Neither Carly nor Dieter has married yet. Was that my fault, I sometimes ask myself? Dieter sends us postcards from ports around the world. The old lady has a world map on a cork board in the kitchen and she tracks his progress with coloured pins. I never did get round to telling Carly that I had a leading part in how Grace died. Every time I tried the conversation seemed to drift away from me, and eventually I gave up. He comes up to stay whenever he gets leave, and plays golf at the Royal Dornoch. I consider that my biggest failure of his upbringing. Often we take my small pistol and shoot targets behind the house: I’m not ashamed of the fact that it was one of my sons who finally taught me to shoot straight.
Carly has proofread each of the volumes of my memoir – he corrects the manuscripts before you get a look at them. He’s in the house now, having sat up all night with the book you’ve just read, and in a few minutes will walk from the porch carrying our gun, and a box of bullets. Half an hour on the targets before we go in to supper. There is just a little darkness in Carly; when the ghosts crowd round, and Carly has a pistol in his hand, it is almost as if he knows them as well as I do.
I wanted
The Last Post
Although our misadventure in Cyprus from the mid nineteen fifties onwards wasn’t the last time an incompetent British government sent conscript soldiers to other lands with guns in their hands, it was one of our last attempts to apply serious military pressure to the politics of the Mediterranean and the near Middle East for colonial purposes . . . mind you, the Aden crisis was only just around the corner, and then there was Oman.
As with the previous Charlie Bassett novels, it has been National Service veterans who were actually there who have given me the background material for the story, and generously allowed me to see ten weeks in Cyprus during the Emergency through their eyes: they put the frame around my picture. But don’t blame them if you have spotted a mistake or two, or an inaccuracy – that will have been my fault. It was one of them who told me that two young soldiers had taken a week’s leave during a lull in the EOKA insurgency, and had hiked from one side of the island to the other, staying with hospitable Greek Cypriot families along the way. It puts an entirely different meaning on that delightful invitation – ‘take a hike’. Either they were lucky, or it can’t always have been all love and bullets over there.
I borrowed the Foreign Office mandarin, Carlton Browne, from Terry Thomas, who gave us so many wildly comic creations in the Fifties and Sixties. He is among the most underrated of British comic actors – I still have his films as DVDs, and drag them out to cheer me up when I’m blue. I don’t know why he professionally outlasted his contemporaries like Norman Wisdom and Ronald Shiner, but between them they taught us to laugh again – and, as importantly, to laugh at ourselves. We owe them a large debt: I’m sure the small classic cinemas will rediscover them one day, and start to run film festivals based on their uniquely British comedies.
There was a real Inspector Robert Fabian – ‘Fabian of the Yard’. He was a master thief taker of the 1940s who became famous for the successful investigation of high profile murders. After he retired he pumped up his pension with frequent contributions to the national newspapers: if a quotation was needed to round off a juicy murder report then Fabian was your man . . . and, you might have guessed it, one of the earliest successful Police dramas on TV was ‘Fabian of the Yard’, in which he was portrayed by the wonderful Indian-born Scots actor, Bruce Seton – actually Major Sir Bruce Lovat Seton of Abercorn. Bruce made his first film in 1935, and was still facing the cameras in 1961. Charlie loves these survivors.
There was once also a real Steve, although, as far as I know she didn’t evolve to become a belly dancer in a seedy Cyprus hotel. Steve was the second girl with whom I fell in love – I was probably 12 or 13. She was older, gentle, more intelligent and (in my memory) very, very tall. Although at different schools, for part of a magic year we travelled daily on the same bus between Rose Hill and Carshalton. My pals made fun of me, and called her ‘Tarzan’ behind her back. Boys can be cruel, can’t they? I lost touch with her, and my school, at roughly the same time – one of my former classmates recently described me as a ‘serial absconder’ – and sadly, now, can’t even remember her family name. I hope she made it.
It was about that
