Snakes and Ladders Page 5

  “You always said that war made men very odd, and it was true really. It all came at once, you know. Just as I wrote it, I didn’t even have to re-write or correct much, a word here and there … and it was for you … because of you really.”

  She bowed her head very gently and went on smoothing the table cloth slowly. “How did it get into the Times Lit? Was it your father?”

  “No. I sent him a copy, after I sent you yours and his secretary found it and sent it over to them without telling him. I think he was a bit shocked.”

  “But pleased?” She looked worried.

  “Oh yes. Especially when they sent me three guineas.”

  “I didn’t tell you, did I, I’ve taken a cottage in Wiltshire for my father and mother. It was getting a bit too noisy up in Belsize Park—all the bombs. It’s very small, but I go down at weekends, and when I’m not working …” She stopped suddenly and started to unfasten a brooch at her neck. Her eyes were full of tears. I reached across the table and offered her my hand. She went on struggling with the brooch, a tear welled and slid down her round red-lipped face. She got it off and started to examine it as if she had just found it.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to us. You and me. I’m shy. It’s idiotic, but I’m shy. I don’t know what to say …”

  I took her hand and squeezed it hard, the brooch spun across the table and lay winking its cheap light by the coffee pot. “I’m shy too. It’s all different. Isn’t it strange, nothing seems to be as it was before. It’s all gone, I wonder why?”

  She looked up at me with swimming eyes, and made a blind reach for the glittering paste brooch. She shrugged hopelessly. “The war, I suppose. We blame everything on the war … it seems to be going on and on … it just seems to bugger everything up. I don’t know …”

  “It can’t go on for ever, honestly. I mean, after all, I haven’t even gone in yet!”

  A floppy joke, she smiled wanly and refastened the brooch carelessly. ‘I hope you don’t have to, that’s all. I hope it’s over by then.”

  “So do I. I’m not very good at it.”

  “Really not?”

  “Can’t do the Morse and ride motorcycles and all that stuff.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose the others can write poetry, can they?”

  “I can’t even send dit-dit-dit-da. For God’s sake.”

  “What’s that?” She was incurious, busy repairing the eye-black which had run.

  “It’s the letter V. You know, dit-dit-dit-da, Beethoven. The Victory Sign.”

  “Oh that!” She was weary suddenly and snapped shut her powder compact so that the dust flew up in a little cloud between us; she blew it gently across the table and started to button her coat. “That’s a hell of a long way off,” she said. “Come on, you’d better get the bill, the big picture starts in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  There was no Gooley to welcome me when I got back to Le Cateau Lines. Tilly was there, smirking and strutting about, and old Worms who had had an exhausting time dipping his wick, as he called it, all over Wimbledon, Wandsworth and Battersea Park, but Gooley, my first real mate, had gone, as he had always promised he would from the first time we met in the train up from King’s Cross. I felt a hard thrust of despair. Leave had been gloomy enough, and now with no one to laugh at the miseries of civilian life, and make comparisons in our attitudes and points of view, the future looked glum indeed. There was still a long time to go until February when the course ended. My cubicle was dank, and dusty. The Times calendar squint on the wall, the leave dates blocked in. I unblocked them, in so far as I blacked them out. It was over, that part, and now I settled down to the following months with something akin to despair.

  I remembered our last night, Gooley and I, together in here, on the eve of our first leave. After the almost euphoric hysteria of packing kit-bags, polishing boots and brasses, and handing in the bits of equipment we would not be taking away, he came and joined me, sprawling, cigarette in mouth, across my bed.

  “Who can tell, boyo, who can tell when we’ll meet again? After de war, Toff, and you sitting across from me at me own bar, Kitty dere pullin’ de handles and bloody great jars of Guinness slopping all over de counter! Ah de bliss of it all! Mind you, so long as I play me cards right, that is … de pub’ll be mine, and de drinks is all on de house, I can see it now. Only, one ting, Toff,” he leant up on his elbow and wagged his cigarette butt across at me seriously, “one ting, don’t you go getting yourself killed and that. It’d be a waste, a terrible, terrible waste.” I promised, in my cracked mirror, that I’d take care.

  “Better chance of survivin’, Toff, if you’d only stop volunteering for every damn little ring dat comes along. Hang back a little and give the Sweet Lord a little chance to see youse … he can’t keep his eye on us all at de same time … he’ll lose you in de crowd … all dat stuff about him havin’ his eyes on de sparrows is all blarney, you remember dat. And you tell dem I told you so, and I’m a good Catholic boy!”

  I was struggling with the cords on my kit bag and wasn’t really listening to him. He yawned heavily and eased himself off the bed and shuffled towards the door. “Hey!” he called softly, “catch this, you bugger!” and threw something through the air towards me. I ducked and missed the catch and it slid and scattered, glinting in the harsh light from the lamp. His rosary. “It’s not for keeps, mind; you’ll give it back when you comes to Cork.” He went away whistling, his hands shoved into his pockets. I never saw him again.

  Now the little dusty room seemed emptier because of remembering, and I stared miserably at the calendar which still said November. Time past. Nothing seemed good; I started unpacking slowly, cigarettes, a fruit cake in a tin, Evelyn Waugh, John Donne, a pound of winter apples from home. There was a sudden commotion through the partition in the hut. People started clapping, and cheering. I was putting everything neatly away in my locker when Worms shoved open the door, his face scarlet.

  “You heard, did you?”

  “What?”

  “The Japs.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’ve gone and bombed some bloody harbour in Hawaii. The Yanks are in!”

  Chapter 3

  Five and a half years later I was out; my war was eventually over and after a long and uncomfortable trip from Singapore on the Monarch of Bermuda, filled with anticipation, relief, and a modest sense of a modest job well done, I reached my Regimental Headquarters on a dank October morning outside Guildford, where I was issued with a pork-pie hat, a cotton-tweed suit, a pair of new black shoes, a ration book and a travel warrant for Haywards Heath. Nothing could have been more prosaic, dull, or flat. Dragging a cardboard box of ill-fitting clothing to the gates on the way to the station I was accorded my last salute from a pale young Sergeant.

  “Is that all there is to it?” I asked him. “I mean, I just go?”

  He smiled a weak-tea smile. “That’s all, Sir,” and then flicking a wan eye at my thin line of ribbons he added, “thanks for the help, Sir.” He wasn’t even wearing the Defence Medal. I supposed he must have been fourteen when I joined up. Help be buggered: where, I wondered, wandering down to the station, had all those years gone? A Morris Minor stopped beside me and a man asked me if I wanted a lift. I hadn’t thought about a taxi—and wasn’t sure of the rate of exchange even, for I had not handled English money for a long time. We drove in silence for a while. He had assumed, correctly, that I would be going to the station.

  “Been away long then?” His voice was kind, not curious.

  “Not long. A couple of years.”

  A woman at a crossing suddenly slapped her child, shook it angrily, and then pushed her pram hurriedly over the road.

  “You’ll see some changes here then, after two years.”

  “I expect so.”

  “People are fed up really. Can’t blame them, can you? A war’s a war. They don’t know what to do with the peace now they’ve got it. All at sixes and sevens.”
<
br />   So, I thought, am I. What lies ahead for me now? I don’t think I’m all that used to a peace. Two weeks left to wear the uniform which, after five years, had given me a sense of identity, then into the cotton-tweed and then what? An interview with some headmaster in December and, if I passed, a temporary job teaching at a Prep School in, of all God-forsaken places, Windlesham. Did I want to go and sit among the pines and heather of Surrey and teach scrappy Art, History and, possibly, English to a lot of stinking little boys in grey flannel suits? And supervise their cricket, I who couldn’t even buckle on my pads, or tell the bails from the ball? Was this all that I was any use for now? I was, indeed, most grateful to my brother officer who had made this temporary job even possible, for he taught, or had taught, at the same school before the war, and had put in a good word for me some months ago when I had written to him, in despair, saying that I would not, after all, make the Army my career, and would be demobilised in October without any chances of a future job, and could he suggest something for me to do. I was not, I added, ever returning to the theatre; I had been away too long, it would be impossible to try to start again; and in any case I reluctantly agreed with him that he was right when he had once said, years ago in Shrivenham where we had first met, that acting was a pansy job. So the theatre was out … what could I do? Windlesham and Cricket?

  My silence in the car was impolite. I apologised.

  “I know how you feel; at sixes and sevens yourself. Married, are you?”

  “No … not married.”

  “Just as well really. So many of them didn’t last the first bloody leave; all done in hysteria, really. Sad.”

  At the station he pushed a packet of five cigarettes into my hand. “Have these, not much, might cheer you up. I can get more, don’t worry. Know a girl up at the Wheatsheaf.” He drove off before I could thank him.

  “I can see you been in the sun, mate,” said a porter, shoving my box and bits and pieces on to the rack. “Where was you, Alamein then?”

  “Calcutta … Java … Malaya.”

  “Aha! The Forgotten Army, eh?”

  “No … no! Nothing as brave as that.”

  “Well, welcome home, though you won’t get sunstroke where you’re going, but I expect you’ll be quite glad of that. Can’t stand the heat myself, brings me out in a rash.”

  Friendly, kind, solicitous; traditionally English. Like the tidy little back gardens whipping past the window. Neat, dull, familiar. Here and there a row of houses rubbled by a bomb, washing fluttering, children playing in a school-yard, a red bus turning a corner. The flat October light grey; grey as the brick houses, the autumn gardens, the pearl sky above. Through the rumble of the wheels I heard, distinctly, the bull-frogs in the lily pool outside my house in Bandoeng, the clatter and clack of the evening wind in the bamboos, the soft rustle of the frangipani leaves, and the quarrelling of the parrots, swooping low over the eaves of the house, then spiralling upwards into the lavender sky, wheeling, diving, emerald turning to ebony, as they splintered and scattered hurriedly into the gleaming leaves of the great banyan tree to roost before the swift fall of night. And then the great hush which followed; the hills across the valley gently fading from deepest blue to blackest black, the sky vermillion and in that pure stillness the urgent, angry, reminding rat tat tat tat … tat tat … tat-a-ratter of a machine gun down on the perimeter wire.

  It had been a goodish war, as far as wars go. I had survived, although I still wondered, slumped as I now was, looking out at Surrey, how the hell I had. Luck most probably. That and the very early training of my sensible parents and Lally, who had always insisted that one could do anything one wanted, if one worked for it; the working was the hardest part … the wanting came easier; but I had worked.

  * * *

  When the course had finished, eventually, in February, the Royal Corps of Signals, delighted with my theatrical ventures, distressed by my lack of any technical knowledge whatsoever, even after almost half a year under their very careful eyes, bundled me off, unexpected and unwanted, like a plastic netsuke in a packet of cornflakes, to the unaware Royal Artillery who, though quick to discover my talents as an actor (I started another Dramatic Society and flogged “Journey’s End”, playing Raleigh yet again), were equally quick to discover that I found guns just as incomprehensible as a field telephone, only more dangerous, so they in turn handed me on to the Infantry. Even though I had learned the handbook on the Bofors gun by heart, and was able to quote it in great chunks with the passion of a Lear, I was totally unable to do anything else with the thing, dropping dummy shells all over the place and most often on other people’s feet, never, as far as I remember, on my own. I constantly jammed my fingers in the auto-loader, apologising with pain and dismay all the way to the M.O.

  Defeated, therefore, once again by machines, which I came to dread and loathe for the rest of my life, I arrived at an Officer Cadets’ Battle School in a wet cloud-sodden camp on the top of Wrotham Hill. There the only thing required of me was self-preservation. And since I had an extremely strong instinct for that I somehow managed to survive all the assault courses, bayonet drills, cliff-climbings up and down the quarries of Kent, and swimming, or boating, across every river and stream in the county. The fact that I couldn’t swim a single stroke never daunted me. I just hung on to the nearest piece of floating matter, be it a log or a fellow cadet, and got through. My worst test of this came once at a public swimming baths in Maidstone where, in full regalia, steel helmet, boots, full kit and a clonking water-bottle on the hip, I sprang off the top board knowing that I would die. From the board the pool looked like a neat rectangle—a grave—and as I plummeted down, feet first thankfully, I knew that after this I would no longer have to try, no longer have to keep up with the best in the team, no longer have to make tremendous efforts to get myself into form as a leader of men. I no longer needed to prove anything. The angels, I had no doubt that there would be angels, could care for me from there on in; I took the sensible precaution of holding my nose. I seemed to go down a very long way, and bobbed up like an empty bottle, grabbed desperately at someone’s threshing legs and was towed safely to the side. The angels receded for the time being.

  I couldn’t swim owing to the fact that I had once, at the age of ten, been encouraged by unknowing Lally to leap off a breakwater into the sea at Seaford. She was sure that the water was shallow and that I would love it. The water was extremely deep, the tide was coming in rapidly, and I loathed it. Floating about in the pale green gloom, a large strand of seaweed drifting gently towards me, I knew that I was a gonner and was rather surprised to find myself on my stomach some miles, it seemed, along the beach, being thumped by a fat man in a red bathing suit. I brought up most of the English Channel, and stayed at the water’s edge for the rest of my life. Shrimping was as far in as I ever went.

  Then at school in Glasgow, dumped in a lavatory pan by mindless classmates because I spoke with the accent of a Sassenach, I was once again immersed in roaring water and left half drowned in a sea of stale urine and floating effluvia. It was all I could do after that to take a bath. But, somehow, I got through five and a half years of war without once touching a field telephone, a Bofors gun, or swimming a single stroke. I wondered if that was simply luck or deception. No matter. Here I was in one piece, with all that, sadly, behind me. Sadly, strangely enough, because in spite of all the minor, and some very major, miseries, I thoroughly enjoyed all my war and had seriously contemplated making it my full-time career when the Americans dropped the atom bomb and war, as I knew it, came to a full stop. There was no point at all being a soldier without a war to fight: like a key without a lock, a meal without salt, or Androcles without his lion.

  It was borne in on me very soon at Wrotham, among the blasted trees and bomb craters of the assault course that this was my third, and possibly last, chance to win through. No Morse Code here to trouble my idiot head, no auto-loaders in which to jam my hands, just me myself and my own deep sense of Self.
The only way in which I could possibly succeed in this hell hole was by being, not The Best, I could never be that, but among the first five or six. In that way I might just manage to survive. I was always among the first handful up a cliff face, over a river, through the tunnels, across the mine-fields, over the palisades, along the greasy pole and in and out of booby-trapped buildings. I went like a ferret. Panic lent me winged feet and a lack of vertigo. Panic that I should have to stay behind with the slower members of the outfit who, struggling desperately over every obstacle, slipping in the mud, swirling in the swift currents of the River Medway, gasping and choking, were far more dangerous than any stray bullet, coil of wire, or raging weir. A bayonet up the backside was something to dread, and most of them waved theirs around like parasols. So I let them all sink or swim as they chose and belted for dear life across acres of ravaged Kent as if the V.C. was my main objective.

  In this rather shameful way I managed to clamber towards the heights of my Commission and become a fully fledged, even though unwilling, little leader of men. Which was all, in the end, that was required of me. I was given to understand that my life, in real action, would have the duration of about twenty-four hours. Which seemed to me rather a waste of effort; however, with all the supreme self-interest I could muster I felt quite sure that this unpleasing rule could only apply to the others. Never, at any time, to me.

  On April 1st, 1943, a glorious, sunny, wind-whipped morning, I finally achieved greatness and marched solemnly off the parade ground at Sandhurst a fully commissioned Lieutenant. In my splendid uniform, fitted for weeks by a gentleman from Hawes and Curtis in a wooden shed near the barracks, wearing my father’s Sam Browne, with the badges and buttons of the Queen’s Royal Regiment flashing like the Koh-i-noor, my head held high, and before my somewhat astonished, but proud none the less, parents, I strode bravely up the stone steps preceded by a relation of the King’s who rode a large white horse which defecated cheerfully when it got to the top. This was expected, and indeed hoped for, and to the strains of “Don’t Fence Me In” rather oddly chosen for the march, and a wild roar of delighted applause and cheering, I set my right foot forward to what I sincerely hoped were better things.