The Sixteen (7 page)

In a large, side-less marquee, where wind and dust passed straight through, we were doled out pitiful portions of greasy eggs, stringy bacon and dried-up porridge mixed with dust and grit. Even before we had time to finish, we’d be rousted out for works parade, with barely enough time to say ‘hello’ to one another. Before leaving the tent, we had to wash our mess tins and plates in two small tin baths set up on a trestle table. Hundreds of us had to use the same water and it was always thick with grease, even
though the kitchen staff kept changing it. If you were one of the lucky ones who managed to get to the water first, you might just end up with clean kit!

After breakfast we’d line up on the parade ground, a level area surrounded by tents with a flagpole stuck in the middle. And, as we stood to attention, small whirlwinds called dust devils would whip past us making us grab on to our hats and each other. Through the swirling dust, we would see that stupid little sergeant coming towards us trying to hold on to his orders and shouting at the same time.

I
’d never heard of Cyprus until we’d landed there. But one important thing we all learned from the moment we arrived, was just how much the Cypriots hated us.

The Greek Cypriots, under General Grivas, wanted self-government and ENOSIS (union) with the Greek mainland despite almost a third of its citizens, who were of Turkish descent, being bitterly opposed to this. In 1923, Turkey signed an agreement that gave up all claims to Cyprus, which then became a British colony in 1925. However, after the Second World War, Britain refused to give Cyprus the right to self-government and by 1955, the Greek Cypriot National Organisation of Cypriot Freedom-Fighters (EOKA) began an armed struggle for liberation. This came to a head during 1957–8 with the outbreak of serious riots and fighting between Greek and Turkish factions. Due to the strategic importance of the island’s proximity to the Middle East, Britain was forced to pass a special Emergency Powers Act and increase its
presence on the island, in order to protect its military installations there and to control the increase in hostilities.

The British troops taken to Cyprus were told that they were there to keep the peace between the Greeks and the Turks and to protect government property. However, the Greeks mainly regarded us as the enemy and did their utmost to get rid of us, and didn’t seem to care how they went about it! Not just satisfied with killing British troops, there had also been incidents involving the deaths of British servicemen’s families too. The situation there at that time was similar to the one which would eventually erupt in Northern Ireland years later.

It certainly made no difference to the terrorists that my unit was in Cyprus mainly to repair roads and supply the fighting troops, not to take part in any peacekeeping exercise – they still would have liked to get rid of us all. This frustrated me as, from what I could see, we’d been given little or no training at all to deal with a dangerous situation like this. In fact, we were treated little better than POWs (prisoners of war) and had to set up camp virtually from scratch.

The living conditions at our campsite were very basic and had hardly improved since we’d moved in. The planners in their wisdom, must have chosen the most barren piece of rocky wasteland they could find in the area to build this particular camp. I hated it the moment I saw it and continued to hate every minute of being there!

Our washing facilities were as basic as the toilets and, although drinking water was regularly brought to the camp in two-wheeled mobile tanks, these stood on the main compound in full sunshine for most of the day, so the water was always warm. Digging latrines was especially difficult due to the hard, sun-baked, rocky landscape. I was not impressed! This was not
what I had expected of army life. I could have stayed at home to dig roads like a navvy and probably earned a darn sight more than army pay!

Having experienced first-hand the terrorists’ activities, on our first night here, I was understandably nervous to be sitting on a tin bucket (due to the lack of proper toilet facilities) surrounded by a four-foot wall of hessian, and fully expected to have my butt shot off at any moment. It certainly didn’t give me peace of mind or help my stuttering! Even in my crowded home in Byker, I’d had a lot more privacy than here. I found having someone else coming in when you’re on the toilet, then sitting down right next to you very difficult to get used to.

My mate Dave Buckfield burst into the latrines, on this particular occasion. He had a painful expression on his face as, like most of us in the camp, he was suffering from dysentery. He sat down next to me.

‘’Ere ’eard the good news, Geordie?’ he said in his strong cockney accent.

‘Wh-what’s that?’ The only good news I could be given was that they were shipping me back home!

‘They’re only settin’ us bloomin’ free this weekend. We can go down to the bloody beach on our own! Well, that’s not strictly true, there ’as to be at least three of us, an’ one of us will ’ave to carry a rifle. You coming, mate?’ I shook my head. ‘You’ll ’ave to come otherwise we won’t be able to go, there ’as to be three of us! C’mon, it’ll be a larf!’

Some great news! It certainly didn’t cheer me up; all I wanted was to get back home, away from the heat, the flies, the smells and the deadly dull routine which had set in during our first couple of weeks at the camp. So far, we hadn’t been given any proper recreational time since we arrived and so this first ‘weekend off’
was an eagerly anticipated event, and most of the guys wanted to go to the local beach about a couple of miles from the camp.

Although in general I got on well with people, I wasn’t really ‘one of the lads’ – I didn’t fit in. I didn’t drink at all, had never tasted the stuff, whereas they all drank a lot. I was very self-conscious about my stammer and tended to keep to myself. I was also very disillusioned with army life, which to me appeared to consist of endless navvy work, then going out to get blind drunk afterwards. Luckily, the two lads I shared a tent with, Bill and Dave, were good fun. The three of us got on very well and shared a lot of laughs.

The two of them kept on at me, pestering me to go with them.

‘Come on, Geordie, it’ll be a laugh!’

‘C’mon, mate, ’ave some fun!’

In the end they convinced me to go with them and so, when Saturday morning came, we grabbed a couple of blankets to take with us, as we’d been warned that the sand got so hot you couldn’t lie on it. Before we were allowed to leave the camp, we had to report to the ‘stupid little sergeant’ who woke us every morning. He gave us a lecture on what to expect when we got to the beach and what time we had to be back. Then he went on about making sure that we kept covered up and didn’t get badly sunburned, or fire the damned rifle by mistake. Though what the hell they thought we’d be able to do with the three rounds we’d been issued, was beyond me!

After this lengthy talk, he eventually let us go and as we left the camp we felt as though we had just been let out of prison and rejoined ‘normal’ life once more. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were carrying a rifle, we could easily have forgotten that we were soldiers. We were just a group of young lads laughing and joking together as we walked along, cheered by the prospect of having some ordinary fun.

We were all wearing standard army-issue shorts, short-sleeved army shirts, white socks and black sandshoes. The shorts were horrendous – huge, baggy things that flapped around our knees like something a music-hall comedian would wear. In an attempt to get these terrible things to look half decent, most of the lads paid a local Greek bloke to take them in; this reduced the flapping effect and made them look a helluva lot smarter. Unfortunately, as new arrivals, we hadn’t been given the opportunity to either buy any suitable clothes or have these alterations done yet, so we flapped our way along the hot dusty road.

It took about twenty minutes to get down to the beach, which was a couple of miles away at Episkopi. There were troops everywhere, all heading in the same general direction. Those of us who’d only recently left Britain in the middle of winter were still becoming acclimatised to the weather and to us it was baking hot, yet the summer hadn’t even started in earnest yet. We couldn’t get to the beach quickly enough. All we wanted to do was get into the water to cool ourselves down.

Eventually, we came to a fairly long tunnel that had been blasted through the huge rock cliffs. On the top of these rock faces were a number of houses, which were used as married quarters. The tunnel was dark and dank, but once we got through to the other side a beautiful, golden sandy beach appeared in front of us. The sea was an incredibly bright blue colour that I had never seen before, its surface sparkling and glinting in the fierce sunlight. It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie.

The long, wide golden bay stretched off into the distance to the left of the tunnel and formed a crescent-shaped bowl that was surrounded on three sides by steep, craggy cliffs. Also to the left of the tunnel, and some way from its entrance, was a golf course for officers’ use only. The track from the tunnel continued, across a wide
area lightly covered with scrub, towards a cluster of huts standing on the beach itself. These huts sold refreshments, cold drinks and hot dogs, although God knows it was hot enough without hot food too. You had to run like hell over the beach to the water, as the sand was so hot it actually burnt the soles of your feet.

The layout of the beach was just as the sergeant had described it, divided into sections: one for officers and their families near to the tunnel, one for other ranks, and a further section for families and children out of sight of the surrounding hills and possible snipers.

Apparently, there had been a number of occasions where shots had been fired at servicemen on the beach and we’d been told to keep the rifle with us at all times. This meant one of us carrying the rifle just in case we had to defend ourselves and taking it in turns to keep watch while the others swam, and was the reason we’d been warned to always go swimming in groups of at least three.

We made our way along the crowded beach, away from the officers’ area, and found a spot about one hundred yards from one of the refreshment huts, which was covered with ‘Coca-Cola’ signs. By the time I’d laid the blankets out on the sand, Bill had already stripped down to his trunks and run off towards the sea.

‘Stay ’ere, Geordie, with the rifle an’ our gear,’ Dave said. ‘I’ll go an’ get some cold drinks an’ sandwiches. We can go an’ join ’im later!’

I lay on the blanket using Bill’s clothes as a pillow, and idly watched a nearby group of blokes who were playing a noisy game of volleyball. Dave was only away a few minutes but when he got back sweat was pouring from him. He plonked down on the blanket beside me.

‘Gordon Bennett,’ he panted. ‘It’s hot enough to fry a bleedin’ egg!’

‘Well, wh-why don’t you go and join B-bill for a s-s-swim, the
w-water looks g-great?’ I told him. ‘I’ll w-watch our g-gear and go when you g-get back b-but don’t b-be all day, I don’t w-want to b-be roasted alive!’

‘Okay, Geordie. Cheers, mate.’ He winked and ran off.

I sipped the ice-cold drink and rubbed the bottle across my forehead and chest to help cool me down. For the first time since I’d arrived on the island, things were starting to look up a bit and I thought that if this was the way most weekends were going to be spent, then my time in the army might not be too bad after all. Although I felt a little more relaxed, I was still very homesick and missed my mother and sisters a great deal. Knowing that it would be at least eighteen months before I saw them again just made it worse: a year-and-a-half on this godforsaken island!

I finished my drink and lay back. It was growing even hotter now and the beach was packed with groups of off-duty servicemen lounging about while others played football or volleyball, and in the cordoned-off family area, the married men sunbathed and picnicked with their families. It was very easy to spot any new arrivals from England: they were generally lily-white and looked like ghosts and until the three of us had arrived on the beach we’d imagined that our newly acquired suntans made us look like bronzed Hollywood film stars. But now looking around at the host of well-tanned bodies, I could see that Dave, Bill and I still easily fell into the ‘ghost’ category!

Getting sunburned was considered a serious offence and NCOs constantly warned us about the dangers of getting burnt, and how much damage the strong sun, and its reflection off the sand and sea, could do to our eyes. To help prevent this, we’d each obtained what passed in those days for army-issue sunglasses.

These consisted of a long piece of celluloid with a v-shaped cut-out and a small hole at each end through which a rubber band
was tied. When you put the band over your head, with the ‘v’ inverted over the bridge of your nose, the plastic wrapped around your cheeks and shielded your eyes very effectively. Generally, drivers of motorcycles and open vehicles used these as protection against dust and insects, but the plastic in theirs was clear, unlike the pair that I now put on. These had been modified and the clear strip replaced by an almost opaque layer of dark, bottle-green plastic. In fact, they were so dark that I could barely make out the nearby game of volleyball and the guys playing it, who now only appeared as shadows, while the rest of the beach disappeared into a green haze.

A figure emerged from the direction of the volleyball game and came into my line of vision, gradually growing larger and larger as it neared me. I watched him lazily until, eventually, he blocked out the sunlight, casting a shadow over me. I removed the sunglasses in order to see him better but at first couldn’t make out his features as the sun was behind him.

‘Hiya, John, or should I say Geordie!’ he said as he flopped down beside me on the edge of the blanket.

Before I could speak, he raised his hand and said, ‘Don’t say anything. Just listen for a moment. Do you remember a chap talking to you in the gym back in Blighty during your basic training? He told you that you would be contacted in Stratford, but something happened back then and we couldn’t make contact with you at that time, then your lot were shipped over here. Well, Geordie, I am that contact!’

I’d never seen him before and the fact that he knew my name took me by surprise. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, then suddenly it came back to me and I remembered.

‘Oh, th-that’s r-right. Y-y-y-es, I r-remember the g-guy,’ I stammered.

My eyes had acclimatised to the bright sunlight by now and I saw him clearly for the first time. He was an extremely fit, good-looking bloke, deeply suntanned and dressed like the rest of us in army-issue shorts, although his had been tailored to fit him very well.

‘How would you like to have a change, a chance to do something more exciting?’ He paused before carrying on. ‘Think about it for a moment, would you like a drink?’

‘W-well, y-yes, OK,’ I replied as he stood up and dashed off.

I didn’t know what to think! I wasn’t quite sure just what he meant by ‘excitement’ but I was so fed up with the way things were going anyway, I’d have done anything to get out of the boring routine back at camp and the nightmare prospect of another eighteen months of the same stretching ahead of me. From what he’d said, I had visions of maybe being transferred to an active unit where, perhaps, I might be patrolling the streets. I felt that anything would be better than what I was currently doing but I didn’t understand why he would need to meet me so secretly for that.