He points out a tank. ‘One of Jerry’s. Brewed up in the first push. Want to take a look, miss?’
They climb out of the truck and walk across to the tank. It is a blackened hulk and it stinks. It lies lurching on one side, beached in a sand-dune, and around it is strewn more debris, small-scale intimate debris – a mess tin, a tattered airletter that flutters in the wind, a packet of biscuits from which a neat black stream of ants pours away towards a rock. Jim Chambers takes some photographs.
There is continuous noise. When planes pass overhead – transport planes, fighters – the whole sky roars. From beyond the horizon come dull thumps and every now and then a silver glitter of tracer fire rises from its rim, or a jewelled explosion of Very lights. And the entire landscape smokes. Burned-out vehicles stream grey in the wind, the sky-line erupts with white puffs, a black column towers away to their right where captured enemy ammunition has been blown up. Smoke and dust fume upwards together, each truck, car or motor-cycle trailing its own buff-coloured wake. In the distance, there is a column of lorries, so blotted out by dust that only their shapes can be seen creeping across the waste and evoking another wilderness and another time – covered waggons on the prairie. And when another cloud of dust comes near enough to disgorge the outlines of tanks they too seem to be something quite else – the high complex turrets of ships riding an ocean, complete with bright pennants.
‘We’ll stop for a brew,’ shouts the driver. ‘I want to take a shufti at the map.’ They are climbing a slight ridge at the top of which is the hollow of a gun-emplacement with camouflage net and scattered leaking sand-bags. This makes a useful shelter from the wind which is getting up. A fire is made in a can of petrol-soaked sand and tea is brewed in a mess tin. ‘Cuppa, miss?’ Claudia sits drinking the tea and staring over the top of the sand-bags down into the shallow valley from which they have come; she wonders who lay here a few days before, trying to kill someone else. A little earlier they passed three crosses erected in a line near the burned shell of a truck. One of them had a tin helmet beside it and an inscription pencilled on the rough plank of wood: ‘Corporal John Wilson, killed in action.’
The driver thinks they are in for a fucking sandstorm – ‘Pardon my French, miss.’ They climb back into the lorry and rattle down the other side of the ridge where the landscape of the last hour, and the one before, repeats itself. The track is badly marked but the driver heads for the distant black smudges of other vehicles which resolve themselves, as they get closer, into a couple of Red Cross trucks, stationary near the carcass of a tank. A bundle lies nearby on a stretcher. Men are clambering on the tank. The driver stops and jumps out, as do Jim Chambers and the New Zealander. ‘I’d stay put, old girl, if I were you,’ says Jim Chambers to Claudia, who disregards him. They walk towards the tank and she sees now that the figures on the tank are dragging from it what has been a man, a reddened, blackened thing with smashed head and a shining splintered white bone for an arm. There is a reek of burning and decay. Two more bundles on stretchers lie in the back of the ambulance truck, whose driver is giving directions to their driver. They are all, it seems, off the track. This is the scene of one of last week’s tank battles and yes, the ground is crisscrossed all over with the crenellated plough-marks of their tracks, reaching away on all sides, a silent mayhem in testimony of what has happened here.
They get once more into the truck. The sand is blowing hard now; the sharp clarity of vision has gone, the horizon can no longer be seen. The driver puts on goggles and finds a pair for Claudia. They crash on into the murk, the driver stopping every now and then to jump down and examine a marker, but presently the petrol cans and posts give out altogether and they are forging into emptiness with occasional tyre-marks roving off in all directions. The sand rises in clouds. The whole world turns a lurid pinkish orange; it is impossible to see more than ten or fifteen yards ahead.
They creep on through the sandstorm. The firm going gives way to softer sand from which jut treacherous boulders that grate against the underneath of the truck. Twice they flounder to a halt and have to dig out. And the second time no sooner are they going once more than there is a grinding smash from somewhere beneath and the truck judders to a stop. The driver jumps down and vanishes beneath. He comes up to announce that the fucking back axle is done for.
Everyone, now, is cursing. The New Zealander has an interview lined up that he sees evaporating if they do not reach HQ by nightfall. The driver, who clearly regards Claudia as his special responsibility, says, ‘Don’t worry, miss, we’ll get you there.’ ‘I’m not worried,’ says Claudia, who is not. She takes the cover off her typewriter and sits in the cab of the truck, typing, while the desert roars around, now white, now sulphur, now rose-coloured. Jim Chambers produces a flask of whisky. The driver says this may not be blinking Piccadilly but there’ll be someone by sooner or later, they can’t be far from the fucking track and once the sandstorm dies down they can get their bearings again. ‘How do you spell “incandescent”?’ enquires Claudia. ‘Don’t show off, Claudia,’ says Jim. The driver, now besotted with her, offers yet another cigarette.
Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.
And now out in the howling sand there is another sound, and something solid moving in the murk that presently forms itself into the outline of a jeep in which are two figures. Shouts are exchanged. The jeep approaches. The figures jump out. They are a tank officer called Tom Southern and another officer. Their reaction to Claudia’s presence is one of amused concern. They are making for HQ and can give a lift to two. The driver will stop with the truck until the breakdown blokes can be reached. Jim Chambers volunteers to stay also. So, grimly, does the New Zealander. So, naturally, does Claudia. In the end it is decided that Jim will stay and the rest continue.
Claudia climbs into the passenger seat of the jeep. Tom Southern drives. The sandstorm is dying down and it is again possible to see the contours of the desert and to pick up the track. She is so tired that she is unable to respond to anything said by the others and at one point she dozes off, slides against Southern’s arm and feels him gently but firmly prop her upright again. She sits there half-asleep, seeing little, just his hand on the driving-wheel, a brown hand with a scatter of black hairs between wrist and knuckles; forty years on, she will still see that hand.
My cushioned and carpeted return to Egypt, courtesy of Pharaohtours and the Hilton, included a brief trip into the desert, seen this time through tinted windows from within an air-conditioned coach. The driver stopped so that his passengers might descend and taste for themselves the authentic desert air; there was also a fine view of the Pyramids of Dashur. ‘Don’t you want to get out?’ said my American friend. I shook my head. ‘You sure you’re OK?’ he enquired solicitously. ‘You’ve not spoken a word this trip’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I was thinking, that’s all. And I’ve already seen the desert. You get out and have a look around. I’ll stay here.’ He heaved himself up. ‘OK then. How come you’ve seen the desert, though – you been here before or something?’ ‘Not here exactly,’ I said, evasively. He did not pursue the matter; his attention span was short and camel touts had appeared from nowhere, camera fodder not to be missed. He got out and I was left alone with the tinted glass through which I saw my own images, the distant but vivid shapes and colours of another time, the tanks hunched into the sand, the surrealist sepia swirls and blots of camouflage.
I wasn’t thinking of Tom but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be not ‘me’ but ‘she’. An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom. This is how I have felt – how surely anyone must feel – contemplating those p
oised moments of the past: the night before the storming of the Bastille, the summer of 1914 in the valley of the Somme, the autumn days in Warwickshire before Edgehill. Nothing to be done; no halting or diverting the foreordained. This is the story; these are the things that must happen.
My Texan got back into the coach again, stowing his photographic equipment away, having preserved for posterity some mafioso on camel-back who brandished a Lawrence of Arabia rifle in one hand and a string of plastic lapis lazuli beads in the other. ‘One helluva place to call home,’ he observed. ‘That fellow,’ I said, ‘probably lives in an apartment in Cairo and commutes out here on the bus.’ ‘You think so?’ He looked regretfully at the departing huckster. ‘I daresay you’re right. I’m a sucker for local colour. Never could spot a phoney. But you’re one sharp lady, aren’t you, Claudia?’
And I suppose I used his name too. Ed? Chuck? I don’t remember, though I do recall that easy incongruous companionship, the peculiar temporary alliance of strangers in transitory circumstances. In an odd way I was glad of him; his impervious presence was a shield. I had hesitated to make this journey, had put it off year after year but had known always that eventually it must be undertaken. And, confronted at last with the mirage – with the shining phantom of that other time – I was surprised to find that it was myself that was the poignant presence. Not him – not Tom. It was in other ways that Tom was there.
I shared a flat in Zamalek with another girl. Camilla was a frothy secretary from the Embassy, one of those silk-clad scented camp-followers who do well out of wars. Camilla, under other circumstances, would have had to spend her youth in the shires, breeding dogs, hunting and going up to town for a show occasionally. As it was, she was having the time of her life, doing a bit of typing in the mornings for someone Daddy was at school with and taking her pick of the officers of the 8th Hussars in the evening.
Teeming polyglot Cairo of the nineteen-forties seems now an apt manifestation of that strange country. The landscape, fusion of antiquity and the present, had its counterpart in the brimming life of the city, where all races met, all languages were spoken, where Greeks and Turks, Copts and Jews, British, French, rich, poor, exploiters and oppressed all brushed past each other on the dusty pavements. The pavements were all they had in common, though. I once saw an old woman sit down on the steps of a mosque and die; across the maidan ice-creams and confectionery were being eaten on the terrace of a café. We Europeans rode the streets in cars or in horse-drawn gharries; alongside and among us moved the donkey-carts, the bicycles, the barefoot thousands, the trams so loaded with humanity that they looked like a bee-swarm. For some of us a war was being fought; there must have been many who had no idea what this war was, whose it was or why it was. Like some theatrical lion it roared off-stage while the actors got on with their business. And all the while the extraordinary backcloth eerily reflected the juxtapositions – that scenery in which the lush vegetable borders of the Nile ended so abruptly that you stepped from fields to desert in one pace; in which a crumbling monument might be Greek, Roman, pharaonic, medieval, Christian, Muslim; in which illiterate peasants with a life expectancy of thirty lived in shanty houses set up between the soaring columns of temples inscribed with the complex mythologies of three thousand years before. There was no chronology to the place, and no logic.
‘See the picture of Rameses the Second,’ says the guide. ‘See the king is making a sacrifice to the gods and godses. See up there the lotus. See the magnificent carved pillar. Is three thousand two hundred year old. Is twenty-three metres high. See at the top the carving of Victoria.’
‘See what, Mustapha?’ says the padre.
‘Please be using your binoculars, sir. See up there.’
‘Oh, I get you. Victorian, he means. Graffiti by Victorian travellers. Extraordinary thing, eh?’
‘How did they get up there?’ exclaims one of the ATS girls, and the others collapse with laughter. ‘The temple wasn’t dug out then, you ass. It was full of sand. They were walking about at the tops of the pillars.’ And they drift out into the blinding sun again, towards the gharries that will take them back to Luxor, while Tom and Claudia linger in the hot dark shade, with Rameses the Second and the Rev. John Fawcett of Amersham in the county of Buckingham 1859.
‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ says Tom. ‘There are only six more hours till the train.’
‘We may never be here again,’ says Claudia, staring upwards. ‘Think of the Reverend John Fawcett, stumping about over our heads, back then.’
‘To hell with the Reverend John Fawcett,’ says Tom. ‘I want to go.’
‘I love you,’ says Claudia, not moving.
‘I know. Come back to the hotel.’
‘On Wednesday morning you’ll be in the desert again.’
‘You aren’t supposed to think of that.’
‘I have to,’ says Claudia. ‘In order to keep a grip on things.’
For there are moments, out here in this place and at this time, when she feels that she is untethered, no longer hitched to past or future or to a known universe but adrift in the cosmos. At night she looks at the sizzling stars, which cannot be the same stars that glimmer in English skies, and she feels eternal, which, far from being tranquil, is like some hideous fever – a psychological version of the malaria, typhoid, dysentery and jaundice that smite each and all at some point in this continent.
You lived from day to day. That of course is a banality but it had a prosaic truth to it then. Death was unmentionable and kept at bay with code-words and the careless understated style of the playing fields. Women whose husbands had bought it during the last push were seen a few weeks later being terribly plucky beside the swimming-pool at Gezira Sporting Club. I remember laughing immoderately. Dancing. Drinking. People flowed into my life and out of it again, people I have never seen since, people I knew intimately: cronies in the Press Corps, men on leave from the desert, attachés at the Embassy, éminences grises at GHQ, and the flotsam of Cairo itself, the long-term residents, professional Middle Easterners running banks and businesses, peddling culture with the British Council or the English language to schools and universities. The heroes of the hour – the swashbuckling brigadiers and colonels and majors of the Eighth Army – flitted like medieval barons between the battlefield and the sybaritic excesses of the city. They left their tanks to come back for a few days’ polo or some snipe shooting down at the Fayoum. I knew a whiskered colonel who kept a string of ten polo ponies and a couple of Egyptian grooms, a laconic Hussar who set up a pack of hounds at Heliopolis to harry the jackals. The very form of the war itself seemed to stress the analogy – sieges, tented armies, raids and skirmishes, a seasonal ebb and flow as the desert itself dictated advance and retrenchment. And, as the myth of Rommel grew, it was as though Saladin himself lived again – the cunning but gentlemanly enemy, giving no quarter but essentially chivalrous. I wrote a piece about the modern Crusaders and sent it to a leftish London weekly – and got a tart response from an editor who did not see an analogy between the conscripted British working class and feudal retinues. Well, he had a point, of course, but at the same time you had to be stubbornly literal-minded not to perceive in this war an echo of that other European descent into the desert, that other pouring of men and weaponry into an alien landscape. I sent the piece to Gordon, tongue in cheek, and had his answer flung back at me months later – ‘Typical Claudia romanticism.’ I didn’t notice or care; by then I was thinking of other things.
In the Press Corps war was our business, of course. We hung around waiting for communiqués, press releases, rumours. We pursued those close to the moguls of GHQ, curried favour with crisp young attachés who might get us an interview here, some off-the-cuff remarks there. We sat grumbling at the Censors’ Office, waiting our turn in the labyrinthine processes of getting our copy to London. Or to New York or Canberra or Cape Town, for we were as international a bunch in our small way as the Cairo crowds. And I have to admit that like that chicken-br
ained Camilla with whom I shared a flat I too had a sexual field-day. I was one of very few women in what was predominantly a male occupation, and I was by far the best looking. As well as the most resourceful, the most astute, the least deceivable.
And the most immodest.
‘And how did you wangle yourself out here?’ he enquires.
‘Natural talent,’ replies Claudia crisply. And immediately wishes she hadn’t. It is the wrong note to strike – slick café society talk and they are not in Cairo now but somewhere in Cyrenaica and they are sitting on petrol cans eating a meal of bully beef, tinned rice pudding and marmalade. Tom Southern looks at her and then down at his map. Someone puts a tin mug of tea into Claudia’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ she says, humbly; she has learned, in these brief twelve hours out here, the value of such an offering.
It is perhaps midnight, and very cold. They sit outside the Press Tent. Within, the New Zealander is clattering out his account of the interview with the C.-in-C. All around, figures move darkly against the silver sand, going to and fro between the just defined shapes of vehicles and tents. The sky is an immense black dome spiced with brilliant stars; the long white fingers of searchlights wander across it; the horizon flames with orange tongues; Very lights fly up – red, white and green. Somewhere beyond it – where and how far no one is prepared to tell them – is The Front, that elusive shifting goal: a concept rather than a place. The men are hunched into greatcoats or tattered sheepskins. Claudia wears slacks, two sweaters and an overcoat and still shivers. Jim Chambers – who caught up with them again a couple of hours ago – yawns and says he will turn in now. Claudia and Tom Southern are left alone.
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I talked my way into it somehow.’