Whenever someone feels the need to offer me reassuring words before I’ve asked for them I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I accepted an old aluminium water bottle from him. I could hear fluid that I hoped was water sloshing about in it, and something else that rattled. I’d heard tales about the Army putting chemicals in the water to suppress men’s natural inclinations, so I hoped it wasn’t that. Meanwhile I had a headache which was not improving – I ought to have asked that doctor for an aspirin. On the upside I was heading for Ismailia, closing in on an exotic dancer with a reputation for improvisations that could bring a tear to the eye. So life wasn’t all bad.
I was wrong, of course: it bloody was.
They tell me that your first visual impression of the sweep of Egypt seen from the Treaty Road stays with you for ever. Mine didn’t.
The road is a dark thread of tarmac parallel to the Canal, and literally within spitting distance of it. It runs as straight as a Roman road, skirting the salt beds of Lake Manzala, and on south to Canal Road and Ismailia. To the west – that’s on your right if you are travelling south – the desert stretches off as far as you can see. The sky is a washed-out blue, because the intense sun robs your eyes of their ability to concentrate colour. It looks like a place where nothing normal can live. I didn’t see much of that, though: after about ten minutes I began to shiver. I wrapped my flying jacket, which I had been toting over my shoulder, tightly around me and squeezed into the corner of my seat. I probably passed out soon after that.
Nobody noticed, because my few fellow passengers – mainly old Canal Zone sweats – had settled down to sleep themselves by then. Apparently someone finally pointed out to the driver, after the stop at Gordon Camp was behind us, that an RAF officer at the back was stubbornly resisting all attempts to rouse him. Gordon Camp was about fifty miles south of Port Said – the last stop proper before Ismailia, and the complex of camps around it. I suspect that my driver wasn’t alerted before then because nobody wanted the bus delayed before it reached their own stop: your British squaddie is nothing if not practical. The driver decided to press on: any other decision would have probably earned him a thick ear anyway.
My next proper memory – and there are a few others, mainly fragments of faces and murmurings – is of waking up in a white room with a curved ceiling, and knowing immediately that all was not well. It felt like the inside of a long Nissen hut, because it was the inside of a long Nissen hut. I’m not that fond of Nissen huts: they remind me of being forced to get into a Lancaster bomber and fly all over Germany while our German brothers were meanwhile doing their level best to kill me. I was aware immediately, though, that this wasn’t a bad dream or a flashback. Nearly everything else in the long narrow room was white as well. I knew that white: I had woken up in a bloody hospital before. After twenty minutes, a woman came to stand alongside the bed. I felt too ill to even care whether she was plain or a looker. She took my pulse. Why do nurses always do that? Even when you roll them on their backs they can’t resist the urge to take your pulse. It must be some sort of programmed reflex they develop when they’re still in training.
‘Welcome back, Pilot Officer. The doctors were worried about you.’
‘Did they blow up the bus?’ My voice was cracked and hoarse, and my mouth was dry.
‘No. Why do you think that?’
‘I missed one in Malta, and the Maltesers blew it up. I thought this might be God having a second go at me.’
She smiled. ‘Nothing as dramatic as that, I’m afraid.’
‘Then what happened to me?’
‘The doctor will explain. Are you thirsty?’ I nodded my head. ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’ It was cold water sipped slowly through a straw: the best drink I ever had in my life.
I said, ‘I’m tired.’
‘Why don’t you sleep then?’ She picked up my limp wrist again, and I knew exactly what she was about to do. Maybe they just like to keep in practice.
The next morning I was lifted onto a trolley, and my bed sheets and mattress changed. Two male orderlies sponged me down with cool water: they can’t have enjoyed it as much as I did. I drank a cup of very thin tea, and ate half a slice of bread and jam. Then I went to sleep again.
I awoke feeling reasonably alert, and because I was reasonably alert quickly noticed the Port Medical Officer from Port Said standing alongside the bed beaming happily down at me.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘you’re not dead. I haven’t killed a patient yet, not even a donkey . . . and didn’t want to start with you.’
‘I would find it hard to disagree with that, sir.’
He pulled over a chair. It creaked when he sat down. An overhead fan nearby clicked as it revolved.
I asked, ‘What happened to me?’ My voice was stronger.
‘I nearly did for you with a yellow fever jab, that’s what.’
‘You gave me yellow fever?’
‘I hope so. That’s the principle of the whole process.’ He grinned and looked younger. ‘We give you enough dead yellow fever antigen for your body to produce the necessary antibodies against the real thing. The dead virus wasn’t a problem, but what we had it in was.’
‘Please explain.’
‘The vaccination you were given wouldn’t last ten minutes after it
