There is a poem about Habbaniya that circulated among the airmen stationed there. Someone typed it out and passed it around. Walter kept his copy.
Habbaniya · Author unknown · Circulated among the airmen
An emerald set midst golden sands,
This camp of ours — Habbaniya stands...
To passers by; it thus appears,
To us inside three bloody years.
Walter arrived at Habbaniya in late 1941 and would not leave the Iraqi posting until early 1943. Fourteen months. By the standards of what came later — the constant movement of the desert campaign, a new location every few weeks — it was a very long time to be in one place. But Walter did not appear to resent it. He was, he wrote, thoroughly at home.
The work was real and constant — malaria blood slides, bacterial cultures, the endless processing of samples. He organised the cricket club when June came and there had been no cricket. He played football. He attended every ENSA show. The fortnightly dances at the Sgts Mess brought most of the nursing sisters. He was happy in his job, and that, he wrote, was all he worried about.
Beyond the wire, the world was at war with new ferocity. Japan had entered the conflict. HMS Repulse — the ship that had escorted his convoy south — was gone. But Habbaniya was Habbaniya.
The movement order came in January 1943. He packed up the laboratory he had spent fourteen months building. He left.
The stillness was over.
The laboratory floor plan on page 9 of S.O. Book 137 — a pencil sketch Walter drew of his own workspace — shows a man who thought carefully about how to organise things. The notes themselves cover sterilisation, culture media, staining techniques, filtration, microscopy. The vocabulary of a working scientist, written in the same neat hand as the diary.
The Habbaniya poem in Walter’s papers was typed, not handwritten — suggesting it was reproduced and distributed rather than written by Walter himself. The author is unknown. That refrain — to us inside, three bloody years — captures something about long postings that no diary entry quite manages. Walter kept it. That says something too.
Volume I diary scan (PDF) Full transcription (PDF) Narrative version (PDF) Laboratory notes — S.O. Book 137 (PDF)