East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road

John Lawton

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611859256
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

1963. While London is beginning to swing, George Horsfield has settled into a stultifying routine - pushing paperwork around at the War Office on behalf of the fading British Empire, then catching the 5.27 home from Waterloo for twin beds and Ovaltine. Until a case of mistaken identity leads him into a world of Russian spies, cash-stuffed envelopes and call girls who aren't what they seem...

This elegant short story, imbued with the mordant wit and seamless period detail that characterise John Lawton's work, shows once again why 'Lawton's up there with Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. Yes, he's that good.' ( The Sun)

EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD

John Lawton

UNHAPPINESS DOES NOT fall on a man from the sky like a branch struck by lightning, it is more like rising damp. It creeps up day by day, unfelt or ignored until it is too late. And if it’s true that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy’s equation, because George Horsfield was unhappy in a way that could only be described as commonplace. He had married young, and he had not married well.

IN 1948 HE had answered the call to arms. At the age of eighteen he hadn’t much choice. National Service—the draft—the only occasion in its thousand-year history that England had had peacetime conscription. It was considered a necessary precaution in a world in which, to quote the U.S. Secretary of State, England had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Not that England knew this—England’s attitude was that we had crushed old Adolf, and we’d be buggered if we’d now lose an empire—it would take more than little brown men in loincloths . . . okay, so we lost India . . . or Johnny Arab with a couple of petrol bombs or those Bolshie Jews in their damn kibbutzes—okay, so we’d cut and run in Palestine, but dammit man, one has to draw the line somewhere. And the line was east of Suez, somewhere east of Suez, anywhere east of Suez—a sort of movable feast really.

George had expected to do his two years square-bashing or polishing coal. Instead, to both his surprise and pleasure, he was considered officer material by the War Office Selection Board. Not too short in the leg, no dropped aitches, a passing knowledge of the proper use of a knife and fork, and no pretensions to be an intellectual. He was offered a short-service commission, rapidly trained at Eaton Hall in Cheshire—a beggar man’s Sandhurst—and put back on the parade ground not as a private but as Second Lieutenant HG Horsfield RAOC.

Why RAOC? Because the light of ambition had flickered in George’s poorly exercised mind—he meant to turn this short-service commission into a career—and he had worked out that promotion was faster in the technical corps than in the infantry regiments, and he had chosen the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the “suppliers,” whose most dangerous activity was that they supplied some of the chaps who took apart unexploded bombs, but, that allowed for, an outfit in which one was unlikely to get blown up, shot at, or otherwise injured in anything resembling combat.

GEORGE’S EFFORTS NOTWITHSTANDING, England did lose an empire, and the bits it didn’t lose England gave away with bad grace. By the end of the next decade a British prime minister could stand up in front of an audience of white South Africans, until that moment regarded as our “kith and kin,” and inform them that “a wind of change is blowing through the continent.” He meant, “the black man will take charge,” but as ever with Mr. Macmillan, it was too subtle a remark to be effective. Like his “you’ve never had it so good,” it was much quoted and little understood.

George did not have it so good. In fact, the 1950s were little else but a disappointment to him. He seemed to be festering in the backwaters of England—Nottingham, Bicester—postings relieved only, if at all, by interludes in the backwater of Europe known as Belgium. The second pip on his shoulder grew so slowly it was tempting to force it under a bucket like rhubarb. It was 1953 before the pip bore fruit. Just in time for the coronation.

They gave him a few years to get used to his promotion—he boxed the compass of obscure English bases—then Lieutenant Horsfield was delighted with the prospect of a posting to Libya, at least until he got there. He had thought of it in terms of the campaigns of the Second World War that he’d followed with newspaper clippings, a large corkboard, and drawing pins when he was a boy—Monty, the eccentric, lisping Englishman, versus Rommel, the old Desert Fox, the romantic, halfway-decent German. Benghazi, Tobruk, El Alamein—the first land victory of the war. The first real action since the Battle of Britain.

There was plenty of evidence of the war around Fort Kasala (known to the British as 595 Ordnance Depot, but built by the Italians during their brief, barmy empire in Africa). Mostly it was scrap metal. Bits of tanks and artillery half-buried in the sand. A sort of modern version of the legs of Ozymandias. And the fort itself looked as though it had taken a bit of a bashing in its time. But the action had long since settled down to the slow motion favored by camels and even more so by donkeys. It took less than a week for it to dawn on George that he had once more drawn the short straw. There was only one word for the Kingdom of Libya—boring. A realm of sand and camel shit.

He found he could get through a day’s paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty’s Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he inquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, “What do you do with the rest of the day?”

Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading—Teach Yourself Italian.

“Come sta?”

“Sorry, corporal, I don’t quite . . .”

“It means, ‘How are you, sir?’ In Italian. I’m studying for my O level exam in Italian.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pass the time. I’ve got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German, and Russian—this year I’ll take Italian and Art History.”

“Good Lord, how long have you been here?”

“Four years, sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in fuckin’ Libya. ’Scuse my French, sir.”

Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books—Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary.

“Why don’t you give it a whirl, sir? It’s better than goin’ bonkers or shaggin’ camels.”

George took the books, and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.

It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the partition—“Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore”—“Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole”—that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek, a...

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