The shopkeeper said, 'I'll toss ya. Head or Tails.' He threw a single coin. While it was in the air Slaven grabbed it. It was a double-header. He belted the wog who had his fez pushed down over his face, like a pig with his head in a cow-shed tin. He paid the price. We took off.

Two-up was particularly popular for soldiers on leave. In Cairo they played in an area at the back of the New Zealand Forces Lottery Club. A group of Kiwis were playing on one occasion in 1941 when military police arrived and ordered them to disperse as they were blocking the street. The command drew only mocking laughter. The patrol then batoned the players, who were rounded up and returned to the barracks to be confined, though not before the picket's captain received a black eye. When General Freyberg, 2 Division's commander, arrived at the club he was puzzled by the absence of customers. After hearing the explanation, he berated the captain and ordered that the men's leave be restored.

There was big money to be made in the texas lottery game. One 23 Battalion veteran, Groppi Gilchrist, was in a tent in the base camp at Bari near Taranto in southern Italy, when he heard of a soldier from another unit who was prepared to pay big money for threepenny pieces. Such coins were scarce but Gilchrist, a recent arrival, had kept five in his money-belt after shore leave in Fremantle. The soldier heard about this and visited Gilchrist, who offered him the coins. The man insisted on paying and pulled out a great wad of sterling notes which may have contained as much as £500. Gilchrist quickly relented and accepted £10 sterling for each of the coins. The man was running a very successful two-up school inside tents at nighttime, using threepenny bits as pennies were too cumbersome to toss. For Gilchrist, a non-gambler, the £50 he received was equivalent to six months' wages.

As in the British army, housie was the only gambling activity that was officially allowed, partly to keep soldiers occupied in times of boredom and implicitly to steer them away from more 'malicious' gambling pursuits. In the NAAFI canteens of the base camps, large-scale games were run by the unit in occupation, each canteen having a large blackboard on which the jackpot was advertised. Big schools reached up to £100 and attracted three or four hundred punters. Games were run on three or four nights a week with paid callers, usually chosen for their clear voices. Some individuals 'creamed off the profits. One housie organizer from 19 Battalion found himself in a worrying predicament when his pockets ripped from the weight of coins in them; he had pocketed more money than he had given out in prizes. The battalion picket returned him safely to his quarters, but he never ran another housie evening. Another soldier and his mates took their own housie operation into Cairo for six months during 1941 and made a regular income.

Cards were popular because they could be arranged at a moment's notice. Many men played bridge, usually for small stakes. Poker, pontoon, slippery sam, forty-fives, euchre and five hundred were all played for money, cigarettes, tobacco or matchsticks. In 1941, Maori troops in the desert played poker and pontoon from the booty of a captured Italian pay-truck. Tiring of being paper millionaires, they began to use the notes as cigarette lighters and toilet paper-to their eventual chagrin when they learned that lira were exchangeable in Cairo.

Card playing created opportunities for unfair practices. These were more common in transit camps, where the turnover of personnel was constant and soldiers were strangers to each other. Corrupt players used cigarettes to send signals to their partners: a new one for hearts, a lit butt for spades, a struck match for diamonds or a few frantic puffs to indicate the joker. Strangers chancing upon a scam, particularly if they were in a minority, feared retribution if the perpetrators were exposed. Things were different when the numbers were reversed. One group of soldiers was playing slippery sam in a tent in the desert when a sergeant who was losing badly began to cheat. When his misdeeds were exposed, he was unceremoniously roughed up, taken far out into a sandstorm and left to find his own way back.

Other gambling took unusual forms. Some soldiers in the desert amused themselves by capturing scorpions and matching two of them in a fight to the death inside a ring traced in the sand. To frighten the scorpions and so stimulate them to fight, petrol was poured around the ring and ignited. Bookies shouted odds on the combatants. In Syria, scorpion-racing was another gambling diversion, the creatures being tickled along with the hot end of a cigarette.

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