The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy Read online

  ‘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 t
hat 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 accura
tely 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.