A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  Three

  The rumours about a homegoing ship were finally confirmed when the time-expired men – Corporal Fox, Corporal Feverel, Corporal Bates, Kneller, Ginger Donnelly, Nobby Clark and all the rest of them – were told to collect their clearance chits.

  Holding the magic slip of paper at arm’s length, Kneller couldn’t stop smiling. ‘If there were some beer in the camp,’ he said, ‘I’d get drunk.’

  ‘If we had some ham,’ Feverel said dryly, ‘we could have some ham and eggs if we had some eggs.’

  As he appended his signature to their slips, Hobson looked up at them. They were a scarecrow lot in their frayed shirts and shorts, lean, stooped and yellow as canaries, and at that moment soaked with rain. He’d known them a long time and he regarded them with affection.

  ‘I’m glad I’m going home, too,’ he said. ‘Because I should hate to run this place without you lot.’

  They bridled, still dazed at their good luck and pleased with the compliment.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Hobson went on, and they guessed there was a catch to it, ‘you’ve not finished work as usually happens with clearance chits. The new lot who’ve arrived to take your places were all trained or promoted in the last year and they’ve all got white knees and know about as much about marine section work as my Great-Aunt Fanny knows about steam navigation. So I shall expect you to carry them until you leave. However, for your information, there’s a lorry going to Freetown tomorrow morning, so you’d better make sure you’re on it if you want to buy presents to take home. We’ll manage for a day. I hope you find something. I never can’.

  Warm thoughts of home in their minds, the time-expired men took down their thick blue uniforms from where they had hung for months on the walls of the huts. They could just see themselves getting the glad eye from the girls in their native towns. Unfortunately, to their dismay, they found that the rats and the moths had chewed holes in their trousers in the most unexpected and embarrassing places.

  However, for their trip to Freetown they were lucky.

  Getting out of camp was a rarity these days and going to Freetown was virtually unknown, so that to find a fine day for it in the middle of the rainy season was a gift from the gods.

  The skies had cleared and they had all put on clean khaki, washed and ironed – scorched a little here and there, too – by the dhobi boys. Even leading Aircraftman Alec Donnelly looked clean for a change.

  ‘If the Duke of Windsor had joined the Raff,’ Feverel told him cheerfully, ‘he’d have looked like you, Ginger.’

  The journey to Freetown was hot and dusty because there were too many men crammed in the back of the lorry and they had to stand up all the way, clutching the stanchions that supported the canvas cover, rolling and swaying together as they swung round the corners and the hills.

  Trixie Tristram, as time-expired as the rest, his bleached hair combed, his starched khaki immaculate, enjoyed himself enormously as he bounced against Feverel’s sturdy shape.

  ‘And there was this German singing this song, ducky,’ he was saying to one of his boyfriends. ‘“Lili Marlene”, it’s called. The Germans are all at it these days. There’s one group that sing it falsetto. I bet they’ve all got blond hair and blue eyes. I told the padre. Honest, I think he’s going round the bend. He thinks he’s some sort of secret service and I’m Mata Hari.’

  In the end Feverel gave him a shove. ‘For God’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘Lean on your breakfast.’

  Trixie turned to look at his hot angry face. ‘I think you’re gorgeous when you’re cross, Fevvy,’ he said.

  On arrival, the first reaction of the lorryload of men, saffron with mepacrine and for the most part devoid of excess energy, was to go to the harbour. From the wall above the market – a riot of Technicolor where the mammies sold pawpaws, bananas, limes and green oranges – you could see everything that was happening.

  There were two vessels moored one behind the other, both converted liners. One was the naval depot ship, Philoctetes, which had been there ever since the war began and was said to rest on a reef of empty bottles; the other was an armed merchant cruiser which had limped in after a fight with a German raider the year before. There were no means of repairing her in Freetown and she lay low in the water with flooded holds, the corpses of many of her crew still bobbing against the bulkheads. What made their eyes shine, though, was a group of strange ships laying well out, surrounded by bumboats and canoes whose occupants were offering to dive for shillings while wearing top hats, frock coats or even water wings.

  ‘That’s it,’ Corporal Bates said enthusiastically. ‘That’s the convoy for England.’

  They were easily persuaded and, feeling better, set off past the stained green statue of William Wilberforce, the law courts, the cathedral and the enormous cotton tree that threw its shade over almost a hundred yards of pavement and had been a meeting place for the freed slaves when they had first arrived nearly two hundred years before. Sierra Leone took its name from the shape of the hills behind, which resembled a lion in repose, and the thunder which rolled round them like a lion’s roar in the rainy season, but the town, so fresh and green-looking from the sea, was a disappointment as usual when seen from close quarters. Hot with a breath-catching closeness, it wore a jaded midday look, drab and drained of energy as it huddled under the hills like a shabby old beggar. Every street had its reminder of the old days, and guns from the slave ships were embedded in the pavements in all sorts of odd corners.

  Feverel, Kneller and Ginger found themselves in a native bar. Next door was a carpenter’s shop with outside a masterpiece of West African advertising expertise: ‘Bungie, Sympathetic Undertaker. Coffins supplied with hearse and uniform men at all moments. Been born sympathetic. Promise to carry on that function.’

  Trixie was at the other end of the bar with his friend, and Feverel glanced at his own bottle of beer and a sticky-sweet gin and orange. ‘Why is it,’ he asked, ‘that at headquarters and all military, naval and air force establishments in Freetown they have as much beer as they can drink and that even the bloody native bars can produce gin and whisky, while up at Jum, no more than fifteen miles away as the crow flies, we’re rationed to three bottles of beer a month – when they can get it?’

  It was something that never failed to puzzle them.

  Afterwards, they pushed through the crowds outside the flat, unshaded façades of Syrian shops. They were situated in a mass of buildings from a dead era and were backed by the unpainted box-wood houses and the mud-and-beaten-out-tin dwellings of the poor with their rusting roofs and their air of unwanted junk. Sizzling in the sun, the sweat trickling from armpits and down spines and legs, they pushed through the brightly-hued chattering black people, their ears filled with the high-pitched sound of an African crowd – self-important clerks, mission-educated and stiff in starched linen suits; Hausa traders wearing robes of striped pyjama cloth and gold-embroidered smoking caps; labourers with twanging voices heading for the waterfront with slapping bare feet; farmers with trussed live pigs on their heads; mammies in chemise-like Mother Hubbards and gaudy Madras handkerchiefs, bearing baskets of paper-stoppered ginger beer bottles; Creole girls trying to look European, their faces ghostly with white powder, their dark lips lavender under red lipstick.

  It was a riot of breathtakingly crude hues, smells and sounds. Two vultures in the centre of the road tug-of-warred over a dead pi-dog; an overloaded bus wobbled by, its African passengers chirruping like a lot of monkeys; smug cyclists worked at their bells as if they drove Rolls-Royces. The noise and the colour hit them like a hammer blow and for the first time since he’d arrived Feverel began to wish he were not going home. There was nothing in England resembling this and he knew he would never see its like again.

  Everywhere in West Africa, he had to admit, wasn’t like Jum. After the war, he decided they’d all exaggerate the miseries of Jum, but there were some places further south, he’d heard, where life was said to be quite bearable, even, he
supposed, a few in Sierra Leone – especially round Freetown where headquarters was situated and there were beaches and bars and something to do besides twiddle your thumbs.

  Refreshed by the beer, they headed for a building of whitewashed brick and corrugated iron that went by the name of the Mi-Ami Restaurant. On the wall some Creole nationalist had written ‘English Go Home’ and beneath it some disgruntled British serviceman had retorted, ‘I wish to Christ I could.’ A black figure inside the door, like a disembodied smile in the shadows, took their order and indicated a table in what looked like the loft of a barn. There was only chicken on the menu and, as they sat down, the chickens were dragged squawking from a cage by the door, slaughtered and plucked. The entrails were slung on to the tin roof to be fought over by the waiting vultures, their feet clattering on the corrugated iron sheets, right alongside the bemused customers.

  Trixie Tristram was once more there, this time with a new friend, a blond blue-eyed pretty young man, deep in conversation.

  ‘You say there’s a lorry going back?’ the young man was saying.

  ‘Of course. Join us, dear. Are you time-expired, like the rest of us convicts?’

  ‘No. Just been down to HQ to deliver some papers. From Hawkinge.’

  ‘Didn’t they lay on a car, ducky? They are a mean lot, aren’t they? They’re just as bad at Jum.’

  ‘If I can get a lift back to Jum, I know someone in Transport who can fix a lift to Hawkinge.’

  ‘Well, just tag along and pile on board,’ Trixie said. ‘Don’t mention my name, though, dear, because it’s supposed to be only for us old lags. What’s your name?’

  ‘Paul.’

  ‘Mine’s Derek. This is Arthur.’

  By late afternoon they had all managed to fill themselves with drink and food. Trixie set off to buy lengths of material – not for female relatives in England like most of them but for himself, less intrigued for a change by the texture and the value than by the blond blue-eyed young man he’d picked up. Corporal Bates, inflamed by thoughts of home, unwisely allowed himself to be persuaded by a small boy offering his sister – who, he claimed, was that West African symbol of purity, a schoolteacher – into a native brothel that looked like a stable. Outside the door, under a roaring cloud of flies, stood a mountain of used bottles and opened tins. The others, arms full of newspaper-wrapped parcels, succumbed to the blandishments of the sidewalk salesmen selling wallets, purses, writing cases and leather pouffe covers decorated with palm trees and elephants. Nobby Clark bought a splendid suitcase which he filled with lengths of Indian silk, nightdresses and pyjamas so out of date they were Edwardian, and everything else he could think of for the women of his family. As he humped it to the lorry for the return journey, he was greeted with jeers by Ginger Donnelly who, after ten years in the RAF, had seen it all before.

  ‘Them suitcases,’ he said, ‘ain’t leather at all. They’re cardboard underneath. Chap in our ’ut bought one when the last ship ’ome came in, in February. The ’andle came out as ’e was going up the gangplank and the lot went into the ’arbour.’

  Clark eyed his suitcase with considerably less enthusiasm than before and decided, when the time came, to tie it up well with rope.

  The lorry was waiting near the cotton tree and they set off on the long drive back to the camp. Corporal Fox and Corporal Bates had elected for a lark to take the narrow-gauge railway that ran past Brighton and Hawkinge Town on its way to Pendembu and the borders of Liberia and French Guinea. It was quite an experience with its miniature engine and miniature carriages, and you could always rely on the driver stopping en route to buy dried fish or provide hot water for some mammy who was waiting to make coffee. Sometimes they even had beer to sell.

  The lorry was free but more wearing because where the macadam ran out the red laterite surface on the road was appalling, and every few miles there were gullies crossed by bridges wide enough only for single-file traffic, and the native drivers of the West African Frontier Force liked to race for them so that most of the gullies contained the rusting wreckage of vehicles which had met in the middle.

  The bush started as they left the town. The streets didn’t just peter out; they stopped dead, and from then on the trees were like a solid hedge all the way to Jum. A mile or two from the town, everybody started singing, even Trixie and his boyfriend, both a little high on gin and orange. ‘Bless ’em All’ inevitably, because it was the song of time-expired men the whole world over.

  There’s a troopship just leaving Bombay,

  Bound for old Blighty’s shore,

  Heavily laden with time-expired men

  Bound for the land they adore…

  The marine section sang it with special gusto because it was supposed to have been written by that predecessor of theirs, Lawrence of Arabia himself. Who else, they argued, would have had the brains to put into words so exactly the emotions of servicemen a long way from home?

  Always at its hottest before it finally disappeared, the sun fried them as they clung to the lorry’s stanchions, rocking and bumping and swaying as they sped up and down the hills and round the winding curves. Red and gaudy green, the land seemed to enclose them, the trees brushing the sides of the vehicle as it swayed.

  A few black men waved and cheered as they passed, but there were no horses or mules, because horses and mules couldn’t live in Sierra Leone. A company of native soldiers of the West African Frontier Force, tall, strong men in shorts, shirts, and huge boots designed like boats for their broad flat feet, grinned as they tramped past, and a lorryload of time-expireds from RAF, Hawkinge, exchanged insults and ribald gestures.

  Dropping into a valley, they passed a stream running over a cluster of rocks where African women from a nearby village bent over the water, naked to the waist, slapping and hammering at their washing. It was a place that had already entered into poetry and song and Ginger got them singing again.

  …And if you think that Africa calls,

  Just take a look at Swinging Tit Falls…

  He was conducting his choir with a leather-handled bundu knife he’d bought as a souvenir, pretending to bring in first one side of the lorry then the other. The blond-haired airman Trixie Tristram had picked up watched him warily and Trixie gestured.

  ‘Make up your mind, dear,’ he giggled. ‘This side or that.’

  The blond-haired man moved to the left and Ginger swept him in.

  There’s lizards, mosquitoes and snakes green and black

  And bloody great scorpions that fall down your back…

  At Giuri the road curved close to the Bunce. The creek was navigable at this point for flat-bottomed craft, and on the hill nearby, well away from military installations, a mine and depth charge dump had been set up by the navy. It was fed by a winding road from a landing stage in the creek where lighters from Freetown could come alongside. A flag flapped against the greenery and there was a glimpse of a West African sentry and a few bored sailors in white shorts.

  They were still singing as Hawkinge Town came up and they roared cheerfully between the dark masses of cotton trees and palms whose curving boles slashed the sky, their fronds rustling in the hot wind. Mud-and-wattle huts huddled among the banana plants in aromatic air heavy with the smell of wood smoke and vegetation, the ancient smell of Africa, so that a few of the men in the lorry wrinkled their noses and wondered if, after so long, they could ever live without it.

  As they waited for a group of children to cross the road, two mammies, naked to the waist, waved from where they were selling mangoes from calabashes and in the open doorway of a wood-and-tin dwelling, a tailor crouched over an ancient treadle sewing machine looked up and grinned. From somewhere among the trees came the monotonous plink-plonk of a single-octave tune on an instrument made from a biscuit tin and, like a bass accompaniment across the hot still air, the thud of a bundu drum in the steady throb of a pulse.

  Ginger’s woman was outside the store buying tinned peaches for the celebrations that would fol
low the coming bundu ceremony, and, because one or two of them knew her bar from the days when they’d been allowed out of camp, they started to sing.

  Go home, Lizzie Morgan,

  Go home, Lizzie Morgan,

  You gone done put your Mammy to shame…

  She smiled and waved, but Ginger kept his head well down, pretending to fasten his shoe lace, because he had no wish for her to know he was going home.

  As the lorry joggled along the rough road to the camp, the singing died. They were all tired now and feeling the effects of the heat and the first real drinking for months. At the gate, a service police corporal, all smart, starched khaki and blanco’d belt, was checking the native workers as they left the camp, poking his fingers through their carrier bags and satchels to make sure they’d stolen nothing. The men in the lorry started to sing ‘Why Are We Waiting?’ and ‘Why Was He Born So Beautiful?’ and the corporal gestured angrily at them. The blond young man alongside Trixie blew him a loud raspberry and Trixie giggled. Eventually, the flustered policeman decided to forget the passes and waved them through.

  They climbed down with their newspaper-wrapped parcels and brand-new leather-covered cardboard suitcases, not sure whether to regret the amount of liquor they’d drunk or the fact that there was nothing in the camp to provide a hair of the dog that bit them. Hot, stooped, and beginning to wonder in a curious sort of way if they really wanted to go home, they stumbled towards their billets. They’d all heard the saying that if you stayed too long the Coast got you, and several of them were wondering if it had.

  Men were heading for the water bowser to fill bottles for the night. A few others, still grimy from the day’s work and trembling and fatigue and hunger, were heading for the cookhouse. A few were kicking a ball about on the uneven patch of red earth that did duty through the year as a football and cricket pitch. It wasn’t too bad for football but it wasn’t much good for cricket. The wicket was matting on a stretch of concrete which had a crack at one end that one of the Australians in Mackintosh’s squadron, a fast bowler of no mean repute in New South Wales, could hit three times out of four so that the ball – if it didn’t half-kill the batsman – went clean over his head and the heads of the wicket-keeper and the longstop for four byes.