Snakes and Ladders Read online

  The man opposite, hit by my unconscious kick, woke up and blinked. I apologised and he smiled through half sleep. “Nodded off,” he yawned and stretched his arms wide across the near empty compartment, contentedly licked round his stale mouth, belched gently and asked me where I’d been.

  “The Far East.”

  “I could see you had a bit of a tan … Burma, were you?”

  “Partly … Malaya, you know …” lamely, leave it, don’t ask me. Tears aren’t far.

  “Ah! The Forgotten Army, eh? Well, you’re safely home now, sonny. Mind you, we’ve had our problems, oh yes! Not been easy. Dunkirk, the Blitz, and those V2s … shit, don’t suppose you know about them, eh? And the VIS … very nasty … nearly did for us that lot did. But we won, didn’t we? We muddled through … can’t say we didn’t win in the end.” He smiled again, “Course we had Churchill, but he had to go; a bully … don’t need a bully in peacetime.” He pulled his mackintosh and a carrier bag off the rack, and stood at the door as we rumbled into a platform. “And,” he said with a wink, “Waterloo’s still here! But we had a bloody awful war, mark my words, we was under siege, you know … under siege.”

  “But you weren’t occupied, were you?”

  He lowered the window and thrust his hand out for the handle. “Don’t follow?”

  “Occupied. You weren’t occupied, were you?”

  He swung open the door. “Occupied? This is Britain, mate. Good luck!” He jumped off and ran along the platform before we had finally stopped.

  I collected my kit together, and the cardboard box with the black shoes and the cotton-tweed suit. I left the pork-pie hat, alone, on the rack.

  * * *

  If Waterloo was still there, home was not. Well, not the home that I had left five and a half years before. It was no longer the red-tiled, gargoyled, ugly, much loved house by the big pond. No more the bamboo thicket in the orchard, my tin studio called “Trees”, the magnolias, the lawns, the Granny Smiths from whose scaly arms I had often stared, hopelessly loving, concealed in leaves, at Elsie Brooks in her attic bedroom changing into something pretty for the day off with her mechanic from Lindfield; no more spreading common ablaze with summer gorse, no lizards, no gentian patch, no pond, no rotting punt. That had all since gone, sold to people who ripped down the studio, hacked down the bamboo and the magnolias, cleaned up and cemented the pond with hideous crazy paving paths, and generally opened up the place to the light, leaving the unhappy house standing baldly four square and ugly to the winds.

  Home now was a small cottage, badly placed under the Downs, on a narrow lane facing south and north. That is to say the back faced south into the hill and practically never got the sun, and the front faced north across rolling plough to the station at Hassocks. It was not unlovely, just uncomfortable. But with me half across the world, Elizabeth my sister, a WREN at Portsmouth, and Gareth, now twelve, a boarder at Hurstpierpoint, the dog dead and Elsie married to her mechanic and a mother herself, it was the right size for what remained of the family.

  “It is rather small, darling …” My mother wistful, apologetic. “But I think you can make do in Gareth’s room … he comes home at weekends only, you see, and then he can sleep in the telephone room on a camp bed. But you can’t use the bathroom while Ulric’s shaving … he goes up to town on the 8.25 so we have to keep everything clear for him, you see; he doesn’t get back until very late. I do wish he’d retire.”

  Gareth’s room was very small, eight by six. A minute window looking out over the fields to Hassocks and Ditchling, a not-big-enough bed and some rather ugly bits of furniture I didn’t remember. I sat on the bed and looked around the stranger’s room, feeling very much as I had done in my own room on leaves long past, only in this private place there was nothing to remind me of myself. A German helmet, a jam jar full of used stamps, part of a wireless-set, coils and valves bloomed with dust, Treasure Island, The Boy’s Book of Hobbies 1912, and handfuls of dried acorns, Sherwood Forest dormant in a Dolcis shoe-box. I didn’t know the person who lived in this room any more than I knew the person sitting presently on his bed. I had been. Who was I now? Nervously, curiously, I looked for signs of myself … surely he must have something of mine from the days past? The Eiffel Tower was there! And the lay-figure my Grandfather had given me, legs and arms akimbo still, head pressed into its aluminium chest. In the meagre bookcase some old sketch books from Chelsea Polytechnic. I felt the pages for familiarity, riffling through them with affection. My old notebooks, filled with projects never accomplished, designs never designed, ideas long abandoned. All the help that I had been offered by Moore and Sutherland and my other teachers was intact. Sutherland’s splendid Stonehenge, eight rectangles on a half sphere with a radiant sun, some of Moore’s wrapped ladies helping to define form for me, they all were there still, half obliterated by crayon drawings of Spitfires, monsters, a sinking battleship, someone called “My Pal” wearing a hat and cross-eyes, and riotous squiggles of red, yellow and green wax. The sad ruining product of an idle day and a box of crayons by my little brother.

  I had no present here. I had no past here. The October day was dying in wan splendour, a flock of lapwings eddied down into the plough opposite and scuttled about busily for the last feed before night, crests rising and falling in cautious alarm. Somewhere down below I heard spoons in saucers and my mother singing. It came softly up the little staircase through the door with a Japanese flag pinned across it, which I had sent Gareth from Sourabaya, long ago. The voice was sweet, warm, gentle, a remembrance of time gone by, of rooms gone by, of places lost and other evenings. But equally a reminder, a reassurance of now; of love, of belonging, of coming home again. I went over to the little desk and started to unpack the presents I had brought back; her singing filled the house.

  “I’ll be loving you, always …

  With a love that’s true …

  Always. …”

  * * *

  “What-did-you-do-in-the-war-Elizabeth, then?”

  She laughed and brushed a silk-stockinged knee with a dismissing hand. “Nothing much, just a boring old WREN. Made a lake of cocoa, I should think.”

  “Nothing brave? Firing torpedoes or something?”

  “No. Nothing. The only time I ever got really upset was when I got very muddled about all that twenty-three-fifty-nine business. You know, the time thing. I never learned that ten o’clock was twenty-two hundred hours. Did you?”

  “Never.”

  “And I was late back from leave so I had hysterics on the platform at Haywards Heath.”

  “Real hysterics?”

  “Screams and sobs, it was ghastly. People thought I was having a fit. I was.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, Daddy telephoned the Head Nun, or whatever she was, and sorted it out. But it gave me a terrible turn.”

  “As Lally would say.” We laughed together.

  “She’s married now, you know … terribly nice man, a footman to Lady Hedgerly. She’s very happy. Are you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s all so different somehow, I don’t know. I miss it all. Isn’t it strange?”

  “I hated it all, my bit. Yours was different. What are you, a Captain or something?”

  “War Substantive Captain … but a Major, it’s difficult to explain …”

  She lit a cigarette busily. “Don’t try, I’d never understand. But it’s quite good, isn’t it? Can you be a Captain in peace time?”

  “They say I can.”

  “But you wouldn’t, would you? You’d sound like something in a Club House. What are you going to do, though?”

  “That’s the whole problem. I don’t know.”

  “Go back to the theatre thing?”

  “No. Not now. Too late. I’m too old anyway. And it’s a bit frivolous, isn’t it? Shallow somehow. I’d feel …” I dried up, I didn’t know what I’d feel. “Anyway, there is this school job at Windlesham … I’ll try that. Got to do something, I haven’t a penny.”
/>   “I’m going to get married, I think.”

  I was struck dumb with shock.

  She nervously pulled down her navy skirt and shook her hair round her shoulders. “Mummy and Daddy don’t know yet. Don’t tell. It’s not certain really.”

  “It’s not The Prawn, is it?” An awful wet in a Guards Regiment she had known years ago on one of my last leaves.

  She snorted with scorn. “God no!” she laughed. “He made a pass at Mummy one night in the pub, and that was the end of that, thank you … ghastly creature. Do you remember his whiskers!”

  “Who is this one, will I like him?”

  “George, in the RAF, and you’d better. I do.”

  It was a strange feeling, the two of us sitting in our uniforms, smoking with a couple of beers, in the little sitting room of the cottage. It was as if some great duster had wiped away a large chunk of our lives together, like a half-erased problem on a blackboard. The last time we had really been together she was still in her blue tweed school coat, I in my awful, but loved, green suit from a Gamages Fire Sale. And now I was talking of becoming a schoolmaster and she was talking of getting married.

  I laughed aloud and she looked at me incuriously.

  “George is a very nice name, you needn’t laugh.”

  “I’m not … about George. About us really.”

  “What’s wrong with us?”

  “Nothing! Nothing’s wrong. It’s just so funny. You and I playing in those plays I wrote, do you remember. ‘The Titanic’, and pushing you off the wall into all the straw … Do you remember when we used Gareth as a baby and you dropped him on his head in the barn, on what you called the soft part, and we thought he’d go mad or something? Perhaps he still will; he has masses of time.”

  “I remember lots of things then, Lally most of all of course, Twickenham and Mrs Jane and those lovely chocolate cakes she used to make for us …”

  “Madeira cake.”

  “I remember chocolate … it doesn’t matter. You know I don’t feel the least bit different inside, do you? I feel just the same as I always did. Isn’t it awful.”

  “I feel just the same too. I suppose we are supposed to be different, but I don’t feel it. I feel just as silly now as I was then. Sillier.”

  She sighed and went over to the window and peered out, her arms folded over her chest, she hunched her shoulders up high as if she was cold. “Isn’t Mummy wonderful really? She’s kept the garden going all the war, you know, vegetables, fruit, garlic even … always something; she used to eat huge garlic sandwiches all through the winters to keep well. Daddy nearly choked to death. But she never got a cold once. I wonder what happened to the time, all that time? I expect we grew up.” She sounded sad, wistful, almost as if she hoped that I would say that she was wrong. I did.

  “No, I don’t think we did. I haven’t, I know; what worries me so much is that I have got to start doing it now, right away, and I don’t know how to begin.”

  She came slowly across and sat beside me, her arms still holding her body. “But in the war, in France … or even, you know, in Burma or India or wherever it was. I mean that all made a difference, didn’t it? There were things which happened; things which make you grow up. They say so anyway, killing people, you know. Were you frightened?”

  “Yes. Very. But I don’t think fright makes much difference to it.”

  She leant towards me very secretly, as she had done so often in childhood, a very private matter between us both. “What was the most frightening thing?”

  “Climbing a mill chimney in Blackburn.”

  “Whatever for?” Her eyes were wide with astonishment.

  “It was part of a Street Fighting Course … we had been doing Hand to Hand Fighting in some ruined houses, with real bullets and stuff, tiles flying, and dust … and at the end there was this damned chimney, about eighty or ninety feet high, with little steel spikes driven into the brickwork all the way up … and we had ropes, and when I looked upwards it sort of reeled against the sky and I felt sick. I think you could have refused. Some people did.”

  “Why didn’t you then?”

  “I was too frightened not to. I didn’t want to be a coward.”

  “I think you must be mad, really.”

  “Anyhow, when I got to the top it was about a yard wide all round and the Sergeant was covered in soot and very hearty. He made me look at the view. ‘Grand view from here,’ he kept saying.”

  I remember that I stood clutching his arms with my shaking hands, my legs weak, as if my knees had been removed. I forced myself not to look at the great black hole to my right, but to look up where he indicated out across the filthy city cupped in its rolling endless moors and dales, far below the pale faces of those who had not come up, or those who had already reached the bottom, stared up at us like a scatter of mushrooms. When I got down I was sick. Hopelessly. But the Sergeant gave me a pat, and stuck up a thumb. I had been frightened then. But I had been far more frightened of showing that I was.

  She got up suddenly and, shoving her tie into her jacket, buttoned up her little buttons. “I’ll go and give Mummy a hand with the table. She’s made a meat-loaf or something with two sausage rolls she got this morning and some sage and onions. I do think she’s clever; all I know is that I’m terribly frightened of growing up. I just wish I knew how to do it.” She went off into the little hall and a few minutes later I heard my mother laughing in the kitchen and the door closed.

  She had only asked me about being frightened, not about terror. I thought that terror, like responsibility, and killing people which I had done, might make a difference, but it hadn’t, so it seemed. And there had been terror, but I didn’t want to tell her that. I didn’t even, when it really came down to it, want to remind myself yet either. It was an emotion which you could, after a time, obliterate more or less for a little. Only during really bad thunderstorms would I remember Belsen, and the girl, shorn head covered in scabs, face cracked with running sores from which she carelessly waved away the April flies, who grabbed my hand and stumbled with me along the sandy tracks amongst the filth, talking, crying, singing all at the same time, pointing me out proudly as we went, her filthy striped skirt flapping, breasts swinging like empty pockets against her rib-lined chest. A Corporal, red faced and gentle, took her from me and pulled us apart, thrusting her away. She stood appalled for a moment, and then with cascading tears pressed both hands to her lips and threw me kisses until I had gone from her sight.

  “Sorry, Sir,” apologetic, careful. “Typhoid. The place is full of it … I reckon they’ll all go.”

  Outside the camp, in the pale April sun, the larches shadowy with spring, larks high above the rolling, sandy heath. Help had come, trucks and jeeps and cars still bumped slowly across the tracks through the huge wire gates into hell. I drove away.

  And the wood outside Soltau … the dark pines and the earth below squashy, so that tent-pegs driven in slid into slime. The stench then, and the massed grave … legs and arms and swollen heads, the bloated, the rotten, liquefying, death beneath the pine-needles and moss. They had forced the people from the village to march past. Old men and women mostly, dragging, or carrying children. Some, the oldest, sobbed into handkerchiefs, the younger ones, white faced, spat, pointing out putrescence to unaware babies slung around their hips. Laughing, spitting into the grave, proud still, Germans.

  That was terror. Because it was so completely incomprehensible. Being dive-bombed on the airfield, shot at crossing a July field of buttercups, chased by tracer-bullets at night among the dykes and ditches of Holland, getting lost in a minefield, staggering up the beach at Arromanches, seeing my very first battle casualty, a man in a kilt lying indecently sprawled among the cow-parsley, the Daily Mirror plastered, considerately, across his blown-away face, holding the shaking shoulders of a woman stretched out under a shattered roof, while three older women delivered a child induced by shell-blast and terror … they were not Terror for me, because those things, however
bizarre and strange, however unexpected, were, in fact, to be expected in a war. Those things, because I could understand them, terrified me less than the terrors which began to emerge from a new kind of war. These things had not been in a textbook, and no one had been able to tell us that we should find them strewn along our victors’ path, no one had ever said that perhaps this was what growing up entailed. If they had, I doubt very much that I would have believed them, for I tend to disbelieve anything remotely beyond my comprehension.

  A limiting fault.

  * * *

  The light had died, the room was still. From the kitchen I could hear them clonking about, a tap running, the door opening and my mother coming into the little dining room next door; she rattled plates on to the table singing still.

  “Are you hungry?” she called. “We’ll eat early tonight, won’t wait for Ulric, Elizabeth has to get the eight-thirty bus back. Darling! Do put on the lights, it’s so gloomy in there.”

  The door shut. I put on the lamps and poured another beer. My father’s portrait over the fireplace looked sternly across me to another time.

  “I’m home,” I said aloud. “You said at the beginning that I might enjoy it, and some of it I did. But I don’t know what I had to go for, really, do you, now that it’s over? But I’m back, and I have lost nothing much. Nothing I really regret. Nothing that I won’t have a try at replacing, even adolescence. I must have gained something after all these years, but I suppose it’ll take a bit of time to come through, won’t it?”

  Elizabeth came quietly into the room, pulling off an apron. “Talking to yourself, my dear … that won’t do, you haven’t gone do-lally-tap, have you, like Gooze at Twickenham?” She rummaged in a large leather hand-grip and found some cigarettes. “I suppose you’d got all lonely on your first night home …”

  I offered her a beer, but she shook her head, and lit her cigarette blowing the smoke in a long stream towards me.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I was having a bit of a chat to our father up there over the fireplace.”