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weeks ago and the news in it already stale by the time I’d received it.
    And, in the end, I wondered how many more names would be added to the list on the granite cross in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels. Would mine be there – or Pansy’s or Kate’s? I wondered if there’d ever even be an end.
    And then I had fallen into an uneasy sleep in which I had walked down row after row of village memorials – granite crosses bleak on the sweet green grass of England. I was counting the names, but the numbers wouldn’t add up, no matter how hard I tried. I knew I was looking for one, particular name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I couldn’t remember, but it seemed to matter so much. Someone. Somewhere. Someone was missing. A sense of urgency pushed me on. There was so little time. The grass around the crosses was powdered with scarlet petals. I reached Z and then went back to A again – it had to be somewhere, I would recognize it when I saw it – until woken by Pansy’s stealthy movements, as she rose and dressed to begin early shift at the cookhouse. Very softly, she was humming Onward Christian Soldiers!
    *   *   *
    Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was supposed to be a secret, one of those military secrets that everyone has something to say about. Everyone knew there was something behind the high fence and the armed guards, but nobody knew for certain what (although you could make a jolly good guess just from the name) and very few people went freely in and out of the gate.
    There was a PoW – mostly, though not all, Italian – camp at Helwan, guarded by New Zealanders, rows of tents behind barbed wire and guard towers. Any prisoner who looked interesting would be brought to CSDIC before being shut up in Helwan. In my impeccable shorthand I took notes of the interviews. When I’d slaved over unruly grammalogues in Bournemouth, I couldn’t possibly have imagined the use to which my country would demand I put them.
    Brown, dusty and humiliated, the prisoners trooped in and out, to have questions that seemed to me random and extraordinary tossed at them by a long-haired Field Security Corps major, a fluent linguist who had been an Oxford don before the war. He wore his uniform like a woolly cardigan and was supposed not to have a single matching button anywhere on his clothes. Whether or not the questions made more sense after interpretation, I don’t know, but the answers when they came – if they came and often they did not – sounded very disjointed. I think he was too clever for them and, like many clever people, he didn’t have the common sense to realize this.
    Major Prosser had been very exercised over whether the Italians ought to be allowed to say prayers for Mussolini during mass. He was so worried that he’d referred the question to a higher authority. Back came the answer, ‘Yes – he needs it!’
    The questioning was not physical – we left that to the Nazis. It was more in their line. The Geneva Convention prevented interrogation of prisoners, so we simply asked them questions. They didn’t have to answer. Some did. Some didn’t. Sometimes it only lasted a minute or so. Sometimes, if Major Prosser was convinced there was something to be discovered, he’d bash on.
    He never seemed to need to stop to eat or go to the lavatory. The trouble was that he imagined that his staff also had elastic bladders. I cut myself down to one cup of tea at breakfast, just in case. I’d arrive with a fistful of pencils sharpened at each end and scribble on until my hand seized up. Once I didn’t last out and had to make up interesting answers when I came to transcribing my notes the following day. No-one noticed.
    It was very hard to look at these men as they shuffled around in trousers without braces and boots without laces and not feel pity. These were the men of Rommel’s terrible Afrika Korps, who’d rolled our advancing army right back to the borders of