The Sixteen (8 page)

As I looked over to where he stood at the Coke stand my mam’s words came to me: ‘Shy bairns get nowt, John. If you don’t push yourself you won’t get anywhere.’

I watched the guy now running back towards me, a Coke bottle in each hand, and in that brief moment decided to take a chance and go along with whatever he said when he returned. What had I to lose?

‘Y-yeah, OK, I’ll g-give it a g-go!’ I told him before he had time to sit down or speak.

He smiled slowly and handed me one of the cold bottles.

‘Great stuff! Right, we’ll be in touch soon. Catch you later!’ And with that ran off in the same direction he’d come from.

I was surprised at him leaving so quickly as I’d expected him to tell me more and maybe arrange the date and time for another meeting. I stood up and looked around to see if I could see him anywhere but he’d completely disappeared. Replacing my sunglasses, I lay back on the blanket and thought about our odd conversation. I got the impression that he could have been an officer as he was very well spoken and sounded well educated and confident. But I knew absolutely nothing about him and really he’d told me little more than the guy in the gym back at Wrexham had.

For security reasons, we’d been warned to be extremely cautious in our dealings with strangers and what we discussed with them. There was a lot of terrorist activity on the island and spies and infiltrators were all around, looking for information which could be useful to them. But, for some strange reason that I couldn’t explain, I instinctively felt that I could trust this guy. Besides, I thought, he must have something to do with the army otherwise how was he going to be able to change things for me. It was weird though, the way in which he’d known all about the guy who’d spoken to me back at Wrexham and the supposed contact at Stratford-on-Avon.

Just then, Bill and Dave ran up the beach and flopped down beside me on the blanket breaking my chain of thought.

‘Eeh t’water’s great, Geordie, you want t’get in there!’ Bill said.

‘’Oo was that geezer you were talking to?’ Dave asked casually as he dried himself down.

‘Oh, him. He’s j-just one of the lads from the c-c-camp, Dave,’ I replied, which apparently satisfied their curiosity, as they didn’t pursue the matter further and the whole thing was so strange that I pushed it to the back of my mind.

It was very hot now and my turn to go for a swim, and the shimmering sea looked so cool and inviting. So leaving them in
charge of the rifle, I headed over the scorching sand down to the water.

Everyone was having a good time, noisily playing games, splashing one another and generally larking about in the warm water – so different from the North Sea, which was freezing even at the height of summer. I’d borrowed a pair of flippers and, putting them on, swam out to a wooden pontoon anchored a little way off the beach from where people were diving into the crystal-clear water.

There were a number of porpoises (or dolphins – I never could tell the difference) swimming around the pontoon. They really seemed to enjoy being near to the people swimming and bumped into us with their noses. Now and then, someone would shout ‘Shark!’ for a joke and everyone in the water would panic and frantically look around for the telltale dorsal fins. For all I knew, the porpoises could well have been sharks and, at first, they scared the life out of me!

The three of us stayed on the beach until the end of the day when everyone gradually began to pack up their belongings and head back to the camp. As the light quickly began to fade, we reluctantly prepared to leave too – our day of freedom seemed to have been so short. Still stripped to the waist, we headed back towards the camp through the cool, dark tunnel, our voices echoing as we laughed and joked. It was still very warm and we walked along to the sound of crickets chirping in the velvety night air. In the distance, the lights at the camp gates shone brightly while the rest of the camp remained in virtual darkness, lit only by a few scattered light bulbs.

As we walked back up the dusty track, Dave and Bill chatted to one another, discussing whether to go to the NAAFI when they got back and I began to think again of my conversation with the
man on the beach. The total strangeness of it all really hit me. It was weird to think that someone could be ‘watching me’ all of the time, as the guy had implied. I went over and over what he’d said in my mind, as Bill and Dave chatted on by my side. By the time we reached our tent, I realised just how chuffed I was to have been singled out this way; to be considered a bit special by someone. Although unsure of what it was all about, I was also quite excited at the thought of having the opportunity to do something ‘different’.

It was a warm sticky night and I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The conversation on the beach kept on going through my mind. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me: the plane I’d been travelling in from England had been forced to make an emergency landing in Malta and as a result our original destination of Beirut had been changed, which was how we’d ended up in Cyprus. Or so we believed, you could never tell with the army.

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘how did he know that I would be here? Would he have made contact with me in Beirut if I’d ended up there? Had that been the original plan? Who the hell are these people and how did they get all this information? And just why have they chosen me?’

I spent a restless night worrying about just who I might be dealing with and what I was possibly getting myself into. My brain buzzed with a hundred-and-one questions and I couldn’t sleep.

During the early hours there was a loud commotion from a nearby tent, a lot of screaming and yelling. The racket jolted me out of a fitful doze and I rolled out of bed to see what was going on. But, in my haste, I’d completely forgotten about the mosquito net over my bunk and immediately became entangled in it as I stood up. Struggling to break free of the damn thing, I tripped over the duckboards on the ground, overbalanced and landed heavily
in a heap on top of Bill, who was sound asleep in one of the other bunks. He instantly woke up in a major panic.

‘Wh-what is it? What’s going on, Geordie, what’s happening, what’s that noise outside, are we being attacked or what?’

‘G-give us time, Bill, m-man, I’m t-trying to g-get out of this flaming n-net!’

Eventually I managed to rip a hole in the material, and peered out through the tent flaps. Two guards were dragging a guy from a nearby tent and judging by the racket he was making, he was in agony. As they passed beneath the light in the middle of the Parade Square I saw what looked like a huge balloon on his back. In fact, the majority of his back was covered in one enormous blister, which made him look like the hunchback, Quasimodo.

‘What the hell’s going on, Geordie?’ Bill asked again.

‘Christ, Bill, you w-wanna s-see the size of the b-blister on this g-guy’s b–back!’ I replied.

‘Serve t’noisy bugger right,’ Bill grumbled. ‘We were warned about getting burnt. He’s in trouble now; he’ll be in for a court martial. At least we might be able to get some bloody kip.’ And, satisfied that we weren’t about to be attacked by terrorists, he lay back down and went back to sleep.

I climbed back into my bunk and eventually dozed off, but it felt as though I’d only been sleeping for about five minutes before that ‘stupid little sergeant’ was bashing the side of the tent and screaming his bloody head off at us to get up!

On parade that Monday morning, the officer on parade told me to report to Lieutenant Stevens. As soon as we were dismissed, I went over to his tent, knocked on the pole and waited.

‘Who is it?’

‘Urwin, S-sir.’

‘Ah, yes. Come in.’

I pushed through the tent flaps and went inside. Lieutenant Stevens was sitting at his desk looking at some papers. He was a young, boyish looking bloke of about twenty-seven or so, slightly built and around five foot eleven inches tall. I usually got on well with him but he seemed to be annoyed with me, for some reason that I couldn’t think of. His manner was curt and he eyed me suspiciously.

‘What have you been up to, Urwin? How did you manage to get yourself detailed over to 518 Officers’ Mess?’ he demanded.

I was as surprised as he was.

‘The Officers’ M-mess, S-sir? I h-haven’t a clue, S-sir.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re going so you’d better report to 518 Company straight away, you’ll get further instructions over there,’ he said, dismissing me abruptly.

I had no experience in this area at all, besides it was generally considered to be a bit of a ‘cushy number’, kept for those who deserved some type of merit, which certainly explained Lieutenant Stevens’s raised eyebrows at my selection. But I wasn’t complaining: I’d get better rations and wouldn’t have to parade or do any guard duties!

My first thought on being told to report to Lieutenant Stevens, was that it might be something to do with the guy on the beach, but now I was just confused and didn’t know what the hell was going on.

At 518 Company Officers’ Mess, I was greeted with a mixture of deep suspicion, disbelief and a great deal of resentment by both the kitchen staff and mess orderlies, who simply couldn’t understand how a stuttering Geordie could possibly have been given the position of Head Waiter! However, they had their orders and went through the motions, showing me how to lay tables and serve food. I was just as baffled as they were and, although it was certainly an improvement on digging latrines, I didn’t know why I had been sent there any more than they did.

In fact I wanted to be a ‘real soldier’ and thought that if this had anything to do with the guy on the beach then I’d been well and truly conned! This was neither funny nor exciting! I just couldn’t believe that this could be what he’d meant; besides, why would ‘they’ – whoever ‘they’ were – go to all that bother, all of that secrecy, merely to stick me in the Officers’ Mess? It just didn’t make any sense.

I wondered if perhaps it was because one of these officers was to be my next contact. But how would I know and why hadn’t the guy on the beach simply explained more to me? I just wished that he’d given me more information but, for now, I’d simply have to wait and see and hope that it wouldn’t be too long before everything became clear.

The Officers’ Mess was a large wooden construction, consisting of four pre-fabricated units, which together formed a square. One large rectangle formed the dining hall, with windows on two adjacent sides and doorways on the other two. A long, highly polished table stood in the centre surrounded by chairs and along the longer, windowless wall, were draped flags and regimental regalia. On this same wall was a doorway through into a smaller, squarer room that was fitted out with a bar, although for some reason there was no actual door attached to this opening. The bar led through to another room, which held a full-size snooker table.

And the second doorway, on the shorter window-less wall, led directly into the kitchen area via a set of swing doors. The kitchen formed one short wall of the dining hall and was the length of the bar area beyond.

I was kitted out in the regulation white jacket, red waistcoat, white shirt and black tie, and black trousers with a red stripe down the outside of each leg. To my utter horror, I was told that I’d been given the task of reading the menu out to the officers, and then to wait in order to take their individual orders.

The menu consisted of soup and a main course followed by a pudding and as I looked at it the nightmare grew, partly due to my stammer and self-consciousness, but also due in part to the fact that I didn’t even know what half the stuff on the menu was, or how the words should be pronounced!

Soon the officers came through from the bar area in dribs and drabs, then sat around the table chatting to one another. Suddenly, one old boy with an enormous moustache, pushed the papers he’d been reading into his breast pocket, looked up at me and then glanced around the table.

‘Well?’ he bellowed. ‘Are you going to get on with it?’

‘Y-yes, S-sir. R-right a–away, S–sir,’ I stammered.

‘What! What’s this?’ he roared in his loud, plummy voice. He glanced around at the others, then stood up and turned his chair to fully face where I was standing at the head of the table before sitting down again. Then he glared at me and leaned forwards with his knees wide apart and one hand resting on each of them.

It was totally intimidating, and my first attempt to read out the menu was a complete disaster. I simply couldn’t get past the word ‘soup’! I was supposed to be saying, ‘For soup there is a choice of…’ but all I managed was ‘F-f-f-for s-s-s-s-s-s-s…’ before I stopped dead, flushed and very embarrassed.

I tried again, but with no more success than my first attempt, which several of the officers found very amusing. However, the old boy was very definitely not amused at all.

‘What the hell is going on, here?’ he loudly demanded to know, his face turning slightly red.

To my surprise, another officer leaned over the table and beckoned to him. The old guy bent forward and listened intently as the younger officer whispered something to him.

‘What? What’s that you say? Well, why wasn’t I told this before?’
he said as he listened. Then he turned back in his seat to face me, leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and tweaked the end of his large bushy moustache. He continued to look at me very, very hard for a few long moments, weighing me up.

‘Look, if you can’t say it, why don’t you try to sing the bloody thing?’ he said loudly.

I thought it had to be the stupidest thing I’d ever heard but he was deadly serious, so with a little hesitation and feeling a complete idiot, I did it – I sort of read the menu in a sing-song way, which to my amazement worked with almost everything but asparagus. I don’t know why but for some reason I just couldn’t get my tongue around that one flaming word!

From then on, I gradually lost my stammer day by day.

Most of the officers were pleasant and reasonably friendly towards me, especially the old guy. He seemed very pleased to see that his remedy for stuttering was working and he always made a point of speaking to me. Unfortunately, my popularity with the officers did little to improve my relationship with the other orderlies; if anything it seemed to make them even more resentful.