That morning's landing had pushed the gloom aside; though in the next months it was to come and go like a vagrant toothache; I generally suppressed it by sheer activity. I had followed that coffee scent with my nose flairing like a pointer’s, leaving behind me on the apron a group of senior officers. I was often to note that the very great (and the would be great) seemed to be incapable of finding their way alone. They wanted to be met, saluted smartly and then conducted to a place appropriate to their station. I had left them to be teased by the smell of that wonderful breakfast while they were waiting for someone to lead them away.

For anyone coming from the rationed UK that breakfast was utterly amazing, served cafeteria style to anyone who picked up a stainless steel tray with depressions punched in its surface corresponding to the separate starting elements of the 7200 calorie American combat ration: an oval for two fried eggs, a rectangle for a handful of bacon rashers, a round hole for a large helping of baked-beans another for a hot-cake and syrup etc. For a 1944 Londoner this was orgiastic. Those trays are still in Morocco in the University Hospital where today they are used in the casualty department for instruments and dressings. To catch sight of them today brings back so vividly that bright morning when I first set foot in the country which, twenty years later on, was to become my home. At eight o'clock the Movement Officer put me on three hours warning and said he hoped to get me at least as far as Algiers before night. That next leg was in a Dakota - that wonderful DC3 that made post-war civil aviation possible. It seemed to me a miracle of silence after that infernal bomber. We flew low over Morocco, the big estates near Fes showed up clearly as did the snow topped Atlas Mountains. In the early afternoon we landed in Algiers-Maison Blanche where I was to spend the night. In the virtually empty Airport Transit Officers Mess, I found a British Captain. I asked him where he was going and he answered that he was just going to ask me whether I had been posted to Algiers. He had come out from the city to the airport on the shuttle transport because he was bored. Maison Blanche made a good start, so he said, for country walks. We set out together, left the perimeter and were soon going down a track between fields of maize. Italian prisoners kept popping up out of undergrowth, asking for cigarettes or making trading offers. This Captain said that he was one of a group of unemployed British Officers who called themselves "Le Cercle de Demoralisés". The Army had sent them to Algiers to get them out of the way. They had either offended some great person or had somehow qualified for shunting into a siding. I never learnt more about this oubliette until years later in Ghana, when Geoffry Byng told me that he had been dumped there for many months to keep him out of the way. That may not have been such a bad idea because, as an adviser to Nkruma he was not a very useful influence. His wife Chrystal had helped Claude Cockburn to edit "The Week".

Algiers certainly had an odd atmosphere. After my British pick-up went back on his shuttle, I found myself talking to a permanent inhabitant of the Transit Mess, a tragic man, an American Army Chaplain who had lost his faith and had been refused a transfer as a soldier into a combatant unit. His fault had been that he thought too much for his station in life. The bother with vast administrations, such as an army, is that individuals like this fall through the cracks and get lost all because someone can not face doing the paper-work. My hedge hopping journey continued via Malta until, late in the evening of Saturday the 29th of July 1944, at last I got to Cairo. That Allied Military Liaison had sent transport to meet me, told me that my own case had not as yet fallen through the cracks. It was Saturday night and the Egyptian civilian driver volunteered to take me to see the Pyramids rather than to drive me to the hotel where his orders notified that I was billeted, Bête et obeisant, I made the driver go to Allied Military Liaison H/Q in obedience to my high priority movement order. He said there would be no one there, I insisted, he was right and I was wrong. It was the first of many demonstrations that London, towards the end of the war, was nearer to the front-line than Cairo felt itself to be.

Next day, Sunday, I drew a blank by phone, a bored voice at AML/HQ told me to come round on Monday. I went to Shepheard's Hotel and ran into Topolski who was surprisingly friendly. Janetta and I had both found him and his work really interesting, but with Felix Topolski I had always found it hard to put a foot right. The social commentary implicit in his drawings made me think of Georg Grosz and this he had found unflattering. So to be welcomed as a long-lost friend was a relief, especially as I myself was feeling more than a bit forlorn. By noon on Monday my calls on the civilian and military bodies that I understood were clamouring for my presence were already giving me the feeling that something was wrong. Everyone knew that I existed but they did not seem to know what to do with me.

I went off to see Squadron-Leader Patrick Balfour (Lord Kinross), a friend of Cyril Connolly's since school who had married Angela Culme Seymour, Janetta's half-sister. As a wife she had been causing Patrick much trouble, but this never stopped him being a good friend to both Janetta and myself. He was the perfect counsellor for a case such as mine. It was simple, said Patrick. "You make them do what you want, that should be easy because, from what you say, they do not seem to know themselves what to do." I demurred, as I could not see that I had the status to push around my bosses; this, Patrick regarded as pure nonsense. I knew that my presence in Cairo was the result of correspondence involving, amongst others, Lord Moyne the Minister Resident. Patrick's advice was to "Stop fooling around with people who don't count, don't wait for Lord Moyne to send for you go and see him right away and he will set you straight." I did so. Lord Moyne gave me an excellent lunch. He had had a letter from the Admiral and said that cases had occurred before of officers arriving in Cairo, because their name had survived on some urgent list, only to find that the operation for which they had been designated had been cancelled. In Lord Moyne's view that was often a blessing in disguise as it provided fresh blood for current jobs that were running into trouble. "You are on an old list but now there is another job just in your line which I will talk about later."

The Blitz, the evacuation of civilians and the shelter of the bombed out, had given us in London an apprenticeship on our home ground in meeting emergency social needs. These skills had to be militarised; maintaining unhindered lines-of-communication is more onerous in friendly territory where an advancing army owes the inhabitants the respect and neighbourly care due to allies. Minimum civilian needs have to be satisfied as soon as friendly territory is liberated. I had been classed as having special competence in the analysis of Civilian Requirements.

I learnt from Lord Moyne that Churchill had been trying to stop Anvil (the American South of France landings) so as to press on up Italy and thence, via the Ljubljana gap, to Vienna, the Danube, and to Bucarest along the lines foreseen by the planners of operation "Autonomous". The PM had even been tempting himself with the idea of a Salonika operation. My precipitate dispatch from England was connected with this plan which Roosevelt refused to understand and failed to support. I learnt that my original employment was to have been the planning of civilian requirements along the lines of communication of British troop movements through Jugoslavia and into Romania. There had even been thoughts of a glider-born landing. None of this ever took place, and the mere mention of the idea in a dispatch shared with the Russians had provoked paroxysmal reactions. The Romanians desperately wanted us in but it was not to be. They had switched sides too late. Anyway the Red Army moved in before Churchill could develop his 'soft underbelly of the Axis' ideas which Roosevelt had never liked, even if (or maybe because) it involved beating the Soviets in the race to the Danube.

Churchill had seen the immense political advantages of a Danubian presence, which militarily, if substituted for "Anvil", would have cost nothing extra and would have achieved important military and political results. At a minimum, the Soviets could not well have objected to our following through from Trieste and pressing on to Vienna, which we might well have reached before Marshall Tolbukhin. Anvil's action in the South of France had little or no influence on the war, so cancelling it could even have been an economy; but Roosevelt was not at all interested, what he wanted was a show of his own in the South of France. It is only now, with the publication by HMSO of the Official History of Strategic Deception in the Second World War that I can see how well my own movements in 1944 and the hinted explanations for their changes may most probably have fitted into Operation "Zeppelin" which was an elaborately thought out Deception Plan for a British Military intervention in the Balkans, specially invented for the Abwehr to discover. It ensured the diversion of German troops away from areas where we were really able to do something. Cairo was one of the centres from which such deceptions were spread and this may well explain why I, and some others, were kept zig-zagging around the Levant for the critical months of the West European Operations. Zeppelin and its sub-operations bore fruit, as the war-diary of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht shows. In 1944 the Germans were expecting that "at a later stage an Anglo-Saxon offensive on the Dalmatian coast" would have "to be reckoned with..." which was just what they were meant to go on thinking.

Lord Moyne was against the Special Operations Executive: "You must not get muddled up with SOE because its virtually over anyway." He had been having more trouble with Brigadier Keeble. He went on. "It's not the last days of war that are going to count. It is the first months of peace that will decide the politics of Europe for the foreseeable future." I reminded him of Cyril's parody in which Rear-Colonel Connolly had defined Peace as "War continued by other means", which pleased him greatly. Lord Moyne steered me away from Romania into that part of Allied Military Liaison that was preparing the relief of the civilian population of Greece, Albania and Jugoslavia. There was still a slim chance of an immediate drive to Trieste and on, through the Ljubljana gap into Austria for which I might have been required. But, from Lord Moyne's point of view, I was on hold for the only Unit of Allied Military Liaison that was immediately able to use the skills I had to offer. Under AML auspices, preparations were going forward for the establishment of UNRRA Country Missions once the Balkans became accessible. Lord Moyne was most anxious to assure a British presence in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile Patrick Balfour had this wonderful flat at the top of a house in the old City with a view over and into the Mosque of Ibn Touloun. He liked having someone there when he was out of Cairo on RAF duty, so it was there that I stayed when I was not in the Maadi AML Camp or on those short detachments into Lebanon and Palestine.

Sometime in the autumn of 1944, working under the umbrella of AML (Allied Military Liaison), I had started assembling what were to be the first Units of UNRRA - Jugoslavia which was by then located under canvass next to the Maadi golf-links just outside Cairo. I had been introduced to the very first Soviet recruitment for UNRRA, a Doctor Irena Zhukova. She had spent the earlier war years as a medical research-worker marooned in Glasgow. She must have been born a bit before 1900 and was the widow of a Leningrad red intellectual Professor who had died young in the 1920s. Later on I learnt that her father had been a Tsarist railway magnate but that she had belonged to the pro-revolutionary avant-garde. She was a great amateur of the Orthodox Church and was one hundred per cent behind the joint efforts of Marshal Stalin and the Patriarch of Moscow in the pursuit of the Great Patriotic War. She displayed total sovietisation but also knew western ways well. She was very naturally considered an asset in the prevailing pro-Soviet climate of that time. I was living in Patrick's Ibn Touloun house. It was a lovely place and made for entertaining. By an odd coincidence the second flat below Patrick's was occupied by another Balfour who was no relation. This David Balfour was something of a recluse, commissioned as a Major in the Intelligence Corps. I had invited Dr Zhukova to lunch, knowing hardly anything about her, but understanding full well that she had to be handled with all friendly circumspection. Her National status as a Soviet recruit to UNRRA gave a special weight to her presence in Cairo.

We got out of the car and entered the house to go up its dark and steep stone staircase. On the landing, outside David's flat, we stopped for breath. We could hear through the thick oak door set in the cut stone walls a Bach fugue being delivered fortissimo on his piano. It was stunningly arresting. Suddenly the piano stopped in the middle of a measure. A few seconds later the door was snatched open and a very angry voice said, "Kenneth, you know I hate to be listened to--it's quite simply eavesdropping." Zhukova was just a quarter of a pace behind me. His glance left me and met Zhukova's astonished appraisal. I heard her say, "Svjati Nikola Tchudodvorats" David turned to me and said "This is intolerable." He switched to Zhukova. "Madam I do not follow you." Zhukova was not to be put down. "But I have seen you before." David Balfour snapped back. "There is nothing to discuss - that man is dead." This simply made Zhukova impatient and, as he turned away, she added, "But not buried, only shaven." The door was slammed and she went on up the stairs with her shaken host.

On the terrace overlooking Ibn Touloun's cloisters she accepted a vermouth saying equably, "It increases my respect for the British that they should send officers around disguised as monks." She added in a quiet manner, "It is an interesting if disquieting idea - I might even have chosen him as a father-confessor." These remarks were totally incomprehensible to me. David's extrasensory perception of our presence on the staircase was disorienting enough in itself, the extraordinary exchange between two persons who, in all logic, should have been complete strangers was equally puzzling. That unearthly reference to Svjati Nikola Tchudodvorats - Saint Nikolas the Miracle worker - and now this incomprehensible but smooth irony from Zhukova, it all left me speechless. True, he had been a monk, but why should she have this idea that he had been an officer before hand? Why indeed think that he was an officer at all? He had been in his shirt-sleeves, his slip-on shoulder markings were not visible. Why on earth should she know anything about him at all?

Zhukova answered all these questions without my having to formulate them. As I was getting drinks she remarked that the whole situation was very silly. Before the war she had been on a visit to Berlin and had gone to the Orthodox Church to venerate the miracle-working ikon of Saint Nikolas. It had been brought out from Mount Athos to do a circuit in Europe of the Russian Orthodox Cathedrals. The monk, who had held the Ikon to the lips of the faithful and who had wiped it with a napkin after each osculation, was now, having shaved off his beard, without question living in the same house as myself. That he was so unmannerly was a pity, she would have liked to have talked to him. She held his behaviour to be absurd. I was panic-stricken that she would go and report to her home authorities that we in Cairo had been engaged in a diabolic anti-soviet spy operation to penetrate the Orthodox Church, using officers disguised as monks. So I had to tell her that she was inverting her data in their time relationships and was in risk of making an erroneous, unscientific, generalisation. The true story of that Bach-playing officer gave the monk precedence in time over the officer. Did she not know that total mobilisation, British style, meant exactly that? The piano player may have been a monk in civilian life, but in war he had become a soldier, just like the rest of us. Zhukova left the subject alone and we got on with our lunch; in fact her main preoccupation turned out to be the settling of her accommodation, pay and allowances. She had a discerning eye for the bourgeois comforts. Though I knew the outline of David's career, I needed to know the whole story--here it is, assembled from the bits and pieces that I got from Cairo friends and from David's rare references to former times.

The fact is that a scrupulous scholar called David Balfour moved out of the Roman Church into the Orthodox because what he wanted to read was in the library of a Mount Athos monastery. While reading he found that the Orthodox way suited him, so he stayed on until the war was about to engulf the whole Athos life. The British Admiralty had a Destroyer in nearby waters, rounding up deserving persons from the Islands. So the Navy went to Mount Athos and collected thirty or forty monks who, largely in view of their national origins, did not wish to risk life inside a zone of Nazi occupation. The Destroyer, with over one hundred very dirty refugees from the various islands, made for the nearest Allied port, which was then called Haifa, now Tel Aviv. The Pioneer Corps had a disinfesting station ready on the quay through which all such arrivals had to be funneled. Most of the passengers accepted this abjectly, as they were used to being pushed around. Not so the monks, and they formed a compact huddle. The NCO i/c Disinfestation Detail shouted at this group to move along, because he did not have all day and because once a regular movement stops the Army knows very well that everything can rapidly get out of hand. The huddle got more compact, so he shouted louder; no resulting movement came, but, out of it came a clear very English voice saying "Sergeant- Major, I trust I am reading your rank-markings correctly, if you will tell me exactly what you are proposing I will explain it to the good Fathers who have not understood what you wish of them. They can then decide whether they will be able to comply."

The sergeant, surprised at this upper-class English voice coming out of a black-robed, long-haired, scrum of tattered bearded clerics, explained that, to protect both travellers and residents from plague, everyone had either to be quarantined or to have their body hair, head hair and beard clipped off. After this they then had to take a hot shower while their clothes were passed through superheated steam. All this, translated by Pop Dmitri/David Balfour, caused intense debate and no compliance. To break the impasse David then volunteered to go through with it, for the others to see exactly what exactly was involved. He advanced, was duly stripped and clipped. When he lost his beard he lost his faith. Being polyglot and reputed to have been the father-confessor to the Greek Royal Family, the Intelligence Corps was very glad to recruit him. One authority told me that since David's soutane did not survive the steaming, the Sergeant Major had to give him a set of khaki-drill fatigues. This set a sartorial seal on the changes forming in his mind, just as had the soutane, years before, on his anointment to Orthodox Holy Orders: L'habit fait le moine David Balfour reacted immediately to the Zhukova encounter by seeing it all as a red offensive in which I was deeply compromised. He insisted that one or other of us had to leave the house. I had of course made my own reports on Zhukova’s extraordinary retentive memory and powers of recognition. If nothing else, the incident provided a heaven-sent opportunity for a test: only the three people concerned were aware of David's unscheduled encounter with Zhukova, and since piquant information tends to spread, where it comes back from can indicate where it got out. If any version or hint of British spies in Orthodox soutanes became current in circles related to Lovinov, the Russian Minister-of-Legation (who chronically doubted British good-faith and who would have lapped up the story), we would have had clear demonstration of a Zhukova double function. This did not happen.

Zhukova stayed in United Nations service for the next ten years and became a factor for tolerance with a great appetite for international tea-parties. After the war she got into UNESCO, but, in 1954, the American anti-red purging mission, led by McCarthy's lieutenants Cohn and Shine, had her fired. She ended her days in a Russian Orthodox Hostel in Jerusalem, having decided not to return to the Soviet Uhion. Lord Moyne thought that the staircase incident must have been invented until David Balfour's sense of outrage gave witness to its literal truth. Happily David Balfour and I became reconciled. He ended up as Consul General in Istanbul and wrote an excellent yachtsman's guide to the Turkish coast. Cairo was a wonderfully stimulating place, but it was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to know my Balkan itinerary but in army parlance I "was awaiting orders." Meanwhile Egypt offered its own traditional Islamic self, while also nurturing its modern intellectual life - a Franco-Coptic amalgam swimming in the kaleidoscope around the vast British political and military establishment. I had freedom to enjoy it all because, for most of the time, I stayed on in Patrick's house in the old City. When I was not there I would either have been in the AML Mess at Maadi Camp or else with Cairene friends, of whom, by then, I had made many.

Today, as in those yesterdays, I have a particular gratitude to Bertha Gaster, the Palestine Post correspondent and to Borschardt that talented Islamic antiquarian, for the hours spent in their enchanted Garden-house, the Pjata Ljetka, on the banks of the Nile. During the working week Bertha's flat in Charia Antikhana, near Groppi's was a cross-roads of the most lively intellectual traffic. It was but a short time before I arrived in Cairo that the future Member of Parliament for Pontypool, then Leading Aircraftsman Leo Abse, had taken a leading part in the so called "Soldiers Parliament". This debating club had been officially conceived by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs as an intellectual recreation for soldiers. It had sat once a week in 'Music for All' -the Army's own concert hall. The fact that a make-believe "Chancellor of the Exchequer" of a toy parliament was worth arresting and sending back to the United Kingdom by the very Army that had invented the toy in the first place (and that had decided to support Tito), shows how nervously confused some parts of GHQ must have become. All that this "Parliament" had been doing was to discuss the Beveridge Plan and to approve the nationalisations that were to become British policy after the next Parliamentary election. The thought of this forgotten political ferment makes me remember the best booksellers in Cairo, the Librarie du Rondpoint. Its owners kept perpetual open house; people like Robin Fedden, Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Olivia Manning, and a whole stream of minds burning fast for the future, all swept through these friendly spaces, as well as travellers such as Bernall, Churchill's scientific adviser, the sage of the left. Then there were also the radical Copts who seemed to know Proust by heart, and the Cavaffy illuminated, perfectly polyglot, Eastern Mediterranean Europeans now a vanished tribe. These last rose above nationality, sailing their individual courses with Olympian indifference, many were stateless but they were often rich enough not to mind. Cairo was not just a crossroads in 1944 - it was more of a hub, but it was beginning to detach itself from the war. The daily round in London related directly to the winning of the war. Cairo was not so sharply focussed in the Autumn of 1944.

One day Janetta's half brother, Mark Culme-Seymour, turned up in Cairo, somehow detached from his Rifle Regiment. I still treasure the memory of our rendezvous for dinner. As he came up to me he said, "Oh dear, it’s a terrible drag but I simply must get some money". I had replied that we could surely manage with what was in my pocket, but Mark persisted, saying that it would only take a moment to pick some up. We got into a gharry and went a short distance down the Sharia Kasr-el-Nil towards the Banking section of the town. I said that the banks would all be closed but Mark told me not to worry. We got out at a block of very sober offices, went upstairs, rang a bell at a plain door and were admitted into a dark room containing a large roulette table. Mark put a pound on the rouge and, a few seconds later, collected a pile of notes which he transferred to impair, where they promptly multiplied themselves again. Mark picked up the lot, turned around and we left. The crowd of eye-shaded Levantine habitués seemed barely to notice us, the whole transaction was over within about four minutes. When my own pockets are empty, the memory of that moment still comforts me and remains a monument to a hubris, even then rare, and now vanished. I wish I could remember the name of that Captain, a war-artist, whom I used to meet so often at Patrick's. He was having terrible trouble with a Brigadier whose troops he was painting. In the Brigadier's view, he was "not getting them right." After every sitting this exasperated senior officer always said "You'll have to give it another go, you'd better come tomorrow but much earlier in the morning". The Brigadier was convinced that his troops looked their best at about sunrise providing they were all glistening with sweat. They were African and they were made to pound around the parade ground until they were streaming. I heard about this every day when the dispirited artist came back to breakfast with me on Patrick’s calm roof-terrace overlooking the Ibn Touloun courtyard.

One day he returned beaming, at last he had got it right. The Brigadier had been overwhelmed with martial impatience; he had ordered the artist to "stop pissing against the wind. That is all you are doing when you persist in painting my Fuzzy-Wuzzies from the front or from the side." The N.C.O. whose job it had been to keep the battalion galloping around, always faced them from a position in the shade, keeping the sun out of his own eyes. The artist had been stationing himself in the shade alongside the N.C.O.s in charge of the exercise. The Brigadier had another approach "It's their bare backs that glisten, there is nothing like it, nothing like it anywhere in the world. It's the Battalion that has got to have the sun behind it, then you've got to be behind them. That's where you should be. That's the way to do it, stupid; now just carry on with it." Such was the Brig's final order. His Battalion has been immortalised in the sun-rise, shirts off, viewed from the rear, as they galloped around their Cairo parade ground.

Two months later the confusion about my future employment still persisted. I had been sent on a variety of short jobs that took me into Palestine and the Lebanon. Had I just shut-up and floated with the tide heaven knows where I would have ended. The Army having shipped me out in a hurry and without checking on that already cancelled Romanian operation, could have parked me anywhere - even into that Algiers Cercle de Démoralisés that I had met on the way out.

I had been fortunate in that my introduction to Lord Moyne had a personal, as well as an official, basis. He had told me at our first July meeting to come and see him again if I had the need. So, after nearly three months in Cairo, I wrote him a brief note asking if I could seek his advice. Very promptly I got a message to come to his Zamalek house the next evening. He had the faculty of focusing his total attention onto a person or a problem. This built up my confidence, which in turn, made the whole visit a joy. What I needed was a defined job. I had spent August, September and a part of October on odd tasks with an increasingly odd set of AML officers. I had followed Lord Moynes advice to avoid entanglement with SOE, even when the Interservices Liaison Bureau had wanted to steer me in that direction, but when I saw him he had already informed himself, consequently he was brief and effective. He said that SOE's work in the Balkans was now virtually over and that all these odd-jobs I had been doing had to stop. He was making it plain that my military ranking was now to be used solely for the purposes of movements. He considered that I must be appointed to the Jugoslav Mission of UNRRA as soon as it was constituted. "But," he added, "You will have to sweat it out first of all in Italy. This will mean your going to Bari, where you will find a very confused situation. Don't be discouraged, stick with it. The Americans are detaching highly qualified officers from their military Public Health Service who will be arriving any day now. The war is nearly over; the United Nations holds the clue to a workable peace. We shall most certainly see each other again as I hope myself to be involved in the development of that Organisation."

That was on Thursday the 2nd of November 1944. On Friday Sir William Mathews, who ran the United Kingdom Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration, sent for me and told me that I was to be appointed acting Director of Health and Relief Services in the Jugoslave Mission of UNRRA. He said that I had to get to Italy as soon as possible; the future of the Military Liaison phase was shortening rapidly. I would certainly find some confusion in UNRRA, as the marriage of British and American administrative methods was a troubled one --particularly in zones of left/right tension such as Jugoslavia. Two days later, on Monday the 6th of November, just at the entrance to his Zamalak house, Lord Moyne and his driver, Lance-Corporal Fuller, were shot dead by two members of the Stern Gang. The good that did to Zionist aims was zero. Moyne had favoured a multi-confessional Palestine assuring freedom and development to everyone. This seems hardly a reason for killing him, but, at that time people like Beguin (who was then a terrorist) thought it was. The present day Israeli views on terrorism and good government are illustrated by the fact that the bodies of Lord Moyne's murderers were recently exhumed from the Egyptian cemetery, where they had lain since execution, to be re-buried ceremonially with the Founding Heroes of Israel in this same cemetery as that in which Mr Maxwell's remains have now been placed. The symbolism of these operations is hard to follow but there is a possible matter-of-fact explanation. When the sixteen year old Jan Ludwik Hoch (aka Leslie du Maurier, aka Robert Maxwell) left Slatinske Dole in December of 1939 to escape Hitler's ant-Semitic savagery, he followed a recognised escape route to Palestine whence he was delivered with a batch of British aided volunteers to the Czech Legion at Agde near Marseilles in early 1940. Was he helped even then by the Jabotinsky movement, the Stern Gang - the fathers of Mosad? What part did he play in the capture of Vanuna by Mosad fifty years later?

Throughout all this time Janetta and I did indeed write to each other a great deal. I adored her; we certainly loved each other, but she could not get over her disapproval of my voluntary departure overseas. Effectively this meant that all discussion of the work, around which my current life was built, lay under a boycott. We had always assumed that my earning our living by the general practice of medicine was unlikely. We had thought that, when the war was over, I might once again become a parliamentary candidate. This would have fitted in very well with our shared life-style, with Janetta's artistic and literary interests and with the people we both enjoyed seeing. The experience I was gaining would certainly have well served such a post-war future.

Compared to London, Cairo was positively sybaritic. There were plenty of young women entirely disposed to accept invitations to dinner. Intellectually and physically well endowed ATS officers (often the daughters of aristocratic Zionist families settled in Palestine), cypherines like Barbara Skelton - and charming Copts. There was no such thing as privacy in Cairo, perhaps because our social world was really so tiny, limited to a terrain bounded by the Gezira Club, Maadi Camp, Shepheard's Hotel, Garden City, Rustum Building, GHQ and the Embassy. I have always blamed Topolski for spreading piquant news about myself when he returned to London. We had been fated to keep running in to each other. On my side I was not always silent about his own adventures; for example his problem with the management of Shepheard's when Barbara Skelton came to have tea privately with him in his room. The management had beaten on his door shouting "no adultery, no adultery"; the couple were convinced that they could not be the target since neither of them were married.

I was making the contacts at operational levels that eventually enabled me to get back to the UK to see Janetta. These contacts later, but, alas, too late, got space for her and our daughter on a Free-French flight to Belgrade. Journeys of this nature called for the manipulation of the movement system and friendly help. The Poles and the Free French were more understanding in such matters than anyone else.

In June 1942 Cyril Connolly had published an article in Horizon, in which I had set out an approach to Medical Services in post-war Britain. Janetta and I had worked on this in a way that made the article's good qualities as much hers as mine. Now I found myself quite literally able to practice what we had then preached. I was the principal adviser to an Allied Government, whose Health Services, because the war had destroyed everything, had to be recreated from zero.

In 1944 I was thirty-one years old, and I found myself at the beginning of an international career in a position of leadership to which, at home, I could not possibly have aspired until I was ten or fifteen years older. All this must have gone a bit to my head. In Cairo my ambitions were becoming more and more engaged; Lord Moyne had shown me new perspectives within the nascent United Nations, and I believed that all pointed to a fine future for the three of us. I found it easier to see Janetta's reactions to my leaving her alone in London more as a passing accident de parcours. Fortunately I had not left them with money problems as my pay had gone up handsomely on the promotion that went with this overseas posting. At the time, and on a more serious level, I did not recognise how much the accident of my arrival, with its unusual military and administrative routing, as well as the impulsion derived from Lord Moyne's interventions (and even from my own bumptiousness) had turned out to be politically opportune. I had arrived at the end of July 1944 when the only American presence in Cairo was that of the Typhus Commission which was purely concerned with that disease. As 1944 drew to an end, Americans, headed by very competent specialists from the US Public Health Service, started to arrive. Cairo was receiving the first cohorts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. The only locally available British contributions were Voluntary Agency staff who, though willing and energetic, did not offer a very high level of expertise.

In these circumstances my own presence struck the political planning level on the British side as useful. Moreover three years with the Air Marshall had given me a good education in staff-work, my German and Spanish was adequate, my French was rated as good and I was learning Serbian, also I was carried on the General Service List with the reasonably senior rank of Lt Colonel and had some insight into the political forces that were emerging as peace drew nearer. All this served to compensate for the fact that I was young and had never before held a senior post. It had become evident that I had been marked out for promotion but that was no help to Janetta alone in England, no one near her was telling her the score or serving as my advocate. Allied Military Liaison (AML) existed to provide military authority and facilities for dealing with civilian problems in zones subject to military law, notably the Balkan territories where, until their liberation, SOE had been the sole British military presence.

Some Balkan governments were trying to drop the Nazis and change sides - Romania and Bulgaria for example. Others had governments in exile which, though recognised by the Allies, were repudiated by a proportion of the population; for example Greece, Albania and Jugoslavia. AML held the keys to UNRRA's future work fields. It was from the agreement of 24 March 1944 with Allied Military Liaison Balkan H/Q that UNRRA derived its right to be present in Greece Albania and Jugoslavia.

By the autumn of 1944, the tide of war had so turned that planning for the peace became essential. The UNRRA Field Missions were born in Cairo amidst the disbandment of our Balkan military activities. The Americans had none of the man-power shortages that five years of war had imposed on the British so, by the end of 1944, they were arriving in a seemingly prodigal fashion. Such numerical dominance made my presence opportune as did also my AML attachment.

The numerical preponderance of British staff in AML was such that the initial letter "A" (for 'Allied') was dropped; the Americans did not like the word 'Allied' which they held might make them subject to British military command. They preferred to have guest status in a purely British Unit. The American Army was not involved in the Balkans and was not seeking a military linkage with the British Units which were already in place or poised to go. On the contrary, the one American Officer (Lt Colonel Marks) detached to AML had been withdrawn. Undoubtedly all this arose from Roosevelt's reserves about Churchill's Balkan policies.

There was also a lack of unanimity, about Balkan priorities which arose from Roosevelt’s rejection of Churchill's wish to meet the Red Army on the Danube. At the beginning these contradictions could only be sensed at the political level of the Minister Resident. But ambiguities resulted in poor Anglo-American coordination on a military level and this complicated arrangements for getting UNRRA into the field

A further complication lay in the fact that few of the Americans knew any foreign language: even fewer understood Balkan life or politics. The exceptions were more recent immigrants who often had sympathies with the right-wing losers of the covert civil-wars in the countries of their ethnic origin. In the Balkans, British mastery of the combative Liaison Missions in enemy-occupied areas had been paramount. In Albania, Jugoslavia and Greece an active British network of military liaison officers, whose contacts spanned both left and right wing resistance forces, had existed for years, and we were not without contacts with British sources in both Bulgaria and Romania. In this last country the authorities were so keen to abandon their Nazi allies that they allowed radio facilities to their SOE prisoner, Major Porter America's presence in Jugoslavia was assured by a few token officers, some of whom were woefully misplaced, like the unhappy Lt Colonel McDowell and Lt Kramer whose work for the OSS had included parleying (under truce) with Herr Rudi Stärker, an assistant to the volbemächtigführers, Hitler's representative in Belgrade. These perfectly honourable officers, naive, misguided or misdirected, had been attached to Mihailovic and had to be evacuated before they could be taken prisoner by Tito's Partisans as they rolled up the the Chetniks to whom the Americans had been attached. The fumbling and delays, with which I had had to live throughout 1944, and which were now ending, had often taken a paradoxical form. At one and the same time it might be impossible to get a decision on some quite practical point because no one was clear who had authority to act; while at the same moment some other illusive level would substitute new instructions for seemingly relevant orders already in hand.

Quite evidently there were more than one pair of hands on the wheel - which was truer than I was able to know at the time. "Zeppelin” was a brilliantly conducted deception Operation designed to lead the Germans into believing that we were planning a major Balkan landing. Real people, like myself, were needed to season the chicken-feed for the German Intelligence Services. Our movements were meant to be observed and reported by enemy agents who had been left at liberty for that very purpose; and it was for that very purpose, without my understanding of the real reasons, that I had so often been moved around.

In any field of high security activity secrecy favours the manoeuvering of rival cabals. Work in the Balkans needed very tight security cover so, not surprisingly, it was bedevilled by rivalry at the Command level. In the field mutual support was automatic between British Liaison Officers but that received from the distant H/Q by individual missions was not always even handed.. The secret departments were in such a state of enmity that very drastic measures eventually had to be taken to eliminate those who had lost sight of the real enemy - the Germans. The possibility has now to be faced that at senior levels there were officers who were not only biased but that also inspired and guided from levels outside their line of command. When one looks into the world of mirrors it is hard to distinguish left from right. Of course the top - as we now know - was far from being unanimous. Roosevelt did not share Churchill's longing to cut into "the soft under-belly of the Axis". There is evidence that Churchill consistently refused to be side-tracked. He set up a skeleton plan, hoping that the moment would come when Roosevelt would see the paramount advantage of a British dash over the Balkans ploughing through a collapsing German front to the Danube. It became clearer each day that the enemy could not continue to garrison South East Europe, and Churchill certainly saw no reason to make a political present of the whole Danube basin to the Soviets. Movement without money was never possible in the Balkans; so money was an essential prerequisite for any cut into that soft underbelly. Towards the end of the war the only money that could really buy anything was gold. A war-chest of golden sovereigns was amongst the material stock-piled for the hoped-for rapid British thrust from Salonika up to Bucarest through the yet to be shattered Axis lines.

I shared a tent for a few days at Maadi Camp with an RASC Officer who had been in charge of three trucks sent to move a number of crates in Alexandria. These crates were not very large but they were horribly heavy, the RASC had not sent a working party with the trucks and, horror of horrors, the drivers were made to help load and unload the cargo--an outrageous breach of the immunity from degrading manual labour conventionally conceded to drivers.

Anyway the crates could all have fitted into one truck. The other two trucks were required simply to sandwich the loaded truck in between them in a tight convoy on the road. The drivers had to shift these cases by hand (the job was at a villa full of senior officers) but their grudging attitude to stevedoring resulted in one of them being dropped from the back of a high truck onto a concrete flooring. It broke open, sending a cascade of golden sovereigns over the villa's back-yard. Immediately afterwards the whole transport detail was dispersed, the RASC Captain was told he was being sent to Italy, separated from the Unit with which he had spent the war. He was furious, he had been told not to talk about the Alexandria job. As it had got him posted he was not inclined to forget it. He said "It’s bloody insulting. Anyone would think that Alexandria lot are expecting me to remember their fucking address and fucking-well burglarize them." My tent-mate insisted that he had shifted more than a ton of gold that afternoon. My name had been an item on the same Romanian Order of Battle that Roosevelt had not liked. So had been that gold. But I could speak for myself and had got myself going to Jugoslavia. How the sovereigns ended up I have no means of knowing They were so secret that they may not ever have been inventoried. Lord Moyne, Churchill's nominee, had straightened out my muddles before his assassination, but at the time of his death, much stayed somewhere between his in tray and the out.

I left behind in Cairo, sovereigns apart, an extraordinary collection of Expert Advisors. Many of them were gallant figures from earlier times, as was Lord Norton, who had lost a leg in the 1914 war campaigning around the Balkans and the Near East. His views about the financial needs of travellers are still worth bearing in mind. While others were worrying about the relative merits of dollars or gold for emergency funding, he assured me that all a man of sense needed was a cheque book on a decent bank. "I was all over the place between 1914 and 22" he assured me "and all I ever used was my cheque book." It seems that, in those times, there was no fear of cheques bouncing.

According to Lord Norton, whether in Yalta, Kabul or Bucharest, they took cheques on Messrs Coutts instantly. I asked him whom he meant by 'they.' Rather wearily he explained, "Any fool knows that money in the Bank is real and that it can't be stolen. As for gold and notes - that stuff is made to help thieves and murderers." He went on, "Coutts actually asked to keep one of m'cheques, it had been endorsed and re-endorsed all over the Levant, scores of signatures hundreds of miles apart. A good cheque is better than money - it’s as good as money already in the Bank, which is the only proper place to keep the stuff. Notes and coins, it’s all dirty, I can't stand handling cash. Why, any decent merchant, anyone at all with any sense, would rather have a cheque on London than local notes." He added "Even if the account is low, Coutts always pays because they know their customers; they know the money will be coming." Charming Edwardian sentiments but by now the halo is fading, even that around the head of Mr Coutts, still remembered by the Moskva Narodna Bank in the 1960s as safe to cash.

The Americans had obtained the inclusion of Sociologists as a necessary part of the UNRRA staff. Someone in London had recruited a lady ethnographer from a British University to advise the as yet to be established UNRRA Balkan Headquarters. This lady was also a dress-reformer. Her wardrobe consisted of washable cotton tubes controlled by draw strings Such a tube, open at the bottom and pulled in at the top, made a skirt; another tube, drawn in top and bottom, made a blouse. A large tube tied tight at the bottom made a sack for packing duplicate items. I have a clear picture of her controlling the drying of her laundry, in the part of Maadi Camp reserved for ATS Officers; she had a camp-servant holding one end of the drying line because, in her view, that ensured that he would not be able to leave her things unattended. The ethnographer was a late survivor of that glorious race of nineteenth century English Spinsters. Mary Kingsley and Florence Nightingale would have recognised and approved her intrepidity. She was an authority on the fertility rites of the Danube basin. I did not see that her expertise was immediately relevant to the emergency situations we were facing; moreover she was clearly ungovernable and her force of character was such as to make her dangerous. Considering her undoubted courage, the post-war Balkans would have given her many opportunities but, as turned out to be the case, they could all too easily be of the wrong kind. Regretfully, as far as I was concerned, she simply could not be attached to a country mission. I had her listed to be called-forward "only as and when specifically requested". Much to the credit of her determined character, she not only arrived in Serbia a few months later but got into the Field behind our backs and nearly had us all thrown out. She found some wretched Serbian peasants who knew how to make the dead speak and she got them to practice their art while she took notes. All that was needed for this was a corpse awaiting burial plus a violinist playing the right music which, when a question was asked, had to be stopped suddenly. In the silence that followed the skilled could hear an affirmation or a negation. In the small hours of the morning this is held to be a very effective way of getting at the truth, or at last obtaining a wished for reply; it all depended upon the interpretation of the slight gurgles that may be heard near a corpse awaiting burial. Her ethnological observations, in the summer of 1945, were interrupted by the Serbian People's Authorities. They were delighted to find their worst suspicions of the reactionary qualities of imported UNRRA staff so strikingly confirmed. The upshot was that either she, or the lot of us, had to go. We sacrificed the ethnographer.

While waiting around in Cairo I had been able to make friendly contact with the Jugoslav Military Mission. Its commander, Colonel Jaksic (who later became ambassador in Canada) represented Tito's H/Q which itself had been recognized by Churchill when he sent in Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean - to say nothing of his son Randolph and Waugh. But because Colonel Jaksic's mission was not accredited by the Royal Government in London but by the Partisan Military Command, it lived in a diplomatic limbo in Cairo. We were not able to discuss anything very substantial with them, but, when we arrived in Belgrade, our simple initiative in Cairo was seen as a testimony of good faith. On the American side, visiting the Jugoslav Partisan Mission had been criticised as a possibly imprudent compromise to our neutrality. This had forced me to say that, as there was a war on, I was not able to feel neutral. I had always thought that America's neutrality had ended at Pearl Harbour - just as the Luftwaffe's bombardment of Belgrade had ended that of Jugoslavia.

Fortunately for my future, Lord Moyne had passed the word on about our November the 2nd meeting before his ridiculously pointless assassination on the 6th. So I received my orders to move through routine channels later that month. I use the words ridiculous and pointless because to find Jews helping the common enemy by killing a leader in the fight against the authors of the holocaust cannot be characterised otherwise. Just before leaving Cairo I had been able to have one last lunch with Eddie Gathorne Hardy who had established, with British blessings, an odd outfit called "The Friends of the Arabs” which was supposed to provide a forum for better understanding, which I believe it did - both in a political sense as well as on the much more personal terms that were Eddie's special interest. He had used the whole of his small Government subsidy to acquire a printing press; he swore that it was the one Napoleon had brought with him on his Egyptian campaign. He showed me proofs of some English poetry, written by soldiers, set up in a wonderful Baskerville type-face. It is perhaps too much to hope that this extraordinary find of Eddie's has survived and still prints in Cairo. We often met for lunch; he tended to be "busy in the evenings" with the friendships. I have a very clear memory of this last meal with Eddie in Patrick Balfour's Ibn Toulun flat in which as usual I was squatting. Afterwards we had gone down into the street and were waiting for a Ghari to trot up and take us back to town. We were standing on the pavement just outside the Ibn Touloun mosque when suddenly Eddie said that it would be mad for me to miss the chance of having my fortune told. He had just spotted a particularly gifted old woman who, according to Eddie, was amazingly clairvoyant.

We went over to her and she emptied onto the stone flags her sack of desert sand which contained some largish shells. Eddie translated: I was to take a shell and put it to my ear. I did. Could I hear the Ocean? Yes, it's roaring was clear. The old woman filtered sand, small pebbles and shells through her withered hand while her divinations were rendered into English by Eddie. They were disturbing: I was soon to travel, I would go far but not to my home. There--in my home--would be great changes, probably a great loss. In the distant country to which I was going I would find my masters unkind, but I would prevail and become greater than those who tried to oppress me. I asked about the threatening situation in my home. There was little clarification; the old woman said that my daughter would not be harmed but for the rest I must trust in God.

Eddie accepted with modesty my congratulations on his Arabic. To my very great regret, I was never to see him again, though thirty years later Nicolette, my daughter, married his nephew, Jonathan. I now believe that it was really Eddie who had been telling my fortune. Jonathan has only recently confirmed that Eddie's Arabic was almost non-existant. The old woman's recital was but an incomprehensible obligato to Eddie's solo cadenza. That accounts for the oracle hitting so true. Eddie always cast his net wide. Soon afterwards I did indeed get my orders to leave Cairo.

In late November 1944 ML flew me to Bari via an Athens in a state of civil war. I stayed in Greece for a few days; doubtless a part of my then unrevealed part in Operation Zeppelin which was leading German intelligence to conclude that there would be a British move into the Balkans. When in early December I eventually landed on the Bari RAF field I was lucky to find an ML driver who took me to the Officer's Hotel in town which, in the days of its splendour, had been called the Imperiale.

Thanks to the reassuring professional deference of the Imperiale's Italian staff the Officers billeted in this hotel, mostly survivors of our North African campaigns, were becoming convinced that we really had as good as won the war. There was no Officers Club in Bari but there was the Hotel Imperiale which was the place to meet everybody and to learn everything. The fifth year of the war offered to soldiers who had come through from 1939, the time and the opportunity to assure their continued survival. By far the best thing for those who had had enough excitement was to find an activity that was both safe for the incumbent while being seen as essential by Higher Military Authority--in other words something that no acting Lt.Colonel, pilot-fish to a staff Brigadier, would dare to claim as surplus to requirements.

I came across three British Majors in Bari who, each separately, had fought their way, to and fro across the desert to Tunis, then on via Sicily and southern Italy, to Bari. They had certainly done their bit. One Royal Engineer Major, who spoke good Italian, was the master of an inventory of local civilian craftsmen who did precision castings, tool making, turning etc. He was able to organise instant emergency repairs for anything under the sun. The second Major had become official black market procurement officer. When Higher Formations or Hospitals found it necessary, he traded excess army soap for pheasants, better quality fish, decent wine and those world famous Italian instruments for eye surgery. The crowning laurels must go to the third Major who had entered Bari with Operation "Baytown", hot on the heels of those few Italian Army Units that had not yet surrendered to the 8th Army as it advanced through Calabria. At dusk one evening in late September 1943 the Major had found himself opposite the Bari Opera House where he was ordered to halt and consolidate his position. They were all very tired, the atmosphere was altogether unwarlike, so the Major decided to bivouac the greater part of his unit inside the Opera House while maintaining a reasonable vigilance round about it. Not a mouse stirred outside, but inside the Opera House he found a complete Opera company, with musical instruments, chorus, corps de ballet, scenery, stage hands, manager, conductor, Prima Donna--the company had everything they could want, except something to eat. They were also afraid to leave the building. They knew that a terrible Moroccan Tabor had been let loose in the Town to enjoy the rapine and loot that their French Officers allowed them whenever an objective fell into their victorious hands--such indeed were then the legal rights, under French Military law, of these tribal levies. The Major did nothing to allay the obsessive fears of this Italian company though, that first night, he did share spare rations with them. He traded the protection of his Unit, plus a good supper, for the Opera company's promise to give a gala performance the next night. So, twenty four hours later, before a packed house obtained by opening the doors to any one in battle-dress, they had Rigoletto. The Army loved it, straight off the battlefield into the Opera. Everyone in Bari was talking about it and it got to the ears of Brigadiers and upwards. The result was a second Gala performance the night afterwards with the Grand Box full of red-tabbed mighty ones. The whole cast broke into the soldier audience's final ovation with a terrific choral rendering of God Save The King. This was a somewhat unorthodox version, but entirely recognisable; the tenor sang a wild descant while dabbing his eyes, the Prima Donna wept openly, sweeping into the Imperial Triple Curtsey directed at the occupants of the Grand Box. It made the Senior Officer feel like a Viceroy and the whole Staff was deeply moved. Higher Authority saw that opera was good for morale. The Major was congratulated by the General and was told to carry on with the good work, which he was only too glad to do until the war really did come to an end. The Army called Rigoletto Wriggletoes. The Army also liked Pagliacci which was known as Paggers or Pagywaggy. I obtained a permanent pass for the Grand Box.

I spent as many nights as I could in that Hotel Imperiale. Allied Military Liason had taken over a housing development on the edge of the small fishing village of Santo Spirito a few kilometers outside Bari. This was the staging area for both UNRRA and AML, its necessary military sponsor for entry into the field. These two bodies did not blend very well, but they were condemned to get on as neither could do without the other. There was a surprise waiting for me in Bari: the job, for which Lord Moyne told me I was destined, already had an incumbent.

Dr. Banks, who had been an MO in the 1917/18 Salonika campaign, had been fished out of a London County Council fever hospital and rushed out to do the job for which I had been selected by Cairo. He was a good infectious diseases man, most honourable in character. He was near the end of his career; I was at the beginning of mine. We split the pear in two, I set up the operational Public Health framework while he concentrated on Hospitals. This was pretty abstract, as all we were doing was planning on paper. After a month or so, he got fed-up and went home but not before we had had some rather tense divisions of opinion. It was a mercy that he went, because he simply could not understand, in any way at all, professionally, verbally or intellectually, the outstandingly competent American Public Health Service Officers who were joining us in increasing numbers--nor indeed could they understand him. More important was the fact that had he been dealing with Martians he would have understood them better than he did Jugoslavs.

UNRRA now made its first real personal contact with the Partisans. The British Government had accepted that Tito's Partisans were the effective resistance to the Germans. In Bari there was a Jugoslav liaison mission headed by Colonel Nikolic, who left the contact with Military Liaison and with UNRRA in the hands of a Major Neubauer whose interpreter was called Nada Kraigher. Her father had been the translator of Shakespeare into Slovene and her brother was in the Partisan leadership. Neubauer had been an eminent Ljubljana doctor who had long worked in the underground Resistance, getting messages up his stethoscope as he examined patients and passing them on when he got a password up the same instrument from a later patient.

One day, up the stethoscope came the message that the Gestapo had a man in his waiting room who was coming up the line, when his turn came he would arrest the doctor. Neubauer went out by the back window while the next three patients filed through one after the other, each staying ten minutes in the empty consulting room to give him a good start. When the Gestapo man's turn came, he found the consulting room empty, he looked around a moment and when he came back to the waiting room, it too was bare.

This contact with the Partisan Mission was humanised by the fact that Neubauer was in love with Nada Kraigher. The discipline of the Partisans in such matters was legendary. It was also a matter of Serbian historical tradition that during a war no one married until it had been won. King Peter had become a national nonentity when he married in London, his job was to lead as a hero king. The Partisankas never became pregnant; they shared the war on equal terms with the men. They were non-the-less real women, as indeed was Nada Kraigher, for all that self discipline. The magically attractive qualities of young slav women were not neutralised by this self-discipline, nor did they go unrecognised by those elements of the British Armed Forces that worked with the Jugoslavs. A British able-seaman in the crew of the Royal Navy guard-ship in Split developed a walking-out relationship with a Dalmatian girl who was in the Partisan Port Security unit. They had no common language but they were sufficiently taken with each other to go for evening off-duty strolls on the neighbouring hill side. They had been communicating very well in their wordless language of mutual sympathy until one evening, stretched on the turf, his hand had failed to appreciate a gentler negative and he found it to be grasping a hand-grenade from the selection she carried on the bodice of her battle-dress. She had removed the pin but she was prepared to put it back if he behaved himself. While making up his mind he had to keep his hand tightly clenched on the lever. Otherwise he would have to hold it while walking the Partizanka back to her Unit.

 

 

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