by Shaun Clarke
Once darkness fell, bringing the blessing of cool air, they were made to march even deeper into the desert. There they were taught to navigate by the timing of the rise and fall of the moon, or by the position of certain stars or constellations.
‘So,’ Wild Bill asked at the end of the final lesson, when the SAS men were unmistakably exhausted, ‘did you understand all that?’ Eager to return to base and get some sleep, the troopers either said ‘Yes!’ or nodded affirmatively. ‘Good,’ Wild Bill said, climbing up into his Chevrolet, just as the other LRDG men, along with that other experienced desert hand, Sergeant Lorrimer, were doing the same. ‘If that’s the case, let’s see you prove it by making your own way back to the camp. Goodbye and good luck!’
Temporarily shocked speechless, the SAS troopers just stood there as the LRDG trucks roared off, churning up great clouds of sand, and eventually disappeared into the darkness, letting the eerie silence of the desert settle around the men.
‘Jesus!’ Frankie said, almost whispering, glancing about him at the vast, moonlit wilderness. ‘This is pretty scary.’
‘I’m not scared, I’m exhausted,’ Neil said. ‘I don’t think I can walk a step.’
Taff studied the stars, recalled what he had been taught, then pointed towards the invisible horizon with his index finger. ‘That way, lads. Let’s go.’
They began the long hike back to the camp.
Surprisingly, they all made it back. Some had fallen behind, others had broken away from the main group and become temporarily lost, but all of them made it back somehow, albeit in the early hours of the morning and in a state of utter exhaustion.
Falling straight onto the groundsheets under their poncho covers, they attempted to sleep, but found it almost impossible. Some were too exhausted to sleep, others dozed fitfully, and all were tormented by a combination of the freezing cold and the usual swarms of fat black flies, mosquitoes and midges, which buzzed and whined constantly in their ears, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Curses exploded up and down the separate tents as the men tossed and turned and, in some instances, gave up altogether, lighting cigarettes and talking instead.
‘Cor blimey,’ Jimbo said to Frankie, lying next to him, ‘I don’t mind being in the Army, doing my bit, but this place is bloody ridiculous. For the first time since I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking of home.’
‘Wapping, wasn’t it?’ Frankie asked.
‘S’right. Good old Wapping. I was there when it took the brunt of the Blitz, but I didn’t mind that. When the air-raid sirens wailed, we didn’t go to the bomb shelters; we just locked the doors of the pub and sat out the bombing. Buildings ablaze all around us and the ARP and Fire Brigade at work, but we knocked back the mild and bitter and sang our songs until it was all over. They’re a good lot in Wapping.’
‘What about the missus?’
‘What about her?’
‘She all right?’
‘Not bad, I suppose. I mean, I could’ve done worse. She kept the house clean and looked after the kids. A decent girl, really. But I joined up before the war started, so I didn’t see her that much.’
‘That’s why you’re still married.’
They both chuckled at that, inhaled and blew clouds of smoke. Allied aircraft were passing overhead, very high in the sky. When they were gone, there was silence.
‘You were born in London?’ Frankie asked.
‘Course. Right there in Wapping. Lived there all me life, worked me old man’s fruit cart, first Brewer Street, then Covent Garden, but eventually joined the TA, then went into the Army. Smart, see? I knew there was a war on the way and that if I joined up, instead of being conscripted, I’d have certain advantages. That’s why I’m now a corporal and you’re a private, you poor bleedin’ conscript. I joined up the day England beat the Aussies at the Oval and Len Hutton had an innings of 364. I’ll never forget that.’
Frankie grinned and had another drag on his cigarette. ‘Don’t like cricket m’self,’ he said. ‘I like a bit of football. I follow Arsenal ’cause that’s near where I live. They have some good matches there.’
‘Bleedin’ Paddy Town over there. That’s Finsbury Park, ain’t it? All them bloody Paddies livin’ off the bleedin’ dole. Should send ’em back on the boat.’
‘Good place, Finsbury Park. Lively. Know what I mean? The Paddies enjoy a good time in the pub, plenty of chat, and are a generous lot. There’s lots of Paddies in my street and they’re a good bunch. My Mum and Dad swear by them.’
‘You live with your Mum and Dad?’
‘Never left home,’ Frankie said. ‘We have a nice three-storey house in Stroud Green Road. The tube’s only five minutes’ walk and the buses go right past us.’ Frankie’s father was a train driver on the London and North-Eastern Line, between London and Newcastle, while his mother looked after the house and enjoyed her neighbours’ company. ‘Now there’s air-raid shelters up the side streets and black-out curtains all over the show. My girlfriend’s keen on black-out curtains. It makes her feel safe.’
‘You mean …?’
‘You’ve got it. We know we’re not being watched when we do it.’
In fact, like most of his mates Frankie lied about his girlfriend Pam and only did ‘it’ with her in his dreams. Of course he had groped her a lot, sucked her tits, but that was about as far as he had got in the eighteen months that he had known her. She was a respectable girl from Crouch End, up the hill, which put her a cut above him – or so she thought. She wanted respect, so she had told him, and that could only mean marriage. Frankie, who had a good life at home, and was spoilt by both of his parents and two doting older sisters, had his doubts about leaving home for marriage. A man could make a mistake that way.
‘Funny, ain’t it?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The way we think about London,’ Frankie went on, ‘about it being divided up into areas with different classes of people, that’s the way people think of the whole country. Divided between north and south, I mean. You take Neil there, and Taff Clayton – they think they’re real folk up in the north while we’re artificial.
‘Taff Clayton’s a Welshman.’
‘But he thinks the same way. The Welsh and the Scots, they think just like the northerners. They think they’re better – more real and genuine – than we are in the south. It’s a queer thing, ain’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t give the time of day to the north of England,’ Jimbo replied. ‘Nor to Scotland or Wales. A right worthless shower they are.’
‘Neil and Taff are all right,’ Frankie said, suddenly feeling sentimental and generous towards his mates.
‘They’re a pair of piss-heads,’ Jimbo replied. ‘They don’t know the real world.’
Frankie sighed. ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right.’
Jimbo mumbled something else and then started snoring. Frankie swatted the flies away and lit up another Senior Service. He could not sleep to save his life; he was just too tired.
The men were up at first light the second day, some having slept only a couple of hours, some none at all, to swallow a quick breakfast of wads and hot tea, desperately trying to protect both from the swarms of bloated black flies and mosquitoes that had driven most of them mad throughout the night.
After breakfast and a clean-up, with their mess kit put away, they had their final shit in that place and then poured petrol over the temporary latrines, lit it and burned everything. It seemed an odd thing to do in the middle of the desert, but no one thought to question it – or indeed had time to do so – as they were then obliged to hurriedly dismantle their shelters, roll and pack their groundsheets and ponchos, remove all signs of the camp, and load their gear in preparation for another drive into the desert.
Before setting off, however, they gathered around their LRDG instructors, in the already fierce heat of the morning, to receive lessons in how to maximize the use of their precious water. The first method was to clean their teeth, spit the tiny amount of water in th
eir mouth out into a container, use that to shave with, then put it into the radiator of their vehicle. Monkey Madson then showed them how to make an improvised filtering system out of stacked four-gallon petrol cans, using a layer of sand and small stones in the top can, pouring the dirty water onto it, and letting it drip through to the lower can, when it could be recycled.
‘You can also use one of these instead of the layer of sand and stones,’ Monkey said, removing the filter from a captured Italian gas mask and placing it over the opening in the top can. ‘So, when you’ve picked up your meagre water-bottle ration, you clean your teeth, swill your gob out with the water, then spit the water into the filter to run back into the can.’
‘I feel ill already!’ Neil said.
‘Then,’ Monkey continued enthusiastically, ‘when you’ve got half a can of water, you wash your face in it and pour it back into the top can to be filtered and used again. You can even wash your socks in it, then, as before, pour the dirty water back into the can to be filtered and …’
‘Fucking great,’ Jimbo said. ‘You clean your teeth with it, wash yourself with it, wash your socks and shitty underpants in it … and drink it as well. I don’t think I’m hearing right.’
‘You heard right,’ Monkey told him. ‘It’s a continuous recycling process and you better get used to it. Mind you, most of us don’t drink the water as such; we have it as a brew-up. That way you can swallow it.’
To the amusement of the others, Taff rammed his fingers down his throat and pretended to choke and die.
‘We’re moving out!’ Wild Bill Monnery bawled, interrupting Taff’s act. ‘Get to your vehicles!’
This time, when they were driven out into the fierce heat of the wilderness, they were taught to drive the Chevrolets across smooth, hard ground, up and down deep wadis and steep sand dunes, and across a rocky terrain that alternated dangerously with patches of soft sand and gravel – and to fire the weapons fixed to the vehicles while doing so.
When going through soft sand, the vehicles often became bogged down and had to be dug out; the men learnt the hard way just what the sand mats and channels fixed to the vehicles were for. Invariably, the nose of the car would be tipped right forward, the axle buried deep in the sand. Getting it out was dreadfully hard work that would have been impossible without the sand mats and channels. The former were woven mats; the latter were heavy metal channels five feet long that had originally been used in World War One as the roofing for dugouts.
First, the men had to unload all their gear from the vehicle to make it lighter. After laboriously digging and scraping the sand away from the wheels of the trapped vehicle, they pushed the sand mats under the front wheels and the steel sand channels under the rear wheels. When these were firmly in place between the wheels and the soft sand, the vehicle, with its engine running in low gear, could then be pushed forward onto a succession of other sand mats and channels until it was back on harder ground.
It was a sweaty, back-breaking, exhausting business that had to be done at least every couple of hours.
‘I’ll never joke about the LRDG again,’ Jimbo said breathlessly to Frankie, after both of them had helped rescue their Chevrolet. ‘These blokes earn their pennies!’
After a full day of this kind of activity in the relentless heat of the barren plains, the men were about ready to collapse when ordered to stop and make up a camp for their second night in the desert. However, once they had put up their poncho shelters, where they had hoped to relax while waiting for the cook to prepare the evening meal, they were dragged out by Wild Bill to be instructed in the art of desert cooking.
This lesson was given by Corporal Tod ‘The Toad’ Harrington, a great beast of a man who drove them crazy with hunger when, instead of cooking for them, he arrived in their midst with a portable soldering kit and took two hours showing them how to make their own cooker out of a large biscuit tin and a small cheese tin. After cutting the latter in two, he poured sand and petrol into one half, to be used as fuel. He then cut holes in two sides of the biscuit tin, put a funnel through the middle, welding it to the sides of the holes, then surrounded it with a water jacket that contained a gallon of water and could be brought to the boil in three minutes when placed over the burning petrol in the cheese tin.
‘Any questions?’ he asked the men sitting around him in the sand, most of them nearly demented with exhaustion and hunger.
‘Yeah,’ Jimbo said. ‘When do we eat?’
Grinning maliciously, the Toad picked up the hard biscuits he had removed from the biscuit tin before turning it into a cooker, placed them on a large stone, then proceeded to pulverize them with the handle of his handgun. When they were completely crushed, he scraped the crumbs into the unused other half of the cheese tin, added condensed milk, jam, sugar and hot water from the modified biscuit tin, then stuck a spoon in it and handed it to Jimbo.
‘Voilà!’ the Toad exclaimed in a tone that suggested whisky had ruined his vocal cords.
Jimbo looked down in disgust at the steaming mess in the cheese tin. ‘What the fuck is it?’
‘Porridge!’ the Toad explained proudly.
‘Vomit, vomit!’ Taff gurgled, again sticking his fingers down his throat.
Nevertheless, they were fed that night, not with the Toad’s porridge, but with his bully beef, tinned M and V, dehydrated potatoes, herrings in tomato and some noodles obviously rifled from the Italians.
‘It’s an international cuisine,’ the Toad explained, ‘so I want no complaints.’
‘We’re too busy gagging to complain,’ Frankie replied, ‘so you’ve no need to worry about that.’
Attempting to sleep out in the open that night, on the cold groundsheets under their poncho tents, but otherwise exposed to the freezing cold and the relentless flies, mosquitoes and midges, which appeared able to defy the cold, Taff and Neil tossed and turned, moaned and groaned, then gave up and lit cigarettes – Taff a Woodbine, Neil a Players – and tried to pass the time with conversation.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Neil said, his words following a cloud of smoke out of his trembling lips. ‘Here we are, two working-class lads who otherwise probably would never have left their home towns, in the middle of the bleeding North African desert, looking up at the stars.’
‘Very poetic,’ Taff said. ‘I’ve got a lump in my throat already.’
‘No, seriously, I mean it. I mean, here we are, just two common lads, and now we’re members of the toughest regiment in the British Army, fighting in a desert in North Africa. It really makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘How the bleedin’ ’ell did you get in the Army?’ Taff asked him, not being in the mood for philosophy.
‘I was a weekend soldier,’ Neil replied solemnly. ‘Territorial Army. I volunteered in my local drill hall, in Blackburn. On 11 April 1939 – the day Glasgow banned darts in pubs as too dangerous. That’s how I’ll always remember it. I mean, what kind of people would stoop to that? Bleeding mad, those Scots are.’
Taff recalled the first air-raid shelters, the evacuation of the children from the cities, the eerie silence when the kids had left; then the beginning of the war, the first air-raids, the pounding ack-ack guns and exploding flak, the German bombers and Spitfires, the blazing, crumbling buildings of bombed cities. He thought of all that and wondered how on earth Neil could only remember the day he had volunteered to fight as the day darts were banned from Glaswegian pubs. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?
‘Aye, right,’ he said, getting back to mad Scots. ‘We should send them all to Blackburn, where they’d seem perfectly sane.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Neil said. ‘How did you get in the Army? Volunteered as well, did you?’
‘Are you bloody mad? You think I’ve got a hole in my head? I’d rather be down in the coal mines of Aberfan – that’s where I lived and worked, mate – than takin’ a lot of bloody shite from English Army thickheads. I didn’t volunteer, mate. I was bloody conscripted. I tried sayin’ I was do
in’ a job that was in the national interest, but the bastards replied that bein’ single I could serve better elsewhere. They then put me on the bus with all the others and drove me away from the village. Booted me into boot camp, then into the Welsh Guards. So, here I am, mate.’
‘Not only in L Detachment, SAS, but now a corporal to boot. If you hate the Army so much, how did you manage that?’
Taff puffed a cloud of smoke while tapping his temple with his forefinger and giving Neil the wink. ‘No screws lost here, mate. I made the best of a bad thing. I was good at soldiering, see? I mean, the mines toughened me up. So when I saw that I was good, I thought what the hell, and decided to milk it for all it was worth by tryin’ to get a quick promotion. Worked my fanny off, ended up in Tripoli, and was shipped on leave to Alexandria just before Jerry surrounded Tobruk. Then, while still on leave, I read Captain Stirling’s memo about that meeting in Geneifa and thought there might be something in it for me. When I heard him talkin’ I figured he might be a man goin’ places, so I decided to volunteer to go with him. Now, here I am, in the middle of the North African desert, gazing up at the stars. I feel a right bleedin’ Charlie!’
He stubbed his cigarette out, lit another, and blew a couple of smoke rings. One of them ringed the pale moon and then dissolved into it.
‘You’re not a Charlie,’ Neil told him. ‘You’re a good soldier, Taff. I mean, you come from Wales and the Welsh are like northerners: they’re real folk, they endure, they have qualities you don’t find in the south. Know what I mean, Taff?’
