Royal Corps of Signals
Dud's
Army
Chapter 8
Episkopi
Our plane turned out to be a Hastings, four-prop, military transport - noisy like hell. I was given a window seat, Jack was elsewhere. This flight would be our first.
There was barely a pause after taxiing to the end of the runway where our pilot swung us in a great arc to the heading, gunned the engines to maximum revs and set the plane into a forward motion. We bucketed along the straight, teeth rattling. The acceleration pinned us to our seats. It was as though our machine then bludgeoned its way into the air by sheer brute force, the four engines together exerting a staggering five thousand and eighty-eight brake horse power. I got a kick from imagining those many horses, with wings, powering us up. We got off the ground alright, banking alarmingly as we adjusted our course for the Middle East.
I remember some details of the flight. The marine commandos I’d seen at Woolwich were aboard, as quietly menacing as ever. There was a spare flight crew, all leather jackets and lambs-wool collars, playing cards and smoking in the rear. There was a scattering of civilians, one seated by me. The noise from the engines was deafening. From my seat at the wing I could see the circular haze of the propellers snatching and flinging bits of cloud at unbelievable speeds. In contrast, the ground, incomprehensibly distanced below, moved beneath us at a caterpillar crawl.
It occurred to me that flying was a dodgier business than I had imagined. Our aircraft seemed disconcertingly flimsy, appearing similar in construction to the balsa-wood and paper models we made as teenagers. And my experience of petrol engines was that they were continually going wrong. My father and my uncles, I had twelve of the latter, were forever getting-out-of-and-getting-under their second-hand cars. Whenever a group of them would meet up they would inevitably talk cars, with failing engines as a favoured sub-topic. But all four of the Bristol Hercules engines on our Hastings, though occasionally spitting out flame and smoke, never faltered. I comforted myself with the thought that unlike my uncles’ car engines, our plane’s engines were designed to win wars.
We landed in Malta to refuel, the approach over the water so low I thought we were going to ditch. The spare flight crew got off and did not return. It had taken us seven hours to get this far. It was definitely warmer in Malta.
Cyprus is a thousand miles due east of Malta. I remember the journey only as one of many images: that of flying the entire distance encased within variegated climes of blue. The cerulean of the sea mingled with the azure of the sky together coloured the sparkling heaven through which we passed. Far below sailed tiny clouds, a dispersed armada of white smudges. “How sweet to be a cloud, floating in the blue,” remembered from Children’s Hour defined the prospect for me. The clouds convoyed with us all the way to Cyprus, the Mediterranean Sea beneath them a serrated blue porridge.
On landing in Nicosia we were immediately collared and loaded into the back of a canvas-covered, 15 cwt. Army truck. Climbing in with us was a British infantryman toting a Bren gun. He let down a camouflaged piece of netting across the back and fastened it to the side frames and tailgate, a sergeant outside finishing off. With the slam of the sergeant’s door forward we were off and going like the clappers, our driver determined we should understand he had been trained by the Pioneer Corps. In spite of my two stripes I hadn’t a clue where we were going. By now the display of them made me uncomfortable; at every turn there were private soldiers way more competent than myself.
The truck had chariot suspension and we were forced to grip the slatted wooden bench rattling beneath us for the sake of general safety. Our Bren-gunner sat closest to the road, his gun across his dirty brown knees, his boots caked with limed clay. He was tanned, tough and cheerful. He looked back, winked at us and lit up a cigarette. Jack asked him what the net across the back of our truck was for. The answer came quick enough:
"Stop the baastuds lobbin' bombs in."
We squinted through the netting out to the baking hot streets of Nicosia. I immediately noticed the black-garbed ladies. Some were at roadwork, going at it with pick and shovel, or hefting baskets, others imperiously riding donkeys. Their white-shirted counterparts, the men folk, were to be observed mostly sitting around in the shade of cafés and awnings. There was much dust, generated by the tyres of swiftly-passing motorised vehicles like ours. Many of the pedestrians covered their lower faces with light scarves, obviously against breathing in the dust, but to my eyes they looked like potential terrorists avoiding recognition. But on we motored with no action taken against us. No “ bomb-lobbin’ baastud.“ manifested. All that I could see were everyday people dealing with the curse of heat and dust. The men-folk back home would not have gotten away with what I was seeing here, but that was not terrorism, well, not the kind we were here to deal with. So how did one recognise the enemy? Wait until they lob? Jack and I would do better to covertly watch the demeanour of our rifleman than that of any of the Cypriots outside: so long as our man stayed cool we could do the same. I cannot recall his regiment but I remember being impressed by that British soldier who guarded us.
So in cautious mood, at rally speed, we tore our way south to Limassol and then west to Episkopi. By then, except for a decent road, we had quit civilisation. The sun shone from a blue sky. There came quick glimpses of a blue sea, at which Jack and I would silently signal each other our delight. From going abroad to being abroad was rapidly rearranging our priorities. We went storming through some low scrubby hills, the crumbling soil of the hillsides cream-white between dark-green patches of scrub. The road steepened, starting us on a bit of a climb. The driver double-declutched into a lower gear and hit the slope with a smooth amalgam of gears, clutch, revs and road speed, pushing the truck on without hesitation or pause. It was perfect ambush country, I thought. Our bodyguard lit a cigarette. On we travelled, with nothing much to do but hang on. As the time passed it didn’t seem to matter much where we were going; only the getting there was looked forward to.
Dry and dusty, we drew up at the barbed-wired entrance to Episkopi, a Signals 3GHQ, a garrison, thereby qualifying for a population of five thousand, their doings spread untidily over the face of dazzling, crumbling, pock-faced hill, sloping to the south and on down to the sea. At the top of the hill lay some important-looking Signals installations, and as one descended from there so did the status of each succeeding station and building. We were placed in a four-bed tent at the very bottom of the hill. We were still nig-nogs. But a great expanse of the bluest sea we’d ever seen was on our doorstep, in our faces. We could even see it when we laid down in our tent. We were excited. It was all so foreign.
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