Kids Behind Barbed Wire. Growing up by the Suez Canal. Mudsailor

8/9/2019 Kids Behind Barbed Wire. Growing up by the Suez Canal. Mudsailor

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Kids behind barbed wire

Between 1949 and 1951, my mother, sister Hazel

and I lived in a small transit camp at El Ballahabout a mile from the Suez Canal. The camp was

surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by

British soldiers. Whichever direction you looked,

there was nothing but flat hard sand and the

occasional ship passing by on the Suez Canal .

For adults, it must have been sheer hell and the

only thing they had in common was a longing to

be anywhere but El Ballah. For us kids, however,it was fantastic. We only went to school in the morning and, in the afternoon, were

allowed to swim in the canal. We lived in shorts or swimming trunks and only tidied

ourselves up for church on Sunday. I could spend hours just watching the cargo ships

and passenger liners passing up and down the canal and dreaming about what it

would be like to work on them. The area had once been a huge shallow saltwater lake

which filled with water from the Red Sea and shrunk at certain times of the year. The

sand there was full of tiny seashells. Many biblical scholars now believe that Moses

led his people to the promised land through El Ballah and that the ‘sea crossing’ took

place just to the north of the camp.

Our mother worked in the camp school but that was for smaller kids. Our school was

about 20 miles south in a large military camp close to the town of Ismailia on the

shores of Lake Timsah. Timsah is Arabic for crocodile but I never saw any. Lake

Timsah had a real beach and there were some sail boats which we could use. We

would travel to Ismailia in a canvas-covered three ton lorry or a small jeep with

wooden benches for seats and there were no seat belts. Once aboard the lorry, the

tailgate was bolted securely and you kept away

from it in case the driver braked suddenly.

Sometimes the drivers would let us climb

through and sit up alongside them as there was

little or no traffic on the desert roads. I even

got to drive the lorry though my feet could

barely reach the pedals. Occasionally, the

military police would pull us over because they

were bored and we would scoot back to ourseats so the drivers would not be put on a

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charge. On one occasion, we were stopped because a film was being made. It was

called The Cairo Road and was about drug smuggling. The two main stars of the

film, Lawrence Harvey and Eric Portman, were standing by the side of the road as we

passed by.

The road between the two camps ran alongside

the Suez Canal, a railway line and smaller canal.

The small canal was known as the Sweet Water

Canal and had been dug originally to bring fresh

water to the men excavating the main canal. If

there was one rule we never broke, it was to

swim or enter the Sweet Water Canal. The water

was anything but sweet and contained many life

threatening bacteria. The locals may have

bathed, laundered and defecated in it, but the Europeans had to avoid it like the

plague (which it probably carried). In contrast, the Suez Canal was quite safe with a

slow current flowing south from the Mediterranean. Another rule we never broke was

to stroke stray dogs, especially when they were foaming at the mouth.

The highlight of my life in Egypt was a visit by lorry to the Pyramids and the Sphynx

many miles away at Gizeh. I remember going right into the centre of the Great

Pyramid and climbing up the large sandstone blocks outside. The Sphynx waspractically buried in the sand, and Cairo was just visible on the skyline. Visiting

Egypt forty years later, I was amazed to see that the city and its slums had spread

until they were just a stone’s throw away. The camel drivers and souvenir sellers,

however, were just the same. Even as I write this, someone will be shouting at some

British tourist, ‘Hello Johnnie! You want to buy naughty postcards? Where you live

in England? Arsenal? Sheffield Wednesday?’

Once a month, a library came from one of the larger campsand we could also order books from the UK. One book I

remember was ‘Scouting for Boys’ by Lord Baden-Powell.

From it, I learnt how to track footprints in the sand and how to

work out which way a bicycle was being ridden from its tyre

marks. A wobble will produce two tyre tracks which gradually

merge in the direction in which the bike is travelling. I

discovered how to carry secret messages in a cleft stick and

how to hide when you have to spy on people. Did you know

that liars always walk with their feet splayed out. What a

book! The man was either a genius or a complete nutter.

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It wasn’t always paradise. One of the teachers in our

school was a popular American nun called Sister Anthony.

One day, an Egyptian entered the school with a gun, she

asked him to leave quite firmly and he shot her dead. At

about the same time, a Major living on the camp took his

family on a shopping trip to Port Said, a town at the

entrance to the Canal. They were attacked by a mob and,

although the family escaped, he was murdered and dragged

through the streets. This was one of Britain’s ‘forgotten

wars’ in which many soldiers and civilians lost their lives, and not always at the

hands of the locals. We often made friends with the camp guards and I remember one

in particular. He used to give us comics and make jokes. When an official vehicle

approached the camp entrance, he would lift the barrier and cry. ‘To your posts, men!

Here comes the stage coach from Deadwood City! Watch out for them Indians!’ One

night when he was off duty and drunk, he stumbled into the barbed wire of the

perimeter fence. He ignored the commands of the young guards sent to investigate,

and believing him to be an insurgent, they shot him. The two guards had to guard his

body that night until an ambulance came from another camp. Later, they told us what

a terrible experience it had been for them. We missed him.

! The barbed wire fence Soldiers tents

My hero in the camp was a former prisoner of war whom we called Armenian Joe.

He managed the soldier’s canteen and shop and lived in a small room to the side of

the building. Some evenings we would sit outside his room and listen to his tales

about the war. He had served in the German Navy and had been shot in the leg. On

special occasions, he would show us the bullet wound and we would gape at it in

awe. Armenian Joe was a kind man, generous with his time and money. We always

felt safe in his presence and he was the closest I ever got to having a father.

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But the main purpose of this trip into the past is to tell you about some of the things

we kids would get up to. There was a gang of us and the girls could join in as long as

they didn’t want to play kiss chase. I cannot imagine what today’s Health and Safety

laws would make of some of the things we did. As a guide to our activities, I’ve used

some of the rules we had to obey; we must have broken every one of them.

Children should be protected from the sun and wear suitable footwear

What a sensible rule, for the daily temperature could reach 46° and soldiers often

died of heat stroke. In India, we wore pith helmets (topees) which made us look like

mobile mushrooms, but they weren’t issued to us in Egypt, so we ignored it. As for

the footwear, well if the locals could shuffle around in bare feet, then why not us?

Walking along the side of the Suez Canal, I slipped down the sloping concrete edge

and cut my foot on a piece of broken glass. As I hobbled back to the camp, I made an

interesting discovery. At first, the blood came pouring out of the cut but within a few

minutes it had completely stopped as if nothing had happened. Our feet must have

become very hardy for a deep cut to heal so quickly.

Children are not to interfere with military activities

I’m not quite sure what they thought we would do. I know that we changed the

direction of signs around the camp in order to confuse visiting military personnel, andsat in the trees firing catapults at the soldiers on parade, but apart from that we

generally kept out of the way. There was, however, one area of the camp that

fascinated us. Two disused aircraft from WW2 lay close to the perimeter fence at the

back of the camp, and were used for training purposes. Wearing heavy kit and rifles,

the soldiers would climb in and out of them whilst being barked at by a sergeant

major, whose surname, incidentally, was Major. The aircraft with their torn fuselages

were off limits, but that didn’t worry us, and we spent hours climbing all over them,

sitting in their cockpits, moving levers and twiddling knobs. Invariably, we would bechased away and fled like rats across the desert and back to the camp.

The wrecked planes inspired one of the most bizarre things we ever did and almost

ended in disaster. We built our own plane, a glider, from fruit boxes and sheets of

plywood for the wings. Our flying machine had two wheels and a tail plane, and I

have never forgotten the day it was launched from the sloping roof of the hospital.

I don’t remember why we used the hospital roof; perhaps it was an insurance policy?

And why I was chosen to be the pilot? The plane was supposed to slide down the

corrugated iron roof and glide gracefully to earth. Unfortunately, it just slid over the

edge of the roof and plunged to earth where it buried its nose in the sand. I was

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catapulted out but the sand was soft and deep and cushioned my fall. After that

unsuccessful maiden flight, we switched from aeronautical engineering to show

business. We converted our aircraft into a Punch and Judy stall, and put on a show for

the little kids.

Children will not fraternise with the soldiers or civilian staff.

Now this one was really unfair. I know we fired our catapults at the soldiers but they

were really good fun and taught us lots of interesting skills which we didn’t get at

school. For example, they showed us how to cheat at cards, how to load a rifle, and

which pedals to use when driving a three ton lorry. We also learnt how to pronounce

important Arabic words and phrases and the gestures that should accompany them.

The Sudanese workers were particularly friendly and taught us how to play native

drums and finger drumming techniques. I must have driven my mother mad

practising them on the dining table. Then there were the Captain Marvel comics

which the soldiers gave us. Captain Marvel put Superman in the shade as he didn’t

have to hide in a phone box or wear underpants outside his

jump suit. No, Captain Marvel just yelled SHAZAM! and

his clothing changed by magic and he flew to rescue of the

World. There was Mary Marvel for the girls and there was

Captain Marvel Junior who, as we were reminded in every

edition, was ‘just a poor cripple’. When confronted by avillain, Captain Marvel would shout ‘Holy Moly!’ and that

became our war cry; we even whispered it in church

instead of ‘Amen’. A court case by the publishers of

Superman put Captain Marvel out of business, but the

artists were all recruited because their work was superb. I

can still see those piles of Captain Marvel comics lying

around the soldiers’ tents. Today, they are worth a fortune.

Children are not to enter certain buildings without permission.

Now that was like waving a red rag at a bull. We explored every inch of that camp

and any buildings near the Suez Canal. We discovered all sorts of interesting things

when no one was around. I remember we broke into a room above an assembly hall

and discovered a cache of maps. They were all stamped Top Secret and looked jolly

interesting so we nicked a few to swap for marbles at the big school in Ismailia.

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Children must be accompanied by an adult at the camp cinema

! ! ! ! ! ‘Cinema Paradiso’

Well, that was a non-starter. The camp had a cinema close to the main gate and films

were shown two or three times a week. We would sneak in for free, and at the end of

the programme, collect up all the empty bottles which the soldiers had left littering

the floor. The bottles had a deposit of one piastre (1p) on them and an agile scavenger

could make a tidy bit of pocket money. At the start of the show, I would go up to the

projection room and put on the one record in the cinema’s collection. It was a rousing

march called Semper Fidelis (Always faithful) by the American composer John Philip

Sousa and I handled that old 78 rpm record as if it were gold dust. By law, the

cinema had to play the Egyptian national anthem and display a picture of King

Farouk on the screen at the end of the film. I must confess that the soldiers did not

treat this with the respect it required and sang a rather bawdy song in Arabic to

accompany the anthem. We picked up the words very quickly.

Children must be supervised when visiting beaches and behave themselves

Yes, yes, we know all that. Now what we really liked to do was

dig large holes and cover them with pieces of cardboard and a

layer of sand. Then, it was great fun watching people walk

along the beach and disappear suddenly into our hole. Or, wewould get some little kid to volunteer to sit in the hole while

we covered him with sand. ‘You will dig me out afterwards,

won’t you?’ We didn’t and just sat hurling rubbish or fruit

skins at the strange little head sticking out of the sand.

There were always one or two objectionable older kids who would pinch our drinks

while we were out swimming. The best solution to this problem was to fill our glasses

with a certain fluid that is also a pale yellow but tastes nothing like lemonade. Then,when the thieves helped themselves to it, we just couldn’t help laughing as they

gulped it down and spat it out in disgust.

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Children are strictly forbidden to swim across the Suez Canal

Even the soldiers were forbidden to do this because

the other side of the canal was not under the British

mandate, and it still contained mines laid during the

recent war. A little thing like that didn’t stop us and

we regularly made excursions to the other bank and

make rude gestures, and used some of those

important Arabic phrases, to the soldiers who

shouted angrily at us to return. By the time a launch

was sent to remove us, we had all returned safely.

When these escapades were brought to our mother’s attention she sent us to the camp

chaplain or to the commanding officer to be punished. We were absolutely terrified of

the RC chaplain who was a drunken bully, but found the camp commandant, Captain

Hall, a very decent fellow. The former would rant and rave and threaten us with all

kinds of beatings whereas Captain Hall would send us out with his son, Carl, to

collect litter. Hazel was very keen on his son, so this was hardly a punishment for her.

To avoid the priest, we begged our mother not to send us to Captain Hall, and of

course she did. Later, he was sacked from the Army, but that wasn’t our fault.

Children are to keep away from ships passing through the canal.

Now what they had in mind was the

danger of our being sucked into the

propellors or injured by the wash which

followed a ship up the canal. But if we

saw an American naval ship heading

our way, there was no stopping us.‘Give us some gum, chum!’ we would

shout as we paddled in the water, and

be showered with sweets from those

generous yanks. Occasionally they

would shout ‘Hey, where are you guys

from?’ and in our best English we

would reply ‘We are Egyptians. We live

here.’ I always wanted a US navy sailor’s hat ( pork pie), but whenever they threw

them, they were sucked under the propellors and, although I searched in the ship’s

wake before the next ship could plough into me, they never resurfaced.

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Our most exciting day was when all the

traffic on the canal came to a halt

because of a collision to the south. Ships

moored up to the side of the canal with

large hawsers and gangways were

lowered for the benefit of crew members

who wanted a swim. It was a heaven sent

opportunity and we made full use of it.

An Amercan cargo ship, the Cape Race

of the Isbrandsten Line, moored almost

opposite the camp and we dashed a mile

across the sand to inspect it in closer

detail. Cape Race was what was known as

a Liberty Ship. These cargo ships were built quickly and cheaply during WW2 on the

basis that many of them would be sunk by German submarines. Despite their cheap

construction, they survived for many years after the war. Seeing the gangway

lowered, we leapt into the water and struck out for the ship. Observing us paddling

around at the foot of the gangway, the Captain invited us aboard and we spent an houror two inspecting every inch of the ship, talking to the sailors and asking loads of

questions. The American sailors were puzzled by our accents. ‘Gee, you kids speak

such good English.’ This time, however, we did not pretend to be Egyptians and

happily accepted their generous gifts of sweets and chocolates before heading back

for the shore. Thereafter, I was hooked on ships and was determined to work on

them, which I eventually did.

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Now here’s an odd little thing. As our father had been a captain in the Pioneers (a

labour corps which included two thousand Germans), we were allowed to live in the

officers’ quarters. Sometimes, other children in the quarters would confront us and

with braying voices announce ‘Your father can’t have been an officer. You don’t

speak like officers’ children. You both speak like riff raff’. How mother fretted over

her feral offspring when she overheard that blunt remark. A year later, I was

watching a football match at Hillsborough in Sheffield and made a comment about

the game to some lads next to me. ‘You’re not from round ‘ere are you?’ asked one of

them. I replied that I wasn’t and asked how he knew. ‘Cos you talk right posh.‘

With the passage of time, Hazel was sent to a boarding school in Cairo to improve

her behaviour and become a young lady. But the Suez Canal Zone was not a safe

place to live; the British military presence severely irritated the Egyptians who rightly

wanted more control over their canal. The camps were being attacked and people

were dying. I was sent to a military school in England where most of the boys were

orphaned or their fathers were absent. At the military school, I met up with a boy

from the camp. When one of the masters discovered that we had lived in Egypt, he

made us sit cross-legged in front of each other at an assembly and conduct a

conversation in Arabic. Initially, we greeted each other warmly with the usual

pleasantries, Salam! Kaifa Haloka? Then we became more adventurous and began

to exchange all those important Arabic phrases that we had picked up from the

soldiers, plus, of course, the gestures that went with them. Everyone was impressesdand our performance was warmly applauded by our audience. If only they had known

what we were saying, particularly about the master, we would have been grounded

for life.

But after the freedom of a desert urchin, it was like being sent to prison. Wearing

heavy boots and an uncomfortable khaki uniform, I shivered in the cold rain and

longed for the warmth of the desert sun. Abroad, I had discovered that the British

were not universally loved: at school, I was to discover why. I made up my mind toleave that place at the earliest opportunity and go to sea.

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The camp at El Ballah today. Egyptian Army warehouses have replaced the original British Army

buildings but the general outline of the original camp is still visible in the desert sand. The Suez

Canal lies off to the right and is half a mile nearer the camp! This is because a short loop was added

to the canal some years ago to allow convoys of ships to pass each other

Sunday Best at El Ballah The ‘Riff raff’ on Lake Timsah

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Kids Behind Barbed Wire. Growing up by the Suez Canal. Mudsailor

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Transcript of Kids Behind Barbed Wire. Growing up by the Suez Canal. Mudsailor