Christmas Excesses and the Glories of Asmara
Once Gondar Hospital had been resuscitated and returned to civilian administration to serve the region, Morris Hirsch and the other six medical officers of the 6th Ugandan Field Ambulance had time on their hands. Christmas and New Year celebrating set the revelry going.
There was no shortage of hard liquor. Every officer could buy from Naffi, the army comforts supply, of a bottle of whisky, brandy and gin per week, at the cost of seven shillings and six pence for the whisky and five shillings for the brandy and gin. All the medical officers, idle, festive and isolated, eagerly accepted and consumed the ration!
The Ambulance had somehow acquired a Lancia open tourer. It was in the care of the adjutant and used for official purposes.
Now, the medical officers drove it hard around a grassy airstrip at Azozo doing their best to dislodge another inebriated medical officer clinging to a sheet of metal at the end of a rope. It was hilarious fun until George Gosling fractured his arm. Col. Cowan, made aware of the high jinks, brought them to an abrupt halt.
The campaign over, the entire Ambulance returned 300 miles from Gondar back to HQ just south of Asmara.
The returning British troops, the Gordon Highlanders, had been in the field much longer. They made a bee-line for the brothel in Asmara twenty miles away. It was gaudy but orderly, hygienic and discretely managed. The Italian whores were relatively young and attractive. One of the medical officers who had remained at HQ, true to his reputation, had made a conquest of one of the prostitutes. He was her lover and frequented her apartment. She confided to him that her occupation was temporary to save money to set up home again when her husband returned from his prisoner of war confinement. She saw no conflict between her prostitution, her love for her husband and her substitute lover.
Morris Hirsch watched the goings on from the artistically decorated lounge of the brothel. The girls amused themselves by taunting him, but he was committed to Joan. It confirmed the confidence he'd developed at the Barberton Base Camp.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
Excerpt from Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch's Unpublished Memoirs. Hirsch Archives.
Photo Credit: Hirsch Archives