‘Didn’t I tell you already, sir? I can swim. My school was famous for it. Most of my class were medallists, although I was never that good.’
‘OK. Take a ninety-six then, and take care of your bloody self. Keep your eyes on the alerts wherever you go.’ He wrote out and handed me the ticket, and said, ‘. . . and keep this in your bloody pocket; if the SPs pick you up without one they’ll think you’re a deserter, and with your reputation I don’t think you’ll be able to talk yourself out of twenty-one days at Moascar. Toddle along now.’
I walked around his pavilion to find Pat Tobin – I needed a decent set of KDs and a couple of spare shirts out of my secure storage. Between the MT Section’s tent and the pavilion was a small square area screened off on three sides by striped wind-breakers – the kind you see on the beach at Southend. Concealed in it lay a woman under a sunshade, face-down on a cheap sunbed. She wore a white swimsuit with the shoulder straps pulled down and a floppy white hat.
She lifted her head and looked over her shoulder when she heard me. ‘Hello, Charlie.’
I loved her body, but it took me a minute to recognize it. I’d never seen her with her clothes off.
Then, ‘Hello, Daisy. Day off?’
‘Half-day. He worked me hard last night.’
‘There are a thousand bored men confined behind the wire here . . . and most of them probably have their binoculars trained on you. What you’re doing is either dangerous, or cruel.’
‘. . . probably cruel.’
I wouldn’t bet on it, love, were the words that went through my mind, but all I said was, ‘. . . see you.’ Light touch, Charlie: if she was playing silly buggers it was her own fault, wasn’t it?
‘What would you do with your first ninety-six?’ I asked Nansen, as I threw what I needed into a small canvas crew bag someone had given me at RAF Waddington years before.
‘I’d ask my outrageous tent mate if he would like to join me.’
‘Would you?’
‘Love to, but I’m flying over the Delta tomorrow photographing Gyppo installations.’ Military installations, that is. There had been a few incidents reported in the papers. The Egyptian Army was getting very touchy about our reconnaissance flights.
‘What then?’
‘Ismailia, I suppose; but draw a pick handle from the guards before you go – it’s either a red-amber or an amber alert again, but the Arabs still hate us, and will stuff you if they can. Personally I always feel safer in Port Said. There’s a lot more of us about because of the port and the transit camps, and hence a lot more of our coppers on the street . . . and it’s more cosmopolitan in many ways. More of the locals speak English, and there are more clubs and restaurants, old-fashioned hotels and even an art gallery.’
‘I know some people in Ismailia. From when I was in hospital there.’
‘Well, then; pay your money, and take your choice . . . and don’t forget to wave as you see me flying over.’
‘Could you get away after your job?’
‘Mm . . . Charlie. Maybe. That sounds suspiciously like a date.’ Then he laughed, turned away and picked up an old copy of Picture Post. The girl in a swimming suit on the cover looked like Daisy. I noticed he had reverted to shorts of a more or less standard pattern, and wondered if that was because his streamliners were in the wash, or was it because of me?
I paid a visit I had been putting off. The SWO at Deversoir was surprisingly difficult to find. He was in an office behind an office behind an office behind an office, and everyone I asked had a different way of getting there. I found him in a large room at the end of a corridor in a long wooden hut. A big bald man with a hanging black moustache. He looked like the walrus’s father, and twice as fierce. A notice facing me on his desk top read SWO Cox. I’ve always distrusted people who need their own name on their desk: I suspect it is there because they are in danger of forgetting it, and therefore shouldn’t have been trusted with a desk of their own in the first place – I’m sure you’ve met the type. An aircraftman typed at a table behind him, and a relentless fan stirred the air slowly above them. Overweight flies rode on it like kids at a fairground. I wondered where the Arabs were. Then I caught my own thought – bloody well all around us, of course.
‘Pilot Officer Bassett,’ I told him. ‘I wanted to see you earlier, but they sent me out almost immediately.’
‘Good afternoon, sir.’ He was right. It was afternoon already. He was probably one of those sad types who always get that right. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to. Take a pew.’ My chair was rickety. I didn’t trust it.
‘What do I need to know?’
‘More than I can teach you, sir, but with a ha’p’orth of common sense you’ll get by. Would you like a glass of lemonade?’
‘Thank you.’
The AC brought two over without being asked.
‘In the first place keep your wits about you at night – and being inside the wire is no guarantee of safety. There are incidents every week . . . most of the wogs who break in are just stealing, but if you get between them and what they’re after they’ll slit your throat first, and call themselves a hero of the resistance
