The Baghdad Railway Club(51)

We were meant to control the line from Baghdad to Samarrah, and if we were to move troops north when the fighting season restarted, we must make our presence felt. Shepherd, Stevens and I were then to make for Samarrah itself, and beyond. It was not what I wanted to hear.

When Shepherd had finished his briefing, I took the cork out of my second bottle of soda water and drank it down. I was having to fight the desert, which is to say that I’d twice seen engines steaming towards us from the opposite direction. It would have been a serious matter if they’d been real, since they came on fast, and this was single-line working. But they were altogether too rubbery; blended in too well with the wavering air.

As we rattled along at a steady twenty miles an hour, I took the wife’s letter from my pocket. It was typewritten.

Dearest Jim,

What is it like out there? That is the question of the hour in your family. I know you’re not to say exactly why you are out there, but just as to the scenery and people and so on, and by people I do not mean the British Army. Sylvia said it must be like the film of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ that we all went to see. Harry said, ‘Don’t be daft, that’s nothing more than a fairy tale. It’ll be nothing remotely like that.’

So Sylvia has an idea (which of course Harry says is another daft one) for how to settle the point. Is it really like ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ or not? You’re to write either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Harry said this was ‘a ridiculous oversimplification’ (and if that boy doesn’t get into the grammar school, then I’d like to know who does). Sylvia said, ‘I daresay it is but I don’t mind.’

And so I leave this poser with you in the full confidence that you will provide an answer leaving honour satisfied on both sides. Do write, anyway. I know the letters take four weeks, so you’d better get on with it.

We Co-Operative ladies are concentrating on margarine, of which there is not enough, and which is threatening to create a war-within-a-war in York. All the margarine entering the city now comes to the Guildhall, from where we distribute it not only to Co-Operative Society members but to all holders of one of two registration certificates. Oh, I can’t be bothered to explain, and it’s not as if margarine is even nice.

What else have I got to say? Amazingly little, it seems. Oh, I know. A wonderful development in our office. We have a new type-writer, to use her official title, but I call her a ‘typist’ otherwise she sounds like a machine. She is called Margaret Lawson, and will be typing this letter for me. (You may have noticed how beautifully presented it is.) Now Margaret – and she doesn’t mind a bit my saying this – has been since birth quite deaf, which gave rise to a curious incident on her first day here.

Mrs Howells from the Food Control Committee came in, and we had an argument (me and Mrs Howells I mean). It was about, guess what, margarine. I do not care very much for Mrs Howells, partly I admit for no better reason than that her husband sits for the Conservatives on York Council. As she walked – stalked, rather – out of the office, I said in an under-breath, ‘Confound that woman,’ at which I saw our lovely new typist look up and smile. Well, she could not possibly have heard me, being (a) quite deaf, and (b) on the other side of what is quite a large office room. You will have guessed the secret already: she can see speech, or to put it another way, she knows ‘lip-reading’. In fact Margaret is a demon at it, and we pass the time very merrily by my speaking – inaudibly – quotations from the Bible, or Shakespeare, or saying what I will be buying at the market that day, while Margaret looks on, watching my lips. She then types what I have said, and it is always and without fail correct. I have asked her to teach me.

Tom Sutherland, Mrs Sutherland’s son, is home from France for good after a severe shell wound to the arm. I asked him about his experiences and he said, ‘You are just jellified, shaking with fear all the time.’ He said it can’t be true that fear sends your hair white, otherwise his would be. He said he couldn’t stand to be in the same place for any length of time, because something bad would be bound to happen in that place before too long. Therefore he was going to buy a motor car, and have it adapted so that it can be driven by a one-armed man. He will then spend the rest of his life racing about the country. I told him you were out in Mesopotamia, and he said, ‘You should wear cologne. It will keep the mosquitoes off. It will also make you smell nice!’

Do write soon,

Your loving

Lydia.

The wife had always rather fancied Tom Sutherland, and as for the typist, Miss Lawson, the Co-Operative movement was well known for employing crocks of one sort or another.