War Read online

  I kept pacing slowly up and down the road, waiting for the sun to go down and for the cool night to come along. Then suddenly, in the sand just a foot or so off the road, I saw a giant scorpion. Jet black she was and fully six inches long, and clinging to her back, like passengers on the top of an open bus, were her babies. I bent a little closer to count them. One, two, three, four, five … there were fourteen of them altogether! At that point she saw me. I am quite sure I was the first human she had ever seen in her life, and she curled her tail up high over her body with the pincers wide open, ready to strike in defence of her family. I stepped back a pace but continued to watch her, fascinated. She scuttled over the sand and disappeared into a hole that was her burrow.

  When the sun went down, it became dark almost at once, and with the night came a blessed and dramatic drop in temperature. I ate another hunk of water-melon, drank some water and then curled up as best I could in the back seat of the car and went to sleep.

  I started off again the next morning at first light, and in another couple of hours I had crossed the desert and come to Beersheba. I drove on northwards across Palestine, through Jerusalem and Nazareth, and in the late afternoon I skirted Mount Carmel and dropped down into the town of Haifa. The aerodrome was outside the town on the edge of the sea, and I drove my old car in triumph past the guard at the gates and parked it alongside the officers’ mess, which was a small hut made of wood and corrugated iron.

  We had nine Hurricanes at Haifa and the same number of pilots, and in the days that followed we were kept very busy. Our main job was to protect the navy. Our navy had two large cruisers and several destroyers stationed in Haifa harbour and every day they would sail up the coast past Tyre and Sidon to bombard the Vichy French forces in the mountains around the Damour river. And whenever our ships came out, the Germans came over to bomb them. They came from Rhodes, where they had built up a strong force of Junkers Ju 88s, and just about every day we met those Ju 88s over the fleet. They came over at 8,000 feet and we were usually waiting for them. We would dive in amongst them, shooting at their engines and getting shot at by their front- and rear-gunners, and the sky was filled with bursting shells from the ships below and when one of them exploded close to you it made your plane jump like a stung horse. Sometimes the Vichy French air force joined up with the Germans. They had American Glenn Martins and French Dewoitines and Potez 63s, and we shot some of them down and they killed four of our nine pilots. And then the Germans hit the destroyer Isis and we spent the whole day circling above her in relays and fighting off the Ju 88s while a naval tug towed her back to Haifa.

  Once we went out to ground-strafe some Vichy French planes on an airfield near Rayak and as we swept in surprise low over the field at midday we saw to our astonishment a bunch of girls in brightly coloured cotton dresses standing out by the planes with glasses in their hands having drinks with the French pilots, and I remember seeing bottles of wine standing on the wing of one of the planes as we went swooshing over. It was a Sunday morning and the Frenchmen were evidently entertaining their girlfriends and showing off their aircraft to them, which was a very French thing to do in the middle of a war at a front-line aerodrome. Every one of us held our fire on that first pass over the flying field and it was wonderfully comical to see the girls all dropping their wine glasses and galloping in their high heels for the door of the nearest building. We went round again, but this time we were no longer a surprise and they were ready for us with their ground defences, and I am afraid that our chivalry resulted in damage to several of our Hurricanes, including my own. But we destroyed five of their planes on the ground.

  One morning at Haifa the Squadron-Leader called me aside and told me that a small satellite landing field had been prepared about thirty miles inland behind Mount Carmel from which the Squadron could operate should our aerodrome at Haifa be bombed out. ‘I want you to fly over there and have a look at it,’ the Squadron-Leader said. ‘Don’t land unless it seems safe and if you do land I want to know what it’s like. It’s meant to serve as a small secret hideaway where those Ju 88s could never find us.’

  I flew off alone and in ten minutes I spotted a ribbon of dry earth that had been rolled out in the middle of a large field of sweet-corn. To one side was a plantation of fig trees and I could see several wooden huts among the trees. I made a landing, pulled up and switched off the engine.

  Suddenly from out of the fig trees and out of the huts burst a stream of children. They surrounded my Hurricane, jumping about with excitement and shouting and laughing and pointing. There must have been forty or fifty of them altogether. Then out came a tall bearded man who strode among the children and ordered them to stand away from the plane. I climbed out of the cockpit and the man came forward and shook my hand. ‘Welcome to our little settlement,’ he said, speaking with a strong German accent.

  I had seen enough English-speaking Germans in Dar es Salaam to know the accent well, and now, quite naturally, anyone who had anything even remotely Germanic about him set alarm-bells ringing in my head. What is more, this place, according to the Squadron-Leader, was meant to be secret and here I was being met by a welcoming committee of fifty screaming children and a huge man with a black beard who looked like the Prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler. I began to wonder whether I had come to the right spot.

  ‘I didn’t think anyone knew about this,’ I said to the bearded man.

  The man smiled. ‘We cut down the corn ourselves and helped to roll out the strip,’ he said. ‘This is our cornfield.’

  ‘But who are you and who are all these children?’ I asked him.

  ‘We are Jewish refugees,’ he said. ‘The children are all orphans. This is our home.’ The man’s eyes were startlingly bright. The black pupil in the centre of each of them seemed larger and blacker and brighter than any I had ever seen and the iris surrounding each pupil was brilliant blue.

  In their excitement at seeing a real live fighter plane, the children were beginning to press right up against the aircraft, reaching out and making the elevators in the tailplane move up and down. ‘No, no!’ I cried out. ‘Please don’t do that! Please keep away! You could damage it!’

  The man spoke sharply to the children in German and they all fell back.

  ‘Refugees from where?’ I asked him. ‘And how did you get here?’

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he said. ‘Let’s go into my hut.’ He picked out three of the older boys and set them to guard the Hurricane. ‘Your plane will be quite safe now,’ he said.

  I followed him into a small wooden hut standing among fig trees. There was a dark-haired young woman inside and the man spoke to her in German but he did not introduce me. The woman poured some water from a bucket into a saucepan and lit a paraffin burner and proceeded to heat water for coffee. The man and I sat down on stools at a plain table. There was a loaf of what looked like home-baked bread on the table, and a knife.

  ‘You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’

  ‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’

  ‘Jewish refugees.’

  I really didn’t know what he was talking about. I had been living in East Africa for the past two years and in those times the British colonies were parochial and isolated. The local newspaper, which was all we got to read, had not mentioned anything about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in 1938 and 1939. Nor did I have the faintest idea that the greatest mass murder in the history of the world was actually taking place in Germany at that moment.

  ‘Is this your land?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’

  He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live