“A Child’s Eye View”
by Anne Ammundsen,
daughter of the late Colonel “Pip” Newton. MBE

Anne, 7 years old, with her Father.

The history of The Emergency in Egypt in the early 1950s is perhaps not complete without a child’s-eye-view of those times?  Bear with me and I will tell you some of my experiences there.

My mother and I flew to Egypt in May 1951 to join my father who was already posted to El Ballah.  At six years old, it was the first time I had flown in a plane. The experience was quite magical and almost unheard of amongst my peer group at that time!  I had been bundled up in warm clothing on account of a night flight, and wore a pinafore dress my mother had made for me.  However, immediately on arrival all I wanted to do was to take my clothes off because I was so hot. To everyone’s amusement, this I did, on a military bus taking us from Cairo out to the desert campsite of El Ballah.  I’m not sure my mother laughed as loud as the rest of the passengers though!   I was at that toothless stage, where the two front ones were on my Christmas present list!

I have many memories of Egypt, some good, some not so good, and some bad.   I learned to ride a bicycle there.   It was a dreadful old bike and far too big for me. My father’s tactic was to put me on the bike and let go.  It worked, eventually, but only after I had collected numerous scars which can be seen on my knees to this day!  This experience is accompanied, in my mind’s eye, to listening to the soldiers marching past singing the song “Quarter Master’s Store”.   Perhaps my father only held on to my ears? Learning to swim was another achievement accomplished in the same manner.  I was thrown into the Suez Canal and told to get on with it.  I don’t know if this was the generally accepted way of teaching a child to swim in those days.  Again, it worked, eventually, but the experience was so frightening that, although I can swim if I have to, it never became a favourite pastime.  Lounging around in water on a hot day yes, swimming – why bother!!   I can still ride a bike too, but like swimming, that never held any particular joy for me in the years to come.

I got my own back on my father, though. One day I walked back from school (just three pupils, aged about 12, 9 and me at 6) so could you call it a school?!) to find the house empty.   I had been told that the only water I should drink must be taken from a bottle kept in the fridge, marked ‘Gordon’s Gin’!   So, seeing it already out of the fridge, on the side table, I poured a large tumbler for myself.  One gulp told me that it was the very thing my parents had been warning me about, – BAD WATER.  There was only one place for bad water, in my childish mind, and that was the flower bed. So, out I went, bad water bottle in hand, and poured it on the soil.  My father returned from work just as the last drops of his precious Gordon’s Gin glugged from the spout!

Another bad taste in the mouth comes to mind. We had to take salt tablets daily as it was believed that the heat of Egypt made us sweat too much and thereby lose body salts.  They were the foulest pills I ever had to take, dissolved in a tumbler of water, and many a Squaddie would spit them out rather than swallow them. Today I think they would be regarded as very bad indeed for the health.  How times change.

Before the Abrogation of the Treaty, and all that followed, my father drove us up to Alexandria for a short break, stopping to see the Pyramids on the way.  Lots of photographs were taken, naturally, and my father left the film in Cairo to be developed and collected on the way back after the break in Alexandria.  He never got those photographs, and I was never allowed to forget that it was my fault!  In Alexandria I developed a high fever (probably simply sunstroke), a Greek doctor was called, and my parents were told that I was to get to a hospital quicker than quick.  It was late at night, so my father navigated the car by the stars through the desert.   I have no idea which British military hospital he got me to in spite of being their guest for three months.  I wasn’t even really ill.  My initial high temperature was the crime which had me locked up for three months.  Basically, the doctors had no idea what was the matter with me and so all they could think to do was to put me out of circulation for months on end.   My parents visited me, but could not come into the room I was in.  They had to write letters to me and hold them up to the glass pane which linked me to the rest of the ward.  The glass pane was too high for me to be able to see through to the rest of the ward though.  From these letters I discovered that the cat had had the kittens I was so longing to see – but which I never got to see as little kittens since they were almost as big as their mother by the time of my release. (pictured below). My abiding memory of those three months was the back view of my parents, as seen through the window of the room, disappearing down the path back to their car and return journey.

The saddest memory I have of El Ballah was my grandfather’s death.  The telegram arrived in the middle of a blinding sandstorm in December 1951 after the Emergency had begun (which led up to the rather more well known invasion of 1956).  My mother and I were not allowed to return to the UK for his funeral because, had we done so, we would not have been allowed back to Egypt for the remainder of my father’s tour of duty there.  It was a dreadful choice my mother had to make and I don’t think she ever forgave herself for not being at her father’s funeral.   I cried so much with her then, but, strangely, I cried again in February the next year when King George VI died.   I don’t know why I cried, unless as a child I had viewed him as a grandfatherly figure who I had believed would always be there for me.   By February 1952, when the King died, we were moved to El Kirsh (pictured below).  I do not have very specific memories of that camp, except a phenomenal sandstorm which left our bungalow knee-high in sand.

My father’s final move in Egypt came in July 1952 when we moved to Moascar where we lived in a married quarter.   Moascar seemed like a wonderful paradise after being out in the desert military camps for most of the two years we were there.   The NAAFI was a dream come true where my mother bought me my first new things in such a long time – new shoes which I remember to this day, were a special treat.  All sorts of consumables were suddenly within reach.   Had we needed them earlier, I don’t quite know what would have been the answer since our movements were severely restricted on account of the “troubles”.  We had only ever travelled with an armed guard. Moascar had a much darker side for me though.  Apart, that is, of being made to walk two steps behind the Brigadier’s daughters at school, at their insistence, because my father was only a Major then!  What would the PC pundits of today make of that?  Thirteen years later I attended the wedding of the elder sister having bumped into the younger during my years of flatting in London.  They were actually rather nice people by then and had grown out of needing me a step or two behind them!

In Moascar my mother acquired a houseboy.  I don’t know what his real name was because my parents only ever referred to him, out of earshot, as “I see all, I know all”.  This was because they were the only words of English which he spoke.   Thus, “Abdul”, or whoever, “Will you sweep the verandah before you go?” – reply “I see all I know all!!   I think it wore my mother down and she often found it much easier to do something herself rather than get the paid houseboy to do it. The houseboy, throughout the time we were in Moascar, sexually abused me.  At seven years of age, I had no idea what was happening, nor how to explain it to my parents.  He didn’t rape me, because had he done so my parents would have discovered this I am sure, but he did the next best thing and, every time my parents were out, up came his galabier, and out came his wedding tackle.  It was a traumatic experience for a young girl and one for which, nowadays, there would have been counselling.  Decades later both my parents died having never known the truth about their houseboy.

Returning home in February 1953, on the troopship The Empire Ken, was great fun – except through the Bay of Biscay.  But nothing matched the feeling of being back home again once we had disembarked onto British soil (pictured below).   Our first visit was made to my darling grandmother who had been so recently widowed.
 

Anne with her parents, just disembarked in the UK.

'Pip's Medal.'

Fifty years later the servicemen and women who had taken part in the Emergency, risking their lives for king, queen and country, had still not been awarded a GSM (General Service Medal), in spite of decades of campaigning by my father and many others, including myself after my father died.  Sadly his death occurred before the final breakthrough, which was based on evidence compiled by him over 25 years.  Victory finally came to the patient veterans when they were awarded the GSM in July 2003 – fifty two years after the Emergency began in October 1951.  I use the word "patient" advisedly since two years later there were still some applicants who had not received their medal.   This was on account of the large number of applications that swamped the Medal Offices. A picture of my father’s very own posthumous ‘Pip’s Medal’ (so named in recognition of his leadership of the quarter century campaign) is above. I will treasure it for him and pass it to my children one day.

Thank you Anne for your contribution to the website's History and Recollections section.
Richard Woolley.
January 2006.