‘Howly Mother of God!’ He snatched his cap off and, tossing it into the back of the lorry, knocked Dampier’s off his head to the ground and stood on it. In his excitement his accent slipped back to his native Galway. ‘’Tis Italians they are, sorr!’
Dampier was just about to bolt when Rafferty grasped his arm. ‘Stand still, sir,’ he said. ‘Put on your sunglasses and wave.’
Bareheaded, the badges on their shirts blurred by the coating of dust, they stood by their lorry, grinning like death’s heads and waving as the Italians roared past. Their waves were answered but nobody took the trouble to stop and they could only assume the Italians were in too big a hurry.
‘They think we’re prisoners,’ Dampier gasped as the last lorry passed.
‘No, sir.’ Rafferty shook his head. ‘They’re thinkin’ we’re Italians, and I reckon it might be a good idea if we hopped it. I don’t fancy ending up in the bag.’
Climbing hurriedly into the vehicles, they swung them round and started heading eastwards again. Half an hour later they were obliged to stop once more. Ahead of them in the desert to the south through the rolling clouds of dust they could see a column of vehicles stretching right across their front.
‘Italians, Mr Rafferty?’ Dampier asked.
‘That they are, sir. And a lot of ’em too. And their direction’s east. Which, from our point of view, is the wrong one.’
At roughly the same time as Dampier’s party was trying to get out of Zuq, the Desert Ratbags were hurtling along the coast road, trying to get in. Their audience was supposed to be waiting, and, directed through a narrow gap at the north end of the minefield east of Sofi, like Dampier’s group, they had been stopped in their tracks by the storm. Bedding down in the lorry among their property baskets and flats and folded curtains, they had passed a disturbed night. There had been a lot of noise in the darkness and the sound of grinding gears but with the dawn they had got going again. By this time, however, though the visibility had improved, the sun was totally blotted out. Their lips were dry but, muffled against the flying sand and aware how late they were, they were in a hurry.
They were passing now through an area of pinky-red gravel with areas of stony ground where the going altered and the land grew uneven, with large plate-like stones jutting from the earth and flat pebbles rattling away from under the wheels. Here and there were patches of shrubs, dried out by the sun, uprooted clumps of it clattering away before the wind which blew with a parching dryness to leave sand in the folds of their clothes and in the sweaty wrinkles of their faces.
‘We can’t let them down,’ Clegg said with showbiz indestructibility. ‘They said they’d fix up a stage for us. They’ll play hell if we don’t turn up.’
The lorry’s engine had been giving trouble after the storm and they had had to stop for a while for the cursing Caccia to stick his head inside the bonnet to put it right. He was now trying hard to catch up on time.
‘We can’t be late either,’ Morton said. ‘We’d start with the audience hostile. The show’d die on us.’
‘Name any theatre you like,’ Clegg replied. ‘I died there at some time in my career.’
Deciding to dress as they drove so they could go into the opening sketch as soon as they arrived, they fought to keep their scarves over their faces against the flying sand.
‘It’ll be a hell of a performance in this lot,’ Clegg observed, scratching at the grit that had got under his shirt. ‘Even Jones can’t sing with his mouth full of sand.’
‘They’ll have rigged something up indoors,’ Morton said. ‘They’ll have found a warehouse or something. There are a lot of old sheds near the harbour.’
After a while, they passed a couple of guns and a few groups of men. They were in khaki shorts and shirts like everyone else in the desert, and like the Ratbags were well coated with dust so that nobody in the lorry took any notice of them because they were busy getting everything ready to go straight into their first number.
‘I think I’m going to have a headache.’ Jones’s nerves always seemed to take over when things went wrong, and his small, ugly, dirty face was gloomy. ‘And I’ve forgotten me lines. What do we open with?’
‘The song. Then the Italian sketch and “I’ve broken me bootlace”. Caccia comes back with “Use spaghetti”. Remember?’
Surrounded by dust, the lorry rolled past another group of soldiers. As Caccia slowed down, everybody stuck their heads out, Italian caps and all, to see where they were. The soldiers, their faces muffled against the sand, waved them past. A few minutes later, Jones looked at Clegg. He’d gone pale, Clegg noticed, and his headache seemed to have started because he was staring with such intensity he seemed paralysed.
He gestured nervously. ‘That lot back there, man,’ he muttered, looking at the uniform Clegg was wearing. ‘They thought we were Italians.’
‘Well,’ Clegg said, ‘that’s what we’re supposed to be, isn’t it?’
‘Why, aye, boy,’ Jones agreed. ‘But that lot weren’t English, see?’ His voice cracked as he expressed the opinion that had already occurred to Warrant Officer Rafferty. ‘They were Italians! Real Italians!’
Part Two
Chapter 1
The thought that had occurred to Jones the Song and Warrant Officer Rafferty had crossed Caccia’s mind, too, because instead of slackening speed when the lorry reached the spot where they were supposed to put on their performance he simply kept going.
Nobody argued. Suddenly they were all too scared. The stage was there all right, in the open against the blank wall of a warehouse, built of ammunition boxes and facing rows of sandbags laid out to make tiers of seats. It might have been a good show, Clegg thought, because the wind
