On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Then came a blow.

  In 1966 the UK government announced they were leaving the Aden Protectorate within two years. This stupid and thoughtless declaration encouraged Arab dissidents to begin killing British servicemen there. If we had upped sticks and left without saying anything, there would have been far less violence and certainly fewer deaths all round. But the British government needed time to get the old sheikhs back in power (democracy? - forget it), rather than the communist insurgents. All the factions, from the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) to the National Liberation Front (NFL), wanted to be seen as the group who drove the British out of Aden.

  So they began killing as many of us as they could, as well as killing each other at an even faster rate. After one month in Kenya I was sent to RAF Steamer Point in Aden for the last two months. This was the land of my childhood. I had loved it back in those days, but now it was a violent place, full of restrictions and ugly duties, and I detested everything about it. My so-called enemies were those Arab kids I went to school with, for they were the sons of clerks and shopkeepers who had grown to rebellious manhood.

  Out of Africa with its superb climate and wonderful topography and into a place of dark-grey sand and volcanic rock. The scenery was bleak and dreary, the heat oppressive. Steamer Point was crammed to its edges with depressed servicemen who wanted to be elsewhere. One’s eyes had to be everywhere, continually watching for the Arab with the gun or handgrenade in his fist. Guard duties, especially in the town itself or on the fringes, were fraught with unwelcome excitement. I would spend two hours on the roof of the Cold Store in Maalla with my balls tingling, staring out into the pitch black night expecting to see the flash of a weapon. I wrote a story about those long hours entitled ‘sumi dreams of a paper frog’ which the reviewer Colin Greenwood thought was pure imagination. It was not.

  Two other stories came out of my third long, forced sojourn in Aden: ‘The Dissemblers’ and ‘The Invisible Foe’. All three tales appeared in my first collection of short stories, The Songbirds of Pain, published by Malcolm Edwards, who was by the end of the ’70s the main science fiction and fantasy editor at Victor Gollancz Ltd.

  Aden was a war zone, ignored much of the time by the media, who were more interested in Vietnam and the American struggle there. Once more I carried a bolt-action Lee Enfield Mark IV rifle with live ammunition in the mag. We had a pink card telling us when we could open fire on a potential enemy. The card, using English and Arabic words said, ‘You must cry out the warning “Halt! Waqqaf!” three times. If on the third warning the person fails to halt, then you may open fire.’

  Ha! By that time a sentry would have been blown to bits.

  In any case we always altered the warning shout to, ‘Halt! Fuck off!’.

  Well, we would, wouldn’t we?

  It rained in Aden for one whole day during my two months. A biblical deluge. I’m sure the ark was supposed have been built somewhere near the Yemen. That rain was the first Aden had seen for two decades and six inches came down. There are no drains in that country, no channels or ditches. Nothing to siphon the water off the bare ground. Thus we had a flood which came down off the hillsides and filled the valleys. Everyone was walking waist-deep through water to get to wherever they need to be: the cookhouse, the work-place or a club. Snakes and rats swam by our bare knees. Aden is normally sand and bare rock and nothing else, yet after that rain it had a green coat six or seven inches deep. Millions of dormant seeds sprouted and tiny flowers bloomed within a very short time. Those seeds had been waiting twenty years for water and when it finally came they took advantage of it immediately. The whole of Aden – known colloquially as ‘the barren rocks’ – was a garden. It was bizarre, beautiful and wonderful.

  Guard duties went on day and night. An average of two British servicemen were being killed every week. They were either shot at point blank range, or were victims of bombs. I was riding shotgun in a land rover in a back alley of Steamer Point when a hand grenade was thrown by a dissident. I wasn’t hit by the shrapnel but the noise of the grenade going off made me deaf for several days. I still have a deafness in my left ear and receive a disability pension. There was a young lad named Sam in the next bed to me on the balcony. He was a motorcycle courier. One day he was ambushed by two dissidents with machine guns. The medics said they could hardly lift him, he was so full of metal.

  Sentry points were scattered throughout the colony, denoted by colour and number, such as Red 10 or Blue 7. You stood at your post for two hours waiting to be shot with absolutely no chance of seeing the enemy before you were hit. A lottery. The most hated post was Blue 16, the Cold Store Maalla, about which I have already written. The sentry was positioned on the top of the store and was surrounded by flat-roofed buildings, any one of which could hide a gunman. I remember standing with my rifle at the ready, cold sweat running down my neck and my heart keeping time with the second hand on my watch, thumping terror around my arteries. One of our number was unlucky enough to draw that post out time and time again. We dropped his name and started calling him ‘Blue 16’. A small chubby bloke, he had that haunted look that men get when they know the gods are against them. I can still hear his trebled groan of ‘Oh, Jesus, not again . . .’ as he put his hand in the bag and drew out the fatal plastic blue disc with the number 16 on it.

  Ironically, I believe he went home safely, whereas others at the post were not so lucky.

  Most of that two months was spent on sentry duty, at the comcen and swimming in the sea. It was the monsoon period and the Indian Ocean was kicking in its traces. Huge waves crashed on the beaches and swimming became quite dangerous. One day I was cultivating a tan on the sands when I heard a cry for help. I jumped up and saw a man struggling in the surf, clearly in a great deal of trouble. The waves were ten or twelve feet high and he was being dragged further and further out of his depth. I learned later he couldn’t swim. He must have had crap for brains to go into a monstrous sea without that skill.

  There were a number of men on the beach. I rushed into the water along with one of my pals. Being a strong swimmer, it was me who reached the drowner first. However, he was so terrified by that time he grabbed me and climbed on my shoulders, wrapping his legs around my neck. I managed to prise his legs apart and pushed him away. Immediately he went under the surf again, thrashing and gasping for breath. My mate was now alongside me and we both left the man to take in enough water to calm him down. Then we each grabbed an arm and slowly worked our way through the dragging, thunderous surf to the beach. Battered and exhausted my co-helper and I staggered up the sand and fell down gasping for breath. Someone else took the victim over and began pumping the water out his lungs. An hour later I saw him being led away by friends, looking pale and wan.

  He never did thank us, that wally.

  When my two months in Aden were up I went home at top speed, full of joy and bonhomie to see my lovely wife and children. It was like being let out of prison. The world was sparkling new. I had toys for the children and presents for Annette. It was Christmas in July.

  A few weeks after returning I received a devastating blow. I had new long-term posting, back to Aden. One whole year unaccompanied by my family. I was to return almost immediately to that hated place. Annette burst into tears and then sat down to write to the Ministry of Defence to tell them what she thought of them. It did no good of course. I was hauled up in front of the C.O. and told to control my wife. Control my wife? What did they think she was? A dog? Insufferable idiots.

  It was a miserable, miserable time for both of us. Annette could not stay in the house in Cornwall, which was needed for the new man taking over from me. So we found her a flat in Shoeburyness, close to her mum and dad’s house. It was a dreary-looking flat but as ever my dear Annie put on a brave face and prepared to make the best of it. She has the most indomitable spirit and nothing gets her down for long. Ever the optimist and smiler is my lovely wife. We moved our belongings to Shoeburyness. We didn’t have muc
h. No furniture or anything large. Just framed photos, clothes, books, that sort of thing.

  I caught the train from Southend on a day when there was a downpour. I remember leaning out of the carriage window to kiss Annette goodbye and the train jolted and all the water that had collected on the carriage roof went down my neck. I was cold, soaked, and as the train pulled out and I could see Annie waving goodbye, getting smaller and smaller on the platform, I felt utterly depressed.

  I arrived back in Khormaksar from where I had taken off just a few short weeks before and was driven by Land Rover to Steamer Point. I went back into the same billet I’d left, only this time I chose to sleep out on the balcony away from the noise. Aden billets were like those in Singapore, open plan with about eighty or so beds. Airmen were coming and going all the time with shift work and guard duties and indoors was mayhem. No one was meant to sleep out under the open sky of course, but the billets were so crowded with swaddies and airmen, there was nothing else for it. Personally it helped me get through that year, lying back at night on my bed and looking up at the clarity of the sky, encrusted with billions of bright diamonds, counting the shooting stars.

  This time I had not been posted to the main comcen, but to a unit up on the hills: 123 Signals Unit. This was a listening post, intercepting broadcasts between Yemeni forces up-country. (The Yanks called enemy territory in Vietnam ‘in-country’ but we in Aden called the Radfan and the Yemen ‘up-country’.) I was not one of the listeners, but a communicator for them. Special telegs took down the messages which passed by Morse code between Yemeni government forces (mostly consisting of Egyptian troops), if they were not in plain English, they were first decoded by a cryptographer, and then passed to me to send to the UK or elsewhere for assessment and recording.

  Up-country there was a civil war going on at the same time as we were being hammered by dissidents in the Aden Protectorate. When I was a boy in Aden, al-Yemen was ruled by an imam. As mentioned earlier he was a particularly cruel and medieval despot, beheading and imprisoning his subjects at will. Colonel Nasser in Egypt, sent the imam a message asking if he wanted any of his young men educated in Cairo University. The imam was a sage old ruler and realised that Nasser wanted bright young men to indoctrinate, so that they would come back to the Yemen trained to overthrow him. He agreed to send one boy, a young blacksmith’s son by the name of Ali Abdullah al-Salal, thinking that the son of a lowly tradesman would not have the intelligence to start a rebellion. So Salal went to Cairo University, learned how to foment a revolution, came back to the Yemen and overthrew the Imam.

  This is a lesson in underestimating the intellect of those of lesser status, for blacksmiths’ sons have ever been thus gifted.

  The imam was killed in a battle for Sanaa, the main city, but bedu tribesmen rescued his baby son from the rubble. They fled with the infant into the surrounding hills and deserts and to this day they are still opposed to the Yemeni government that took over. During the time I was in Aden the tribesmen were inflicting high casualties on the government forces. Nasser had sent troops down to assist Salal in his fight, but these were conscripted boys out of the shops of Cairo. They knew nothing of desert warfare and had probably never been far from their fathers’ businesses or workplaces. They were lambs thrown to the wolves, literally. There was a group of warriors known as the ‘Red Wolves of the Radfan’ who preyed on such ignorance.

  The Qotaibi tribe had been a sore on the back of the British ever since the latter had been in Aden. British soldiers had regarded the Radfan as a punishment posting from as far back as 1839. The Radfan itself is sixty miles north of Aden, is high up on a barren, burning plateau, and covers forty square miles of blistering desolation. Waterless, roadless, with scorching heat up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit, the Radfan was dreaded by the English Tommy. The Qotaibi were merciless with those they captured, beheading them or handing them to their women to be slowly cut to pieces with knives. They controlled the Sacred Road, the travellers’ and tradesmen’s track between Aden and Mecca. While I was in Aden the Qotaibi numbered around 7,500. They were, like most desert tribes, crackshots with their ancient rifles. They did not waste a single bullet, for bullets cost money and they were a poor people. If you were ever in the sights of a Qotaibi rifle, you were a dead man.

  Thus the Bedu of al-Yemen and the tribesmen of the Radfan slaughtered these Egyptian conscripts. The Egyptian and Yemeni government troops sent out heartbreaking messages which we intercepted. A poignant signal might read, ‘We are being shot daily by the Bedu [typically just a father and two sons on fast camels] and only half our number are left. We have run out of water and bread. Please try to find us, for we do not know where we are . . .’ Even as I was sending the transcript of such an intercepted message I knew that no help would come to those poor lads. They were doomed. Perhaps a whole company of them, numbering a hundred men. Boys who would no longer see their mothers, their sisters, their fathers. Boys who would be mourned as deeply as my family would mourn me if I did not make it home. Boys who were caught in a net of terror not of their own making, forced to go out with a rifle in their hands, and die for a cause they did not understand. I had no love for their government, which was sending assassins to kill my countrymen, but I could not help but pray for these young men in their peril.

  Constantly receiving and passing on messages like these touched something in my conscience and laid the foundations for my later embracing of pacifism when I became a Quaker.

  123 SU was situated on a hill above the Arab town of Tawahi, adjacent to Steamer Point. The communications centre was on the back of the hill, just below the brow. On the peak stood a square tower with a parapet. It was up in this tower that we did our sentry duties, usually two men, guarding the back end of the military zone and, obviously, our own section. We were given night-vision binoculars and were armed of course, and had a radio to call in to the incident centre should anything happen in the town below. I have to say that it was ten times better than the guard posts I had been doing when in Aden on detachment. We had all-round vision together with a good view of the houses and streets quite a long way below us, and the tower was open to the stars, which are always wonderful to look at while reflecting on the vagaries of life.

  To the west of the tower, just under us, was a stark reminder of our mortality. A place called Silent Valley, the graveyard where British men were buried, far from the land of their birth. Even today I don’t know whether we had a policy like the Americans in Vietnam, and shipped the bodies home, or whether they were actually planted in Middle Eastern sand. All I know is there were many white crosses down below.

  Life on the balcony was pleasant enough, though the yearning to be home was like a constant pain in my chest. I bought a pipe to smoke and thought myself quite the thing. I learned to snatch flies out of the air with my bare hands, played a lot of cricket, swam a great deal, went to the pictures, read a lot of books, wrote one or two stories. At that point in my life I had one novel on the constant go. Its title was Beyond the Silver Surf, a children’s book in the vein of Alice in Wonderland. My wonderland, however, was a submarine world where the fish and mermaids were the protagonists. There were lots of rhymes and creatures of the deep blessed with funny names. I spent hours revising this effort, but I never did send the manuscript to a publisher.

  One of the other airmen on the balcony had a complete set of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels. I borrowed them and was amazed by the author’s skill. Yes, they were ‘romantic’ novels, but they were in the vein of Jane Austen and easily as enjoyable as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. I devoured the lot and have since read them twice over again and my enjoyment of Heyer’s prose has not diminished.

  One day I was penning a letter home when the building rocked with an explosion. Then came another, and another. Dissidents inside the town of Crater were sending mortars over the lip of the volcano. Something like eight or nine hit the ground around our billet. I saw one man running across the area in a zigza
g fashion, hoping the pattern of the mortars was not going to imitate his own. These mortar attacks were infrequent and not very accurate but they made your heart thump like hell. Once I was in the cookhouse when a mortar landed just ten yards outside the main door. A cook was ladling custard. He panicked and swung his arm in an arc, spraying the people at the front of queue with hot viscous yellow stuff. They screamed in pain. This caused more panic and men began running for the doors. It was a while before the scene settled down again and we could enjoy our puddings.

  My year in Aden was of course far worse than my year on Gan. There was less to do in the confined area of the camp, there were killings going on, and now I was married and ached to be with my family. My hatred for the place which I had loved as a boy grew daily. All I wanted to do was go home. I despised the British government for sending me there and did not understand what the intentions were. The British Empire was dead. Why were we still pretending we ruled the pink bits on our old maps? The days of colonies were over and hanging on to places like Aden for the extra year or two made no sense whatsoever. Men were dying almost daily for nothing more than Whitehall policy. I would have been livid if I had been killed just because some politician thought it ‘in the interests of Great Britain’ to leave a few sheikhs in charge of the barren rocks of Aden. Someone had made a mock recruitment poster and pinned it up on the wall of the billet. It read:

  JOIN THE ARMY

  SEE THE WORLD

  MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE

  AND KILL THEM