In 1948 or ’49 two British Army drivers broke into a tank park in Palestine and attempted to steal two 30-ton Comet tanks which they intended to hand on to the embryonic Israeli Army. I don’t know if they were successful – if they were, then there’s a story in that – but, because the Army acknowledges the event, I suspect not. The loss of another Comet in the Canal Zone a couple of years later is less certain.
It is impossible to spend much time with the Suez veterans – many now in their seventies – without being told the story of how a group of Egyptian thieves, or klifty wallahs, stole and hid a Comet tank in battle order, by the simple deception of building a shack around it. This is not a loss that the Royal Tank or any other regiment owns up to . . . not that they would, perhaps. Red faces all round.
I recently asked for details of the theft from the Tank Museum at Bovingdon (probably the only place you will get to see a Comet these days), and was told by a historian that this was the first time he had heard the tale. He firmly dismissed it as a military myth. This is curious, because when you sit down with a Suez veteran it is inevitably one of the first tales told to illustrate the Alice in Wonderland world of the Canal Zone in the Forties and Fifties. Maybe the Tank Museum isn’t listening hard enough.
I have heard three variations on the story so far, and two likely locations – off the Treaty Road close to Ismailia, and somewhere north of Suez. I borrowed the latter for Charlie’s story. I enjoy hunting down unlikely tales, and I love proving experts wrong, so if there is anyone out there with the information to pin the tail on this particular donkey, please write to me. It would be marvellous to add another cock-up to our glorious military heritage.
Charlie’s first voluntary parachute jump closely mimics my own, at Strathallan in Perthshire nearly twenty years ago. Having been told by the jump master that if I baulked at the command to go he would have no choice but to push me out of the aircraft I shuffled up to the exit with the thought ‘No bugger’s going to shove me out of an aeroplane!’ Thus I left the plane as soon as I was told, but before expected, cut a nice wide swathe in a field of oats a mile from the airfield, and had to walk in carrying my ’chute under my arm. If the farmer is reading this, please accept my belated apology. This was after a briefing which had concluded with a list of things most likely to go wrong with a parachute, so that big khaki nylon dome opening above my head was one of the most beautiful sights I will ever see.
The passing reference to a soldier hiding behind a tombstone in an English graveyard to avoid the attentions of a German fighter pilot is another family tale. My father, returning for a few days’ wound leave after Dunkirk, was caught crossing a Carshalton or Beddington graveyard by a ‘tip and run’ raider in a Me.109. Having successfully hit the Carshalton gasometer with his single bomb – it went in one side and out the other without exploding – the pilot decided to take out his frustration on the lonely khaki figure in the graveyard. Dad hid behind the gravestone (allegedly) of a ‘famous poet’, but I’ve never been able to find out which one. This happened before I was conceived, so in a strange way I owe that poet my life, if you see what I mean. I haven’t been to Carshalton for years, but even as late as the 1960s you could see the patches on the gas holder marking the bomb’s impact . . . and I wonder if the German pilot is still alive?
Dungeness in Kent is nothing like as awful as I make it out to be . . . as long as you don’t mind having nuclear power stations at the end of your garden. The Listening Ears – massive concrete dishes, designed and built between the wars to detect the approach of aircraft – can be found on an island in a flooded quarry at Denge . . . within walking distance of the Pilot Inn. Access to them is managed jointly by English Heritage and English Nature, who allow occasional guided tours in the summer months. The principle of detecting the acoustic signatures of approaching formations of aircraft is a redundant technology – it was kicked into touch by the development of radar in the 1930s . . . however, a Danish artist plans to build another one on the north coast of France, aligned with the Denge dishes . . . so in theory it may one day be possible to exchange words, unsupported by modern technology, with someone standing thirty miles away. It won’t displace the mobile telephone, although why anyone would want to talk to someone in France beats me.
You can thank Errol Flynn for the aspirin and Coca-Cola recipe for a hangover cure. It appears in several biographies as both a cure and an amphetamine-like pick-me-up. I once made it up for the former reason, but the drink went the colour and consistency of an after-curry diarrhoea, and after the first sip I poured it down the sink. People come up with spurious cures for hangovers all the time, but G.P. Gibson VC relied on a pint of water and half a dozen lungfuls of pure oxygen . . . that sounds close to it for me. There’s only one proper remedy, of course – moderation. I shall have to start acting my age,
