He was just reflecting on the thought when he heard the sound of an aeroplane engine and turned to see where it was coming from. Howling over the rooftops, bright against the blue sky, the rondels on its fuselage clear with the letter K near the tail, was a Hurricane. He was just about to wave to it when he saw flashes coming from the wings and heard the rattle of guns.
‘You daft silly sod!’ he screamed. ‘Zuq’s ours!’
Rafferty had dived for shelter but, in a split second of shock, Clegg saw Dampier, trying awkwardly to run, flung aside, his khaki cap tossed into the air and blood on his face, then something kicked Clegg’s foot from under him and he fell against the wall. As he hit his head, he passed out.
When he came round, Morton was leaning over him. ‘You all right?’
‘I think so.’ Clegg looked down at his foot, expecting to see it torn open, but the bullet had only ripped the heel from his boot and done him no harm. ‘Did anybody get hurt?’ he asked. ‘I saw the Old Man—’
‘When I arrived,’ Morton said, ‘Rafferty was pushing him into the back of a lorry to take him to the hospital. He looked as if he’d been shot through the head.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Clegg was shocked at the idiocy of war. ‘Poor old sod! And at his age, too!’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Well,’ he ended, ‘he always wanted to be in the fighting. Pity he had to be killed by it, though.’
Epilogue
That wasn’t the end, of course. Stories go on long after the last full stop.
After the war, like a few others, Clegg went into the theatre in a big way with a whole string of sketches he’d developed in the desert, among them the ludicrous one about a German tourist trying to buy ice cream from an Italian who spoke no German, and the famous Will Hay type act of a half-baked fireman getting into a bucket chain at a fire at the village inn so that the full buckets went back to the tap and the empty ones to the fire. Then, after years of appearing in music hall, he surprised everyone by going legitimate and starring in a whole string of excellent British films before appearing in a repeat of My Fair Lady. When he announced his retirement, he gave interviews to the press, and for the first time the full story of what had happened in and around Zuq appeared in the theatrical magazine Beginners, Please! It was in good theatrical journalese and contained a lot of Clegg’s patter but it was all there just the same.
‘That was a real bit of Elgar’s “Land of H and G”,’ Clegg was reported to have said. ‘I captured Zuq and won the Battle of Alamein. Everybody thought it was Montgomery but it wasn’t. It was me.’
He then explained what had happened to the others. Morton, it seemed, was commissioned in the field, which is always a good way to be commissioned, and since by that time he’d decided he quite liked being an officer, he stayed in the army and, with his degree, his languages and his background, eventually became a major general. ‘He comes to see me when I’m appearing in the West End,’ Clegg pointed out. ‘Sometimes, to please me, in uniform. My agent always demands higher fees on the spot.’
Jones the Song went back to Wales, opened a shop and ended up conducting the local choir. Caccia took over a thriving business in Soho and he and Rosalba now have eight children and a lot of grandchildren. ‘They’ve put on a bit of weight since those days,’ Clegg said.
Rafferty retired and did very well with a spare-parts service for garages. Clinch opened a radio business, while Clutterbuck went into the secondhand car game. Micklethwaite came off worst. He had the biggest story ever and he wasn’t allowed to write it because the army refused to let him give their victory at Zuq to a mixed group of actors, singers, storebashers, deserters, prisoners-of-war and what-have-you. Even when he finally did write it, nobody believed it.
‘He wasn’t blessed with a lot of luck,’ Clegg added.
Then, ‘What about Dampier?’ he was asked. ‘Did you bury him out there?’
Clegg’s reaction was unexpected. ‘God bless you, no! He didn’t die. The bullet only scraped his scalp and did no more than raise a groove like a tram track across the top of his head. When we went to the hospital to pay our last respects, he was sitting up in bed trying to get his mitts on an Italian nurse. He ended up a brigadier with a DSO and lord lieutenant of his county.’
There was also just a little bit more that didn’t appear in Beginners, Please! but was fact, nevertheless.
‘We had a reunion a few years back,’ Clegg said, ‘and he made a speech. Everybody turned up. Coffin and Grady and Fee, who was over on a visit from Australia. Even Scarlatti. Even Schwartzheiss and Erwin from Germany. Schwartzheiss was making a lot of money as a building contractor by then – experience, I suppose you’d call it – and Erwin owned an art gallery in Wiesbaden and was picking up a fortune from American tourists. He wasn’t a bad chap. His only fault was that he talked too much. The only one who couldn’t make it was Clutterbuck.’
‘Why didn’t
