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Chapter-9- ‘The Nile Delta’ and ‘Port Fouad’

Our final destination was a town called Benha in the delta of the Nile and the Battery’s other troop of guns was at Tanta. I never did discover what we were supposed to be defending there and I think we must almost have been the first British soldiers the locals had seen even though our army had been in Egypt since the First World War. I can’t remember much about our stay there other than the occasion when Spencer Forbes went into Cairo and returned with a whole blue cheese which we very much enjoyed on the first day or two, but not so much thereafter because it sat on the tent’s table and got riper and riper so that after some days it practically walked out of the tent of its own accord. The Nile delta is not the most attractive place to live in; very hot and sticky and the night kept alive by the honking of hundreds of bullfrogs. There was one memorable occasion when a member of the Egyptian Senate invited the officers to dinner at his house on an island in the middle of the Nile. Dinner was preceded in very western fashion with canned beer and potato crisps on the flat roof of his residence. Then it was downstairs to a more eastern meal with each guest facing a pile of plates with just one knife, fork and spoon. There followed a succession of dishes, first savoury with things like roast chicken taken from a large dish to be eaten from hand and pigeons stuffed with rice followed by plates of sticky sweetmeats and fruit. We had been told that it was impolite to refuse any dish and that a little had to be partaken however small, so that by the end of the meal we were right royally stuffed!

Soon after this we were moved to Port Said, or to be more accurate Port Fouad which is on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal opposite Port Said. We were to remain there for some five months and our stay was arguably the best interlude in the whole of my war. I can’t remember that we ever had an air attack and if it had not been for the social side of things life would have been very boring indeed. From this you will gather that I am about to discourse on the nicer side of a soldiers life.

First, our gun site was within a few hundred yards of the beach where there was a beach club which had been built for children before the War and was thus named ‘La Plage des Enfants’ and which had now been reserved as an Officers’ bathing beach. It was to this very civilised haven that we found our way every afternoon that we were not on duty, which was about three out of four. The weather was of course idyllic, the sea blue and calm, the sand as yellow as butter and to cap it all we shared the beach with a number of local girls, mostly teenagers but then so were we. One or two of the subalterns were not slow in asking them out for the evening but this quickly waned when it became evident that your guest for dinner turned up with her mother or her aunt or some other female chaperone. It was quite definitely a case of look but don’t touch.

I particularly recall that for several days we had an influx of birds landing on the beach and in the water and we learnt that these were the annual migration of quail from Asia Minor and they had flown non-stop across the eastern Mediterranean Sea so that on arrival at the Egyptian shore they were so utterly exhausted that one could just bend down and pick them up. Not that the local small boys picked them up, or not at least until they had killed them with a stick, because they were making a nice little income by selling their ‘catch’, to the restaurants in Port Said.

Then, I was detailed, as still the most junior subaltern, to be liaison officer to a committee of ladies who ran a canteen at our end of the ferry across the canal from Port Said, where tea and cakes (char and wads in the vernacular) were nightly offered to returning soldiers after a night out. These ladies were the wives of senior officials of the Suez Canal Company and lived in luxurious houses on the canal bank. My job was to attend their meetings, which were always on Saturday mornings in the home of one or other of the committee members. Meetings were always short and were followed by long drinks on the terrace. As Saturday morning was the time for C.O.’s inspection I didn’t mind being detailed for this chore one little bit.

Worth mentioning also is that we slept in single rooms in wooden huts which made a welcome change from four in a small tent and we had a mess hut with a separate dining room. There was one drawback in that the huts were somewhat bug ridden and it wasn’t out of the way to be sitting at a six foot army table carrying out the unwelcome task of censoring letters home from the men when you suddenly became conscious of something biting your forearms. You quickly discovered that the warmth of your bare arm had attracted bugs that lived in the cracks of the table.

Censoring letters was indeed something that we all hated but was imposed to prevent incautious comments about troop dispositions falling into the hands of the enemy. It was only the ‘other ranks’ letters that had to be read before posting by the mens’ immediately superior officer, the officers themselves being trusted to be more discreet. I wonder whether the practice still obtains on today’s battlefields. One thing I did learn was the meaning of certain initials on the sealed down flap of the envelope e.g. S.W.A.L.K. means, ‘Sealed with a loving kiss’ and I.T.A.L.Y. means ‘I treasure and love you’.

Mention of verminous insects brings to mind the subject of house flies and nobody writing about experiences in the Middle East at that time can ever forget these pests. I still smile sometimes in the summer when we get excited about a single fly buzzing against a window and hurriedly look round for a fly swat or an aerosol of fly spray and remember the almost daily event of spreading a biscuit or a piece of bread with jam and waving a hand to fend off the flies before one could get it to ones mouth. I suppose the flies were the reason why most people newly arrived in Egypt went down with ‘gippy tummy’ soon after their arrival.

Whilst we were in Port Said there was an outbreak of bubonic plague, caused it was said by a man from the Maltese community returning from a visit to Cairo and finding that his father had died and had been buried whilst he was away: apparently he insisted on the tomb being opened so that he could give the deceased a final embrace. As the plague is borne by fleas the outcome was hardly surprising. The out break resulted in the town being quarantined and nobody was allowed in or out of the district for several weeks.

Port Said is arguably one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the whole wide world and all the westernised inhabitants are fluent in at least three languages, Arabic, English and French. Many of them probably spoke several more but did not admit to having any German or Italian, at least not in front of us. There was one café owner who was said to speak seven languages fluently and he had never been outside the city in his life. I recall being in a queue in a bank one day and noticing that the teller, when counting out notes, just looked up at the customer and broke into the appropriate language.

At the end of October 1942 we heard that the battle of El Alamein was over and that the 8th Army, now under the command of General Montgomery, was pursuing the remnants of the Afrika Corps towards Tripolitania. To our chagrin however we were destined to remain in Egypt and it was not until after Christmas that we were to get orders to rejoin the forward troops. .

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