by Wesley Stace
Diane opened the door. “Hail the conquering heroes!” she said with unexpected enthusiasm. And we were taken through the oak-beamed warren to a sitting room where Frankie and Echo were playing pelmanism.
“Ha!” Echo shouted in triumph the moment we entered. “She’s doing all right at pelmanism, but I just can’t teach this child canasta. She can’t pick it up.”
“She’s only five,” said Joe.
“Yes, but I can play older,” said Frankie, her own agent, and, with that clear, ran towards us. She was about to throw herself around Joe’s legs when she stopped in surprise. “George! You’re a soldier now!”
“Yes, Private George, reporting for duty.” I saluted my new salute.
“Marvellous,” said Echo, with genuine admiration, betraying the fact that she wished she had thought of this for herself and would steal both the uniform and the salute for Narcissus. “You both look very dashing.”
“Is the war over? Can we go home?” asked Frankie.
“I wanted to come and see you,” said Joe. “We’re being sent abroad.”
“Where?” asked Echo with a forced air of unconcern.
“They won’t tell us, but my kit bag is full of exotic items like little blue tablets, mosquito nets, hurricane lamps, powdered everything — meat, potatoes, and carrots — and a roll of lavatory paper.”
“Hmm . . . ,” said Echo. “Well, the Welsh still have lavatory paper, so that rules out Swansea. Can we sit outside? Do you have time?”
It was a lovely afternoon, soft, green, and daisied. Diane brought tea as they chatted, the war far away. Joe held Frankie’s hand, asking her about Capital Studios and her interactions with the Bright Spark. She was not in the least starstruck and had a most matter-of-fact attitude to her new career. In a crowd scene, she advised, it was best to blend into the background rather than try and be at the front looking at the camera. It was annoying to have to do more than one take if you got it right but the camera people, who had the least to do but made the biggest fuss, got it wrong. Most frustrating was when another actor fluffed his lines. The Hungarian director had told her she could be in all his films.
“Now, we mustn’t just talk about ourselves,” warned Echo, “or we’ll end up with a big head.” Joe, however, was keen to deflect questions, so he asked Echo her plans.
“I am to be packed off, kit and caboodle, to America,” said Echo, as if Winston himself had talked her into it. “It’s no secret that we need assistance.” Though I allowed myself visions of Narcissus’s fraught negotiation with Charlie McCarthy, persuading him to join in the struggle against the Axis, the reality was less a mission upon which rested the hopes of a nation and more a personal reconnaissance–cum–pleasure trip. (And perhaps in the back of her mind, she was hoping to find a vacancy at the top of the profession right up there next to Edgar Bergen — we knew of no great American ventriloquistes.)
“Leave politics to the politicians,” I said. “The boys need you in Burma.” I saluted, and Frankie giggled.
Echo held up her hand to silence us all. “I know. There is a need for foot soldiers, brave men like yourselves, Jojo and George, as never before. But we battle-weary colonels, we old Blimps, who have lived through a Great War already, we must use our hard-won experience for the good of the country.”
It was confirmed then. She was running away.
The afternoon glided by on tea and thin slices of cake, as Frankie grew a little morose at the prospect of our departure.
“Are you going to see Queenie?” asked Echo.
“I can’t. There isn’t time. In fact, I must go.” He turned to Frankie. “I’ve left some books upstairs at Cadogan Grove, and should the house survive, they’re for you, and for your son.” This was beyond her. “For the future. When you grow up, get married, and have children.”
“Like you and Mummy? Well, why can’t you give them to me then?”
“Oh, hush,” said Echo. “Do stop being so morbid. You’ll frighten the child.”
“I have to go . . .”
“. . . or they’ll have you on a charge!” reprimanded Frankie, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Joe,” said Echo in valediction, as she leaned on the back of the garden bench, “we’re so proud of you, how war has shown us the real you. Feckless in peacetime you were — and heaven knows where that came from; it must have been some flaw in your father’s side of the family, God rest his soul — but we’re all so very proud of you, Frankie and I . . . and Queenie too. . . . And I ask you, as a mother, to be in touch with her more. She’s doing wonderful things with those movies and a few silly tricks. And she needs the support of a man.” Echo covered Frankie’s ears with her hands and hissed urgently: “You’re losing her and you don’t even care. There’s not much I can do from here. Write to her, for the sake of . . .” She glanced downwards as the object of pity writhed free of her clutches.
“What are you saying?” Frankie laughed.
Echo continued: “One day the lights will burn bright again, the church bells will chime, and carol singers will go from door to door in the snow on Christmas Eve. Pubs will open, and people will live together again in peace, not listening anxiously for the all-clear. And then this will all be a thing of the past, this uncertainty, this fear. And we’ll be together again as families, in the way we are together now as a country.”
“Grandma,” Frankie piped up, “that’s just what the Bright Spark said at the end of Heil Who?!”
“Not as well as that, he damn well didn’t,” said Echo, “and don’t call me Grandma. I can’t stand Grand and . . .” Frankie joined in: “I’m going to hate Great!” Echo tickled Frankie under the arms. Frankie ran away, screaming, collapsing in a heap by the fishpond at the end of the garden. Joe lifted me up and we watched her. I saluted. Frankie ran towards us, crying.
“It’s all right,” said Joe, as he handed me carelessly over to Echo and hoisted Frankie up. She was worn out, poor thing, and he carried her inside, her head on his shoulder. Echo rummaged inside me, trying to work out the engineering that had gone into my salute. Joe laid Frankie down on the couch in the sitting room, and Echo sat beside her, stroking her hair.
“Back to Capital for you tomorrow, young lady, and we can’t have big red eyes,” said Echo.
Frankie sucked her thumb, looking at me as if she knew it was the last time she would ever see me.
Then we were on the move. Joe knew as little about where we were going as I did, and we weren’t always able to travel together. By the time I next got another good look at the two photos pinned to the inside lid of my box — Frankie, and one of Bobbie holding Belle — we were halfway across the world.
We reached Cairo in June of 1941, as the Germans started fighting. Initially, we only saw the perimeter of the desert, and our entertainment was confined to small city theatres and various military buildings. But as the conflict grew, we ventured farther, first playing for the wounded at the rear of the action, then slowly making our way forward. There was no great bravery involved — we just went where we were told. Besides, it didn’t matter where you were: machine gun fire was liable to strafe the stage at any moment.
There was no property at stake in the desert war; the purpose was purely to annihilate the enemy, and since the fighting was mobile, the entertainment followed suit. As the Eighth Army pushed west, the performers followed. At first we were in a concert party — still the nucleus of Tonic for the Troops — that travelled in a jeep towing a converted caravan called Cairo Cara, the side of which could be taken down to make a stage and, if folded again, create screens on either side for the wings.
The desert was something apart, and my first glimpse was unique: one hundred soldiers sat on the ground in front of the stage, and another hundred stood behind them, a happy, sand-weathered bunch separated from me by the band, which consisted of a tiny drum kit and a piano. Beyond them, nothing. Sand. Nothing. No sign of civilization. The shimmer of the horizon stunned me.
“Blim
ey!” I said. “This is the biggest bunker I ever saw. Must be a huge golf course!”
“This is no golf course, George.”
“Nice sandpit, then. Better than the one at the playground.”
“Now, George,” said Joe. “You’re a soldier now, not a schoolboy anymore.”
To show how right he was, I tried to have a fag, but I couldn’t. Standards of hygiene had fallen during the last few weeks. My home sweet home had become dingier (home sweat home, we called it), less of a private sanctuary and more a spare kit bag for papers and all sorts of old gubbins that Joe wanted to hang on to but didn’t have a proper place for: addresses, photos, other small mementos of his travels. An extremely irritating pencil had rattled its way around my innards for the last week and somehow got lodged in my mechanism, jamming one of my levers.
“I’m gasping!” I pleaded, waiting for the fag to pop out. Joe rummaged around, got hold of the obstruction, gave a brutal yank, and removed it, tossing it into the audience.
“That’ll get the lead out!” someone yelled as I lit up. We’d use that.
The blackout meant we couldn’t perform at night, and the possibility of attack often prevented us from performing by day, so we pioneered Moonlight Matinées at the oases and wadis where the armies were laagered. Every now and then we would find a well-organized camp — where they’d managed to rustle up a generator and a rudimentary marquee, where the latrines were not just a large circular hole around which everyone squatted, like wise owls facing outwards — but most of the time we took our work as we found it, travelling outrageous distances to reach an audience, men dying of boredom, looking forward to a shoot-up just for a change of pace.
The whole troupe learned as they went. Props were improvised from mosquito nets and Sten gun slings, scenery dyed with tea. The girls made do without dressing rooms, holding up blankets for each other or wrapping themselves in a sheet and changing beneath. At night, they lived in Cara while the men put up hammocks under mosquito nets or shared tents as part of the bivouac. Joe swung on his hammock, strung between the back bumper of the caravan and a eucalyptus tree, writing letters by the light of the moon.
There was a special kind of desert night when it was windy but not so windy that you had to keep blinking sand out of your eyes. These nights were perfectly cool, and the heat of the day was almost forgotten. The stars were manifold and shone with a brilliance that made you feel kissed by the history of the place — these were the same stars that had shone on the pharaohs, on Jesus Christ, the same stars that shone on Belle. And there lay Joe, alone, separate from the rest of the party, reading and writing, just like always, but now so far away from home.
And the troupe became real troops, doing the things that soldiers did. They got their TAB and typhus injections without complaint. They wore their Basil dress, with shorts mostly, and learned to salute. When the natives walked out in protest during “God Save the King,” they returned the compliment by singing insulting words to the Egyptian national anthem, an unassuming ditty that sounded wholly English. The ruins and wreckage of war ceased to shock, and they drove past without comment. The soldiers taught them the tricks of the desert: how to keep water cool in the heat by filling your hat and hanging it in the shade, and how to produce water out of thin air by stretching a groundsheet between two trees overnight. The cold night condensed the humid air, and there was fresh, cool water by morning. Magic.
* * *
Heaven knows how long we had been travelling when Joe got ill for the first time, and heaven knows, since conditions were so poor, how he had managed to stay healthy so long. The heat was so bad, and the water so short, that the only time anybody could wash was when it rained, and there were flies everywhere, swarms too relentless to repel, settling on rubbish, meat, excrement, flesh (dead or alive), moving promiscuously among them all.
At first, Joe was stricken with desert sores. These began with a cut, which got infected — the sand didn’t help — and festered into an oozing ulcer. Some soldiers were covered in the sores, which they daubed with a blue ointment that made them look polka-dotted. The flies were to blame: their maggots ate into broken skin, causing the boils. Once the infection had found a way in, it spread, emerging wherever there was a scratch. But the sores didn’t quite do enough to lay you low: everyone went about his business, spotted blue and itching. Joe wasn’t only blue. He was also pale yellow, which he suspected was jaundice. What he didn’t know was that he also had malaria.
We were barely into our spot one Moonlight Matinée when it became obvious that something was wrong. There was no strength in Joe’s clammy fingers, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead as we struggled on. Before even a few seconds of this agony had passed (that horrible moment of silence between missed line and prompt), Joe stood up gasping for breath and lurched forwards, taking me with him off the edge of the stage. We landed just by the drum kit, surrounded by soldiers even before the flies had a chance to swarm.
We were out of it for some time, taken at first to a field sanatorium (arriving with a temperature of 105), then to a hospital in Cairo, and finally to an Australian hospital ship for long-term convalescents. I don’t remember much of this, and I can’t remember how long we were there. But Joe’s condition was critical — his kidneys practically packed in. The hospital ship was paradise after months in the desert. He had been used to bully beef and Machonachies M&V, an unappetizing canned meat-and-potato stew; on the Canberra, he ate chicken for the first time he could remember.
Time is all one to me. I’m happy sitting where it’s safe. Sometimes I can drift out of my body and look at myself; other times I forget I’m there at all. But it was certainly nice to find myself floating at sea, away from the flies and the sand. And to see Joe, smiling in bed at our reunion, no longer the yellow-and-blue boy. He seemed so rested, as I hadn’t seen him since before Tonic for the Troops began.
Once he was well enough, we amused the other patients after dinnertime. Joe wrote from his bedside, and letters arrived, which always put him in a good mood. BESA had given Bobbie the honorary title Dame Bobbie Sheridan, though he claimed it hadn’t changed him at all: “No airs and graces, I’m still out here mucking in. I’ve got a new song, though: ‘The Dame Who Was Made Wrong.’ Get it? (Hint: some of the other anagrams are very saucy indeed, and far too devilish for Cecily Censor!)” But there was less mention of Belle. I pictured her far from the front line, waiting for Bobbie in a Delhi hotel, fanned by palm fronds, ordering room service on Dame Sheridan’s account. And then we didn’t hear from Bobbie for some time. This was to be expected: Frankie’s Christmas card, containing the news that she was going to be in her first pantomime, arrived in March.
The Canberra was too good to last. I thought we would have to go back to Egypt before too long, but I was wrong. Tonic for the Troops had been posted elsewhere in Joe’s absence, and Joe himself was going to a different part of the world. He was hoping for India. He got Paiforce: Persia and Iraq.
Belle, we are edging closer.
Persia is a blur.
We were issued a Matchless 350cc with a sidecar. As itinerant entertainers, we drove ourselves everywhere on that desert tiger, and we were doing more shows than I could possibly remember. Did they even count as shows? Stop the bike, out of the sidecar and then the box, say hello, a quick monologue (for example, a parody of that old chestnut “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”), and then a brief chat in front of a tiny audience. Then into the box, back into the sidecar, and so on. We had done well in the troupe, but this suited us even better: no stages, no set times, just improvised banter.
We played to audiences of one man and audiences of five hundred, in gun sites, olive groves, and hospitals. We rarely had any accompaniment, but who needed it when everyone was singing along? And of course, we talked together, about home, about the desert, about what we would do when the war was over.
It was while we were in Iraq that we started to make our mark, that news of us and our heroism
— that’s what they called it — reached home. The men of Paiforce weren’t forgotten, not as a unit and not individually. And we were the proof. ENSA gave us an award we never saw. We brought a lot of happiness everywhere we went. We weren’t the only ones — George Formby, Gracie Fields, for example: and come to think of it, hadn’t my very initials destined me for the tip-top of our profession? — but Joe and I were on the front line if we were needed.
“He hasn’t been home in years!” I heard a bloke say as we passed. “He’s like Lawrence of Arabia!”
After this, I took to wearing a little Lawrencian white veil to great comic effect. But the private was right. We did what ENSA told us, although they rarely knew precisely where we were. We became a law unto ourselves. And, of course, though we couldn’t record the fact anywhere, we also took the odd despatch here and there, information we could convey as easily as anyone else. It was in Iraq that Joe earned the nickname Death Wish Fisher. Our legend spread.
Something was driving us forward; there was wilful loneliness in our perpetual movement, this endless tour undertaken in perfect solitude. Yes, we were keeping up morale — but what of our own? Where was our own peace of mind? There was emptiness in the constant motion. We were always running away and never towards.
What others saw as bravery — the quality that had earned that soldierly nickname, such a privilege for a civilian — was fear, despair, and defeat.
I only found out as we were shipping out of Persia.
Bobbie was dead, his throat silently slit while he was relieving himself in the dark night of the jungle. Bobbie Sheridan, whose smiling picture was pinned just above my head, his Adam’s apple hidden behind an elegant choker.
And Belle, my Belle. Where are you now? Who will look after you? Who knows how but I?
