WIRELESS BILLET, RAF Kabrit 1950-51
"FANCY SEEING YOU HERE!
As Remembered By LAC W. Pyatt
Reading your magazine, loaned to me by one of your members, takes me back to when I was in Egypt, February 1950 to August 1951.
I was stationed at RAF Kabrit where I operated a Radio Direction Finding Wagon, in company with my fellow opo, Roy Gardner. Our wagon was sited right the other side of the airfield away from our camp. The only thing between us and the Suez Canal was the Forces Broadcasting Station, sited at French Point, a Suez Canal Control Station, between the Great and Small Bitter Lakes. The F.B.S. moved to Fayid and the Army then occupied the vacant site.
One morning, the squaddies were drilling on the dis-used dispersal pans on the far side of the airfield by our van. Looking across at them, I recognized my best mate from civvie street, as one of the squad who were drilling. The last time we met was 9 months previously back in Blighty.
Later that day I walked across to the Army camp to see if I could meet up with Dave (my mate) only to be met by their RSM who looked at me (in my crumpled K.D. jacket, very short K.D. shorts etc) as if I’d just crawled out of the Sweet Water Canal. But he did find my mate and we became reunited again.
Because their camp was newly opened they had very little in the way of canteen facilities, NAAFI or entertainments, so Dave and one of his mates used to walk across the airfield to our camp after their duties and use our Mess, our swimming facilities in the Lake and the cinema. They would then walk back across the airfield to their camp, keeping a watchful eye out for Piards which came out at night. This carried on until I came home on demob. Dave was a short time late as he was demobbed after me.
What a coincidence to meet a mate like that when he could have been posted anywhere else in the world