Forgotten Life Read online

  A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. He’s an important man. At the moment it’s our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.

  With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting – at present it’s Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.

  A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.

  Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. It’s our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.

  Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards don’t smoke.

  Bert’s my relief. He’s working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of ‘S’ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up writing home long ago – part of the myth of the Forgotten Army). They are no longer astonished that I can send and transmit Morse almost as rapidly, as stylishly, as they. What they can’t get over is the fact that I appear to be enjoying myself. Nor can I.

  Love to all.

  3

  Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and took them over to the window sill, to tuck them in Box File No. 2, in which he kept anything of his brother’s relating to the war period.

  ‘Good letters,’ Sheila said. She had sat immobile, as was her way, to read them through. ‘Joe’s excitement comes through. He seems to have had no qualms about going to war.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Glancing out of the window, he saw Alice Farrer in her front garden next door. Holding her green watering-can, she was sprinkling the roots of her pseudoacacia. It was her excuse to have a good look at what was happening in the street. The fact that very little ever happened did not deter her. She used her nose as a tracking device to follow two girl students who walked slowly along the pavement, talking, completely unaware of her.

  ‘He had made up his mind by then there were worse things than going to war.’ He spoke as he turned back into the room. He was fascinated by Alice Farrer only to the extent that he could say honestly that nothing she did would ever interest him.

  ‘Such as what, exactly? His unhappy childhood?’

  ‘That, too, I suppose. But I was thinking of an incident he once told me about. Maybe he told me twice. It was about something which had made a great impression on him. It took place outside Calcutta, and so it would have happened just before the first of these letters to Ellen. In any case, the incident was too horrific for him to wish to report it to a little sister.

  ‘The group he was in was led by the Sergeant Sutton he mentions in one of Ellen’s letters. After travelling across India from Bombay, they reached a transit camp somewhere on the outskirts of Calcutta. Joe gave me a vivid account of the squalor, and of seeing a water buffalo dying in the railway marshalling yards – shunting yards, we used to call them – surrounded by vultures, who set about tearing it to shreds while it still had life.

  ‘Owing to some confusion in the rail timetables, not uncommon in those days of crisis, with the Japanese army at the gates of India, Joe’s detachment had to leave their train and go to this camp somewhere nearby. It was just a collection of ragged tents beside a railway embankment, no signs of discipline or cleanliness anywhere. Full of flies and filth.

  ‘Joe and Sutton went to the office to apply for money to continue their journey to Burma. I suppose at that time the movement of troops would be towards the east only, across India to the war zone. He said it was like a peristaltic movement. Everyone was drawn into it. But he and Sutton found that this camp was full of deserters, who had got that far and then jumped off trains at Calcutta, rather than face the Japanese. Deserters ran the camp. There was nowhere they could go – they certainly couldn’t make it back to England. So they stayed put, waiting for the war to finish. If the camp was inspected, the deserters simply melted into Calcutta, where no one could find them. They lived by making false returns to various legitimate units nearby. The money was spent on food, booze, and whores. The whores came into the camp – quite against army regulations, of course.’

  He glanced out of the window again. ‘The old bitch next door is watering her tree once more. Anyhow, Joe and Co had to stay in the deserters’ camp that night. The camp was run by a renegade RSM, a Glasgow man, an alcoholic. He approached Sergeant Sutton, inviting him to stay there, since he wanted a sergeant under his command. Joe thought there was some talk of a drug racket, I don’t know what.

  ‘They had a crisis in the camp. I’ve never told you this, have I? The RSM had an NCO with him who was severely ill from amoebic dysentery and complications. He died the night Joe was in the camp. The RSM sent a detail of four men out at midnight with storm lanterns to bury the body under a railway bridge, where it wouldn’t be discovered. They hadn’t got a padre for any kind of service, because all padres were officers, and an officer would have had them rounded up and shot.

  ‘Sergeant Sutton said to Joe and the others, while the burial was going on, “Do you want to stay here or go on to Burma?” All the detachment, fresh out from England, were profoundly shocked by what was happening. Of course, the idea of Burma was also not to be taken lightly. So Joe said to Sergeant Sutton, “What do you think, sarge?”

  ‘And the sergeant said, “I’d sooner be killed in battle than stay in this fucking sink of iniquity another night.” Next morning, they marched back to the Calcutta station – Howrah, I think it was called. They swore to the RSM that they would say nothing about the illegal camp, and of course they kept their word.

  ‘Joe derived a profound moral from that episode. I’ve always thought of him as very courageous – not heroic, I don’t mean, but courageous – and he probably saw the war itself as somehow cleaner or more honest than the fear which was the reason for the camp’s existence. He saw how easily men could deteriorate.’

  Sheila had moved over to the window and was gazing out at the sunlit street.

  ‘It makes a good story. Terrifying. It would make a play. Did the RSM threaten them before letting them leave? With a gun, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘I think he’d have to. Burying the body at dead of night is a nice touch, but they could have left the body out for the vultures. Would that be a quicker way of disposing of the body?’

  ‘Sheila, this really happened.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  When she had gone downstairs to get on with her own work, and he heard her typewriter tapping in the room below his, he thought of how her mind was at work on the story. It would probably surface, with added drama, in a future Kerinth novel. He merely wanted to strengthen the story, not add to it. He wanted it clear and as it had been, over forty years ago. Yet even he, telling it to Sheila, had added something. The bit about the whores coming into the camp seemed all too likely; but that had not been anything Joseph had told him. He remembered now that Joseph had said, in passing, that the deserters got fearfully drunk on palm wine every night, in order to escape from their miserable circumstances. Had he said palm wine? It was difficult to remember.

  Precision was not the only function of memory.

  All the untidy clutter of papers in his room came from Joseph’s flat in Acton. He had to get clear in his own mind his brother’s early years. Then he could make decisions on how to deploy the material.

  He picked up from his desk a photograph he h
ad taken a year before Joseph’s death, showing Joseph and Sheila walking together on Port Meadow. In the background was Joseph’s girl friend – his final girl friend – Lucy Traill.

  Joseph was laughing, his mouth open, his face creased with humour. His tall, spare figure was leaning slightly forward. He liked to walk briskly. His hair, as always too long, was a streaky white and grey.

  It was his wife’s features that Clement mainly studied. Because of the aspect of stillness in Sheila’s nature, she photographed well. Her broad face and well-defined nose and mouth were in evidence as she smiled at whatever the joke was. He thought, ‘No photograph can ever do her justice. Nor for that matter does my memory. I fail to set up a moving picture of her in my mind. That’s why I’m always eager to see her again, even if she has been out of the room for less than an hour. How I love that face! I couldn’t explain to anyone what it means to me, to see it every day.

  ‘I must be over-dependent on her. Why aren’t I more detached, as I am with others – with Arthur Stranks, for instance? Sheila would probably be shocked if she knew with what intensity I love her face and the woman. What a weakling I am! And she went to bed with that wretched little Hernandez …’

  He was wasting time. To celebrate the publication of War Lord of Kerinth, he was arranging a party for Sheila in nine days’ time, on the Thursday of the following week. He made a few phone calls to local friends, inviting them to come. Then he returned to the question of his brother.

  In Box File No. 2 lay a battered exercise book, in which Joseph had sought to retain some of his memories of the war years, in particular his time in Burma. The letters to his sister explained why Joseph had scarcely written home at all during the Burmese campaign. The censorship would not permit him to give a truthful account. And the censor already had an eye on Joseph. Joseph perhaps recalled Frederick the Great’s epigram that the common soldier had to fear his officer more than the enemy.

  The battered exercise book was of Indian origin, bound in a coarsely woven cover. The narrative it contained was undated. The handwriting, in miscellaneous inks, some now badly faded, varied sufficiently for Clement to infer that the greater part of the account had been composed shortly after Joseph’s division had returned from Burma to India for rest and recuperation.

  This was his brother’s first attempt at anything like an historical narrative, his first step towards the historian he was later to become. To lend the original narrative a clearer perspective, Joseph had inserted a few passages later, generally of a reflective nature. For an instance, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was mentioned.

  First came the title. Joseph had made it deliberately grandiose.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGN OF

  2ND BRITISH DIVISION

  UNDER GEN. NICHOLSON

  AGAINST THE JAP ARMY AND

  THE RECONQUEST OF MANDALAY

  1944–1945

  By Signalman Joseph Winter

  Nights were filled with gunfire when the various units of 2 Div crossed the River Chindwin, against stiff opposition from the Japs situated on the eastern bank. Those nights were climatologically beautiful. The Burmese moon is like no other moon. It woke unvoiceable yearnings in the men involved in the great struggle.

  Of all those beautiful dangerous nights, one in particular stands out.

  I had had to be away from my unit, and a driver was sent in a Jeep to collect me and catch up with the advance. He was in no mood to hurry; I could not make him hurry; and darkness overtook us before we had done much more than start on our way forward. The sun plunged down into the earth and the stars immediately shone forth overhead, streaming along in the grip of the galactic current.

  We were two insignificant creatures in a machine on a plain that ran clear to the Irrawaddy. The driver had no intention of driving by night. We ate K-rations and slept one on either side of the Jeep rolled in blankets, with the marvellous sky unfettered overhead. Far from being dwarfed by it, I felt that it filled me and made me vast; I was indivisible from it. A war was passing over the starlit land with its ‘bright and battering sandal’, and I was part of its great process.

  Burma was beautiful, a country worth fighting for. Nothing else was asked – at the time. I was eighteen years of age.

  We woke at dawn with a bird calling. We were chilly in our thin uniforms before the sun came up. We brewed up mugs of tea, ate a hunk of bread, and moved on. ‘Bloody cold,’ we said.

  Nothing was to be seen all round us but plain and, distantly, tops of trees. I found no way in which we could share the magnificent experience of the night; perhaps such exciting experiences are always enjoyed alone – unless one has a girl there. In any case the driver was a man of few words.

  The track across the plain led us to the River Chindwin, where a Bailey bridge had been built. It was strongly guarded. Men lounged about, brown-naked to the waist, smoking, rifles on their shoulders, sweat-rags tied round their necks. We called out cheery greetings as we crossed that splendid river, its name honoured in the East. Fine dust hung in the air, sun shone on the water as it ran dark and flat between its sandy banks. It was as peaceful a scene as you could wish. Only two nights earlier, men had died at that spot.

  Myingyang, the town on the far side of the river, had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Smoke still drifted among the ruined trees. Everything – remains of houses and bungalows – took on tones of black; smoke issued from their gaping black mouths. Tree stumps still burned quietly.

  Black also were the piles of corpses gathered up neatly here and there and now left to ripen like grapes in the sun. They were swollen as if about to burst, and stank with the powerful smell of death. So much for the remains of the Japanese Army.

  The Jeep driver stopped at one of the biggest piles. He went over to it and helped himself to a pair of boots from one of the dead. I cannot say how this offended me. A fat porker was feeding among the corpses, scarcely able to waddle. The driver, kicking the animal out of the way, beckoned me over. I would not leave the Jeep. He selected the pair of boots he wanted, dragging them off the corpse, kneeling in the sunlight to do so. He fitted the boots on to his own feet before coming back to the vehicle. I could not look the man in the eye.

  To everything that happened at that period in time, an extra weight of significance was added. It was as though I travelled back through time to witness the traits of man and nature at their most basic, as though our movement through trees was also a movement through centuries. My understanding of the world, which had hitherto been rather childish, or child-based, advanced greatly, so that everything that happened, down to the movement of my own muscles, was surrounded by a nimbus of truth, in which the ugly was perceived as being as sacred as the beautiful. The blessed sunlight contributed to this revelatory mood.

  I was a little mad in the nights, as in the days. The world turned – I heard its axis rotate. One night early in the campaign we were bivouacked by the improvised road which, in the wet season, served as a river bed. A Burmese moon shone through the trees – the moon seeming always to be at the full, when Chinese Buddhist thought has it that the Yin (female) influence is at its most strong. I could not sleep, pent in my little bivouac, for an overwhelming feeling of excitement, so was forced to get up and walk among the dust-saturated trees and shadows. Muffled trucks and guns rumbled out of the silver darkness and into the opaque distance. I stood by the road, unable to leave it, letting the dust settle on me. The behemoths, with dim orange headlights for eyes, were the sole occupants of this world.

  Of course what I longed for then – there and then – in my hot little heart, was love or, less abstractly, a woman to love.

  Greater than the Chindwin is the river into which it flows, the unmeasurable, immemorial Irrawaddy. The waters of the Irrawaddy are fed both by tributaries rising nearby and distant tributaries which rise in regions of rock and ice up in the Himalayas, so that, like life itself, the river consists of alternating currents of warm and cold streams
; and no swimmer can tell which he will encounter next, the warm or the cold. Just to stand looking at the Irrawaddy after the weeks and miles of drought we had put behind us was to drink deep, and to feel its flow as something profound – a main artery in the life of the planet.

  For a brief period after rejoining my unit I was able to swim alone in the great river, flinging myself in from the sandy bank, for once unmindful of Japs, snakes, and signal offices. The river immediately took hold of one with its dark effortless power. A river-steamer had been sunk in mid-stream, and lay at an angle on the river-bed with all its superstructure in the sunlight. Long tresses of weed, anchored to its bows, pointed tremulously downstream. It was possible to reach the boat after prolonged battles with the currents, and the water, green as lizard skin, suddenly gave way to scaly hull. With a heave, I was there, over the railings and lying fish-naked on the slant of deck. Ferns and small trees grew on the deck house, giant bees toasted themselves on the sere planking. There it was possible to squat, dangling one hand in the race, a part of that stationary voyage upstream, Captain of the Wreck.

  Solitude was precious, because rare. Most of the time, we men of the Forgotten Army crowded together. Life was gregarious for safety reasons. Those of us on ‘S’ Relief grew to know each other very well. Despite our uncertain movements, our routine was fixed. It went in three-day cycles: first day, afternoon shift from 1 p.m. till 6; second day, morning shift from 8 a.m. till 1 p.m., and night shift from 6 p.m. till 8 the next morning; third day, off duty after 8 a.m. to sleep, probably with guard or similar duties in the afternoon or evening. This routine, or something like it, was to be mine for almost three years, in action or out of it. In Burma, night duty generally meant no sleep at all, with signals being passed all the time. Sometimes, it was possible to doze for half-an-hour, head on your arm at the table; more rarely, you could curl up under a blanket in a corner of the office for an hour.