大象传媒

Chapter 8a

Settling In

Next morning we had to say so-long to Nick and Les. They had received instructions to proceed to Battalion H.Q. at Reykjaskoli, many miles further north, and were leaving with Lieutenant Murdoch, our signals officer. Les Morgan was Mr. Murdoch's batman and Dick was to take charge of the signallers at H.Q. As we saw them off we did not envy them their long journey in the back of the 15 cwt truck over extremely dusty and pothole-cratered roads.
For the rest of that day, and the next, Charlie and I spent our time becoming fully acquainted with the jobs we would have to do when we officially took over from the D.L.I. We both knew how to operate the switchboards but we had to become familiar with the names of the different subscribers and also learn how to make long-distance calls through the local civilian exchange, which had three lines from our switchboard. In addition, there was a long list of numbers in a so-called directory, which it would be advantageous to memorise.
The signal clerk's duties were easy enough. They only required our learning the different wireless call signs of the various stations occupied by the troops. The rest - checking up on the number of groups in a message, filling in the T.H.I., transferring the originator's degree of priority (if any) to the "OUT" space of the "CALL AND INSTRUCTIONS鈥�, looking for the originator's signature, and the various minor things that a signal clerk had to look out for - were easily remembered from our training days, as also was the method of registering messages. We stayed in the signals office until eleven o'clock each morning, and then had a break for a mid-morning drink of steaming hot Bovril. Baths was the next item on the second morning's programme and at 11.30 hours Charlie and I accompanied some of our new friends to the bathhouse. This was a wooden shed with six showers hidden behind a screened-off section, the rest of the space being the "dressing-room!'. A "bench" of upturned boxes nailed to the floor occupied two sides of the room, and nails hammered into the walls served as pegs on which to hang our clothes.
We lost no time in getting undressed and, as we stood under the hissing showers, with steam seeming to ooze out of every pore in our bodies, we revelled in the newfound luxury. We had not seen a shower since leaving the Depot, where we had enjoyed them after the morning's half-hour "torture" in the gym. In Dudley and South Wales we had had to be content with what we could get. Small wonder, then, that we lingered under the steaming spray as long as we could.
The time passed quickly and pleasantly and we became quite attached to the D.L.I. boys. Nothing seemed to be too much trouble for them. No matter what we wanted to know, or what little problem we might encounter, they were only too willing to help us in any way they could. I formed a particular rapport with them when I told them that my Uncle Bill, with whom I lived when I first came to Birmingham, served with the D.L.I. during the First World War.
One evening I went with some of the D.L.I. lads to the local cinema, and as we strolled leisurely along the road towards it Ken" told me of an amusing incident concerning one of the men in the early days of the occupation of the island who became friendly with one of the local girls and invited her to the cinema. Thinking Icelanders were of Eskimo stock and liked to eat a lot of fat, he gave her a candle to eat! History does not record the girl's reaction to his intended kindness.
The cinema, when we first saw it, was a revelation to us. It was a dilapidated corrugated-iron shed tacked on to an equally dilapidated corrugated-iron garage. The seating arrangements were just as primitive. If you were unable to get a seat on one of the few rickety wooden benches at the front you had to either provide yourself with an empty petrol tin or stand throughout the Performance.
Thin rays of sunlight percolated in through many little holes like pencil torch beams, and at various places along the walls was the prominent sign 鈥淩EYKINGAR BANAAR" (No smoking). Because of the petrol cans, no doubt.
The film was "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", with Robert Donat and Greer Garson, but even that had its limitations. I found I had to strain my ears very carefully to hear the sound above the constant whirring of the projector in the little box-like cubicle at the back, and the film broke off at the end of each reel just like in the old silent films. It was highly amusing to be watching an interesting scene and then, just as something more interesting seemed about to happen, to see a sudden flash of black and white and "End of Part So-and-So" flicker haphazardly across the screen and the lights come on while a new reel was fitted.
When I first saw this recurrence of an age I thought to be now but a memory I could scarcely believe it. It reminded me of the Saturday morning matinees, when peanut shells and orange peel littered the floor and loud cheers greeted every appearance of the hero and emphatic boos met the entrance of the villain. It brought back scenes of the gallant cowboys galloping round and round the same clump of bushes firing blanks all morning, and of the pianist plonking away at the incidental music, and the "Please Do Not Spit" notices hanging at frequent intervals along the musty, red-Iamped walls.
"What do you think of it, Doug?鈥� Ken asked, with a grin, when the lights went up at the end of a reel.
"I don鈥檛 believe it," I replied. "I've a feeling I'll wake up in a minute. "
"Don鈥檛 worry. You will, when winter comes,鈥� he answered, irrelevantly. I did not say anything. After what he had already told me, I knew he could be right.
Being strangers in a different regiment and not even attached to them for any specific purpose, Charlie and me enjoyed certain privileges denied the others, chief of which was being left entirely to our own devices, with no interference from anyone. With no official duties to perform, other than to familiarize ourselves with the switchboard and the other signal office duties for when the time came for us to take over the running of the office officially, no Company Orders to obey and no one to give us orders, our time was our own, to use as we pleased, and needless to say we took full advantage of the situation.
On the morning of Saturday, 14th June, Ken took us for a walk round the village to enable us to become better acquainted with our new surroundings, and introduced us to a middle-aged widow who would do our washing for us at a very reasonable price.
Borgarnes, we found, was not as bad as our first impressions had implied, but was a neat, compact village situated on a narrow neck of land that protruded into Borgarnes Fiord. The main street was rough and stony and full of potholes, as were most of the other streets. One street branched off at right angles to the main street and led up to the civilian Post Office and Telephone Exchange. The principal building on this street was the Hotel Borgarnes, a neat, clean-looking place three storeys high, half- way along the right-hand side. The other buildings on this street were two or three general stores, a clothier, and a "Skosmidur's" (Shoemaker's) shop, while at the extreme left-hand corner was a neat little boot and shoe shop at which you could buy any type of footwear from flimsy sandals to sturdy mountaineering boots. Being right on the corner, this shop had a window in each street.
The bakery, just below the Post Office, stood well back from the road on a patch of grassland almost at the edge of the fiord, while the dairy, a long, plainly-built building with a tall chimney tapering towards the sky, occupied most of the left-hand side. It was painted pure white and looked even more attractive than it did when the sergeant major pointed it out to us on our ride up from the quay to the camp.
Turning to the right at the main street again we came to the concrete bridge we had driven over that first day and stood for a while to admire the glassy tranquillity of the fiord and the range of dark brown hills beyond it. The hills were completely devoid of any sort of vegetation except for a strip of greenery between them and the fiord.
"How wide do you think this fiord is?" Ken asked, as we leaned against the rail of the bridge and surveyed the scene. We already knew that the air in Iceland was much thinner than the air in
England, and that this could render distances very deceptive. We hadn't a clue, and we said so.
"Go on. Have a guess. How wide?" Ken persisted.
"Oh, about three hundred yards," I hazarded. Charlie kept quiet.
"Well, you see that sheep moving along at the other side?"
"Yes."
"And that fence post just in front of it?"
"Yes."
"Well, that sheep isn't a sheep, it's a bus; and that fence poet isn't a fence post, it's a telegraph pole; and this fiord isn鈥檛 three hundred yards, it's nearer three miles."
Charlie was wise to keep his mouth shut.
The Army Poet Office was our next port of call, then a cafe near the quay, where we enjoyed a lovely cup of coffee each. We were to find that the Icelanders made the nicest coffee we had ever tasted. "Where you English can make tea, we can make coffee," an attractive young waitress in a cafe in Reykjavic was to tell us eventually.
The population of Borgarnes was only six hundred, many of whom eked out a bare existence from their little plot of land with one or two cows and sheep and a few hens. Others earned their living from that most precarious of industries, fishing. Most of the men thus engaged owned their own motor boats and the atmosphere in the vicinity of the quay was always redolent with the smell of fish. Many young men were employed by the British in building new camps or adding extensions to existing ones. The village boasted one policeman, known as the Sheriff.
We spent a very pleasant morning "discovering " the place with Ken, and combined business with pleasure by tracing the different lines of communication from switchboard to subscriber, so that we would know where to go if lines should break or a telephone go "diss鈥�. The morning's exploring in the fresh bracing air had so tired us that after dinner we curled up in our blankets and slept soundly until teatime. So soundly did we sleep that our D.L.I. hosts had to shake us vigorously and drag our blankets unceremoniously from us before we could be persuaded to wake up. A good tea did nothing to enliven us at all; in fact it seemed to have the opposite effect and made us more lethargic than ever, so instead of going out to do some more exploring as we had planned we spent the evening reading and writing letters.
The fresh air had certainly got to us with a vengeance, for when Reveille sounded next morning we failed to hear it and slept on until the irresistible notes of "Cookhouse" roused us to a reluctant wakefulness. There followed a frantic scramble to get dressed, have a hurried wash and shave and a headlong dash for the dining-hall.
If we expected to have another easy day doing as we pleased the Orderly Sergeant soon dispelled our hopes. Sorting us out at the table he told us, "You two chaps will be on cookhouse fatigues this morning. Report to the cook sergeant at 09.00 hours. Got to do something to earn your keep, you know. After all, you are eating our grub," he added, with a grin.
We exchanged wry grins. "I thought it was too good to last," Charlie's look seemed to say.
However, there was nothing we could do about it, and we had got away with it pretty well until now, so at nine o'clock we were in the cookhouse receiving instructions from the sergeant cook. We had donned our denim overalls in anticipation of having greasy jobs to do. Our first job was to scrape from the dixies all the breakfast leavings, then scrub the dixies in hot water. That task finished we washed the ladles and cleaned the little room in which we were working.
It was after eleven o'clock when we finished, but, as we were not supposed to knock off until twelve we had to think of some way to fill the next hour. It was not difficult. From the doorway of the little room we could see the cookhouse staff dipping pint mugs into a dixie of freshly-brewed tea. That decided us. Strolling casually into the cookhouse we took a pint mug each from the table by the right-hand wall and helped ourselves to the tea. A loaf of bread, a knife and some margarine on the table, and some tins of corned beef on a conveniently low shelf, attracted our attention. We helped ourselves to them, too.

contined in Chapter 8b

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