A Breed of Heroes (16 page)

‘Back room,’ said the man, in a matter-of-fact way.

‘He shares wid his brothers,’ added the woman quickly. ‘He’s no harm, they’re no harm, none of them.’ She pulled the girl closer to her. One of the soldiers
came in with two boys, one in his teens and the other about nine or ten. They were tousled and frightened. The smaller one wore dirty underpants and the elder held a pair of jeans around himself.
The soldier who shepherded them in looked embarrassed. ‘Found them upstairs, sir. No more.’ He went back up the stairs.

Sergeant Mole then left the room and the woman put her arm round the girl, as though to prevent her from being touched by anyone. The little boy sat on the tatty sofa and the elder one stood
sullenly by the electric fire, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The man said something which Charles had to ask him to repeat. He said it again but Charles’s ear was unaccustomed to the
thick West Belfast accent. Finally, the man repeated the four words with sarcastic slowness. ‘Is-he-all-right?’

Charles was concentrating so much on understanding that he had to think for a moment who was meant. ‘Yes – yes, as far as I know,’ he said. ‘I think he’s all right.
There was no trouble, I believe.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in custody. I’m afraid I don’t know where. I wasn’t there.’ There was a silence. Charles felt sorry for the people and wanted to say so, but he knew
that anything he said or did would be filtered through the medium of his boots, beret, flak jacket and rifle. There was no escaping his role. ‘I’ll try to find out for you,’ he
said lamely in the end. Advertisements flickered soundlessly across the television screen. The man moved an ashtray from the arm of the sofa to the mantelpiece.

‘I’ll make tay,’ muttered the woman. She took her hand from her face and walked with tightly-folded arms out of the room. The girl ran after her.

‘I’ll see if I can find out where your son is,’ Charles said again, but the fat man turned his back and sat on the sofa without speaking. The two boys stared. Charles went
upstairs and asked Sergeant Mole, who was turning out a cupboard in the front bedroom. ‘This hasn’t been turned out since the house was built,’ he said with genuine disgust.
‘You can smell it in the street, I reckon.’ By the time Charles got back down the woman had made the tea and was standing sipping it, holding the cup in both hands. ‘He’s in
Hastings Street police station,’ he said.

The woman’s eyes, enlarged by her spectacles, looked directly at him for the first time. ‘He’s never in no trouble,’ she said. ‘He ain’t any of them. He
don’t have no trouble wid him.’ Her lips trembled. ‘God strike me dead if I lie.’

Charles was called out of the room by a voice from upstairs. As he left the room he caught his rifle butt on the door-jamb. He looked back to apologise but said nothing.

His corporal was at the top of the stairs. ‘Found something, sir,’ he said in a low voice. ‘In the back room.’ The room was very small and there was hardly room to move
around the double bed. It was where the three boys slept, and was filthy. The room stank. One of the policemen held up the top end of the mattress. On an old brown blanket beneath was a rusty
revolver with a broken handle. It seemed a pitiful gesture. Sergeant Mole picked it up in a piece of cloth. ‘Old Webley,’ he said. ‘Very old. Loaded, too. Silly young fool.
It’ll have his paw-marks all over, I don’t doubt. What a place to hide it, eh?’

Nothing more was found in the rest of the house. Sergeant Mole showed the revolver to the family in the living room. They gazed sullenly at it. The woman blinked tearfully. ‘He’s had
no trouble before,’ she said. ‘He niver told us he had that. It’s no hisn, it can’t be. Someone else has put it there.’ She pressed a tightly-screwed handkerchief to
her thin nose. ‘It’s never his, it can’t be his. He never told us about it. Dear God, it can’t be hisn. He would’ve said. He’s not with them. He’s not a
part of it.’

Sergeant Mole wrapped the revolver preciously in a piece of cloth. The man stared at the threadbare carpet. No one looked up at them when they left.

Only one of the other houses searched yielded anything, in this case a worthwhile find. There was an old British Army .303 Lee-Enfield rifle, two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition, twenty pounds
of home-made explosive and, under the floor of a shed, a home-made mortar. The CO was delighted and stayed in the area of the search longer than was necessary in the hope of provoking a riot which
he could quell, but none came. It was likely that the trouble, if there were any, would be a planned demonstration some days later, although even this was not that likely since trouble usually
followed fruitless rather than successful searches.

Back in the Factory the CO had drinks in the ops room and ordered everyone to join him. Drink and his own boisterous good humour accentuated all his normal characteristics, and he gave a lecture
on the Lee-Enfield, using the captured one as a demonstration model. When he had finished, his eyes lighted upon Charles. ‘Ah, Charles, I want to speak to you.’ Still holding the rifle,
he grabbed Charles by the arm and propelled him into a corner where he spoke in low, earnest, conspiratorial terms, apparently imagining that no one else was listening. ‘You’ve done
well, you’ve done bloody well, but it’s not on, I’m afraid. Politicians won’t allow it. Too much of a hot potato. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Right, sir.’ Charles was not certain that he knew what the CO was talking about, but it was a response that worked its usual magic.

‘Good man. Knew you’d take it like that.’ He squeezed Charles’s arm hard, his dark eyes brimming with sincerity and alcohol. ‘It’s infuriating, I know. We
know they’re there but we can’t touch them. Had it right from the top. They must have a source. Keep it under your hat. And to think they could be used on my soldiers, that’s what
makes me want to scream blue murder. I’d raze the place to the ground if I had my way. Rid these poor people of their priests, their politicians and their paramilitary thugs – and us,
mind you, and us – and give them a chance to get on with their lives in peace. The day will come, I hope. For the time being no joy, though. But you did well, Charles. Let’s have more
of it.’

The CO grinned and punched Charles playfully in the stomach. His face was so close that Charles could see the back of his tongue. ‘Good man. Have another drink. Don’t argue.
We’ll knock this university stuff out of you yet.’

Charles made his escape unnoticed after the CO had finished with him. He lay down in his partition but could hear the drinking going on for another couple of hours. Months later it fell to the
company officers to pay for the drinks.

T
he company’s spirits remained relatively high for some days after the arms finds. The shooting of Chatsworth also contributed to good
morale. Everyone was amused because it was Chatsworth, and the story was put about, to his annoyance, that he really had been shot by a monk. Soldiers made jests to him about what clerical
gentlemen carried beneath their vestments, and how the real meaning of Holy Orders was ‘Aim – steady – fire’. Spirits were lifted by the mere fact of a shooting, since
something happening was always more exciting than nothing.

The worst times for everyone were periods of inactivity during which the boredom and the drudgery of military life wore on remorselessly. Like everyone else, Charles was short on sleep and
temper and was, indeed, more tired than during active periods because then the excitement was stimulating and the tiredness healthy. Living conditions in the all-male military community were
cheerless and sordid; patrolling, guarding, cleaning and watchkeeping formed a grinding and unending routine.

Underlying everything in his life was the feeling that no one in the world cared for him. He suspected that everyone felt this. It was evident in occasional surliness and in the deliberate,
hearty display of lack of emotion. The positive side of this was that he found he worried less about his own concerns but at the same time he cared less for other people, and noticed them less.

Each man developed a front of unconcern, which in some was ingrained, to the extent that the more he hardened himself the more he relied upon the corporate identity to take the place of his own.
This corporate identity could be seen and felt: each man borrowed from it and lent to it; it embraced all and excluded none, to such an extent that all seemed merely to be aspects of it. It was
difficult to say how much these conditions contributed to the suicide of Lance-Corporal Winn but, whether or not they acknowledged it, everyone felt that the contribution must have been
substantial.

Lance-Corporal Winn was a small, chunky soldier from Birmingham, a man of few words but reliable and conscientious. He appeared to have little or no ambition to distinguish himself but simply
jogged along and ‘kept his nose clean’, as the Army would have it. Charles knew him by sight but had never spoken to him, except to give orders when mounting guard in Aldershot. In time
he would probably have made sergeant. The day before his death he had been told by another soldier, who had had a letter from his own wife, that back in Aldershot his wife had been carrying on with
someone from one of the other regiments there. He had not said much about this at the time. In fact, his informant had had the impression that he didn’t much care. He had been on guard duty
that night and had shot himself just after six, when he had come off duty. He had walked over to where the Pigs were parked in the Factory yard and had gone behind one of them. His relief, who had
not spoken to him except to remark upon the cold, had assumed that he had gone to pee against the wall. When the shot came, he and one of the other guards had run to the Pig and found Winn on the
ground behind it, but with the back half of his head splattered over the wall. He had apparently rested his rifle butt on the ground, bent over and put his mouth round the barrel.

Winn was in Tim’s platoon and Tim had been roused immediately. Henry Sandy was sent for and the body taken away in his Land-Rover ambulance. The padre came and Tim was unnecessarily rude
to him. Arrangements were made to inform Winn’s widow through the Families officer in Aldershot. The CO appeared during the morning and talked to Edward, Tim and the soldier who had received
the letter. The effect on the company – and, to a lesser extent, on the rest of the battalion – was to lower morale for a few days. Everyone was quieter and more serious, there was none
of the normal banter and boisterousness amongst the soldiers nor any of the perennial grumbling that was so necessary to them. However, things were done quietly and conscientiously, and there was
less fuss. But days pass in the Army as they do everywhere else and normality reasserts itself with the willing assistance of everyone, perhaps more quickly than in civilian life because of the
consciousness of common purpose. Layer upon layer of daily and nightly routine soon smothered any exceptional event.

Charles was not sorry, though, when a telephone call summoned him with all his kit to battalion headquarters. There had been another shooting: Philip Lamb had inadvertently shot himself in the
foot and Charles had to take his place as PRO. He was glad to leave the company and the Factory. The people and the place had become depressingly familiar, like a tedious argument for ever repeated
and never resolved. There was a dreary intimacy about it all from which he was glad to free himself. The police station occupied by battalion HQ, though far from comfortable, could not fail to be
an improvement upon the Factory, and dealing with the press would be a welcome change from the sordid concerns of his platoon, where kit inspections and deficiencies seemed to be the paramount
concern in his life. Sergeant Wheeler was to look after the platoon until a new subaltern arrived from the Depot. Charles bade him goodbye in the Factory yard with what seemed even to himself an
absurd formality considering he was moving half a mile or so.

‘’Spect we’ll see you back with all them press poofters, sir,’ Sergeant Wheeler said as they shook hands.

‘No doubt, and I shall expect your help.’

‘You’ll be too good for us then, sir. You won’t want to know us.’

‘Goodbye, Sergeant Wheeler. Good luck.’

‘Goodbye, sir, and you, sir.’

Despite the relief at leaving the Factory there were disadvantages about going to battalion HQ. It was renowned throughout the battalion as a place of madness and fear. In addition to the
loathing which most soldiers have for the headquarters of higher formations, even their own, the personality of the CO pervaded the building and induced in all who entered it a sense of urgency
bordering on panic and the feeling that heads were about to roll. As Charles’s Land-Rover entered the gates into the yard around which the police station was built he already began to feel
that there had, after all, been something homely and reassuring about company life. Battalion HQ contained much that was unknown and hence dangerous for second lieutenants. No move in the Army was
entirely for the better.

‘Going to be murder with the CO breathing down your neck all the time,’ Edward had said. ‘Rather you than me, old son. Still, it’s more your sort of line, I suppose, all
this press rubbish. You read books. Apparently, the new chap we’re getting is very good. Bit of life and a drop of new blood won’t do the company any harm. Drop in and see us sometime
when you’re swanning around. Don’t forget to hand your kit in to the company stores. And your rifle.’

‘No more action for you,’ Chatsworth had said. ‘You’re being more or less pensioned off. There might be some women amongst these journalists, so bear me in mind. You
know, the sort who have to do it to prove to themselves how liberated they are. With a chauvinistic Ackie shit like me they can feel they’re even more liberated than they thought by embracing
the opposition, so to speak. Poor fools. Bring ’em round for an interview.’

It turned out that Philip Lamb had shot his foot whilst entering B company’s location with a TV team. While unloading his pistol for the sentry’s inspection, as was compulsory when
entering any defended area, he had carelessly cocked it with the full magazine still in and, pointing towards the ground, had squeezed the trigger to clear it. The TV team had filmed his subsequent
writhings. It was the first negligent discharge in the battalion and the CO, who was furious, had fined him heavily. He had brought public disgrace to the regiment and the CO was determined not to
have him back.