all other considerations being equal, owing to the fact that I was the junior officer in my troop, at the same time if there is anything much to choose between officers naturally they always send off the least useful. But I have always thought myself pretty useless & I am surprised they did not discover it before … We may be here three days or three months, all depending on the intensity of the fighting in the Middle East.

  As it turned out, David spent the best part of a month at Base Depot in Almaza, on the outskirts of Cairo, a period which appears to have been in many ways something of a holiday:

  I have been into Cairo … It is so wonderful to walk about on carpets again in places like Shepheards [Hotel] & to have a bath & go to a proper toilet place after being in the desert, and it is wonderful to see shops & pretty girls. Of course it is pretty hot, the temperature in the shade is always over 100 during the day, but I rather like that. One is driven almost mad by all the street beggars & sellers of muck. People chase after you in hoards [sic] shoving matches & cigarettes & leather wallets & baby ducks & hardboiled eggs & fly swatters & dark glasses in your face, & whenever you stop people come & scratch about at your shoes & you have to kick them off & even then they crawl after you & give your shoes a brush every time they touch the ground when you are walking along … The evenings I spend going to night clubs & dance places or looking at cabarets, & drinking rather too much. Last night I saw one of these bellywobblers doing the most lecherous dance I have ever seen in my life.

  There are two very amusing chaps with me from the regiment & we roar with laughter when we nearly get run over by runaway horsecabs or argue with blacks about money or get lost or swindled … I feel that leaving the 72nd is probably the best thing that ever happened to me, & the fact that fate is playing pingpong with me is exhilarating …

  A letter to his parents written on 6 August, towards the end of David’s period at Base Depot, confirms his enjoyment of all it had to offer:

  Incidentally I am very glad to have left them [the 72nd] now as this has been a marvellous change for me & I have been having a good time here. I am afraid it won’t be long before I am posted now & I am really rather looking forward to it as I have had enough of it. Just recently they have found a lot of work for me to do, but before that I had a fortnight of practically none at all. I joined a lovely club* where I went & bathed all day & am very brown now, nearly as brown as a real base officer, who can only be distinguished from a native by lifting up his shirt!

  In the evenings I go either to open air cinemas or restaurants & dance. The cinemas are very wonderful & you sit under the stars & black girls come & bring you whiskys [sic] & sodas & sandwiches when you clap for them. The dancing places are great fun too & there are a lot of lovely girls. They speak all sorts of strange languages, but very seldom English & my three girlfriends so far have all spoken French to me, so you can imagine that intelligent conversation is ‘out’, especially as I have to try to talk French at the same time as trying to do a rhumba or carioca …

  Around the same time David wrote a very similar letter to Pamela about these experiences, but added the reassuring paragraph:

  I thought to myself this is where my love for Pamela will be tested, but it hasn’t been at all. It has taken these dusky beauties to make me realise how completely I want & need you … Often I try to imagine that it is you I am dancing with, but I just can’t. Darling the other day I went & looked at the Pyramids. I rode round them on a camel feeling very uncomfortable & rode back on a donkey. I was cornered by a holy man in the tomb of the Sphinx who insisted on telling me my fortune for 10 piastres. He told me that there was a girl in England who thought about me in the mornings. He said I would be back in England in 10 months, married to this extraordinary girl in 14 & back in Egypt with her in 6 years …

  I enclose an enlargement of a photo taken by your camera of Stanley & I on our camels that day. It is a wonderful little camera & I will send you some more of its results …

  David’s period of comparative idleness came to an end on 12 August, when he and a new base officer friend, Mike Kershaw, were posted to the 4th RHA* as first reinforcements. Two months later, the 4th RHA would be reorganised into three eight-gun batteries, one of which – David’s – was officially named DD Battery. The latter’s informal name was the ‘Jerboa’, as the ‘History of DD (Jerboa) Battery’, printed in 1946, explains with some pride: ‘The Battery was granted the great honour of the title “Jerboa” (Arabic for desert rat) by Brigadier Jock Campbell, commanding 7th Support Group, of which the Regiment formed the 25-pdr unit.’

  Members of the 4th RHA already considered themselves ‘Jerboas’, as the beginning of David’s later memoir about his desert war experiences illustrates. He was writing about the train journey that he and Mike Kershaw took from Base Depot to the temporary headquarters of the 4th RHA at Mersa Matruh, during which they happened to find themselves in a carriage with a fellow officer returning from leave in Cairo:

  ‘You’ll like the Fourth,’ said the General, ‘They’re a jolly good crowd.’ He wasn’t a real general. In actual fact he was a Second Lieutenant, but his name happened to be Booth, so he was promptly nicknamed ‘the General’ after the Salvation Army leader. ‘Of course we’re a lot of rats, just desert rats’, he went on; ‘we live like rats, look like rats, and we will probably all be exterminated like rats’, and he roared with laughter …

  Up until mid November 1941, the 4th RHA spent the period on training exercises in the vast expanses of the North African desert, only occasionally encountering enemy forces, who were similarly engaged. Both sides were preparing for a major offensive, code-named – in the case of the Allies – ‘Operation Crusader’, the first objective of which was to relieve the strategically important port of Tobruk. In January 1941, in a significant victory, the Italian garrison at Tobruk had fallen to the Allies, and had been put under the command of Allied Australian divisions. Since the arrival of Rommel’s forces later in the spring, Tobruk had become besieged; a couple of unsuccessful attempts to relieve Tobruk had been made during the summer by Wavell’s forces. Wavell was replaced by General Claude Auchinleck, who went on to build up what would become known as the Eighth Army, of which the 4th RHA formed part. Rommel was determined to recapture Tobruk, whilst the Allies were equally determined to relieve Tobruk once and for all. The nearby German-controlled Benina airstrip at Sidi Rezegh was to become the scene of much heavy fighting, changing hands several times, and David would find himself in the midst of this chaotic engagement. This was yet to take place, however. Back in August 1941, David found the prospect of joining the 4th RHA more than a little intimidating: ‘I had felt very nervous about being posted to an R.H.A regiment, as I had heard that they were exceedingly smart and everyone had at least six pairs of riding boots.’

  Such fears proved groundless, for
on reaching their destination, Rakam Bay – which David described as ‘a beautiful little cove with a large white tent within ten yards of the sea’ – he and Mike Kershaw were immediately made welcome, and called by their first names from the beginning. David was much relieved to note that his fellow officers’ appearance was completely at odds with his preconceived ideas:

  I thought these officers looked quite scruffy. They wore issue shirts, old cord trousers with little or no creases supported by wide faded blue canvas belts, and ‘desert’ suede bootees. The complete outfit was bleached by the sun to the colour of the desert, and they were all sadly in need of a haircut …

  Once inside the mess tent the officer in charge declared: ‘You’re guests tonight … What are you going to have?’ David’s memoir goes on to describe the mess tent as follows:

  The tent was furnished with a trestle table and a miscellaneous assortment of folding chairs, which were mostly on their last legs. In the corner was the bar, a small wooden table, on which were a few glasses, the cutlery such as it was, and the drink signing book. Around it were crates of Chinese beer, the only beer obtainable at that time, and some petrol cans full of water. Fly swatters lay around everywhere, and the sand underfoot was covered with dead flies. It was a local rule that you had to kill thirty flies every day before your first drink. There was an electric light wired to the battery of the mess truck. You could not see to read but it was all right for talking. We were plied with questions about England until bed-time. We had not liked to ask where we were to sleep, so we wandered out, groped our way to where our kit had landed when we threw it out of the truck, and made up our beds on the spot …