Blue Thirst by Lawrence Durrell Page A

you sent down one proof with some misprints on it, they sent you back a whole new set of misprints and this could go on indefinitely. Of course, it led to awful political situations. For example, there was a particularly good and devout general who was described in the Egyptian Mail as a “bottle-scarred” veteran instead of a “battle-scarred” veteran. His press attaché rang me up at the embassy and said, “Look, it’s absolute scandal that General B. should be treated like this. You must get a correction.” So I rang up Mr. Goldstein who was the head of the paper and I said, “Do you realise what you’ve done to General B.? Will you please correct this tomorrow morning?” He said yes, he would and the next morning they come out with “We are so sorry about the reference to a “bottle-scarred veteran”, what we mean was a “battle-scared veteran.” There seemed to be no way forward from this. I was on the point of resigning.
    Then there were all kinds of engaging things. When Lord Mountbatten came to visit us he was described as having a lovely “louse-lipped smile.” And the British Air Force was going to get even with Germany with their giant Sunderland Flying-Goats. You know their flying boats were quite celebrated, but their flying goats? Perhaps a secret weapon? A new British device to defeat the enemy, you see. And an item in the want-ad section of the paper, placed by a gentleman who needed someone to cook for him, read: “British officer urgently needs one good plain cock.” We had a very great deal of trouble like this, which kept everyone swearing and telephoning.
    And I’ve also had trouble with statistics. I tried first of all to computerise this job a little bit because we were wasting so much money and it was costing lives to bring newsprint across. One had to take it seriously. The newsprint shortage was such that shipping space was allocated out for various demands and it seemed to me scandalous that one should waste it on propaganda pamphlets describing the situation in Nubia. So I started doing some spot propaganda as market research, of the kind that I suppose the big industries here must do; in fact it’s a kind of advertising, really. But so much was wasted that I tried to establish a kind of percentage of waste. I got one factory which had 2,000 workers and I inundated it with 2,000 pamphlets on one subject or another and I went on inundating it, and as we knew the dustmen in the area we collected what they threw away so that I finally established that most of the stuff I was feeding into the factory was being thrown automatically into the dustbin. By continuing the process I suddenly discovered that what creates a demand is shortage. I’m not a good Marxist, but I suddenly realised that if I gave 3% of the total, the fact that it wasn’t enough to go around made the 3% read it and pass it around, whereas if I gave 100% of my product to them it appeared in the wastebins the next morning automatically. So this was a valuable discovery for the record. But I couldn’t interest London in this. They thought I was being too clever. Of course suborning the press and buying its influence is also very gay but what can one do against honest people with honest convictions? Nothing. The Germans were much better at it because they were not so respectable and they were not worrying about their image the whole time because they were desperate. We were still fuddy-duddy and worrying a great deal about our image, so it was they who suborned all the mullahs in the minarets who give out the evening prayers and make a little sermon, to tell the Egyptians that once Rommel came they’d all have ice cream. And the Egyptians liked ice cream so much that this was our most dangerous moment, our most heroic moment. I was tempted to do a cut-rate ice cream act and hand out ice cream on our side, but this would have been