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Leading off the pompous Victorian centre of Bombay were endless warrens – narrow teeming streets packed with animals and amazing vehicles and humanity; though we were instructed not to think of it as humanity but just Wogs.
If I had thought of India at all in more peaceful days, I had regarded it as a place where people were miserable and starved to death; but here was a life that England could never envisage, noisy, unregulated, full of colour and stink, with people in the main laughing and gesticulating in lively fashion.
Knowing absolutely nothing of the culture, caring nothing for it, we saw it all as barbarous. Jungly music blared from many of the ramshackle little shops. Gujerati signs were everywhere. Tangled overhead cables festooned every street. Half-naked beggars paraded on every sidewalk. Over everything lay the heat.
Although I do not remember the details of that dramatic march to the station, I recall clearly my general impression. The impact of noise, light, and smell was great, but took second place; following the long spell on the ship, we were on the look-out first and foremost for women. And there the women were, draped in saris, garments which struck us as not only ugly but form-concealing. Some women paraded with great baskets loaded with cow shit on their heads, walking along like queens, while others had jewels stuck in their noses or caste-marks painted on their foreheads. Barbaric! And set in scenes of barbaric disorder!
People were washing and spitting at every street corner, and hump-backed cows were allowed to wander where they would, even into buildings!
‘It’s sort of a filthy place, is this,’ Geordie Wilkinson told me as we fell out at the station. He had the gift of grasping the obvious after everyone else.
On the platform, we became submerged in this motley tide. In the chaos of boarding the train, porters struggled amongst us, grabbing at our kit-bags and luggage so that they could then claim exorbitant fees for their assistance. Their naked urgency, their struggle for work and life, were factors we had never faced before. And the disconcerting thing about the brown faces, when one was close enough to get a good eyeful, was that they looked very similar to English faces! It was the desperation, not the colour, that made them so foreign.
This discovery haunted my days in India. In China or Africa, you are not so weighed down by the same reflection; people there have the goodness to demonstrate their foreignness in every fold of nostril, lip, and eye, whereas the Aryans of the sub-continent – why, that gnarled and emaciated porter trotting along in a small dhoti with your trunk on his head – he looks surprisingly like one of the clerks in father’s bank! That snaggle-toothed chap in the comic button-up white suit, arguing in what sounds like gibberish – put him in a proper pinstripe and he’d pass for an Eastbourne estate agent! That bald chap with the heavily pocked cheeks trying to flog you an over-ripe melon – wasn’t the corporal in PTC his very spitting image?
I never entirely recovered from the shock of realizing that the English are just pallid and less frenetic Indians.
Our task was at once to defend them from the Japanese and keep them down, so that their place in the British Empire remained secure.
‘If this is bloody India, roll on fucking Dartmoor!’ Old Bamber gasped, as we milled along the platform fighting the buggers off. Bamber was an old lag and did not care who knew it – a sour man whose days inside prison gave him a natural advantage in the hurly-burly of ‘A’ Company.
‘Grab us a seat, Stubby!’ my mate Wally Page called – like me, he operated a wireless set – as we fought to get into the wooden carriages, struggling against porters and other squaddies.
‘Keep a hold on your rifles!’ Charley Meadows was yelling. ‘Tread on their feet if they get too near for comfort!’ It was all right for the sergeant. He had been out here before in peacetime and knew the ropes.
Neither Wally nor I managed to get a seat. Every little compartment was crowded with men and kit right up to the ceiling. It was better where we were, sitting on our kit in the corridor. We collapsed on our kit-bags, puffing and wiping our crimson faces. We sat there for an hour before the train moved out. For all that while, the porters and other beggars besieged us. The most alarming deformities were presented to our eyes: a child with both arms severed at the elbows, beggars ashake with alien palsies, men with blind sockets of gristle turned imploringly to Heaven, skeletal women with foetus-shaped babies at their breasts, scarecrows with mangled fly-specked limbs, deformed countenances, nightmare bodies – all aimed at us with a malign urgency.
‘Fuck off! Jao! Jao, you bastards, jao!’ we shouted. We had learnt our first and most important word of Urdu.
‘It’s like some fucking madhouse!’ Geordie said. ‘I mean, like, I’d no idea there were places like this here dump.’ He was jammed in the corridor with Wally Page and me. We did not realize then how rare corridors were in Indian trains. When Geordie brought out his cigarettes, a dozen brown hands uncurled through the window towards the packet. Geordie threw two fags out of the window and shouted to everyone to fuck off. Then we lit up. Geordie was a thin and awkward-looking bod until he played football – where he was often inside right to my right wing – on which occasions he took on a sort of terrible grace, his Adam’s apple pumping madly to keep ahead of him. At present you could almost hear his brain wrestling with the concept of India.
Geordie was hatchet-faced, most of his teeth having been removed at the age of sixteen. Wally had a beefy face, a thick neck, and a body like a young bull. The bull-body was covered with yellow hair, less bovine than chick-like; it enclosed Wally from skull to instep as if he had been dipped quickly into scrambled egg. He was apt to punctuate his speech, when chatting to pals, with short jabs to the biceps, as if perpetually testing their amiability.
‘We’ve got a right lot here!’ Geordie exclaimed. ‘You would think they’d sort of get a bit organized. Why doesn’t bloody RSM clear this rabble off the fucking platform?’
‘He’s running up and down the train like an old tart.’ This observation was not entirely true, although certainly RSM Payne was marching from one end of the platform to the other, barking commands with an anxious air. ‘He doesn’t know whether his arsehole’s drilled, bored, or countersunk,’ Wally added.
After more delays, and more parading by Payne, the train began to drag itself along the great platform towards freedom. It was late afternoon. A cross-section of the strange world rolled past us. Tea-venders with urns on their heads, uttering that endless melancholy cry, ‘Chaeeeeee wallow, chaeeeeee wallow!’; the other vendors with their stale buns and withering fruits and fifth-hand copies of Lilliput and Coronet; the three-legged dogs; the ruffians spitting and peeing from squatting positions; the IORs – India Other Ranks – below even us, yet apart from their own breed; the women washing and drinking at a water tank; the monkeys sitting or squabbling on shed roofs; the aimless people, probing into their crutches for wild life as they watched everything fade under dust; the able-bodied kids running level with our accelerating carriages, paws outstretched, still working on squeezing one last baksheesh from us!
This was years before I heard the term ‘population explosion’.
The station was tugged away behind us, its people and pungent smells lost. Instead – the maze of Bombay. Its scents! Its temples! Its wicked complacency! Here and there, we caught sight of a face at a window or a family group on a verandah, immobilized by speed. What was it like, what was the essence of life like, in those demented rooms?
From the nearby compartment of our train came a bellow of laughter. Enoch Ford was yelling at us to see what he had found, his doleful pug face wreathed with smiles. ‘Here, Stubby, dekko this!’ He pointed to an enamel notice affixed inside the sliding door. ‘“This compartment is designed to hold eight Indians” … And there’s bloody twelve of us in here, with all us kit! How do you like that for de-fucking-mocracy?’
Complaints and laughter greeted his remark. But Enoch was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist (by no means the only one in ‘A’ Company), so his comments were always taken with a pinch of salt. We all commiserated cheerfully with each other on the hells of existence and lit up another round of cigarettes.
The lavatory at the end of the corridor, for which a queue was already forming, caused more fun. It was simply a cupboard, without ventilation, in the floor of which was set a round hole. Through this hole, some light and air was admitted, and one had a fine view of the flashing sleepers below.
‘That’s your one way of escape from the Army, lads – down the plughole!’ Corporal Ernie Dutt told us good-humouredly. Ernie took everything good-humouredly – you felt in his presence that even India was partly unintentional.
Nameless slimes worked their way down the sides of the bog. Nameless moulds worked their way up. To balance in the squatting position without touching these sides with your hands, while at the same time shitting accurately through the hole, needed flair, given the violent rocking motion of the train. The hole was encrusted with misplaced turds – some of which, when dry enough, rocked their way to freedom unaided.
We left Bombay. The train forged through open country, picking up speed as though desperately concerned to cover the enormous distances now revealed. Villages were dotted here and there – never were we out of sight of one or more villages, with their attendant cattle. In comparison with the city, everywhere looked prosperous and inviting. There were water-buffaloes, tended by infants; some wallowed up to their nostrils in ponds. The landscape kept whirling and whirling away from us without changing its alien pattern, as if a huge circular panorama were being cranked outside the carriage window. We grew tired of the deception and turned to our own horseplay, spinning out anecdotes about home, consuming many cigarettes, repeating jokes about life aboard the Ironsides, whose hardships were already becoming humorous in retrospect.
‘Crikey,’ exclaimed Wally, striking Charlie Cox on the biceps for emphasis. ‘Soon as we get sorted out, I’m going to get myself a black woman! After that boat, I’ve got a lot of dirty water on my chest.’
‘You ain’t the only one, cock,’ Charlie said. Charlie was our platoon lance-jack. He was in his thirties and going thin on top, but a good man on the Bren gun, sober, thoughtful, and reliable. Charlie had taken awards at Bisley in his time.
We spent a pleasant half-hour describing to each other how the dirty water had piled up on our chests. During this conversation, darkness came down over India.
We knew and cared little of what lay ahead. Somewhere in the future lay the strong likelihood of action against the invading Japanese in Burma, but first we were due for six weeks’ acclimatization course in a mythical place called Kanchapur. We were heading for Kanchapur now; it lay beyond our ken in the onrushing night.
Our talk petered out in grumbles about hunger. The important thing was where the next meal was coming from. We sat unspeaking in corridor and compartment, hunched as comfortably as possible. One or two of us still smoked mechanically. Warm breezes poured through the open windows, stroking the short hairs of my neck. Charley Meadows and Sergeant Gowland of ‘B’ Company moved slowly down the train, seeing that everyone had their sleeves rolled down against mosquito bites; the battalion was otherwise torpid. As the sergeants reminded us, we had tins of an acid grease to apply to hands and face, in order to keep the mosquitoes away. Despite this, the insects whined about our ears; men began to clout their own faces idly. We considered the possibility of dying of malaria.
‘There’s more than one sort of malaria and most of them are deadly,’ Bamber said. ‘Dartmoor’s got one of its own what you can die of.’
‘Millions of Wogs dies of malaria every year – a bloke told me on the boat,’ Wally said.
‘Get stuffed, man, them Wogs are immune,’ Geordie said. ‘They die of it at birth, like, if they’re going to get it at all.’
‘No, they peg out by the hundred every day. This bloke told me.’
‘He was pulling your pisser, Wal. Malaria’s no worse than a cold to the Wogs, is it, Bamber?’
‘They can pass it on to you or me,’ Bamber said grimly.
The argument faded into the rattle of our progress. We sat on our kit-bags and dozed.
Occasionally, I stared past my reflection at the night, through which an occasional lamp sped. Even the odd point of light spelt an exciting mystery. And as for the scents on the breeze – they could not be analysed then, just as they have never been forgotten since.
As we drew into Indore, where we were to disembark for Kanchapur, the train filled from end to end with the bellow of non-commissioned voices, cursing, complaining, joking, as we struggled into our harness and sorted out our kit and slung our rifles and heaved up our kit-bags and perhaps smoked a last half-fag – and then jerked and staggered and climbed down to the parched concrete of a station in what was, in those days, the Central Provinces of India.
The lighting was dim except far out on distant sidings. All platforms were crowded with people. Did they live here or did they all take midnight excursions? Heads, shaven or in motley turbans, bobbed all round us, their owners pressing forward in the greatest excitement. Beyond the heads, we gained the impression of a great tumbling city, making itself grimly known by the rattle of trams and hooting of frenzied traffic, and by the glimpses of streets, ramshackle façades, and poor hutches, dissolving into the smokey night. Just the place for a few anti-British riots! Nearer at hand, porters pressed all round us, yelling their weird variant of English. We bellowed back at them, and the NCOs bellowed at us.
‘Get fell in! Come on, move! move! Put yer bloody knitting away and move! Hold on to yer rifles and get your gear off the train as quick as you like!’
Behind the NCOs moved the figures of our officers, among them our platoon-commander, Gor-Blimey, meaty and as usual aloof from what went on round him.
We got fell in. We became a unit again, a series of platoons formed up along the length of the platform. The porters disappeared. We stood at attention and were given a quick inspection; plenty of stamping, with the train now an empty shell behind us. We marched off the platform in good order, topees high, and transferred our kit to a line of three-tonners standing waiting for us outside the station. All trucks, we understood, were called gharris now that we were in India. We climbed into the gharris and the tailboards were slammed up after us. Now we were no longer military in appearance, and the salesmen moved in on us again until driven off.
Sergeant Meadows peered into our platoon truck.
‘Everyone okay in there?’
‘I get travel sick ever so easy, Charley,’ Dusty Miller said.
‘That’s better than having to march, isn’t it? Just see you spew up into your topee in proper orderly fashion, that’s all. Right now, we’ve got half-an-hour’s ride to the barracks at Kanchapur. There’ll be a meal laid on when we get there and then straight to bed, okay? Heads down as soon as possible. It’s zero-two hours now. Reveille five-thirty and a run round the block before dawn and it gets too hot to move.’
Groans all round.
‘And just remember – you’re in a tropical country. No buying any food off of these street-wallahs, understand? That way, you get maggots in your bellies. If I catch any of you trying to buy food off of the street-wallahs, I’ll have you up before the CO so fast, your feet won’t touch. Just watch what the old hands do – like Chalkie White, who’s been out here before, same as me – don’t panic, remember India isn’t Glorious Devon, and you’ll be okay. Thik-hai? Remember, the Indians are supposed to be on our side.’
Ironical cheers.
‘The Indians are supposed to be on our side. They are part of the British Empire and it is our duty to protect them. That’s what we’re out here for. Never be familiar with one. Treat the Indians with respect and don’t let the buggers near your rifles. Never remove your topees in daylight in direct sunlight – sunstroke is a self-inflicted wound and will be punished accordingly.’
We looked down at him in silence. Charley Meadows was a big man with a soft-looking face. His cheeks trembled with earnestness. He feared for us. Much of what he said to us he had said almost every day on the boat; to hear it repeated was pleasurable. It helped to keep us awake.
‘What about women, Sarge?’ Jackie Tertis asked.
‘You’re too young to ask such questions, Tertis,’ Charley said, and everyone laughed.
The truck-ride lasted over an hour. We swayed in unison as our vehicle bumped along. The convoy wound out of Indore and through a countryside of increasing wildness. The few dust-coated villages we drove through were absolutely desolate. The only life we saw, beyond the odd cow, was an occasional mangy dog, a piyard, glimpsed in the headlights of the following vehicle; it turned its red eyes on us as we passed … Every now and again, our gharri would surge forward as the driver tried to run one of the dogs over. Hate the place – hate its inhabitants – already the official message was getting through to us!
‘I don’t think I’m going to go much on India,’ Geordie announced. It was even registering on him.
The barracks loomed up, looking as deserted as the villages – except that they were guarded. They consisted of several great blocks, two-storied, with colonnades on the ground floor and wide balconies above. No lights burned, except in the mess hall, where grumpy cooks served us a meal of bully beef hash, plums and custard, and tea. As quickly as possible – and that meant pretty fast – we ate, scrambled for beds, and got our heads down.
We had our run next morning at five-thirty, as promised. The sky cracked at the edge, horizontal beams of light burnished our hairy legs. It was another military day: the country was different, the orders were familiar.
After breakfast, we paraded for the local CO to address us. He was a heavy man, with that air of authority which confers anonymity on senior officers. You could tell he wasn’t a Mendip, just by looking at him. We stood on the drill square, rigid in KD and topees, listening to the tale of how this was a soft station at which we were to get acclimatized before proceeding first to jungle training and then to the real business of driving the Jap out of Burma.
‘I know the reputation Burma has in the UK, and it is a bad reputation. Don’t be misled by it. You will soon discover how the Chindits, together with other units of the British Army, are pressing the war home against the Japanese even now. We’ve learnt by previous mistakes. The Jap is not invincible and we are going to send him home with his tail between his legs. Burma – most of it anyway – is ideal fighting country for infantry.’ A murmur in the ranks, at which the CO grew slightly more rigid.
‘I repeat – ideal fighting country! That’s where British 2 Div comes in. You will be fighting in Burma, make no mistake about that. Over the next few weeks, you are going to be turned into ideal fighting machines. I know you have courage already – our job is to see you leave for the front with fitness also on your side.
‘In that connection, I would advise you to drink very little alcohol and plenty of water. Drink your water with salt in, as much as you can take. Also, keep away from local women, all of whom have the pox. You may be offered women down in the bazaar. Refuse them. Don’t be misled. They will have the pox, so stay away from them. It’s a hot climate, so keep yourselves morally pure. That’s all.’
We dismissed.
Many of the bods wandered back to the barrack-room muttering to themselves, dazedly, ‘Morally fucking pure … What does he think we are …’
In the afternoon, we paraded at the quarter-master’s stores for new kit. All the kit with which we had been equipped before leaving Blighty had to be turned in. That included our KD, our respirators, and the hated solar topees. In exchange, we were fitted out with drab green jungle-dress, in sizes that fitted us to some extent. We also acquired steel helmets and bush hats. The latter made us look like Aussies; we swaggered about in them, calling each other ‘cobber’ and ‘me old darlin’’, but it was the CO’s speech of the morning which really preoccupied us.
‘Are there really a lot of women in the bazaar, corp?’ Wally Page asked the store corporal, as we collected mosquito nets.
The corporal paused and looked at Wally suspiciously. ‘What do you mean, are there a lot of women in the bazaar?’
‘What I say – are there a lot of women in the bazaar?’
The corporal was a thin, sandy, faded man, all rounded surfaces, as if he had spent his life in a pullover two sizes too small for him – a man designed by nature for the fusty darkness of the QM stores. We had heard him addressed as Norm. Removing a stub of cigarette from his mouth with thumb and forefinger, he looked Wally and me over contemptuously and said, ‘You young admis want to get a bit of service in! You’re fresh from the Blight, aren’t you?’
‘I was in France in 1940 – where were you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want none of your lip! You want to get some Indian service in, that’s what counts. We don’t call them women out here, malum? We call them bibis, black bibis. That’s Urdu, that is. You lot want to bolo the bhat a thora, you do!’
We had already noticed the convention: as many Urdu words were to be crammed into the conversation as possible. It was as effective as a display of medals for dismaying young upstarts like us.
Sticking to his original point Wally gave me a blow on the upper arm and said, ‘The Corp ain’t going to let on about what these black bibis are like, Stubby, is he? P’raps he don’t know much about them!’
‘They’ll give you a fucking dose of VD, mate, that’s what they’ll do, if you go mucking about with them just like what the CO warned you about,’ Norm said, pointing his cigarette stub at us in order to emphasize the horror of it. ‘You want to stay away from bibis unless you want your old man dropping off!’
‘What are we supposed to do? They can’t all have VD, can they?’
‘You want to stay away from the lot of them! Stick to the old five-fingered widow! Stick to the old five-fingered widow and you won’t go far wrong.’ He banged a pair of trousers down on the counter for emphasis. ‘Now then, you young lads, who’s next? Jhaldi jao! I ain’t got all day!’
Wally and I loped into the blinding sunshine, carrying our kit, momentarily silenced by Norm’s arid philosophy. We soon found it to be the prevalent philosophy at Kanchapur: hardly surprisingly, for it was the only distortion of, rather than a departure from, the philosophy prevailing at home. There, too, the older tried to impose on the younger the idea that going with women was to court disaster, as my mother was living witness. Even the CO’s impossible idea about keeping ourselves morally pure struck me as less unpleasant than Norm’s advice about the five-fingered widow.
The awful thing was that Norm’s philosophy prevailed. The five-fingered widow was my own constant companion. Never a day went by but a marriage was arranged.
Even on the Ironsides … But it had been harder and taken longer to come your load on the boat. On the boat, bromide was put in the tea. So the rumour maintained, and so I believed. Something had to account for the acid flavour of the char. The bromide damped down desire – you really had to work to get a hard on, whereas before it always flipped up naturally. Now we were ashore again and back to undoctored tea, and all the lusts were free to caper once more.
At Kanchapur, everything caused lusts to caper madly. The giddiest dances were brought on by the climate: the heat of the day, the warmth of the night, the voluptuousness of the breezes, the energy stored in everything we touched, stone or tree. The mystery of all we saw in those first weeks in India was also aphrodisiac: the secrets of the swarming people of the Central provinces, the sense of being nearer than ever before to the basics of life – birth, death, fathering – and the attractions of the bibis in the bazaar, where smooth young smiling faces, gleaming raven hair, and perfect shining teeth gave the lie to the filth talked in the QM’s stores.
As the days went by, the original impression that India was beyond comprehension disappeared. It could be comprehended – by its own standards. You obviously had to yield to it, as to sex.
The shithouse at the barracks was cleaned and emptied by a group of Untouchables, who bent low to their sweeping and touched their foreheads as you entered. In there, behind the stable-like door of one compartment or another, I went to a regular evening rendezvous with my dry-mouthed widow.
The rumour was that the Untouchables would bring you a bibi if you asked. You just had to say, ‘Bibi hai?’, and one would become available. But the association with shit and disease was so marked here that I never dared ask. I fantasized instead. The mere image of lifting up a sari, exploring amid its dark forbidden areas – while those white teeth smiled! – and shafting the girl up against the whitewashed back wall of the bog – a knee-trembler in the sunset! – was always enough to send your hand into a frenzy of imitation matrimony.
Those desperate wanks! It was a case of remaining mortally sane, not morally pure. It was never enough merely to lower your trousers – they had to come off, and ankle-putees and all, so that you could crouch there naked but for your shirt, frantically rubbing your shaft, as if by this nakedness you got a little nearer to the real world and further from your own useless dream. And to see the spunk spattering down into the throat of that lime-odorous pit was never satisfaction enough. Again I would wrench at my prick, red and swollen, until it spat out some of my longings a second time.
Sometimes these sessions ended in disgust, sometimes in a blessed feeling of relief. It was hateful doing it in the shitter, but nowhere else was private enough, not even your creaking charpoy, the rope beds on which we slept. As you crossed the sandy distance between barracks and shithouse, with your intention working in your mind, you could see the empty country beyond, tawny by day, blue by evening, and, as dark moved in, lit furtively all round the horizon by flickers of lightning. That world of freedom out there! The hand was a poor but essential substitute for it.
Kanchapur was only a small town. Perhaps it thrived, although to a squaddie’s eyes it wilted. The highroad from the barracks led straight to it, so that a sermon on the contrast between military order and the disarray of Indian life was readily available. We walked down from an outpost of England and civilization into a world where grotesque trees and monster insects dominated poor streets; and on those streets, tumbledown houses and shops had been built over reeking ditches.
Everything was terrible to us because it was strange. We laughed and pointed in horror at anything you would find in different form in Exeter or Bradford. The bright posters for native films, ointments, or magazines; the amazing script which flowed over shops and placards like a renegade parasitic plant; the unlikely beobabs and deodars that shaded the road; and particularly the smells and foreign tongues and wailing musics – all so closely related that they might have poured from one steaming orifice – these things seemed like the stigmata of some sleezy and probably malevolent god.
Desperately randy as ever, I tried to discuss this supernatural feeling with Geordie, when he and Wally and I were down in the bazaar one evening.
‘They’ve never been Christian here, that’s the trouble,’ Geordie said, piously. ‘I mean, like, they don’t go to church proper or sing hymns the way we do.’
‘No more do you, you hypocritical fuck-pig!’
‘Oh, aye, I know what you mean, like, but I mean I could go, like, if I wanted. Anyroad, I’ve got an Uncle and Auntie what goes to the Baptists every week. Or most weeks, leastwise.’
‘These Wogs’ve got a church down the road here, though.’
‘No, I know, aye, yes, they have that, but it must have come too late like, I mean they’ve been worshipping monkeys and all that, haven’t they, for millions of years. You know what I mean. That’s why you’ve got to be so careful with them. Folks at home just wouldn’t believe what goes on here, would they?’
‘I wish I knew what goes on here. Don’t you reckon the women must be like bloody wild animals in bed?’
‘They say the longer you’ve been out here the whiter they look. I saw a little one just now I wouldn’t sort of mind having a go at …’
‘I heard that one of their gods has got a dozen cocks!’
Geordie laughed. ‘I bet Jack Aylmer told you that.’
