‘The cap’s not Nazi, is it? – only the bloke who wore it once. Anyway it was Afrika Korps, and they weren’t all that bad. Cut the badge off, if it bothers you.’
‘Thank you.’ I said it again.
‘Just take it off and sit on it if we run into a Yid patrol, OK? It upsets them.’
‘Shouldn’t the Israelis stay their side of the border?’
‘Nobody knows where the border is any more, sir. Why else do you think we’re up here?’
I remember two things from the evening that followed. One was that we climbed up, for the umpteenth time it seemed, out of a low stony wadi – but instead of being faced with more of the same there was now sand. Beautiful deep orange sand lit up by the setting sun as if it was on fire. It stretched for a hundred miles, and was so beautiful that it took my breath away. Clare turned us round, and we camped for the night around a lonely, stumpy-looking tree. The odd rusty can dotted here and there said we weren’t the first Boy Scouts to spend the night here. The second memory is that when we were settled round the stove with a bottle each, taking the smallest of sips to make the beer last, one of the kids asked me to tell them what it was like flying over Germany in 1944.
I talked for longer than I intended, and at the end of it no one said a word for several minutes. Then Trigger asked me to tune one of the radios so as to pick up some music. I got something from Port Said or Cairo. Arab music. Drums, tambourines and small cymbals; the gentle wailing of pipes and flutes. That was why the guys began to compare the dancing girls they’d seen in clubs and bars up and down the Canal Zone. Flat bellies and big tits seemed to be the combination they recalled best. When I asked about the girl and the pig I’d been told about, Clare said, ‘She must be a European; even English maybe.’
‘How do you make that out, Sarge?’ That was one of the young national servicemen: I never properly learned his name. Carter maybe?
‘No Muslim woman would be allowed to do that. They’d lock her up; maybe even worse. Stone her or cut bits off her – just like in the Bible. The pig is religiously an unclean animal for them . . . they can’t even touch it. It’s because we allow that sort of thing to go on in our clubs, and build churches everywhere, that they don’t take us seriously when we say we want to negotiate an end to the troubles out here.’
‘Have you seen her, Sarge?’
‘Yes; as it happens.’
‘What was she like?’
There were a couple of low guffaws before he responded. I looked up: a billion billion stars like the night before. I could feel the heat radiating from the oil-drum stove on my legs, and cooler air off the desert curling around my back.
‘Bloody formidable, as it happens . . . but my mother wouldn’t ’ave been all that chuffed to see me there.’
We broke away soon after that. Every man to his own blanket and his own thoughts. I tried to think about Dolly and Grace . . . they were so much part of my world, but I found thoughts of my boys instead, and the girl Flaming June. Maybe she was still waiting for her wounded hero. Maybe she had married him. I remembered Dieter telling me off for blowing it with her, and Carlo crying. I resolved to send her a letter or a card when I got back. Cast my bread upon the waters.
In the morning the Sergeant sat me down at the radio, and made me stay there. We didn’t break camp. I had a two-hour listening watch for Watson in the middle of it, so it didn’t make that much difference. Clare himself set off into the desert with one man, a pole about six feet long, a shovel, a map and a compass – but they only went about fifty yards.
The men lazed about watching him, but no one seemed to think it odd behaviour. Those who’d been in the blue with him before had seen it already, and those who hadn’t had learned to trust him anyway. From the small side window of my radio wagon I watched him prospecting around in the sand. After about an hour he straightened from the latest hole that he had scooped, turned back to us and waved. Five or six of the lads lifted spades that had been dumped in a heap from one of the wagons, and trudged up the nearest sand dune to join him. Then they began to dig in earnest.
Clare and his helper returned to us. Trigger put on a brew. When he had an ally mug of strong tea in his hand the Sergeant climbed into the radio room.
‘Anything?’
‘No, Sergeant. Even the static sounds pretty uninspired. What am I listening for?’
‘Anyone. Friendlies and unfriendlies.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Friendlies are the ones we allow to be out here, and the unfriendlies aren’t. At the moment the Israelis are classified as friendlies, but only four years ago they were blowing up hotels full of our nurses, weren’t they?’
‘So even the friendlies are unfriendly, as far as you’re concerned?’
‘Yeah, so yell if you hear anything. Goddit?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘I’ll get Trigger to bung you a cup of char; I should ha’ brought you one.’
‘Thanks.’
‘. . . and one last thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘That cap really suits you: you look like a proper little Nazi.’
‘I knew someone clever in the War Office a few years ago . . . he said that we are the Nazis now.’
‘He should know.’
‘He died.’ Actually I shot him, but let’s pass over that one.
‘Well; he can’t have
