Apple Blossom Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

again.

1941
    The gypsy, or Mrs Pagett, or whoever she was, had been right. I was behind bars, but not in the way she had meant – or I had thought she had meant, at any rate.
    Through barred windows, I looked out on to the side windows of another hut, with its own bars. If I twisted my neck very hard, I could squint along the side of our hut and see a dusty, camel-coloured parade square, almost the same colour as our starched tropical drill, beyond that, a fence of tall, dried rushes that rustled in the breeze off the river. Everything was the same. Even the sky seemed to be the colour of Nile dust, the sun dull and metallic.
    ‘Well, if this is the Mysterious East, you know what you can do with it,’ muttered Grace, tightening her belt around an already minute waist. Grace was the only one amongst us who’d dared to have her uniform tailored to fit. The rest of us wore khaki sacks, stiff drill skirts and Aertex shirts, that fitted where they touched. She smoothed down the skirt with the palms of her hands. ‘I’ve got sand in my teeth, sand up my nose, sand up my … knickers.’
    ‘You didn’t say that yesterday.’
    ‘Yesterday was yesterday and it still had novelty value. Today I feel as though I’ve been stripped and rubbed down ready for a gloss finish.’
    *   *   *
    Crammed with our kitbags into the back of an open Bedford lorry, we’d been assaulted by Egypt, by its heat, its noise, its smells. Our truck had inched away from Maadi station, threading between laden donkeys and flocks of fat-tailed sheep, taking its turn behind battered Thorneycroft buses decorated with blue beads against the evil eye, creaking carts, staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers, signal-bearing Don Rs on motor bikes.
    Delicacies that we’d forgotten even existed spilled on to the streets outside shops no bigger than wardrobes: oranges and dates piled high in crates; vegetables bigger than we’d ever seen before; cans of paraffin; sacks of sugar; bales of silk; bundles of charcoal; baskets of eggs – enough eggs to whip up a mountain of meringues.
    ‘And not a powdered egg in sight,’ sighed Vee in ecstasy.
    Pansy took a deep breath. ‘Smell that? That’s coffee, that is, real coffee!’
    ‘Smell that?’ Grace giggled. ‘That’s donkey manure, real donkey manure!’
    ‘I’m not so sure it’s only donkey, actually,’ I remarked, watching a little boy lift up his jellaba and squat down at a corner.
    Coffee, dung, Turkish tobacco, paraffin, spices, foul water, all mingled into a sort of nasal cacophony, rivalled only by the noise. Donkeys brayed. Hucksters shouted. Engines backfired. Sheep bleated. Shoe-shine boys drummed up custom. Only the black-robed women with firewood or water on their heads were silent, swaying along with the flop-flop walk of a camel through sand.
    Little boys ran alongside the truck, banging the side with sticks or the flats of their pale-palmed hands. One, more daring, clung on to the tailboard and peered over the side at the uniformed English women, holding out one hand to us. ‘Father dead, mother dead,’ he chanted in a sing-song voice. It was hard to resist the appeal in his long-lashed brown eyes, but we’d all been warned about beggars, so we turned our faces away. Just as well Pansy wasn’t sitting at the back of the truck, or she’d have emptied her purse for him! He hopped off, yelling something. I was glad none of us could understand, although his gestures were quite plain enough.
    Then we were out of the little town and being driven along a wide avenue lined by flame-flowered casuarina trees, where large houses – Home Counties under a blazing sun, equatorial Esher – sat back amongst parched lawns swept by gardeners with stiff brooms. There were swimming pools and shady verandas that made us gasp for long, cool drinks and garden chairs.
    None of those for us at Maadi Camp. The ATS quarters were guarded by grinning, armed soldiers, fresh from India. They didn’t say