World, the World

by Norman Lewis

  It was agreed that we might fit very well into this scheme of things. Eighty per cent of the customers for Havana’s hotels were Americans, thus fluent English in the reception was essential. Juan and Gloria Mola and Ernestina were full of enthusiasm, I a little less so. Cuba attracted and stimulated me in every way, but I was alarmed at the prospect of burning my boats and settling without a period of trial in a country of which I knew so little. The search for a suitable house for conversion was still in progress when the war broke out, and despite the general feeling in Havana that it might be possible to turn one’s back on what was happening on the other side of the world, something in the depth of my being whispered that the course of our lives was at the point of change.

  The general view in Britain at this time, which the government made no attempt to play down, was that the country must be prepared for all-out attack both by the Luftwaffe and the submarines of the German Navy, and in response to a bombardment of requests for information and official counsel the embassy in Havana advised all British nationals able to do so to stay where they were until protection could be provided from dangers they might encounter from submarine attacks. Once again, despite the experiences of the First World War, the enduring fallacy had survived that the war would be over by Christmas. Wars, according to ancient inherited memories, started when the harvests were safely gathered in and stopped when the first snow fell. Despite the size, strength and obvious determination of the two sides that now faced each other, more people could still find cause for hope that they might take up their normal lives again in a few months. Nevertheless I found myself temperamentally unable to stay in Havana as less than a spectator of world-shaking events. It was agreed that Ernestina should stay on, as recommended, at least until the spring, while I took the first ship passage I could find, arriving by an American cargo boat in Tilbury on 29 November.

  To my delight I found that Oliver Myers was already home from Egypt, and had exciting news for me. The threatened all-out air attacks in London had not happened, and war at that moment was a matter of unlit streets, rationing for those unable to eat in restaurants, and a determination not to carry gas-masks whatever the threat of a surprise gas attack on the capital. Myers’ news was that there was an urgent demand for speakers of Arabic. He had presented himself at the War Office where he was told to put what polish he could on his peasant Egyptian dialect, and in the meanwhile hold himself in readiness for some occupation of a special kind. My interview was with the same elderly and bookish lieutenant. He gave me a simple English sentence to translate, and I did what I could. ‘Where did you learn your Arabic?’ he asked, and I told him that I had picked it up in the Aden bazaar. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a sort of gentle disdain, ‘so I would have thought. And would you be prepared to tackle the considerable task of making it work for North Africa?’ I said I would. ‘In that case we’d better get you into the School of Oriental Studies,’ he said. There might be months before my call-up, he thought, and so there were.

  I took the school’s course, and to fill in time crammed in a six-month course in Russian, but a year passed slowly before I was called for an interview in a Mayfair office. Although I could now cope with the Algerian alphabet’s extra letter and its invention of a future tense (seen as irreligious in other parts of the Islamic world), the interviewer made no attempt to test my Arabic. Instead he studied with satisfaction my Celtic aquilinity of feature and dark eyes, asked me how I was as a swimmer, and I glossed over the fact that I was bad. Had I ever done any amateur theatricals, and would I be happy about dressing up a bit? he wanted to know. I told him about a school play, and that seemed to satisfy him. ‘The main thing is a sense of adventure,’ he said, to which I nodded in agreement. They were not ready to use me, he said, nor could he say when that was likely to be. In the meanwhile he wanted to enlist me in the Intelligence Corps, but to apply for deferred embodiment, just in case the waiting period was longer than he hoped and I might suffer the misfortune of being called up in the ordinary way. When I asked him what was the Corps’ function, he told me that he knew that it existed, but no more than that.

  I enrolled in the Intelligence Corps, underwent four months of training with an infantry unit in Northern Ireland, then three months at the Corps depot at Winchester, where they specialised in ceremonial drills invented by Frederick the Great and taught recruits to ride motorcycles downhill after the brakes had been disconnected, with the result that one third of them went to hospital. The call to dress up—I could only suppose as an Arab—and be deposited from a submarine on the Algerian shore, never came. It was a lucky escape indeed for a poor swimmer. Most certainly I would have drowned, for according to a newspaper report published in the last few years, the three or four volunteers committed to this adventure all died.

  The last meeting with Oliver before the tides of war were to sweep us in different directions was, inevitably, at Prada’s restaurant. By the purest mischance it was on the night of the first so-called thousand-bomber raid on London. Bombs were falling everywhere on the city and we watched through a tiny peephole in the blackout while a fiery glow enlivened with golden sparks rose over the roof-tops across the road and the fire-engines jangling their bells went racing by. Mr Prada joined us, looking remarkably composed but convinced that his business was about to come to an end. In view of this he offered to sell us any bottle or bottles from his much-acclaimed collection of rare vintages for one pound apiece. We chose a Madeira in a long narrow bottle that he swore was from 1822 and an 1878 Chateau Yquem, drank them slowly and awaited with fatalism the decisions of destiny. When we staggered out it was to discover a new beauty revealed by fire in the normally dismal surroundings of Euston Road. We accepted that years might pass before we saw each other again, and this proved to be so. Oliver was off in a matter of days to some unknown destination in the Middle East, while in the same week I embarked with my Intelligence Corps section on the Maloca, bound for the invasion of North Africa.

  Service with the Corps, always interesting and supplying occasional excitements, took me to Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Austria and Iraq. In October 1944 I embarked on the most extraordinary of these experiences: escorting 3,000 unfortunate Russian prisoners back to the frontier of their homeland. Our ship, the Reina del Pacifico, stopped at Aden to take on fuel, and received a visit by two sergeants of the port security section, limp with the boredom of such desolate outposts of empire that is temporarily relieved even by the sight of a new face. In the course of an exchange of professional chat mention was made of an eccentric supremo named Myers in charge of the Aden defences. ‘Red face, gap teeth, finger missing?’ I asked, and was told that that was the man. ‘Any chance you could see him and tell him I’m here?’ I asked, and the sergeant, clearly astonished by such a request, said he would try. The two went off, and within a matter of minutes a launch roared out from the shore and Oliver stepped aboard.

  He hesitated by the taffrail, caught off guard by the inhibitions of the occasion. I had rarely seen a less military figure, certain that this was the only soldier wearing a solar topee and Sam Browne who could still contrive to look a bohemian. ‘What on earth?’ he said. ‘What on earth?’ The two Field Security sergeants who had come back with him brought a rope to exclude intrusion, and behind this Asiatic Russians prowled softly, as if over the black, spongey earth of the Siberian forest, and watched us with almond eyes. I explained what I was doing there. ‘Supposed to be exceptionally ferocious, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Must say they don’t look it. Do you have much contact with them?’

  ‘Constant,’ I said. ‘They compose wonderful surrealistic poetry in Tadjik and the battalian commander translates it into Russian, after which I have a go at putting it into English.’

  ‘What a marvellous experience. Tough soldiers and still poets. What do you put it down to?’

  ‘They’ve managed in some way to retain the imagery of childhood. Their heads are full of fairy stories.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s
marvellous. But what’s likely to happen to them?’

  ‘I think they’ll be shot.’

  ‘How unfortunate. I’d have loved to see one of your poetry sessions in action.’

  ‘Well you can. All you have to do is say the word. They’ll reel out poetry at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘Unhappily you’re leaving in a matter of minutes. Have to get you out of Aden as soon as we can. We’ve received a garbled signal about a possible attempt by persons travelling on this ship to get ashore. Well, I suppose it makes sense. It’s a pity. I won’t even have time to tell you about the afreets, the Arabian demons in the Lahej desert. See them any time you like. I’m in the middle of some tremendously exciting experiments.’

  ‘But hasn’t it all been explained away as something to do with luminous gas?’

  ‘It’s much, much more than that. I only wish we had the time to go into it in a properly detached and scientific way. This is an awful place but being here has at least helped to confirm my attitude, for example, to such things as E.S.P., for which I can only be thankful. I do hope we’ll have more time together on your way back.’

  There was a blast on the ship’s siren, followed by shouts and the rattle of a heavy chain. The sergeants, blank-faced in their pressed shirts and white blanco, closed in, reminding me of sanatorium attendants about to take over a patient back from an outing. Myers was suddenly limp and forlorn against the great, grey slagheaps of the Aden background. Returning my salute it was almost to be foreseen that he should knock his topee slightly askew. ‘Ma es salaam,’ he bleated softly as the party turned away.

  Infantry soldiers of the accompanying guard rounded up the Tadjiks and took them below.

  Senior Lieutenant Golik, the Russian Commander, discussed the prisoners’ future and the entertainment the Asiatics were staging that night. There had been a last-minute decision that this particular batch of prisoners should be treated as allies, because there was proof that they had freed themselves from the Germans and actually fought them before surrendering to the British. Therefore at Port Said, in the midst of the voyage, they had been told to get out of their German uniforms, and had been issued British uniforms in replacement. The uniforms were joyfully accepted and even the subsidiary equipment such as zinc water bottles, mess cans, nail- and tooth-brushes and combs, for which a Tadjik would normally have little use, were ingeniously dismantled and turned into musical instruments. Miraculously, almost, the Tadjiks converted such items as gas capes and camouflage netting into colourful and extravagant costumes and slyly filched ochre paint used to touch up the ship’s bare metal, and with this decorated faces and bodies with fantastic designs. The three Russian officers did not understand the Tadjik theatre and were bored by it all. The Tadjiks impressed them in other ways, notably by their attitude to death. Golik explained: ‘In our case life and death are very different things. We see them as entirely separate. With the Tadjiks this is not so. You may be chatting to one and he will say to you “Well, of course we are now talking about the time when I was alive.” “So at this moment you think you’re dead,” I say to him, and he tells me, “Yes, and you’re dead, too.” The Germans put 100,000 of them in the camp at Salsk and provided food for only 10,000, so they ate each other and put it into their poetry about their adventures in the demon land.’

  ‘Did you eat human flesh, lieutenant?’ I interrupted him. ‘Only cannibals survived,’ he said. There was a Tadjik stretched out on the deck nearby and Golik called him over to show me the hole in his thigh. ‘This one had a fever and didn’t know what they were doing to him. We had no knives at Salsk but there were men who grew thumb-nails like daggers and they used them to scoop the flesh out. The Tadjiks were the best fighters we had. They were never sure whether or not they were dead, and that made the difference.’

  I was down in the hold every night with the Russians, trying to write down the poetry, and watching the Tadjiks act out their dreams. In addition to the British Army issue of kit they had managed to scrounge all kinds of useful litter from the crew and these they turned into antique-looking fiddles, lutes, and rebecks which they played with an ear an inch from the strings to listen to the soft resonance, inaudible to outsiders, of the music of the other world.

  Ten days later at Khorranmshahr all this came to an end. The ship tied up under the soft rain and I looked down on the glum prospect of a marshalling yard in which, synchronised as a piece of theatre with the dropping of the anchor, an extraordinary train came puffing into view. This, drawn by three pigmy engines, was composed of an endless succession of miniature cattle trucks of the kind the Russians use to transport pigs. It stopped when level with us and instantly a column of Russian great-coated infantry came into sight, halted, then deployed to form a line between the ship and the train. This was the moment for the prisoners and their British infantry escort to disembark. Two of the 200-odd soldiers of the British infantry escort faced two long ranks of Soviet troops in between which were ushered the returning prisoners. There followed prolonged shouting of orders, the stamping of boots and slapping of rifle-butts as both British and Russians performed ceremonial drill movements appropriate to the occasion. The OC Troops and the Soviet commander then strutted to meet each other, saluted and shook hands, and the documents formalising the handover were exchanged and the thing was at an end. Or almost. As explained later by one of the Soviet interpreters, such was the Soviet commander’s distaste for the returning Russians that he refused to speak to them even to give the order to entrain. He asked a representative to talk to me. This man, wearing a commissar’s star, was exceedingly overbearing in his manner. ‘Comrade Interpreter,’ he said. ‘Kindly tell these pigs to entrain.’

  ‘Tell them yourself, Comrade Commissar,’ I said, and turning, I walked away.

  On its return to Port Said a few weeks later, the Reina del Pacifico failed to stop at Aden as announced and it was two years before I saw Myers again, immediately after our demobilisation in 1946. We met at Gordon Street, where only the basement rooms were habitable, one of which I shared with a hundred or so old motor tyres. In those days of shortages, Eugene had found there was a brisk demand for these.

  About one third of the west side of the street had been demolished with much loss of life by a parachute bomb dropped in the last night of the big air attacks. On the east side, including Number Four, some mysterious phenomenon of this blast had spared the façades of the houses while virtually ripping out many of the interiors. Partition walls crumpled, all windows and most doors were blown out, staircases collapsed. There were freaks of almost impish destruction; a flying missile wrecked a valuable picture in a room otherwise intact, while oil dropped on the tapestry seat of a single chair.

  Oliver had been hardly recognisable as a soldier in Aden. Now, in a rumpled jacket and black hat, he had turned into a Bloomsbury regular of old, although Bloomsbury as he had known it had disappeared.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, and I found myself holding a small articulated fish, possibly of silver. ‘It’s a fertility charm, worn during intercourse to ensure pregnancy by the tribal women of Lahej.’ His last present to me had been a moose horn, and now I was ready for him with an enormous collection of philosophical works for which I had paid £1 in Charing Cross Road.

  I made hazelnut coffee over a primus while Myers untied the parcel.

  ‘Where are the Corvajas these days?’

  ‘They found a cottage in Kent,’ I said.

  ‘And those wonderful copies of the Sistine Chapel ceiling he was working on?’

  I had almost forgotten. Ernesto was no original painter, but a superb copyist. He had arranged for expensive reproductions on a reduced scale of the Sistine paintings to be sent from Italy, and had spent two or three years using the paintings made from them to enrich the ceilings of his best rooms.

  ‘What happened to them?’ Myers asked.

  ‘They fell down. Like everything else they returned to dust,’ I said. ‘There are a few chunks lyi
ng about the place somewhere, if you’d like a souvenir.’

  He had finished unwrapping his gift and took out the first volume, turning over the pages with obvious delight. ‘I say, this is rather exciting,’ he said. ‘What do you think of it yourself?’

  ‘It’s tosh,’ I said.

  Myers shook his head sadly. ‘Oh well.’

  ‘Still investigating E.S.P.?’ I asked him.

  ‘I keep an open mind in these matters as you know,’ he said. ‘And now we’re on the subject, I wonder if you’d object to helping me with an experiment I’ve always wanted to do?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘So long as it’s not absurd.’ He expected me to talk to him in this way, and gave a good-humoured laugh.

  ‘It would mean a trip down to Stonehenge,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see it.’

  ‘The question is how would we get there? Half the trains don’t seem to be running.’

  ‘I managed to get hold of a car last week, so there’s no problem.’

  The car was a baby Fiat. There was an old airship hangar in a field at Isleworth full of cars that had lost their owners or been repossessed, all selling at £100, whatever the make, model or age. There was a Mercedes SSK that had cost £3,000 but the baby Fiat did fifty to the gallon and 200 miles’ worth of black market petrol coupons bought from farmers went with the car. ‘Fine day and empty roads,’ I said. ‘Let’s make it tomorrow.’

  The night in early April had dusted the fields with frost, and there were still patches of mist, and stiff little clouds in an otherwise clear sky leap-frogged over the hills. We’d come down through Basingstoke and a dozen small towns and the first building of Andover showed over the grass.