Small Wars by Sadie Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

pressed herself close up to him. Let him think her a girl-woman if he wanted. ‘Proper fighting, Hal?’ she repeated and he laughed again.
    ‘Well, a bit of action, anyway. If I’m lucky,’ he said.

Chapter Six
    The boy Hal had handed over to the Special Investigations Branch was called Andreas. He was interrogated by them, but the talking was done by an interpreter, who was a gentle young Englishman, a classics scholar before his National Service, and not inclined to – or often able to – translate the more colourful language of the two SIB plain-clothes officers he had been attached to. The transformation from Homeric to modern Greek had been achieved by a hasty language course in England at the end of his basic training when the WOSB had discovered he had a classics degree.
    The interpreter was one of life’s diplomats, and his answer to ‘What did he say?’ was often a tactful approximation: ‘He said he doesn’t know, sir,’ rather than ‘He said you can rot in hell.’
    After three months in Limassol, the interpreter had begun to see himself more as protector than questioner. In Nicosia he had worked for the Special Investigations Branch attached to a different regiment, and wished he was still there, where he could honestly say he had never felt ashamed. These two were harsher. They were both quiet men, who kept to themselves, not making friends around the camp, standing out in their suits as the outsiders they were. The sight of them going about their secretive business was chilling sometimes even to the soldiers who worked alongside them.
    The interrogations he was asked to leave were the ones he felt he’d failed at, and often he thought he was under more pressure to get results than the SIB themselves, because he so badly didn’t want anybody to be hurt. He didn’t want this boy to go onto the next stage of questioning, the more unpleasant stage. He tried to explain to him, without meaning to threaten, that if the boy would be helpful, then he would be unhurt and even protected, but if he was stubborn he – the interpreter – couldn’t say that he would not be hurt, and perhaps seriously. Often prisoners took this the wrong way, and were defiant, but sometimes they accepted that the young officer was trying to help them. His uniform was less frightening than the incongruous dark suits of his two superiors; it was honest, and his face was honest too, and kind. Sometimes they gave up their secrets, if they had any to give. Sometimes they didn’t.
    The moment where a variation of ‘All right, Davis, we’ll take over from here,’ was said to him, and he was dismissed – leaving them with a soldier and the prisoner in a closed room – was a relatively rare, but deeply uncomfortable one for the interpreter. He saw the prisoner again an hour later, or the next morning, when the phrase he used in his mind for that was ‘a little the worse for wear’. A face that was a little the worse for wear was not a pleasant sight. It might not be bloody – although he’d seen that too – but it was always changed.
    The interpreter knew he was a necessary part of a larger process; he tried not to feel responsible when the process went on without him. He had been told harsh methods were justifiable, and he believed that to be true, but he had never seen an English death brought about by terrorism, he felt no animosity towards the Cypriots, and he could not help feeling that violence was like cheating, and unfair.
    This boy, Andreas, was not a hard nut to crack. His defiance on arriving at Episkopi Garrison faded to sulkiness within an hour of being locked up. He was given food and water and spoken to by Davis, and when the evidence of his feeble crimes was laid before him on the wooden table he became actually chatty. He had an uncle, he said, who had been talking to him and his friends for months about EOKA. His uncle hated the British – Andreas gave his name, pausing politely for it to be spelled