We set off without life jackets in a flimsy double-canoe with a canvas-covered frame, thinking we would cling to the shore all the way round the island and so did not meet with any serious problems. We were both very good swimmers and could do two or three miles without too much trouble in warm water. However . . . there’s always that however . . . we came to a part of the coast with a deep wide bay and decided to cross it, rather than hug the shore.
When we got halfway across this enormous bay, the wind and sea suddenly grew stronger and wilder and we found ourselves about two miles out and in some danger of overturning the canoe. It was all we could do to keep it from capsizing in the choppy waves and not for the first time in my life I had those horrible ugly worms of fear in my stomach. If we did capsize we were in deep, deep trouble, because around the edge of the bay were steep, high cliffs, against which a turbulent sea was beating. There was no beach to swim to, nor any place to crawl up out of the surf. Just tall, smooth, forbidding limestone.
‘We’re in trouble,’ said Neil, his voice wavering.
‘I know,’ I replied, feeling the tendrils of fear quickly working their way through my gut. ‘Do a bit of praying, chum.’
And he did, bless his cottons.
Had we capsized we would most definitely have drowned. Throughout my life the sea has always been trying to get me – Stambridge, Felixstowe, Aden – and it was coming for me again. We said very little to each other, Neil and I, as we fought to keep the canoe upright. His face was as white as the belly of a fish and I had no doubt my own had a similar hue. We paddled and we paddled, water washing over the deck of the canoe and into the cockpits, occasionally getting that electric jolt of fear when the canoe nearly went over. After about half an hour we reached the other side of the bay. We made straight for the beach that began there and landed safely, then lay on our backs, the sweat pouring down our faces. I was shaking badly, as the relief flooded through me.
Neil said, ‘We’re not going on, are we?’
‘Not a bloody chance,’ I said. ‘I’d rather carry this canoe across the Sahara than go back into that sea.’
~
Annette had her own problems in Malta. Because it was a deeply Catholic island birth control was against the law. Visitors obviously had to obey the laws of the land but the British government had negotiated an arrangement with the Maltese government. Servicemen would be permitted to have contraband condoms in their homes, but they had to be issued at the Military Hospital. Since the condoms were issued only on Thursday morning, once a month, the men would be at work. It was left to the wives to collect them. Thus every condom day there would be a long line of servicemen’s wives stretching around the hospital grounds, waiting for their turn to collect the forbidden goods. It was, Annette said, humiliating.
At that time and maybe still, servicemen abroad were permitted to buy cars without purchase tax, so long as they kept them for a year before taking them back to the UK. I purchased a new Hillman Imp, a little blue beauty. We loved it, as one does a new car. I still had jazz at the top of my music listening, but apart from Bob Dylan, other singers of his ilk were coming along. Melanie Safka was a revelation to me. And Simon and Garfunkel. I was reading books by the dozen and writing poetry which was beginning to have a personal voice. We visited every nook and cranny of Malta, including the Neolithic cave complex, Marsaxlokk rocky headland, St Paul’s Bay, Valetta, and a dozen other sites and villages of interest. We finally got married quarters and moved to Luqa camp, where the first thing that happened was three of our fighter jets crashed on landing, two of them together. Tragic.
During the first three years of our marriage in Germany Annette had asked me what educational qualifications I had.
‘None,’ I replied, cheerfully. ‘Zilch.’
‘Then you have to get some,’ said my nineteen-year-old partner, who was wiser than a hundred-year-old sage. ‘Sign up at the education section and any they don’t do, we can do by correspondence courses.’
I began studying for seven GCE O-Levels. Since I had left school at fourteen without ever taking an exam, this was new ground. I had no idea if I had it in me to pass a GCE of any kind. But actually I found it easy, I enjoyed studying, especially English literature and ancient history, and that second summer in Germany I had passed six of them very well, but failed the mathematics. I retook mathematics and failed again. ‘You need to get a science then,’ said my already-qualified wife. ‘If you can’t get maths, get a science.’ I took human biology and passed with flying colours. It’s those damn figures I don’t get.
In Malta I moved on to A-Levels, but before I finished them I was called in to see the CO and he told me I had been promoted to sergeant and posted to Cyprus in charge of a signals unit.
Cyprus! Wonderful. We had only spent ten months in Malta, so we had two years and two months in Cyprus, a much larger island, and a posting which all servicemen loved. In Cyprus there were mountains where you could ski in winter and beautiful seas to swim in during the summer. There were shish kebabs and mezes, Greek dancing, Turkish festivals, long walks through orange groves. The navy shipped my Hillman Imp there to await my arrival. And I was going as a senior NCO. Life in the RAF, in any armed service, is a hundred times better as a senior NCO. Officers treat you with the utmost respect. You have your own mess, with squadron dinners, balls, dances, and a bar with flunkies to serve you drinks. You did not have to mix with drunken airmen or sleep in billets with eighty other souls. If you went unaccompanied you got a room to yourself, for a mess was like a quiet hotel, with kidneys for breakfast and newspapers in the coffee room. I had made it.
So, a brilliant posting and a wonderful position. I would be in charge of fifteen to twenty airmen on a listening post. This time, unlike Aden, we would be monitoring our own people. We would tap phones, listen to broadcasts, read letters. At that time the Cold War was going on and traitors were coming out of the woodwork. My job was to stop, look and listen for anyone giving away secrets, whether deliberately or unintentionally. There would be an officer in overall charge, but he sat in an office and wrote reports, while I took the men away to various places, including Malta, Libya, Masirah Island, Gan, as well as various other British outposts, to make sure everyone was behaving themselves.
As usual I left behind some good friends. Two men in particular: Sergeant Giy DeVri, a Frenchman who had joined the Royal Air Force after the war and was more British than I am, and Vic and Lila, a couple born in the Ukraine. Vic was a corporal and would rise no higher, since he was from the Soviet Union. The authorities would only trust someone from that area so far. He was a pale wisp of man, with gentle manners, and he had a lovely wife in Lila. They introduced Annette and me to salami sausage, which we had never seen before. I disgraced myself by eating the rind. Everyone, including Annette, had a nice little pile of rind on the side of their plates, while my plate edge was bare. Vic and Lila were too polite to join Annette in laughing at me.
16. RAF Episkopi, Cyprus
John and Grace Chidlow, with young Craig, had gone to Cyprus straight from UK. John was not going to be at 127 Signals Unit, but was in the main comcen, so we wouldn’t be working together this time. However, we were all stationed at Episkopi, so would see something of each other. They had married quarters on Episkopi camp, but once again we were not eligible. I wrote to John before leaving Malta and asked him if he could find a hiring for me. He and Grace were as good as ever and they found us a bungalow on the edge of Limasol with a view of the mountains. It had a small garden in front, with a carob tree just a few yards away, and was otherwise surrounded by what we in the RAF called ‘bondu’, which is actually bare wasteland. John and Grace ‘marched in’ for us, which is actually quite a stressful duty, and so they saved us the trauma of counting spoons and coat hangers.
A tenant of RAF married quarters or hirings has to ‘march in’ and ‘march out’ of rented accommodation. This consists of a visit by the RAF Families Officer, sometimes a civilian, sometimes an
RAF officer, who comes with a clipboard and is accompanied by an NCO to oversee the occupation of the house. An inventory of every item is taken, right down to the last paperclip.
Marching in is not so bad. It consists of following the Families Officer into each room and ticking off all the items on the inventory, because at the end of the day you will have to sign a form to say you have taken over responsibility for every little thing in the house, from bedding, to cups, to cushions, to gas bottles. Married quarters were always furnished by the RAF, but civilian hirings were obviously furnished by the owner of the property. If any of items went missing or were damaged, or even dirty, on ‘marching out’ the tenant had to pay for them. Everything on the inventory was listed generically. Thus under spoons one would get:
Spoons desert, 6
Spoons serving, 2
Spoons sugar, 1
Spoons tea, 6
etc.
The great fear on marching in is that you are so flustered by the new posting and hoping your absent wife will like the house, that you might sign for something either missing or wrongly registered. There is the apocryphal story of an airman who thought he signed for:
Hangers coat, 1
When actually what he had signed for and would have to cough up a huge amount of dough to replace was:
Hangars aircraft, 1
Marching out is without doubt the worst duty the RAF ever put a husband and wife through. Before the Families Officer arrived to inspect it, the house had to be absolutely spotless. He would lift carpets, take the oven to bits, climb up to inspect the tops of wardrobes, take out drawers and look behind them, hold blankets up to the sunlight to look for any stains, thoroughly investigate the interior of a teapot, etc etc. It was a nightmare experience which Annette and I went through at least ten times in our fifteen years in the service together. Every mother’s son (and daughter) loathed and feared marching out with every fibre of their being. It was an humiliating duty.
Two weeks prior to marching out the cleaning of the house and its myriad utensils and pieces of furniture would take place. Neighbours who had been kind and helpful enough before that time would now stand back and watch and wait. It was an unwritten law that you never assisted your neighbours or friends in a march-out. It was something that one had to do on one’s own. And it was not a pleasant task. The worst object was the cooker. There are legends attached to cleaning cookers. Everyone had their own method, from unscrewing each detachable piece and soaking it in a mild solution of acid, to covering the whole thing in fierce foam, hoping to shift the grease. Almost always there were several stains which refused to budge, no matter how much hard work went into it, or what shifting agent was used.
The bathroom was the next horror, usually because the grouting in the tiles had gone brown and had to be made white again or the kids had cracked the washbasin by knocking a bottle of something or other from the cabinet shelf down on to the porcelain. A new washbasin was not cheap and we were not well off in those days. Likewise a dropped and dented saucepan had to be replaced. Annette once threw one at me during a tiff and I tried to hammer out the subsequent dent to save money.
Such repairs never ever worked.
Children’s bed sheets and mattress covers, and indeed mattresses themselves, nearly always got stained. Mattresses are expensive items, but this mishap was accepted by airmen and wives with resignation, since tots will indeed pee in their sleep at least once in every bed, and if they fail to do that they will definitely wake up once or twice on a tour abroad with a bad tummy – and puke all over themselves. This is a fact of life as certain as taxes and death.
Always there were missing knives, missing spoons, missing forks. We did get an allowance for broken crockery, but that was often exceeded. There is the tale of Mr Airman who having broken the handle from the teapot secretly glued it back on for the marching out. However, once the marching out was complete, the Families Officer asked for a cup of tea and Mrs Airman, unaware of the repair made a whole pot of Rosy Lee. As the lady was pouring his brew and chatting to the dreaded officer, the glue on the teapot melted. The handle slowly peeled away from the pot, which then crashed on the floor below. That particular Families Officer sent the unhappy couple a cleaner’s bill for his trousers.
But . . . but at least John and Grace had marched in for us and we loved the bungalow. In the ’60s in Cyprus the locals often built houses and rented them out while they themselves lived in the garage. Eleni next door to us did just that. She was the mistress of the local baker, who had given her the deposit for her bungalow, and then she had let it out as a hiring to the RAF, knowing they were reliable and paid good rent. Eleni was a cheerful lady, who had two children by the local baker and occasionally got into a scrap with the baker’s wife. Every few months or so the baker’s wife would arrive in the middle of the night and do battle with the mistress, screaming, ‘Stay away from my husband,’ in English so that we and the other airmen in the district would know she was the righteous one and Eleni was the harlot. The next morning everything would be back to normal, with Eleni bestowing her favours on the baker, who would then go home to his wife for dinner.
Another apocryphal tale. The Families Officer gets a telephone call from a newly arrived airman’s wife. ‘There’s a lizard in my living room,’ says the panicking woman. The officer knows that all houses in the tropics have three-inch-long geckos running around the walls and ceilings that are tolerated because they eat flies, mosquitoes and other unpleasant bugs. ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells her gently, ‘it won’t hurt you. Just leave it alone and get on with your unpacking.’ A while later the same woman rings back. ‘It’s still here,’ she says. ‘Look,’ says the officer impatiently, ‘I’ve said it won’t bother you. Just ignore it.’ He slams the phone down. Immediately it rings again. ‘What?’ he yells. A calm voice says, ‘I just wanted you to know that it’s eating the furniture. Will we have to pay for that?’ The officer gets in his car and hurtles round to the quarters to find a six-foot monitor lizard happily chewing on the sofa, refusing to be budged by the lady prodding it with a broom handle.
Cyprus was a dream posting. My new unit was up in the hills and away from serious authority. As I have said, we did have an officer, but he was often away on other duties. Our work was not done at the Signals Unit, but on other stations throughout the Near East and Middle East. We would fly into an RAF station in a Hercules C130 aircraft and set up our listening post, tapping phone lines and listening to radio telephony channels and Morse channels. When we were on base we would spend a great deal of time playing volleyball on a court we had out back.
We had a football team too, which meant making a team of eleven men out of a total of fifteen to twenty staff. It wasn’t surprising that we lost a great majority of our games. I enjoyed playing football but I’ve never been good at it. Volleyball was different. That was a game I really enjoyed. There was another sergeant on the team, but he was the radio technician and had no staff responsibilities (lucky him!). His name was John Slowly, and my impression was that we got on well together.
Staff responsibilities. Most of my airmen (we had no WRAFs on the team) were good lads and men. We spent a lot of off-duty time in each other’s company as well as working together. But there are always odd-bods who cause headaches. One was not so bad, a Welsh boy, but he had a head the size of a beach ball. He believed himself to be an intellectual of sorts and was forever giving the rest of us lectures on English literature, science, mathematics, geography, history, you name it. When you spend a lot of time with other men in tents, you don’t need a chunter like that.
The other lad that gave me a great deal of heartache was a young man called Joe who was bi-polar. Several times Joe had been reported to the Medical Section as mentally unstable, but no one seemed prepared to do anything to help him. So we muddled along with other men filling in for him when he went into one of his violent or depressed moods. One day I was in the storeroom and the doorway darkened. There stood Joe with a fire
axe in his hand and a nasty look on his face.
‘You only gave me a three in assessments this year.’
It was my job to assess the airmen in their duties and give them a mark between one and ten.
‘A three? As much as that?’ I joked, though my eyes never left the fire axe. ‘Um, what are you doing with that thing in your hand, Joe?’
‘Nothin’,’ he muttered. ‘Just bringing it back.’
‘Look, Joe, as far as assessments go, you don’t even want to be in the RAF, do you? A three is good. It’ll help you get out.’ I was making it up as I went along, the sweat running down my back. ‘Because when headquarters see the low mark I’ve given you, they’ll want to interview you and get your side of the story.’
‘I’ll tell ’em you’re a bloody bastard.’
‘That’s your prerogative, of course, Joe – and I have nothing to say to that, except that I do have a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate.’
‘Don’t get bloody funny with me, sarge.’
‘You used to like to joke, Joe.’
At that point relief flooded through me as he tossed the axe on a pile of ropes and walked out without another word. Shortly afterwards they came and took Joe away. I was shaking. I hope he got the treatment he should have been getting long before that point. Sometimes the authorities act extremely irresponsibly. Joe had been fine when I arrived at the unit but had deteriorated mentally over a period of a year. At his worst we were without an officer in charge and doctors in the RAF don’t take a lot of notice of an NCO in charge of a section. They’re always wondering what the angle is and why we’re trying to get rid of a man.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 16
