Then my dream came to a sudden end, it is a requirement in the army that all regular soldiers have to do at least one overseas tour and on this particular day the sergent in charge of the inspection team called me into the office and told me the bad news and on 9th November 1953 I boarded the troopship Dunera on my way to the Canal Zone in Egypt.
Now this is where an unlucky break came my way ,the overseas postings at that time were Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Malta and the Canal zone, the worst one being The canal Zone, well that's where I was posted.
I got myself a good job on board which was cookhouse fatigues, this involved peeling the spuds, cleaning up and buttering hundreds of slices of bread with a four inch paint brush, what you did you laid all of the slices on the table then dipped the paint brush into the runny margarine and then just painted the slices. The big advantage with working in the galley was you did not have to queue up for your food and you got extra rations.
We went through the Straits of Gibraltar then on to Port Said in Egypt we arrived they early in the morning and disembarked and on to a train to take us to Tel-EI Kebir which was the main British army camp in the Canal Zone, this is situated in the middle of the desert.
Because the Egyptians were at loggerheads over the ownership of the Suez Canal they were very uncooperative and kept shunting the train into sidings for hours just to delay us and we did not arrive at the camp until late at night and starving so the cookhouse rustled up some food for us and we scoffed everything, ate slices and slices of this bread which we thought was whole meal, it wasn't until the next day that we discovered that it was white bread but the flour was infested with weevils (a common occurrence out there) so they just cooked the flour and the weevils and they then go crunchy, but I think even if we had known this we would still have eaten the bread as we were that hungry.
Tel-EI Kebir was only a transit camp and after a week we were posted to a R.E.M.E. workshops at Shandur on the edge of the Great Bitter lakes and because of my inspection experience I was given the job of inspecting the vehicles when they came into the workshops
We all slept in tents which were very small and took six beds and we were constantly having disinfect the beds for bed bugs, these came out at night from the crevices of the bed and sucked your blood and left little sores all over you.
As there was no sewerage huge holes was dug out of the sand by the engineers twenty feet long ten feet wide and about fifteen feet deep and over these holes were built movable wooden shithouses1 the buildings had a central gangway and toilets were built each side no doors and the holes in the seats dropping straight down into the hole.
When this hole finally came to within three feet from the top another huge hole was dug and the whole building shifted on skids over the new hole and the other one filled in and warning signs put around the freshly filled holes otherwise you would have disappeared from sight if you had walked over it. One night when one of the holes was nearly full someone dropped a lighted newspaper into the hole and the sewerage gases exploded and burnt the building to the ground.
Another one of their diabolical tricks when the level got near the top was to light a large rolled up sheet of newspaper, drop it into the hole and hope it would float along and singe someone's bum.