First Iraq Gig - where I Peeled the Marine's Minstrel

                                 Less Godzilla-like, please...

 So, just to recap: we're in Iraq, flying from Basra to Camp Smitty to perform the first ever Comedy Store format Combined Services Entertainment show.  

  Oh, and I first met Stacks, Royal Marine liaison, when I sang formally onboard the H.M.S. Victory at the celebrations marking the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. On our first morning in Basra he told me on no account to get him onstage for my Madame Galina act out in Iraq...

  Click to read the opening of this chapter

  Final checks and, wasp-like, the helicopter rose and thrust forward. Prince William and counterpart sat behind the guns and peered past them at the ground. Stacks was looking about him as though he wanted to be doing something. Through the porthole between Rhod and Tonks opposite I watched the airfield give way to desert road, a straggling white stone bungalow, burnt out cars and a caravan of camels.

  After half an hour or so Prince William went along the two lines of seats and made us all show him that we were belted in securely. We flew over clumps of date palms, then parallel to a ravine with a single row of square two-floor houses along its floor with windows facing us. Amid panicked screams the helicopter dropped straight at the ground.

                                                              ***

  ‘Shitting heck, did we need that bit of trick flying?’ Spoons was asking.

  We had landed safely at Camp Smitty. Squaddies had come on-board to unload the equipment from the hold and we had followed them off down the ramp onto the landing strip.

  ‘Did you not see that the air-guy give me his camera?’ Gina asked. ‘He asked me to take a photo of him lying on the ceiling when the helicopter was in negative gravity. Sorry, should have warned you all.’

  ‘Just frightening civilians,’ said Stacks. ‘We had that Welsh opera singer with the rack out here and they did it when she was on a helo. She wrote about it as though they’d taken a direct hit from the ground, apparently. They should discipline the crab-twats for it, though, whatever. Like they did the pilot the last time I flew home from Afghanistan. He put out a message: “And this is one for the ladies on board. Now that we’re back in blighty: your attractiveness rating will adjust itself back down in accordance with reality”. Serious smacked wrist.’ 

  Watching the helicopter trundling along, he added, ‘You may get some flare action from them if they have some past the safe-use date, you never know.’

  We did get some flare action; as we reached the edge of the landing strip sulphurous blues and greens crackled and fizzed to earth from the sides of the helicopter as it passed overhead. 

  A squaddie emerged from the smoke and loped in our direction from white, flat-roofed hangars that had the fake look of Thunderbirds sets. He had a sphinx-wide face, blonde curls and wore a mint-green t-shirt, brown short-shorts and floppy-fitting grey ankle wellies.

  ‘Christ up a pole,’ Stacks commented out of the corner of his mouth that was nearest me. ‘Typical Para. Oh, but from that look on your face I see he’s clearly chalked up a score of one at least.’

  ‘He’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Sirs and ma’ams,’ the Para said. ‘Proud to welcome you to Camp Smitty today, on behalf of the awesome Company that is 2Para. I’m Captain Sam Ashton, known as ‘Gorgeous’ for obvious reasons.’ When he stopped walking his wellies lurched. ‘If you’d please like to follow me.’

  Andy asked Stacks, ‘By the way, why did you call the helicopter guys “crab-twats”?’

  Sam cut in, ‘The RAF are known as Crab Airways because only them out of the three armed services are allowed to step sideways as many times as they like during drill. The rest of us are only allowed three steps. If the mood takes them, RAF personnel can march sideways over the whole of a parade ground. And so often do. Also, going back a bit here, Spitfires had to be taxi’d sideways with the pilot leaning out of the cockpit to look where he was going, as the big old Merlin engine on the front was too big to see past straight on. So all in all, the amount of sideways movement: crabs.’

  Stacks said that most of what Sam had just told us was total bollocks. 

  ‘The Navy gave the RAF the nickname Crabs. RAF uniforms were the same shade of blue as the ointment that sailors put on the crabs they inevitably caught during shore leave. The ointment came to be known as Crab Fat so the RAF came to be called Crab Fats, shortened over time to Crabs.’

  Sam actually said ‘Pah!’ then added that the Navy were known as Bum Boys or Fish Heads; the army as Pongoes, from: Where the army goes, the pong goes. Royal Marines were Booties or The Green Death. Tank Division: Tankies, Canned Veg or GRUNTS: Government Reject Unfit for Normal Training.

                                    
                                       Pretty Camp Smitty

  

  The C.S.E. green room was in a modern prefab; grey industrial carpet, as yet no holes punched out of the walls. There was a trestle table along the far wall laid with a white paper cloth, plates and napkins. Nicky had laid on fruit baskets, soft drinks, bottled water, Pringles, wine gums and Minstrels.

  ‘Locust storm or what?’ Sam said, watching we turns rush the trestle table.

  Nicky said, ‘Comedians: can I just finalise the running order for this show. We can change it if we feel the need to. Tonks compère, Rhod on first, then Andy, then the interval, then Gina then Madame Galina. Okay?’

  I said, ‘I need to flag up an apology here and now for not being able to watch your sets, guys? I have to stay out of sight, obviously, and it takes me a while to get ready.’

  Nicky asked Sam who we would have out front for the show.

  ‘Us and the Australian Army, mainly, plus a few hangers on.’

  ‘2Para for the first ever Comedy Store format gig,’ said Nicky. I caught her eye and she looked immediately away. ‘Eye of the storm, or what?’

  Sam said, ‘Hoping our lad up for a bravery medal will be here for you to meet later. We had a bit of a mad one last week. Enemy surprised about twenty of us on foot out in the open. They were hitting us with small arms and grenades from everywhere and anywhere. We must have been outnumbered two to one on a road so pot-holed getting a firing rhythm going was virtually impossible, you had to look down at where you were putting your feet the whole time. I thanked God, Allah, my nan, fuck and all the others on a long list when I saw the Land Rover. Driven into the middle of the fire by Sergeant James Newell - put his name on your tankard hanging above the bar in your local. Jimbo jumped out of the Land Rover and returned fire, picked up four of us at a time, drove to this operations centre we’d previously rigged up - we’d at least have some cover there - then went back for the next four, and again, till we were all in the centre. Jimbo himself said he’d never experienced anything like it, and he’s had regular shouts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. Up for the bravery medal for, as they put it, showing repeated and premeditated disregard for his personal safety.’

  I looked at Stacks, expecting some heckling comment. He was nodding slowly, watching Sam.

  ‘Now then, if we’re all ready?’ Sam asked. ‘Let’s head to the venue.’

  Stacks stopped me at the door. ‘Body armour?’

  ‘On the table next to the Pringles.’

  ‘Ah, talking of which…’

  He walked with me to the table and took a handful of Minstrels. Stowing them in a hankie he put them in his pocket. ‘For later.’ Then he helped himself to another Minstrel out of the bowl and tried to peel it.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked, picking up my body armour.

  ‘I like the chocolate part, but the shell does the same to my teeth as fingernails down a board. Shit the fucking thing – nails are what I could do with, actually.’

  ‘Pass it here,’ I said.

  The venue was white colonial, fifty yards down from the green room. Wooden benches in twenty or so rows, armchairs at right angles to the front row, raised stage covered in a damask patterned carpet.

  ‘Lads and lasses,’ Spoons called. He was sitting at the technician’s station just on the other side of a particularly frowzy green and mauve armchair. ‘Please bear with me on the sound and lighting front tonight. I’m having to do what we can without our proper equipment, remember. Still at Brize Norton when I last heard. Managing with a halogen lamp borrowed from a Dutch priest in Basra. As you do.’

  Though the show wasn’t due to start for another hour and a half there were already three Australian army lads in shades of alabaster uniforms near the front. The first was bald with a pewter tankard jaw, the second sunken chested and swarthy, the third massive, two-cropped with an urchin’s face.

  ‘Iestyn,’ I said, shaking hands.

  ‘Sobs,’ said the one with the tankard jaw.

  ‘Cairnsy.’ Sunken chest.

  ‘Leighsy.’ Massive.

  I asked how Sobs had come by his nickname.

  Cairnsy answered for him, ‘Stories he tells to get out of building deployment.’

  ‘I’m out here to fight the fuckers hairying around on the other side of the wire,’ Sobs said. ‘Not to build offices for generals to sit around in with their feet up having their tea and biscuits.’

  ‘You’re not from Australia,’ I said.

  ‘Derby.’

  ‘Then why are you in the Aussie army?’

  ‘They’re the only ones who’d have me.’

  Tonks, notepad in hand, came and sat down. ‘So, gents, who’s being a bit of a twat perhaps this tour, common knowledge sort of styley?’

  Cairnsy answered, ‘The Major with the rubber gloves fetish. He’ll clean the ablutions himself just for the kink of being able to wear them. Also wears those velvety shorts from Switzerland. Some of the rest of us get put on the same detail with him and can tell you he gets that little bit over-excited in the shorts.’

  I left them to it and asked Spoons if I could borrow a hammer and pliers.

  ‘Er…’ he said, finding them in his kit and handing them over.

  I knelt on the stage, with the hammer in my hand and the pliers between my teeth.     

  Stacks wanted to know, ‘What the fuck, please?’

  I explained: ‘Just doing my usual Licia Albanese.’

  ‘And again: what the fuck, please?’

  ‘Before each of her performances at the old Met in New York, soprano Licia Albanese crawled over the stage like this making repairs with a hammer and some pliers. She said that doing that saved her over the years from at least twenty-five fatal falls.’

  To date before performances for C.S.E. I’ve done my Licia Albanese routine over a sand-blown right angle in a boardwalk; over mortar-gouged flagstones; black-plastic topped ammunition boxes laid end to end and over orange crates covered with cardboard filched from the cook-house. Spoons, rigging lights above, observed that as the baked beans slogan didn’t stand proud of the cardboard there was possibly no need for the pliers.

  In an anxiety coma back in the green room I checked tights, pants and pink ballet shoes for scorpions and/or camel spiders, put them on, and applied slap using my spare backing track CD as a mirror. I sang Bellini’s “I am a Blithesome Virgin” to start the pant mechanism in my diaphragm, and then went outside to do ballet barre hanging onto the wire. From their imprint in the sand I could tell if my ankles were rolling back and forth as they mustn’t during knee-bend stretches. Squaddies passed on the other side of the space where a game of five-a-side was being played and waved. They shushed me before I could call out a greeting and pointed to my left. There were some local workers in blue overalls praying beside an ablutions block. The first roar from the venue then interrupted both the prayers and my pirouette practise.

  A man of towering height emerged from behind the green room prefab.

  ‘You look important,’ I said, standing upright from a bouncing in a squat.

  He changed course mid-lope, walked over and shook my hand. ‘Rupert Curtis.’

  ‘Iestyn Edwards; Madame Galina, er…crown…minus any possible wings…two stars…er…Colonel.’

  He nodded, smiling beatifically. ‘You’ll have a couple in the show today including me. I think Melton’s in there. He’s the 2Para CO. And poss…oh, hello.’ He was looking out across the five-a-side pitch to where three armoured cars were just then pulling up. ‘Not to worry, guards are onto it.’

  The guards were skirting the pitch at a jog. About twenty or so squaddies got out of the cars. They chatted briefly to the two guards, who then pointed them in the direction of the venue.

  ‘Royal Marines,’ Colonel Curtis told me. ‘And in numbers, too. Not strictly meant to be here as their base is a way away. Obviously come over for the entertainment.’

  I asked, ‘Do you know my new friend the First Sea Lord? And please excuse me while I goose-step here.’

  ‘Alan West? Good friend of mine.’

  ‘So, now we know that, listen to me - if anything kicks off in there, anti-my-act sort of thing, you’ll pull rank, right?’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Not nervous, surely?’

  ‘Terrified. As Nicky - Nicky Ness, boss of C.S.E. - puts it, the squaddies have a pack mentality. If they go with it, they’ll go with it as one. If they don’t, they’ll turn as one.’

  ‘I think, seriously, you’ll be dealing with a very game bunch of lads in there who’re up for a laugh.’

  ‘But they’re known to be really hard, aren’t they, Paras?’

  ‘That is rather the point of them. Er, by the way, are you within two minutes of your body armour? I can’t see it anywhere.’

  Sighing, I hurried back to the Green Room.

  I lifted my body armour off the Pringles table.

  ‘But…but…’

  I couldn’t fit my helmet over my tiara.

  ‘And…and…’

  When I carried the flak jacket over my arm it hung down and flattened my tutu skirt.

  ‘I…I…’

  Would have to wear the jacket and hold the helmet by the chin strap in as balletic a manner as I could.

  I left the Green Room and walked along to the venue. There I had a sneaky reccy through a window at Gina onstage with the room full of brown t-shirts; rapt silence alternated with laugh explosions. The venue was packed now. Packed! Even in extremis I was envious of the numbers that C.S.E. had pulled in, remembering one of the recent shows on my UK tour.  The venue programmer, in cords and a cravat, had met me at the stage door, clasping his hands and smiling quite sadly. 

  'For the sake of the intimacy impact factor of your work,' he had said, 'we thought it would be best to take you out of the main barn of a venue tonight and put you in our studio. Actually, we’ve not so much done that as put you in the work in progress space…no we haven’t: we’ve put you in the bar. I exaggerate: we’ve put you in the corridor leading from the loos to the…oh, all right: we’ve put three chairs in your dressing room, all right?'

  Gina signed off and Tonks took the mic from her. He acknowledged how brilliant she had just been – bay of agreement – and announced that now we had some culture. I turned from the window to look at the wire behind me. I could climb it and take my chances with the enemy.

  ‘We’re pushing the envelope here,’ Tonks was saying. ‘We’ve got some ballet. From a true prima ballerina. Fresh from a series for Channel 4, a private performance for Her Majesty and the Olivier Award winning C’est Barbican: please give it up for Madame Galina, Ballet Star Galactica.’

  The wire or the Tchaikowsky, the wire or the Tchaikovsky, the…

  I chose the Tchaikovsky and waited for my cue. I was opening with the “Entrance of Princess Aurora” from Sleeping Beauty and reminded myself as I always did of what my ballet teacher Stella Beddard had once said to me after a variety show in the Hinde Street Methodist Church.  

  ‘Your Princess Aurora needs to be much more delicate as you run on down the staircase. Remember she is the embodiment of her Fairy Godmother's Gifts: Grace, Ease of Articulation, Wealth and Temperament. You must suggest a fairy-tale princess seeming to materialise in the colonnade to dance sweetly for the guests at her Coming of Age celebrations. Not Godzilla boosting itself out of the Hudson to square up to the Chrysler Building.’

  One and two and three and - I pulled open the door at the back of the venue and hoisted myself onto the stage, careful to give the impression that I was running down a flight of stairs in a correctly non-Godzilla-like way. The squaddies stared at me. I glanced over to where Nicky was sitting. She winked. The cue for me to start dancing in Iraq was thirty-two slow counts away. 

  I realised that I had come onstage holding my helmet and still wearing my metal jacket. 

  Sam was sitting in one of the armchairs. 

  ‘Hello, Samuel. Bet you’d love to palm my helmet?’ 

  I handed it to him and tripped to the centre of the stage to undo my flak jacket. I had the Velcro straps arse about face. The nearest person to me now was sitting on a green paisley-pattern Love Seat next to my new friend Colonel Curtis. 

  ‘Quick, you have to help me with this. I nearly should be dancing.’ 

  He stood and received an ovation from the room. He was my height, blond, with a tired but cheerful expression. When he started to walk towards me I noted his imploded stomach.

  ‘Tom Melton. Delighted to help,’ he said, then reached round and was ineffectual with one of my Velcro straps.

  ‘Stop being so gentle and do something,’ I shouted; the cue to start to start what Stacks later called more-epileptic-than-normal Morris Dancing bearing down on me.

  ‘You’ve actually – sure it’s a new one on you and all that – done it up incorrectly, this bit should - ’

  ‘This bit should, shis-shbit-shmould, can you hear the Tchaikovsky building or what? Pull the stupid thing!’

  He yanked at the strap, tipped me over, and we ended up with him beneath me on the Love Seat. Out front they bellowed. Righting myself for my first jump I thought that maybe, after all, I mightn’t ask Nicky if she could please fly me home.

  I got big laughs with Stacks’s diarrhoea and vomiting quarantine reference and for ‘Thumbs-flat on my floating ribs, please, colonel, this is ballet not S and M’. Also, a loud ‘Fucking hell!’ and applause for the thirty-two fouetté turns. Then something kicked off at the back of the venue. 

  Looking up I saw Stacks, swearing and spluttering, in the midst of a melee of Marines making its way gradually up the room. He later said that he allowed his fellow Marines to throw him to me as really fighting back would have caused carnage.

  ‘Here you go, darling, present for you!’ shouted a Marine as they shoved Stacks onstage. ‘He wants to join in nicely.’

  There was silence in the venue. Stacks stood at ease watching me. I didn’t realise that standing at ease meant that a Marine was respectfully waiting. And I still don’t know what he was waiting for. I panicked. Prodding at his pecs, I asked, ‘Are our muscles for use in warfare, or are they just for gay display?’

  You know how when you ask a plumber or a mechanic for an estimate they suck in breath for six or so seconds before answering? Virtually everyone in the place did that. I looked at Stacks. His expression veered between roustabout and pot-bellied pig as he moved a step toward the edge of the stage and looked out into the body of the venue. Then, sighing, mouth wide like a crab’s, he upended me. 

   Huge applause. 

  My chin tittuping down Stacks’s glutes on my way to being laid out on the stage, I briefly caught sight of Nicky checking in with Ian, who stood up. Colonel Melton made a hold fast gesture at him. Oh, good, I thought, you just all delay the rescue party. Stacks slung me over his shoulder and trotted out of the venue.

  Past the ablutions, along the wire, across the now deserted five-a-side pitch. A line of sun through the mountains was all that remained of daylight. Stacks muttered the whole way. 

  ‘My lot weren’t meant to be here. The fucks. But they saw the C.S.E. poster with you in your fluffy outfit on it. And expecting Royal Marines to stay away from a bit of drag is like expecting a politician to go for a colonic and not get a doggy-bag.’ 

   He tipped me off his shoulder and onto a tank. 

  ‘But still that’s no excuse,’ he shouted up at me. ‘This’ – he pointed – ‘is the Naughty Tank. But you’re not staying up there for a minute of every year of your life – which, even allowing for that fooling no one Just For Men job would be next Tuesday fortnight at the inside. No. You can get down again when you’ve sung me the song I particularly liked from off the Victory.’

Click to watch me sing that song he particularly liked

  ‘Er…Stacks. Can’t get down. Stacks! I sang it, didn’t I? Don’t just walk off!’

  ‘I warned you,’ he said, coming back. ‘Leave me respected and in peace at shows. My exact words.’

  ‘I didn’t get you onstage, the Marines put you onstage.’

  ‘You made the smart-arse remark.’ Finally, he held his arms out. ‘Take that look off your face if you don’t want to stay up there indefinitely. Thank you. Jump.’ He eased me to the ground. ‘Someone needs to tell you that scowling makes you look like a beaver with PMT. We’re shaking hands now and it’s forgotten.’

  Nicky and Ian were standing watching with Sam as I walked back across the now deserted five-a-side pitch holding my tutu against my belly. Stacks passed them with a nod. Nicky shook her head ruefully at me. 

  ‘Get changed, hon, and be ready for the off.’

  Sam made the intake of breath sound as I drew level with him. 

 ‘Mate, seriously, you were a bit lucky just then that the Marines were guests on our base. You gig at a base run by Royal Marines and you say something like you just did to your man, you’ll get fucked onstage by him, making a point in front of his mates.'  He put his head on one side. 'That’s a warning and not a challenge, by the way.’

  Onboard the helicopter taking us back to Basra from Camp Smitty, Nicky said, 

  ‘You must, must keep coming onstage wearing your body armour over your tutu and falling into the lap of whoever helps you unfasten it.’

  I nodded, watching, as the helicopter tilted, the lights of the cars flowing on the roads below. Where were the occupants of the cars going? Did they ever forget that their country was occupied? How much infrastructure was back in place down there? Would a camel do the same kind of damage to a car that a deer would?

  ‘I’ll try, Nicky,’ I said. ‘Though, re the falling into the lap business: it’s always tricky to repeat something that’s happened spontaneously, and make it look like unrehearsed. It was always touch and go on tour in 2004 rigging my knickers to fall right the way down in Giselle’s “Mad Scene”.’

  Stacks pointed me to the seat next to him on the bus from the airport to the base and for a minute or so sat looking out across the desert to the various fires burning, gaze flicking between them, as though he were making a comparison.

  ‘Weird to hear you sing again,’ he said. ‘That sound that comes out of you anyway, let alone when you’re in your frilly garb: bit like you’re possessed.’ He made a sound like a bass organ pedal.

  I had to ask him. ‘Stacks, if we’d be on a Marine-run base and I’d goaded you onstage, would you really have done something sexual to me?’

  He nodded without looking at me. ‘Probably. Though I maybe know you a bit too well now. And you’re a bit too in with my ultimate boss, come to think of it.  First Sea Lord. Jury’s out. Actually, no, changed my mind: I would have.’

  ‘Why would you?’

  ‘Because you mouthed off with a sexually challenging remark.’

  ‘But to do anything to me would be gay.’

  ‘No, it would just be a Marine thing.’

  ‘There onstage?’

  ‘Yes. Cos in a Marine-run base there wouldn’t be any of 2Para near enough to get a sneaky feel in while it was going on.’ His expression was unreadable.

  At a signal from the guard in the sentry box back at Basra he got out of his seat and slid the passenger door window open. ‘Something up?’

  ‘Message from the Dutch chaplain, sir. He wants to see the British entertainment civilians in his drop-in chapel. Says he’ll be there till at least Midnight.’

  The Dutch chaplain, twenty-something, with thick reddish brown hair, was sitting in his drop-in chapel reading by torchlight.

  ‘Lars Ton.’ He stood up. ‘And, sorry, but I would have wished that you might have asked if you could borrow my chapel light to take away to your comedy performance.’

  Spoons apologised. ‘It was all a bit needs-must with our equipment stuck in the UK. There was no-one around to ask. I did leave a note.’

  Lars sighed. ‘Yes, and I was surprised I must say to receive such a note.’ He gestured around. ‘I have no window in my chapel as you can see. And I was almost in the dark during service this evening. No electric lighting fixtures. And we cannot budget for candles, you know.’

  ‘Really sorry. I just went into your chapel and saw the light.’
  Lars’s lips twitched with the beginnings of a smile.

  ‘Well, perhaps in that case this regrettable incident has not been quite the lost cause.’

  To be continued...