大象传媒

[Air raids on Egypt, 1941]

From Cairo, we went to the big Army base at Moascar, near Ismailia, on the Canal. Our [anti-gas] laboratory was in a two-storey building. Nothing much was happening in the Canal Zone, except that Italian (presumably) aircraft occasionally tried to drop mines in the Canal. This did affect me, because Phil Cole, a friend of mine, had somehow acquired a girl-friend in Haifa (she was Adina Gwirtzman, a cellist and an expert on the Arabic pagan, i.e. pre-Muslim, poets) and decided to go and see her. To that end, he bought an old wreck of a car, which he christened "Yimkin" (Egyptian Arabic for "perhaps"). He needed a couple of people to go with him so Tom Smith, who ran the unit office, and I joined him. We started in the evening, but there had been an air raid so the ferry across the Canal was not running and would not until the Canal had been swept for mines. I passed a very uncomfortable night somewhere. In the morning, Yimkin wouldn't start, but Phil somehow managed to get a gang of Egyptians to give us a push. He had discovered that, further up the Canal, there was a pontoon bridge, but this could be used only by military vehicles. He didn't let this stop him, though, and waving aside the Egyptian policeman who tried to stop us, we crossed over into Sinai. There would be trouble on the way back, as we didn't have the necessary stamp on our documents. After that, the crossing of the desert and the journey up to Jerusalem were trouble-free. After spending the night in Jerusalem, we drove down to Tel Aviv, where Yimkin broke down so seriously that it had to be left in a garage there while we returned by train.

For some reason, the Germans then decided to make things unpleasant for us. I was on guard duty in the lab one night when the siren went. As usual, nobody moved until we heard a bomb being dropped on the nearby RAF airfield. Everyone immediately rushed out and into a curious structure whose purpose I never knew. It was made of concrete, but was only partially below ground level, the top part sticking out above ground level and having openings in it. Still, it was better than nothing. A stick of bombs was dropped, each bomb coming closer to us. The flash from the explosion of the last one lit up the inside of our shelter, and someone commented that, if he found a bloody great hole near it when he went outside, he would kneel down and kiss the concrete. After it was over, I found a piece of shrapnel on my pillow. There were then raids more or less every night so going into the slit trenches as darkness fell became a regular proceeding. In the end, with practice, I learned to tell from the sound that the bombs made whether they were approaching or passing overhead. To begin with, there was absolutely no defence, but antiaircraft guns were gradually brought in. Needless to say, the entire Egyptian workforce disappeared after the first raid. Work became increasingly difficult as plaster and ceiling fans fell after every raid, and the building became surrounded by unexploded bombs. To avoid the raids, we left Moascar every evening and went to tents some way away, near the Canal, from where we could watch the firework display over Moascar. This was possible only because Phil Cole was willing to stay in the lab building as guard every night. I remember the classic comment by Sergeant Morphy one evening: "Wish I were ome. Wouldn't be sitting on the doorstep eating a blasted sandwich."

In the end, it must have dawned on someone in authority that we were serving no purpose by staying in Moascar under these conditions, and we were moved to Cairo, or rather to Beni Yusef, an Army camp just where the green of the delta met the sand of the Western Desert. Here we lived in holes in the sand; these were rectangular, and covered by tents. However, as a Royal Engineers unit, we had craftsmen who could do anything. Very soon, the floors were concreted over, using cement stolen from the RE stores, and beds made with stolen timber and signal wire. We had our own generator, so we had light at night. However, we suffered from a plague of fleas, and there were also mole crickets, harmless but rather alarming to look at. The other inhabitants of Beni Yusef included Italian POWs and, at times, the 7th Armoured Division (the Desert Rats), who had just received American Grant tanks, but I didn't think much of them because the [main] gun was [in a sponson] at the side, so that the whole tank had to be turned to aim it.

[The other big drawback of having the main gun mounted so low was that you had to expose the entire hull of the tank to enemy fire in order to be able to fire back. With this tank alone it was pointless to hide the bulk of the tank "hull-down" behind a sand dune and fire the turret gun at the enemy because the tiny gun in the turret at the top was unable to penetrate any significant armour.]

I started learning Italian, helped by Sydney Blattner, who was born and educated in Alexandria, at the English school, Victoria College, but somehow had British nationality. He was always very keen to get into a unit fighting the Germans, but never succeeded, unlike his brother who fought in the Dodecanese. Sydney spoke not only Italian but also Arabic, which made him extremely useful. Thanks to him I visited the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, the City of the Dead, which was then completely uninhabited (I believe that this is no longer true), and most amazing of all, the Monastery of the Albanian Dervishes in the Mokkatam Hills, with its kitchen full of enormous pots and pans, and a long tunnel in the rock leading to the tomb of the founder.

While stationed in Beni Yusef, I went on leave to Jerusalem. This involved taking a train from Cairo to a place called El Kantara on the African side of the Suez Canal. It was then necessary to cross the Canal by boat to the Asian side to catch the train to Jerusalem. It was because of this that I found myself in a small boat together with two New Zealand soldiers and the New Zealand General Freyberg, who had been in command of the British and Commonwealth forces on Crete. I was amazed to hear the soldiers talking to the General as man to man, as such a thing would have been impossible in the British Army. It was wonderful, after the long journey across Sinai, to see hills again instead of the uniform flatness of Egypt. I loved Jerusalem and was fascinated, in particular, by the Old City, although the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was too commercialised. At weekends I would escape from the squalid conditions of Beni Yusef to Cairo and the civilisation of "Music for All". This was started (as I now know) by Lady Russell Pasha, the wife of the Chief of the Cairo Police; it provided concerts of recorded music for the forces in an old cinema. Apart from the music, there was also a good restaurant (it was here that I saw an Egyptian waiter lift a bottle of Worcester sauce to his lips and down a large dollop). I also went to chamber music concerts at the American University. In addition, our C.O., Major Leonard Kent (I did not discover what a great man he was until I saw his obituary in The Times), organized a trip to the step pyramid at Saqqarah and to Memphis.

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