On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (15 page)

Thus the Bedu of al-Yemen and the tribesmen of the Radfan slaughtered these Egyptian conscripts. The Egyptian and Yemeni government troops sent out heartbreaking messages which we intercepted. A poignant signal might read, ‘
We are being shot daily by the Bedu
[typically just a father and two sons on fast camels]
and only half our number are left. We have run out of water and bread. Please try to find us, for we do not know where we are . . .’
Even as I was sending the transcript of such an intercepted message I knew that no help would come to those poor lads. They were doomed. Perhaps a whole company of them, numbering a hundred men. Boys who would no longer see their mothers, their sisters, their fathers. Boys who would be mourned as deeply as my family would mourn me if I did not make it home. Boys who were caught in a net of terror not of their own making, forced to go out with a rifle in their hands, and die for a cause they did not understand. I had no love for their government, which was sending assassins to kill my countrymen, but I could not help but pray for these young men in their peril.

Constantly receiving and passing on messages like these touched something in my conscience and laid the foundations for my later embracing of pacifism when I became a Quaker.

123 SU was situated on a hill above the Arab town of Tawahi, adjacent to Steamer Point. The communications centre was on the back of the hill, just below the brow. On the peak stood a square tower with a parapet. It was up in this tower that we did our sentry duties, usually two men, guarding the back end of the military zone and, obviously, our own section. We were given night-vision binoculars and were armed of course, and had a radio to call in to the incident centre should anything happen in the town below. I have to say that it was ten times better than the guard posts I had been doing when in Aden on detachment. We had all-round vision together with a good view of the houses and streets quite a long way below us, and the tower was open to the stars, which are always wonderful to look at while reflecting on the vagaries of life.

To the west of the tower, just under us, was a stark reminder of our mortality. A place called Silent Valley, the graveyard where British men were buried, far from the land of their birth. Even today I don’t know whether we had a policy like the Americans in Vietnam, and shipped the bodies home, or whether they were actually planted in Middle Eastern sand. All I know is there were many white crosses down below.

Life on the balcony was pleasant enough, though the yearning to be home was like a constant pain in my chest. I bought a pipe to smoke and thought myself quite the thing. I learned to snatch flies out of the air with my bare hands, played a lot of cricket, swam a great deal, went to the pictures, read a lot of books, wrote one or two stories. At that point in my life I had one novel on the constant go. Its title was
Beyond the Silver Surf
, a children’s book in the vein of
Alice in Wonderland.
My wonderland, however, was a submarine world where the fish and mermaids were the protagonists. There were lots of rhymes and creatures of the deep blessed with funny names. I spent hours revising this effort, but I never did send the manuscript to a publisher.

One of the other airmen on the balcony had a complete set of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels. I borrowed them and was amazed by the author’s skill. Yes, they were ‘romantic’ novels, but they were in the vein of Jane Austen and easily as enjoyable as
Pride and Prejudice
or
Sense and Sensibility.
I devoured the lot and have since read them twice over again and my enjoyment of Heyer’s prose has not diminished.

One day I was penning a letter home when the building rocked with an explosion. Then came another, and another. Dissidents inside the town of Crater were sending mortars over the lip of the volcano. Something like eight or nine hit the ground around our billet. I saw one man running across the area in a zigzag fashion, hoping the pattern of the mortars was not going to imitate his own. These mortar attacks were infrequent and not very accurate but they made your heart thump like hell. Once I was in the cookhouse when a mortar landed just ten yards outside the main door. A cook was ladling custard. He panicked and swung his arm in an arc, spraying the people at the front of queue with hot viscous yellow stuff. They screamed in pain. This caused more panic and men began running for the doors. It was a while before the scene settled down again and we could enjoy our puddings.

My year in Aden was of course far worse than my year on Gan. There was less to do in the confined area of the camp, there were killings going on, and now I was married and ached to be with my family. My hatred for the place which I had loved as a boy grew daily. All I wanted to do was go home. I despised the British government for sending me there and did not understand what the intentions were. The British Empire was dead. Why were we still pretending we ruled the pink bits on our old maps? The days of colonies were over and hanging on to places like Aden for the extra year or two made no sense whatsoever. Men were dying almost daily for nothing more than Whitehall policy. I would have been livid if I had been killed just because some politician thought it ‘in the interests of Great Britain’ to leave a few sheikhs in charge of the barren rocks of Aden. Someone had made a mock recruitment poster and pinned it up on the wall of the billet. It read:

JOIN THE ARMY
SEE THE WORLD
MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE
AND KILL THEM

This was not an attempt at humour. Like being angry when I was dead, it was meant to be ironic. Yes, we had joined the armed forces. Yes, we were ready to defend our country against attack by an enemy. Such was our job, though men do not join armies because they want to kill people, but often because they are in need of work. Aden was not our country. These people who we were killing, who were killing us, were defending
their
country and we were the aggressors, the enemy who had taken the land by force. Admittedly when we had first arrived in Aden it was a different time, different Britons with different mindsets, nearly two centuries previously. Right of conquest was then still an accepted rule throughout the world. This was not the nineteenth century though. We were now living in a world where colonisation was regarded as unacceptable. Yet, here we were, killing, being killed, in a land that did not want us. Why?

With the hot season came sandstorms which covered our beds on the balcony with grit. It mattered little, since most of our time was spent at work or on sentry duty. One day we were told the hill on which our comcen stood was being attacked. Dissidents were apparently attempting to storm up the slope, but though we were lined up along the ridge with our weapons I didn’t see any of the enemy. As an NCO I had been given a Sten to use that day, a weapon that was notorious for jamming, but thankfully I didn’t have to use it. The army soon arrived and relieved us. Some swaddy with a Browning heavy machine gun slung over his shoulder nudged me out of the way with, ‘Leave this to the professionals, Corporal.’ I was happy to do so. This infantryman looked like Rambo, with his belt of bullets and huge HMG.

Once or twice in the comcen I met with SAS men who went ‘up-country’, where the National Liberation Front was gaining ground and forming an army of some 25,000 men. There was talk that the colony might be invaded by this army, but since I was not privy to the secrets of generals I don’t know whether this was true or not. The SAS and their operations were known as the ‘keeni-meeni’, a Swahili phrase describing the slithering of a snake. These keeni-meeni included Fijians recruited by the British Army because their skin colouring was similar to that of the Aden local population and they could move among the Adenis more easily than could a European. One night one of these huge keeni-meeni Polynesians frightened the pants off me as he came out of the dark near our observation tower, silent as a ghost. With bandoliers of bullets criss-crossing his chest and carrying a machine gun he looked just like some South American revolutionary.

Automatically I croaked, ‘Halt! Waqqaf!’

‘Hey, man, I’m on your side,’ he said, and a broad grin flashed across his face. ‘I’m your brother.’

He was indeed.

After that I have always had a soft spot for Fijians and when Annette and I visited the islands, much later in life, I found them to be among the most loyal of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects. In a bus queue on Fiji we were asked by the person in front, ‘When did you last see the Queen?’ The man was shocked when he heard we had not been to see our royal monarch, even though we lived ‘just forty miles away from Buckingham Palace’. ‘You should be ashamed,’ said the man, ‘I have seen the queen twice and I live thousands of miles away from her.’ Indeed, when we were there last, in the late 1990s, the Queen’s profile was still on their stamps and her portrait on their money, despite the fact that Fiji had not only gained independence a long time ago but actually left the Commonwealth too.

On 5 June 1967 there was another distraction for the Egyptian troops in the Yemen: their country had begun a war with Israel. This was the six-day Arab-Israeli war. The local Arabs in Aden were cock-a-hoop on the first day of the war, yelling at us that Israel was about to be wiped from the map. ‘The Yahudi will all be killed!’ they shouted, as we walked around the town, or drove through dangerous areas in Land Rovers, ‘Then we will do the same to you!’ Quite the reverse happened of course. Within two days the Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi air forces had been shot out of the sky by the Israeli Air Force. Within two more days the combined Arab land force assault had been halted, encircled and smashed. Two more days, and it was all over. The Israelis had inflicted disastrous losses on the armies of four countries and established themselves as the major military power in the region, with far-reaching consequences that continue today.

Our Adeni Arabs were devastated, as they would be again when Saddam Hussein was defeated both times in the years to come. The military optimism of the Arab world has always been too high for its own good. Much later, when we lived in Hong Kong, the first Iraq war was about to take place. The Reverend Norman Jones, a close friend and the vicar of Christchurch Kowloon Tong, held a peace vigil the night before the ‘Mother of All Battles’. He got a call from local Muslims threatening him if he did not call off his vigil. They said, ‘We want this war to take place. We want to see the Americans defeated.’

Every time there is a conflict between the Arab world and the West, the former believe their troops are going to be gloriously victorious. I think they still live in the time of Saladin, who was indeed a great warrior and defeated Christian armies with ease, but those times have long gone.

Towards the end of my time in Aden, 1 Parachute Regiment and 42 Commando arrived to oversee the withdrawal of thousands of troops. The aircraft carrier HMS
Eagle
stood out off Steamer Point, in the bay, ready to use its Sea Vixen aircraft in the final days.

However, earlier in the year the local Aden Armed Police had mutinied and shot down eight unarmed British soldiers from a transport unit. So far as I can recall, there were no reprisals and the assassins went unpunished. The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers also lost men shot in separate incidents and armed dissidents finally took complete control of Crater. We in Steamer Point were horrified to learn that an enclosed town of 80,000 inhabitants in the middle of Aden was now in insurgent hands. Gunmen and bombers could slip out of Crater at night and assassinate men in the streets, before running back to safety. Lorries with mortar tubes on the back could drive here, there and everywhere, firing mortars into our midst. It was a situation that the authorities, including General Tower and the High Commission, seemed willing to accept. Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell had recently arrived in Aden with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and he was having none of it,

‘Mad’ Mitch was a soldier through and through. He was incensed that the politicians and generals were happy to accept the deaths of the fusiliers without retaliation. He requested permission to send in a small reconnaissance patrol to ‘assess the situation in Crater’ and this was granted. Mitchell used this authority to mount a major attack on the enclosed town. Driving his Land Rover at the head of his regiment, with fifteen bagpipers playing ‘Scotland the Brave’, Mad Mitch led the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders through the only narrow pass into Crater and swiftly reoccupied the whole town. It was said to be the ‘last battle of the British Empire’. Only one man was killed, a dissident. Colonel Mitchell was then chastised by General Tower, by politicians and by the High Commission. He was never awarded any medals for his time in Aden, though colonels before him who had seen far less action were given OBEs. The media loved him, his men loved him, and we loved him, but he was afterwards forced to resign from the army.

Politicians and diplomats send forces out to fight their stupid battles and then expect them to stand still and be shot. Where oh where do they get their brains from? And where is their loyalty to those they use? None of us
wanted
to be in Aden while the politicians were safe on their fat bottoms in Parliament, but they expected their soldiers to police a totally hostile territory without defending themselves. They disgusted me then and they disgust me still.

After we left Aden the National Liberation Front took over,
not
the sheikhs that the government had wanted to see in power. If Mad Mitch made a mistake by going into Crater and ensuring the safety of the colony while we made ready to leave, then the British Government made a massive mistake in the first place, keeping forces behind in the colony for two years, allowing their citizens and soldiers to be assassinated because of idiotic undemocratic political aims which in the end came to nothing. What a waste of men’s lives, both Arab and European. What a stupid, insane waste.

I had the seeds of the pacifist planted in my soul at that point, though admittedly I did cheer with others when Colonel Mitchell and his regiment marched past our lines. The reoccupation of Crater was almost bloodless. A single dissident was shot when he fired on the Argylls. What a fuss the generals and politicians made of a battle that was not a battle, but merely a show of force. Over a hundred British servicemen and civilians had needlessly been killed up to that point. Two of my colleagues were among those who never came home.