Royal Corps of Signals

Dud's Army.
Chapter 12
Bugs and Bunnies

Having arrived in Cyprus during the early winter months there was time to more casually accustom oneself to the higher temperatures along with getting a tan started ahead of the summer. One of the trademarks of a newly arrived nig-nog was his lily-whiteness, contrasting unhealthily with the tanned long-timers. This new-boy pallor would provoke the call to “Get yer knees brown, matey.” No question the sun shone to strong effect in Cyprus. Albert The Lone Army Cook, for instance, initially took to naked sunbathing which resulted in a serious sunburn to his more precious parts. He needed hospitalisation to bring him back to rights. One would have thought that a trained cook would not have been so silly as to roast himself, but to be sure, vanity and sanity have only a common rhyme to connect them.

A further tell-tale, nig-nog characteristic at Cape Gata was to appear at the swimming place covered in red blotches - a sure sign of the visitations of bed bugs. These suckers not only infested mattress crannies but also established colonies in the wooden walls the blokes were encouraged to build around their tents. At the end of the day as darkness fell the bugs could actually be observed marching out in orderly columns from their daytime retreat, deploying for attack in perfect formation. It was obvious from their precision of march they were Army bugs and naturally they favoured the soft white bodies of nig-nogs. The fellows who regularly went swimming were not sucked on, probably due to the sea-salt on their bodies. Periodically every inch of one’s mattress had to be scrutinised and the tent walls sprayed with DDT. The whole camp regularly went to war against bed bugs but they proved a stubborn and elusive enemy. It never occurred to anyone in management to prohibit the tent’s encirclement of nailed up boards.

Life at 280 SU settled into a routine of eat, sleep, work and play, the latter providing the dominant interest for us Radio Relay types. Very occasionally there came a need for two of us to drop one of the sixty-foot high Yagi antenna, for example, which we brought down and re-erected using the cantilever method invented by Archimedes. The only other job comprised changing the oscillator crystal in one or other of the AN/TRC sets and retuning - a half-hour’s concentration at most. Considering we had trained for eight months prior to our posting one might suppose we were a shade over-qualified and a deeper shade under-worked. But if there were management rumblings over the few hours we were at our post and the very little we did during those hours we were not privy to such noises. Without fail we maintained the critical RAF phone channels open, day and night, ad infinitum, and this net result of Army presence seemed to be sufficient.

I had not done a month’s worth of shifts before discovering the presence of rabbits. At least I supposed the creatures were rabbits although they might have been hares. Their ears were longer than British rabbits but in all other respects they seemed quite standard. They frequented the area of bush between the back of our equipment hut and the barbed wire perimeter. There was nothing for it but to immediately consider the prospect of rabbit pie. Albert expressed full support for the notion and would provide the bacon, onion, apple, bay leaf, suet crust and oven time in the event I could provide the elemental ingredient. So, as Mrs Beeton famously remarked, and eventually wrote down in a book: “First catch your rabbit.”

One knew how to catch rabbits and one had done so since fourteen years of age. One could net the burrows and slip in the ferret, or net along the brambled railway embankments and use the village dogs to drive them out. One could go out in the early morning or late evening and shoot them with either a four-ten, a twelve bore or even a catapult. And one could set snares wherever the rabbit commonly runs. As an impecunious sixteen-year-old I had employed this latter method to good advantage, selling my goods at two-and-sixpence each. But in camp there were no ferrets, dogs, nets, catapults or shotguns; it would have to be snares. And lacking an ironmonger’s shop, they would have to be manufactured.

A proper snare, or slip as it is called in Newfoundland, is fashioned from braided brass wire with an eyelet of the same material at one end to assure the wire clean travel. There was no braided, brass wire in camp. I settled for braided, copper wire which is inferior to brass in this application by token of its lack of spring and tensile strength, but I made them up all the same, using brass eyelets taken from my football boots. The runs through the bush were easy to recognise and it was with high hopes I set my loops in the most promising, well-travelled courses. Yet try as I might those Cypriot rabbits outfoxed me, so to speak, and I never succeeded in catching one. On returning to my traps I found my loops dismissively brushed aside. Not accustomed to failure in this pursuit one concluded that either the creatures’ inordinately long ears or excessively bouncing gait confounded the scope of the slip no matter what diameter or distance above ground level I arranged them.

Failure in this enterprise was no great loss to me but Albert was disappointed, the chance of his bringing off such an elegant dish at the Cape Gata cookhouse coming infrequently. Further, producing a rabbit pie from one’s hat, so to speak, would have gone far to restore the damage done to his psyche as a result of the still-rankling, sun-burning debacle of last summer. I felt badly for Albert and figured if I could contact someone in the motor pool and thereby acquire an old rubber inner tube I’d have the necessary propellant to make a catapult. I was an excellent shot with this weapon. But while thus engaged in solving my rabbit problem, a call came through for me to pack up and prepare for a sojourn in a Signals camp to the west of Episkopi called Paramali.

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