Snakes and Ladders Read online

  I think that the very first thing which helped to break me into the life was the Haircut. For endless hours we queued in drizzling mist to be shorn like sheep. When my turn came the hefty bruiser with the clippers pronounced it as long as a girl’s and asked what I’d been before. This eternal question. Unthinkingly I said that I’d been an actor. “Aha!” cried the bruiser with relish, and shaved me down to a prickly, almost naked dome. Everyone crowded round to see; gleeful that it was not they; goading him on in his surgical efforts to reduce my morale, my appearance, and my spirit.

  I remembered a rat that some of the village boys had trapped on a brick in a water tank up at the farm. They were stoning it into the water with half-bricks, it kept falling off and swimming desperately round and round the brick-pile, blood running into the water, its hair sticking up like mine now, its nose split. They stoned it until it quietly gave in and floated, pink feet upwards in supplication, tail trailing, dead.

  No rat I.I had to start proving, and show them what I could do. I joined in the laughter. My laughter stopped the others. I departed in a curious silence. I had learned my first psychological trick. Laugh with them at you. And then you win. As long as you can follow it up. I did by being the best boot-polisher in the squad. For one cigarette a time I offered to do it for all the others who found it difficult and, after a very short time, had enough to open a shop. I stitched on badges and “flashes” and buttons, thanking God all the time for my training in the theatre wardrobes of “Q” Theatre and Amersham. It was not, you understand, the most elegant of stitching, but it was able to pass muster at inspections and kept me busy in the long dull evenings while the others lay disconsolately on their beds reading Health and Strength, Tit-Bits, or just staring into space.

  I never had any spare time. I excelled at Drill. Theatre training again. I enjoyed marching and about-turning, by the right and by the left. The precision of it interested me, the effort very nearly killed me; but I did it, and did it moderately well. I worked so hard in fact that every time I clambered down on to my hard bed I was almost immediately asleep. No haunting nightmares of misery assailed me. Self-preservation was strong, thanks to the theatre and a determined, sensible, family training before that.

  Out on the range, scrubby heather, mist, a brick wall and rows of targets, I learned to shoot with my heavy Lee Enfield. I was determined to be best in the squad. Tilly, who was equally determined, but who could neither sew nor polish, was a comfortable second.

  I was very good at everything except the one thing for which I had been sent to Catterick initially: to be a signaller in the Royal Corps of Signals. My father had been as much surprised as I myself at the arbitrary, seemingly idiotic, decision to draft me into the Signal Corps. I who had the co-ordination of a bursting dam and the technical intelligence of an eft. We had decided that it was probably due to the fact that I had had to state my school background on my papers and that I had attended, for some time, a highly technical school in Glasgow which may have, erroneously, given them the idea that I was qualified. At school I had been so dense that I was finally removed from all the Technical Classes and allowed to follow my own pursuits in Bookbinding, Metalwork and Pottery. Which is why, to this day, I can sew on buttons, marble paper, open tins brilliantly, and glue the handle on to a cup. Everything else had been a total mystery to me, and remained so. And so it was with Morse Code and all the other bits and pieces which went with the Course. I was baffled, uncomprehending, lost. And although I tried to learn the handbooks as I would a play, like a parrot, the practice of the exercise left me floundering in a mess of wires, bells, batteries and code. I knew that in this instance I was utterly doomed. Polish boots I could, sew on badges, hit the inner, outer, magpie, and bull’s-eye time after time with my little gun. I could throw a grenade, wash a floor, drill like a demon, pass Kit Inspection with top marks, write excellent, if mawkish, letters to a girl named Kitty who seemed to be the dominant factor in Gooley’s life. But I could not perform any function, whatsoever, required by the Royal Corps of Signals. I couldn’t even send the S.O.S.

  So, when the time came, I volunteered for the cookhouse. And because no one knew quite what to do with me, I was left there, peeling potatoes by the barrel, scrubbing down tables and benches, bashing about in a lather of soap and swill in the tin-wash, opening tin upon tin of bully beef, liver, pilchards and plum and apple. I hoped that my diligence would not go unremarked, and that perhaps after a time they’d forget all about me and let me off the Morse Code thing and allow me to spend the rest of my war washing up. Fat chance. But for a time I was in a busy fool’s paradise.

  Sunday was a dreary day. After Church Parade and lunch, I wrote letters to Kitty for Gooley who was in my hut and to whom I had become very attached in spite of his violent past, and wrote reams and reams of frightful poetry in blue notebooks about Isolation, Loneliness, Shells, Death in the Mud, Barbed Wire, Larks and Cornfields. I wrote them all, without exception, like the mouse’s tail poem in “Alice”. Long wriggling columns without rhyme, or very much reason, usually ending in a single word like “dead” or “cigarette” or “stench”. My war poetry, after about three weeks, was still completely second hand, and borrowed exclusively from my father’s war, about which I thought I knew a great deal. It took me six years to realise I knew nothing. It was not, however, a total waste of time. Just putting words down on paper was something. Out of the welter of rubbish bits and pieces emerged, shyly, causing me great delight, and forcing my Venus pencil to even wilder efforts. It also passed the time in the grey, brown, greasy room with its scattered tables and sagging posters of the “Night Train to Holyhead”.

  Except for Tilly and Gooley, I didn’t get to know anyone else very well. Because of my accent I was called, as indeed Gooley had done in the train coming up, Toff, but was excused for that in some dumb way by the fact that I was good at polishing and volunteered hysterically for practically anything. Usually a frightful error. I had, I thought, my own methods for survival. Blithely unaware that there were other factors working against my conceit.

  Palmers Green, my light operatic companion from the train, was not very happy. I did his boots and sewed on his flashes free. Not out of any form of generosity, because he didn’t smoke and never had cigarettes, but he was, as he had pointed out a number of times, a fellow actor, and loyalty came into it. He suggested one Sunday over slopped tea in the NAAFI that perhaps we should try and start a Concert Party. It would give us something to do, and he felt sure that the lads would enjoy a bit of a singsong or some sketches which he suggested he would write. He himself, he pointed out, with his operatic background could oblige with some renderings of familiar and well loved numbers … and he had two sisters who could send him all the scores and song sheets collected from his past glories at The Society. I thought it quite a good idea myself, and began to rough out a few ideas. But first we had to get people together. And then where was the stage? Not, for sure, in the NAAFI. Tilly said there was a Garrison Theatre just outside the camp, and that if we did decide to form a concert party he’d be very pleased to supervise the lighting because apart from accounting his main hobby was electricity. I might have guessed. So now there were three people ready to start things off.

  We pinned a notice up one Friday evening and settled down like anglers to wait. Palmers Green became almost cheerful. Writing off to his sisters in Hammersmith for the scores and libretti, daily scanning the notice board as if it was a rat-trap. We didn’t appear to be attracting anything. One or two hesitant names; someone who could play a viola; someone who was a carpenter. And then it fizzled out. After a couple of weeks I gave in and forgot all about a concert party. And then one evening Palmers Green came into my hut with an ashen face, his thin hair straggling from under his cap, his fatigues drooping round him like ectoplasm. In his shaking hand, the notice, ripped hurriedly from the board. With a smothered cough he handed it to me. Someone had drawn an enormous, detailed, erect penis, plus optimistically splendid appen
dages, and under it, in block letters, had printed, WE WANT TO SCREW NOT SING! I tore it up and shoved it in the stove.

  “They’re animals,” said Palmers Green hopelessly, “simply animals, there’s nothing you can do with people like that. Beasts, that’s all. What’s the use of trying to help people in life, to bring a little cheer into their lives, what’s the use, I ask you?” He was distressed and near to tears as he ambled miserably across the hut. I was forced to follow him for comfort.

  “It’s a joke, really … you see. We’ll put up another tomorrow.”

  “They won’t care. They are all obscene. It’s hopeless. They’ll take over the world one day, you see if I’m right.”

  I leant against the door-post. “We’ll try again. Just give it time.”

  He wandered down the steps. “In my hut, you know, they all call me …” he screwed up his eyes and I thought he was going to cry, but they unscrewed and he said, “Hilda.” We stood in helpless silence looking at a row of fire buckets. “I don’t know why,” he said, almost to himself, “I try to do what I can, but it is difficult. The Morse, the marching … I do my best. It’s just not something I’m used to at my age. Difficult to look neat in this stuff too, isn’t it? Do you know,” he pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose hard, “do you know, I haven’t even whistled since I got here, not a note, and I was always so full of melody, little snatches here and there, really very cheery, but I just haven’t the heart these days.” He shoved his handkerchief back and tried to cram the wispy hair under his cap. “You’ve been very kind, very kind,” he tried a wan smile. “I did say ‘birds of a feather’, didn’t I? Oh well, I’ll be seeing you quite a bit this coming week. Cookhouse Fatigues. The Kit Inspections, you know. I don’t seem to manage very well.”

  I watched him wander sadly down the track in the soft June evening. It had rained all afternoon but now the sun was out, glistening in the puddles, the tin roofs of the huts shone like silver paper. Gooley and a skinny man we called Worms, because he was so thin and ate faster and more than anyone else, came down the hill. Gooley threw an affectionate arm round my shoulders.

  “Come on, Toff. I’ll treat you to a bromide tea. Me auntie sent a postal order yesterday.”

  We walked off together, avoiding the puddles because of our polished boots, and Worms made us laugh because he said that even if they did put bromide in the tea he still felt horny every morning and woke up with an erection like a tent pole. I wondered what Palmers Green would have thought of that.

  * * *

  The frozen Argentinian liver came in blocks eighteen inches long and five square. It had the texture of iced sand with veins running through it like string. This we cut into slices, tipped into boiling cauldrons, fished out after fifteen minutes, slapped into shallow tins, twenty to each, smothered in what was euphemistically called gravy, and bunged in the ovens. Then we had our breakfasts. Up since five-thirty, we ate fried eggs, left-over-potatoes, bread and marge and a mug of tea in the peace of the empty Mess Hall. A moment of luxury. I only ate liver once, ever. At seven on the dot the Army arrived, clattering blearily into the Mess, faces pink from shaving, hair, or what remained of it, sleeked with water or Brylcreem, mugs and eating-irons clutched in their fists.

  We shoved the liver tins on to each table, the Daddies Sauce, the margarine-bread, and filled the mugs with bromide tea as the noise of a cattle fair mounted. For all the disadvantages of working in the cookhouse, there were excellent advantages, I found. We fed better than the others most of the time, avoided the misery of Roll Call, kit inspections and the general daily chores of the barrack room life. We also missed out on Drill for a while, which, even though I liked it, was a bit of a relief.

  But best of all, I was able to avoid the absolute terror of motor bikes. This was a hazard which I had not been expecting at all. Gas, bombs, bullets, mud and discomfort, all these. But never for one single split second did it ever occur to me that I should have to sit astride a giant motorcycle and learn, not only how to drive it, but how to care for its incomprehensible guts as well. My complete lack of co-ordination rendered the whole enterprise of riding a bike into something as dangerous and unreasonable as crossing Niagara Falls on a rope. I could seldom start it, and the only way I could stop it was by falling off as gracefully as possible. I developed the agility of a tumbler.

  For all these reasons I was happy in the cookhouse even though the work was hard, dirty and often long. But it at least sped time along and kept our minds off the submerged wreck of fear which lay just below our fragile barque of courage. The Draft. Sometimes we dared to speak of it … but not often. A rumour would sometimes weave a thread of chill vapour into our overtly medical conversations. We were going to Madagascar, to Iceland, to Singapore; improbably far away places, never, alas, Europe. For that was long since sealed off from us. Once someone said that they had seen hundreds of sun helmets in the Q.M.’s store hidden under blankets. Which meant the Tropics for certain. Africa maybe … even, God help us all, India! Panic, always latent, surged within each breast, until someone mentioned tits or farts and then we relaxed back into laughter, instantly banishing Madagascar.

  Washing up in the tin-wash was so unpleasant that it was ranked as a punishment for anyone slack enough to have a dirty bolt to his rifle, an unblacked-out window, or a messy kit inspection. Standing at the concrete sinks, arms deep in filthy, greasy water, hands red from corrosive soda, feet soaked from the spilled swill and muck on the floors beneath us, it ranked high as disagreeable. I saw poor Palmers Green clonking and scrubbing away there, his thin hair limp with sweat, his smile, when he saw me, tremulous, his elbows raw-boned, going up and down like a wooden monkey’s. For me, there was a certain satisfaction to be gained by wiping clean a battered two-handled tin, once foul with grease and caught liver or frozen kidneys, and polishing it into a brilliant shining mirror. One always felt that it might be the one to come to one’s own table the next day. It never was. But one hoped. Without hope there was not the slightest possibility of surviving those initial twenty-five weeks. Some did not.

  One morning, while finishing off the last of the fried bread, a man crashed into the Mess looking as if he had been hit by a falling wall. Hair staring, shirt-tails flapping, trousers, clenched in two anguished fists, sagging round his knees, braces flying like hoops, he stood barefoot, shocked. We stood up in mute surprise. He was handed a mug of tea which he waved aside and slumped on to a bench. “There’s a geezer hanging in the pisshouse.”

  In the already warming June sunlight an aimless huddle of men stood about outside the latrines waiting, presumably, for Authority to arrive and settle the business. Half dressed, some with toothbrushes or washing bags, they shifted from foot to foot in the embarrassed silence reserved for death. The door of No. 8 was wide open. In the vivid shaft of sunlight which illuminated the cubicle like a pin spot, hung a man. Dressed in striped pyjamas, head on his chest, one leg twisted cruelly in the pan, the other almost kneeling on the filthy floor, a stretched figure of supplication. The cord from the cistern was as tight as a bow-string, buried deep into his livid neck, forcing his fat tongue through blue lips in a final obscene gesture at the insult of life. His hands swung gently, a ring glittered. He had messed himself. I turned suddenly away and pushed through the silent herd with its toothbrushes and washbags. Hunched against a brick wall I fought a desperate, and successful, battle to retain my breakfast. Heaving and retching, fighting down the rising nausea, I pressed my face into the rough, warm bricks. After a while it started to subside. I gasped for breath, wiping my snotty nose and the cascading tears of effort from my cheeks. In a blurred instant I saw the worried, caring face of Gooley. Gently he put out a hand and patted my shoulder.

  “Silly boy, you was. You shouldn’t have looked, you know. You shouldn’t have looked.”

  I shook my head hopelessly, brushing the muck from my face with a shaking hand. I knew damn well I shouldn’t have looked. It was Palmers Green.

  * * *r />
  We prepared for the funeral with all the excitements and terrors of a First Night. Boots were honed to a brilliance never before seen, even on Colonel’s Inspection, badges glittered, trousers were creased like knife blades. Soap rubbed down the inside of the crease, and then ironed hard, belts blancoed, brasses shining like a Whitbread’s dray horse. We were determined to do our first official Show as well as possible and to give the deceased a far better send off than he had ever had welcome.

  They had asked for volunteers. Palmers Green’s family, shocked and dazed, one presumed, demanded his body to be returned to them in London. Pall bearers, six, were to cart the coffin from Richmond Station along the platform to the London train. I was first, this time because of Palmers Green and the odd, unwanted bond which he had forced upon me. Tilly and Gooley came in also when they knew I was on, and a small, neat, cherubic youth called Derek. His had been one of the few signatures on our ill fated notice for the concert party, and it had written beside his name, “Dancing, acrobatics, splits, etc.” With his wide blue eyes, pink complexion, soft blond hair, delicate voice, and pleasantly defined figure, he had become a fairly frequent visitor to the Sergeants’ Mess up the hill, and so no one dared to openly insult him. Behind his back was a different matter altogether. But it was felt that one false step or word with this angelic, helpless, little fellow would lead straight to a Madagascar posting or anywhere else east of Suez. Without any questions. So he was tolerated. Just about. He never got into the tin-wash or did Pack Drill at the double or anything disagreeable. We were still two short, and finally we were lucky to get Piper, who was a Christian Scientist and said that death was all in the mind so he didn’t care much one way or the other, and Grimm who said that he had been sorry for the poor sod and he ought to have a fitting farewell. They were matched for height and we were off most duties for rehearsals.