A Breed of Heroes (12 page)

‘I’m afraid my giving them a piece of my mind won’t have done much good for neighbourhood community relations. But, there you are, if they behave like that they must expect it.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Serves them right if they’re unhappy.’ She changed gear and turned corners with unnecessary speed as he directed her towards the Factory.
She pulled up abruptly outside the main gates, watched by the sentries. ‘God, what an awful place. D’you really have to live in there? I don’t know how you stand it.’

They kissed goodbye, a little awkwardly. ‘Write soon,’ she said.

‘I will.’

‘You’re all hot. Are you all right?’

‘Yes. It’s just coming back, you know.’

‘Are you sure, Charles? You’re sweating. You haven’t got ’flu or something, have you?’

‘Perhaps that’s it. I’ll let you know.’

‘I hope you’re all right. Look after yourself.’

‘And you.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’ He got out and she drove off with a wave, obviously buoyed up by her confrontation with the women. He walked slowly in through the gate.

‘Some ’ave all the luck, sir,’ said one of the sentries, with a grin.

Seconds after he had reported back into the ops room Chatsworth pounced upon him. ‘Did you screw her?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘There was nowhere to do it.’ It was a truthful response, but truthful in a trivial way. It was untruthful in that it allowed Chatsworth to assume that Charles shared his view of the
relationship. Perhaps he did, ultimately, but the truth at that time was that he did not know how he viewed it.

‘Very unenterprising of you,’ said Chatsworth, disappointed. ‘There must be an empty sangar somewhere on the Peace Line. You’d have been all right as long as there
wasn’t a riot.’

Charles was on duty until four the following morning, but when he finally crawled into his bed he was still preoccupied with his reaction to the women in the street that afternoon. Janet had
reacted decisively and effectively. What she had done could even be called healthy and normal. He felt that his own reaction had been more than simple indecision. It had amounted to a paralysis of
the conscious powers. Perhaps there was some excuse after the events in the cul-de-sac the other evening, or perhaps less because he should have learnt. He imagined that Janet would have coped with
the cul-de-sac better than he had. She would certainly have fired the rubber-bullet gun, for all her stated dislike of violence. He, on the other hand, could well have shot someone dead that
afternoon, acting unconsciously and unnecessarily out of fear. Fear, after all, was what it seemed to come down to.

L
ife in the Factory was monotonous but, paradoxically, the time seemed to pass quickly. Charles often had the feeling that there was much he should
remember, perhaps even record in a diary, yet successive days and nights were so much alike that he could not sort one from the other. Features of military life that seemed at first to be undyingly
memorable soon became so obvious and mundane that they were no longer noticed and were soon forgotten. Overall, it was the drudgery and the pettiness that were ingrained most deeply into his soul.
Incidental details, such as what should be worn with what and when, had an importance which sometimes overshadowed even operational matters. At their worst these could give to Army life a horror
unimagined by mere civilians, as Charles now realised. It was no one’s fault that the horror was so little known. The experience could not be conveyed to those who had not had it. It was like
fear and suffering, an experience so particular to each man as to be ultimately untranslatable, except in general terms. Radio-watching during the long hours of the night, patrolling the dirty,
unhappy and unfriendly streets, returning to a grim and noisy home where there was no possibility of privacy, eating, living and working with the same people amidst the sounds and smells of a
hundred and twenty men cramped into poor conditions all contributed to a life which seemed literally to be monotone. The streets were no relief from the Factory nor the Factory from the streets,
but it was necessary to keep changing one for the other in order to make both more bearable.

Yet the time passed quickly, perhaps because it was broken up. Even though the same activities were repeated day and night their order varied and the time of doing them varied. The working day,
or night, was about seventeen hours, seven days a week; sleep was irregular and frequently disturbed; anyone who had a few minutes with nothing to do simply closed his eyes and usually experienced
a rapid succession of very vivid dreams from which he could nevertheless emerge immediately because he never fully ceased to hear what was going on around him. Duties and watches were simply got
through; no one thought further ahead than the end of the next one; tomorrow was irrelevant to today and yet it all would end sometime, and so the present was made endurable.

Henry Sandy came one day with a complicated form. He was supposed to compile a medical report on the working and living conditions of the soldiers. At a time when everyone looked pale and tired,
he looked still worse.

‘You look like death warmed up,’ said Edward.

Henry proffered cigarettes to the smokers. ‘Shagged out,’ he explained. Henry and his medical team lived at the military hospital, where there was an abundance of nurses. The kindest
interpretation of their behaviour, which he himself provided, was that his and his team’s debaucheries were a vicarious acting-out of the frustrated desires of the rest of the battalion.

‘Wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t make it sound as though you didn’t enjoy it,’ said Chatsworth. ‘You make it sound like a duty.’

‘That’s what it’s becoming,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not sure I do enjoy it. I don’t think I do really. I think I do it just to see if I’m right in
thinking I’m not going to enjoy it. And I am.’

‘Why keep on doing it?’

‘In case I’m wrong, I s’pose. You never know your luck.’ He grinned and then giggled. ‘That’s not really why. I don’t know why. I just do it whenever I
can. Perhaps I’m too emotionally immature to say no, though Christ knows there’s little enough emotion involved.’

‘Well, I lack emotional maturity as well,’ said Chatsworth. ‘And I also lack the opportunity to be immature. What about me and Charles coming out one evening if we could fiddle
it? Reporting sick or something.’

‘Great. Whenever you like. I can easily lay on a couple of nurses. I’m not sure that Charles really wants to, though.’

‘’Course he does. He’s just so emotionally mature that he’s frightened to admit it.’

Henry spent about an hour going over the Factory, ticking boxes on his form. When he returned to the ops room he said: ‘It’s unfit for human habitation. Too little light, poor
ventilation, inadequate washing and toilet facilities, too much noise, too many people and the cookhouse is illegal.’

‘Could’ve told you that on the phone,’ said Edward. ‘Fit for soldiers, not fit for civil servants. God, imagine if they tried to send some of those fat bums in the MOD
somewhere like this. Wish they would. Send a few of them out here for a week and they might spend a bit more money on the poor bloody Ackies who do their fighting for them.’ Edward, mug of
tea in hand, overflowed with righteous indignation. ‘So what’s the good of your form, Henry? What’s going to happen, eh? What are they going to do about it? Sod-all, I
bet.’

Henry shrugged. ‘They might close the cookhouse.’

Henry then had to inspect the sentry positions along the Peace Line, and so Charles took him round with a section that was doing a routine foot patrol. Most of the positions were incorporated
into barriers that cut across streets, through which only pedestrians were allowed. Thus many streets were cut in half, Protestants on one side, Catholics on the other. The houses nearest the Peace
Line, where they still stood, were usually unoccupied. They were blackened and scarred by riots and pockmarked by bullets. Flush against the wire defences at one point on the Catholic side, a row
of new houses had been built to replace the dozen or so that had been burnt in that area during the early riots. They stretched right across a broad street with their blank rear walls facing the
Protestants. Children played against the barriers for most of the day, whether there was school or not.

‘Glasgow’s the only other place I know that could end up like this,’ said Henry. ‘Peace on condition that you annihilate the other side. Unless we get race war in our
other cities.’

‘Depressing prospect.’

‘The future always is. In our time, anyway. In the last century people looked forward to this one as a time when everything would be better. I suppose many things are. But we’re not
so optimistic about the next century, are we? If anything, we think of it as a time of diminishing humanity.’

They strolled along the pavement with the escorting section spread out in tactical formation on either side of the road. Henry seemed completely relaxed but for Charles the demands of the
present easily outweighed those of the future. He was constantly looking for sniping positions in windows, alleyways and blocked-up doorways. ‘Perhaps we’ll be as wrong about the next
century as others were about ours,’ he said. He had noticed in himself before that states of nervous watchfulness encouraged opinions that were more reassuring than realistic. It was as
though he was thereby staking a claim in a future he was not sure of reaching.

Henry, though, was apparently oblivious to his surroundings. ‘I don’t believe you’re that much of an optimist, Charles. Beneath that cool exterior a cold heart freezes. Things
generally get worse, don’t you agree?’

‘It depends upon the things, which means I don’t agree. Some things get worse, some get better, some don’t change. Generalisations are difficult, if you’ll forgive that
one.’

‘They’re also the only things worth saying. You could record your sordid particulars for the rest of your life but it’s all pointless if you’re not prepared to generalise
on the basis of it.’

Charles smiled. ‘Some philosophers argue that the general comes first and that we fit the particulars into it.’

‘Some philosophers are arse over tit,’ said Henry. ‘I was being serious.’

‘What makes you think I wasn’t?’

‘You? You never are, you bugger. You’re always on the fence. Serve you right if you get piles.’

Henry found that all the sentry positions lacked everything except ventilation. ‘Makes me appreciate living in the hospital,’ he said as they clambered down from one sandbagged,
corrugated tower. ‘It has its problems, of course – too many women – but it is comfortable. It’s a funny thing about the women. I’m becoming utterly depraved and
heartless. I just keep on doing it with as many as possible to see how long it’s going to last. There must come a time when I shall reach the bottom and be able to sink no lower, but each
time I think I’ve got there I find I can wriggle down a bit further. D’you know what I did the other evening?’ – he giggled – ‘but I won’t tell you,
I’m still ashamed about it. I’d like to find out if Chatsworth’s ever done it, though. But the trouble is, after a while, you get so that you can’t think about anything
else. It infects every part of your life. Don’t you find that?’

‘It’s the other way round with me. If I’m starved of women I’m more inclined to dwell on them.’

‘If I’m starved of them I just sort of forget. I become asexual until I’m with one again, and then I just want to jump on her, stoat-like, without a word,
anonymously.’

They were on the Protestant side now, where the kerbstones were painted red, white and blue and the slogans were painted neatly on the roads and walls. Union Jacks hung from some of the windows,
and were occasionally strung across the street from house to house. Two very small boys with very dirty faces ran up, proffering ragged bits of tartan. ‘Have ye killed any Fenians,
mister?’ asked one. ‘We’ll help ye kill ’em. We’ll help ye kill the Fenians.’

They refused the tartan, meant as a symbol of identification, and Charles watched to see that the patrolling section did the same. The soldiers were strung out along both sides of the road at
five-yard intervals. It was a sunny, breezy, cheerful day but there was no grass or any other greenery to be seen. At one house they were offered tea, a regular stop in that street, and they drank
it on the pavement, joking with the women and playing with the children. Henry and Charles stood a little way off. For some reason it would have seemed unofficer-like to accept tea.

‘The trouble with being an officer,’ said Charles, ‘is that it’s not possible to be anything else. Everything you do is determined by what other people expect of you. You
just can’t help it. You can’t even look like anything else.’

‘Unlike your soldiers, you don’t need food and drink and you have no sexual desire.’

‘Nor emotion, fear or envy.’

‘You are indifferent to heat and cold and to any other form of physical discomfort.’

‘Wherever you are is always the best of all possible worlds.’

The tea finished, they went on their way. Without wishing to identify with the Loyalist cause, they could not but feel safer in Loyalist areas. Except in times of very bad sectarian strife they
were unlikely to be shot at, whereas in Republican areas they were quite likely to be. Although they were genuinely unbiased towards one side or the other, they were less relaxed, hence more tense
and watchful, in Republican areas. It was more difficult for them to be friendly even if the people had been so inclined, which they were not. The Loyalist areas were more reassuring because of
their insistence upon identification with the rest of Britain, but it was a fierce and un-British insistence which made it difficult to ignore the differences. Charles felt generally comfortable
but essentially fraudulent in such places.

They crossed the Peace Line and approached the monastery that dominated the Republican area, on top of which there was an Army observation post. There were the same kind of houses and the same
small streets here, but the flags hanging from the windows were Republican and the slogans, instead of being anti-Catholic, were anti-Army, anti-RUC and anti-Brit. They were not anti-Protestant, as
the Protestant slogans were anti-Catholic, but the Republican flags were symbols of defiance. There were fewer people in these streets, no offers of tea, no well-scrubbed doorsteps. Instead, there
was an atmosphere of silent and sullen hostility. The people were quiet on the whole but they had close, hard faces and they seemed to be able to make the very brickwork seem alien. At least in the
new estate the hostility was open and vociferous, but here it was suppressed and bitter. The people lived in fear of their Protestant neighbours on the other side of the wire and they relied upon
the Army for protection, for which they hated the Army.