The general was delighted. ‘Just one or two tips,’ he pointed out to Clegg. ‘And I hope as a professional you won’t take them amiss. I always thought the original of the “Ave Maria” was in Latin, and you should tell your female impersonator not to raise his arms at the end of his act when he’s acknowledging the applause. Either that or he should shave under his arms. Otherwise, no complaints. Just what the troops want. Tits and tinsel. Pity we haven’t a few spare ATS girls.’
Calling themselves the Desert Ratbags, they put on a show wherever anyone would erect a stage from ammunition boxes. Once the curtains fell on them as they were being opened and stopped the show before it had even started; once Caccia fell through a gap in the ammunition-box stage and sprained his ankle; and once, when a German aeroplane came over and dropped bombs nearby, the whole audience and cast bolted, leaving an amateur escapologist they’d recruited from Base Workshops still tied up onstage. But they improved all the time as they thought of new material. Clegg worked up a comic strong-man act, then, because there were two of them who could rattle off Italian at full speed – Morton who had grown up with it and Caccia who had spoken it constantly at home – they worked up the German-officer-and-Italian-soldier sketch into a finale with three ‘Italians’ on stage so they could finish with a song the South Africans had sung about them after Wavell had kicked them out of Libya – ‘Where do we go from here, Now that we’ve lost Bardia?’ To make it look better, they obtained captured Italian uniforms and a German jacket and cap.
For a month they moved about the desert between Sidi Barrani and Mersa Matruh. The Italians had been the first to push forward in 1940, making a hesitant thrust into Egypt, which had been wiped away before the year was ended as Wavell’s army flung them back all the way to Beda Fomm on the bulge of Cyrenaica. Unfortunately, while they’d still been crowing at their success, there’d been a shout for help from Greece and, with half the crack units of the Desert Army crossing to the mainland of Europe, while nobody was looking a lot of uncomfortably aggressive Germans had appeared in Africa and in no time at all had slammed the British back again so that, after a little to-ing and fro-ing, the line had finally settled down just west of the Egyptian border. It was now considered to be the British turn again.
At the end of May Clegg was asked to put on a few performances at Zuq, which was just beyond the Egyptian frontier. They’d all been to Zuq at one time or another. It was a picturesque coastal settlement that had been part of Mussolini’s scheme for the colonization of Libya, one of those strange bastard towns on the coast which was neither Arab nor Italian, but a mixture of both. To create jobs, under the Ente Colonizazzione Libia, put in force by the Italian government after they had acquired the territory from the Turks after the war of 1911, there were smallholdings providing vegetables and fruit for the Italian mainland, and a furniture factory where Arab craftsmen created excellent North African furniture to grace the homes of party officials in Rome, and a cheaper range that was not so excellent to fill the small box-like houses the government had provided for the colonists.
There was a mosque among the palms and spreading bougainvillaea, a bombed-out white church and a few shops, a governor’s residence, a hospital and, in the centre of the town, an amphitheatre dating back to the empire of Hadrian. It was only small and at some time in the past it had been partly destroyed by an earthquake, but there were still tiers of stone terraces and a lot of chambers filled with drifted sand. Finally, just outside the town there was a fort looking like something out of Beau Geste, built years before by the Italians as an observation post but now out of date and used only as a transport base, and, near the harbour, a few corrugated-iron huts and warehouses erected by whichever army happened to have possession of the place in the backwards and forwards sway of the war, or by the few Libyan or Italian civilians who had businesses there.
Clegg agreed at once. Zuq, he felt, was far enough forward for them to be performing to genuine front-line troops but just far enough back for them to be safe from anything but a prowling Messerschmitt.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll give it a go.’
As it happened, it didn’t work out quite as they expected because before long other people became involved. Among them Colonel Horace Thomas Dampier, MC and Bar, Inspector of Equipment to the Army in the Middle East.
Chapter 2
Colonel Dampier wasn’t naturally an even-tempered man. He was tall, good-looking, inclined to plumpness as age caught up with him, but upright in bearing in the best military fashion, complete with greying temples and brisk clipped moustache.
For months now, he had been struggling to stop the theft of army stores. In other wars, plundering hadn’t started until you’d beaten the enemy, and it had never been easy anyway, because in those days everyone moved about on foot and you had to carry your loot on your back. Nowadays, nobody bothered to wait until the enemy was in retreat and, since everyone now used lorries, the loot had grown larger and things were a great deal easier. With half Egypt waiting with open arms for anything that was going, people simply stole everything that wasn’t screwed down and flogged it in the Cairo black market.
To Dampier, a magistrate in
