Unknown to the Ratbags, Dampier’s group was just ahead, moving along roughly the same route.
On the way up, they stopped at a café where a bored Egyptian in a greasy evening suit served them with coffee. On the wall was a picture of King Farouk and his bride, taken when both had been a lot younger and slimmer, and, nearby, RAF lorries were dumping stores to make a new airfield. It was here they bumped into Albert Micklethwaite, a war correspondent from Nottingham who was anxious to get a lift forward so he could do a few interviews with men from his home town.
Micklethwaite was plump and pink, his uniform didn’t fit him, and he hadn’t been long in the Middle East, where for most of the time he hadn’t had the faintest idea what was going on. But, with everybody else called up, he had been the only reporter available when his editor had been accredited a war correspondent, and he had been sent out to see ‘what the local lads were doing’.
Micklethwaite had long since decided he didn’t like Egypt. Within two days of arriving he had acquired a rash of prickly heat and been stung by a fly which, judging by the effect it had on him, had a poison sac as big as a cow’s udder. He had no sooner recovered when he’d had his wallet lifted and, before he could report it, had been asked for his documents by a military policeman. Unable to prove he was what he claimed to be, he had been whipped into the Bab-el-Hadid barracks, where the Special Investigation Department of the Military Police had their headquarters, and it had landed him in endless difficulties, which he had only just managed to sort out. He had found a few men from Nottingham around the base camps but they were hardly suffering for their country, and an indignant telegram from home had insisted that he get among the fighting troops. In desperation he had scrounged a lift west with the B echelon of a lancer regiment who, having just informed him they were about to swing south, had advised him he had better scrounge a lift from someone else.
Dampier looked at him in astonishment. ‘A war correspondent?’ he said. ‘One of those fellers who write all that tripe in the newspapers? All that about lean, hard warriors in Cairo? “Bronze, suntanned and muscular.” “Uniforms showing the wear and tear of their hard living.” My good chap, most of the people in Cairo are fat and flabby, with uniforms starched and pressed ready for the next session at Groppi’s.’ He snorted. ‘Too many damn women in Cairo. There weren’t women about in the last war.’
Rafferty lifted his eyes heavenwards. It was a complaint he had already heard many times.
‘Wives were supposed to have been banished to South Africa,’ Dampier went on. ‘But a lot got jobs as secretaries and stayed on, and when you tick somebody off for her bad work you find she’s the bloody brigadier’s better half.’ He lifted an angry face to stare at the newspaperman. ‘The Gezira Club’s full of women and you can play polo and tennis and swim and be watched by crowds as leisurely as at a Test match at Lord’s on a hot day. No wonder the chaps in the desert call them Groppi’s Hussars, the Gaberdine Swine and the Short Range Desert Group. The bloody place’s full of drones of both sexes. Cairo, my good chap, is in perpetual conference. On welfare, passive air defence, morale, sport, entertainment, improvements to hostels, but never, it seems, on fighting the war. Very well’ – he dismissed Micklethwaite with a careless gesture – ‘jump in. We’ll take you forward.’
Grudgingly fitting the chastened Micklethwaite into his little caravan, the Inspector of Equipment moved on at first light, driving fast before news of what he was up to arrived ahead of him. Most of the stores they had unearthed so far had turned out to be honestly held against emergencies by frustrated men who had grown used to having their requests ignored by Cairo. Because so many orders came down the pipeline, no one really knew what they should hold, anyway, so they held as much as they could for safety.
‘When you can’t get the stuff, sir,’ one dogged stores warrant officer caught with three hundred extra suits of battledress admitted, ‘you hang on to it against the time when it’s needed.’
Another unit was found to have seven surplus shirts per man for the same reason, and yet another, a field battery, held a hundred new tyres, none of which fitted any of the vehicles they ran. ‘It’s because when you get new vehicles, sir,’ the quartermaster argued, ‘you can’t get the bloody tyres for them, so we hold ’em just in case.’
The attitude of the men who had stood with bared teeth against the enemy was different again. They carried loot and weren’t ashamed of it. They’d won it from the Italians in a fair fight and, despite orders to the contrary, were not going to hand it in. Every old hand rode a motorbike or in a motor car or lorry, fitters had tools they’d previously only dreamed of, medical officers had equipment they’d never seen since their training; every wrist sported a watch, every officer and sergeant wore Zeiss binoculars, and everybody had dainty Biretta automatics and cameras, all obligingly supplied by the Italians during Wavell’s 1940–1 campaign.
‘After all,’ one cavalry unit’s engineer officer, weary of fighting a running battle with the sand and the engines it was wearing out, said, ‘if we don’t keep them, the bastards in Cairo will, and they haven’t even fought for them. We once captured a crate of Zeiss X12
