If you’d asked me, I would have said that it took me ten times longer to extinguish my fire, than he did his. When I finally dropped the hose on the ground I was alongside the smouldering wreck, had no eyebrows and the curl which fell over my brow was frizzled. I could smell my own burned hair. My cheeks were glowing. To tell the truth if my bladder had been more than empty I would have wet myself. Maybe that would have done a better job on the flames than the foam. Back at the Champ Ryan spread some paste on my cheeks and forehead.
‘You may lose a layer of skin,’ he told me, ‘but it’s nice to know you can do it, isn’t it?’
I took a gulp of water from a water bottle he handed me before I replied.
‘I suppose so. Did I pass?’
‘We’re still here, aren’t we?’
‘I was in an aircraft crash once – the bastard thing burned like that.’ I was still pulling in air in great gulps; I must have been holding my breath as I fought the fire, so it can’t have taken all that long, can it?
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘What difference would it have made?’
‘I would have made it harder for you, guv’nor – to compensate for the lack of surprise. You knew what was coming, didn’t you?’
In the mess that night the sergeant on the end of the Two-Kick trick came up to me with a beer for each of us. Like most sergeants he rolled with every punch, and kept grudges. He lightly touched the paste on my forehead: it had set like plaster.
‘Got too close to the matches, did you?’
‘The bastard teaching me drove me into the fire until my eyebrows disappeared.’
‘My baby brother. He must have heard about that trick you lot played on me – I must tell him thank you. Honours even?’ He held out his hand, and we did the shake-it-up-and-down ritual. I got drunk with his people after that – they seemed like a decent bunch.
At about 2300 hours, after I knew I’d drunk enough to land myself with a hang-over the next day, he leaned across the table and said, ‘Pack yer gear tonight, Mr Bassett. You’re off tomorrow.’
Chapter Eight
Hello, Pat
I stood on the tarmac in the rain apart from the group of National Servicemen and reservists who were flying out with me. It seemed unfair that on the very day that my craven government had agreed to comply with international demands to uninvade Egypt again, they were bunging me on a plane to fly in that general direction. Two people had come to see me off. That was nice. Both were men, and that was disappointing. There’s nothing like a bit of skirt standing at the edge of the runway, waving her knickers as you lift off to fight another day.
Old Man Halton had greeted Carlton B by saying, ‘Hello, Hannibal. How are things in the Madhouse, these days?’ I took it that the Madhouse was the FO.
‘Mad,’ CB said, ‘quite mad.’
‘You two know each other?’ I asked.
‘From years ago,’ Halton beamed. ‘Our families were close, and Hannibal once asked me for a job.’
‘And he said not bally likely,’ the Mandarin told me, ‘so I joined the Home Civil Service instead. Thus I have your employer to blame for everything that’s happened to me ever since.’ The smiles they were banging off, and the way their handshake went on for ever, said that they liked each other as well. ‘I drove down to see Charlie off,’ he added, ‘and to warn him to try to stay out of trouble.’
‘So did I. It’s going to keep raining . . .’ Halton looked at the cloud base, and sniffed. Then he treated us to one of his wondrous rolls of coughing. It was like standing alongside a thunderstorm. ‘Do you think we have time for a drink? The transport hasn’t turned up yet.’
We were hanging around on a Royal Canadian Air Force Base, RCAF Langar, waiting for an aircraft to turn up, and we hadn’t even got as far as Canada yet – just bloody Nottinghamshire. I’d been trucked over in a one-tonner before respectable people were awake.
Langar was a bloody great piece of old England surrounded by unfriendly Canadian conscripts with unprincipled dogs and big guns: the main Canadian base in Europe. Our Egyptian folly had used up so much of our own runway space that we had to borrow some back from friendly allies . . . and there were fewer of those by the day. As you can imagine, we hadn’t asked the Yanks for help, because none would be forthcoming. I’ve liked almost every American I’ve ever met, but politically they still haven’t got over the Boston Tea Party.
Eagle Airways, a civilian mob whose trooping contracts Old Man Halton had his eyes on, was doing the needful, but because the government wanted to hide the number of troops we were moving around the globe most movements had to occur from military airfields.
Browne asked me, ‘What kind of aircraft will you use?’
‘I went to Cyprus three years ago on a converted Wellington Bomber – it scared me half to death. I think Eagle uses real aeroplanes – DC-6s or Hastings. Things like that.’
Halton began to cough again; we’d have to get him out of the rain, so we let him lead us to a small square chunk of a building alongside the watch office.
At least the Canadians had the ability to surprise: we found ourselves in a rather plush little lounge with a small bar, and a white-jacketed steward. I was a VIP for a day, and I might have known that Halton would have known
