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‘Let me re-fill your glass,’ I said. Dog’s urine or horse piss?
Ann was still working away at the gramophone, flipping the ten-inches on one after the other. She was swigging sherry with Sylvia and giggling. Jeremy Church was hovering about as if he fancied them both, while Mrs. Church listened in agony to the Mole aunt’s account of her bombing-out. Most of the records were the sentimental tunes that Ann adored. How Green Was My Valley, Room 504, Whispering Grass, You Walked By, My Devotion, Yours, and one that she kept slipping on in my honour, You Can’t Say No to a Soldier. Christ, she was the only one who had said yes to me; the other bitches here assembled did not even appear to know what the question was!
I evaded old Church, who was anxious to talk about The Agony of the Great War (‘You don’t remember it but things were very much harder then!’), and commenced to flirt with Sylvia again.
‘You didn’t have much luck with Henrietta then!’ she said, and she and Ann and I burst out laughing.
Her arms were rather spotty, but we were getting on quite well when I noticed Nelson preparing to slip out with Valerie. He winked at me, a slow thorough wink that must have bruised his eyeball. Dirty bastard! Jealousy seized me. Valerie wasn’t bad, a bit hefty owing to her involvement in the Women’s Land Army, but very cheerful – and everyone understood that Land Army girls needed it regular; the contact with agriculture made them that way. They would be going to the pub for a pint and afterwards Nelson would get her against our back wall for a knee-trembler. I knew this because he had told me about it in a humble but proud way. He claimed that knee-tremblers were the most exhausting way of having sex. I longed to have a try, longed to be really fucked out.
‘Like to come and see our air-raid shelter, Sylvia?’
‘What’s so special about your air-raid shelter? We’ve got one too!’
‘Ah, but has yours got hot-and-cold running water in it?’
‘No, and I bet yours hasn’t!’
‘It’s got a bit of a puddle in one corner! No, look, see, I keep my collection of small vases in there. You’d be interested.’
‘You keep your what?’
At that point, when the battle to get Our Syl into a suitable knee-trembling position might have gone either way, enter my father! He had finished his warden’s parade, looking for chinks in other people’s blackouts. He carried his gas mask and his torch, and was careful not to remove his steel helmet with the letters ARP on it until he was well into the room, so that everyone present was reminded of their duty. The helmet made him look more squat than ever. I noted that its rim barely came up to the most prominent bit of Henrietta Crane.
His entrance caused some confusion. The old Mole aunt interpreted it as a signal that she should take cover, and had to be restrained by the Moles and Mrs. Church from seeing the rest of the war out under our gate-leg table. In annoyance, father pretended he had noticed nothing (a favourite gambit), and went over to twitch severely at our own blackout, pulling the curtains three times, as if signalling to a drove of Dorniers circling overhead. Nelson and his pusher took the chance to sneak away, and I managed to manoeuvre Sylvia as far as the kitchen.
‘Let’s go out into the back garden and get a breath of air.’
‘I’m just going to have a smoke. Do you want a Park Drive?’ She offered her packet. ‘It’s all our local tobacconist has got and I don’t care for them all that much.’
‘Thanks. Let’s smoke them outside. You can’t hear yourself talk in there.’ Our hands touched as I lit her fag.
‘I was enjoying the music. Wouldn’t you say Artie Shaw’s the best musician there ever was?’
‘Look, please let’s go out! You can’t rely on the music – my mother may stop it at any moment and recite some poetry, if she thinks the thing’s getting out of hand. It only needs old Church to get a bit stewed and all hell will break loose in there!’
We were standing one on either side of the kitchen table, puffing our fags, staring at each other. She was looking more attractive all the time. Surely she must have had enough sense to know what I was after? Where was her patriotism? Desperately though I wanted to kiss her – just kiss her if nothing more was available – my whole upbringing prevented my telling her so directly. Everything had to be done according to a deadening set of out-of-date rules, rules so ill-defined that you could never be sure when you were set to move ahead. Or there was the more up-to-date but equally inhibiting way of tackling it, the cinema way, where everything had to be done romantically, where there had to be that look in her eye, and a moon in the sky, and Max Steiner laying on the violins … and then you both suddenly went soft and began saying witty tender self-mocking things: ‘I’ve never felt so young before tonight.’ ‘Why, you’re looking positively boyish!’ ‘It’s you, my darling, you bring out the adolescent in me.’ ‘Aren’t we all external adolescents!’ ‘Just for tonight we are!’ That sort of American approach was even harder to master than the Ancient British protocol but, once mastered, it gave positive results. The music came on strong, your hands touched, you were over the hump, flowers appeared, you were prone, your lips were touching, pelvic movements started of their own accord. Over our scrubbed kitchen table, nothing began to begin.
‘Will you think of me when I’m on Wake Island or some similar hell-spot?’
Then Ann in the next room put on her favourite record, everyone’s favourite record, of Len Camber singing That Lovely Weekend. We could hear the words in the kitchen, goading me on with their middle-class anguish at war and parting.
…The ride in the taxi when midnight had flown
And breakfast next morning, just we two alone.
You had to go, time was so short,
We both had so much to say.
Your kit to be packed, your train to be caught
I’m sorry I cried but I just felt that way …
‘I just love this old thing,’ Our Syl said. ‘There’s a chap at the office calls it That Dirty Weekend.’ She laughed.
‘It’s a ghastly song – reminds me of what I’m missing. Whipped overseas tomorrow, never to be seen again. Some far corner of a foreign field and all that …’ By this time, I had an arm round her waist and was smoking heavily against her left flank. She affected not to notice.
‘Whereabouts is your brother stationed?’
These days, you’d hit a girl across the chops if she asked you a silly question like that at a time like that. Eventually, I did coax her outside the back door and into the soft dark autumn air. You could tell she wasn’t too reluctant. Scrunching the Park Drive underfoot, I got an arm round her neck and muttered a few edifying remarks. I could smell her and she smelt pleasant. The night evidently encouraged her. She dropped the rest of her fag and looked up and smiled at me. She was mysterious, just about visible. A nice face, not a bit shifty. She put her hands up to my cheeks and kept them there.
‘I’m sorry you’re going,’ she said. ‘You’re nice.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back!’
‘I’ll miss you when you’re gone!’
‘Ah, but I’ve not gone yet, have I? Let me give you something to remember me by!’
We kissed and cuddled in closer. My system started to connect up with hers, going all warm and soft inside, while a fresh young erection nuzzled against her stomach. This was very much better! Sylvia was squeaking and saying ‘Oh darling!’ in a way that even Ida Lupino would not have despised. Our mouths began to open as we kissed. She clearly had no objection to what she was rubbing against. Scarcely aware of what I was doing, I managed to wedge her in the corner between the garden wall and the air raid shelter where, with a bit of stooping on my part, a knee-trembler should have been perfectly feasible, provided I didn’t come my load before I got it in.
Still kissing her, I pulled my fly-buttons undone and lobbed it out. Sylvia knew perfectly well what I was doing. Without any mucking, she grabbed hold of it and squeezed it affectionately while I slid my hand up her skirt. I was just dipping the tips of my fingers into a soft and furry crack when the bloody kitchen door opened behind us.
‘Horatio!’ My mother in a stage whisper. What timing!
Sylvia let go of my prick as if it had turned into a sea urchin and shrank into the dark. Murder boiled up in my veins. Flipping the sea urchin away, I said ‘What do you want?’ Good question, really.
I could see her long thin form dimly outlined in the doorway. Father’s training was such that she had switched off the kitchen light before opening the door, so as not to spoil the blackout.
‘What are you doing out here, Horatio?’
‘I’ll be in in a minute, mother. For Christ’s sake, stop following me about as if I was a kid!’
‘I’m not following you! Why should I want to, since you obviously don’t want to talk to me, your own mother! Come in at once and look after your guests. They’ll think how rude you are not to talk to them.’
‘Look, I’m just getting a breath of fresh air. Okay?’
She sounded genuinely angry, and old reflexes of alarm that Sergeant Meadows could never have roused woke in me. ‘I know perfectly well that you have Sylvia there with you! Now, come in at once and behave yourself or I’ll fetch your father!’
So we went in past her, Sylvia blushing with shame, me a twenty-year-old infantryman, pride of the Royal Mendips, about to die for Old England, erections every night up to my armpits – sometimes you wondered what the fucking hell you were fighting for!
I was so bloody browned off that I stayed on the top of the chest-of-drawers for some while, idly doing a Tarzan act at myself in the mirror. I had so nearly got it in! I sniffed my fingers but even the scent had gone now, bugger it. After another shot at the crucifixion routine, I slid down to the floor head-first and writhed across the carpet. Gradually, with my head hanging brokenly between my shoulders and my tongue lolling, I ascended before the mirror. It was the third day. I was rising again.
I looked really idiotic. Saliva started dripping down on to my sock. I made my cheeks tremble and my forehead go purple.
‘Yoooooo are going Maaaaaaaad!’ I told my reflection, as I twisted one arm under my crutch and the other behind my shaking head. ‘Yoooooo. Err. Ger-wing. Blerdy. Ferking. MAAAAAAAAAAD!’
The temporary reversion to idiocy was amazingly refreshing. The Army offered no privacy and it was a treat to go through my old stress-relievers again in solitude. I kept working at the insanity thing until I succeeded in convincing myself that I was indeed going mad. Frightened and satisfied, I undressed and climbed into bed.
Visions of what could have been done to Sylvia assailed me. I’d actually had my fingers in the gorgeous place! ‘Come and see me tomorrow, if you have time,’ she had whispered; she was willing enough, given time and That Lovely Weekend. She had been opening up her legs before the reprise. Those glorious mobile buttocks … I felt my old man perking up again at the memory. Oh no, not that! I had to be up early tomorrow morning, and then a long journey before I got back to the depot at Aldershot. Was it never content? It was worse than a baby with the wind, always crying out for attention. What the hell was wrong with the bloody thing? In loathing, I put my hand down the bedclothes and felt it. Just to check its pulse, as it were.
It was hot, dry, and stiff, like a corpse stored in an oven, and gorged with blood – all head and neck, a sodding vampire giraffe! Oh God, oh Sylvia! ‘Come and see me tomorrow, if you have time!’
The natural law which insures that once you’ve clutched hold of it you can’t let go of it came immediately into force. The thing is your master. The tail wags the dog.
As I started to pacify it by fair means or foul, fantasies crowded in on me. It was next morning. I had woken very early, was dressed, climbed out of my window and down over the dining-room bay into the street. Everyone still asleep, only a vanishing milkman in sight. Round to Sylvia’s place, up her drainpipe, tap on her window. She comes to window, hot from bed, frowsy, wearing flimsy nightdress, scratching crutch. Opens up, eyes gleam at sight of randy young soldier. He jumps in, embraces her, closes window. On bed immediately. You had to go, the time was so short. Little to say. Fanny swimming with juice, slurps when touched. Marvellous tits, delicious underarms. Roll her over, lovely bum, super expanse of back. She mad for it. Groans in delight. Slip it in from rear …
At that point, I remembered Nelson who, probably at that very moment – the moment of reality not dreams – was enjoying another knee-trembler with Valerie against our fence! That’s what I should have had with Sylvia if bloody mother had not stuck her nose in! Cancel last fantasy. Instead, open air-raid shelter door, hurry in with her. Lock the door. No interruptions. Syl writhes against me. Lips together, my tongue in her mouth, hand right up, leaning on each other against the damp wall …
It’s getting pretty urgent. I grab a handkerchief and hop out of bed, still rubbing the vampire giraffe that possesses me. Standing against the bedroom wall, I clench my fists one on top of the other and penetrate them slowly with the gorged head of the beast. A knee-trembler-substitute. This time it’s really you, Sylvia, my little beauty. I clutch her buttocks, pull her against me. She’s half-fainting with excitement.
Overhead, waves of Dornier bombers are going over, disturbing the fantasy. Heading for Birmingham again, third night in succession, throb-throb-throb. As they come over the chimney-tops, I come over my fists, and stand alone panting in the dark, resting my head against the wall, listening to the bastards fly through the fucking night, on and on.
No time for Sylvia next morning. Everything hurried and perhaps just as well. With a light tap on the door, Mother came waltzing into my bedroom as in days of yore, before I could even get my eyelids unstuck. She carried a khaki shirt she had ironed. I knew at once she was tearful, even as I sat up hurriedly and looked across the room to see if there were any telltale stains on the wallpaper. The Phantom Wanker Strikes Again! All okay, luckily. Now to avoid her weeping.
‘Crikey, it’s late! I’d better jump up straight away!’
‘Nonsense, darling, you’ve plenty of time. Your father’s come out of the bathroom and there’s quite a nip in the air – you’d think it was autumn already. Wasn’t old Auntie Mole funny last night? I’m sure she’d had a bit too much to drink! It was a lovely party, wasn’t it? I – suppose you have no idea where your unit will be going overseas, have you?’
‘I told you, nobody ever knows. Sergeant Meadows says it could be Burma!’
‘Oh dear, not Burma, I hope! It’s such a dreadful place. Don’t they call it The White Man’s Grave or something? Does your nice Captain Gore-Blakeley think you will be going to Burma?’ She sank down on the side of my bed, absently picking up my dressing-gown and fiddling with it. ‘I’ve been a bad mother to you, Horry, dearest!’
‘You know that’s not true.’ But my reply rang as hollow as her statement. She and father had never quite forgiven me for running away from home to live in London, just as I had never forgiven my father for not coming down to find me. All that was four years ago, but memories stay ever fresh in family matters.
‘I will write to you, Horry. I hope you’ll write to me. I know you’re no longer my little boy, but that’s how I think of you always in my foolish old heart.’ Perhaps it was her way of apologizing for stopping me getting it with Sylvia. She took hold of my hand and said, ‘Think of your poor loving mother sometimes. You won’t have her always, you know, and some day you’ll be old and decrepit yourself.’
‘Go on with you! You always say that! You’re as fit as a fiddle!’
Tears near the surface again. ‘I’m not … I’m not well at all, really – not that it matters to anyone!’ I had a premonition that she would die while I was overseas; or perhaps it was just guilt that made me imagine it. She was startlingly thin – ‘a bundle of nerves’, as she put it. Ann told me that she often disappeared nowadays, going on her long compulsive walks. Perhaps she would be knocked down and killed by one of the American Army convoys now plunging through the countryside.
We had done this to our parents. We had failed them in some way. We assaulted them just by growing big and strong and sexy while they shrank, year by year, into minor roles, making do with their old clothes and curtains. Ann was talking about joining the ATS – the last of the fledgelings to fly, leaving the Stubbs nest not without shrill cries of relief.
All one could do about all this was to be inarticulate. There were tears running down Mother’s cheeks. The more she staunched them, the more they flowed. I put an arm round her thin shoulders, a greyhound’s shoulders, and her tears came faster. She shuddered and exclaimed between sobs about what a wretched parent she had been. Despite my muttered protests, I was inclined to agree – in those innocent days, I did not realize how rare successful parents were.
‘You’ll be all right, Mum! Dad’ll be here to look after you, and there’s all your friends …’
‘I haven’t got any freh-hends! Only you three …’
‘Well, cheer up, we’ve knocked the Italians out of the war and the whole business will be over before so long.’
‘I’m so afraid you’ll get i-hih-hih-hih-hinjured!’ She jumped up and ran from the room, as if to dump her grief elsewhere. I gave my bloody kit bag a swift kick as I headed for the bathroom.
More of the same sort of thing occurred in a minor key during breakfast as wincingly we tucked into bacon-and-egg and toast. The gift of speech is a curse on such occasions. Nelson regaled us with an account of the gas course he was on in Edinburgh and Ann essayed a few jokes.
‘Did you hear what the British and the Americans said about each other? The British said that there were only three things wrong with the Americans – they were oversexed, overpaid, and over here!’
‘I don’t want to hear that word in my house, girl!’
‘And the Americans replied that there were only three things wrong with the British – they were under-sexed, under-paid, and under Eisenhower!’
Nelson and I laughed loyally although we had heard it before. We laughed a trifle uneasily: we knew Ann had been out with an American G.I. Probably she had got the joke from him. We hoped she got nothing else – the joke lay painfully close to the truth. The Americans had sex relations; we just had relations.
Clomping about in my boots, I gathered my kit together and rammed my forage cap on to my head so that it clung just above the right ear, its two shining brass buttons hanging over the right eyebrow. I answered repeated inquiries about whether I had packed safely the apples they had given me off our one tree. The time had come to leave. This was it. Farewell, England, home, and beauty! Bus to the station, then away.
‘See you in Berlin, mate,’ Nelson said, as we shook hands. I kissed Ann and gave her a big hug, wordlessly did the same to mother, who just sobbed and patted my shoulder. We all looked round at each other with pretty ghastly expressions, as I hefted my kit-bag on to my left shoulder. At the front door, we milled about sadly, touching each other. Then I began the walk down the street with father; he was coming as far as the bus stop with me before going on to the bank.
My boots seemed to make an awful row on the pavement. There were only plain, middle-aged women and old men about; no Sylvia. Familiar street, all but empty. Old cars, a dog or two. Mid-August, and a leaf or two blowing in the gutters. Neglect. The fag-ends of old fantasies. There’s no way of saying good-bye to people you love; you just turn and look back, carefully so that your forage cap does not fall off, and you grin and wave inanely. You are already separated: a few feet, a few seconds, but enough.
‘You’ll find it won’t be too bad,’ Father said, speaking with a wavery jauntiness. The kit-bag dwarfed him as he walked beside me. ‘By gosh, if I were a bit younger, I’d be proud to join up myself and be marching beside you.’
‘You did your lot last time, Dad.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said you did your lot last time.’
‘All I hope is that they don’t send you out to the Far East. It’s a horrible place to have to fight a war. Europe’s not so bad. The Middle East’s not so bad … You can get back home from there … I don’t know what’s to become of us all, I’m sure.’
‘Let’s hope it’ll all be over soon.’
‘Birmingham got it again last night. You just don’t know where it’ll all end …’
We reached the bus stop. Two old men stood there, not speaking, hands in pockets, staring ahead down the road as if watching for the Wehrmacht. I fell in behind them and Father started to talk about the Great War. Like Mother, he was feeling guilt. He was missing something. He was growing old. As the station bus rolled up, he thrust a five pound note at me, mint from the bank, and said – did he really say, did he really bring himself to say, ‘Be a good lad and see you don’t go into any brothels’, or did I imagine it? I was never sure, my emotions clouded my perceptions.
All I remember is swinging the kit-bag on to the platform of the bus and clutching his hand. Ting-ting went the bell. The bus swept me away from him. He stood where he was, one hand raised in salute, a brave gesture, staring at me. As I stared back, I began to recall all sorts of loving things I meant to say to him only a few seconds previously.
Whatever you may think, Dad, I do love you, even if you never came down to London to look for me. I do love you, and I’ll try not to go into any brothels …
Wartime is much like peacetime; it is just peace brought to a crisis. In wartime, all one’s feelings about chance and luck crystallize. Your fate is decided by whether your name falls last on List ‘A’ or first on List ‘B’. You become sure that you are being moved about with intention, but randomly, like a shuffled pack of cards in a conjurer’s hands.
In and out of countless uninviting offices, wartime lists were continually on the move. Sure as snipers’ bullets, one would eventually break through into reality and settle your hash. It was one such list, a tyrant of the species, which determined that the First Battalion of the 2nd Royal Mendip Borderers (CO, Lieutenant-Colonel William Swinton), one of the three battalions of 8 Brigade, arrived on the troopship Ironsides at Bombay, late in October 1943, to join the other units of the 2nd British Division already in India, to which our brigade had been attached by the courtesy of a yet more despotic list. A subordinate list had determined that I should be present, leaning goggle-eyed over the rail of the Ironsides, together with my mates in No. 2 Platoon, listed as one of the three platoons in ‘A’ Company.
India was a world away from the UK (the pair of initials to which England had now shrunk) and connected with it only by a thin and peevish stream of orders and lists. Bombay was an embodiment of the exotic.
Long before we could see the harbour from our deck of the troopship, we could tell that land lay ahead. The sea transformed itself into many different colours, the blues of the wide ocean giving way to swathes of green, yellow, red, and ochre. A low line of shore materialized. Strange flavours floated on the breeze, pungent, indescribable, setting the short hairs crawling with more than sweat.
As the Ironsides moved forward, little trading boats rowed out to meet us, manned by natives intent on getting in their kill first. The boats were loaded with rugs and carpets and brass vases and leather goods of all kinds. Brisk bargaining started as soon as the traders were within earshot, with the wits of Ironsides calling down harshly to the brown faces below them. Wally Page and Dusty Miller distinguished themselves as usual. Some of my mates were being jipped before we ever touched land.
For miles round, the sea was punctuated by the thirty vessels of our convoy. We had sailed from Southampton eight weeks ago, with a four-day break in Durban. The hellish Ironsides had become our home – so much so that I had developed one of the neuroses that home breeds: desperate till now to get off the hated boat with its hated routines of exercise and housey-housey, I was suddenly reluctant to leave the shelter of a familiar place.
About India, there was nothing familiar. It took your breath away. It swarmed, rippled, stewed, with people. The docks were packed with coolies; as we moved in single lines down the gangplanks, loaded with rifles and gear and respirators and wearing full tropical kit complete with solar topees, we were surrounded by crowds of Indians. NCOs bellowed and struck at them as we formed up smartly into platoons, dripping sweat on to India’s soil.
After an hour’s wait in the sun, we were marched off through the town to the station, with the regimental band going full blast.
‘Heyes front! Bags of bullshit! Show these bloody Wogs they’ve got the Mendips here!’
It was impossible madness to keep eyes front! We were on an alien world and they didn’t want us to see! – it was another example of military insanity!
