On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (16 page)

In the 123 SU observation tower one night, just before I left, I was standing guard with a friend when we saw a stream of fireflies coming towards us. The ‘fireflies’ began smacking into the base of the tower and travelling up its length. It took but a second to realise we were being fired on and that these insects were tracer shells from a machine gun. I fell flat on my face. My companion had to lie on top of me, since with all our equipment there was no other space. Unfortunately his bottom stuck above the parapet of the tower, only twelve inches high.

‘I’m going to get shot in the arse!’ he screamed. ‘I’m going to get my arse shot off!’

The lad didn’t get his cheeks drilled, but he was pretty flustered by the time the shooting stopped. Later, when I was again posted to the MOD, he was there on my watch. He and his wife met with me and Annette several times and the incident was retold and retold.

‘It was your husband’s fault,’ he said to Annette. ‘Down in a flash he was, leaving my buttocks to be blown away.’

Annette, remembering my shameful action in the street of bulls in Germany, replied, ‘Garry’s always had a strong sense of survival.’

123 SU left Aden at the end of October, 1967.

We were one of the last units to leave the land that was to become South Yemen. Some wags had hauled a broken-down car on to the top of Shamsan, the peak of the volcano that was Crater, and left it balanced on a pinnacle. We were not sent home, as we expected to be, but on to Bahrain, to finish our tours of duty. While we were in Bahrain it was Ramadan and the local cannon was fired daily to signal that sunset had arrived. When that gun went off every day most of the men of 123 SU, late of the Aden Emergency, dropped to the floor instinctively. Then we got to our feet a minute or two later, sheepishly remembering that we were no longer in a place where they were trying to kill us, but in another place where they might want to kill us one day but hadn’t started yet.

While in Bahrain, two other lads and I rode stallions bareback in the sheikh’s desert races. My months at the Pear Tree Riding School outside Uxbridge were put to a severe test. None of us came anywhere near winning our race. I was quite happy to finish still clinging to the mane of a magnificent snorting beast that must have been thoroughly contemptuous of my efforts to bring him glory.

14. Ministry of Defence (again!)

Imagine my unbounded joy on my arrival back in England to learn that I had once again been posted to the MOD London, that hated place I had escaped from just a few years previously. This time I was prepared to wait it out, knowing I would be posted within six months or so. I had put down Cyprus as my first choice of overseas posting, with Singapore second and Hong Kong third. They ignored all three and told me my next posting would be the island of Malta. Ah, what the hell, Malta was as good as anywhere else and I’d never been there.

Annette was staying with her parents. I walked up the garden path in Church Road, Shoeburyness, to be greeted by two small children, one with a smile on his face. Richard was now five years of age and I was thrilled to see he remembered me after a whole year’s absence. Not so my little daughter, a pugnacious curly-headed blonde who stared at me with frank hostility and said, ‘I’m goin’ to tell my dad of you!’

‘I am your dad,’ I said gently.

She stared at me for a long while, thoughts going round in her three-year-old head, before giggling and running to fetch her mum.

Annette came out of the house looking as lovely as ever.

We were quite shy with one another at first, having been apart for so long. There had been no phone calls between Annette and me. Telephoning had been out of the question, unless an emergency occurred. Thankfully no such crisis had arisen during my absence. Such has been the progress in communication media to date that I have to say hand-written letters were in those days our only form of exchange. So we went for a walk, held hands like young sweethearts, and talked about those thousands of little things that sweethearts talk about.

Once we had set up home again, this time in Shenfield, with easy access to London and work, things got a little difficult. Probably Annette expected life to be one way and I another. It was nothing terrible. There were no rows or heated arguments, but there was a sense of disappointment in the air. I think I had been dreaming for a year of how things would be once I got home and Annette had been doing the same, but our separate dreams did not dovetail for some reason. Once we learned we were going to Malta, everything changed for the better. We both walked about with sparkling eyes, me knowing I would not have to catch a dirty train to work every day and Annette knowing she would not have to be just a housewife, which she found very dull.

Richard attended a local school for a few months in Shenfield. Chantelle went to nursery.

After the lease on the flat had expired, while I was still in Aden, Annette had been given married quarters at RAF Debden, an RAF police dog training unit in the north of Essex, near Saffron Walden. There she had been robbed by a woman she trusted, her next-door neighbour, who was subsequently charged by the police. There was also an accident in the van, when a car driver ran into her while she was doing a three-point turn, but thankfully no one was hurt. Richard had not been happy at school there and was pleased to get away from it. We went in the van and collected some stuff and then that chapter was closed.

At least while we were at Shenfield we were fairly near our parents and saw quite a lot of them, but our excitement with our new overseas posting was such we could not wait to get there.

15. RAF Luqa

We arrived in Malta in the autumn of 1968. The Americans were still having a hell of time of it in Vietnam, while a huge peace movement was sweeping the USA, but I was in a tranquil backwater of the Mediterranean and now far from the bullets and bombs.

At first we again did not have enough points for a married quarter and took a flat in Sliema, near to the harbour. Valetta city was just a bus ride away and though Malta is a small island there were plenty of places for us to visit. The flat was on the third floor of a four-storey building and the landlord was not a very friendly man. One day Annette shook the crumbs from the tablecloth from the balcony at the back. Unfortunately there was a side plate still in the cloth, which went skimming out on the wind like a discus, hurtling out then down towards the landlord who was tending his tomato plants. It narrowly avoided decapitating him and smashed into the wall of a neighbour’s house. The landlord indignantly jerked up to see who was throwing missiles at him. By that time Annette had ducked behind the curtain, so he never ever did find out who launched a deadly plate at his head while he wasn’t looking.

We loved the evening promenade along Sliema harbour, where the Maltese, young and old, would dress up in their best clothes and simply stroll along the water’s edge greeting neighbours. We too joined these light-hearted people in their evening walk.

There was much we loved about Malta. The people were friendly and had some very British ways. (After all, Malta was the ‘George Cross’ island, the medal awarded to it for the stoical bravery of its people during the Second World War.) The buses were gaily painted in gaudy colours, with Catholic altars just inside the entrance doorway so that Mary could assist the driver. Many churches had two towers, each with a separate clock, one showing the right and Christian time, the other showing the wrong time in order to confuse the Devil. English money was used. The people loved their fishing in the harbour and we would walk by a long line of rods each day. The beaches were golden sand and the water was only slightly murky. Fireworks were let off at regular intervals – any excuse was used for a display – and they were mostly bangers that were more like sticks of dynamite than squibs. The whole island used to judder during a festival. Maltese butcher’s shops displayed the words ENGLISH BUTCHERY, which looked like a political statement.

As with Singapore and other RAF camps abroad, local men were recruited and worked alongside us in the comcen. I made a good friend in a Maltese guy called Fred Azzopardi, who tried to teach me the Maltese language. Maltese is a mixture of Arabic, Italian, English and local words. Fred would amuse me when I heard him talking to one of his friends on the phone, and English phrases kept coming out. ‘Yabba-yabba-yabba-yabba safe as houses, mate,’ was a typical sentence that he might use, the yabba being Arabic-Italian of course. I could recognise some of the Arabic words from my years in Aden, but I never got much beyond yelling, ‘Fred,
isma ha
!’ Which meant, ‘Fred, come over here!’

~

We had been on camping holidays with Dave Thompson and his family in England on several occasions. Dave was another ex-Boy Entrant and we had been stationed together afterwards. He and his wife and kids were posted to Malta too. We all went off to Gozo, a smaller island off Malta where Calypso had her cave in Homer’s
Odyssey
. We camped on the beach below Calypso’s cave for several days, washing in the sea and getting thoroughly tanned and salty, then when the time came to leave, tried to get into a hotel for a meal. They turned us away at the door. We looked and smelled like tramps. The kids were incensed as we had promised them all ice creams, but there was nowhere else on Gozo to get such delicacies, so home we trudged, via the ferry.

One of my co-workers in the comcen was a young man who had converted to the Mormon faith. Neil was an Englishman with a nice family, who had been persuaded into the belief of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. We became firm friends. He did not preach to me and I wouldn’t have listened anyway, but we both shared a love of the outdoors. Once we climbed a cliff on the north side of the island and slept overnight in a cave full of spiders and bats in order to see the sunrise. We would take our families and camp on the beach using a bed sheet and broomsticks to make a tent for the children. Another outing was not so clever. We decided to canoe right around the island of Malta. I’m not sure of the distance, but we thought we could do it in a day.

We set off without life jackets in a flimsy double-canoe with a canvas-covered frame, thinking we would cling to the shore all the way round the island and so did not meet with any serious problems. We were both very good swimmers and could do two or three miles without too much trouble in warm water. However . . . there’s always that however . . . we came to a part of the coast with a deep wide bay and decided to cross it, rather than hug the shore.

When we got halfway across this enormous bay, the wind and sea suddenly grew stronger and wilder and we found ourselves about two miles out and in some danger of overturning the canoe. It was all we could do to keep it from capsizing in the choppy waves and not for the first time in my life I had those horrible ugly worms of fear in my stomach. If we
did
capsize we were in deep, deep trouble, because around the edge of the bay were steep, high cliffs, against which a turbulent sea was beating. There was no beach to swim to, nor any place to crawl up out of the surf. Just tall, smooth, forbidding limestone.

‘We’re in trouble,’ said Neil, his voice wavering.

‘I know,’ I replied, feeling the tendrils of fear quickly working their way through my gut. ‘Do a bit of praying, chum.’

And he did, bless his cottons.

Had we capsized we would most definitely have drowned. Throughout my life the sea has always been trying to get me – Stambridge, Felixstowe, Aden – and it was coming for me again. We said very little to each other, Neil and I, as we fought to keep the canoe upright. His face was as white as the belly of a fish and I had no doubt my own had a similar hue. We paddled and we paddled, water washing over the deck of the canoe and into the cockpits, occasionally getting that electric jolt of fear when the canoe nearly went over. After about half an hour we reached the other side of the bay. We made straight for the beach that began there and landed safely, then lay on our backs, the sweat pouring down our faces. I was shaking badly, as the relief flooded through me.

Neil said, ‘We’re not going on, are we?’

‘Not a bloody chance,’ I said. ‘I’d rather carry this canoe across the Sahara than go back into that sea.’

~

Annette had her own problems in Malta. Because it was a deeply Catholic island birth control was against the law. Visitors obviously had to obey the laws of the land but the British government had negotiated an arrangement with the Maltese government. Servicemen would be permitted to have contraband condoms in their homes, but they had to be issued at the Military Hospital. Since the condoms were issued only on Thursday morning, once a month, the men would be at work. It was left to the wives to collect them. Thus every condom day there would be a long line of servicemen’s wives stretching around the hospital grounds, waiting for their turn to collect the forbidden goods. It was, Annette said, humiliating.

At that time and maybe still, servicemen abroad were permitted to buy cars without purchase tax, so long as they kept them for a year before taking them back to the UK. I purchased a new Hillman Imp, a little blue beauty. We loved it, as one does a new car. I still had jazz at the top of my music listening, but apart from Bob Dylan, other singers of his ilk were coming along. Melanie Safka was a revelation to me. And Simon and Garfunkel. I was reading books by the dozen and writing poetry which was beginning to have a personal voice. We visited every nook and cranny of Malta, including the Neolithic cave complex, Marsaxlokk rocky headland, St Paul’s Bay, Valetta, and a dozen other sites and villages of interest. We finally got married quarters and moved to Luqa camp, where the first thing that happened was three of our fighter jets crashed on landing, two of them together. Tragic.

During the first three years of our marriage in Germany Annette had asked me what educational qualifications I had.

‘None,’ I replied, cheerfully. ‘Zilch.’

‘Then you have to get some,’ said my nineteen-year-old partner, who was wiser than a hundred-year-old sage. ‘Sign up at the education section and any they don’t do, we can do by correspondence courses.’

I began studying for seven GCE O-Levels. Since I had left school at fourteen without ever taking an exam, this was new ground. I had no idea if I had it in me to pass a GCE of any kind. But actually I found it easy, I enjoyed studying, especially English literature and ancient history, and that second summer in Germany I had passed six of them very well, but failed the mathematics. I retook mathematics and failed again. ‘You need to get a science then,’ said my already-qualified wife. ‘If you can’t get maths, get a science.’ I took human biology and passed with flying colours. It’s those damn figures I don’t get.

In Malta I moved on to A-Levels, but before I finished them I was called in to see the CO and he told me I had been promoted to sergeant and posted to Cyprus in charge of a signals unit.

Cyprus! Wonderful. We had only spent ten months in Malta, so we had two years and two months in Cyprus, a much larger island, and a posting which all servicemen loved. In Cyprus there were mountains where you could ski in winter and beautiful seas to swim in during the summer. There were shish kebabs and mezes, Greek dancing, Turkish festivals, long walks through orange groves. The navy shipped my Hillman Imp there to await my arrival. And I was going as a senior NCO. Life in the RAF, in any armed service, is a hundred times better as a senior NCO. Officers treat you with the utmost respect. You have your own mess, with squadron dinners, balls, dances, and a bar with flunkies to serve you drinks. You did not have to mix with drunken airmen or sleep in billets with eighty other souls. If you went unaccompanied you got a room to yourself, for a mess was like a quiet hotel, with kidneys for breakfast and newspapers in the coffee room. I had made it.

So, a brilliant posting and a wonderful position. I would be in charge of fifteen to twenty airmen on a listening post. This time, unlike Aden, we would be monitoring our own people. We would tap phones, listen to broadcasts, read letters. At that time the Cold War was going on and traitors were coming out of the woodwork. My job was to stop, look and listen for anyone giving away secrets, whether deliberately or unintentionally. There would be an officer in overall charge, but he sat in an office and wrote reports, while I took the men away to various places, including Malta, Libya, Masirah Island, Gan, as well as various other British outposts, to make sure everyone was behaving themselves.

As usual I left behind some good friends. Two men in particular: Sergeant Giy DeVri, a Frenchman who had joined the Royal Air Force after the war and was more British than I am, and Vic and Lila, a couple born in the Ukraine. Vic was a corporal and would rise no higher, since he was from the Soviet Union. The authorities would only trust someone from that area so far. He was a pale wisp of man, with gentle manners, and he had a lovely wife in Lila. They introduced Annette and me to salami sausage, which we had never seen before. I disgraced myself by eating the rind. Everyone, including Annette, had a nice little pile of rind on the side of their plates, while my plate edge was bare. Vic and Lila were too polite to join Annette in laughing at me.