EGYPT, 1945

Picking up the theme of Dad’s wartime snapshots from yesterday’s chat about Burma, here’s another page from that album featuring a few of the pictures of him taken in Egypt during 1943.

I think what’s interesting about these pictures, other than the fact that they exist at all and that they confirm the fact that dad actually was actually in Egypt, (which is something which still astonishes me), is how much the ordinary soldiers were allowed to interact with the ancient monuments back then.

I mean I know there had been a worldwide war on, and that preserving antiquities probably wasn’t near the top of anyone’s agenda, just I know that the idea of the value of ancient monuments, tourism and looking after them future generations was probably still relatively in its infancy, but being able to go up to a statue and give it a cuddle, or just clamber up to the top of a pyramid “because it’s there” is something that modern visitors to Giza can only really dream of.

I certainly know that during my own visit, sixty-five years later, we had about two hours maximum in which to try and absorb the sheer wonder of being so close to these remnants of the ancient world and much of that was spent trying to keep out of the way of the hundreds of other coach-loads of tourists and get away from the many, many locals who would latch on to you and try to sell you some tat.

Interestingly for me, I found that just strolling along the length of one of the sides of the Great Pyramid to an alternative corner where the crowds basically weren’t was the best way to get a moment alone with the ancient stones, and photograph it to buggery without getting too many strangers into your shot, and that, I suppose, is my “Travel Tip of the Day…”

Mind you, I think everyone in our little minibus would have been gut-burstingly envious of the kind of access to those monuments which my dad and his “gang” must have had all those years ago, although, on balance, I think that I still would have preferred to be there under the circumstances I was rather than those that took him there.

Meanwhile, I hope that my dad and his pals, including, I presume, his best mate at the time, the enigmatic “Cyril”, managed to have a great day out visiting the pyramids in the midst of all that madness, and managed to create a few good memories from amongst all of the bad ones.

The first picture, however, also fascinates me for other reasons. My dad would have been about twenty-one at the time (maybe this was his birthday treat) and yet there he stands, “Near top of Pyramid” as the caption explains wearing a flippin’ monocle alongside those ridiculous army socks and looking for all the world like the officer he so very patently wasn’t.

I wonder about the conversation that was going on when they decided to set up that snapshot and what joke they thought that him standing there like that would illustrate to the folks back home?

I don’t suppose any of us can ever know, now…

Mind you, it’s almost endlessly fascinating to me how much older everyone looks in photographs from the forties, fifties and early nineteen-sixties. I know that it’s most likely down to the clothes and the haircuts, but everyone looks so much more mature.

And then, someone in charge of such things must have dropped a tab of acid (Oh, look at me pretending that I know all of the vernacular) and decided that they’d had enough of this and changed the rules so that we all dressed like children who’d just raided the dressing-up box and decided that wearing some curtains was the most sensible option, which led directly to the modern age where pensioners feel that they have to dress like toddlers and mumsies are mortified if they don’t get at least one inside-pants-targeting smarmy “But surely you must be sisters…” comment during the day.

People fought a ruddy great big war for our basic freedom, you know… and now we’re left with a world designed for and run by children, where “acting your age” is more likely to get you rounded up and shipped off to a death camp disguised as a rest home than to get you anything approaching respect.

Still, I guess that’s progress for you.