CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST WINTER
It was in the first week of November that we moved into the house allotted to us in the town. It was in a good quarter, about half-way up the hill, and it was a very good house as houses go in Asia Minor. In front there was a narrow street, and the building opposite to us was popularly supposed to be the Angora University. It was, at any rate, a school of large boys or small men; and I think we must have looked right into the University Museum, for there was a mouldy-looking stuffed owl there. On our left was another large house, at first used as a military hospital; but, when all the patients had died, restored to its purpose of a boys’ school, small boys who used to make cutthroat signs to us. Our right flank rested upon a dunghill, or, rather, a kitchen midden, a public store of all manner of beastliness and the playground of the little schoolboys. Behind us was a dark, damp, narrow passage, beloved of dead cats, bounded on the one side by the school and our house, and on the other by the city wall. The hill was so steep that the entrance from the passage was two stories higher up than the main entrance from the street. We used the back door, for the main entrance was nailed up. The two bottom stories were uninhabitable, and by us unused. They contained stables and store-rooms. In the floor of one of the rooms there was a well, and beneath the floor there was the usual cess-pit. The next floor was on a level with our entrance, and contained a small kitchen and four bedrooms, one of which Derrick and I shared. The floor above that contained another kitchen, three bedrooms, and a large hall we used as a mess-room. Above that again was a small room containing a jumble of more or less useless articles, a sort of lumber-room, in fact, and a great many cubby-holes and recesses in the walls and under the roof. Above that again was an unwalled, roofed space used for hanging clothes to dry.
The house was owned by an Armenian woman who had found some means of adapting herself to terrible circumstances, and of conciliating the Turks. There were a number of such forlorn women in the town, and I, for one, do not blame them.
To this lady, who lived further down the street, we paid rent. So the Turkish Government was actually providing us with nothing at all except our four shillings a day. For we rented the house furnished, very little furnished.
The first fortnight of our stay here I passed in bed with persistent fever.
We had not long been in residence when some more prisoners turned up; the officers of a second submarine, and two or three others. They stayed for a while in the hotel, and then we divided forces and made two houses of it. Our house was already rather overcrowded, and it was impossible to take in half a dozen more.
The new house was a couple of hundred yards away from the old one, and was rented from a Turkish cavalry officer who kept a small bootshop in the town.
There was great friction over the division, but the less friction is emphasised the better. It is inevitable among prisoners.