SOME OBSERVATIONS ON RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE.

Syrian children have been subjected to “unspeakable” suffering in the nearly three years of civil war, with the Government and allied militia responsible for countless killings, maiming and torture, and the opposition for recruiting youngsters for combat and using terror tactics in civilian areas, according to the first United Nations report on the issue.’ UN News Centre, 4^th February 2014.’

In 1961 I was a briefly suspected by the Libyan police of stealing a consignment of golden ‘bijouterie’ which had arrived by air from Italy and stored awaiting collection in one of my warehouse at Tripoli’s international airport. I was arrested and interrogated by a polite and well trained police lieutenant and, it transpires, followed by competent detectives for some time.

Some members of my Libyan staff who also came under suspicion were treated with less consideration. On them the police used an interrogation technique known as the bastinado. I had not heard of this painful process until I asked one of them why walking caused him such pain. He told me that during his interview in the airport police post he was forced to lie on a bedstead whilst someone thrashed the soles of his feet with a stick.

It took two years for an insurance agent to work out that a near bankrupt Tripoli jeweller had arranged an insurance scam in which a box of worthless costume jewellery was shipped to him by air from an accomplice in Naples. It was insured for a considerable sum as ‘golden bijouterie’ and marked as a valuable consignment on the air waybill and cargo manifest. He arranged for other accomplices in Tripoli to steal it from my freight warehouse so that he might claim its fictitious value in gold from his insurers. His scam, his insurance claim and his business failed.

My failure to protest about the brutal interrogation of my staff is amongst my bad memories but I may have been conditioned by my own education to accept it as normal. In the late 1940s I attended a boarding school in the English county of Cornwall where beatings of younger boys by their elders were common and vicious. Initiation ceremonies in such establishments were both physically and psychologically violent and were perpetrated by boys who are now pillars of society. Violence, habitually committed, leads to a point where it loses its significance. Put simply, savagery begets savagery.

When moral leadership, law and order and civic society is absent people tend to seek mutual security by bonding in groups which may be religious, racial, political, tribal, gang or clan. When this happens individual identity merges with the ‘group self’ and loathing for other groups is increased. Groups with strong internal identities, especially religious and political groups, can become capable of inhuman savagery. Eventually people will do savage things if their leaders tell them it is acceptable once they have renounced their individuality and merged with the group self. Examples of this are found in the Red Terror, the Pol Pot extermination of 25% of the Cambodian population and the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion today. When religion is infused into the ‘group self’ it seems to heighten hatred for those who hold incompatible values. The fate of Christians in the Middle East is a notable example. Salafist-Jihadists have begun to see themselves as the sole arbiters of Islam. They persuade their foot-soldiers that ‘their hands are prepared to do the blessed act’ of beheading their enemies.

Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part in perpetuating the savagery. The Bedouin tribal concept of ‘Amara dam – ‘those who have agreed on the blood’ – means a group of close male tribal relatives who are bound to revenge a killing of one of their number or to pay blood money should one of their number kill a member of another tribe. This is a manifestation of group behaviour sanctioned by tradition and which grew up in the lawless and nomadic tribal life of true Arabs to reduce the homicide rate.

I suggest that this was what made the killing reported in the Libya Herald dated 30^th August 2014; ‘The Shura Council of Islamic Youth in Derna has killed an Egyptian man it accused of murder in what is reportedly the second public execution carried out by the group in the town……..The execution was the second such public killing in Derna. On 27 July, Islamic Youth put to death two men, one Egyptian and another Libyan, for an alleged murder. This most recent killing has received wide-spread attention after a video of the proceedings was uploaded to the internet. The veracity of the video has been confirmed and shows one man…… killed by a single gunshot to the head. He is surrounded by around 40 members of the Islamic Youth most of whom carry Kalashnikov rifles and wear face masks and military fatigues of one kind or another. One member holds the black flag of Al-Qaeda at the centre of proceedings. There are a large number of spectators present in the stands at the football ground but they cannot be seen in the video. The execution is met with the sounds of chanting and applause.’ Sources in Derna say that the man who pulled the trigger was the murder victim’s brother.

In a paper entitled ‘Kitchener’s Lost Boys’ published in The Evacuee and War Child Journal, volume 1, number 7 and dated 2012, I attempted to show that juvenile adventure and war stories played a major role in recruiting adolescent volunteers to fight for Kitchener’s New Armies in the early years of World War I. I argued that the effect was magnified because of the neuro-physiological changes which take place in the frontal lobes of the human brain between the ages of 12 and 19. This is a period, which might be called the early formative years, when synaptic connections are forged in the frontal lobes in response to experiences. The frontal lobes influence conformity in adults and the connections formed therein during adolescence are said to exert a profound influence over subsequent moral behaviour.

Educators will point out that adolescence is a period when the tendency to form groups is at its strongest. In this case it is often a defence against perceived injustice or for self protection. The group self becomes very strong and is bolstered by a hierarchy, conformity in dress and language and dislike of out-groups. This tendency is exploited by military trainers to focus loyalty onto ‘the cause’ and to reduce individuality in favour of group loyalty.

As James Walvin wrote in a study of English childhood between 1800 and 1914; “It is reasonable to assume that the adults who displayed such fierce nationalism in the early years of the century had learned their jingoistic lines and acquired their sense of national superiority in their early formative years, when thumbing through their books, comics, magazines and yarns.” We might remind ourselves that Walvin refers to a period when the first Information Technology revolution took place fuelled by improvements in papermaking, printing, book binding and by the coming of railways offering rapid distribution of what became the mass print media.

Those of us who are against censorship in any form may have to consider our convictions with greater care in the case of our own IT revolution and in particular the ‘Social Media’. Perhaps we might take the view that the social media is a ‘virtual’ country where law and order, moral leadership and civic society are largely absent. People tend to use it to form virtual groups some of which develop strong group identities. Vulnerable adolescents are particularly prone to this effect and may isolate themselves with their laptops and games consoles from real society and begin to abdicate their identity to a ‘group self’. In this way Jihadist propagandists adjust the inner personal narrative of their target audience so that their recruiters find ready volunteers.

In particular we might consider the effect of violent videos depicting public executions and savagery on adolescent development. I argue that these videos are the ‘flight simulators’ for brutalising the minds of young recruits to the Islamist militias.

A future James Walvin might well write; “It is reasonable to assume that the adults who displayed such fierce Jihadist zeal in the early years of the 21^st century had learnt their murderous ways and acquired their sense of religious superiority in their early formative years, when watching videos and playing violent games on their laptops and games consoles.”

THE HISTORY EXAM

Near the end of my teaching career, I was invigilating a history exam. Whilst it was in progress, I looked at the exam paper. One of the questions required the candidates to comment about a photograph of a member of the British Royal Family in the tropical dress uniform of an admiral surrounded by a group of smartly dressed notables. They had, the candidates were informed, been lowering the flag on British colonial rule somewhere in Africa. It was time I retired. In my early career, I had played a very small part in the aftermath of the event.

Sometime in December 1962 I was watching at Benghazi’s international airport as an East Africa Airways aircraft in transit from Nairobi to London aborted its start-up procedure. One of its engines was broken and we could not fix it in Benghazi. The aircraft would have to be flown back to base using three of its four engines. The passengers were disembarked and parked in the airport lounge. They were stranded in Benghazi until we could find another aircraft to take them onwards. That was not a simple matter.

My staff removed the baggage from the aircraft, found transport to take the passengers to town and accommodation for them in the aged remnant of Italy’s colonial architecture, the Berenice Hotel. There was also the matter of emigration and customs to sort out. Whilst all this was exercising my mind the cabin crew told me that the ex-Governor General of Tanganyika and his wife were amongst the passengers. It was the time when the British Empire was on its last legs. Tanganyika had just become a republic and he had become redundant as the Head of State.

By this time, the passengers were showing signs of discontent. I decided to follow them to the Berenice Hotel and do what I could to make their lives easier. I identified a distinguished looking gentleman as the Governor General and offered to take him and his lady wife to town in my car. I was a little concerned that they had two young daughters. Governor Generals, in my limited experience of such personages, were unlikely be encumbered by progeny. We arrived at the hotel before the other passengers and I arranged for the distinguished gentleman and his family to have the VIP suite. It would allow them to unwind from the rigours of high office in tranquillity, or so I reasoned. There was much to do, and I forgot about the matter until the next morning.

There was, in those days, a certain type of English woman who could dominate a hotel lobby or any other public space for that matter. It was such a woman that I found in the early morning addressing the hotel receptionists in the manner of a Governor General’s wife. She was complaining that she and her husband had not slept well as their very small room was immediately over the night club. No doubt the orchestra’s limited repertoire would have tested their patience.

I had identified the wrong person to have the VIP suite. The gentleman I had selected for the privilege had just sold his farm in Kenya and was on his way to England to start a new career. The exchange that followed between me and the ex-Governor General’s lady would not have found a place in a history exam.

THE QUEEN’S DOCTOR

For some years, our home was in a suburb of Benghazi. Our near neighbour was a Sicilian doctor who lived much of his life on the edge. He was a government doctor who also treated private patients. Amongst them was the Queen of Libya. He was living with a beautiful Belgian lady who had just left her husband. He augmented his income by embalming expatriates whose mortal remains had to go home for burial and by attempting to beat the roulette wheels in the casino. He liked to hunt and kept the badly cured skin of a cheetah which he had shot in the desert. He had a pet gazelle in his back garden and was upset when it was bitten by a scorpion.

He often needed rescuing from himself, sometimes by me. He was good enough to reciprocate. His influence was invaluable, for example, when our daughter had bitten off the end of a mercury thermometer and we thought she had swallowed it.

I asked no questions when he appeared at our door and instructed me to dash to the pharmacy in town and collect some saline drips. I did as he asked under the impression that one of his patients had turned up at his house in need of urgent attention.

I met him sometime later and asked him if his patient had recovered. He explained that the supplies I had collected from the pharmacy were not for a patient but for the Belgian lady. He and she had had a fierce difference of opinion. She had become very angry indeed and locked herself in the bathroom. To persuade her to come out he decided to frighten her by firing his pistol. He reasoned that if he shot downwards into the wooden bathroom door the bullet would embed itself therein, but the noise of the shot would persuade her to stop arguing and come out. He fired into the door, but the bullet penetrated it and ricocheted around the bathroom. She had been sitting on the water closet which was shattered by the bullet, depositing her on the broken shards. She was deeply shocked.

On another occasion, he turned up at our door looking somewhat worse for wear. He asked me to drive him to the hospital with great care as he thought he had broken a shoulder blade. He was in too much pain to explain in detail, but he and his lady had been out in the desert in a government Landrover ambulance in which he had topped a sand dune at speed and rolled down the steep side. He had landed heavily but the Belgian lady had only minor injuries. I left him at the hospital entrance.

He had indeed broken a shoulder blade and one of his colleagues fixed the pieces together with a wire and encased his chest in plaster of Paris. There was a piece of the wire sticking out of the plaster so that it could be removed later, leaving the plaster cast in place.

The full story emerged soon enough. He and his Belgian lady were in a government Landrover ambulance but not on official business. They were hunting gazelles. They had spotted a herd and given chase, topped a dune at speed and rolled down the other side. He was accused by the government of using the ambulance for private purposes but offered the implausible, but apparently acceptable, excuse that he had received a report of a typhus outbreak and had gone to investigate.

He held a party in his house when he decided to have the wire removed from his shoulder blade, to which he invited June and me and several doctors. They gleefully insisted that I removed the wire using a pair of pliers from the garage tool kit.

GUILT AND GALLANTRY

I have ordered a book about David Drummond who was awarded the George Medal for gallantry during his service with the Kenya police. I want to read it because I met him long ago.

He oversaw security for East African Airways when I met him in Benghazi. He came to find out if air crew were smuggling diamonds. It was not improbable. A young co-pilot working for another airline told me that he lived in fear of arrest because he had been paid to smuggle African diamonds. A rich Swiss passenger who had broken his journey home from Ruanda offered me money to go there and bribe government officials to produce certificates of origin for blood diamonds. He had, he said, been hunting gorillas in Ruanda. He was a sinister character. The money would have been welcome. It would have eased my conscience but not guarantee my safety.

David Drummond won the George Medal during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya. The Mau Mau emergency was essentially a war between fighters from the Kikuyu people and the British settlers who had taken tribal land for their farms. The Mau Mau were also known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. It was also about the about independence – Uhuru in Swahili. The British military were engaged in the war and many young white colonialists were drafted into the King’s African Rifles and the Kenya police. Mau Mau fighters were recruited from the Kikuyu and took an oath which was said to be powerful, binding and terrifying. It was also used to prevent betrayal by the wider Kikuyu population. Both men and women took the oath. It was one of the most influential factors in the battle for independence in Kenya.

Mau Mau campaign lasted from 1952 to 1960 and was to haunt the British who conducted it with ungentlemanly ruthlessness and disregard for the truth. Despite their efforts Kenya became independent. It was argued at the time that harsh measures were necessary to match the ruthlessness of the Mau Mau.

Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya’s first prime minister and then president. He had been imprisoned by the colonial power, wrongly so many believe, for his role in the agitation which finally led to independence. Kenyatta was suspected of supporting the Mau Mau. Some say he was the most powerful administrator of the oath which members of the Mau Mau were required to take. This was probably false, but many colonialists believed it. I met Kenyatta when his aircraft staged through Benina on his way to meet the Queen in London and go on to the United Nations in New York.

David Drummond, who spoke fluent Swahili and was a skilled hunter, had joined the Kenya police in 1952, He killed around 40 terrorists. He was awarded a George Medal for conspicuous gallantry against the Mau Mau gangs in the Aberdare region. I see from his obituaries that died at the age of 74 having come to regret taking so many lives.

Whilst we sat on the terrace of the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi, David Drummond told me that he had been to Buckingham Palace and received his gallantry medal from the Queen. Whilst he was in the UK, he took the precaution of visiting the famous Lloyds of London and buying an insurance policy to cover his future life. He explained that as he had killed 40 Mau Mau he constituted an unusual risk. Lloyds of London is still a specialised insurance broker. It gained some notoriety for insuring lady film stars legs and the hairs on the chest of a famous Welsh singer.

He also told me an ironic story.

There was a great deal of tension amongst white residents in Kenya in the early days of independence. Many believed that Kenyatta was dangerous. Drummond had earned a reputation as a ruthless killer of Mau Mau gang members. He told me how surprised he was to receive a summons to meet Kenyatta. He told friends that if he attended and did not return, they should report his demise to the British High Commission.

Drummond kept his appointment. Kenyatta offered him the job as his personal bodyguard. He politely refused the privilege.

Abbar’s tent

I am trying to recall when I first met him. My impression is that he came to see the new offices which I had opened near the dock gates in Benghazi. I remember his appearance well. He was unshaven and his lugubrious eyes were bloodshot. He wore traditional Libyan dress. On his head was the little white skull cap worn below the maroon one, as was common in Libya. For the rest, a white loose shirt with a waistcoat over it, blue cotton trousers which gave plenty of air to the crutch and were tight about the calves and leather sandals out of which his toes with long nails emerged. Most unimpressive of all was the old British army greatcoat he wore against the cold. I had been in Libya long enough not to discriminate on the grounds of apparel and greeted him with the same deference my Libyan colleagues were showing him.

The next time I saw him he had come to visit us in his new western clothes and to receive our admiration for his conversion into a modern man of substance. He wore a smart suit, shirt and tie, pointed leather shoes – with socks – and no skull caps on his head. Most impressive of all was his shave and coiffure, which had been administered by a barber along with strong perfume. I was strangely disappointed but followed my colleagues with fulsome praise for his westernisation and with cups of Turkish coffee proffered in celebration thereof.

He honoured June and I with a feast and a day on his private beach. His home was distant from the town and reached by striking out into country. There was no road and no features to aid navigation. Simmering pools, caused by hot air refracting the light, filled hollows in the ground; mirages I suppose. After an anxious drive his guests were met by retainers and directed to the shore from whence the metallic sea reflected furious sunlight.

His hospitality was dispensed in his simple tent, pitched on the seashore, and shielded by dunes amongst which his sons and retainers lay discreetly hidden. Their purpose was to protect June against prying eyes and to communicate the progress of the feast to Abbar, who remained in his modest house up on the rise. It was a very small house, flat roofed, stone built and protected by a reef of rocks and cacti.

Abbar’s flock of sheep was driven down to the sea to bathe. Boats passed by on their way to fish for sponges in the Gulf of Sirte. The feast was Bedouin in style and not suitable for western digestive systems. Nor was it in accord with western customs, though simple chairs and a small table were provided for guests unable to squat.

First came individual tins of a powerful fish for which tin-openers were provided. These were followed by plates of raw egg roughly mixed with chopped red meat. Then, from the house, the big cuscus bowel was carried down along with legs of freshly killed lamb, charcoal cooked, though not thoroughly. Afterwards came grapes and watermelons. It took many painful, helpless, shameful days to recover from Abbar’s hospitality.

Who was Abbar? He was Mohamed al Abbar, of the House of Abbar, of the Awaquir tribe. The house of Abbar reflected the glory of the great patriot and guerrilla fighter, Abd al Hamid al Abbar, hero of the Senussi wars against the Italians and one of Sidi Omar al Mukhtar’s lieutenants; the only one to escape the murderous clutches of the butcher Graziani after Libya’s hero, Omar al Mukhtar, had been hanged on 16th September 1931.

THE CONTORTIONIST

A small ageing Englishman lived in the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi. He was a bachelor, and his work was not time consuming. He spent much time in the cabaret in the hotel basement. It was known as the Snake Pit by its aficionados.
The cabaret acts toured the North African circuit in troupes. Spanish dancers were popular. There is an affinity between flamenco and Arab dancing.
The female artists were required to entertain the male customers and persuade them to buy Champaign. For each bottle they sold they received a small plastic token which they could cash for spending money. The Greek who ran the place called this ‘making the consumption’. It was unpopular because some customers were too demanding.
The old Englishman made no demands and was well liked, especially by the Spanish dancers. They helped him endure his sixtieth birthday with a joyous celebration in the Snake Pit, only some of which he remembered. He awoke in his room in the morning to find they had flattered him by leaving some female underwear in his bed.
He fell in love with a young Yugoslavian contortionist who was unhappy. Her troop was on the point of leaving. He wanted her to stay in town a while longer, so he took her to a rival cabaret for an audition. He asked me to go along to give moral support.

She performed her strange act before two cynical Greeks whilst he sat nearby. The morning light flattered neither the contortionist nor the old Englishman. She failed the audition and left.

The Englishman retired to live in Spain where he was sometimes visited by second rate flamenco artists who were between engagements.

WHAT HAPPENS ON TAVEUNI STAYS ON TAVEUNI

I cannot remember details of the few days I spent on the Fijian island of Taveuni. The event occurred so long ago, and my aged and declining memory will only release tantalising glimpses of that strange visit. If you are Fijian and reading this, you will understand how hard it is for people to believe I was invited to drinks in the home of Ratu Penaia Ganilau on Taveuni. That I was in the company of two Fijian princesses, Adi Samanunu Cakobau and one of Ratu Penaia’s two daughter, Adi Sivu Ganilau I think, makes the story sound even more fanciful, but it happened.

Sometime in the 19^th Century Christian missionaries decided how to spell and how to pronounce Fijian words in English. They made it more difficult than was necessary and explanations are needed occasionally. So, the title Ratu is used by Fijian men of chiefly rank and Adi – pronounced Andy by me and others – is used by woman who are of similar status. The English pronunciation of Cakobau is Thakombau. I apologise for this bit of pedantry.

Let me begin by telling you who Ratu Penaia, Adi Samanunu and Adi Sivu were. Ratu Sir Penaia Kanatabatu Ganilau GCMG KCVO KBE DSO ED, to give him his full quota of honours and gallantry awards, was a great Fijian personality called ‘Ratu Penny’ by Queen Elizabeth II who liked him a lot, as did most people who met him. He was a hard drinking, Rugby football loving soldier and statesman. He was to become the last Governor General of colonial Fiji and the first President of the Republic of Fiji soon after it achieved independence as a nation in 1987. Adi Samanunu was the daughter of the late Ratu Sir George Cakobau the Paramount Chief of Fiji and also its sometime Governor General. He was the grandson of a reformed cannibal and King of Fiji, Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau.

Adi Samanunu Cakobau became a diplomat and government minister. She was a Fijian chief in her own right and a gracious lady even when she was young. Kipling, the much-maligned Imperial poet, would surely have said ‘she walked with kings – nor lost the common touch’. If he had, he would have been right.

Adi Sivu Ganilau has taken a leading role in demanding compensation for the Fijian sailors probably contaminated by radioactive fallout during the British nuclear weapon tests over the Christmas and Malden Islands – now known as Kiribati – in 1957. Orange Herald, the largest British nuclear weapon was released from a Royal Air Force Valiant bomber and explode high over Malden Island on 31^st May 1957. Amongst those present on board a Royal Navy warship in the vicinity was a contingent of 39 Fijian Naval ratings. Ratu Penaia visited them as one of three Fijian’s notables invited to observe the test. He was one of those who went ashore on Malden Island after the event. His feet were too big to fit protective rubber boots, so he went without, and it is likely that he was contaminated by radioactive fallout. He was to suffer from Guillain-Barre syndrome and died of leukaemia and sepsis in December 1993. Fiji finally paid its own remaining veterans of this and other British nuclear tests some compensation in 2015. Has the UK government offered to help? Probably not.

There were two Pacific island trading companies of note doing business in Fiji. I worked for one of them and probably set back its attempts to enter the tourist industry. The rival company had built a hotel on the Island of Taveuni and invited travel agents and airline representatives to sample its delights. I was amongst them as was Adi Samanunu and Adi Sivu. We were there at the same time as an Australian TV crew. They had discovered that you could send a waiter up a coconut tree to throw down a few nuts. You could slice the top of the nuts and pour in generous measures of vodka which blended with the cool coconut water, and you had a superb but near lethal beverage which encourages you to appreciate the qualities of the hotel and to recommend it to potential clients.

Amongst our pleasant duties in the cause of tourism we were invited to Ratu Penaia’s stately home. It was made of natural material and the roof was supported by hardwood ridge posts. I vaguely recall some fine Tongan or Samoan mats. These mats are highly valued, and the Tongans used to bring them to Taveuni and trade them for beautiful red perroquets, or, it is whispered, the loan of a few wives for a while. The latter exchange may have benefitted Taveuni’s gene pool. The beautiful birds are sometimes called Red Shining Parrots or Taveuni Shining Parrots and are now endangered. There are still some in western Tonga.

Ratu Penaia offered his whisky in bottles with a generous invitation to ‘help yourselves’ which made close observation of the architecture difficult. It also makes the accuracy of some of this story suspect, but I like it this way.

When a Fijian chief’s residence was built in pre-Christian days each ridge post required a human sacrifice. One of the chief’s team of skilled craftsmen willingly gave his life for the honour being buried in the post hole. A sobering story.

THE ENGLISHMAN’S TROUSERS

There was a terrace cafe outside the main bar of the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi. It was on the right-hand side of the great marble steps and from it drinkers could see across the corniche to the harbour mole. It was at its most popular in the summer evenings when the notables from the town sat with the oil folk and the airline crews and talked.

One night they heard a taxi coming too quickly from the sailing club. Some saw two men walking from the basement laundry around the casino towards the steps. Most heard the thump and saw a dead body fly through the air from the taxi’s bonnet into the sunflower garden.

News passed up and down the terrace amongst the drinkers. The dead man was a worker from the hotel laundry. It was the best laundry in town and many people had known the man by sight. The police came and did their work and an ambulance took the body away.

The next day an Englishman was arrested and questioned for some time in connection with the case. The dead man had been wearing his trousers which had been at the laundry for dry cleaning.

The Englishman remembered to be calm about the event. Many clients wondered what adventures their own trousers had seen whilst they were at the dry-cleaners.

BRASS BUCKLED BEATINGS

Military kit soon acquires a name amongst military folk. Webbing is one such. It is the name we use for the harness and carrying pouches worn by soldiers during, and for some time after, World War II. It was made of stout cotton webbing, hence its name. It was secured with brass buckles which required constant polishing as did boots, shoes, badges, and barrack room floors.

The second time I encountered it I was in the Royal Air Force and of the lowly rank of airman 2^nd Class undergoing my recruit training.

Compulsory National Service was in force. Most men of 18 were required to serve in one of Britain’s armed forces for two years. Ladies were not required to do so. Thousands of young males were assigned by a remote bureaucracy to one of the three main arms of the British military. They were dispatched to camps where their civilian identity was removed and replaced by a military one. I was amongst them. I had been accepted to train for a short service commission in the Equipment Branch of the R.A.F. for which prior basic training was needed.

The first step was to divest us of our civilian clothes and replace them with an RAF uniform. Thereafter we drilled repeatedly on the great parade ground wearing our heavy boots until we responded in unison to words of command. We learned, amongst other things, how to handle our Lee Enfield .303 rifles, salute officers, read maps, polish linoleum floors, and to bayonet straw dummies suspended from frames. We were instructed in all these skills and more by men with loud voices, a predisposition for disciplining others and a jaundiced view of officers. One of them explained to us that ‘officers is shit’. We called the process square bashing, but you may know it by its American version as boot camp. We spent three months doing this in deep winter in bleakest Staffordshire.

I wore full kit on my way to my grandmother’s house from an RAF station which specialised in square bashing sometime in 1955. I was on leave. I carried a large square webbing pack on my back in which I stuffed such things as a waterproof cape, a housewife, shoe polishing gear and spare underclothes. There was a water bottle at my side and small, but empty, ammunition pouches on my chest.

All this webbing was support by a canvas belt fastened by a brass ‘hook and loop’ buckle and with two brass buckles at the back to secure the braces on which the webbing packs and pouches were attached. I carried a white canvas kit bag over my shoulder and wore my airman’s hat as casually as I could.

I recall walking along the black cinder path from the last bus stop of my journey, past the little grocery store, through the council estate and over the canal bridge to my grandmother’s house where I was to spend time before the next stage of my training.

I had met webbing before as a young army cadet in my Cornish boarding school. At the age of 13 we boys were dragooned into army uniforms and taught military stuff such as what to do if a Bren gun stops firing, how to march in time, salute officers and read maps. Whilst so doing our trousers were supported by an army webbing belt.

Our leisure time was unsupervised. Violence was commonplace amongst us. When we were driven inside by harsh weather, we spent time in the large schoolroom heated only by a log fire before which we jostled for a place to warm our backsides. Singed trousers and itchy chilblains were not uncommon.

It was here that I witnessed a small boy cruelly and extensively beaten by a large youth with an army webbing belt. I was later to fight the large youth in a bout of Cornish wrestling. Cornish wrestlers wear a short canvas jacket. He tried to strangle me with mine when he thought the referee, the Stickler, was unsighted. I met him in the boxing ring later with a little more success.

God, Latin, and the cane were the authorised version of our education. We lived in another and more brutal world.

UP THE SEPIK – THE VILLAGE OF ANGRY MEN

It is a long and remote river is the Sepik. It wanders some 700 miles or so through hostile country from the Victor Emmanuel Ranges in the Central Highlands of New Guinea to disgorge itself abruptly into the Bismarck Sea a few miles east of Wewak. Unlike the Fly river, its southern cousin which drains into the Gulf of Papua, it has no delta. There must be a reason for this. I never stopped to ask why.

I got to it only once and that was in 1968 when Papua New Guinea was administered by the Australians. The company I worked for had acquired a chain of travel agencies situated in the main towns in Papua New Guinea. The company bought it from a feisty lady who was keen to get away from a bad divorce and make a new life in Australia. It took me some time to realise that my employers had been too easily persuaded to make the purchase. A lack of due diligence may have been the cause, or I may have screwed the business up being too young and less than well at the time I took it over. You can take your pick should you be so inclined.

I had been sent from Fiji to manage the business and was just recovering from multiple injuries sustained in an accident. Most of the bones I had broken had mended. My left femur, however, had not. It was held together by a device invented by the German surgeon Gerhard Küntscher during WWII. It was a metal rod hammered down the cavity of the femur to hold the broken bits together whilst the bone healed. One of the problems with the device in those days was that it allowed the bone to rotate about the fracture, and my left foot began to point inwards. I found that alarming. Surgeons have recently cured this problem by drilling nails through the bone into the rod.

I was making a familiarisation trip to see for myself the potential tourist destinations around Papua New Guinea. That is why I was traveling up the Sepik river in a canoe hollowed from a huge cedar log. A crocodile head was carved on its sharp end for luck. I was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair behind the aforesaid feisty lady who was similarly seated. We were also accompanied by an Australian crocodile skin trader. The owner of the canoe, a small local man, sat at his outboard motor wearing an imitation pith helmet and smoking tobacco rolled in newspaper. The refreshment available was small tins of Craft cheese and a bottle of Cognac. This was supplemented after a while by the purchase of some fresh coconuts from one of the riverside villages.

The crocodile skin trader had a double purpose. He intended to make money as my tour guide and to purchase some skins recently pealed from crocodiles which he would sell via a local trade store to someone in Singapore whose name sounded like Arshak Gallstone. The said Mr Gallstone had a factory in Singapore where he cured the skins and made ladies handbags and other ‘accessories’ from them. My interest lay in the possibility that Japanese tourists might be persuaded to make a trip down the Sepik river to see where their fathers or grandfathers had fought in WWII.

The Japanese had occupied New Guinea during WWII. Between July and November 1942, they attempted to expand their Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere into Papua by forcing the Kakoda Track through the Owen Stanley mountains but were thwarted by the Australians who defended it heroically. The defence of the Kakoda Track is now a part of ANZAC history. Had the defence failed the Japanese would have had a foothold in Australian territory.

In 1968 there was still plenty of evidence in New Guinea of the strange brutality the Japanese had visited on the Australians they had captured. I was aware of the hostility Japanese visitors engendered, especially those who adopted military uniforms when they visited their ancestor’s graves. Even so we did a fair trade in Japanese ‘battlefield’ tours of Wewak, Madang, Lae and Rabaul. In Rabaul there were some old Australian WWII veterans who had been ‘Coast Watchers’. They had spent time alone and in great peril on remote islands reporting the movements of Japanese shipping by radio to the Australian navy. They were less than happy to welcome Japanese tourists.

We had set off upriver from Ambunti in the early morning and aimed to reach a village known to the crocodile skin trader before sunset. Here we would stay in the Haus Kiap, that is the house built and reserved for Australian District Officers and government officials. It was built on stilts to make it harder for ants to get into the house and to avoid inundating the residents when the Sepik river flooded the village. It had a somewhat flexible floor made of split cane. The floor’s flexibility was disconcerting.

On the way upriver, we had stopped at a village or two and traded for fresh skins. By the time we reached our destination we had consumed a good portion of the brandy and acquired several potential handbags. When the canoe stopped the mosquitoes attacked in the still air. I crushed a squadron of them feeding on my forearms. They were bloated with blood which burst out of their abdomens and smeared my skin red. The females of these voracious Anopheles mosquitoes were vectors of the Malaria parasite. I was not infected. Perhaps they did not like the brandy.

We reached the Haus Kiap village and sat for a while talking to a group of village men with aid of the official village ‘talking chief’ who spoke in a ‘Pidgin’. My broken leg was a source of embarrassment. In the New Guinea Pidgin, I was known as the ‘big fella ‘im leg ‘im bugger up’. To add to the effect this unfortunate title had on my self-esteem, ‘crippled limbs’ were thought by natives of the Sepik villages to contain evil. My ‘rotated’ left leg and my ungainly limp made me the object of some suspicion in the village.

We slept on bunks in the Haus Kiap from whence I could see the Sepik river gleaming in moonlight through the open door. I stumbled out of my bunk, through the open door and down the steps for a call of nature during the night. On the way back, the treacherous split cane floor attacked me. The cane was not distributed continuously across the floor and my injured leg pushed through a gap leaving me with one leg dangling through the floor and another at right angles to it on the surface. I manged to extract myself from this undignified position. The dangling leg had been scoured by the sharp ends of the split cane and needed first aid.

We made our way down stream the next morning. We passed a side channel at the entrance to which some men in a canoe made gestures in our direction. They clearly implied we were not welcome. The Australian guide told us this story.

Somewhere down the side channel was the ‘Village of Angry Men’. During the WWII some Australian prisoners of the Japanese had escaped and somehow reached the village. They were closely pursued by Japanese soldiers. The Australians dived into the thick bush and hid. The Japanese told the villagers they would kill some of their menfolk if the Australians did not give themselves up. Despite some frantic hollering from the villagers the Australians remained hidden. The Japanese shot some of the village men. The villagers, who were innocent spectators of the war, blamed the Australian fugitives – and by extension all white men – for the barbarous act. That is why the men in the canoe at the entrance to the side channel had made their anger clear as we passed.