Snakes and Ladders Read online

  He shook his head looking vaguely worried.

  “Nothing?”

  “Well … I was shit scared dey’d hear her screeching away … you know …”

  “Did you think that you’d killed her? Or could have?”

  “Naw! Wasn’t more dan a little tap-like … couple of little taps … just to keep her quiet, you see. It was her or me, you know, and she was a ould bitch.”

  “No remorse?”

  “What’s dat den?” He looked blank.

  “Well, it didn’t worry you, afterwards, I mean?”

  “Mary, no! You know? I never even mentioned it on me rosary … not one bead did she get from me … after all it’s her as got me into dis bloody ould army, isn’t it?” He slid Kitty’s letter carefully into his breast pocket, and thumped my knee. “What’s up wid you? Dere’s someting worrying youse …”

  “Well … the other day, you know when we were up on the exercise in the woods … with the dummy ammo that leaves a stain, and I got Ernie Basset in the chest …”

  Gooley cuddled his knees happily. “Ah wid dat last little shot our side won, didn’t it den?”

  “Yes, we won. But, you know I really thought that I had shot Basset. I thought it was real suddenly.” I could see by his eyes that he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, and I knew that I would not be able to make him understand.

  “But it was just an ould exercise! It was like a game is all! What’s dere to upset you about dat den?”

  “It suddenly didn’t seem to be a game, is what I mean. I felt sick, do you know that? When Basset just fell forward on his face out of that bush, I was sure he was dead and that I had killed him. I can’t get it out of my mind, Gooley.”

  He sighed with kindness, impatience and incomprehension. “Youse daft, Toff.” He got up and went to the door of the cubicle. “It was just de same as me and de ould woman, Toff. It’s dem or you. Nothing to it,” and patting his breast pocket with the letter inside, he winked his wink and was gone.

  Somewhere, buried under layers of romantic nonsense, I knew that he was right; it was just an old exercise, I had been on many before, but none had had this effect on me. Sitting up there in the little wood that day I was calm, serene, detached, curiously watching an ants’ nest which I had thoughtlessly disturbed with a stick. I heard someone suddenly crackle through bracken, the wispy whisper of fronds against a body; heard the heavy breathing, as if that person had been running a long way; heard the little groan of effort as it buried itself into some bushes not far in front of me; saw a branch tremble violently, and then become still. Through the fretted leaves a gleam of sunlight flickered through the slender trees, glanced off a steel helmet. He was one of the enemy side; our side wore forage caps. Quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, my mouth went dry and I was frightened. Perhaps it was his almost tangible fear coming across the little clearing, perhaps the silence suddenly of the wood; still, still. Away down on the road I could faintly hear the voices of the others who had dropped out and would be sprawled about smoking. Apparently we were the last two left unaccounted for. I glanced at the magazine of my rifle. Two bullets left. I hunched back silently into the bole of a tree, bracken screening me. I think I stopped breathing.

  And then I saw him. Cautiously he raised his pale helmeted face from the bush, and blindly looked about him, straight at me but unseeing. He was sweating with effort, or fear, for fear emanated from him like mist. He moved very slowly, as someone in a dream. His helmet shone in the filtered sun. He gave a little grunt of satisfaction that he was safe, and I watched as he quietly, carefully, secured his position, in the springing branches of the elder bush, lowering his gun and slowly wiping his nose with the back of his hand. My heart thudding, my body tense, I raised my gun and got him securely in my sights. A bellow of distant laughter came from the road, he instantly pulled up his gun and stiffened. I saw the clean steel of the muzzle ring, the black hole from which his bullet would speed, the trickle of sweat running down his jaw beading under his chin. For seconds we faced each other, then he relaxed a little, the muzzle dipped, he looked up into the trees and I shot him.

  The report of the rifle shattered the wood and smashed my shoulder into the tree behind me. A bird went off chittering through the branches. He opened his eyes with wide surprise, his mouth in a soundless cry, and pitched forward on to his face among the branches. For a second I sat hunched, frozen with horror. It was only when he started to move that I started to shake. I recognised him immediately, Ernie Basset with red hair from H Hut. In the middle of his chest a large crimson stain from my killing bullet. He looked down at it with some consternation, and then called out to the wood loudly: “You sod! You got me! Where are you?” Finding some hidden reserve I scrambled to my feet, surprising him, and helped him up. We walked through the trees together arm in arm. “Didn’t know you was there,” he said. “Gave me a terrible shock, right on it did! Just like the real thing. Gave you a bloody good run, didn’t I? Thought I’d lost you down by the wall there … Jeese, quite a thrill that …”

  When I came to light his squashed cigarette, my hand was still shaking, and he laughed and held it firm in his two, his rifle clutched between his knees. “Quite a little thrill,” he said.

  That evening I stayed in my cubicle instead of trailing over to the NAAFI for watered coffee. It was not so much the fact that I had killed Ernie Basset which upset me, for upset I certainly was, it was the clear and blinding fact, which was uppermost in my mind, and which shocked me so deeply, that I had actually wanted to kill him. And I had enjoyed doing so. I, who never trod on a snail if I could help it, never robbed a nest of eggs, couldn’t remove a hook from a fish, never said boo to a bloody goose even, had determinedly, and with pleasure, apparently, taken a man’s life. Him or me. And it wasn’t going to be me.

  This small revelation of self knowledge nagged at me like a stone in a shoe. And it frightened me. Where had it come from, this passion, this cool determination, this almost-pleasure in an action so wildly perverse in a very late developer?

  At nineteen I still behaved like a slightly retarded fifteen. It was, however, true that I was no longer a virgin. That had been seen to a year before by a slightly flaccid girl I met at Art School who was a couple of years older than I. Heavy breasted, big bottomed, with fair hair in earphones curled round her face, beads clattering between the mammoth gourds slung under her hand-printed cheese-cloth blouse, her square toes thrusting through holes in her sandals, she assaulted me, for I was too far gone on a quart and a half of light ale to do more than feebly wave my hands as she pulled down my trousers, on a very prickly rush mat in front of a plopping gas fire one evening in her so-called studio at the top of a house in Fulham.

  The whole event, due to the quart and a half of ale, was all a bit hazy. I was shocked at first, but helpless, waving useless hands in the air like an overturned beetle, and then witless with terror as first the beads, the cheese-cloth blouse, the tweed skirt and a pair of yellow knickers flew about the room and she deliberately lowered herself on to my limp body spread, like a sacrifice, on the rush matting. I fought for breath. The heat from the gas fire roasting my purpling face. She raised two hefty arms and tugged at the earphones, releasing a cataract of heavy blond hair about my head like a soap-smelling tent. Confronted, as I was, with a vast black triangle only inches from my chest, I knew that I was helplessly in the hands of a cheat, hands which none the less were apparently expert, coaxing, and determined. Lost in that vast hemisphere of fleshy thighs, I orbited Mars, the Moon, Saturn and Venus, before finally coming back to earth, exhausted, sweating, blue in the face and smothered by her licking tongue, a maze of dyed fair hair, and, for some unexplained reason, most of my cardigan.

  Later, after she had hauled herself off me, and padded off to her bathroom singing happily at the top of her voice as if she had just done the washing up, which in effect she had, I finished off the last of the ale, pulled up my trousers and staggered blindly about the ro
om wondering how to get out. Her singing mingled with running taps and the flushing of the lavatory, and then she was back in the canvas-crowded room, cheerful as a bee, and told me to go and freshen up which I did, shying away from the scarlet, lopsided face I saw in the mirror over the washbowl. So that was what sex was like? Well, it was pretty good while it actually happened; it was the now part which was not so delightful.

  She said her name was Constance, and laughed disdainfully as if she never could be, and told me to call her Kiki and was it the first time for me? Because she guessed it was—not that she had given me much chance anyway to prove if it had been or not. When I assented, bravely I thought, she stroked my face with stubby fingered hands, swilled the dregs of my beer and said that she’d had her eye on me ever since the play at the end of the last term. I looked at her blankly and with faint dislike which she mistook for curiosity, so she took my limp hand and pressed a kiss on my cheek. “Those tights! In ‘The Miller and His Men’, last term, remember?”

  Repelled, but fascinated, stoat with the rabbit stuff, I returned to the ample thighs and arms of my two-toned mistress in much the same way that one returns to a restaurant or an hotel. Because you know the service and they know you.

  But one day she told me, sadly, just before the lights went down for a Judy Garland film at the Royal Court in Sloane Square, that her special friend was coming back from a business trip to Morocco, and that since he was a Swede, very strong, and five years older than I was, it might be tactful to keep out of the way for a while. Which I found to my surprise I accepted with almost unseemly alacrity. She was rather expensive anyway. And heavy to move about.

  And so, apart from friendly little waves across Class, and stolen, rather smothered kisses and fumbles in the lockers, we drifted apart comfortably and I went on with my interrupted journey towards the theatre. The April sprig, the late developer, was starting to put out leaves, of a sort.

  But Ernie Basset, and all that he stood for, was something very different, and something which shocked me deeply. After all, sex was what everyone did, or had. But killing a man, even with a dummy bullet, and finding almost the same pleasure in release at his death, was both frightening and surely wrong?

  Hunched on my blanketed bed, staring worriedly at the knot holes in the floor I began to realise, after a very long time, that this was really what war was about. Killing each other. Simple as that. Him or me, you or him, it had never remotely occurred to me before. Now that it did, I would have to come to terms with it pretty quickly and put aside the romantic notions I had so firmly cherished. Now I could perhaps really understand Sassoon, Owen and the rest, and one day, not so far distant it would appear, I would have to use a real bullet against a real man, and that would be the final test of growing up, which I had delayed so long. I would put the thought of that aside until it actually came to pass. But of one thing I was perfectly certain. That when it came, I would be able to do it. It terrified me far more than it gave me courage.

  Every night before going to sleep, practically without fail, I mumbled silently my prayers. A firm relic of a swiftly fading childhood. It was a sort of charm thing, rather than a religious thing. Habit rather than faith. But it also comforted me greatly, and I still do it. No set prayer, a familiar pattern of words only, beginning with “God Bless Mother, Father, Elizabeth, Gareth …” and so on down to the dog. Sometimes, over-tired, exhausted from route marching, or work in the cookhouse, or even just mildly pissed on NAAFI beer I slid, without awareness, into a much older prayer which bubbled from my subconscious like a meadow spring:

  “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

  Look upon a little child,

  Pity my simplicity,

  Suffer me to come to Thee.”

  It went on for a bit longer but I had usually, by that time, fallen asleep. Now, shuffling about my six foot by four foot cubicle, changing my boots for gym shoes in order to go over to the NAAFI for a beer, I knew that all that simplicity stuff was bunk. Innocence was melting around me like snow in the heat of the sun. I could no longer ever say that absurdly childish prayer again; all that had gone. Exit my simplicity more like. Not pity. Kiki, Palmers Green, now Ernie Basset, Innocence. Odd, I thought, growing up seems to be all exits.

  * * *

  Jammed at a corner table under the sagging “Night Train to Holyhead”, with a beer, I opened my much abused blue notebook and, heading the first clean page with the title “Man in the Bush”, I wrote my first poem for Vida. Straight off, in one ordered series of line and words, without corrections or additions or pencil lickings, it all fell into clean, simple shape. My muse had entered at last. I had thought that she would arrive with a crash of thunder, in a blaze of glittering light, a golden pen in one hand, my inspiration in the other. But that is not how it happens at all. As someone has said, when she comes, she comes stealing in, gently, softly, almost shyly, and taking your hand she says: “Come and look! I have got something I want you to see.” And I had. I hoped that Vida would like the result.

  Just before Lights Out, sloshing through soapy swill of the Ablutions, Gooley and his chum Worms, towels over their shoulders, washbags swinging, caught me up and we walked across the square to our hut. Gooley slung his arm round my shoulder.

  “Are you better now, Toff? Was you writin’ to your Ma about your problems den all dat time in de corner dere?”

  “No. I wrote a poem.”

  He looked patient. “What for? A pome, for de love of God!”

  “A girl I know in London.”

  “Ah. A girl. Like for Kitty … dat sort of stuff, fancy?”

  “Not very fancy, it was about killing Ernie Basset.”

  “For de love of God! She’ll love dat for sure. Have you told Ernie? He’d piss hisself wid laughing.”

  * * *

  There was a leave somewhere during the course. I don’t remember much about it beyond the fact that I clambered off the bus at the crossroads in the village hung about with respirators, tin hat, kit bags and haversacks, and, I seem to think, my fateful rifle. I can’t be quite sure but I have a vivid picture of my happy mother proudly marching along beside me with it slung over her shoulder, and my sister Elizabeth and Elsie, the Rubens shepherdess, humping along cheerfully, proudly, with bits and pieces of army equipment between them, as if they were fishwives marching on Versailles. And that evening, with my father, who came back from his blitz-beleaguered office at The Times for the special occasion, we all went up to the King’s Head where I was fêted and wined as if I had won the V.C. It was all quite moving and faintly absurd. The civilians, whose war was far more uncomfortable and dangerous than mine, were enjoying themselves. It seemed a pity to spoil the fun. But I felt not-quite-right-somehow; I didn’t fit. I felt taller, everyone said that I was. The women put it down to the rations we got, and the men down to the bint, as they called it, with which we appeared as far as they were concerned anyway, to be liberally supplied. Everyone was delighted that the war had made me into a man, implying that I had returned from ten months in the trenches and the Battle of the Somme. Everything, so I began to believe, was applied to their war of twenty-two years before. I was quite unable to tell them, nor did they wish to hear if I tried, that all I had seen of a war was the inside of Catterick Camp and a few acres of the Yorkshire moors. If I had grown taller it was only because I was growing up a bit, being exercised, and living a healthy life. If anything had started to make me a man it was merely a sort of rough school life. Cosseted, isolated, cared for, taught. Nothing to do with rations or with bint.

  But that’s the way they wanted it to be, and so let it be. I felt strangely detached, distant, like Alice after she had swallowed one of the potions. Familiar things were smaller than I had remembered; my own room, my books, pictures, sketch books, even my clothes had shrunk. The old rowan tapping as it always had done against the window, the wardrobe door creaking open spitefully, slowly, as it always had done, all these things had the ring of familiarity but from a long distance
. It was rather as if I was poking about in the room of someone I had known long ago, and then but slightly. The things, the possessions, evoked memories, but hazy ones; the person that I must once have been had gone and had left behind a not very interesting collection of inanimate objects. I handled them all with careful astonishment. The white Staffordshire pug, a paper-weight of the Eiffel Tower, the snow storm now long since gone dry, the tin lay-figure my Grandfather had given me, legs awry, one arm missing, head squint. I set them all back exactly where they had stood, fearful lest the owner might suddenly return and find my prying into his possessions. I could not reconcile myself to the fact that I was the owner and that this room had been, was indeed, mine. I was a stranger here; I knew, certainly, that some odd metamorphosis had taken place when, finding my old, unfamiliar bed too soft, I dragged the covers on to the floor. And slept there.

  It was the same a few days later when, eager, anxious to the point of rudeness, I went up to London to meet Vida. I went in uniform because I felt strange, uncomfortable, in civilian clothes, which was another surprise. We met, as we always had in the past, outside the Warner Cinema in Leicester Square, and walked arm in arm, momentarily shy of each other, down to the Olde Vienna in Lyons Corner House, where, after all, we had said our farewells together only a few months before. But that was all changed too. The place was the same, red plush, little marble tables, papers still on sticks, gateaux and thin coffee, elderly Jews sitting silently staring unseeingly across the room to Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna. It had the crushed air of a waiting room at a Consulate.

  We tried to start a conversation. I looked well, she had lost weight, what was she doing, where was I going, did I like the army, had I made friends, had she seen anyone from “Diversion”, what did she really think of her poem?

  “I loved it. I told you so. I mean I told you you would write something good, didn’t I?” She smoothed down the cloth with a plump, generous hand.