Previous chapter: Troodos Mountains, Cyprus
Late 1941 to June 1942
When our work at the airfield was finished we moved to a new camp, with Nissen huts and beds even! This was at Athalassa in a pinewood, about three miles from Nicosia. We had also acquired a new commanding officer to replace the captured Major Oliver. He was Major Baker-Cresswell, a tall grim looking man with a black moustache. He wore one of the large sun helmets that we hated, and by his order we were soon wearing them too. I learned later that he had joined us from Mauritius, where he had trained Mauritian troops before bringing them to the Middle East. No doubt this accounted for his keen interest in solar topees. He started off as he evidently meant to go on, with bags of discipline, which we at first resented having become used to the milder governance of Captain Wilson. He was fair though, and after a while we quite liked him. He won us all over when he had half a dozen of our chaps up before him. They had been charged by the Military Police over their part in a disturbance down in Nicosia one night. Someone in a ‘cabaret’ had begun shooting all the lights out, egged on by the others. The MPs arrived promptly and arrested everyone they could lay hands on. Our Major threw out the charges laid by them, much to their fury I would suppose. He then saw to it that the culprits suffered punishment suitable to the crime. The point was that it was his justice and not that of the Redcaps. After that his stock rose and the discipline was accepted more readily.
The Company had been given the job of constructing an underground defence HQ in a stony valley nearby. This involved a good deal of tunnelling and excavation into the rocky cliff that had been chosen. It also involved a lot of fetching and carrying of materials and equipment. Many civilian workers were required and these men had to be transported from their villages and back again daily. Some of the villages were quite a long way off, up in the foothills of the mountain. The roads to these villages were mostly stony tracks with no surfacing at all. Work started at seven in the morning and finished at about six in the evening.
Each morning at half past four the guards wakened us drivers and we turned out to drive up to our different villages. In my case this was nearly an hour away on a bone-shaking track. The centre of activity at the village was the local coffee shop and this was where I parked. The fellows were arriving from different directions and we all went in for a cup of coffee. This was Turkish coffee, amazingly strong and concentrated. The proprietor shuffled about on the earthen floor with long handled brass pots that they had pulled out of the fire in the corner. This fire was of charcoal that was heaped in a glowing mass, from which the handles of a dozen pots stuck out. One cup of this coffee would revive a corpse. Only about enough to fill an egg cup could be got out of the tiny cups from which it was drunk, at least half of the contents being sediment. Some would toss down a small glass of brandy with it, a habit that I quickly acquired. The mornings were pretty cold up in those hills.
Before we left, the village priest would come, swinging a censer of incense. Each man would reach out and waft some of the smoke over his chest and then cross himself devoutly. After that everyone climbed aboard and we clattered off to work.
The return journey in the evening was more cheerful, and when we got to the coffee shop we all went in and had one.
As the days went by it became more and more the custom that the drivers would roll into camp at about ten or ten thirty after a convivial evening with the boys in the cafe. Everyone was tremendously kind to us, and it became embarrassing when they insisted on making gifts, usually a bottle of their own wine, or some oranges or grapes. My truck had so many bottles stashed away in the cab that I started an overflow on a shelf above my bed in the hut. What with rising so early, getting to bed so late and having more to drink than I was used to, life went by in a golden haze compounded of booze and fatigue. That time was the nearest I have come to being an alcoholic. I even got into the habit, when wakened in the morning of reaching up to my shelf and taking a good swig of wine before getting out of bed. How I got down the track when belting home at night, with only black out lights to drive by must remain a mystery.