Memories of Egypt 1948

Small boys were swimming near the troop ship, offering us - the newly arriving conscripts - all sorts of delights.
>You want my sister, Johnny?  She very nice, she very clean.
>You want Spanish Fly, Johnny?  Make you big and strong.
>You want whisky, Johnny?

There were no takers among the lowest ranks, living on four shillings a day.  Corporals could afford the whores and sergeants could buy whisky (> Cheap at half the price ) But for the poor bloody squaddy living on four shillings a day there was little to buy in Port Said.

Later I was in a camp in Port Suez where I developed a swollen knee.  I reported sick and stood around on melting tarmac until a corporal came up to our group.
>What I like to see is a really smart sick parade, he said.> Left right Left right left right.
I was left behind as I could not walk.  I lay on  a bed which was really a table and every now and then a medical orderly would pass by and ask me if I had ever had syphilis. I was sent to a ward which was simply a long tent in the desert with about twenty men in beds lined up on either side. I wrote home cheerfully to say that I had reheumatic fever. I was in the ward, dosed with quinine and beer for a month.  My companions were unexciting but pretending to have TB as one of them was actually ill with it. He would go round spitting in other sputum mugs so that the malingerers could stay in bed all day. One day we were inspected by a general who managed to inspect (>Now then, lie to attention) a patient who had just died.
Four weeks later I was transferred to a convalescent depot where I read Frank Harris's erotic autobiography. (The statitics are very impressive but you should have seen some of the women.)  Guard duty on the Suez canal as boats with headlights drifted through the linked up lakes. Afterwards rejoined my regiment and drove a lorry through the streets of Jerusalem.
After that I was back in Port Said to catch a boat home to be demobbed.

I had little contact with the Egyptians apart from the sellers of rubbish but in hospital there were charming men who came and shaved me while I was still in bed.  We did however sing their national anthem: King Farouk, King Farouk,
              Hang your bollocks on a hook,,,,  and so on,

All this makes me uniquely qualified as a pundit on the current turmoil in this unhappy country.
Natural passimism leads me to expect that they will end up with an Ayotollah,  Plus ca change.