A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  In the huts, stifling after the day’s sunshine on their iron sides, bored men with a long time still to serve were wondering how the hell they were going to occupy themselves this evening and if the rats that inhabited the roof spaces were likely to be having a noisier circus than usual. The question defeated many of them so that they lay on their beds in the suffocating atmosphere, stupefied, miserable, thinking of home and mentally totting up the months that lay ahead. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been a war. As it was, there was nothing, nothing at all. Jum was a rotten place with no beer, no women, and unbelievable heat. Rain or fine, it never let up and the thought of the evening stretching ahead made them wonder what was the point of knocking off work because there was nothing to do when you did.

  A few of the more self-reliant like Feverel, Kneller and Ginger sat outside on home-made stools to watch the red laterite roads change to a delicate pink in a splendid sunset as the day disappeared. The old hands – and Feverel, Kneller and Ginger had been away from England a long time – had developed a considerable skill at filling in their time. In the early days, before it had been placed out of bounds, they had explored the back-alleys of Hawkinge Town where most white men never went. Nearby, a man with the look of a farmer was gazing fondly at a solitary half-grown chicken in a small wire netting compound he’d built. He was feeding it breadcrumbs he’d saved from his meal, his eyes always on the sky for the kite hawks that hovered ready to snatch it up. Satisfied there were none within reach, he turned away for a water bottle to fill a rusty tin lid, and as he did so a hawk, appearing from nowhere, swooped. The chicken fancier danced with fury.

  ‘The bastard’s pinched my last one!’ he yelled. ‘I had six when I started! To fatten up! To lay eggs! The buggers have taken ’em all!’

  Ginger sympathized, blank-faced. ‘When we first came here,’ he said, ‘you could buy eggs a tanner apiece from the dhobi boys. I used to fry ’em in a old sardine tin. But then the price went up so I got me own chickens. Kept ’em in a run wi’ wire nettin’ round, just like that.’

  The chicken fancier studied him, tears of rage still in his eyes. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Shite ’awks got the lot,’ Ginger said. He grinned. ‘But don’t let it get you down,’ he added. ‘The worrying keeps you fit.’

  ‘I am fit,’ the owner of the chicken growled. ‘This is the fittest place in the whole bloody world. It has to be. No self-respecting germ would tolerate our living conditions. They should send out a few political fat-bums from the House of Commons and then they’d improve a bit, I bet.’

  Ginger listened to the bitterness placidly. ‘It’ll be nice to go ’ome,’ he admitted.

  ‘It’ll seem funny,’ Kneller decided.

  They thought about it for a moment and realized it would seem funny because they’d almost forgotten what home was like. When they’d left England in 1940 the chances of ever returning had been so remote as to be non-existent, and the best way to deal with it at the time had seemed to be to forget all about it.

  ‘What do you think of most about going home, Ginger?’ Kneller asked.

  ‘Going to bed with a white bint ’stead of a black ’un. What about you?’

  ‘Going to Covent Garden and hearing Rigoletto.’

  Feverel had no doubts about what he wanted. ‘A bath,’ he said. ‘A hot bath. For three years, ever since we left Blighty, I’ve had cold showers and swills in buckets. I’ve washed in the sea and I’ve washed in the river, but I’ve never – not once – had a sit-down hot bath. Never. I dream about it like an alcoholic dying for a drink. I want to sit with scalding water up to my neck and luxuriate for an hour. It’s the first thing I’ll do.’

  Within minutes the light faded to the violet ambience of evening. Moths, big as small birds, appeared among the elephant grass, and then the fireflies, while the gaudy little toads that lived under the stones added their song to the night-time chorus of frogs, mosquitoes, bats and owls. In trousers and mosquito boots, Feverel began to search the camp for a book while Kneller doggedly played dominoes with Nobby Clark as he had every evening for months now, both of them dedicated to avoiding boredom.

  Corporal Bates was studying his beer coupon. He’d heard there was beer in the NAAFI but every one of the three spaces on his coupon had been marked by the NAAFI corporal with an inked cross, and he was wondering if he could successfully use some of Trixie Tristram’s hair bleach to get rid of them. It had been done, he knew, and he was wondering if the NAAFI corporal had spotted the dodge yet.

  The heat stood in the huts like an assassin and occasionally you could hear the rats making love in the roof or the noise of a flying beetle roaring along between the beds. Ginger busied himself over a little electric stove he’d made out of wire from the aerial of a wrecked Catalina which he’d wound into spirals round a four-inch nail and screwed to a piece of asbestos set in a tin and fed with electricity from the light switch. It was highly dangerous and thoroughly illegal but it enabled him to make a piece of toast from a slice of stolen bread.

  One of his hut mates, still with several months to do and bored to the point of suicide, watched him listlessly, wondering how he was going to get through the rest of his tour. A few men hunted for cockroaches, the enormous spiders that appeared spasmodically, or the rats which the Africans called pigs and liked to eat roasted in mud cases. But these pastimes were considered a sign of going round the bend and newcomers avoided them like the plague. If there’d been a war, it wouldn’t have been so bad because the danger would have given them something to think about. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

  Darkness came. The first mosquito droned and eventually they were whirring like sewing machines wherever there were men. The news went round that the camp cinema was showing.

  ‘What’s on?’ Bates asked.

  They were having another go at Blood and Sand, and a few men headed for the cinema. As others drifted in and out of the huts, the news arrived that the ships they’d seen in the harbour weren’t going home after all. They’d just come from home and were going the other way. Flying Officer Hobson, who’d been down to see the navy about a new set of mooring buoys, had passed the news to Sergeant Maxey who’d passed it to Corporal Feverel.

  ‘At least they brought mail,’ Feverel pointed out. ‘Transport’s sent a lorry to collect it.’

  The time-expired men didn’t believe him, because they didn’t want to believe him, and they tried to avoid contemplating the blankness of what could easily be another month or more. The cinema finished early because the projector had broken down again. A few began to pull down their mosquito nets, crawled inside and lay wide awake, unable to face people and preferring the opaque cocoon-like anonymity of their beds. The cleverer ones shared a stolen slice of bread. One or two, worried about their possessions and thinking of the raiders who came up the creeks in canoes, began to arrange elaborate booby traps with string and tin cans. Drawing on his experience, Ginger had only a ju-ju of shells and feathers.

  Eventually the lights went out without warning. A few arguments started. A few listless dirty stories were told. Apart from the duty crew at the jetty, the service policemen on the gate, the radio operators, the duty officers and NCOs, the stewards clearing up in the officers’ and sergeants’ messes, the camp was silent.

  It was then that the place was shaken by a terrific jolt that seemed to shudder the whole coast. Those men still not asleep saw the sky light up with a flare of red and heard the long roar of a multiple explosion. For a second, as it died away, they lay still under their mosquito nets.

  ‘What’s that?’ Kneller asked.

  ‘Thunder,’ Nobby Clark said. ‘I saw the lightning.’

  Feveral wasn’t convinced. Standing outside the hut he stared at the sky. The moon was low over the horizon and against its glow he saw a monstrous cloud of smoke curling and coiling, touched on its underside by flame, thrusting upwards as though alive to a height of around five hundred feet where it
began to spread outwards like a vast mushroom.

  Feverel studied it for a moment, trying to get his bearings.

  ‘It’s the mine dump at Giuru,’ he said. ‘It’s gone up.’

  four

  Within minutes, a camp policeman was at the door of the hut, shouting for the mooring party, the pinnace crew and any men not due for duty.

  ‘Report to the base at once,’ he said. ‘Mine dump’s gone up and there are casualties. The road’s been destroyed so they’re going to take ’em out by water.’

  The pinnace crew were already being ferried to their boat when Feverel’s group arrived on the jetty.

  I’ll take Scow 14,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t draw much and there’ll be room to take stretchers.’

  Scow 14, ugly and unloved, hadn’t carried depth charges or ammunition for a long time and didn’t even possess a hatch cover, but the mooring party were used to old boats. They’d worked with a mobile squadron in Saldanha Bay where they’d had to manage with civilian craft and a couple of discarded navy whalers with Kitchener rudders. With Catalinas, you couldn’t get anything more difficult than that.

  As Kneller cast off, Ginger busied himself with the engine. Inevitably it refused to start, so he hit it with the hammer from the tool bag and, as it began to chug, they trudged downstream after the pinnace and a seaplane tender carrying Squadron Leader Greeno, the MO, and a couple of orderlies from sick quarters.

  As they edged into Giuru creek, they noticed that the smell of oil, sweat, human effluvium, cooking and rank vegetation which was the normal bouquet of the river bank was overlaid by a new smell compounded of charred wood, explosives and burned flesh. Seeing that the landing stage had been reduced to matchwood, Feverel placed the scow’s nose on the shelving mud. Someone had laid down planks as duckboards and, even as they arrived, men appeared carrying a stretcher. On it was a sailor, the remains of his scorched white uniform clinging to his body. He was terribly burned and writhing in agony. As he was placed aboard the scow another stretcher appeared. When the stretchers occupied the whole centre of the scow, Feverel put the engine into reverse and, with Kneller and Ginger up to their waists in muddy water pushing of, he edged astern until he could swing round and go alongside the pinnace.

  ‘We’ve room for more,’ Fox called.

  Feverel nodded and headed back inshore under the overhanging trees. The bridge that the lorry carrying the time-expired men had crossed only hours before had also disappeared and there was a great gap in the road where the blast had roared down the cleft in the hills to remove everything in its path. As they nosed ashore again, a dazed petty officer wearing nothing but his cap and a blanket stumbled down the duckboards and was pushed on to the deck. Squadron Leader Greeno, already covered with mangrove mud, straightened up from a stretcher as it was lifted and taken down to the boat.

  Three times the scow headed out to the pinnace before the bigger boat weighed anchor and began to head for Freetown. By this time naval boats were beginning to appear from downriver but none of them had the shallow draft of the scow and they could only be used for ferrying to the hospital.

  With dawn they began to see the devastation that had been caused. Everything within five hundred yards of the dump had vanished. Native huts stood roofless and all the foliage had disappeared so that there was nothing but scorched earth littered with scattered thatch, sheets of corrugated iron, beaten-out petrol cans and tar barrels and splintered planks. A few African soldiers searched among the debris for the bodies of their comrades. Directing them were officers of the West African Frontier Force, among them Cazalet, the languid lieutenant-colonel Feverel had last seen on the Dutchman’s launch up the Bic when they’d gone looking for what was left of O-Orange. He was poking about with his swagger stick, bending down almost as if he were sniffing the earth.

  As the sun rose, the injured appeared more rapidly – African soldiers, villagers, white sailors. The column of smoke had dispersed now, but the air was still full of the smell of explosive. All round the area where the dump had stood trees lay flat, palm trees, eucalyptuses, jacarandas, even huge tulip and cotton trees, all radiating outwards like the spokes of a wheel. A few dazed Africans from the nearby village picked over what was left of their homes.

  The houses nearest the explosion had simply disintegrated, their wattle and mud sides vanishing under the blast in a torrent of dirt and dried palm leaves. The zone of destruction seemed to stretch for a quarter of a mile in every direction, the fringes still crackling under small licking fires. A bucket chain and a pump had been set up from the creek and, even as the injured were taken down to the boats, water went up to put out the last lingering flames.

  There were already vultures in the trees. Where they came from nobody knew but they were always the mourners at any disaster, squatting on the branches with their dusty black mourning clothes, their naked red heads moving as they watched, their scabby necks twisting, the light catching the vicious curved beaks and amber eyes. They reminded you of the harpies who had knitted round the guillotine in the French Revolution. Then, suddenly, as one of the lorries backfired, they lifted off with a slow flap of wings, not all together as you might have expected, not in a panic, but one after the other as if to show their unconcern.

  In a state of shock, staggering, weeping, gasping, more survivors appeared. There were dozens more beneath the wreckage, and men and women, still stunned by the disaster, were scrambling among the debris to pull them out. The bodies were being placed near the road. They seemed to be coming from every direction, all sizes, all ages, all colours, though sometimes it was difficult to decide what colour they’d been originally. Every surviving tree, even beyond the immediate impact of the explosion, had been stripped of its foliage and stood up stark and bare, while near the crater a lorry lay on its back, the stumps of its axles in the air, its tyres burned away. By the look of it, the place would never be green again.

  It started raining in the afternoon and when the scow returned to Jum it was dark and they were all saturated and covered with mud. The pinnace and the seaplane tenders were still on their way back from Freetown where they had been ferrying the last of the injured.

  As they tied up to the buoy, Feverel was frowning.

  ‘Wonder what happened?’ he said.

  The same concern, but with different connotations, was being expressed by Wing Commander Molyneux and Wing Commander Mackintosh.

  ‘It makes a big hole in our attack potential,’ Molyneux said. ‘We’re going to have to either go easy for a while or aim better. There’s going to be no dropping of depth charges on suspicion. We’ve got none to spare.’

  ‘How did they get the bloody things up to Giuru, anyway?’ Mackintosh asked.

  ‘Lighter from an ammunition ship at Freetown. They were carried ashore by native labour.’

  ‘Christ,’ Mackintosh said. ‘What a way of doing things. If it’s the wrong way, that’s the way the jokers out here’ll do it. What do they think caused it?’

  ‘The navy puts it down to deterioration. But as everybody near the seat of the explosion’s dead and the whole of the watch that was on duty’s just vanished into thin air, it’s hard to be certain. They’re a bit concerned. It’s going to leave them short, too.’

  ‘It’s going to leave a few families short as well, sport,’ Mackintosh growled. ‘What’s the butcher’s bill?’

  ‘Ten naval men, fourteen privates of the West African Frontier Force and about twenty-seven villagers. They haven’t got the tally of the injured yet. When I went down there that army chap, Cazalet, was rooting about. He didn’t seem to agree with the navy and he’s insisting on guards on all important installations.’

  Mackintosh struck a match and applied it to his pipe. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t us for a change, thank God. Perhaps our crook luck’s left us and gone to the navy.’

  In that, Wing Commander Mackintosh was dead wrong.

  The following morning, with the sky still sombre and threatening and
the clouds ragged-edged and yellow-grey, so low that the tops of the trees were hidden in a muddy-looking fog, the road to the hangar was a ribbon of red mud after the rain, and the undergrowth, dripping diamonds in the strange light, was bright green now that the dust of months had been washed away. The wild cucumbers were suddenly almost fully grown and the plantain trees had pushed up another notch to the windows. The lizards looking for moths and cockroaches on the sills seemed to be studying them with jaundiced eyes.

  The mangroves held wraiths of mist that never seemed completely to disappear. Sometimes it could play weird tricks, coming out of the trees and gathering on the water to form itself into a ball, or show ghostly white in the moonlight, even bursting into thousands of wisps when the breeze got up. The palm trunk supports of the ramshackle jetty shuddered under the weight of the torrent of brown water coming from the hills and the walls of the crew hut were wet with moisture.

  C-Charlie landed, and almost immediately F-Fox left to take its place. During the day the sky darkened again, and a storm of particular intensity broke over the camp. Then it stopped abruptly, leaving only the weeping leaves and an atmosphere that was heavy, humid and depressing. Orders came for the duty refueller crew to turn out.

  ‘K-Katie,’ they were told. ‘She takes off an hour before F-Fox lands.’

  Corporal Herbert Bunting and the two men who comprised the crew of Refueller 81 slithered down to the base and were taken by dinghy to where the refueller was moored just down the creek. Starting the engine they trudged slowly to the lagoon where the aircraft faced every way possible on the slack tide.