‘No, and nobody’s looking any more. The wreck will turn up somewhere sooner or later.’
I realized that he’d just spoken my own epitaph as well. If I didn’t come back from one of his little jaunts, they would forget me too, until my body turned up somewhere sooner or later. Under his avuncular exterior he was as cold as a shark.
He continued. ‘There’s a band over from the UK on at the cinema tonight: I got you a couple of tickets so you could take Daisy. Not my kind of thing.’ He handed me a flyer for the Ivy Benson All Girls Orchestra. I didn’t know how well orchestral music would go down with the troops, but the all-women element would guarantee a decent crowd. Maybe I’d misjudged him. Maybe not.
As I left he said, ‘Get your things together; you’ll be off in a few days.’
‘I thought you said it wasn’t urgent, sir.’
‘It is now. There are some other sods out there looking for it. You’ll be off as soon as Hudd gets here.’
‘Where is he at present, or aren’t I supposed to ask?’
‘Where the hell do you think Australians are most of the time? Bloody Australia of course! Best place for ’em! Sometimes I think you’re a bit thick, Charlie.’
I looked in on Daisy as I left him, handed her an envelope on which I had printed her name, but said aloud, in case Watson was looking, ‘Could you post that for me?’ and, ‘See you tonight if you want to hear this band.’
‘Love to, Charlie. I’ve run out of books and magazines.’ I wondered if she’d realized what she now had in her hand: she hadn’t run out of pictures to look at, anyway.
She played ‘Jazz me blues’, and the notes from her silver cornet fell around the open-air camp cinema like silver raindrops. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.
This was the new cinema, built closer to the centre of Deversoir, and its periphery was patrolled by cops during the shows. The old one had been built too close to the fence line, and too low apparently, so the wogs kept lobbing hand grenades into it, and spoiling the films. The WD never likes to admit a mistake, so the first counter to that had been to put a wire fence around the top of it, but the Gyppoes responded by using old-fashioned slings to get the grenades over the top. It’s a nice picture: a people’s army taking on a mechanized military monster with the same sort of sling David used against Goliath, and forcing a retreat. The Gaza Palestinians are using exactly the same slings against Israeli tanks today.
Watson had done us proud, of course; we had a seat in the front row on the end of a line of staff officers, and what goes around comes around, because Dr Jazz spotted me as soon as she came on stage. She winked very obviously at me as she sat down, and from behind me a great roar went up. Someone behind dug me in the back, and someone else patted me on the shoulder.
Daisy whispered, ‘Does she know you?’
‘I met her once, in Croydon of all places. She became intimately acquainted with my bum. People usually go to Croydon to die of boredom.’
‘I come from Croydon. I went to grammar school there.’
‘In which case I take that back. With you and Dr Jazz both recommending it, it must be the most interesting place in Blighty.’
‘Is that her real name?’
‘No: I never learned that. She was a doctor at my medical. Later that night I caught her playing jazz in an old pub named the Dog and Bull – it’s wonderful how pub names stick in your mind.’
That was all we had time for. They kicked off with ‘I cover the waterfront’, and the boys went totally mad. I suppose that I’d earlier associated the word orchestra with classical music. I couldn’t have got further from the truth. These girls played jazz and swing so hard that Major Glenn Miller himself would have snapped up any of them for his USAAF band. I can recall now looking up at the soft night sky, and those billions of stars, and letting the jazz wash over us, and making a mental note to create some memories of the night. They played ‘Ladybird’ and ‘Jealousy’. Thousands and thousands of honeyed notes surrendered to the night sky. I wondered what it sounded like from beyond the camp’s boundaries – out in the blue.
The doctor herself actually sought me out in the beer queue at the interval.
She said, ‘Sarah Drake,’ as she held out her hand. ‘We were never introduced before. The girls call me Ducky.’ She knew my name, of course, and I introduced Daisy, who looked a bit overawed.
I asked Sarah, ‘What happened to doctoring?’
‘It can wait. If you had to choose between this, and sticking needles in hairy bums all day long, what would you do?’
‘I see your point. Depends how clean the bums were, I suppose, and whether I liked inflicting pain. I even thought you were a bit of an Irma when I met you. You’re a very good musician, you know.’
‘I know darling; you don’t have to tell me. How do you think I got the job? What do you do over here anyway? I remember you were a radio operator, but I haven’t seen any aeroplanes since I’ve been here.’
‘I skive mainly, but we do have a few kites if you know where to look for them.’
We’d arrived at the counter, and I paid for six beers. They could have been larger, but at least they were cold.
I asked Ducky, ‘How many shows are you doing?’
‘Three in the camps, one in a Kiwi transit camp up in Port Said, and a few of us are playing at an embassy reception in Cairo next week.
