Читать книгу A Soldier Erect: or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss - Страница 6

As the last party-guests were groping their way into the blackout, I belted upstairs and shut myself in my bedroom. My dressing-gown fell off its hook as the door slammed, dropping like a dying man, one arm melodramatically over the bed. I dragged my sports-jacket off my shoulders, rolled it into a bundle, and flung it into the far corner of the room, all of ten feet away.

On the top of the chest-of-drawers stood a carved bear, given to me on my tenth birthday by an uncle lately back from Switzerland, a bag of green apples, a framed photograph of Ida Lupino, my uniform dress cap, and three woollen vests. I swept them all off and climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, where I squatted, groaning and rolling my head from side to side.

God, what sodding, shagging, scab-devouring misery it all was! The humiliation – the ignobility – of the whole shitting shower! The creepy, crappy narrowness of my parents’ life! And that was supposed to be my embarkation leave party before I went abroad to serve my king and cunting country! If that was embarkation leave, roll on bloody germ warfare!

By kneeling up a little on the chest-of-drawers, I could press my head and shoulders against the ceiling and so resemble a deformed caryatid. Thinking vicious army thoughts, I pushed one side of my face against the flaking ceiling. My jaw slumped down, my tongue dripped saliva, my eyelids flickered like an ancient horror film, revealing acres of white-of-eye. At the same time, I managed to tremble and twitch in every muscle. Jesus, what a wet dream of a party that was! Party? I asked aloud, in tones of incredulity. Paaarty? Paaaa-ha-ha-ha-rty? Paaaa-urrgh-harty?

And I thought of the other blokes in ‘A’ Company. Their genial and loutish faces drifted before my inner eye, their blunt noses and short haircuts almost welcoming … Wally, Enoch, Geordie, old Chalkie White, Carter the Farter, Chota Morris … Tonight, they’d all be getting hopelessly pissed or screwing girls – or so they would stoutly claim when we got back to barracks tomorrow. And I – I, sober and unstuffed, would have to lie to save my face, to subscribe to the infantry myth that one spent one’s whole leave yarking it up some willing bit of stuff in a pub yard. I cramped my shoulders harder against the ceiling, hoping that I might burst through the lath-and-plaster into the gales of the false roof and erupt against the lagged water-tank. You mean to say that was the best they could do in the way of a party? For me, for the conquering hero, for the pride of the sodding Mendips?

The whole idea had been a farce from the beginning. My father had never shown one flicker of enthusiasm. My brother Nelson had managed to wangle leave from Edinburgh to see me – ‘for the last time’, as he expressed it – and the farewell party had been his idea. He had jockeyed the parents into it.

‘It’s not easy in wartime,’ my father said, shaking his head. ‘You youngsters don’t understand. I’m on warden duty, too, this week.’

‘Go on, Colonel Whale would let you have a bottle of whisky, since Horry’s going overseas. It’s a special occasion!’

‘Whisky? I’m not having whisky! It’d spoil the party! You’d only get drunk!’

‘That’s what whisky is for, Daddy,’ my sister Ann said, in her long-suffering voice. We’d become good at long-suffering voices, simply through imitation.

My mother quite liked the idea of a party if she could possibly scrounge the clothing coupons to buy a pretty dress. She felt so dowdy. That was one reason why she never wanted to see anyone these days. She looked unhappily round the sitting-room which, despite many years of punishing Stubbsian teetotalism, still held a faint beery aroma, in memory of the days when the house had been an inn.

‘It really needs a good spring-clean before anyone comes in here!’ Mother said, looking willowy and wan, mutely asking always to be forgiven for some great unspoken fault. ‘The windows look so awful with that sticky paper on them, and I just wish we could have some new curtains.’

Certainly the house did appear neglected, not only because of the war, but because my mother’s nervous disease was gaining on her. Housework was beyond her, she claimed. She grew more willowy by the week, to our irritation.

Eventually, Nelson and Ann and I browbeat father into holding a cele-ha-ha-bration. Ann was sixteen; she burst into tears and said she would not let her brother go overseas unless he had a party first.

So who do you think turned up that evening, tramping dolefully up our steps and into the living-room, to sit affrontedly about in their suits and complain of the tastelessness of sausages, the decline of moral standards, and the military failings of the Russians, the Australians, the Canadians, the Americans, and the French? Why, flakey-scalped little Mr. Jeremy Church, father’s head clerk from the bank, with his cream-puff-faced wife Irene, very free with her ‘lakes’ and ‘dislakes’; and my grandma, getting on a bit now, but scoring a shrewd blow against the times in which we lived by revealing how sandbags were all filled with nothing but ordinary seaside sand; and the Moles from the grocery, prim but patriotic, bringing with them an old aunt of Mrs. Mole’s, who had been bombed out of her London flat and wasn’t afraid to tell you about it; and mother’s friend Mrs. Lilly Crane, whose husband was in something-or-other, with her daughter Henrietta, sub-titled ‘The Enigma’ by Ann; and Nelson’s current girl friend, Valerie, watching for Nelson’s signal to scram as soon as convenient; and dear old Miss Lewis from next door who still went to church every Sunday, rain or shine, although she was pushing a hundred-and-something, or could it be two hundred-and-something?; and a sexy friend of Ann’s, Sylvia Rudge. Sixteen of us all told, the only people left in the East Midlands that mortality and conscription had spared. A dead lively lot. Mother handed the dates round with her renowned Light Touch, smiling sadly in my direction as one and all offered their condolences that she was having her younger son snatched from her. More of a funeral than a celebration.

Average age of party – fifty? Ninety? Who cared? I crouched on my perch trying to work out when the visitors had last – if ever – had it in. It was hard to imagine that the females were penetrable or, if penetrable, that the males were capable of penetrating them. Did Mr. Mole occasionally manage a subterranean passage up Mrs. Mole, over a sack of demerara, under a flag-draped photo of Winnie with his two fingers in the air?

From my disadvantage point, I could watch my reflection in the mirror of the wardrobe, which stood near the door and opposite the chest-of-drawers. Now there was a born shagger, if ever I saw one, given the chance. I stuck my feet in the top (sock and handkerchief) drawer and spread my arms out along the ceiling. The sight reminded me of something. Pulling the hair down over my eyes, I pantomimed a corny crucifixion scene, with plenty of bleary and reproachful dekkos up at the plaster. ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I looked more like Hitler throwing one of his fits than Christ in final aggs.

Why this obsession with Christ, for God’s sake? Perhaps I’d been Christ in a previous existence – during my mid-teens, I had nursed a sneaking belief in the theory of reincarnation. Oh Christ, don’t let me have been Christ! I dropped the crucifixion act and made monkey faces at myself.

You could rule out all the women at the party straight away, except for Valerie, Henrietta Crane, and Sylvia. Valerie was Nelson’s bit of crumpet, so that left Henrietta Crane and Sylvia. That’ll show you how desperate I was, not to rule out Henrietta Crane straight away! The Enigma was in her mid-twenties – perhaps five years older than I. A heavily-powdered girl or was it just that she had never been dusted?, who looked as if her clothes, flesh, eyes, hair, everything, were made out of a single ambiguous material – stale sponge cake, say. Even I, despite frequent practice shots, could not imagine her undressed, or even with her hair down. Did she ever run for a bus, or fart, or burst out laughing? Henrietta Crane was the sort of girl you didn’t have to go near to know that her breath would smell of Kensitas cigarettes and Milk of Magnesia. You never find girls like that any more, thank God. They were all scrapped at the end of the war.

Which left our Syl. As the party warmed up – i.e., came to something approaching room-temperature – Ann was working our gramophone, then giving out with a Carroll Gibbons recording of That Old Black Magic, and Sylvia was standing beside her, jiffling to the tunes. It was a wind-up gramophone, brought out of the air-raid shelter now that we were not having air raids any more, so that it needed the two of them to keep it cranked and loaded. I prowled round the perimeter of the little conversations, attracted by Sylvia’s jiffle.

Her bum moved round to about ten o’clock and then worked anticlockwise to about two-thirty, after which it repeated the gambit. Since she was putting more weight on one leg than on the other, her buttocks were not quite in synch: the left was with Carroll Gibbons, while the right worked on a wilder melody of its own. What a sight! I could feel my pulses getting sludgey. Sod it, I had to have it in tonight – tomorrow, fuck knows what would happen tomorrow! My stomach gave a thin whine at the mere thought of tomorrow … At least Syl could move, unlike Henrietta Crane. Syl was small and rather shifty-looking, but by no means as ancient as The Enigma. Lumps of breast could be seen under a blue dress, although they were unable to coincide entirely with the tit-positions sewn into the dress. Of course, it would be an old dress of her mother’s cut down. I’d met Our Syl’s mother, but did not let that put me off. I smiled, she smiled, still working the buttocks in friendly fashion. Or perhaps they worked by themselves.

‘So you’re off then, Horatio?’

‘The war’s been taking too long. The War Office has sent for me at last.’

‘… “I hear your name, and I’m aflame …” Lushy song! What do you look like in your uniform? Smashing, I bet! All dressed for action!’

‘How’d you like to see me in nothing at all?’

‘Horatio, what do you mean?’

‘Stripped for action!’

‘Ooh, we’ve got a right one here!’ she told Ann.

Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a glass in her hand. ‘Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn’t let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!’

‘I only just came over—’

‘Circulate, dear – And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!’ These family pleasantries all sotto voce.

If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in Wake Island, which I had seen five times in the camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father’s instinct to have no booze during the evening. ‘It only spoils the party.’ No, come on, he didn’t really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother’s sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green glasses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old turd he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.

‘See you later,’ I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting sexual innuendo they would take.

I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.

The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake – vests, spencers, brassieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my sexual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey vulvas. The prick gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.

Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her – more for the sake of ‘A’ Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surreptitiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my arse.

‘So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta – and your mother. Didn’t have any trouble getting here in the blackout?’

‘So you’ve just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?’ That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.

‘That’s right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.’

‘Just two days, in fact.’

I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath … ‘Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight …’ ‘Yes, that’s right, just two days, in fact!’ said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.

‘And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?’

‘First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.’

‘Well, that is the Army, isn’t it? Where are you going to go?’

‘That’s a military secret, Mrs. Crane, which I am unhappily unable to reveal.’ A military secret securely kept from me, I might have added. While we talked, Henrietta Crane kept looking at her mother, rather than me, her fat little lips glistening as she sipped the burgundy. There was a faint hope that if I waited long enough (say five days) she might get pissed and shed all her moral standards; if her moral standards were in proportion to the number of her underclothes – I was convinced that such a relationship existed – then the hope was faint indeed, and more than one bottle of Church’s burgundy would be called for.

‘Will you be fighting then?’ Mrs. Crane asked. Her thin Midland accent made the verb sound the way Southerners say ‘farting’, while her tone suggested that, whatever I was going to do, it was best I did it quietly in a back street.

‘Aye, I expect I’ll be doing a bit of farting,’ I replied.

More in stupor than in anger, I said to Henrietta, ‘It’s getting stuffy in here with all this fag smoke, and the room starts to stink of beer when it warms up. Would you like to come and see our air-raid shelter out the back?’

The Old Enigma gave me a waxworky look before her eyes slid to mum.

‘We’ve got an air-raid shelter too, you know,’ she said, in a tone suggesting she thought she was committing repartee. ‘I keep my collection of little vases in there, don’t I, mother?’

‘That’s right, dear.’ Smiling at me in elucidation. ‘She keeps her collection of little vases in our air-raid shelter.’

‘Mmm, I suppose that way they don’t get broken if there’s an air raid.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Henrietta said. She uttered a short laugh as if it was a prearranged code meaning NO SEX TONIGHT.

‘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!

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.’

‘Stop talking shit and come and have a shafti at this stall,’ Wally called. Mention of any god annoyed him; he was a fervent atheist. Wally came from Dagenham, where he was a car-worker like his father, and we gathered that if God ever had the cheek to enter the factory, every manjack would have downed tools at once and walked out on strike.

‘Why don’t you pack in ordering us about, Wally?’ I asked, but Geordie was already on the move, in his submissive way.

Geordie and I made our way over a plank bridge spanning an open sewer to see what Wally was up to. He was standing in front of a wooden stall decked with magazines and pictures, mostly sugary ones of Indian film stars. Behind the little counter sat the owner, dressed in white and nodding and smiling at us, indicating his stock with a graciously inclined hand.

‘Hello, young masters, come to see what you are liking just now to buy very much! Yevery thing all at very cheapest prices, young masters, for suit the pocket. If you are looking pretty magazines with photographs of young ladies in the Yinglish language, I have very plenty what is to your likings.’

Ignoring him, Wally pointed to some pictures hanging from the beams of the stall. Each picture portrayed one fantastic personage. Their bright colours suggested that they were posters.

‘What a bunch of fucking savages!’ Wally said. ‘You were talking about their gods – well, there they are, and a right old bunch they look! You notice this cove don’t have no pictures of Winston Churchill here!’

‘You like the pictures, sahib? I hold light for you to make the close observation. Yeach and yevery one a Hindu god and lady-god!’

As we stared, Wally pointed with particular venom at one of the posters. ‘Look at this bastard here! What do you make of him, pulling his own guts out by the fucking yard! Wyhyrr, makes you want to spew up!’

He was stabbing his finger at a splendid and terrifying green figure with the face of a monkey. The monkey wore a crown and the elaborate and stiff golden garments of a prince. The garments were undone. The monkey was ripping his body apart from throat to pelvis, revealing a generalized mass of pink and red entrails. His face was distorted by something between pain and ecstasy.

‘Christ-on-fucking-crutches!’ exclaimed Geordie. ‘Them blaspheming bastards! I mean to say, anyroad, it’s bloody cruel, like, even in a fucking picture.’

‘Yes, yes, very terrible scene,’ agreed the stall-keeper, smiling from one to the other of us. ‘This is a depiction of Hanuman, young gentlemen, who fought for Rama and also Rama’s beautiful wife, the lady Siva. He is also called the Monkey God.’

‘He’s marvellous in a revolting way,’ I said. ‘What did he do?’

‘Sahib, Hanuman is fighting for the lady Siva when she is keeping by Ravana.’ He performed a little sword-play with his hands.

‘Who’s Ravana when he’s at home?’

‘Ravana is the King of the Rakshasas.’ His smile suggested he did not mind stating the obvious for us.

Geordie burst into laughter. ‘Ask a daft question, Stubby, get a daft bloody answer!’

But I was fascinated by the monkey god. I knew how he felt. Wally was furious that I was taking the matter seriously.

‘What do you fucking care what this monster did? The bloke who painted that ought to be put away for keeps!’ He thumped an adjacent picture, which showed an impossibly pink and rounded young lady with curly nostrils, busily balancing on one foot on a green leaf in a bright blue pool. ‘Who’s the pusher, Johnny?’

‘Yes, yes, this lady is Lakshmi, sahib, the lady-god of fortune and also the pleasure of the god Vishnu, according to our religion of Hinduism, sahib. If you like buy one or two picture very cheap?’

‘I don’t want to buy the bloody things, do I? I’ve got no time for all that rubbish. It’s a load of fucking junk, if you ask me.’

‘The pictures demonstrate items in our religion, sahib.’

‘Well then, that’s your look-out, mate, ain’t it? Just don’t try to convert me to the bloody nonsense, that’s all!’

Ganesh, the elephant god, hung there too, with diamonds in his trunk. Wally knocked him and sent him swinging, to show what he felt about Hinduism.

‘Come on, Wally, like – I don’t think you ought to take the piss out of the poor sad!’ Geordie said. ‘He’s got his living to earn.’

‘How much? Kitna pice ek picture?’ I asked the stall-keeper.

‘Gods and lady-gods all one low price, sahib, only five rupee yevery painting. Very lovely things to look upon, in the day or even night-time. Five rupee. No, sir, you young gentlemen now from the barracks, I know – four rupee! For you, four rupee!’

Wilkinson was trying to move Page on, arguing in his vague way. He now tried to move me on as well – not that I had any intention of paying four or five rupees. Seeing us about to move away, across the plank over his well-flavoured ditch, the stall-holder called that he would accept three rupees.

‘Tell him to fuck off,’ Page said. ‘All that sort of thing gives me a pain in the arse. It’s downright sinful! Let’s go and get something to drink!’

‘Yes, let’s go and get something to drink,’ Geordie said.

‘I’ll have a drink when I feel like it, and not before. You two piss off if you’re so bloody thirsty! Give you one rupee for the monkey god, Johnny!’

The stall-holder came to the plank and bowed his head, regarding me at the same time under his brows. ‘You very hard man, sahib, me very poor man with wife to keep and many many chikos to give food, and mother also very sick, all about her body. This is real good Indian painting, sir, for to take home to your lady in England.’

‘I’m not going home. I’m here to stay. I’ll give you one rupee.’

‘Come on, Stubbs, fuck it – you can buy three beers for one rupee!’

‘Aye, tell him to stuff it up his jumper!’

I gave up and yielded to my friends’ gentle advice. As I moved across the plank, the stall-keeper followed, one hand out.

‘All right, sahib, I take one rupee. Come, come, you give!’

Page clouted himself on the head several times. ‘You don’t want that fucking thing, Stubbs! You cunt, come and have a drink! I ain’t buying you a beer if you waste your money on that load of old rubbish!’

But I went back across the ditch and waited patiently while Hanuman was rolled up inside a sheet of frail pink paper.

As I came away with it, Wally and Geordie made pantomimes of staggering about in disgust, clutching their throats and vomiting into the ditch.

‘Don’t bring that horrible thing near me, Stubbs!’ Wally said. ‘You must have more bollocks than brains! We haven’t been out here five minutes and you’re going fucking native already. Isn’t he, Geordie?’

‘Besides, if he’d hung on, he could have got the thing for half a rupee,’ Geordie said. ‘It’s really a terrible country – you have to say it!’

‘Git your loin cloth on, Stubbs, you jungley wallah!’

‘I’ll fling you into the fucking ditch, Page, along with the other turds, if you don’t shut your arse! Let’s go and get a bloody beer!’

After a bloody beer, we went to the cinema. Being a garrison town, Kanchapur boasted three cinemas. One, which showed only native films, was Out of Bounds. The other two, the Vaudette and the Luxor, were in bounds and changed their programme every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. Wally, Geordie, and I went to the Luxor, sitting among the peanut shells in the front row but one, to wallow in The Girl He Left Behind in which – have I remembered aright after all these years? – Alice Faye sang A Journey to a Star and No Love, No Nothin’.

Later, back in the aimless main street, night hung like Technicolor in the trees. The promptings of lust were on every side. Kanchapur’s street lights, infrequent and yellow, were besieged by a confetti of insects. Every shop was open. Soldiers apart, there were not so many people about, yet the impression was of bustle. A man in a dhoti spat a great gob of betel-juice at our feet as we passed.

‘Dirty bastards!’ Wally said automatically.

We made our way to a restaurant and sat out on the verandah bellowing for a waiter with plenty of fine deep-throated ‘Jhaldi jaos’. We ordered five eggs-and-chips and beer three times. It felt good to be sitting there, chatting idly about the film as we ate, occasionally waving to a friend in the street, and slapping the odd mosquito that settled on our fists.

Geordie set his knife and fork down and leaned back in the wicker chair.

‘Aye, well, that was almost as good as getting stuck up Alice Faye.’

‘I’d rather have Ida Lupino.’

‘Ida Lu-fucking-pino? Balls, she’s got no figure – Alice Faye’s lovely, built like a brick shithouse!’

‘She’s just an old cow. Even you can see that, Geordie!’

While this debate on female standards of beauty was in progress, Wally leant forward and grabbed my rolled-up picture of Hanuman, which was lying on the table.

‘Let go of that, you bastard!’ I seized him by his curly yellow wrist. He laughed, pulled back, and crunched the cylinder. I hit him in the chest with my left fist.

The next moment, we were on our feet and confronting each other. I was so angry, I hardly took any notice of Geordie, who was shouting feebly at us both to sit down.

‘Come outside, you lousy thieving bastard, and I’ll teach you to maul other people’s property about!’

‘You couldn’t teach a pig to piss, you ill-tempered bastard! I only wanted to look at the fucking thing!’

‘What did you screw it up for then, you interfering cunt?’

Wally went all quiet and crouchy, as if he was about to jump on me.

‘Don’t you call me a cunt, you Midland prick, you, or I’ll sort you out!’

‘You and who else?’ I waved a fist in his face.

Waiters were running up, fluttering their hands about us and cooing with alarm. People at other tables were jumping up, and Geordie was trying to get us away. ‘For Christ sake, you couple of dumb ’erbs, do you want the fucking Redcaps on us? Pipe down! Pay your bloody money and let’s get out of here!’

He picked the battered roll of picture off the floor where Wally had thrown it and, with much ushering and swearing, managed to get me out of the restaurant. Wally had marched out ahead of us. I pushed past him, knocked down Geordie’s detaining hand, and hurried away from them into the bazaar. God knows, I was prepared to swallow the old working-class ethic whole if I could, but there were times when it stood revealed in all its shoddy triviality! I could be as stupid as the next bloke, but Wally’s stupidity was an invasion of privacy!

Clutching my maligned picture, I walked on, although I could hear Geordie calling to me. My regret was that I had not given Wally a bunch of fives in the mush while I had the chance.

My temper was troubling me, as it had ever since my early school days. The tendency to get involved in fights had already upset my army career. I was sixteen when I left home and went down to London to seek out Virginia Traven, my great love. Without her, I floundered in the war-dazed city. What pavements I trod were nothing to me. All the streets under the sky of 1939 held only frustration and anger.

My pride had not allowed me to return meekly home from London. Had my father ever come down to find me, to collect me, to take me back – yes, then I would gladly have returned, and felt no defeat. But he never came. When I realized that he never was coming, I marched into the Army Recruiting Centre in Leicester Square, lied about my age, and signed on for what was then the traditional ‘seven-and-five’ – which is to say, seven years’ service on the Active List and five on the Reserves.

I was posted to the 2nd Royal Mendips, then in training near Wells and busily covering most of Somerset on foot, stomach, or whatever parts of the body best suited official inclination. When the regiment was shipped over to France in the New Year of 1940, I went with them. There we proceeded to acquaint the countryside round Arras with the stomachs, feet and other organs which had proved so popular in Somerset. To break this routine, I volunteered to go on a radio-operator’s course which, I understood, would take me to Paris. Paris! Gay Paree! The very name evoked a knowing leer on any soldier’s face.

When the fate-deciding list came through, I was not dispatched to Paris. I found myself instead in a North-facing Nissen hut in Prestatyn, on the North Wales coast. The power-that-be had discovered that no man could become proficient in the mysteries of 19 set unless he had been exposed to the ice-filled gales that blew in off the grey waters of Liverpool Bay. While I was undergoing this mixture of technology and meteorology, my mates in the BEF were suddenly plunged into heavy defensive fighting in Belgium, as Hitler’s then invincible divisions rolled through the Low Countries towards France and Paris.

The Mendips were involved in the fighting around Louvain, as a thousand heavy tanks rolled down on them. Many of the friends I knew were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans, while the mangled units retreated to Dunkirk and the coastal ports as best they could. The bad news seeped back to Prestatyn. Guilt and betrayal seemed to be my lot. I got drunk whenever I could afford it, and was always involved in fights.

At the same time, the death of my friends made me a sort of hero. I used to claim – the feeblest and worst of jokes – that France would never have fallen if I had been there to sort things out. Only movement comforted my confusion and, in those terrible young summer days when France was collapsing, movement was everywhere in Britain. The steam trains pulled in and out of stations; evacuees went towards unknown foster-parents; hands waved; women fluttered damp handkerchiefs, and were at once forgotten at unknown destinations. The next day, in another place, you went on parade with a hangover and a bloody eye.

Having completed my operator’s course, I eventually rejoined the unit, then being reformed after Dunkirk. They were short of trained men, and I was given my first stripe. We moved up to the wilds of Yorkshire. Desperately hard up for equipment, we exercised over hills and dales, or endured an endless series of assault courses. The war laboured on, and for some unfathomable reason the seasons took turn and turn-about just as in peacetime, and the invasion of Britain never came.

After a year, I got my second stripe – only to be busted back to signaller a month later for fighting with a private, a great stupid Green Howard I came up against in Richmond. More postings, more trains pulling out of dim platforms, more khaki uniforms in country places. I went back up to corporal, was busted again, and for the same reason – I was drunk and got involved in some prickish quarrel. It did not seem to matter. It was then that one of my mates turned my old joke against me – ‘You’re dead right, Stubby – if you’d been over in Belgium fighting the Jerries, the French would never have given in!’

I couldn’t bear having the piss taken out of me. Remote and evil things happened all over the globe; the blackness in Europe spread eastwards and down into the Balkans. People died and cities burned. In England, there was no Gestapo, only broken sleep and patched underclothing, and lorries rolling throughout the barricaded night. I didn’t care! War is strange: it throws people all together and yet it isolates them from each other. Behind a uniform you can be very impersonal. Even a knee-trembler is generally a solitary gesture against loneliness.

Now I was sick with loneliness again in Kanchapur. How long, oh Lord, how long to the next knee-trembler?

With the taste of the beer and the quarrel with Wally Page still on my tongue, I walked towards the far end of the town, past a row of drivers, each sitting almost motionless in his frail carriage behind a withered horse. Every carriage burned a dim light, every driver called out to me – lazily, coaxingly, seductively – offering to take me where I wanted to go. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Behind the last tonga, half-hidden by tree-shadow, stood a quiet young man. He now stepped forward quickly to my side, grasping my arm with his warm brown hand. His face was heavily pockmarked and he wore a white shirt hanging over blue shorts. A serious-looking young man. With an air of spiritual inquiry, he asked, ‘Why you are walking, sir? You like nice lady for fornication?’

I looked round. Only the tonga-wallahs were within earshot, and they had surely heard it all before.

‘Where is this lady?’

‘Woh, sir, she right close by! Two street only, very near, very nice place! She lie for you now, sir, very pretty. You can come with me look see, sir – just come look see!’ He spread his fingers wide before him, as if to show how open and above-board everything was, her legs included.

‘What’s she like?’ Were we talking about a flesh-and-blood woman?

He could have looked no more serious had he been describing the CO’s daughter. ‘She very lovely girl, sir, pretty face and hands, and body of fine shape and light colour, very very sweet to see.’

‘I bet! What age is she?’

He held my wrist again. ‘You come – I take, and if you no like, no bother, doesn’t matter one litter bit. I t’ink you will like, sir, you see – very nice girl, same many years as you and entirely no ageing in the parts of the body!’

In this broken language of courtship and the fragrance of the evening was something irresistible. Morally pure, my arse! With my heart hammering as if I were already on the job, I said, ‘Okay, just a dekko.’

Of course she would be an old bag …

‘Once you see, sir, you like! Making you much excitement.’

So I delivered myself up for the first time into the hands of the treacherous Indian. Once he saw that I was his, he wasted no more words, moving back among the trees with a gesture that I was to follow him. As soon as he stopped speaking his mottled English, he seemed much more alien, and I went in constant expectation of a cosh on the head.

I had to pursue him down a side lane between two shops, where it was doubly dark and stinking. Narrow though the lane was, people stood there in the blackness. A man called softly to my man, and was answered. A hand slyly felt me as I passed. Even then, on that negligible venture, I was taken by an impulse to dive deeper into this morass of living, to sink into the warrens of India, to disappear for ever from view of all those who had claims on me.

The side lane curved and led into a back street – a street very different in atmosphere from the main one. The main street had a sort of artificial cantonment order to it. This one was narrower, busier, more foetid, less easy to comprehend. This was the real thing, clamorous. We moved into its streams of people, women gliding, porters proceeding at a slow trot, animals going at their own pace. Nobody took any more notice of me, following my man as in a dream, than they did of the sacred cow ambling among the little stalls or the men on ricketty balconies above us, gobbing betel-juice down into the gutters below. The acrid odours, that whining music, reinforced the lustful images in my head. Surely people like this must be at it all the time!

My young man spoke to a boy. The boy said something quickly and went darting away ahead, through the miscellaneous crowd, running as if a tiger was at his heels. My sense of adventure grew; I imagined knives being sharpened for me.

‘Where is this place you’re taking me?’

‘Very soon we come, sir, very near.’

At a corner, a huge deodar was growing. It was difficult to make out in the night and confusion and conflict of shadows. We dived down a side road and from that into a dark, sweet-smelling court. I paused in its black mouth until poor yellow lights gleaming in upper windows allowed me to get my bearings. There was an old tree here, immensely twisted, fainting in the arms of twisted old houses. Silent men were sitting huddled under the tree, smoking – at first I took them for goats, until I made out their cigarette-ends, which glowed intermittently with their breathing.

My young man tenderly clasped my wrist again, perhaps as much feeling my pulse as detaining me.

‘Lovely girl, sir, waiting for you here with sundry embraces, just now, sir, in this room close by.’

Again a whispered word with a half-seen stranger, as we stepped between pillars supporting a balcony or a roof, pushed past a stable containing an animal of some kind (I could hear it moving restlessly), and came to a door. In the wall beside the door, a tiny candle burned in a candle-sized alcove. A faded blossom lay beside the candle, while night insects hovered round the flame. The door was slightly open.

‘Come in, sir, come in!’

The young man pushed the door wider. I could not make out the interior at all, so dimly was it lit. Hesitating on the threshold, and still being able to hear the movements of the animal we had passed, I imagined at first that I was looking into a stable, with a high wooden partition barring most of the space. There seemed to be no furniture. Two or three people – including a boy who might have been the boy who ran on ahead – were standing waiting in the dimness. One of them called out huskily in an Indian tongue.

As my eyes grew used to the light, I made out a face near the ceiling of the interior, staring down at me through ironwork at the top of the partition. At that moment, one of the people in the shadows lifted up an oil-light, so that the watching face took on detail.

How could I describe it? Even next day, it was like a face in a dream. Its dark liquid eyes and its mouth, the black hair neatly gathered back, were common property of millions of Hindu girls. Yet the excitement and imagined danger of the circumstances were so intense that I felt at once I knew her character: pitiful, pliable, timid, passionate. Her face was naked to me in the light.

While the light was still brushing shadows of bars across her face, she became an individual for me – my first foreign woman! Was this the girl they had brought me to? Then I loved her. Sex I wanted, but far more than that I wanted love!

It seemed that my young man was having an argument with the people in the room – for it was a room, and the girl was looking down at me between the bannisters of a wooden staircase. In the delay, she and I stared across at each other.

As we stood there, a wash of brilliance swept round the court outside. It picked out the senile old men and the doomed tree, then lost them in shadow again. Pillars, vines, decaying houses, stable – then the beams of light swung and caught me on the threshold of the room. I turned. As I did so, my young man pushed me from behind. I was outside, in the court again, and felt the door slammed behind me. I heard a bolt clatter home. Two MPs with truncheons jumped out of their jeep and ran towards me.

It counted in my favour that I made no attempt to escape or struggle. As they escorted me towards the jeep, my only concern was to protect the rolled picture of Hanuman, still clutched in my hand.

Out of Bounds! It was one of those childish phrases that made the Army seem like public school. With their arbitrary rules and the cunning mixture of moral impositions and brute force which constituted authority, the two institutions were much alike: although there was marginally more liberty and less swearing in the Army.

I told the Redcaps that I had not realized I was out of bounds. They were openly contemptuous and disbelieving – that was their profession. They demanded to look at Hanuman. I unrolled the poster and let them sneer at it. Even when I said it had only cost me ten annas, they remained disdainful.

My salvation was that I was fresh to India. My knees weren’t brown. I had got no service in. Otherwise my feet would not have touched. They would have had my guts for garters. They had it in for me now. If they ever found me in the brothel area again, I would never know what hit me. I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

After these admonitions, to which I responded by standing more and more rigidly to attention, the MPs drove me through town and back to the barrack gate. They studied me in silent commiseration as I climbed out and made my way back past the guardroom towards ‘A’ Block.

The bastards! Back in the barrack-room, I was too brassed off to speak to anyone, or to do anything more than climb into bed and get my head under my mosquito net. We were off to Burma soon – precious little chance we would have of getting a woman there. We should get ourselves fucking killed and that was all. What right did the Army have to keep me away from that lovely little bibi on the stairs?

It was impossible not to conjure up her face, looking like voluptuousness itself between the bars. Under the blankets, my damned thing rose, the quick-couraged MP-defier. When I clutched its sturdy shaft and tried to think what it would be like to push it up the imagined vulva of that half-imaginary girl, the necessity for a quick rub overcame me. Each stroke was to be the last but, Christ, what else was there in life? Although I grudged the old five-fingered widow her easy task, there was a certain relief in feeling the blobs of spunk cut a swathe over chest and stomach.

In those days, it was easier to come than think.

Next morning before parade, I stuck the crumpled picture of the monkey god on the wall beside the bed, next to the pin-ups of Ida Lupino and Jinx Falkenberg.

‘You know, Stubby, mate, I’m sure the old sweats as knows India are dead right about what they say about women, like,’ Geordie said after parade, waving his hands and his Adam’s apple in distress at having to say something to me I might not like.

‘What do they say, Geordie?’ He had taken care to get me on one side to speak. Word that the MPs had brought me home had evidently seeped through to him.

‘Well, you know same as I do – that you can get into trouble, like, if you sort of go with a pusher, like …’

‘Come on, Geordie, you were telling us down in the bazaar that you saw a bit of crumpet you fancied.’

‘Oh, I know, but I didn’t really mean that. I mean, I wouldn’t really … I mean, we do seem to have everything in barracks as we could want, don’t us, like? I mean, quite apart from all the parading and training. They say there’s two games of football a week. Well, two or three, I think the notice said. We can work up a sweat, you know, me on inside right and you like on the wing, just like at Aldershot …’

‘Sure, and then guard-duty at night. Oh, it’s a full life okay, a great life if you don’t weaken. You aren’t trying to tell me I ought to keep myself morally pure, are you?’

‘No, no, it’s hard to explain. You know I don’t want to get at you, but you are my mate, after all, Stubby. I just mean that even without pushers around, it’s a pretty full life …’

Perhaps he ran out of words. Perhaps he saw the look on my face.

‘You think I’m a bit of a cunt, Stubby, don’t you? Be honest now!’

‘’Course I don’t, mucker! …’

Poor old Geordie! There was a lot in what he said. Our regimented life was designed to be sufficient in itself. And he hadn’t even mentioned our two-day exercises, when we ran and crawled round Central Provinces as we once had round Arras and Somerset …

This rigorous existence was not enough. Every situation generates its legends, and our legend was Burma. We were attuned to every word about it, to every whisper that trickled through, just as we were to messages from that other distant country of sexuality.

Burma was hundreds of miles away from Kanchapur. Mandalay was as distant from us as Toronto from Miami or London from Kiev, and the route there lay across mountain chains and enormous rivers; but our ears were turned in that direction. At this time, late in 1943, the Japanese occupied almost all of Burma and were moving towards Assam. They still had the legend of invincibility round them, which the Chindits were only just denting. They were the fearsome yellow tribes who survived in jungles where nobody else could.

Kanchapur had its share of broken-down old men (as they seemed then – I suppose they would be in their mid-thirties) who had come through operations with Wingate, or through 6 Brigade’s attack on Akyab earlier in the year. From these men, stories of terror came.

‘You don’t want to listen to them,’ Charley Cox said. ‘Now Mountbatten’s arrived, things are going to be different out here. The British have never been permanently beaten yet. That’s how we won our Empire. Ain’t that right, Dusty?’

Miller, who was the platoon funny man, assumed a blasé officer’s voice to say, ‘You’re bally right, Lance-Corporal Cox. We’ll give these little yellow bath-tubs what for, eh, what?’

‘There’s more men out here now to fight the Japs, you see,’ Charley explained.

The Fourteenth Army – in which the Mendips found themselves – was gathering strength and preparing to knock the Japs right out of Burma. But a feeling of misgiving persisted. The Russians were beating back the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Americans were beating back the Japs in the Pacific, our own Eighth Army were pushing up Italy – Nelson was with them – and the Italians had chucked it in and come in on our side. The war in Europe looked as if it would be over one day. The war in South-East Asia had hardly begun.

Between the route marches, the football games, the evenings in the canteen, were spaces with which the Army could not cope. In those intervals, whispers of combined operations and landings on the hellish Burmese coast worked in us like yeast.

The other ferment I was able to deal with personally.

It happened that, two or three days after the MPs ran me back to barracks, No. 2 Platoon was on riot exercise. As usual, there were rice famines in parts of India, and rioting against the British in some of the big cities, Indore included. Riot exercise was a matter of marching about in Kanchapur, not letting the Wogs into the main street, and so on. We were equipped with pick helves for the purpose.

In the crowd, I saw the quiet young man who had led me to the girl. He was clutching a book under his arm. Either he did not see me or did not recognize me, but I took the sight of him as a guarantee that the girl – possibly his sister – was still available. For the rest of the day I could not stop thinking of her. Oh, she was beautiful! It was so much more than a fuck I wanted! To pour my heart out – my ambitions – my dreams … and to hear the dreams of that exotic creature!

I was determined to have it in before we left Kanchapur. Neither MPs nor Geordie should stop me. That evening, I had a shower, changed into a freshly dhobied suit of jungle greens, and buzzed off down to the bazaar on my own. The sky was purple, with bars of gold at the horizon, and the fruit-bats were stirring in the tallest jacarandas. I headed for where the tonga-wallahs idly waited.

The quiet young man was not on duty yet. Very well, then I would find my own way to my beloved! This time I would make bloody sure the Redcaps did not nab me. I slipped behind the trees and down the side lane, and at once a different awareness overcame me. No longer was I alone and lonely, a mere debased squaddie; my life was the stuff of romance and I walked in exotic and oriental paths to meet my sumptuous love!

There again was that other crowded street, packed with people, filled with delicious smells. Now to find that little back court! And if I didn’t, there must be plenty of adventure in other courts, so – so fecund was life and circumstance here. Fecund! My God, yes, the place was fecund, so fecund it was impossible to understand how everyone did not respond to it! I thought briefly, with contempt, of the constipated little CO with his silly speech about being morally pure. The sod was dead from the balls up!

After only one wrong turning, I found myself standing again in the amazing courtyard, where the twisted tree died against the twisted houses. Which door? Of course, the candle and the flower! The candle burned there within its niche, the blossom was fresh: a white flower lying on its side, without a stem. In an hour, it would be withered.

I knocked on the door. I was almost shitting myself. Perhaps nobody would come. A bolt clanked, the door opened slightly. A grunt within. The door closed again. I stood there. It opened again, again closed. Could they be going to phone the cops? Phone? In this dump!

I had half made up my mind to leave when a chiko emerged from the door. It was the kid who had run on ahead last time I was here.

‘You like lady, Johnny?’

‘Yes – the one I saw the other night!’

‘Police, Johnny. Many trouble, police come, many hit, all cry!’ He went through a pantomime suggesting that the Battle of Bannockburn had been fought on his doorstep.

‘The police didn’t see me coming here, I promise. Where’s the bibi?’

‘Thirty rupee, Johnny.’ He held out his hand.

‘Thirty rupee – you’re off your fucking head, Johnny! Look, me no pips, no stripes, just BOR, malum? Poor man!’

‘You rich man! Give thirty rupee, get lady.’ He might not speak English as well as his big brother, but he was a tough little sod in argument. Eventually I knocked him down to ten rupees for a short time. Only when he had the notes in his hand did he let me through the door. When we were inside, he bolted it behind us.

Two oil lights were burning on the floor, beside an old man who sat in a ragged turban nursing a hen. A stick lay beside him. Hen and man regarded me with mistrustful eyes as the boy, with a muttered word, took up one of the lamps and moved to the stairs.

I looked about me. What a ruinous place it was! Bare as a barn! A small door at the foot of the stairs had a grill in it. I peered through the grill. I was staring into the interior of a dim-lit shop. Perhaps it was a tailor’s of sorts, for bundles of fabrics stood on the stairs, impeding our progress. I looked eagerly ahead, tripping up as I climbed.

The boy led me to a door and stopped.

‘Lady in here, Johnny.’

Gently – nervously – I thrust open the door. There was a woman inside, the end of her sari over her head. The lamp, another small wretched thing, stood behind her, so I could only see that she was beckoning me. I grabbed the boy’s light and held it up so that its beams fell on the woman’s face.

‘This isn’t her, you little bastard! Who’s this old bag?’

It was probably his mother. She was aged and wrinkled, her gesture of welcome a grotesque parody of seductiveness. In a fury of disappointment, I began to bellow at them both. They grew alarmed and screamed at each other.

‘Okay, Johnny, I get. You no make shout, police come, many hit, all cry!’ He went through a repeat of the Bannockburn massacre.

‘You’ll fucking cry if you don’t get the girl!’

He came back with her along the landing. She was barefoot. She looked fearfully at me, and my anger went at once. Christ, she was young!

The mere sight of her was enough to wake desire in me. How long had it been! Those liquid eyes again! She looked absolutely terrified – indeed, they all did. The old woman was plucking at my clothes and saying something incomprehensible to me which the boy did his best to translate.

‘She say, you no fuck, she suck.’

‘Look, Johnny, you’ve got the ten rupees, thik-hai? Then piss off, will you, fuck off!’

‘No, no, no fuck off, Johnny. This girl she small hole, you understand? Small hole?’ He showed me with two fingers. ‘She call out, police come, many hit, all cry!’ Bannockburn re-fought.

‘I’m not going to hurt her!’ What sort of place was this? I grabbed the girl by a fragile arm and pulled her into the room. I slammed the door, yelling to everyone to stay outside. Without any further hesitation, the girl undressed. When she was naked, she saluted me with both hands together and motioned to the bed.

‘You first,’ I said, gesturing. I could hardly speak. Had she got any hair on it? Her breasts were so small and sweet – the size of mangoes. As I pulled my uniform off, I could feel my prick come up and knock against my belly. The heat was stifling in the little room – it was no more than a cupboard; there was no window to it. I began to sweat.

Watching me, the expression of fear still on her face, the girl climbed on to the bed, which was a hard wooden platform with a rug over it. She went on hands and knees and waggled her bum at me as I approached.

‘Don’t be filthy, you little cow,’ I said tenderly, sliding my hand between her thighs. ‘I don’t want your arse.’ I crawled beside her.

In those days, I was so ignorant about positions that I never thought it possible to have intercourse like the animals; I mistakenly assumed that she wanted me up her back passage. So I turned her over and looked at her face. Her cheeks were burning; perhaps she was blushing.

‘You’re beautiful!’ I said. She did not answer, just looked helplessly at me, her lips slightly parted, her hair combed neatly back, and tied so that a tail of it hung over her shoulders, oiled jet black. I stroked her breasts, her hips, and a twinge of anxiety took me in case I shot my bolt before I got in. I slid my arm down into her crotch. Her little twot was burning hot and became juicy as I rubbed it.

She said something in a whisper, sighed, and made one or two little voluptuous movements, as if to herself. The scent of her was delirious. I smelt the coconut oil or whatever it was as she leant forward and rolled the french letter I had brought down the length of my prick.

I had the image of her cunt in my mind – my fingers supplied it – and I longed to gaze on it, but lust was spurring me on. I pressed her back and lay for a moment with my body against her. She was so small and so hot, and the whole atmosphere of her, merged with my dreams and desires – even the intense fantasy-like strangeness of our surroundings – was so overpowering that I did not actually realize that I had slid into her and that we were tangled together fucking until her slight pelvic thrusts made me aware of the fact. That mere awareness – or the blazing heat of her, which ran through and through me – or the sheer delight of clasping a female body – or the joy of getting it in at last – or the blossoming of life itself into cunts and flowers and orifices – was enough to slip me into a spurting world of orgasm.