At least it was a change of landscape. We saw many things and all steadily fed our contempt for the Egyptians. Their taxis, without headlights or wind-screens, polished down to the bare silvery metal by sandstorms, with ten guys crushed inside, and ten more standing on the bumpers, the bonnet, the boot, bumping low and springless across the desert. The apartment blocks of the little towns, graceful concrete at ground level, but getting poorer and poorer in construction as they went higher, so the top floor was only a wretched agglomeration of sticks, corrugated iron and sacking. The refuse trucks that scavenged our camps, with figures sitting on top already sorting the rubbish while the truck was still in motion, figures so black and greasy that the rags that clad them seemed only black and greasy ridges on their skin.
It was very easy to believe we were the master race. We were really shocked to be offered fruit off a barrow covered with flies when we realized that in the middle of the fruit, equally covered with flies, lay a naked, writhing baby with sores round its eyes and mouth. Equally shocked when little boys of five and six ran alongside us in their blue-striped nightshirts, offering their sister: virgin schoolteacher, very clean. We pushed them off the side of the lorry with our feet and laughed like wolves when they went sprawling in the road.
Wolves with trucks and guns and that brittle giggle that made nothing in the world matter; everything was some kind of joke. Like when we stopped the huge, blue melon lorries by slewing our truck across the road in some narrow place. The filthy figures sitting on top of the melons would begin to wail and plead. We just pointed our Stens at them, cocking the cocking handles with loud expressive clicks. Then, still wailing and pleading, they would start to throw melons down on to the road, from the mountain of melons they were sitting on. When they’d thrown down enough, ten, twenty, we’d pull over and let them go sobbing past. We needed so many melons because some had burst upon hitting the road. But we’d pick up the ones that hadn’t and go on our squishy rejoicing way, Stens in one hand and a half-melon in the other, until our faces and hands and triggers were thick and sticky with dried juice.
Whose melons? Whose melons did we squash deeper into the dust of the road on our return run? What the hell?
Then came the day we nearly massacred a whole village. I was rear gunner. Neither the driver nor I fancied the look of the front gunner, an Ulsterman, foul mouthed to the point of incoherence, with a bad case of Canal Zone twitch. He couldn’t stop playing with his Sten; it made your flesh creep. But he’d been put down for the duty, so off we went.
On the way home we drove into this village. We were always twitchy going through villages, with their narrow winding streets and close-clustered houses. Ambush territory.
At the crossroads of this one, we ran into a massive flock of sheep and goats that blocked every exit. We were marooned in a sea of goats. Two old men in night-shirts seemed to be in charge, helped by several small boys. When they saw us, they panicked, and panicked the flock until there were goats on the bonnet and sheep trying to get in the lorry with us.
It was a classic ambush ploy. Stuck there: a burst of fire, a hand grenade or even men with knives could have taken us without effort. I backed up against the cab, swinging the Sten wildly in all directions. Rooftops, dark windows, alleys, I couldn’t cover them all at once. Wherever I pointed the gun I could still be shot in the back. I began that crazy dervish dance again, round and round, my boot-nails slipping and sliding on the steel bed of the lorry, the mailbags tangling round my feet, threatening to trip me up. Worse, I could hear the front gunner screaming, ‘Imshi! Imshi!’ The only word of Egyptian he knew, probably. ‘Quickly! Quickly! Hurry up! Hurry up!’ Sheep, goats, old men and boys milled round wildly. A bleating sheep leaped over the tailgate and cannoned into me. Black-clad women began running from the houses screaming, trying to wade through the flock to reach their children. The mass of panic that enclosed us soared higher and higher. The front gunner’s voice rose to a scream. ‘IMSHI! IIIIMSHIIII!’
Then I heard him cock his gun. I took a quick glance round. He was swinging it from side to side like the lead hose it was. Then he aimed at a woman and pulled the trigger.
Click! The good old Sten had run true to form. Jammed on a dud cartridge. Click again, and click again. He went on cocking and firing, as the dud bullets fell from the gun, scattering and tinkling in all directions. And all the time he was aiming and firing at real people. And he was screaming and crying, the dribble running down his face.
He went on until everyone had vanished from sight, until the sheep and goats had run away down side alleys, leaving us in total empty silence. Then the driver put the stalled truck into gear and we got out of there. We pulled up at the first empty quiet piece of desert. The front gunner was still raving on and on, about the way the army had sent him into danger with a dud gun. He went on until the driver hit him. It was a long time before the driver stopped hitting him. Then we threw him in the back of the truck and drove home, ignoring him.
It caused quite a stir back in camp, among the ordinary squaddies. Most of them agreed with the Ulsterman: he shouldn’t have been sent out with a defective gun. What frightened me was that I’d seen him do it, and made no attempt to stop him. Watched him cock and fire at women and children, not once but many times.
I never went on SDS again. Soon after, the British government and Colonel Nasser signed a bit of paper, and the Egyptians suddenly loved us and only wanted to sell us brass camels and leather holdalls and their virgin sisters. We even had a trip round the pyramids, and soon after that we came home.
But Egypt made it possible for me to write about many things. Fear and heat; boredom and death; empire and the corruption that empire always brings; official stupidity and the fact that you have to train yourself to despise a people before you can kill them; madness and compassion. How can you begin to write about such things unless you’ve felt them in your bones? But if you have only a little of them, a spark, a true writer can fan a spark into a whole conflagration. In the heat and boredom, I did not go mad. I began to write: a story of what would have happened if the Egyptians had mounted one machine-gun just beyond our wire, out in the darkness of the desert, and massacred the lot of us. It was, believe me, a very vivid chapter of a book that never otherwise got written.
Jamila Gavin
Years ago, I picked up a book in an oriental bookshop called Twenty Jataka Tales, retold by Noor Inayat Khan. The stories were of the lives of the Buddha in his different animal reincarnations – nearly all about sacrifice. The blurb informed me that Noor Inayat Khan had been the war heroine, code-named ‘Madeleine’, who had been a secret agent during the Second World War and who was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the MBE and the Croix de Guerre Gold Star.
Posthumously. That word always had a strange ring to it: ‘after death’. I vaguely wondered how she had died. Twenty years later, when I was asked to write a story about war, her name immediately leaped into my head. As I researched, I wondered why – if she had been such a heroine – was she so unknown, especially when she was a princess too? There were hints that she had been ‘used’ by powers in London to mislead the enemy, and it seems certain that she was betrayed by a French colleague. Now I found out why and how she died. She was shot by the Nazis as a spy.
Some knew her just for her beauty and ephemeral qualities, but others were convinced that it was only because she was so imbued in the Sufi philosophy she had learned from her father that she was able to find the courage and strength to sacrifice herself.
I also wanted to pay tribute to the thousands of Indians and other Commonwealth fighters and agents who gave their lives for the battle against fascism in the Second World War.
THE PRINCESS SPY
Code Name: Madeleine
Others think they know me
But I am mine; what I am, I am.
In the darkness I see no light. But there is a light in my soul which shines out and illumines my prison cell.
What can the tige
r catch in the dark corners of his own lair?
In the darkness I hear no sound, but in my head I hear music, of course! Music.
Only sweet-voiced birds are imprisoned.
In my mouth I would taste only bitterness if I didn’t have the memory of sweet almonds and lover’s kisses.
They keep me chained to the wall like a savage dog, but I am a swallow, soaring, circling high on the air currents. Whatever they do to me, I will not let myself down. I have not betrayed my country, I have not betrayed my masters. I am a princess. The blood of the great Rajah, Tipoo Sultan, runs in my veins. I am of the warrior class. They can interrogate me all they want and torture me too, but I will not betray myself.
Her name was Noor.
Her father was an Indian prince, Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Muslim, a musician and a Sufi mystic. His reputation spread far and wide for his wise counselling – even as far as Moscow. There, the strange, powerful Russian Orthodox mystic monk, Rasputin, asked him to come to the Kremlin palace and bring his Sufi philosophy of peace and love to comfort the Tsar of All Russias, Tsar Nicholas, in his time of trouble. Russia was in turmoil. Nicholas didn’t understand why. How could he, closed away in his palaces, as far removed from his people as the sun is from the earth?
So, along with his young American wife, Nora, Hazrat arrived in Moscow. Their first child, Noor, was born in the Kremlin palace on 2 January 1914, when Europe was bristling with quarrels, intrigues and assassinations, leading up to the outbreak of the First World War that August. Russia, too, was seething with unrest and things were leading inexorably towards revolution.
The stone walls surround me, yet the chains fall from my limbs and I am an infant again, crawling up the long scarlet-carpeted staircase in the Russian palace. There is an outburst of girlish laughter, and a flurry of princesses surround me like swans, gathering me up, pinching my cheeks and passing me round like a parcel: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. ‘Let me hold her! Let me!’ Their voices tinkle like bells.
‘Darling Alexis!’ The princesses draw in their little brother – their precious boy who, one day, will be Tsar of All Russias. ‘Here. Careful now, don’t drop her!’ and I am passed into the arms of a boy who looks at me with sad, solemn eyes.
Their eyes gleam at me through the years of darkness. ‘They came for us,’ they seem to say. ‘Now they have come for you.’
Look! There I am again, bundled up in furs, crammed in among the Russian princesses on the back of a sleigh, pulled by jingling horses, flying across the flat, white, rigid landscape, and plunging into birch forests, their branches drooping with snow. ‘Baba Yaga, the witch, is after us,’ they whispered in my ear, making me shriek with joyful terror.
They are all dead now. The tsar and his queen, my lovely swan princesses, all captured – not by Baba Yaga, but by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who shot them all those years ago; Alexis too – my little tsaravitch.
My father’s face bends over me so tenderly. His beard is like a cloud and his dark eyes are deep pools of mystery. ‘Go to sleep, my little hare,’ he murmurs.
A hare? Am I the hare? Lord Buddha came as a hare, and was willing to allow himself to be eaten to feed a hungry person.
‘Tell me another story,’ she whimpers in the dark.
How she loved stories and made them tell her more, more, and when there were no more to tell, Noor made up her own.
Princess Noor was born to enchant. She was beautiful and talented. A child of the Muses – full of poetry, stories, dance and music. A child of rhythm – but a rhythm of her own – shy, soaring, circling among the ideas and philosophies that her father taught her.
How could her stiff English masters understand that?
When she stood before them – this dark, gleaming young woman who looked more suited to the bohemian cafes of Paris than the tight-lipped, English-public school-discipline of the War Office – they must have asked themselves, ‘What on earth has she to offer?’
‘Like the hare, my little princess, you can offer yourself.’ My father’s voice counselled me in my head.
Oh, why did you have to die, dear father?
He is the only one I weep for. My torturers have made me scream and cry as they have tried in vain to make me talk, but those tears are different; they are because of my physical pain. The pain which makes me truly weep is deeper; it is the pain of betrayal and because I no longer know who is my friend and who my enemy. It is the pain of loss because you are dead and gone. Oh, Papa! We were all thrown into such agony when we heard of your death in India while we were so far away from you in Paris. Mama locked herself away in her room and would not come out. We couldn’t bear to think that never again would we hear your music, never again hear your deep, silken voice and listen to your wise words. Yet now, in this empty silence, you speak to me. You are here after all, to give me courage.
‘Death is just stepping into the light, dear daughter. Remember the hare? As he entered the fire to give his body so that others could eat, the fairy of light came and made the flames as cool as water.’
We are waves whose stillness is non-being.
It was 1940. The Nazis had overrun almost the whole of Europe and were now at the gates of Paris. ‘We have to leave immediately,’ Noor begged her mother, who had shunned the world for twelve years, leaving Noor to be the responsible one. ‘We must get out now.’ With great difficulty, she persuaded her mother to flee. They all joined a long train of refugees and headed for the coast, and managed to get on to the last boat leaving for England. There, Noor and her brother wanted to help the war effort. He joined the Royal Air Force and she the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – the WAAF – and was assigned to its transport section. She was keen and dedicated. But surely she could do more?
Pinstripe-suited men discussed her, sitting on one side of a long, polished table. ‘She asks to do more? We need more people in Paris. We could use her, perhaps.’
They summoned her before them.
Here in the darkness, Paris gleams out in my mind. Beautiful Paris. The boulevards are scattered with sunlight. I walk gaily, composing tunes in my head on my way to school, sniffing the honey-roasted peanuts they sell in the Luxembourg Gardens, as I cut through to St-Germain-des-Prés. I wriggle my fingers, remembering the exercises I have been practising. Paris is my home; it’s where my friends are. It’s where I feel alive and truly myself.
‘If you send me to France, you are sending me home,’ I told them.
‘Let’s see,’ said Pinstripe, looking at the notes and files in front of him. ‘You have been living in Paris with your mother, brother and sisters for the last seventeen years. Music student, writer of stories –’ he glanced down at his notes – ‘for children? You’ve broadcast on Paris radio – so your French is fluent – and you know the city well.’
‘It’s my home,’ she repeated. ‘I want to help.’
‘Yes, well …’ They conferred while she waited outside. ‘Perhaps she would be of use,’ said one.
‘It will be dangerous,’ said another with some compassion. ‘If they catch her, she’ll be shot.’
‘It’s war. Sacrifices have to be made.’
To the men of the War Office she looked so unsuited to this work – too otherworldly, too innocent, too much of a butterfly. Not British. Most were sceptical. After all, they had never sent in a woman radio operative before. What’s more, she was an Indian. India was already in conflict with the British – trying to kick them out of India. Could they be sure that she could be trusted?
‘If she can’t be trusted,’ a cold, dark voice spoke, ‘all the better for playing a game with, my dear.’
The game. What game? Everyone knew there was a game, but so few knew who the players were and what the rules of the game were.
‘Send her into France as one of our operatives. Give her a radio. Ask her to send and receive messages. We’ll send her information – false information. She’s sure to be caught and sure to be interrogated. At first, she won’t speak,
but – I know these sorts of people – she’ll crack. She’ll spill the beans. But they’ll be our beans, and they’ll swallow them whole.’
So she received her instructions. ‘We want you to go to France. Meet up with the Resistance; be a radio operative. You will be given a transmitter and will learn the radio game,’ they told her.
She was registered in her mother’s name – Norah Baker – and her training began. For long weeks, she learned how to operate the radio, how to use the codes and ciphers they would give her. They told her about the Resistance cells all over France, full of people working to free France and the rest of Europe from the Nazis.
She would have to be flown in at night, landing in a field. She would have to connect with other agents and sympathizers, and be part of a group. She must learn how to collect information and radio it back to them, to live a double life. Her cover name was to be Jeanne-Marie Regnier, her code name, ‘Madeleine’.
I am flying, flying! How beautiful. The darkness of my cell is illumined by the moon. I felt close to heaven, then, as we flew; and close to you, Papa, with the stars all around and the sea glistening below. How small I felt too. Infinitesimal. How could I make any difference?
Yes, daughter, you are but a drop of water in an illimitable sea, but each drop is there to make up the consciousness of the whole ocean.
The world looked marvellously tranquil in the cloudy moonshine that June night, when the Lysander took off from England. So peaceful. Impossible to think of the terrors and dangers that awaited her.
Suddenly, from far below, a shower of sparks from a fire sprayed upwards into the air like fireflies. ‘That’s them!’ muttered the pilot, and the little plane circled and dropped lower and lower. It hadn’t seemed real till then. Just one of her stories in which she was a character – a heroine: brave, unafraid, ready to die for the good of the world. Suddenly, she felt terror.
War Stories Page 15
