Round the Bend (3 page)

We got a week at Southsea for our honeymoon; it was a fine September that year so that although there wasn’t much to do we could sit on the front and look at the ships going in and out of Portsmouth harbour, and the Bostons and the Spitfires going
out on strikes. I think Beryl was happy, and if I was thinking of the work more than a man ought to do upon his honeymoon, well, it was wartime and the flying schools were waiting for the Tiger Moths I mended, to train pilots. Beryl understood—at least, I think she did.

Looking back upon it now, it must have been a poor sort of a honeymoon. It was wartime in England, and everything was short. There was complete darkness at night, of course, there on the coast, and the cafés and the dance halls and the picture houses were full of men and girls in uniform; a civilian didn’t get much priority. You couldn’t get down to the beach to bathe except in one little place because of the anti-invasion barbed wire and tank obstacles and land mines, and there weren’t any motor coach tours or steamer trips or concert parties on the beach, or anything like that. This was all normal to us because that’s the way things were in England then and we didn’t grieve over what we couldn’t have, but when I think about the sort of honeymoon I could have given her if it had been in peacetime, I feel a bit sore. It might have made a difference.

It was better for me than for Beryl. I had Egypt ahead of me. I was going out to an important job in a warm, spacious country, into all the glamour of a successful war in North Africa. There would be luxury in Cairo, and sunshine on the desert, and the Pyramids, and the Nile, and travel to our various outstations in Africa and Persia and Iraq. For me, this week in Southsea was the last of the drab misery of war in England. Ahead of Beryl was a long, indefinite vista of it, cold and monotonous in the same job, and lonely with me away. We neither of us thought about it like that—or, if I thought of it, I didn’t talk about it. But that’s the way it was.

We didn’t look ahead. I can’t remember that we ever discussed where we were going to live after the war, or anything like that. It didn’t seem to be much good, with things as they were. The war had been going on for four years; for four years we had been directed where to work and we were getting out of the way of thinking about our future for ourselves. This job in Egypt was to be for two years, and after that I should come
back to wartime England, so we thought, and it would be the same except that everything would be scarcer and more difficult than ever. We never looked ahead to think about the peace, that I remember.

I was flown to Egypt by B.O.A.C. It wasn’t possible for Beryl to come and see me off because the time and place of departure were secret. The best that she could do was to come down with me to Morden Underground station late one afternoon as I carried my suitcase down from the digs. We walked silent together down the suburban streets; on that last walk we didn’t seem to have anything left to say to each other. Maybe she was only realizing then what the separation was going to mean. She hadn’t got a lot of imagination.

By the entrance to the station we stopped and looked at each other. It was raining a bit, and the red buses starting and stopping at the halt just by us made a great clatter with their Diesels. I put down my suitcase and took her hands. “Well, girl,” I said, “this is it.”

She was pretty down in the mouth. “Write to me a lot, Tom,” she said. “I’ll be ever so lost without you.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “I’ll write as soon as ever I get there, but don’t get worried if you don’t hear for a while. If they’re sending letters round the Cape it might take anything up to six weeks.”

“I won’t be able to sleep till I hear.”

I grinned. “Bet you do. Tuck a bolster in beside you and make belief I’m there, and you’ll sleep all right.”

She smiled, though she was very near to tears. “Now stop it.…”

I took her in my arms. It didn’t matter that there were people all around at the bus stop; you saw this every hour of every day, with people going off on draft. “It’s only for two years, girl,” I said softly. “It’ll soon be gone.”

“It sounds like as if it was for ever,” she said miserably.

There was no sense in prolonging the agony; it was only making things more difficult for her, and we’d said all that there was to say. We kissed, and kissed again, and then I said, “I’ll have to go now, girl. Look after yourself.”

She released me. “You look after
yourself
. Cheer-oh, Tom.” She was crying now in earnest.

I squeezed her hand clumsily. “Cheer up, girl. It’s not for so long.” And with that I turned and picked the suitcase up and left her, and went and got my ticket. I looked back over the turnstile and she was there waving good-bye to me with tears running down her face, and I waved back to her, and then I had to turn round and go down to the train.

I went in a Liberator, squashed in with about twenty others in the rear fuselage. We took off at about ten o’clock that night from an aerodrome somewhere in the south; we didn’t know what aerodrome it was, nor where we were going to. We flew on for about eight hours, and then in the dawn we landed. We couldn’t see anything out of the aeroplane, and when we got out on to the tarmac we found that we were in a sandy sort of place with palm trees and white houses. They told us it was Tripoli.

We weren’t allowed outside the aerodrome; they gave us breakfast in a tent while the Liberator was refuelled, and we took off again for Cairo. We landed at Almaza in the middle of the day and it was good and hot; I had English clothes on, and I envied the chaps working on the aircraft in just a pair of shorts and no shirt. I got passed through the various formalities, and then I went and reported to the manager of Airservice Ltd on the aerodrome.

That two years was a fine experience for me. I was in charge of airframe repairs and general maintenance. I lived in a small hotel about a mile from the airport and I had my office at the back of the hangar. We operated a large number of aircraft all over the Near East and North East Africa, and I was responsible for keeping them in the air, all except engine overhauls, which were the business of another chap. If a Rapide ran off the runway and bent its undercarriage at Luxor or at Lydda, the responsibility for getting it into the air again was mine. If it was a simple and straightforward repair I would send one of my ground engineers to it by air or truck, but if it was a difficult or complicated job I would go myself and see the work put in hand the way I wanted it. We had an old Hornet two-seater that I used to go in if the journey was anything less than five hundred
miles, but there was always a difficulty about finding a pilot who could spare the time, and after a while the firm agreed that I should fly myself about in this thing. It wasn’t worth much if I crashed it, and I didn’t want any flying pay or insurance.

On these repair jobs, flying myself or being flown by a pilot, I travelled very widely in the last two years of the war. I went to Beirut and Baghdad and Aleppo and Nicosia, and down south as far as Khartoum and Addis Ababa. I got to know about Syrian and Iraqui and Egyptian aircraft hands, what they could do and what they couldn’t, what days they had to take off for their religion or their festivals, and why. I tried to learn about all that. It’s no good going round and saying that those boys are just a lot of monkeys, that they aren’t reliable and you can’t use them. You can use them all right if you take the trouble to learn about them, and if you do that you’ll find the work is liable to come out a good deal cheaper, because their wages are much less.

I got some experience in negotiating with officials, too. That was a type of job I’d never done before. Whenever parts for a repair had to be taken into Syria or Lebanon or Iraq there were customs duties to be paid or talked out of; in the usual way I’d get to Aleppo or some place like that and find that the repair parts I’d sent up had got stuck in a bonded warehouse, the Government were asking for a hundred and fifty pounds before they would release them, and the ground engineer had got angry and had insulted the Minister for Air. There was nobody to straighten all that out but me, and I got into the way of taking it easy, going to drink a cup of coffee with the Minister, saying what a happy little town it was and how my wife would like it if we came to live there, and sending over a big bouquet of flowers for the Minister’s wife. I’d usually get the parts next day without any trouble at all, and nothing to pay. The most I ever had to do was to fix up a joyride for the Minister’s children when the aircraft was flying again.

I used to write to Beryl regularly once a week wherever I was, telling her as much about what I’d been doing as I thought would pass the censor. She used to write to me, but not so often. It was
once a week at first, but then it got a bit irregular and sometimes I wouldn’t hear anything for three weeks, and then two letters would come together, written within a couple of days of each other. She never seemed to have much to say, but that was natural because life in England was all just the same. Often most of a letter was about some film she’d seen.

There was one of those long gaps in her letters, nearly a month, about October 1944, when I’d been out in Egypt just a year. Air mail was coming through all right. I got a bit angry, because I’d written regularly myself and I didn’t see why she couldn’t find time to write to me, so I sent her a sharp one. Nothing happened for a bit, and then about ten days later I got a letter from her Dad.

It read:

I was at Damascus when this letter came to Cairo, and I didn’t get it till I got back to Egypt a few days later. By that time the letter from Beryl had just come in, so I got them both together. That one read:

I was up to the eyes in work at that time. I read these letters through with my mind half occupied with the problems of getting enough aircraft serviceable to maintain our scheduled services, and
they were just another thing to me. It was like when you’re counting on an aircraft being finished for the morning flight to Khartoum, and an engineer comes up at six o’clock in the evening and tells you he needs a right-hand contact breaker and they’ve only got left-hand ones in the store and they’ve been telephoning all round and there aren’t any right-hand ones in Cairo. Beryl and her boy friend, in my mind, took their turn in the queue with all my other worries, and must wait for attention till I got the decks cleared a bit. At the same time, I was sick and angry when I got these letters, because there’d been a lot of this sort of thing going on in England. Somebody once told me that ten per cent of the wives of men serving overseas had been unfaithful to them. Now I was in with that ten per cent.

In the brief moments that I had to think about my own affairs that day I wondered how in hell she expected me to set about a divorce in a foreign country like Egypt, in the middle of all my work, in wartime. And then I wondered if they were all mad to go believing such a transparent, cock-and-bull story as this Polish soldier had told them, about his father being a count, and huge estates, and all that. It was a crazy, miserable business that they’d written out to plague me with; the only thing to do was to put it out of my mind and get on with the work.

I had to go to Luxor next day, where a young fool of a pilot had run one of our Ansons into the tail of a Dakota of Transport Command. I had to clear up the accumulation of paper work on my desk before going off again in the morning; I worked on late that night. It was after ten o’clock when I had time for my own affairs and I was dead tired, but I had to write to Beryl because I should be away for another two or three days. I got the letters out and read them through, and I was bitterly angry once again that they should plague me so.