Small Wars (4 page)
Clara was upstairs with the children and Adile was sweeping the stairs. Adile was Turkish Cypriot, about sixteen years old. She had been recommended by Mrs Burroughs and had five brothers and sisters so was presumably well used to children. She spoke not one word of English, which Mrs Burroughs said was probably a good thing, as anything one wanted her to do was easily communicated by sign language, but Clara found their relationship impossibly strained.
She missed the girl who had helped her sometimes on the base at Krefeld, who, although German and a citizen of an occupied country, seemed to bear no grudge – at least, not towards Clara and the babies. She had spoken English well, and been extremely cheerful. Cheerful to the point of backwardness, Hal said, but Clara had found her easy company. This girl, Adile, was silent. She arrived on time every morning and never looked Clara in the eye.
Clara had been making a game of dressing the girls – putting their socks on their hands and heads first to make them laugh – and it had taken a long time to get ready. She was trying to teach them how to put on their own dresses; they weren’t awfully interested.
The quiet slap of Adile’s slippers on the stairs, the light sweep of the broom, and the door was pushed open. It creaked. Adile bowed her head slightly. She had a gentle face. Clara knew the Turkish Cypriots were more consistently friendly to the British, but Adile was a Muslim, and more foreign than a Greek would have been. Hal said the Turks were reliable policemen and did a good job, and Clara worked to overcome her prejudices. Adile always wore her scarf wound tightly around her head and under her chin, and had very big brown eyes. Clara wondered how long her hair was.
She got up from the floor and dusted off her dress.
‘’Lo there!’ said Lottie, who was very chatty, or tried to be.
Meg was quieter. Clara hoped that they weren’t going to be divided like that so obviously all of their lives: the quiet twin, the jolly one, the pretty one, the plain one. They weren’t identical and she was relieved about that. Their being two halves of the same personality would have been an uncomfortable thought.
Adile smiled, but didn’t speak.
‘Good morning,’ said Clara, briskly, and stepping around Adile, took the girls downstairs. The stairs were very narrow, it was a lengthy business with the girls’ tiny feet on the tiles, slipping on the wooden edges that were worn thin.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Who could that be?’ said Clara. She sensed Adile behind her. ‘It’s all right, Adile,’ she said, not expecting an answer. ‘I’ll go.’
The knock came again.
‘We’re coming!’ said Clara.
They reached the door.
‘Who is it?’
‘Evelyn Burroughs!’ came the operatic answer.
Clara opened the door. Mrs Burroughs, big and beaming, briefly transformed all of Cyprus to England.
‘Hello,’ said Clara.
‘Not having a telephone puts one right back in the nineteenth century,’ said Mrs Burroughs. ‘Not that I would remember, I hasten to add!’
She laughed and Clara smiled at her. ‘Come in. Look, girls, it’s Mrs Burroughs.’
‘Silly girl, call me Evelyn.’
‘Evelyn. Come in.’
Evelyn came into the house, which seemed to shrink around her. The children stared up. ‘How’s the Turkish girl doing?’
‘She’s fine. Very helpful.’
‘So you’re all right?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Clara, firmly. ‘Absolutely fine.’
‘I must say you’ve been an awfully good sport about it. I would’ve kicked up a hell of a fuss. Your husband must be proud. It makes all the difference in the world to have a wife who doesn’t make things harder, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Still, it’s a rotten show and I’ve been doing my damnedest to get you a house up at Epi and I may have succeeded.’
‘A house would be nice.’
‘Yes, it’s no good here. I’ve brought a car. I’ve one or two things to get and then shall we go up to the base?’
Clara felt gratitude verging on the adoring. ‘I’d like that,’ she said.
‘We just need to pop by Costa’s or whatever it’s called on Anexartisias Street – and then we can head off. All right?’
‘Lovely. I’ll get our coats.’
‘There’s no need. Have you seen the sun’s out?’ said Evelyn, and opened the door wide to the street where bright light was striking the first floors of the houses opposite.
Evelyn had organised everything. She had invited three more officers’ wives and lunch was very busy and noisy. There were other children, too, though none so small as the twins, and they were all given lunch in the kitchen. The women competed to impress Clara with their welcome and were eager to show her that Cyprus wasn’t such a bad posting.
‘What about a walk on the beach? It’ll remind you of Cornwall in summer…’
So, after lunch they left the children and went down to the beach, by way of the stables, where shiny horses looked over their stable doors at them as they went by and Clara touched their soft noses carefully.
The beach was wide and sandy and a shallow sea broke white-topped waves along it in a homely rhythm. Clara felt her cheeks getting pink as they walked. She imagined kissing Hal and telling him about her day.
When they got back up to the Burroughses’ bungalow, Captain Hayes was there on behalf of the housing officer. ‘We’ve a couple of houses for Mrs Treherne to take a look at. Shall we go along now?’
The house Clara chose out of the two offered her was brand new, the still-damp plaster had just been painted. It was a short walk from Evelyn’s and next door to Deirdre and Mark Innes. They could drive or walk to the officers’ mess. The plot was called Lionheart, a half-built miniature suburb, with front gardens but no fences and a brand-new road through it.
The night before they moved Clara and Hal lay in the tilting bed of the Limassol house for the last time and Clara allowed herself to feel how very much she hated it.
‘I’m glad we’ll have you safe and sound at Episkopi,’ said Hal, holding her close to him, both arms around her. ‘I might be away next week, and I would have hated to leave you here.’
Clara allowed only the smallest of pauses. ‘How long will you be away for?’ she said.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Proper fighting?’
Hal laughed.
Clara pressed herself close up to him. Let him think her a girl-woman if he wanted. ‘Proper fighting, Hal?’ she repeated and he laughed again.
‘Well, a bit of action, anyway. If I’m lucky,’ he said.
The boy Hal had handed over to the Special Investigations Branch was called Andreas. He was interrogated by them, but the talking was done by an interpreter, who was a gentle young Englishman, a classics scholar before his National Service, and not inclined to – or often able to – translate the more colourful language of the two SIB plain-clothes officers he had been attached to. The transformation from Homeric to modern Greek had been achieved by a hasty language course in England at the end of his basic training when the WOSB had discovered he had a classics degree.
The interpreter was one of life’s diplomats, and his answer to ‘What did he say?’ was often a tactful approximation: ‘He said he doesn’t know, sir,’ rather than ‘He said you can rot in hell.’
After three months in Limassol, the interpreter had begun to see himself more as protector than questioner. In Nicosia he had worked for the Special Investigations Branch attached to a different regiment, and wished he was still there, where he could honestly say he had never felt ashamed. These two were harsher. They were both quiet men, who kept to themselves, not making friends around the camp, standing out in their suits as the outsiders they were. The sight of them going about their secretive business was chilling sometimes even to the soldiers who worked alongside them.
The interrogations he was asked to leave were the ones he felt he’d failed at, and often he thought he was under more pressure to get results than the SIB themselves, because he so badly didn’t want anybody to be hurt. He didn’t want this boy to go onto the next stage of questioning, the more unpleasant stage. He tried to explain to him, without meaning to threaten, that if the boy would be helpful, then he would be unhurt and even protected, but if he was stubborn he – the interpreter – couldn’t say that he would not be hurt, and perhaps seriously. Often prisoners took this the wrong way, and were defiant, but sometimes they accepted that the young officer was trying to help them. His uniform was less frightening than the incongruous dark suits of his two superiors; it was honest, and his face was honest too, and kind. Sometimes they gave up their secrets, if they had any to give. Sometimes they didn’t.
The moment where a variation of ‘All right, Davis, we’ll take over from here,’ was said to him, and he was dismissed – leaving them with a soldier and the prisoner in a closed room – was a relatively rare, but deeply uncomfortable one for the interpreter. He saw the prisoner again an hour later, or the next morning, when the phrase he used in his mind for that was ‘a little the worse for wear’. A face that was a little the worse for wear was not a pleasant sight. It might not be bloody – although he’d seen that too – but it was always changed.
The interpreter knew he was a necessary part of a larger process; he tried not to feel responsible when the process went on without him. He had been told harsh methods were justifiable, and he believed that to be true, but he had never seen an English death brought about by terrorism, he felt no animosity towards the Cypriots, and he could not help feeling that violence was like cheating, and unfair.
This boy, Andreas, was not a hard nut to crack. His defiance on arriving at Episkopi Garrison faded to sulkiness within an hour of being locked up. He was given food and water and spoken to by Davis, and when the evidence of his feeble crimes was laid before him on the wooden table he became actually chatty. He had an uncle, he said, who had been talking to him and his friends for months about EOKA. His uncle hated the British – Andreas gave his name, pausing politely for it to be spelled correctly – and would do anything to drive them out of Cyprus. He was in a camp up in the Troodos, and rumour was that he was with Axfentiou, but he couldn’t say for sure. He had another uncle, though, the black sheep of the family, a sort of cousin of an uncle, in fact, and the British were after him, too. Photographs were brought. Andreas identified him in the booklet handed out to every British officer of EOKA’s ‘most wanted’. General Grivas and Axfentiou, EOKA’s leaders, were at numbers one and two, and Andreas’s uncle was there too, down the list, at number thirty-four. Andreas described a farmhouse in the foothills near Kaminaria where he knew they were storing weapons and where this man was hiding. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of his questioners, he gave places and names; they were all good friends. Andreas himself had nothing against the British, and was keen to point that out, but he had been persuaded that fighting for Greece was a fine thing to do, and he regretted it now.
‘Davis, tell him if he behaves himself, we won’t tell the whole village he’s a toad and he won’t get his throat cut.’
‘Andreas, we will take you home. We won’t betray you to your village, if you don’t betray us. We are all trying to stop more violence. Yes?’
Andreas was to do one more thing for them before his release: he was to show them exactly where the farmhouse was. He agreed immediately to this, and it crossed Davis’s mind that the boy could lead a hundred soldiers into an ambush very easily and be a hero. It was impossible to tell from his dark face what he was really thinking.
SIB briefed Colonel Burroughs about Andreas’s black sheep of an uncle, whose name was Loulla Kollias, and Burroughs briefed Hal. Hal devised a plan, his first, with particular care, and then – like a schoolboy having his prep inspected – went over it with Burroughs, who was thorough and helpful and questioned everything.
Loulla Kollias’s photograph also hung in Colonel Burroughs’s office, in his rogues gallery and opposite his picture of the Queen. It showed a middle-aged man who could have been a shepherd or a farmer, with a large black moustache, thick eyebrows and a frayed and faded sweater with a neck that stood up. The photograph had been taken for EOKA propaganda. In it, he was squinting manfully into a wind, with his hair blowing up from his head and the camera at a low angle. The only thing distinguishing him from any other Greek man between the ages of twenty-five and forty was the bullet belt slung diagonally over his body and the nose of his rifle, which could be seen poking up from behind his shoulder. He was responsible for the death of an American government official in a car bombing. He organised roadside ambushes and riots. He was close to General Grivas, and a chief recruiter for EOKA. He was a man who believed in a Cyprus independent of British rule and took his army straight from school, transforming romantic Greek schoolboys into soldiers – or terrorists, depending on your point of view.
Three hours before dawn, three days after Andreas’s capture, Hal left Clara pretending to be asleep in their brand-new bedroom on Lionheart Estate and joined Kirby and a convoy of trucks and Land Rovers, which left the garrison, heading north into the Troodos. Andreas was in the Land Rover behind Hal’s, flanked by soldiers, with the interpreter, Davis, sitting in front, very nervous.
It was still dark. The trucks crawled slower and slower, the drivers keeping to the hard-packed centre of the road, looking for disturbed ground where mines might be hidden, and the soldiers stopped talking and stayed quiet and watchful. There was no protection in being in a vehicle; they would rather have been out of them and on foot, where they could listen better and move more carefully and the ground away from the road had no mines hidden in it.
There had been burns casualties from a roadside ambush in the hills the week before. The terrain was good for it – scrubby and plenty of low cover – and there were caves, too, and not all of the island was mapped thoroughly.
The threat of ambush takes everyone differently. Some spend all their time imagining what may happen: in the front of a truck at night they sit to one side to avoid a bullet from a sniper who might use the headlights to gauge the position of their head. They get superstitious and try to second guess the mind of the man who may have hidden a mine or tripwire in this place or that place. Then there’s the other kind, who don’t think about it imaginatively. They limit their thoughts; they aren’t interested in chance and they don’t give any choice power over another choice because they know they’d spend their whole lives doing it and dying a different way each time. Hal was one of those.
He knew it was a decision to be like that, and understood how you could lose your nerve and start imagining things and he didn’t know if he would be as cool in combat. He hadn’t had the chance to find out yet. Perhaps he would now.
He could smell the damp pines, the mineral rocky ground, goats and, faintly, diesel. He felt his body quicken in readiness for what lay ahead and he was thinking about that, not worrying about imaginary mines, as the trucks made the climb towards the tree-line.
The farmhouse was deep at the bottom of a very steep valley. A river ran along it with a bridge, and the main house and outhouses were along the river and hidden beneath trees. There was one road in, and one road out, and each of the narrow roads made several hairpin bends, doubling back and forth deeper and deeper into the invisible valley or higher and higher to the top of the black hills that met a black sky almost no different.
They left the trucks and blocked the roads at their dividing. Then there was a long wait while half of Two Platoon went the long way around the valley to block the second road before they went forward on foot.
The soldiers spread out across the hillside, making the best of poor cover, creeping down into the dark crack in the earth that was the valley.
When dawn came, it would reach this place last; a more acute and crevice-like hiding place would be hard to find. It was a sharp sudden valley and it wasn’t fanciful to consider it sinister, with the slithering hard stones and earth that went steeply downwards. For most of the day it would be in shadow. Hal had seen the gradients on the map, but was still surprised by the extremity of the land and that anyone would choose to build a farm there, so deep.
The soldiers moved slowly downwards.
Hal’s platoon had the interpreter and Andreas at their rear. Andreas was jittery, flanked by soldiers, and the interpreter, Davis, was hanging back and wishing himself home. Mark Innes and Two Platoon, coming down the other hillside, had the better time of it because they were in trees.
Hal could hear each sound very clearly. He was concentrating intensely, except for the small part of him that felt the eagerness to be getting on with it. He couldn’t see the ground in front of him, or the house, and could only sense the men to his left and right and the mountainside opposite him, but as they went down, and dawn approached, the high line of the mountain showed him where the sky was.
A dog began to bark, then more dogs, and the sound was very loud, breaking the stillness. They all stopped, but no lights showed where the house must be. They continued their approach, holding their Stens close to their bodies. The hill was almost vertical, and they had to cross the flat road every fifty yards. The approach took a long time and their legs shook with the effort of the slope and with crouching so low to the earth.
At the banks of the narrow river the soldiers stopped. The bridge was wooden, and Hal was very near it. The water, where it broke slowly over big boulders, and around the supports of the bridge, gleamed white.
The dogs were still barking, but rhythmically, not in hysteria, because they were being ignored. Hal went along the edge of the water until he reached Trask, who was gripping Andreas by the arm.
He could just see a dark shape behind him, which he took to be Davis, and he hissed to him quietly. Davis came over to them. Andreas spoke to him urgently, and Trask yanked his arm to keep him quiet.
‘He wants to go back,’ said Davis, weakly.
‘Just keep quiet, and wait,’ said Hal, and then, to Trask, ‘Keep them well back.’
Hal went away from them along the river again. He could see the shadows of men and moved towards them, identifying McKinney. They crossed the river through the water, which was shallow and icy cold, seeping into their boots.
The dogs, who were chained, began to choke themselves in their excited barking and, at that, McKinney gave the word and the arrest group moved quickly towards the house.
Hal, McKinney and Kirby were in the cover of some bushes, Hal itching to get in after the others, but for the rest of the platoon there was no more stealth. Over the sound of the dogs, scaring them, came the light spat of gunfire from the house as a shutter was broken open and bullets touched the ground and the trees.
Very quickly the soldiers surrounded the building, the door was kicked in and there was the harsher sound of a Sten fired inside and shouting, the high scream of a woman, and the banging of furniture going over.
There was no more gunfire.
The soft dimness was moving with the blacker shapes of running soldiers. The house, every small building and the big barn too, were surrounded. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the outbuildings but it was difficult to tell anything above the barking dogs and the voices of the soldiers. It was fierce agony for Hal to wait, watching, counting seconds, his blood aching with the need to move.
Then, in the new light, a man could be seen running away from the back of the house towards the dark hill.
The familiar shout of ‘Halt!
Stamata! Dur!
’ and the man flung himself flat to the ground and was held there.
It had been a stupid dash anyway because the whole yard and house were full of soldiers and he had no chance. He only lived because there was no clear shot at him without one of their own being in the line of fire.
From inside the house Hal could hear boots on the wooden floors upstairs, and voices, but the first rush of the attack had eased, whatever confusion there was – and there hadn’t been much – subsiding to nothing. Corporals’ shouts of ‘Clear’ followed one another, and guarding positions were taken up.
Now that it was lighter, Hal could see the positions of his men and the exits blocked. His plan, as drawn, was adhered to. Even the dogs had quieted.
Now –
‘Right, then,’ he said coolly, and started with McKinney towards the house.