The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (25 page)

"I suppose you know why you're here," he would say.

"Well. I. . ."

"For the second day running you have burnt my toast!"

Let me explain this ludicrous remark. You were this particular prefect's fag.
That meant you were his servant, and one of your many duties was to make toast
for him every day at teatime. For this, you used a long three-pronged toasting
fork, and you stuck the bread on the end of it and held it up before an open
fire, first one side, then the other. But the only fire where toasting was
allowed was in the library, and as teatime approached, there were never less
than a dozen wretched fags all jostling for position in front of the tiny
grate. I was no good at this. I usually held the bread too close and the toast
got burnt. But as we were never allowed to ask for a second slice and start
again, the only thing to do was to scrape the burnt bits off with a knife. You
seldom got away with this. The prefects were expert at detecting scraped toast.
You would see your own tormentor sitting up there at the top table, picking up
his toast, turning it over, examining it closely as though it were a small and
very valuable painting. Then he would frown and you knew you were for it.

So now it was night-time and you were down in the changing-room in your
dressing-gown and
pyjamas
, and the one whose toast
you had burnt was telling you about your crime.

"I don't like burnt toast."

"I held it too close. I'm sorry."

"Which do you want? Four with the dressing-gown
on,
or three with it off?"

"Four with it on," I said.

It was traditional to ask this question. The victim was always given a choice.
But my own dressing-gown was made of thick brown camel-hair, and there was
never any question in my mind that this was the better choice. To be beaten in
pyjamas
only was a very painful experience, and your skin
nearly always got broken. But my dressing-gown stopped that from happening. The
prefect knew, of course, all about this, and therefore whenever you chose to
take an extra stroke and kept the dressing-gown on, he beat you with every
ounce of his strength. Sometimes he would take a little run, three or four neat
steps on his toes, to gain momentum and thrust, but either way, it was a savage
business.

In the old days, when a man was about to be hanged, a silence would fall upon
the whole prison and the other prisoners would sit very quietly in their cells
until the deed had been done. Much the same thing happened at school when a
beating was taking place. Upstairs in the dormitories, the boys would sit in
silence on their beds in sympathy for the victim, and through the silence, from
down below in the changing-room, would come the crack of each stroke as it was
delivered.

My end-of-term reports from this school are of some interest. Here are just
four of them, copied out word for word from the original documents:

Summer Term,
1930
(aged 14).
English Composition.
"I have never
met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He
seems incapable of marshalling his thoughts on paper."

Easter Term,
1931
(aged 15).
English Composition.
"A persistent
muddler
.
Vocabulary negligible, sentences
malconstructed
. He
reminds me of a camel."

Summer Term,
1932
(aged 16).
English Composition.
"This boy is an
indolent and illiterate member of the class."

Autumn Term,
1932
(aged 17).
English Composition.
"Consistently
idle. Ideas limited." (And underneath this one, the future Archbishop of
Canterbury had written in red ink, "He must correct the blemishes on this
sheet.")

Little wonder that it never entered my head to become a writer in those days.

When I left school at the age of eighteen, in 1934, I turned down my mother's
offer (my father died when I was three) to go to university. Unless one was
going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer or some other kind
of professional person, I saw little point in wasting three or four years at
Oxford or Cambridge, and I still hold this view. Instead, I had a passionate
wish to go abroad, to travel, to see distant lands. There were almost no
commercial
aeroplanes
in those days, and a journey to
Africa or the Far East took several weeks.

So I got a job with what was called the Eastern Staff of the Shell Oil Company,
where they promised me that after two or three years' training in England, I
would be sent off to a foreign country.

"Which one?"
I asked.

"Who knows?" the man answered. "It depends where there is a
vacancy when you reach the top of the list. It could be Egypt or China or India
or almost anywhere in the world."

That sounded like fun. It was. When my turn came to be posted abroad three
years later, I was told it would be East Africa. Tropical suits were ordered
and my mother helped me pack my trunk. My tour of duty was for three years in
Africa,
then
I would be allowed home on leave for six
months. I was now twenty-one years old and setting out for faraway places. I
felt great. I boarded the ship at London Docks and off she sailed.

That journey took two and a half weeks. We went through the Bay of Biscay and
called in at Gibraltar. We headed down the Mediterranean by way of Malta,
Naples and Port Said. We went through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea,
stopping at Port Sudan, then Aden. It was tremendously exciting. For the first
time, I saw great sandy deserts, and Arab soldiers mounted on camels, and palm
trees with dates growing on them, and flying fish and thousands of other
marvellous
things. Finally we reached
Mombasa
,
in Kenya.

At
Mombasa
, a man from the Shell Company came on board
and told me I must transfer to a small coastal vessel and go on to Dar-
es
-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). And so
to Dar-
es
-Salaam I went, stopping at Zanzibar on the
way.

For the next two years, I worked for Shell in Tanzania, with my headquarters in
Dar-
es
-Salaam. It was a fantastic life. The heat was
intense but who cared? Our dress was khaki shorts, an open shirt and a
topee
on the head. I learned to speak Swahili. I drove
up-country visiting diamond mines, sisal plantations, gold-mines and all the
rest of it.

There were giraffes, elephants, zebras, lions and antelopes all over the place,
and snakes as well, including the Black Mamba which is the only snake in the
world that will chase after you if it sees you. And if it catches you and bites
you, you had better start saying your prayers. I learned to shake my mosquito
boots upside down before putting them on in case there was a scorpion inside,
and like everyone else, I got malaria and lay for three days with a temperature
of one hundred and five point five.

In September 1939, it became obvious that there was going to be a war with
Hitler's Germany. Tanganyika, which only twenty years before had been called
German East Africa, was still full of Germans. They were everywhere. They owned
shops and mines and plantations all over the country. The moment war broke
out,
they would have to be rounded up. But we had no army to
speak of in Tanganyika, only a few native soldiers, known as
Askaris
, and a handful of officers.
So
all of us civilian men were made Special Reservists.
I was given an
armband and put in charge of twenty
Askaris
. My
little troop and I were ordered to block the road that led south out of
Tanganyika into neutral Portuguese East Africa. This was an important job, for
it was along that road most of the Germans would try to escape when war was
declared.

I took my happy gang with their rifles and one machine-gun and set up a
road-block in a place where the road passed through dense jungle, about ten
miles outside the town. We had a field telephone to headquarters which would
tell us at once when war was declared. We settled down to wait. For three days
we waited. And during the nights, from all around us in the jungle, came the
sound of native drums beating weird hypnotic rhythms. Once, I wandered into the
jungle in the dark and came across about fifty natives squatting in a circle
around a fire. One man only was beating the drum. Some were dancing round the
fire. The
remainder were
drinking something out of
coconut shells. They welcomed me into their circle. They were lovely people. I
could talk to them in their language. They gave me a shell filled with a thick
grey intoxicating fluid made of fermented maize. It was called, if I remember
rightly,
Pomba
. I drank it. It was horrible.

The next afternoon, the field telephone rang and a voice said, "We are at
war with Germany." Within minutes, far away in the distance, I saw a line
of cars throwing up clouds of dust, heading our way, beating it for the neutral
territory of Portuguese East Africa as fast as they could go.

Ho
ho
, I thought. We are going to have a little
battle, and I called out to my twenty
Askaris
to
prepare themselves. But there was no battle. The Germans, who were after all
only civilian townspeople, saw our machine-gun and our rifles and quickly gave
themselves up. Within an hour, we had a couple of hundred of them on our hands.
I felt rather sorry for them. Many I knew personally, like Willy
Hink
the watchmaker and Herman Schneider who owned the
soda-water factory. Their only crime had been that they were German. But this
was war, and in the cool of the evening, we marched them all back to Dar-
es
-Salaam where they were put into a huge camp surrounded
by barbed wire.

The next day, I got into my old car and drove north, heading for Nairobi, in
Kenya, to join the R.A.F. It was a rough trip and it took me four days. Bumpy
jungle roads, wide rivers where the car had to be put on to a raft and pulled
across by a ferryman hauling on a rope, long green snakes sliding across the
road in front of the car.
(N.B.
Never try to run over
a snake because it can be thrown up into the air and may land inside your open
car. It's happened many times.) I slept at night in the car. I passed below the
beautiful Mount Kilimanjaro, which had a hat of snow on its head. I drove
through the
Masai
country where the men drank cows'
blood and every one of them seemed to be seven feet tall. I nearly collided
with a giraffe on the Serengeti Plain. But I came safely to Nairobi at last and
reported to R.A.F. headquarters at the airport.

For six months, they trained us in small
aeroplanes
called Tiger Moths, and those days were also glorious. We skimmed all over
Kenya in our little Tiger Moths. We saw great herds of elephants. We saw the
pink flamingoes on Lake
Nakuru
. We saw everything
there was to see in that magnificent country. And often, before we could take
off, we had to chase the zebras off the flying-field. There were twenty of us
training to be pilots out there in Nairobi. Seventeen of those twenty were
killed during the war.

From Nairobi, they sent us up to Iraq, to a desolate
airforce
base near Baghdad to finish our training. The place was called
Habbaniyih
, and in the afternoons it got so hot (130
degrees in the shade) that we were not allowed out of our huts. We just lay on
the bunks and sweated. The unlucky ones got heat-stroke and were taken to
hospital and packed in ice for several days. This either killed them or saved
them. It was a fifty-fifty chance.

At
Habbaniyih
, they taught us to fly more powerful
aeroplanes
with guns in them, and we
practised
shooting at drogues (targets in the air pulled behind other planes) and at
objects on the ground.

Finally, our training was finished, and we were sent to Egypt to fight against
the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. I joined 80 Squadron, which flew
fighters, and at first we had only ancient single-
seater
bi-planes called
Gloster
Gladiators. The two
machine-guns on a Gladiator were mounted one on either side of the engine, and
they fired their bullets, believe it or not,
through
the propeller. The guns were somehow synchronized with the
propeller shaft so that in theory the bullets missed the whirling propeller
blades. But as you might guess, this complicated mechanism often went wrong and
the poor pilot, who was trying to shoot down the enemy, shot off his own
propeller instead.

I myself was shot down in a Gladiator which crashed far out in the Libyan
desert
between the enemy lines. The plane burst into flames,
but I managed to get out and was finally rescued and carried back to safety by
our own soldiers who crawled out across the sand under cover of darkness.

That crash sent me to hospital in Alexandria for six months with a fractured
skull and a lot of burns. When I came out, in April 1941, my squadron had been
moved to Greece to fight the Germans who were invading from the north. I was
given a Hurricane and told to fly it from Egypt to Greece and join the
squadron. Now, a Hurricane fighter was not at all like the old Gladiator. It
had eight Browning machine-
guns,
four in each wing,
and all eight of them fired simultaneously when you pressed the small button on
your joy-stick. It was a magnificent plane, but it had a range of only two
hours' flying-time. The journey to Greece, non-stop, would take nearly five
hours, always over the water. They put extra fuel tanks on the wings. They said
I would make it. In the end, I did. But only just. When you are six feet six
inches tall, as I am, it is no joke to be sitting crunched up in a tiny cockpit
for five hours.