On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (18 page)

Both Rick and Shaney showed an aptitude for swimming. Shaney actually achieved her bronze medal at the age of five, which was a remarkable achievement since it involved a half-mile swim out to sea. Once out there she trod water until I plunged in and swam to join her, quite against the rules. ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’ I asked her. ‘Yes daddy, I am now,’ she replied. ‘I was lonely.’ I turned and looked back at the beach and saw why. The figures there, of her mum and the examiner, did not look much bigger than matchsticks. It only occurred to me at that moment that we were very irresponsible parents.

Rick and Shaney would eventually get their colours for both athletics and swimming at Shoeburyness High, which was not easy in a school which boasted three students who were Olympic swimmers.

I believe my kids loved Cyprus as much as we did. They had their first pets there. I brought home a chameleon one day, which we kept for at least a week, then one of the kids took it out into the garden and, using its remarkable powers of camouflage, it changed colour and vanished on a pomegranate bush. Amazing creatures. We also had two cats. I was walking on the bondu when I came across a sack that was moving jerkily. Untying the string around the neck, I discovered two kittens inside. Someone had dumped them. So I took them home and we named them Cowboy and Indian. One night we left Indian asleep on the bottom of Rick’s bed. At about 2 o’clock Rick stumbled into our bedroom.

He mumbled, ‘Dad, there’s three cats there now.’

I investigated and, yes, Indian was in the process of giving birth to a litter of kittens of her own.

Sadly cats did not last long in Cyprus. They were vulnerable to all sorts of accidents and diseases. After giving it to all the family, including me, Cowboy died of ringworm. Indian had an even nastier fate. There were packs of feral dogs in Cyprus, stag hounds. These were the descendants of a hunting pack left behind by some irresponsible aristocrat in the nineteenth century. They raced around the bondu and the streets, huge devils with broad shoulders, knocking over infants and terrorising other wildlife. Every so often there was a dog shoot to try to eliminate them, but they could never quite be wiped out. One of these dogs caught Indian outside the confines of our garden and within seconds her back was broken and she lay dead in the street.

Unlike Rick who was older, Shaney does not have a lot of childhood memories of Cyprus, but she does still recall both ‘the tree of fire’ and ‘the wind of God’.

A landowner in Cyprus does not necessarily own the trees on that land. Trees have separate ownership and family parties can be seen on another man’s land picking olives or carobs from their trees. This quirk in the law causes a lot of arson. Should a landowner wish to build a house on his patch, he must first purchase any tree on that patch. If the tree owner refuses to sell, that tree often mysteriously catches fire.

As already mentioned there was a carob tree on the plot next to the house, a big old gnarled thing that looked as it had been planted by Gandalf in the days when magic was on the earth. One night our bedroom lit up and crackling was heard. Annette and I rose and went outside to find the carob blazing merrily, lighting up the landscape and sending sparks showering upwards into the darkness above. The kids woke up too and joined us in watching the bonfire just a few yards away from the bungalow. Neighbours were roused and nibbles and drinks were handed round. It was quite a sight. Carob trees are packed with oil and when set alight go up like torches. Our tree burned for three days, even though the fire engine came and put it out twice. It simply reignited within minutes of them leaving. They never did find the arsonist. When we returned to look for our old bungalow in 2003, a large house had been built next door.

The ‘wind of God’ was even more dramatic.

It was New Year. We were sitting on the veranda of our bungalow with John and Grace, and the three kids, enjoying a glass of wine in the weak winter sun. Suddenly the sky darkened and within seconds hailstones the size of marbles began hurtling down. They were so big and hard, and so unexpected, they stung mightily. This short storm lasted only seconds. Then came a noise like a squadron of bomber aircraft. It seemed to be coming from the south, out of the sea. Then we saw it. A huge tornado was heading towards us. Other tornadoes were hitting the island further down the coast. We rushed inside the house and closed the shutters, making the children lie down on the floor.

The noise outside was unbelievable and it was then that 5-year-old Shaney whispered, ‘Is that God out there, dad?’

I was minded to have a word with her Sunday school teachers.

John and I became curious and went up onto the roof with our cameras. The tornado passed about a hundred yards from the house. It was full of car parts and bricks and junk of all kinds. In a nearby yard there was a chicken coop which went up in nano-seconds, the chickens with it. They simply vanished into the clouds. Next, the tornado hit an electricity pylon and we saw the power of wind at its most fierce. The solid steel pylon twisted like a corkscrew, live cables snapping and electricity cracking and flashing when the ends touched earth.

‘There goes our leccy,’ said John, still peering through binoculars as the tornado wound its way into the mountains. ‘No turkey for dinner today, mate.’

Indeed, not only was there an electricity failure, but 400 homes had been left damaged in the wake of the wind. Cars had been destroyed, bikes, dustbins were gone, everything that had not been cemented down had been sucked up into the belly of the sky. There had been five tornadoes in all, created by the RAF when they had been warned that a waterspout of enormous dimensions was heading for Cyprus. The pilots had bombed the waterspout with dry ice to break it up. The whirlwind we had witnessed was but a child of a much greater parent. The other four tornadoes had not caused as much havoc as ours, since they had hit mostly open countryside, not towns.

Episkopi library had an exhibition of photographs at the end of January, pictures of the tornado taken from various vantage points. There had been one or two deaths and some injuries, but considering the force of that circular wind, I think the island got off very lightly.

~

One or two of the many assignments on which I took my 127 SU team are still embedded in my memory.

The first was our trip to Masirah Island, in the Persian Gulf, where there was an RAF base similar to RAF Gan, a staging post. On arrival there we found that no stores had been delivered for around six months and the cookhouse was out of bacon and other delicacies. We also had to wash our clothes and ourselves in seawater. Saltwater makes your skin and clothes itchy and you never feel absolutely clean. There were also scorpions everywhere and though I don’t mind spiders, I detest scorpions. We were only on Masirah for two weeks and I pitied the guys that were doing a year unaccompanied posting there.

One morning the Commanding Officer of the station, let’s call him Wing Commander Johnson, rang the cookhouse. When the phone was picked up the busy CO said briskly, ‘This is Wing Commander Johnson. Is that the Orderly Room?’ There followed a long silence as the recipient ran through probabilities in his head, then suddenly there was a triumphant reply. ‘No, it’s not the Orderly Room and Wing Commander Johnson can
fuck off
!’ Click. Phone down. We all agreed one had to admire the bravado behind this reply, if not the common sense.

Whoever had answered the CO’s call had believed he was safe from discovery. Had we not been monitoring the lines, and given that the CO failed to recall the exact digits he had dialled, the rash airman who had told his Wing Commander to ‘fuck off’ would have been completely safe. A Strowger telephone exchange does not keep records of numbers dialled. We found out who was on duty at the cookhouse at the time. It was a lone maverick corporal. We played him our tape in private. He went white and sickly-looking as he recognised his voice, but we assured him that his Wing Commander would never get to know.

I played a little golf while I was on Masirah. The fairways were hardened sand and the ‘greens’ were oiled browns. Halfway round I met another sergeant playing on his own. After a chat I found out that he was the local comcen sergeant, an ex-Boy Entrant telegraphist, but from an earlier entry than my 29th. We played the rest of the round then met in the mess for drinks that evening. Bill Fedden and I became firm friends before I left Masirah and we were to run into each other again.

The second assignment that sticks out was a return to Gan Island, where much had changed since I was there the first time. It was a lot greener, with more trees and a small golf course. I was with a new unit commander, a Flying Officer Ramsey, promoted from the ranks. He was a good CO for the unit but we went head-to-head on Gan. He ordered me back to Cyprus early from that assignment when we disagreed on something and though we made it up when the unit returned two weeks later I never quite forgave him for using his power to order me home.

This same flying officer was fond of the ladies. In the late ’60s the officer ranks of the WRAFs changed to match those of the men. A WRAF Flight Officer in 1968 became a Flight Lieutenant, just like her male counterpart. It took some time for these changes to register with elderly officers of the old school. I was on duty in June 1969 when an announcement came over BFPS (forces) radio.

‘Will Flying Officer Ramsey, known to be camping with Flight Lieutenant Swisher in the north of Cyprus, report immediately to Squadron Leader Cramphorn.’

I rang Squadron Leader Cramphorn immediately.

‘I don’t think you should broadcast that message again, sir,’ I advised. ‘As you know, Flying Officer Ramsey is a married man and I happen to know that Flight Lieutenant Swisher is a WRAF officer.’

‘Nonsense,’ growled the squaddie. ‘There’s no such rank in the WRAF as Flight Lieutenant.’

Fine. I had made my point. My responsibility was at an end. The broadcast went out on the radio twice more, as before, with the same names. Fifteen minutes later my phone rang again.

‘You’re right,’ barked the Squadron Leader, ‘The orderly room has just called me. Flight Lieutenant Swisher is a
woman
. What do we do?’

I wanted to call him a home-breaker but he sounded so horrified I felt sorry for him.

‘Nothing, sir. Flying Officer Ramsey’s wife is in England and not due out here for some time. But we’d better not broadcast the message again.’

‘No, Sergeant,’ he said, as if it were my fault all along, ‘we had certainly better NOT.’

Round about that time I was having cold feet regarding leaving the Royal Air Force and going into civvy street. I was due to go in 1971 but the air force was all I had ever known in the world. My dad had still been in when I joined myself, so my relationship with the service was seamless. I had gone from a child in married quarters to an airman in married quarters. I had never lived among people who did not wear a blue uniform. Naturally I was worried about getting work and taking care of my family in a completely alien environment. Were those people out there who wore suits or casual clothes the same as me? Could I talk to them, make friends with them, get them to know me? Or were they all cold people, interested only in themselves and their own?

In the end I applied to stay on for another seven years, after which I would receive a pension.

I was devastated to be rejected. There was a quota for sergeant telegraphists and that quota was full. A few years previously I would have been accepted without question, but the good years had passed, they no longer had any problems with recruitment. They had enough Senior NCOs to last them for the duration. In a panic I applied for three extra years, in order to finish my tour in Cyprus. This time I was accepted, but I would get no pension on leaving the service. All that I had coming to me was my last month’s pay and very little else.

In retrospect, having my application for further service rejected was probably the best thing that could have happened to me and subconsciously I probably left it too late on purpose. Given the choice, I would have stayed in the RAF, probably until the maximum of age fifty-five, and would have grown into one of those gnarled old Warrant Officers who spend all their time telling airmen to get their hair cut. That really wasn’t me. I was quite young still – thirty at the time – and though I
felt
over the hill, I still had a huge slice of life waiting for me. It was therefore a good thing that the choice was taken away from me.

So we had one more year or so in Cyprus and then we would be sent back to UK to finish my length of service and get demobilised.

Strange word that,
demobilised
. We usually shorten it to ‘demobbed’ which seems to fit better. Getting demobilised sounds as if one is going to get one’s legs chopped off.

A year or so before we left Cyprus, new neighbours moved into the bungalow opposite. Corporal Trinny Sutherland and his wife Lorraine became life-long friends and we still try to visit them every year at their house in Spain. Trinny originally hailed from the pretty island of St Vincent in the Caribbean, but emigrated to UK in the ’60s. He married Lorraine, a Buckinghamshire lass, and they followed us to Cyprus.

My last assignment for 127 SU again covered an old posting, Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, where I had spent a couple of months after my tour in Aden in 1967. We still had an RAF base on the island and I took my team out there to ‘listen’ to our chaps talking to each other on the telephone and on radio contact channels, such as air-to-ground communications. This was not particularly to discover if any secrets were being divulged to the enemy, but to make sure procedures were being following during exercises and day-to-day comms. There were set rules when using communications equipment and we would make transcripts of any contacts regarding say, a pilot talking to the control tower, or even the orderly room calling the blanket stores.

Flying Officer Ramsey joined us halfway through the assignment and he and I went out in an RAF Land Rover one day to visit a unit on the far side of the island. We had just reached a bridge over a river or gully, I can’t remember exactly where we were, when suddenly the streets started to fill with the Arab population. They came pouring out of buildings and houses, making noises of great sorrow. Men were shouting and beating their heads with their fists. Women were ululating in the way that only Eastern women can, their tongues vibrating in their mouths creating that sound which is so strange and fearful to Western ears. The whole city had suddenly erupted in grief and my CO and I knew that something momentous had happened in the Arab world. I wondered if Israel had swept through Syria and Egypt in a blitzkrieg, or something of that nature, and had stunned the Middle Eastern countries.