A discovery and a question

I can almost feel my dad telling me to lay off with his old photos, but I found this one the other day in the bottom of the wardrobe when I was looking for something else (a gift bag, since you ask - and no: it wasn't there). I'd forgotten that there was a collection of large photo prints that I'd stashed in the wardrobe as being a safe, dry, flat place where they wouldn't be disturbed or damaged; the original of this one is at least 16 inches wide. 

Because in fact it is not the original print of this photo - that will be on a 6- inch photo paper somewhere else - there is no pencilled note on the back telling me where it was taken. Clearly we have what look like Roman ruins, and what looks like a volcano in the background, though it could just be a mountain. My father spent most of his war service in North Africa and in the Middle East, and took his trusty Leica II with him everywhere. When he came home , the camera had to have its lens mechanism rebushed because of sand damage.

I think I've mentioned before that my father's war stories were mostly lighthearted ones involving practical jokes, the purchasing power of used tealeaves (dried on a hot stone and then repacked in the original bag), and the joy of eating dates straight from the tree. There was also the tale of the breakfast abandoned on the fire when there was a sudden retreat to be joined because of something Rommel was doing; as I child I mourned that breakfast.

He lived in a small bivvy in a scrape in the ground near his signals truck - he was in the RAF Ciphers department - and was present at the Battle of el Alamein, which he described as "very noisy". He shared the truck with a Cambridge don called Sam; they cut one another's hair and shared literary allusions and a distaste for linguistic ambiguity in the signals with which they had to deal. 

I notice he's not wearing his pistol in this photo; they must have been on a jaunt at the time. I've never really thought of him as having a military interlude in his life, because he made so little of it, but I've put his Africa Star and bar on the photo because it's still in the box and in the waxed paper in which it arrived with his other medals after the war. He never wore them, never even had them mounted on the appropriate ribbons, but in that unimaginable time of separation and danger  he earned them. 

Sorry, Dad - I'm at it again ...