by Shaun Clarke
Discharged from the hospital and given two weeks’ leave, he returned to North London, married Lesley (a proper church wedding in Crouch End, attended by both families, one High Tory, the other Labour, each uneasy with the other) and compensated for the lack of a proper honeymoon by booking them into a room in the posh Savoy hotel. It was a typically extravagant gesture that both thrilled and shocked Lesley, though clearly she was more unnerved than delighted by it, chastising him for the gross waste of money that could have, she insisted, been better spent setting up home. The following morning, after they had nervously, not too successfully, consummated the marriage to the sound of wailing air-raid sirens, rumbling German aircraft, exploding bombs and chattering ack-ack guns, they had bid each other an emotional farewell at the troop train bound for Liverpool. From there, the hundreds of conscript soldiers had been shipped to Egypt.
After weeks aboard ship, cooped up in the sweltering, stinking hold with its tightly packed tier bunks, allowed up on deck only intermittently to breathe fresh air, moans and groans every night, the smell of spent sperm in the nostrils, fist fights to ease frustration, it had been a great relief when the ship finally arrived at Port Said. Dressed in badly fitting khaki drill that had not been washed since they’d come aboard, sweating in the ferocious heat, heavily burdened with their kit bags, Marty and the rest of the men had virtually staggered down the gangplank to spread out and sit, facing the cooling breeze of the sea, on the grass of the Canal Company building, guarded by coal-black Sudanese wearing old-fashioned naval uniforms, with straw hats and baggy blue trousers. After an interminable wait in the baking sunlight, all the time besieged relentlessly by Arab hawkers, beggars, hideously deformed cripples and children of remarkable beauty, they had been herded onto a convoy of three-ton trucks and driven along the coast road to Cairo. The route had taken them through an exotic landscape of domes, minarets, mud huts and palm trees, past white-robed fellaheen on donkeys, strings of camels led by Arab traders wearing colourful djellabas, and feluccas sailing along the glittering Nile River, their sails billowing spectacularly from forty-foot masts. At the village of Kantara, a ferry carried the trucks of the convoy across to the Palestine Railway Station. From there, in the early hours of the morning, they were driven on to the army camp at Almazur.
So here Marty was, back in North Africa, newly married but determined to have a good time in Cairo before being sent on to his unit.
It’s all a matter of luck, he thought.
‘So how do we get to Cairo?’ Tone asked, clearly keen to get going.
‘That way,’ Marty said, pointing at the dusty, battered taxis lined up along the Cairo road at the edge of the great sea of tents, the Arab drivers gesticulating frantically at the many soldiers either strolling towards them or crouched around open fires, brewing tea under the brilliant stars, shadowed by overhanging palms faintly limned by moonlight. ‘Follow me, mate.’
Feeling cool in his khaki shorts, shirt and sandals, still smoking his cigarette, he confidently led Tone over to the line of taxis, where he engaged a lean, almost toothless Arab driver in an excited discussion about what the drive to Cairo would cost. When the sum was finally agreed upon, the beaming driver, dressed in a comfortable, striped djellaba, opened the rear door of his dilapidated vehicle and ushered them onto the rear seat with a grandiloquent wave of his right hand. He then slammed the door shut, took his place behind the steering wheel, and was soon racing along the Cairo road, between the camp and the open desert, his wheels churning up billowing clouds of sand in the vehicle’s wake.
‘There it is,’ Marty said excitedly, pointing over the driver’s shoulder to the illuminated spires and minarets of Cairo, clearly visible beyond a line of palm trees where the road curved away out of sight. ‘We’ll have no problem spending an evening there. I mean, that city has everything!’
‘And from what I hear,’ Tone responded in a droll manner, ‘you took advantage of most of it.’
‘I did my best,’ Marty admitted, recalling his earlier visits to the fabulous oriental city and the fun he’d had in its many bars, restaurants, cabarets, hotels and brothels.
‘Now that you’re married,’ Tone said, ‘you’ll have to be a bit more selective in what you get up to.’
‘Please don’t remind me,’ Marty retorted.
‘Is that where you fought in March?’ Tone asked, indicating with a nod of his head the vast, starlit desert sweeping past on one side of the taxi.
‘No,’ Marty replied. ‘That’s the Qattara Depression. Our battle was in Cyrenaica, beyond that desert, about four hundred miles farther west.’
Glancing across the flat, moonlit immensity of the Qattara Depression, Marty recalled his first experience of warfare with a great deal of relish, even given that the battle had been lost and he, with thousands of others, had been forced to retreat. As long as he lived he would never forget his first few days in the great Allied camp located just outside Mersa Brega, in the Western Desert of Cyrenaica: a sprawling collection of tents, lean-tos, makeshift huts and caravans overflowing with the men of the 7th Armoured Division and Selby Force, the 4th Indian Division, the 6th Australian Division, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), sappers, a Cypriot labour battalion, and the hundreds of ragged Italian Tenth Army soldiers packed into the prisoner-ofwar cages near the southern perimeter. Though holding a vast array of artillery and tanks, the camp was also protected with British infantry divisions spread out in a defensive line consisting of a series of ‘boxes’ (slit trenches for the infantry, gun pits for the artillery) surrounded by barbed wire and minefields – all far away, spread out a good distance, and well out of sight. It also contained what appeared to be hundreds of armoured vehicles, including the Stuart light tanks of the 8thKing’s Royal Irish Hussars, the Grant tanks of the Royal Gloucester Hussars, the Matildas of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, the Bren-gun carriers of the 9th Rifle Brigade, and Marmon Herrington armoured cars, all dispersed evenly behind the line.
Since the opening of the British offensive in December 1940, those men had resolutely pushed back the Italian forces in Egypt, completing their advance at Sidi Barrani, taking Sollum, capturing Bardia with 40,000 Italian prisoners, Tobruk next, and finally, after two months of relentless fighting, cutting off the main body of the Italian Army at Beda Fomm, with approximately 130,000 enemy troops captured. However, in the closing days of March 1941, advance elements of GeneralleutnantErwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps, including the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, arrived in Tripoli. Supported by the Italian mechanized Ariete Division, Rommel’s forces advanced swiftly across Cyrenaica to engage the Allies in the Western Desert, push them back, encircle them and trap them in Tobruk.
Even now, as the taxi was carrying him to Cairo, Marty could vividly recall the beginning of that great battle when the first of the German Ju Stukas flew towards the Allied camp, looking primitive and ungainly, swastikas clearly visible on their fins, and peeled off to commence their dive-bombing. What he would certainly never forget was the appalling noise. In response to the diving German aircraft, the British Bofors guns in the sangars had roared into action, jolting dramatically as they belched fire and smoke. Simultaneously, a lot of Tommies had opened up with their .303 rifles and Webley revolvers, adding their staccato snapping to the general bedlam. Though slowmoving in flight, the Stukas were extremely fast when diving, which they did through black clouds of flak and criss-crossing tracers. British Bren- and machine-gun teams, even captured Italian weapons, had joined in the fight, creating a deafening, head-splitting bedlam that was, in certain ways, even worse than the carnage on the ground.
That carnage was, however, made even more horrific when the tanks of the Afrika Korps Panzer divisions emerged from a massive cloud of billowing sand and dust, spread out over half a mile, followed by motorized infantry and armoured cars. When the German tanks opened fire with their guns, creating a dense curtain of smoke and fire, the British Grants moved out betwe
en the gun pits and sangars to engaged the enemy on the open ground beyond the perimeter. The German tanks then emerged from their own smoke with pennants fluttering from wireless aerials and their treads churning up sand and gravel as well as more billowing clouds of dust.
Marty had felt no fear, only a kind of crazed excitement, as he jumped up and down from behind his sangar wall and fired his rifle at the German troopers advancing behind the tanks of the Panzer divisions. Looking back on it now, as Cairo reared up before him, he realized that he hadn’t had time for fear, that the speed of the German attack, the sheer noise and pure spectacle, the many explosions on all sides, the dead and the dying, had pushed all thoughts of personal danger aside, leaving only a generalized confusion and senseless excitement.
The latter had rapidly disappeared and the former increased when the Panzer divisions smashed through the Allied lines and Marty found himself marching with hundreds of other British troops through the choking dust left in the wake of Bren gun carriers, armoured cars, Bedford trucks and jeeps that formed a vast column on the road leading back through the desert to the harbour town of Tobruk, during the retreat from the still advancing Panzer divisions. Even worse, with too many units on the move at the same time, panic had set in, many men abandoning their stalled trucks and running to get on others without bothering to check what had stopped their vehicles. Other vehicles were abandoned when they ran short of petrol, even though there were numerous three-ton trucks loaded with petrol passing by on both sides.
Seeing that panic-stricken behaviour had filled Marty with shame, but also taught him a valuable lesson: that panic was no help in such circumstances and must always be fought. It was a lesson he was determined not to forget the next time he saw action.
Luckily, during that particular retreat, the men were not fired upon by the German big guns or dive-bombed by the Stukas that had conducted the ‘softening up’ before the Panzer attack. Eventually, therefore, they had found themselves inside the perimeter of Tobruk, mingling with the Aussies, who directed them to numerous positions along the wired perimeter, between gun pits and boxes of slit trenches, where the tanks and trucks had also lined up behind the wire to afford further protection.
Alas, this did not prevent the German infantry from breaking through the wire a mere hundred yards away from where Marty found himself, grimly and uselessly firing his .303 rifle. As the German infantry opened a path through the Allied lines, letting the tanks and halftracks surge forward through the moonlit darkness, one of the shells from a tank exploded close to Marty, creating a shocking din and hurling him sideways through swirling, hissing sand, into a darkness filled with streaming stars and, ultimately, into oblivion.
Regaining consciousness on a stretcher laid down on the deck of a destroyer heading back to Alexandria, he found himself surrounded by many other wounded soldiers, also lying on stretchers. After two days in a military hospital in Alexandria, he was flown back to England, bitterly aware that his first battle had collapsed into retreat, but still excited by having been part of it.
He learned then, if he’d ever had cause to doubt it, that he had been born to be a soldier; that this, right or wrong, good or bad, was the life for him.
It seemed almost preordained.
Right now, however, he was out for an evening of fun and trouble, the latter, for him, invariably being a consequence of the former. Although he had boarded the ship at Liverpool with nothing in his pocket, having spent every last penny on his single honeymoon night in the Savoy hotel, he had been aboard ship for a month, which meant he had gained another month’s pay, out of which Lesley’s allowance had already been deducted and mailed to her back home in north London. Now, with what was left, he was determined to have the time of his life and forget his nagging misgivings about his recent marriage.
Knowing Cairo well from his previous visits, he was filled with confidence when he slid out of the taxi near the Continental Hotel, his feet kicking up dust, and led Tone into the exotic, clamorous sprawl of the nocturnal city with its brightly lit, packed pavements, open-front cafés, shops and bazaars, its white walls covered in green vines, shaded by palm trees, and strewn with purple bougainvillaea that seemed to glow magically in the moonlight. Here many of the women still wore black robes and kept most of their face covered; the men dressed in djellabas and sandals. Around café tables, the Arabs drank coffee, smoked hashish pipes, played backgammon and talked noisily all evening, ignoring the soldiers swarming up and down the streets, hotly pursued by filthy, screaming bootblacks. It was certainly an exceptionally noisy city, with shrill music and high-pitched singing blaring from radios, trams clanging, horse-drawn carriages, or gharries, clattering over loose stones, water gurgling from pipes and splashing onto the streets, and numerous vehicles, including troop trucks, roaring and honking in a neverending traffic jam. To this deafening cacophony was added the constant growling and whining of the many aircraft flying overhead.
‘Never heard so much noise in my life,’ Tone sa id as he and Marty made their way along a densely packed, narrow street, fighting off gangs of pint-sized bootblacks. ‘Except when I was down the coal mines in Wales.’
‘It’s even worse in the daytime,’ Marty told him. ‘And all these bloody smells,’ Tone complained. ‘Sweat and piss, tobacco and hashish, petrol, the
smoke from those charcoal braziers and car exhausts, not forgetting roasting kebabs, kuftas and ears of corn, jasmine and jackala trees, sarpices and flowers. It’s a feast for the senses, mate.’
Already feeling overwhelmed Tone curtains, into the Sweet Melody Cabaret, where, intoxicated, Marty tugged the
through vividly-coloured beaded wreathed in cigarette smoke, glamorized by dim lighting, soldiers, sailors and airmen were watching the sensual gyrations of a scantily-clad Turkish bellydancer. Pushing his way to the bar, half deafened by the Egyptian music, smelling sweat, piss, tobacco and alcohol, hemmed in by the density of the crowd, Marty ordered two bottles of a deadly brew and handed one to Tone.
‘Drink up!’ he said, tapping his friend’s bottle with his own before taking a mouthful.
‘Christ!’ Tone exclaimed, almost choking when he tried it. ‘What the hell’s this?’
‘Zebeeb,’ Marty told him. ‘You’ll be as high as a kite before long and then this’ – he waved his hand to indicate the packed, smoky cabaret club – ‘won’t intimidate you.’
While drinking his Zebeeb, Tone eyed up the many available young ladies of various nationalities, some of them English, most of them scantily dressed, their skin browned by nature or the oriental sun, their eyes bright with greed, faces flushed with excitement, circulating among the men, offering company in return for weak champagne and more intimate favours for money.
‘Cherry brandy bints,’ Marty said to the bedazzled, selfconscious Tone. ‘They come from all over the place in the hope of making it here in one of the nightclubs, but few of them make it out of Cairo and most get fat from the booze, so get ’em while they’re still fresh, mate.’
After a couple more bottles of Zebeeb, and increasingly aroused by the sensual gyrations of the Turkish belly-dancer, Tone was drunk enough to start making passes at some of the ‘cherry brandy bints’. But he was soon dragged away by Marty, who, keen to revisit some of his old haunts, led him back outside and through the teeming streets until they came to Groppi’s, another nightclub. Similar to the club they had just left, just as packed, dense with smoke, dimly lit, it offered the customary floor show and more circulating cherry brandy bints.
Now truly drunk, so invited a couple of the suggestive banter, but Marty, again keen to relive old memories, soon dragged him away and on to another nightclub, the Blue Nile, where they spent more of their dwindling cash on weak champagne for two of the circulating ladies, Rita and Marjorie, self-described as ‘exotic dancers’ from Lancashire.
‘They’re ready for it,’ Tone whispered drunkenly into Marty’s ear when the girls had gone to the powder room. ‘Where can we take ’em?
’
‘Did you give Rita some cash for the powder room?’
Tone looked embarrassed. ‘As a matter of fact…’
Amused, Marty chuckled and slapped his hand on the table. ‘It’s the oldest trick in the book, mate. How much did you give her?’
‘Two pounds worth of ackers,’ Tone said, referring to Egyptian piastres.
‘A quid each!’ Marty exclaimed in mock disgust, feeling exhilarated, divorced from reality, adrift in a swelling sea of light and sound that was sweeping him away from his humble origins to a new, more exotic world. ‘They’ll have moved on to another joint by now for more pickings from some other cherry boys. You’ve just dropped a right bloody clanger. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
By midnight, when he should have been on his way back to base, Marty found himself even more adrift, bolder than normal, Tone women to their table for raised on high by alcohol, the bright lights of the city shimmering before his dazed eyes, the clamour rendering him senseless, as he led Tone away from the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, into the infamous Wagh ElBirket district, popularly known as ‘the Birka’. Making his way through that maze of packed narrow streets, with Tone stumbling drunkenly behind him, passing repeatedly between shadow and light, still pursued by jabbering bootblacks, begging cripples and touting pimps, he eventually arrived at the notorious Tiger Lil’s brothel. Though a great gloomy barn of a place on the outside, it was lively inside, its many corridors leading off a seedy reception area, stinking of carbolic soap, disinfectant and dried urine, but resounding with the bawling of the many servicemen battling for attention.
Tiger Lil, the obese, good-natured Madame, who was seated behind the cash desk located near the front door, took the money off Marty in advance, then pointed him and Tone in the right direction. As they ascended the creaking stairs, their boots crushing cockroaches and cigarette butts, sometimes slipping in vomit, they came across many young girls, no more than eight or nine years old, all dressed in rags, most looking like angels, hurrying in and out of the various rooms with towels, cleaning rags and bottles of Condy’s disinfectant. Reaching the top of the stairs, Marty and the visibly staggering Tone entered a hallway packed with other drunken soldiers, sailors and airmen queuing up at the doors of the rooms, some peeping through keyholes to see how the man who had entered ahead of them was getting on with his woman, many bawling words of obscene encouragement.
