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86 or 100 or Desert Sweeper?

I have already explained in glorious detail in my story 'Ted's Turn; about the ,shall we say,the more delicate matters of camp life. While thinking about Ted and his turn I am reminded of another, perhaps you might think, more amusing incident involving the same subject.

I need to jump ahead a bit to November '42, we had moved up the blue (as we referred to the western esert) Sidi Haniesh; El Daba, Sidi Barrani all left behind now. We were now at Gambut some few miles from Tobruk and we now made our camp. Scattered round us was the detritus of battles fought long before and some not so long ago. The Africa Corps was in retreat but we weren’t in on the chase, we had to stay to protect the American Air Force base from attack. It was from here that the Liberator bombers took off to bomb the oil fields in Romania, shaking out tents as they went out and waking us up with their lights as they sought out the escarpment on the edge of which our guns were dug in, as they came in to land.

The sanitary orderly,s job here was simplified a bit in that the contents of our tins were burnt in a forty gallon oil drum. All he had to do was dump it all in the drum pour in the petrol stand well back and throw in the match.

One of our lads had seen this done and was therefore able to set to.

After morning parade, we were all cleaning our guns, a continual process due to the wind which, came over the edge of the escarpment picking up sand which we had to, at all costs, keep out of the mechanism of our guns.

This particular morning we were absorbed in our jobs, Sid Farthing was once again Entertaining’?? us with his rendition of Music-Hall songs of which he was an ardent fan in pre-war days. The trouble with Sid Farthing entertaining was that he had a terrible voice. He sang flat and did not allow enough breath, so that he always seemed to be struggling to finish a line. We used to worry about him as sometimes his face would turn quite blue!

With Sid in mid-warble and ourselves somewhere between polishing and shouting for Sid to Shut up!. Suddenly through our usual morning duties we were surprised by a loud 'WHOOPPH' sound. Startled, we looked in the direction from which the sound came.

The direction we looked was in the same direction of what we called but perhaps you might not call the toilets.

As we watched bits of something were flying up in the air like some kind of monstrous fire work display. This display was to be quickly followed by these same bits falling to earth with a soft flopping sound as they landed in the dust. While this was happening hanging or rather floating slowly down was what looked like bits of paper. ???!!!

What the heck was going on?? What was it?? What could it be??

Slowly the truth dawned . The toilets had blown up!!

Had we unknowingly placed the drum over a concealed booby trap?

No,! it was nothing as complicated as that.

The sanitary orderly had had it explained to him how to manage the job of disposal. He had seen the disposal of effluent but he hadn't got the sequence right.

The drum having been standing in the hot desert sun since sun rise was by then quite hot he'd put the petrol in first! and then the effluent instead of the other way round. So by the time the match was thrown in there was a nice explosive mixture at the bottom of the drum.

Added to this it should be remembered that we were now on an air field and instead of our usual 86 octane used by our transport we had plenty of 100 octane flight fuel to throw around.

And, Yes, you've guessed it our hapless orderly of the day spent the next few days going round with a mop and bucket cleaning up the desert!!

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