At this time I was attached to the British Embassy and was as usual pining for an independent command. I was always complaining about being under other peoples’ orders. I was extremely independent and had a number of bad ideas which now, looking back, I am rather glad they didn’t let me put into action. But one of the great tragedies in my life has been that whenever I did get an independent command it was in a situation which had gone too far, had deteriorated into a crisis post. I arrived in Yugoslavia on the night Tito broke with Stalin. The frontiers were humming with tanks. Then again when I got a post in Cyprus the whole island went up under me, so to speak. Well, in Egypt, when I finally did get my independent command, it was I think because they thought I would arrive in Alexandria and find a German sitting in my office chair. They realized that the only man crazy enough to accept such an appointment was Durrell. Why not give Durrell to the Germans? He was not much use to us and could do us little harm if they took him away. But I was so fed up with Cairo that I thought I would take a chance. So I drew a revolver which I only knew how to fire very vaguely, and climbed into the night train for the coast. It was all blacked out, very sinister; and from time to time there were halts, mysterious unexplained halts, in the desert; everything went dead silent. Only giant mosquitoes filled the carriages, biting us to death. When I arrived in my post Rommel was still 40 kilometres away; his troops had got bogged down in a bottleneck of sand dunes and lakes called the Qattara Depression. I couldn’t believe my luck.
In Alexandria everything was shut up. When there’s an element of panic in the air the first sign you notice is all the cafés close and all the delicatessens and everything like that, and they roll down those iron shutters; and the more intelligent had actually put up signs saying “Welcome to Rommel” in German. Well, I went around and made a complete list of these people. It took me about three hours and then I went to the British H.Q. and said, “If Rommel doesn’t arrive tonight, these people are going to be out of bounds to British troops, I assure you.” And the Army agreed and they stayed out of bounds for four months. Finally, I had delegations of these people coming to my office and pleading to be put back on the visitor’s list because after Rommel was repulsed and the British got back into Alexandria these people found the British soldiers couldn’t drink in these places. It was out of bounds for them. So this was the only practical thing I could do in the way of propaganda. I made a lot of friends this way.
But the first night was a frightfully exciting night because in Cairo I went down to Operations in a great big gloomy hall with a giant board which marked all the positions.
The scale was so great that you could almost see individual units, and I went down with a friend of mine who ran one of the Four Hurricanes out of Crete, Dudley Honor. He said, “Come out and have a look and let’s see because I think tonight’s the night.” And the trains were taking everybody away, sending off all the women and children. A delicious thing to experience actually. Pure vertigo of panic in the streets. And on this operations board in this absolutely silent room, the tapes were marking this thing, the Qattara Depression; the chips were down, Rommel was closing in, and we knew there was just one tarmac road and no further to go. Nothing to stop him except sand dunes. And all of a sudden about 2:00 in the morning the chap takes his earphones off and says, “We’ve advanced a bit,” then marked up three positions in the neck of the depression which were considered really unassailable by us. Of course Rommel had a lack of equipment and he also had the long lines of communications. We took an enormous deep breath and went out and had a drink and I wrote up the names of all these dogs who had said “Welcome Rommel,” and for about two months British soldiers really didn’t drink there and they sobbed their little hearts out until I asked the Army to relent.
And then technology also has its problems. In fact it creates more than it solves. One of the great things that bugged me as a press attaché always when I had to try to control newspapers was misprints. The Arabs just loved them. The English-speaking paper in Cairo, the Egyptian Mail, was manned by an Arab staff. The three proofreaders were absolutely grey, they were little grey old men. They’d got grey trying to correct misprints. And the Arabs were an anarchic lot who didn’t understand what they were setting up. The linotypist seemed to be playing the organ the whole time. And as fast as you sent down one proof with some misprints on it, they sent you back a whole new set of misprints and this could go on indefinitely. Of course, it led to awful political situations. For example, there was a particularly good and devout general who was described in the Egyptian Mail as a “bottle-scarred” veteran instead of a “battle-scarred” veteran. His press attaché rang me up at the embassy and said, “Look, it’s absolute scandal that General B. should be treated like this. You must get a correction.” So I rang up Mr. Goldstein who was the head of the paper and I said, “Do you realise what you’ve done to General B.? Will you please correct this tomorrow morning?” He said yes, he would and the next morning they come out with “We are so sorry about the reference to a “bottle-scarred veteran”, what we mean was a “battle-scared veteran.” There seemed to be no way forward from this. I was on the point of resigning.
Then there were all kinds of engaging things. When Lord Mountbatten came to visit us he was described as having a lovely “louse-lipped smile.” And the British Air Force was going to get even with Germany with their giant Sunderland Flying-Goats. You know their flying boats were quite celebrated, but their flying goats? Perhaps a secret weapon? A new British device to defeat the enemy, you see. And an item in the want-ad section of the paper, placed by a gentleman who needed someone to cook for him, read: “British officer urgently needs one good plain cock.” We had a very great deal of trouble like this, which kept everyone swearing and telephoning.
And I’ve also had trouble with statistics. I tried first of all to computerise this job a little bit because we were wasting so much money and it was costing lives to bring newsprint across. One had to take it seriously. The newsprint shortage was such that shipping space was allocated out for various demands and it seemed to me scandalous that one should waste it on propaganda pamphlets describing the situation in Nubia. So I started doing some spot propaganda as market research, of the kind that I suppose the big industries here must do; in fact it’s a kind of advertising, really. But so much was wasted that I tried to establish a kind of percentage of waste. I got one factory which had 2,000 workers and I inundated it with 2,000 pamphlets on one subject or another and I went on inundating it, and as we knew the dustmen in the area we collected what they threw away so that I finally established that most of the stuff I was feeding into the factory was being thrown automatically into the dustbin. By continuing the process I suddenly discovered that what creates a demand is shortage. I’m not a good Marxist, but I suddenly realised that if I gave 3 % of the total, the fact that it wasn’t enough to go around made the 3 % read it and pass it around, whereas if I gave 100 % of my product to them it appeared in the wastebins the next morning automatically. So this was a valuable discovery for the record. But I couldn’t interest London in this. They thought I was being too clever. Of course suborning the press and buying its influence is also very gay but what can one do against honest people with honest convictions? Nothing. The Germans were much better at it because they were not so respectable and they were not worrying about their image the whole time because they were desperate. We were still fuddy-duddy and worrying a great deal about our image, so it was they who suborned all the mullahs in the minarets who give out the evening prayers and make a little sermon, to tell the Egyptians that once Rommel came they’d all have ice cream. And the Egyptians liked ice cream so much that this was our most dangerous moment, our most heroic moment. I was tempted to do a cut-rate ice cream act and hand out ice cream on our side, but this would have been considered rather inferior behaviour. But our servants at our houses came to us and said, “We’re sorry you’re leaving. You’ve been quite square with us and on the level, but this ice cream, you know, you can’t pass that out.” And it’s very difficult in those sort of countries to find some way of countering that kind of idiocy. We came across it all the time, all over the place. And it was no good buying an indignant priest to say,”not ice cream but bully beef.” We couldn’t do that either. So I had a great deal of trouble with that.