Small Wars Read Free Page B

ship to close the distance between them.

    The front door stuck.
    ‘We’ve had a lot of thunderstorms,’ said Hal.
    The girls peered past their mother’s legs into the darkness of the house.
    ‘Well gosh, it’s not awfully Mediterranean, is it?’ said Clara.
    ‘Not today.’
    Corporal Kirby, Hal’s batman, began to bring the cases in from the Land Rover. Clara was forced into the kitchen; she and the girls pressed themselves against the wall as Hal and Kirby lifted the biggest trunk and took it upstairs.
    Clara took off her hat. There was a stove, a small table, a sink and a food safe with a front that opened downwards to make a shelf. The brown louvred shutters were closed on the window at the front, and at the back of the house there was a door with a curtain over it. The little girls silently watched Clara go to it and push the curtain aside. It slid awkwardly on the plastic-covered wire.
    The neighbouring houses backed onto a small courtyard where there was a washing bowl for clothes on the tiles, and a tree in a pot that was dead. She turned back to the room. The girls were pale and top-heavy in their buttoned-up coats.
    ‘Your things are wet, aren’t they?’ said Clara, and took off their woollen hats. ‘Shall we go and see what Daddy’s up to?’
    In the front bedroom, Hal and Corporal Kirby were trying to find space for the trunks and smaller cases. Hal turned to Clara as she came in. He looked serious and embarrassed.
    ‘What a lovely house!’ she said, and he smiled at her.
    ‘That’s fine, Kirby. Leave it, will you.’
    ‘Right, sir.’
    They heard his boots down the stairs, and the door, and then the Land Rover starting up. Meg and Lottie stared at their parents.
    ‘How’s it been?’ said Clara.
    ‘Not bad at all.’
    ‘Better than Krefeld?’
    ‘Well, not half so luxurious, as you can see.’
    ‘We don’t mind.’
    ‘Don’t you?’
    ‘Of course not. We’ll make the best of it.’
    Clara went to him slowly. She put her face against his shoulder and the girls came over too, and rested their hands on their parents’ legs. Hal put his head down and felt Clara’s smooth hair against his cheek. ‘A month was too long,’ he said. He put his arms round them all as the sound of motorbikes and Cypriot voices and the banging shutters of other houses came up from the street.

Chapter Two
    The Episkopi Garrison was west of Limassol. The narrow road left the town and crossed the big headland, with the Akrotiri RAF base fence on the left, then went back towards the sea through orange groves, flat fertile land and a long avenue of cypresses.
    After the orange groves, the road went up steeply and climbed the cliffs, first with a cutting through them, then with big views of the sea and the long coast behind. After that part, the land was empty and more remote for a stretch and then there was Episkopi.
    After you drove through the gate and along the small road into the garrison, there was a mixture of freshly made concrete buildings and Nissen huts, signs to different areas and rows of Land Rovers, three-tonners and large tented sections too, with rutted tracks between them, where permanent buildings hadn’t been sorted out yet. There were too many troops coming into Cyprus to accommodate them all properly, a feeling of movement all the time, and a shifting of plans.
    Happy Valley was at the far side of the garrison, with the mountains behind it, and had been tented, but now white houses for officers were being put up, with front lawns, and the track to the stables and polo field was half laid with tarmac.
    Below the garrison was the beach, an arc, which for most of the year was good for swimming and exercising horses on the sand. You could walk through a long straight tunnel in the high cliff to get to it, or you could negotiate a very steep track down the front of the lower cliffs where they were sandy and had grass in patches.
    The officers’ mess was a new, concrete building, painted white,