The Burning Sky

CHAPTER TWELVE

The main port city of British Somaliland was a bloody awful place to get to and no charming spot when you did, the only blessing being that, sitting on the Gulf of Aden, there was a wind slightly less hot than the normal air temperature, which could rise in the high summer to over fifty degrees.

Jardine had departed the ship at Istanbul, taking a train to Athens to pick up an Imperial Airways flight that went via Aden to Rhodesia and South Africa, then the regular boat across from Aden, having sent a telegram ahead to alert the man from the Colonial Office of his impending arrival.

To call Berbera a port in the modern sense was risible: it had a tiny harbour, and any ship of size calling would have been obliged to anchor offshore, while behind that the buildings were sparse, low, mostly mud-built and painted white. That, combined with the sandy nature of the soil, made the landscape blinding to the eye.

The hat Jardine now wore was a white panama; the man waiting to meet him on the quayside was in the ubiquitous pith helmet and shorts of the cartoons, and he had a clipped tone to his voice that made him sound, as well as look, like the archetypal district officer.

‘Conrad Mason, Mr Jardine,’ a greeting that came with a rather feeble handshake. ‘Welcome to British Somaliland.’

Behind Jardine the boat, more a sort of ferry, was being loaded with live animals, cattle, sheep and goats destined for the dinner tables of Aden; being herded by irate owners, that was a noisy affair. Not far from where Mason stood was a dust-covered grey Hillman with a local driver, tall, slim, barefoot, in crisp whites and a red fez, which made Jardine wonder, for he was sweating profusely, how the native managed to look so smart and dry.

‘We are up in the hills at this time of year,’ Mason said. ‘It’s too hot in this place, so if you give your luggage to my driver we will be off.’

‘Cooler, is it, in the hills?’ he asked, instructing by sign language the porter who had brought ashore his luggage to hand over his one suitcase.

Mason grinned. ‘Only marginally so, but any relief is welcome.’

The inside of the car was hotter than the exterior till they got moving, while the breeze through the open windows was baking when they did, the two passengers engaging in the kind of small talk which seemed so out of place. ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’; ‘How were the India Office wallahs in Aden, helpful I hope?’; ‘How was London the last time you were there?’ The questions were banal, but then so were Jardine’s replies.

Hat off, Mason was a rather bland-looking fellow, sandy-haired, that cut very short for obvious reasons, his unlined face tanned in that way which comes from reflected sunlight rather than direct exposure, a sort of pale-beige colour, in contrast to his forearms and legs, which were a deep-brown hue. Jardine guessed him to be about thirty years of age, and given his location, not very well connected in the service: whoever was governor, British Somaliland was not a top posting, and flyblown Berbera was below that in the Colonial Office pecking order.

General chat, as they bounced along a far-from-perfect road, explained that not much happened in this part of Africa, which Jardine took to mean it was seen as unimportant. It was one of those places Britannia occupied as much to prevent others from doing so as against any strategic imperative.

There was the control of the slave trade to Arabia, still active, and the fertility of the grazing land, which, thanks to biannual rains, fed Aden and removed the need for that enclave to rely on its own hostile Yemeni hinterlands. Added to that was the protection of the ancient caravan routes to the interior, carried out by the British-led Somali Camel Corps, based in Hargeisa.

The hill settlement was not large, a series of scattered bungalows, each with a servant on the veranda pulling a string to move the interior punkah, for the air was still hot, though not as baking as the coast. To be under the sun was to be broiled, so it was a relief just to get to the indoor shade, where he was introduced to Mason’s wife. There was nothing soft about her handshake: it was both firm and energetic, backed up by a very toothy grin, which could not be called a smile, the teeth were too large, and to that was added a sort of endless bobbing of the body.

Margery Mason, ‘M’ for short, was a big woman, much more so than her husband, and that was in her bones, as well as a head topped by a mass of tight curls. The voice, when she spoke, had that hearty tone Jardine associated with fox-hunting folk, and she was dressed in a shapeless, floral garment that did nothing to delineate a figure, if indeed she had one. When she asked him if he wanted something cool to drink, it was following by a sort of braying sound.

‘Cool is relative, is it not, M?’

‘Golly, yes, Conrad,’ she replied. ‘No ice here, I’m afraid. Our refrigerator is on the coast and there’s no power up here; the contents are fetched up in a box every morning by Sulli, our driver. The ice melts almost as soon as it is opened. Still, the lemonade will be refreshing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you wish a shower and to change into a fresh shirt?’

‘That would be nice.’

‘Banda,’ she cried, unnecessary since the servant was only a few feet away. ‘Show Mr Jardine to his room.’

The person who came forward was young, with the even features and mid-brown face of the local Somalis, while he moved with a lithe grace that seemed common to the people. Idly looking out of the car window on the way, Jardine had seen women with baskets on their heads walking, their slender hips swaying in the most alluring way. Yet there was also something in the look the Banda gave this new guest, direct, enquiring, that seemed somewhat out of place: it was too bold.

‘When you are changed,’ Mason said, ‘you can join me in my study.’

‘Man talk,’ brayed his wife, making a sort of chuffing sound as amusement set her large teeth playing a tattoo on her lower lip.

If the lemonade was not chilled it did still manage to be refreshing, though Jardine had made sure there was enough left over: it would be poor manners to drink them out of house and home when everything had to be fetched up from the coast.

‘Fear not, Sulli has to make another journey to get the food for supper. Can’t keep it up here, rots in no time. Now, Mr Jardine, to business.’ Mason sat forward in his basket-weave chair and joined his hands before his knees. ‘While I will do everything in my power to facilitate your endeavours, my actual participation has to be limited. I cannot have them finding out in Hargeisa what you are up to.’

‘I understand, Mr Mason, and I will try to do nothing which jeopardises your position here, which I appreciate is delicate.’

‘Good, it’s not much of one, but I like it.’

Jardine had to stop himself expressing surprise: if he had been stuck here, he would be lobbying hard for a move and asking his guest if he knew of anyone who could help him get a better posting. He was also tempted to ask what motivated Mason to go against the official line of non-intervention, but that was a given: the man had his own reasons and would probably be embarrassed if asked to enumerate them.

‘We will have some guests tonight to dinner, and a couple of our military chaps who will fill you in on what the Eyeties are up to, and pretty comprehensive it will be. I am obliged also to entertain a pair of American visitors whom the Governor General stopped from entering Ethiopia through Hargeisa.’

‘The military, they have good intelligence?’

‘They do. We are not much loved here, but compared to the Italians, our neighbours to the south, we are considered saintly. Most of what you will hear comes from their capital of Mogadishu and the waters off Massawa, reports of the build-up of supplies in both Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.’

‘Why are the Italians so hated?’

‘Usual thing: brutal repression in the past, settlements — a surprising number of people have come from Italy to make their homes here, and naturally they want the best land to grow crops or as pasture for their animals. Forced eviction has been common in the past, with the odd poor native slung from the nearest tree if he dared to protest.’

‘And we don’t do that?’

Mason grinned. ‘Britain imposes a very light touch in our part of Somalia now.’

‘Not always the case, Mr Mason.’

The colonial man nodded to acknowledge that. ‘That is what happens when you give the military its head, Mr Jardine.’

Mason was referring to the way this territory had been pacified. Britannia originally held the coast but not the interior: this was the homeland of what the British yellow press had named the ‘Mad Mullah’, really Abdullah Hassan, the leader of the Dervish State. He had held the colonisers at bay for two decades and had even defeated what was then called the Somali Camel Constabulary in a pitched battle before the Great War.

That conflict left him in peace, but as soon as it was over the army came in and now they had what Cal Jardine had so railed against in Iraq: aircraft and the ability to bomb civilians at will, and even then it took trickery to defeat the ‘Mad Mullah’. He had been lured by the military command into a promise of talks, assured of an official visit by some worthy from London, to discuss some kind of settlement.

What he got, having gathered his family and followers at his own capital city, was a massacre. Unopposed by anything other than rifle fire, British planes had bombed the mud-built city and indiscriminately killed hundreds of both warriors and civilians. Hassan had been forced to flee and his twenty-year fight for independence — the British press called it his rebellion — was over.

‘We civvies are very much in control now,’ Mason continued. ‘We let the people do very much what they want, as long as it’s legal, and few of our fellow countrymen seem to want to settle here. If they do, and seek to buy land, we make sure they pay a fair price — not something the Italians are prone to. Certainly they have sought to mend their ways with agriculture and recruitment in their armed forces. When they do invade Abyssinia, the colonial recruits will be at the forefront.’

‘They will invade?’

‘As soon as the weather cools, I fear.’

‘I was told in London arrangements had been made to transport what I am bringing overland.’

‘Tell me when your goods will be here, what they comprise of, and I will send a message at once.’

‘Where do I land them?’

‘Tell me, Mr Jardine, how much do you know about the slave trade and an old port called Ziela?’

By the time he changed for dinner Cal Jardine knew a great deal about slaving, the most telling fact that it still happened, despite the best efforts of the various colonial powers to stop it. All around in this part of the world there were people disinclined to work: they would much rather have someone else do it for them, and if such people could be unpaid slaves so much the better, very much so in the Arabian Peninsula.

He had seen the beauty of many of the Somalis for himself, and they were prized for that quality and often sold as wives or catamites. For the more menial tasks, no part of the interior — remote areas of Abyssinia and Southern Sudan — was safe from raids by bands of armed men who made their living from transporting those they kidnapped to the markets of Oman, Saudi Arabia and the various lands of the emirs along the Persian Gulf. But fearing interference from the British, they had stopped using a port that had, for centuries, provided their route out.

It was not just slavery that had declined: the port of Zeila, at one time bustling and important, was now a decaying backwater thanks to the rise of Djibouti, the capital of French Somaliland just to the north. Zeila had been a port for sailing boats; the French had made a proper harbour for large ships at Djibouti, just like the Italians had done further north at Massawa. The British, with the wonderful natural harbour of Aden so close, had no plans to improve Berbera.

His shirts had been washed, starched and ironed while he had been talking to Mason and his other clothing had been pressed. Now, with the sun gone and the heat of the day rising into a clear sky, the atmosphere was becoming tolerable and the time came to dress for dinner. As he put in his shirt studs he wondered at the progress of the Tarvita: where would she have got to now? Had that been managed without difficulty? Certainly they had got through the Bosphorus with ease, and by now they ought to be approaching the Suez Canal.

Jardine was hungry, having had little to eat since arriving, some dates and nuts brought in to the study by one of Mason’s many serving boys, it being the practice to wait till the sun went down to have a proper meal. The whole bungalow was now full of the smell of good cooking, of spices and roast meat which he had seen turning on a spit above glowing wood outdoors. Also he had heard vehicles arriving, he assumed the soldiers, as well as two American voices, one rather strident and female, the other a deep male one, both bouncing off the braying enthusiasm of M. Bow tie knotted, he put on his dinner jacket and made his way to meet them.

‘Ah, Jardine,’ cried Mason, ‘come and be introduced to my other guests. This is Miss Corrie Littleton, from Boston, and our other American guest, Tyler Alverson, who, I believe, hails originally from California. And, of course, our two defenders of this part of the colony, Captain Peydon and our naval representative, Lieutenant Grace, who has kindly brought with him some of his Plymouth Gin.’

‘My God, it packs a punch,’ said Alverson. ‘Even with ice.’

‘Hundred per cent proof,’ Grace replied, grabbing the lapel of his dark-blue dress mess jacket like a lawyer.

M brayed. ‘Our American friend has brought a load of ice up from Berbera, ha ha! Insists he can’t drink gin without it.’

‘A touch of bitters is all I need,’ insisted the navy man, a rather vacuous-looking fellow. ‘Be thought a pansy if I asked for ice in the wardroom, what?’

It was interesting to see Peydon react to that: for some reason the captain was angry with his naval chum. Red of face already, and with pronounced cheeks, he went a sort of scarlet shade that was as near as damn it to the colour of his army mess jacket and his voice was a growl.

‘Each to his own, I say.’

‘You would be better off not drinking it at all,’ insisted Miss Littleton.

She was young, slim, quite tall for a woman and looked slightly mannish with her bobbed blonde hair. Added to that she had the kind of cracked voice that sounded like a permanent bad throat.

‘It is bad for your body and your brain, indeed it is nothing but a social ill which-’

‘More lemonade?’ asked Mason, her words and his gesture underlining the fact that she was a teetotaller, the interjection seeming to spare them a lecture on temperance. Her voice had a strangely orotund accent too, seemingly elongating each word in what sounded like a parody of the King’s English.

Her host indicated to one of his houseboys and a jug was brought forward. ‘And you, Jardine, what will you have, old chap?’

‘I think a pink gin would be the ticket, with, if Mr Alverson can spare it, some of his ice.’

‘What do we have here,’ drawled the American, his face amused, ‘a cultured Englishman?’

‘Scotsman, Mr Alverson, which removes any hope of my being civilised.’

‘Hear, hear,’ cackled M, who then suddenly realised she was praising the wrong thing. ‘Oh dear, most dreadfully sorry.’

Mason was mixing his drink, throwing the Angostura Bitters around the glass before tipping it out, then pouring the gin. ‘Mr Jardine is here on a little errand for HMG, to pick our brains about the ice cream vendors next door.’

‘Really?’ asked Alverson, with a slightly arch look.

‘Yes, I am going to closet him with our military might for a bit so they can brief him.’

‘Can I sit in?’

‘Why ever would you want to do that?’ cawed M. ‘Dreadful bore.’

That got raised eyebrows from the servicemen, with Mason adding, ‘Really, my dear, you can be so tactless.’

M looked a touch broken by that, her voice for once small and meek. ‘I can, can’t I?’

At least she got female support. ‘Well, I agree with you, Mrs Mason, it’s boys talk and … well, war and all that.’

Alverson spoke up with a tone of deep irony. ‘And you, Corrie Littleton, you must be the only admirer of Sparta who does not like war.’

‘I am an admirer of the women of Sparta, Tyler. As for the men of Sparta, well we know all about them.’

Peydon nearly choked on his drink and he began coughing, Mason went pink under his tan and Alverson said, ‘Well, being a newspaperman, I am interested.’

‘Sorry,’ Mason responded. ‘No can do, can’t have you spilling the beans on what we know.’

‘Might queer our pitch,’ said Lieutenant Grace.

That had the captain barking at him. ‘Shall we go to the study?’

Mason addressed their backs. ‘Call the boys if you want any more to drink.’

‘Damned odd,’ Peydon said quietly, as he closed the door behind Grace, ‘Mason inviting a reporter like that.’

‘Odd the chap is here at all,’ Grace added.

‘Gentlemen, to business, I think. Mr Mason’s guest list is his affair.’

‘Quite right, Mr Jardine,’ Peydon said, pulling out from his pocket a tightly folded paper. Opening it showed it was a rough-drawn map outlining, in very neat but tiny handwriting, the position of the Italian forces, which consisted of one division, the 29^th Peloritana — their numbers, seven thousand effectives, and equipment, three thousand mules and sixty light trucks — the extent of their supply dumps, and even the names of the senior officers serving under their commander, General Graziani.

‘This, I have to say, Captain, is damned good.’

That made the soldier’s chest expand, an act which pushed out a pair of not-very-special medals. ‘Thank you, sir, we try our best.’

‘There’s nothing in the naval line that matches this,’ cut in Grace gloomily. ‘Although my proper area of operations is the Gulf of Aden, I can and do patrol up the Red Sea. We talk to the dhows coming out of Massawa and they are only too happy to pass on snippets of information. Eyeties have been at it for so long we have had a chance to list the whole kit and caboodle up there too.’

The soldier then added, with not a little pride, ‘We sneak across the border on our camels and get chapter and verse about what’s happening on the Italian part of the Abyssinian border.’ Now he looked sly, if still pleased with himself. ‘They are not much on patrolling, the Eyeties, so I usually take a few of my boys right forward and get a dekko of what they are up to through my binoculars.’

‘No sign of movement?’

Peydon made a dismissive snuffling sound not too dissimilar to Mason’s wife. ‘Plenty signs of frustration, more like, and Grace and I pick up the same stuff. Apparently all the talk in the bars is of the need to replace their commanding officer, De Bono. They were ready to go before the small rains came, but they sat on their arses because he insisted they lacked enough equipment.’

There was a dual purpose to this short meeting: first, of course, a briefing on what these two knew, but more importantly to get them out of his way so he could operate with safety. Mason wanted no part of seeking to keep them occupied, for if anything went wrong, like Jardine being intercepted, he would take the blame. Grace had the only naval vessel, an armed patrol boat, this side of the Gulf of Aden, his official task to guard the coastline, look out for smugglers and slavers, while protecting the fishermen and local traders from piracy.

Peydon had two British NCOs and a clerk, but his soldiers were askaris, locally recruited camel-riding Somalis, and, if he was doing his job properly, he would be out on the caravan routes that led to the interior preventing robbery and slaving, the very places Jardine needed him to be kept clear of. Mason had given him the public puff of being sent specially from London and implied, without actually saying so, that he had the power to request them to act at his instructions.

‘I don’t want to go back to London without the most up-to-date picture.’

‘Are we going to intervene, sir?’

‘Not up to me, Lieutenant Grace, but I do know that it would be folly to even consider it on a false premise.’ He waved Peydon’s map. ‘I just need to know if this is still accurate.’

‘I can go up the Red Sea anytime I like, almost to the end of the Suez Canal, if I wish, but I would need to refuel in Aden before I did so and my superior officer there could kybosh the trip.’

Jardine was close to saying ‘damn’ then: if that naval officer had any brains he would ask who the hell he was. Peydon saved the day by a bit of inter-service scoffing. ‘Well, I shall do as I damn well please and say nothing to Hargeisa. Those buggers in Aden are Indian army and I am not, so I will not tell them a damn thing either.’

‘The navy is of a piece, Archie, there’s no division between India and home, and quite apart from the base commander, there is the Captain of HMS Enterprise to consider, as well as officers from vessels other than the cruiser.’

‘Yes, but if you go blabbing they will poke their oar in, Charlie. This is a colony and it is not run from Delhi, but London. In defending it, that is where your instructions should come from. Your bloody superior spends all his time drinking with those sepoy-bashers and he is bound to let slip anything you tell him. You don’t need his approval anyway, do you?’

‘Strictly speaking, no.’

‘Next thing you know you’ll be asking for ice in your drink.’

‘Steady on, Archie!’ Grace exclaimed, a mite too excessively to Jardine’s mind.

‘Well!’ Peydon replied, like a disappointed parent.

Jardine suspected that, stuck in this hole of a posting, Peydon enjoyed his little excursions to spy on the Italians and he was being a bit disingenuous about not needing permission to do so. When he was engaged in such escapades he was not carrying out his proper duties, and it did not matter how news of that got back to the powers that be, he would get at least a rap across the knuckles if it was exposed, and quite possibly, given the fear in Whitehall of upsetting Mussolini, be subject to a severe reprimand.

‘I have to refuel anyway,’ Grace conceded, ‘and the Aden command has no idea of where I go and what I do. I doubt my superior ever reads my logs.’

‘Stout fellow,’ cried Peydon.

‘Shall we rejoin the others?’ Jardine said. ‘I think we have been absent long enough.’