‘I haven’t got a dad.’
‘Well, go back to whoever brought you. Ellis Roper please! Weighing scale number four!’
Craig House holiday home
far far away,
Where us poor children go
for a holiday.
Oh, how we run like hell
when we hear the dinner bell,
far far away.
We were on our way to Morecambe and those that had been before were singing this stupid song. I was in an aisle seat next to the bald lad. He was singing, so I knew it wasn’t his first time. I’d wanted to get by the window so I could wave goodbye to my mum and my Auntie Doreen but by the time I’d been weighed and measured I was too late. Eric was next to me on the other side of the aisle. He wasn’t singing, just sitting there staring into space. Behind me a girl was crying. She hadn’t wanted to go. The driver and the man from the clinic had had to drag her away from her mum and force her on to the coach. Her mum had run off up the street crying, with her dad following. They didn’t even wave her off. My mum had had to get her hanky out cos she had tears in her eyes.
‘Don’t forget to write – your envelopes are in your suitcase under your pants.’
‘Course I wouldn’t forget. I had it all planned. I was going to write as soon as I got there and post it straight away. My mum’d get the letter on the Tuesday morning, get on the train like she promised and I’d be home for tomorrow night. That’s why I wasn’t crying like the girl behind me. I was only going to be away for one day, wasn’t I?
I was looking at the bald lad when he turned round. I made out I’d been looking out of the window but I reckon he knew I’d been staring at him.
‘I’ve got alopecia.’
He smiled. He didn’t have any eyebrows neither.
‘Oh …’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘How long have you had it?’
‘A few years. I went to bed one night and when I woke up it was lyin’ there on my pillow. My hair.’
I felt sick.
‘It just fell out?’
‘Yeah. It was after my gran got a telegram tellin’ her that my dad had been killed at Dunkirk. I live with my gran. My mum died when I was two.’
I told him that I lived with my mum and that my auntie lived two streets away.
‘Did your dad die in the war?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t think so. I’ve never known him.’
He was all right, Paul, I quite liked him. He told me it wasn’t too bad at Craig House. This was his third year running.
‘It’s not bad. They’ve got table tennis and football and they take you on the beach. And you get a cooked breakfast every mornin’. You get a stick of rock when you leave. It’s all right.’
Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. Maybe I’d like it. Maybe I wouldn’t want to go home.
‘Look – the sea!’
It was one of the big lads at the back who’d started the singing. Everybody leaned over to our side of the coach to get a look. Eric didn’t; he just sat there, staring and scratching his face. For some of them, like the girl behind me, it was the first time they’d seen the sea. She was all right now, laughing and giggling and talking away to the girl next to her. The man from the clinic stood up at the front and told us all to sit down.
‘We’ll be arriving at Craig House in five minutes. Do not leave this coach until I give the word. When you hear your name you will alight the charabanc, retrieve your luggage, which will be on the pavement, and proceed to the home.’
The coach pulled round a corner and there it was. There was a big sign by the entrance:
CRAIG HOUSE
And underneath it said:
Poor Children’s Holiday Home
We all stood in the entrance hall holding our suitcases while our names were called out and we were told which dormitory we were in. There was this smell and it was horrible. Like school dinners and hospitals mixed together. It made me feel sick. There were four dormitories, two for the girls and two for the boys. I was in General Montgomery dormitory and I followed my group. We were going up the stairs when I saw it. A post box. I’d been worried if they’d let me out to find a post box and there was one right here in the entrance hall. I could post my letter here in Craig House. It wasn’t like a normal post box that you see in the street; it was made of cardboard and painted red and the hole where you put the letters was a smiling mouth.
I wasn’t able to write it until late that afternoon.
When we’d been given our bed we were taken to the showers and scrubbed clean by these ladies and had our hair washed with nit shampoo. I tried to tell my lady that my mum had already done it but she didn’t want to know.
‘Best be safe than sorry, young man.’
Then we were given a Craig House uniform (they’d taken our clothes off to be washed). Shirt, short trousers, jumper. They even gave us pyjamas. And on everything was a ribbon that said ‘Poor Children’s Holiday Home’. You couldn’t take it off, it was sewn on.
At last, after our tea, I’d been able to write my letter. I licked the envelope, made sure it was stuck down properly and ran down the main stairs.
‘Walk, lad. Don’t run. Nobody runs at Craig House.’
That was the warden. I walked across the entrance hall to the post box and put my letter into the smiling mouth. All I had to do now was wait for my mum to come and fetch me.
I hated it. I hated it. I couldn’t see why Paul thought it was all right. Or Eric. Not that I saw much of them. They were in General Alanbrooke dormitory. I think I was the youngest in General Montgomery. I was the smallest anyway – they were all bigger than me. My bed was between the two who had started the singing at the back of the coach and at night after the matron had switched off the lights they said things to frighten me and they made these scary noises. I thought they might be nicer to me if I gave them each a Nuttall’s Mintoe. When they saw all my other sweets in my suitcase they made me hand them all over. I hated them. I dreaded going to bed cos I was so scared. I was too scared to go to sleep. I was too scared to get up and go to the lavatory. Then in the morning I’d find I’d wet the bed and I’d get told off in front of everybody and have to stand out on the balcony as a punishment.
And I hated my mum. She’d broken her promise. You can never trust grown-ups.
I licked the envelope and stuck it down like I’d done with all the others. I walked downstairs to the entrance hall and went over to the post box. I was just about to put it in the smiling mouth when I heard Eric.
‘What you doing?’
‘Sendin’ a letter to my mum.’
Eric laughed. Well, it wasn’t a laugh, more of a snort.
‘It’s not a proper post box. They don’t post ’em.’
I looked at him.
‘They say they post ’em but they don’t. They don’t want us pestering ’em at home.’
I still had the letter in my hand.
‘I won’t bother then.’
I tore it up and went back to the dormitory. The second week went quicker and I didn’t wet the bed.
‘You didn’t send one letter, you little monkey.’
My mum wasn’t really cross that I hadn’t written.
‘It shows he had a good time, doesn’t it, Doreen? See, I told you you’d like it.’
She was annoyed at how much weight I’d lost.
Robert Westall
The late Robert Westall wrote this autobiographical piece about his time as a National Serviceman in the 1950s. Between taking a first-class degree in Fine Art at Durham University and becoming a postgraduate student at the Slade School, London University, he was called up to do National Service – a compulsory two-year period of conscription which operated from 1947 until 1963. He became a Lance Corporal in the Royal Corps of Signals.
Robert Westall had always been interested in writing; he wrote his first novel at the age of twelve to while away the long summer school holiday. However, it wasn’t until 1962, when visiting an a
rt exhibition, that he decided to write about it and sent the piece to a local newspaper. He was taken on as the art critic. He found he enjoyed journalism; it sharpened his style, and after a couple of years he started to write articles about Cheshire villages and buildings, complete with drawings.
Bob’s son, Christopher, was born in 1960 and, when he was twelve, became a member of a gang. Bob decided to write down, in the form of a novel, how life had been for him, also aged twelve, on Tyneside in the Second World War. He wrote in an exercise book, in his spare time from a demanding teaching job, and would read each chapter out loud. If Chris’s attention wandered, Bob soon learned to edit his work. The Machine-Gunners was published in 1975, and Robert Westall’s career as a writer had begun.
Lindy McKinnel
HARD SHIP TO EGYPT
As a writer, I shall always be grateful for my tiny war, because it led me into wickedness. If a writer doesn’t understand wickedness from the inside, he’s only half a writer, and all his villains will be cardboard cutouts.
The war happened because the British Empire was still sitting on the Suez Canal, and Colonel Nasser wanted us out. So the Egyptians put in terrorist attacks. A bit like Northern Ireland only simpler, because all white faces were friends and all dark ones enemies, so you knew who to shoot at.
Aboard the troopship going out, we lived in a state of brittle, giggly nervousness that was good soil for wickedness to grow in. We were taught only one new military tactic: a judo-throw to use against an Egyptian coming at you with a knife, from behind. It did not increase our respect for Egyptians as human beings. There were rumours that if the Egyptians managed to knife you, they would cut off your private parts and sew them up in your mouth. Our private parts rapidly assumed more importance than any Egyptian’s life.
It didn’t feel a tiny war when we docked at Port Said. Egyptian commandos had just blown up an enormous military warehouse, and the huge palls of black smoke hanging across the harbour made it feel as desperate as Dunkirk. There wasn’t an Egyptian in sight ashore, but on every street corner were Brits playing with the triggers of their sub-machine guns, looking for an excuse to shoot somebody. It felt like a landscape of OK Corrals.
But the only signs of Egyptian attack in the harbour was a mass of frail rowing boats that nuzzled against our troopship like piglets to a sow, full of melons and oranges and men offering up brand-new Swiss watches at incredible bargain prices. There was an Egyptian policeman every ten yards along the ship’s rail, clad in white with a red fez, and a rifle over his shoulder. Yet suddenly, incredibly, there was one of the bum-boat men among us, offering a genuine Swiss watch to my mate in exchange for his old English one. What happened next was too quick for the human eye. Suddenly, my mate’s watch was on the bum-boat man’s wrist and, equally suddenly, the bum-boat man had been felled to the deck by a blow of the Egyptian policeman’s rifle. He lay there unconscious, blood trickling from his nose. The policeman took the watch off his wrist and gave it back to my mate, then stooped and picked him up and threw him overboard. We watched him sink; we watched him come up in a froth of bubbles and be hauled aboard a bum-boat, still unconscious.
We landed under the swinging muzzles of other Brits’ Sten sub-machine guns. We’d been trained to use the Sten, a cheap weapon that looked as if a blacksmith had made it out of spare gas-pipe – famous for not firing when you wanted it to and suddenly firing when you didn’t want it to. They’d missed out any safety catch, on the grounds of economy, and we felt as much in danger from trigger-happy Brits as from Egyptians, as we straggled up the quay with a heavy kitbag on each shoulder, unable to hear a thing and only able to see directly ahead, like animals being led to the slaughter. The sergeant in charge of us said the blown-up warehouse had contained only toilet rolls. He got that quick, brittle giggle.
It was better travelling down the canal by lorry, clinging to the back of the cab with the hot, dry desert wind streaming through our hair. Across the flat desert, wavering through the heat haze, appeared a long line of enormous brightly painted factories. Then we realized they were moving towards us – ships on the canal that didn’t look half big enough to hold them, only a wretched little ditch, certainly not worth losing your private parts for.
The little mud-built towns were full of open-fronted cafes packed with Egyptian men sitting drinking. Until they saw us. Then every man was on his feet, screaming abuse, shaking fists, trying to spit as far as the lorries. A strange new unreal feeling – being hated not for what you’d done, not even for what you were, but for the uniform you’d been forced to wear.
But we were quite safe. From the lorry in front and the lorry behind, the Sten guns swung idly towards them, not even menacingly, but chidingly, like a teacher’s finger. The Egyptians sat down, very suddenly. Only we, in the middle lorry, felt naked without guns.
Between towns, in a broken landscape of wadis and scrub, the tiny convoy stopped. The old hands in the other lorries jumped down quickly and began relieving themselves against the lorry wheels. We, in the middle truck, a little shocked, were a little slow to follow their example. So we were still peeing when the old hands jumped back into their trucks and roared away, shouting to our driver, ‘Catch up!’
A deep silence descended, as our last trickle dried up; only the endless chirring of Egyptian insects. We scrambled back aboard quickly, glancing nervously round the empty landscape. Our driver pressed the self-starter. It whined out again and again, fruitlessly, into the deepening silence. We waited, gunless, remembering the burning warehouse and the hate of the towns. Then someone turned to the little bespectacled padre who had got down from the truck cab democratically, to pee with us. Pointed to his holstered revolver, the only gun we had.
‘We’ll stick close to you, sir, you’ll see us right.’
The padre blinked and stammered, ‘I don’t know how to use it; I only wear it because they make me. I’ve never fired it in my life!’
‘Better let me hold it, sir,’ said the sergeant grimly.
‘Actually, it’s not loaded; I don’t carry any ammunition. As a man of God it’s against my conscience.’
We cursed his conscience and his God and huddled closer together, fingering our private parts inside our pockets, to reassure ourselves.
It seemed a long time before the other trucks came back for us.
Once we got Stens, we felt better. Carried them everywhere, hung on our shoulders like a woman’s handbag.
We lived in a camp, alone in the middle of a desert. A camp made of coils of barbed wire, full of tents without walls for coolness, that billowed with sharp cracks in the desert wind, like the sails of a whole sun-bleached fleet. No foxholes, no sandbags, no cover. A sandy billiard table. At night there were perimeter lights. But they didn’t shine outwards into the darkness of the desert where anyone with a morsel of sense would’ve placed them. No, they shone directly down on the long path between two coils of barbed wire, where our sentries had to walk. You walked up and down, up and down, gift-wrapped in brilliant light for the first sniper who came crawling across the darkness of the desert. You had nowhere to run to, like a canary in a cage waiting for the cat to come. Two hours at a time, alone. With your eyes blinded, you learned to use your ears.
One night the world was filled with a stealthy rustling I couldn’t place. I spun round and round like a dancing dervish, totally out of control, with my finger tightening and tightening on the trigger. Thank God I saw it in time: a tiny rag of desert-bleached Egyptian newspaper, snagged on the barbed wire. Another night the wire kept twanging softly, sporadically, and in the end I found two locusts mating on it, big as mice and green as the grass I’d left back home in England. Appalled, I listened to my own brittle giggle, glad there was no one to hear me within a hundred yards.
Every day was the same. We worked until noon, then lay naked on our beds while the sun flattened us. The walk to the tap was fifty yards and felt like climbing Mount Everest – passing through a landscape of beds and naked, sti
ll, white bodies, while the nude pin-ups of girls that covered every locker leered and flapped at me in the furnace wind. Too hot to read, too hot to think.
One afternoon, I accidently crushed a huge scarab beetle with my foot, getting on my bed. Within seconds, a tiny file of ants emerged from a hole in the concrete floor. They entered the crushed armour of the beetle, as if it was a crashed car and carried out the wet, white contents, piece by piece, holding them above their heads. Then they dismantled its armour, piece by piece, bearing away legs bigger than themselves. Then, finally, five of them together carried off the crushed carapace. Waste not, want not. The ants rule here. They’d do the same to me, if I was dead.
As the sun got hotter, the tension in the regiment grew worse and worse. Worst of all was meal times. If the meal was one minute late, someone would start drumming on the table with his knife and fork. In a few seconds there’d be three or four hundred of us at it. You couldn’t stop yourself.
People went mad. One bloke cut up his army boots for sandals and then wandered round the huge sand parade ground in the hottest part of the afternoon, challenging the sergeant major to come out and fight him. The officers gathered nervously at the edge and tried to reason with him as he walked round and round in circles, aimless as a rabid dog, a scarecrow figure in the shimmering heat haze. In the end, his mates had to go and catch him like a dog, and hold him down on the hot steel bed of a lorry, taking him to hospital. He whined and shivered like a frightened dog. We lay on top of him and wrapped our arms around him, stroking and talking to him as if he was a dog. It seemed to comfort him; I can feel his body trembling against mine to this day, and the fond animal sadness of my own body.
Anything to get out of the sun-drenched birdcage. Even the SDS run. The SDS was an open thirty-hundred weight truck that carried the mail. The Egyptian terrorists had a taste for them. So the truck carried front and rear gunners, with Stens. The front gunner, privileged, sat beside the driver. The rear gunner got thrown round the steel bed of the truck, trying to cushion his bones with the mail bags and praying his Sten wouldn’t go off by accident.
War Stories Page 14
