A Point to Remember

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A POINT TO REMEMBER


When I was a young officer I learnt many lessons from the experience of others. One of them was never to use a bamboo shooting stick.
Shooting sticks had not entered my orbit until I went overseas. If I had been asked to describe one, I would most probably have said it was some sort of blow pipe from the East Indies. The first one I saw belonged to the late Major 'Winky' Benyon who was posted in as second-in-command.
I met 'Winky' on the day he joined us in Khartoum in the middle of the 'hot' season of '49. He was standing on the steps of the officers' mess veranda in South Barracks looking down the Blue Nile wearing the most enormous pair of shorts I had ever seen; their knife edge creases stood out fore and aft like two huge rudders. I learnt later that he wore two pairs of shorts each day, one for standing up and one for sitting down. If you were summoned to his office, you could be forgiven for thinking you had come face to face with the 'invisible man', for perched in the corner were Winky's 'standing up' shorts, supported by nothing but starch ready for him to slip into when he made his round of the barracks.
"It's good to be back in the Sudan," he said. "I was here many years ago as a subaltern." I looked at him and had a vision of a young Benyon swiping dervishes with his sabre as he battled up the Nile with Kitchener's army. A glance at the Army List in my office as I write this story, shows me that Winky was thirty eight years of age when he joined us in Khartoum, but there was a presence about the man that gave him an air of majesty far beyond his years. Maybe it was his eyebrows that made him different from other men; they were about twice as long as normal and he used to twirl them until they stood up like two wireless aerials on each side of his face. He had a thick moustache over a broad upper lip and a voice that seemed to get its resonance from a forty four gallon oil drum buried deep inside him. I don't mind admitting that he frightened the life out of me at first and there were occasions when he nearly stopped my flow of blood. To be at the end of one of Winky's rockets was an unforgettable experience, but these outbursts were like tropical storms; they passed as quickly as they came.
Winky soon set about his job as overseer in training matters and announced there would be an officers' TEWT in a few days time. For the uninitiated in Army jargon, a TEWT is a 'tactical exercise without troops'. In other words, a simple way of practising officers how to fight a battle and letting soldiers get on with other things back in barracks.
Winky committed his plans to paper and none of us were surprised to hear that the TEWT would be held in the usual area.
Jebel Meriam was the only place for miles around where the ground rose slightly above desert level. It was well known to the rest of us as the previous second-in-command had used it to beat off scores of imaginary attacks from all points of the compass. It was, therefore, with a feeling of gloom that we faced the prospect of spending four or five hours being baked alive on this pimple in the desert.
We set out from Khartoum at sunrise on the day of the exercise and drove over the bridge where the White and Blue Niles meet. We turned left through the maze of mud huts that was Omdurman and passed the Mahdi's tomb before heading south for Jebel Meriam. Within an hour we were standing on the summit - all two hundred feet of it.
Winky outlined the situation and waved his shooting stick in the direction of the 'enemy'. For those of us who could not remember all he said, a hand-out was issued and a few minutes later we were given a piece of paper with 'Question 1' written on the top. The routine was always the same on these occasions, first - trying to understand what the directing staff (ie. Winky Benyon) had written, and second - trying to work out, within one's syndicate, a sensible answer. At this stage, 'Fatty' Smith, the mess sergeant, would produce a splendid breakfast, but as the wind blew at 50mph, it was toss up which would fly off first - the corn flakes or the question paper. There was never enough time to eat the eggs and bacon and work out the problem before we were called forward to give our answers.
Winky finished his breakfast and bellowed that he was ready. We assembled before him in our syndicates, hoping that one of the others would be asked to give the solution. The law of averages has never operated in my favour and, on this occasion, not only was my syndicate selected - but I was nominated as spokesman.
Winky was sitting on his shooting stick looking at me in such a way that I knew that whatever I said would be wrong. He allowed me to go through the rigmarole of preparing for battle before he spoke his mind, which consisted of a single word of five letters. He waved his shooting stick around and stabbed at various points in the desert which made my plans a lot of nonsense; it was an impressive performance by someone who had real battle experience.
Like a conductor bringing a symphony to a tumultuous finale, Winky twirled his shooting stick once more around his head before driving it into the ground and depositing his voluminous shorts into the seat. Instead of a crash of cymbals, there was a crack like a pistol shot and Winky travelled a further thirty inches until he was sitting on the ground.
Despite his size, Winky was remarkably light on his feet. Obviously something was wrong when he just sat there and did nothing. The awful truth dawned when we went to help him and saw his broken shooting stick lying alongside him. A jagged spike at the bottom of the stick meant that a matching piece was somewhere underneath him.
Very slowly we raised him and saw the rest of the shooting stick projecting from his shorts. With commendable initiative and enormous courage, one of the subalterns gave the broken piece of bamboo a sharp tug and withdrew it. Winky was not capable of walking, so we carried him down the jebel to a jeep which took him off at top speed to Khartoum military hospital. He remained remarkably cheerful throughout the journey even though he had a nasty bamboo splinter in a very tender part of his body.
The doctor and nurses in the hospital did a great job on Winky's bottom, so we were led to believe. It was one of those operation scars that Winky could not show his friends. By the evening of the same day, he was receiving visitors.
Winky was up and about within a few days and was soon his usual snorting, eye brow twisting, cantankerous but loveable self once more.
As far as I know, he didn't use a bamboo shooting stick again. Come to think of it, I've never seen anyone carry a bamboo shooting stick since that day in 1949. It's amazing how the word gets around!