passing row upon row of tents, tanks, other armoured vehicles and the many trucks of first the British, then the Indian lines, until arriving at the New Zealand area. There he switched off the headlights and the rest of the men piled out, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness, then using torches to locate what they needed in the tents temporarily vacated by the Kiwis.
It took them quite a while, but it was well worth the effort, for they managed to pile the three-tonner high with lamps, tables, chairs, steel lockers, washbasins, mirrors, cooking utensils, proper camp beds, mattresses, sheets, towels, portable showers and latrines, tents large and small, camouflage netting, and even crates of beer and spirits.
‘Come on, lads!’ Taff whispered when they had been busily thieving for an hour. ‘Let’s take this lot back to base. Then we’ll return for some more.’
‘You’ve got a fucking nerve,’ Jimbo said, grinning.
‘Piece of piss,’ Taff replied.
They made three runs in all, boldly driving in and out of the camp, waving cheerily at the Indian guard and passing the British and Indian lines as if they belonged there. Eventually, even the daring Taff checked his watch, noted that it was almost dawn, and became a bit nervous.
‘Let’s pack it in and get out of here,’ he told them. ‘It’ll soon be first light and the Kiwis will probably return then. We can’t afford to get caught now.’
‘Right,’ Frankie agreed. ‘Let’s get going.’
They were hurrying out of the last, largest tent, obviously used as a mess tent, when the musically inclined Jimbo stopped, stared lovingly at a dust-covered item in one corner, near a long trestle table, and said, ‘Oh, God, look at that beauty!’
‘What?’ Neil asked, perplexed.
‘I want her. I need her!’
The rest stared at Jimbo as if he was mad. ‘Are you kidding?’ Frankie asked eventually. ‘That’s a bloody piano!’
Jimbo ran his fingers lovingly over the keyboard without making any sound. ‘A real darlin’, lads. Going to waste here. It could cheer things up a bit in our mess – when we get a mess going. What about it?’
‘Jesus, Jimbo!’
‘We could have a regular Saturday night. Make the beer slip down even smoother. Come on, lads, let’s grab it.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Taff said, exasperated and amused at the same time. ‘Just grab the bloody thing and let’s go. Move it, lads! Now!’
The piano was humped onto the lorry, easily placed there because this last load was light, then the dozen men climbed up to seat themselves around it. Jimbo then drove boldly back through the camp and waved as usual to the Indian guard at the main gate. The latter, seeing the piano, looked suspicious for the first time, but Jimbo was off and gone in a cloud of dust before he could be stopped.
Once back at Kabrit, where the sun was shedding dawn light over the Great Bitter Lake, painting it crimson, the men unloaded their last haul, had a brew-up and cold breakfast to get them through to lunchtime. They then enthusiastically raised the brand-new tents they had stolen, camouflaged them with the netting, filled them with beds, steel lockers, tables and chairs, hung mirrors from the uprights, filled the lockers with their belongings, and placed family photos on their tables and cupboards.
When their sleeping arrangements had been sorted out, they raised the biggest tent, to be used as the mess tent, helped the cook set up his kitchen, carried in the long trestle tables and chairs, stacked the crates of beer and spirits beside a refrigerator run off a portable electric generator, and finally wheeled the piano in.
Jimbo stood back to admire it. ‘Looks beautiful, don’t it?’
‘A real treat,’ Frankie told him. ‘What about a tune?’
‘You mean now?’
‘Why not? Having just nicked it, we’d like to know if you can actually play the fucking thing.’
‘I can play,’ Jimbo said.
When he had expertly given them a Vera Lynn medley, his fingers light on the keys, they all gathered outside to help two former REME men raise the portable showers and thunderboxes. Jimbo had an experimental shit and pronounced the latrines operational. For the rest of the hour leading up to lunchtime, there was a general rush to make use of them.
Later that day Stirling returned from Cairo in a jeep, leading a convoy of other jeeps and lorries for the use of L Detachment. When the vehicles had been parked, the Royal Corps of Transport drivers climbed into a Bedford and were driven back to their own base at Geneifa. Stirling then told his SAS troopers to unload the assortment of large and small weapons he had brought in one of the lorries. These included the brand-new Sten gun, Vickers and Browning heavy machine-guns, the M1 Thompson sub-machine-gun, and the obligatory Bren light machine-gun. These were stacked up in one of the smaller tents, to be used as an armoury under the charge of Corporal Jim Almonds.
By nightfall, when the burning heat was being replaced by freezing cold, the desolate ‘piss-hole’ of Kabrit was a well-equipped operational base and Jimbo was playing the piano in the noisy mess tent.
Their training began at first light the next day with a more intensive weapons course than any of them had ever undergone before. Assuming that their greatest need would be for a barrage of fire at relatively close range to cover a hasty retreat after acts of sabotage, Sergeant Lorrimer gave only cursory attention to the standard bolt-action rifles and instead concentrated on the new 9mm Sten sub-machine-gun. This was only 762mm long, weighed a mere 3.70kg, was cheap and crude in construction, with a simple metal stock and short barrel, yet could fire 550 rounds per minute from 32-round box magazines and had an effective range of 45 yards.
To cover the same needs, great attention was also given to the M1 Thompson sub-machine-gun, better known as the ‘tommy-gun’ and immortalized by the Hollywood gangster movies of the 1930s and early 40s. A heavier, more accurate and powerful weapon, the tommy-gun had a solid wooden stock and grip, a longer barrel, and could fire 11.43 rounds at the rate of 700 per minute from 30-round box magazines, with an effective range of 60 yards.
Everyone was also retrained in the use of the 0.5-inch Browning heavy machine-gun, which could fire 400–500 rounds per minute from a belt feed, and was effective up to 1600 yards; the beloved Bren gun, the finest light machine-gun in existence, which could fire 520 rounds per minute from 30-round box magazines and was effective up to 650 yards; and finally the lethal Vickers ‘K’ .303-inch machine-gun, actually an aircraft weapon, which fired 500 rounds per minute from 100-round magazines filled with a mixture of tracer, armour-piercing incendiary and ball bullets.
This stage of the training was undertaken on a primitive firing range that was really no more than a flat stretch of desert, baked by a fierce sun, often covered in wind-blown dust, forever filled with buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes, and with crudely painted targets raised on wooden stakes at the far end, overlooking the glittering Great Bitter Lake. The firing range was also used for training in the use of 500g and 1kg hand-grenades, including the pineapple-shaped ‘36’ grenade and captured German ‘potato mashers’, which had a screw-on canister at one end, a screw cap at the
