Up For Grabs
Cover
Title Page
Author’s Note
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
The WWII Italian Collection
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Author’s Note
For a short time during the war of 1939–45 I found myself a member of a service concert party in Africa. I’d originally been recruited to write material for the comedian who’d been sweating blood trying to write it himself but, unfortunately, when one of his group disappeared into hospital, I found myself raked in to play a more active part and, in a nightshirt and fez, ended up onstage auctioning ‘slave girls’ in a mini-play which served as an introduction for the tunes of The Desert Song. I was dragged in deeper and deeper but, my heart not being in it, could never manage to learn my lines so that I always had to be given parts where I could hold a magazine with them secreted inside for easy reference. By the time I finally escaped, I had learned not only quite a few of the tricks but also more than one of the disasters that can occur in showbiz.
The tricks, as anyone knows who served during the war, were not confined to showbiz. In North Africa especially, the war was an extraordinary affair in more ways than one. Since the natives were always short of everything, stealing, swindle and fraud were indulged in on an enormous scale. The British were not alone in this. The Italian army also suffered from it and, according to the Rommel Papers, so did the Afrika Korps, and despite the efforts of specialized groups designed to stop it, it was never put down. Confusion was added to by both sides using each other’s captured weapons, vehicles, even clothes. As each ran short, they refitted themselves on their next move forward in the yo-yo war that was being conducted. And men of both sides managed from time to time to live for considerable periods behind each other’s lines – deliberately to gather information or for sabotage, or accidentally as they found themselves cut off by the fighting. One escaped German prisoner was reported to have worked for a time as a waiter in a British senior officers’ mess where plans were discussed over food.
It couldn’t have been too difficult to merge into the crowd. I myself once saw a group of Italian prisoners passing through a station entrance under guard when several of them were cut off by the hurrying people heading for trains. For several wild minutes they were free men and, had they not obviously considered it safer to remain prisoners than to be free, could easily have escaped and vanished because, despite their Italian uniforms, no one took the slightest notice of them.
All this is mentioned merely to show that the events described in this story could have happened, even if they didn’t.
I am indebted for concert party details to Fighting for a Laugh, by Richard Fawkes, and for information concerning the misappropriation of equipment to Tail of an Army, by J. K. Stanford.
Part One
Chapter 1
Edward Kitchener Clegg had been enjoying Cairo, even if he didn’t enjoy being in the army.
He’d been in a show at Golders Green when his call-up papers had arrived and, though he’d managed to put off his appearance in khaki until they’d found a replacement for him, in the end he’d had to go. Because of an old injury caused by falling into the orchestra pit during a comic ballet at the Hippodrome in Wallasey in 1938 when he’d had a couple of drinks, he’d been made a Pay Corps babu. But, working at accounts during the day and following his old profession at night as part of a concert party that entertained the troops of Northern Command, he’d just decided that the war was bearable after all when he was posted to Cairo.
He wasn’t over-excited at the prospect, but when he arrived in Egypt he found that even for a corporal pay clerk Cairo wasn’t bad. There was plenty to eat and drink and everybody worked peacetime hours, staff officers lunching, sleeping and playing games at the Cairo clubs, while men in on urgent business from the desert with scorched skins, burned-out eyes and sand in their hair, had to kick their heels until five o’clock when they strolled back to their desks. Even the fitters in the workshops of the Delta avoided doing too much so they could keep up their strength to go out dancing in the evening.
Morale, however, was said to be low – not at the front, of course, where nobody seemed very worried about the war, but at the back where there was no danger of being shot at – and every now and again there was a blitz with orders from the High Altar that everybody had to buckle down, work harder, get their hair cut, wear sun helmets, avoid exposing themselves to the sun, and be smart and alert at all times. Such orders never had a chance, of course, because the men out in the desert had worn nothing but side hats for some time and staff officers regularly fried themselves to crisps round the Gezira swimming pools without coming to any harm; while the technicians in the base workshops considered that smartness indicated a lack of professionalism and preferred to be scruffy. Come to that, they also liked to sleep off their lunch and when, because of the lost man-hours that resulted, an attempt was made to give them their main meal at night, they complained they were weak from hunger during the afternoon. It was important enough to occupy the minds of the staff for some time.
The panics never lasted long, of course, and they all got back to their personal comfort as quickly as possible. Everybody had vehicle seat cushions as pillows for their beds
