Since the troops out in the blue would need to laugh as much as anything else, he decided on comedy and a few tuneful songs and in the end settled on a group of no more than four. That way, he felt, they could travel light with one lorry for themselves and all their props. Nobody in the desert, he decided, was going to welcome a bloody great crowd all needing to be fed and watered.
The men he chose were a mixed bag. Second-in-command was Lancelot Hugh Morton who, born of wealthy parents who disliked English weather, had had the good fortune to grow up in southern Switzerland and could speak Italian, French and German without an accent. He had a Cambridge degree in European languages and should have had a commission, but a sardonic manner had put the interviewing board off and instead he had ended up as a corporal in Intelligence, examining captured Italian stores NCOs and investigating the inventories of equipment seized in Wavell’s dash to Bardia the year before. Since it was hardly the most exciting job there was, he had decided to seek a change and, though he was an oddity, he had appeared in shows at university and Clegg thought that between them they might produce some good material.
For the songs he found Private Ivor Elwyn Jones, of the Gordons, who, of course, turned out to be Welsh and, like all Welshmen, knew everything there was to know about singing. Trained on hymns, he loved applause, sang well enough to deserve it and could reach notes so high Morton insisted he must have had a nasty accident at some point in his career. ‘High Cs, man, see,’ he liked to boast. ‘Not always, o’ course, but mostly.’ Unfortunately, his appearance didn’t match his talent; he was a small highly strung man with a worn gnome-like face who was unkempt and vaguely unhygienic in a uniform that fitted where it touched. His badges were unpolished, his buttons hanging off and his boots unshined. Happily, he sang most of the time in prop clothes.
Finally, there was Arthur Caccia, whose father ran a grocery shop in Soho. As he was in the catering trade in Civvy Street, the army had naturally made him a mechanic and he was more than eager for a change. He had a good voice, a nice line in Cockney humour and a swift mind that could produce ideas. Being on the small side, he could also do female impersonations and, coming from the RASC, could drive and service the lorry they’d been given.
Careful about what they were to put on, Clegg decided jokes about Egyptians were all right because even the song ‘Up your pipe, King Farouk, Hang your bollocks on a hook’ had never offended the Egyptian labourers who crowded the doorways to watch rehearsals. They could also mock the soldiers’ plight and could be vulgar, but they couldn’t be really obscene because up in the desert the men lived a puritanical life, while jokes about unfaithful wives would only cause worry. They decided to play on nostalgia a lot, however, and dug out the sort of songs that made men think of home, and from Clegg’s monologue worked up a sketch about a German officer and an Italian soldier he was trying to send forward towards the fighting. It was an immediate success because everybody laughed at the Italians, who would persist in surrendering, and there was a lot of comic arguing in mock Italian, German and English, and a lot of talk about ice cream and spaghetti, the leaning Tower of Pisa and Mussolini’s underpants.
‘Variety, comedy and somebody who looks like a girl,’ Clegg decided at their first programme conference. ‘And we never perform on Saturday night anywhere near Cairo because Saturday night’s the troops’ traditional booze-up night and nobody’s going to stay in to watch a half-arsed show like ours when he’s got money to spend on beer.’
They collected planks and curtains and a few props and moved about the Nile Delta brushing up their performance on base details until they were ready to go into the desert. Whatever the disasters, they were always welcomed as a change from Shafto’s Shambles, the Arab cinema where you saw old films featuring Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford at three and a half ackers a go – when it did go, because usually it didn’t. It had Egyptian operators and the films usually began upside-down, invariably appeared with the reels in the wrong order and were so overprinted at the sides and bottom with French, Greek and Arabic subtitles the actors were barely visible.
They weren’t the best concert party in the world and their material probably wouldn’t have raised a laugh back in England but the men they tried it out on loved it. With Jones’s soaring tenor always on hand in case things went wrong, they decided they were in business and Clegg reported to the general, who announced he would see their next performance.
They put it on in a Naafi marquee and Jones was in splendid voice so that, his success going to his head, he announced that as an encore he would sing the ‘Ave Maria’. ‘In the original Italian,’ he said.
It was a lot of gibberish because he couldn’t speak Italian but the audience didn’t know and the rest of the show couldn’t have gone better, though Caccia’s female turn when he donned a wig and sang ‘Olga Paulovski, The Beautiful Spy’
