Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (26 page)

Good. You are buried in Groombridge Cemetery. The suburb,
having
swallowed you, then proceeds to digest you.

The Comprachicos sealed babies in jars. The baby grew: the jar stayed rigid. The child was curiously misshapen: its market value increased in proportion to its freakishness.

Groombridge, similarly, swelling to maturity within its narrow boundaries, has squeezed itself into queer shapes—and this is a sign of its enhanced value as real estate.

The Railway grew bloated. Warehouses rose … clearing-houses, new stations, wider lines, more stations, offices, more warehouses.
Householders
near the Junction were elbowed away. The Railway built them new villas. Old leases were bought in; old streets were demolished. Children cheered as walls tumbled down in swirling dust clouds, and old familiar wallpapers stared out. Rubble carts rolled away. The
Railway
sprawled over. The baby had outgrown the jar. Flesh and blood was squashed into odd holes and corners. Dumping grounds of empty tins, questionable paper parcels and dead cats—lifeless areas behind blackened hoardings or under thunderous arches—bits of bad land soaked in sour water and deader than salty Sodom—became housing estates constructed with the geometrical economy of honeycombs. The flimsy houses rushed up: the coaly air rushed down; in six months the most blatant biscuit-coloured brick was one with the dirty face of the
Junction. And still the Railway spread, swelling, muscling out, nudging people into unheard-of crevices.

Oh, stench! Oh, darkness! Oh, black and melancholy birthplace under a fog-hazed sun!

“Better a bloke like Bill should be born in a place like that, than not at all,” snaps Crowne. “And what’s the odds where you die, so long as you die game? It’s dead cushy to die in a fight in the sunlight. But in a cellar, in the dark, with a ’ouse on top of you … no, if you die game like
that,
you’re all right. And I lay any odds you like Bill died game.”

“Cracking a joke,” says Bearsbreath.

“He gave ’em the old
Hi-de-Hi
!” cries Hands.

“With ’is mouth full o’ sand, I’ve heard Bill Nelson ’and out the old
Hi-de-Hi
,” says Crowne.

“And the spirit of the bastard was such,” says Bearsbreath, “that if you were dying in the desert with him, you’d shout back the old
Ho-
de
-Ho
!”

“But why should Bill die?” asks Butcher the Butcher.

Hands, who has a good, potent baritone voice, sings a verse of the song he likes so much….

This plucks some string in the Butcher’s heart. He turns his face to the blank wall and weeps.

C
ORPORAL
B
EARSBREATH
, that tense, twanging man of iron frame and piano wire, plunges an arm into his kitbag and hauls up a chipped enamel mug. “One of you kids do me a favour,” he says, in an
undertone
. “Go to the Y.M.C.A. and get this filled with tea. Here’s twopence. Just put down the twopence and say ‘Fill it’—you stand to get a
buckshee
penn’orth that way. And give it to Butcher….

“Come on, Butch, out of it! Have a fag, Butcher. Was you the only man that was Bill’s china? He was my pal, too. I’m browned off as much as you are, about it. So is Crowney. So’s a lot of us. Me … I could spit blood. A feller like Nelson, he’s entitled to live donkey’s years. For ever! Never ought to die. You rookies, you don’t know. You couldn’t know what a feller like Bill Nelson
is.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you’re not all right. But … Christ, the years we’ve known Nelson! It takes
time
to make a feller like Nelson. They got to be brewed: they got to mature.

“Bill Nelson.
Argh
—Death! All these years I’ve seen good men go, and go! The best goes first. It’s a fact. The better they are, the less they want to save themselves. And a yeller dog’ll live when a white man goes down. Right. I’d rather be Bill Nelson dead than a lot of other men alive.

“Nelson was a man, a proper man. I was squadded with him. Don’t I know? I only saw him act unreasonable once. It looked unreasonable. It was when he was a rookie, less than a week squadded. Somebody called him a bastard. Nelson went mad. He was thin, but wiry; a lanky kid. This was nearly twenty years ago. He went for this bloke and
knocked him cold. I said to him, afterwards: ‘What made you sort of go crazy like that?’ Bill said: ‘He called me a bastard.’ I said: ‘What of it? It’s a sort of name. Everybody calls everybody else a bastard.’ Bill said: ‘I know. But between ourselves, I
am
a bastard.’ He kind of was one. Not legally illegitimate, but almost. I believe he was fond of his mum, and she’d had a sort of rough time on account of him. But he controlled it, after that. And soon he took things in the same spirit as people said them.

“We went around together a bit. Bill didn’t have any home, and no more did I. We got miserable together, and we cheered each other up. Two people, both cheesed off, are better than one. You feel low, you don’t want a clown to brighten you up. You want somebody to be jarred off with … you grouse it out of your system.

“We went up for the tapes together. We were Young Corporals
together
. We got into trouble together. We were lousy soldiers,
according
to the rules. I’ve been busted four times. After twenty years of it, Bill ended up as only a Lance-Sergeant, which is the same as a Full Corporal. After twenty years! Bill’s conduct sheet looked black as pitch, on paper. He was even in the Glass House, twice. And do you know what? Each time Nelson got Detention, he was innocent. On my dying oath.

“That kind of thing happens. Talk about the Army making a man of you. It can do. But it ain’t the exercise, the drill, and all that
bull-and
-boloney. No; it’s what you learn to bear. That’s what makes a proper man of a feller, if he’s okay to start with. It spoils some, I don’t say it doesn’t. But they’re softish to begin with—they’d spoil anywhere,
anyway
. You want to see what a feller’s made of, give him what Bill Nelson got. Nobody got more injustice than Nelson, and he was the fairest man in the Army. You try staying just when they keep making you carry the can back.

“Bill Nelson was the honestest man on God’s earth. He could lie like a newspaper … but only for a good cause. I’ve heard him swear black
was white, but never for his own sake. Bill was busted three days after he got his tapes for the first time. You heard about that, Crowney.

“You other fellers: that is the kind of mug Nelson was:

“There was a kid that was always getting into trouble. Unlucky. He’d got a sort of manner that got up the nose of the Sarnt-Major. So everything he done was dead wrong. That can happen to you in the Army, too. So this kid’s life was a sort of misery. Once you start getting into a kind of routine of being punished, God knows where you can end. You’re marked. You carry the can. You can’t do
anything
right. Well, one day this kid comes out of Company Orders with a three-days’ C.B. for standing idle on parade … right or wrong, he’d got it. Well, where we were … you know, the peacetime Guards’ turnout took big mirrors. We had a longish sort of mirror in the room. This kid comes in and sort of lets off steam. He means no harm. There’s a scrubbing brush lying about: he takes a flying kick at it. This hand scrubber flies up and goes bong through the mirror, and smashes it to bits. The kid goes white as the ash on this cigarette. Here’s another offence for him to be dragged in on, and he looks sick.

“As luck will have it, the Sarnt-Major looks in just then. It was bad luck: he’d heard the crash.

“‘Who done that?’

“And Bill Nelson ups, quick as lightning, and says: ‘Sorry, sir, I did.’

“‘How?’

“‘I chucked that hand scrubber across the room, sir.’

“‘What for?’

“‘Just for a bit o’ fun, sir.’

“Bill takes the rap for this mirror, out of pity for the kid. They took away his tapes, that he’d only had three days. Less than that has poisoned more fellers than one: broke their spirits. Not Bill. He never
complained
, and actually argued the other kid out of owning up … ‘Give ’em a chance to forget you a bit … I’m glad to get rid of them tapes, anyway.’ That kid’s an R.S.M. in a line mob now. But Bill? I nearly said ‘Poor old Bill,’ but there never was anything Poor about Nelson!

“That was one thing. There were millions more like it. He was made up again in time. He got to be a Lance-Sarnt. Then one day a
Guardsman
comes to Bill with some Fanny about needing some cash, and Bill lent this Guardsman two quid. It’s against the rules. No financial dealings between N.C.O.’s and men, ever. Still, it happens sometimes that men and N.C.O.’s can be pals, and between pals what’s a quid? Bill lends this man two quid. Due course, this man gives Bill the two quid back. But like the mug that he is, he does it where the Drill Pig happens to be looking on.

“Bill goes inside. Taking money off a Guardsman. They can
practically
hang, draw, and quarter you for that. Bill knows it’s no use talking. He’s busted the rules by lending this geezer the two quid in the first place. He relies on the other man to speak up and tell the exact truth. A mug, Bill; but there you are. The other feller was a rat. He let himself out by blaming it on Bill: said Bill’d asked for the money and he didn’t like to refuse. Bill went sort of white. In all his life I never knew that fool of a Nelson explain himself or make an excuse. If you’re in the soup, you’re in it: right or wrong, pay the
punishment
off and forget it; that was Bill. ‘What’s the use of talking?’ he used to say. ‘Who’ll believe you? To go and lay the blame for this and that on Tom, Dick, and Harry,’ he said, ‘is not worth lowering yourself to do.’ So he was not only busted again; he went to the Glass House for twenty-eight days.

“I would of murdered that Guardsman, only I didn’t get to know about it till later. But Nelson simply shrugged his shoulders. He said: ‘Justice?’ he said, ‘Justice is a thing that you deal out if you can. But only mugs cry if they don’t get it. Justice is a sort of a kindness,’ he said, ‘a kind of a charity; a sort of a good turn. It’s very nice to have it, but it’s as well not to count on it. Like Christmas boxes.’

“Yet—God Almighty!—let any one of Bill Nelson’s squad get so much as one drill that he hadn’t ought to have got, and Bill was like a roaring lion. He’d thrash it out with the C.O. himself, and he’d get that man his proper rights. He never had a farthing. Every penny he
ever drew his pals had for the asking. Ask any squad that ever passed through Nelson’s hands if Bill ever punished a man. In twenty years he never put a man inside. And I’ve seen him with some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw in your life. There was an idiot, actually a sort of idiot. Bill worked on that kid and made him a right bloke where everybody else’d given up. Because there’s some fellers that are shy, or scared, or that have been pushed about too much all their lives; and these fellers sort of smack on a kind of mental look so as to protect ’emselves. It takes patience and it takes kindness. Bill could do all that. He had a brain. He could make a thing clear where I beat about the bush. He could put things into words. He had personality. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. His heart was too big for his body. He’d go up a tree for a cat, or down a well for a sparrer. He was as strong as a bull. He was as soft as a woman. He liked kids. He liked pretty nearly everybody. Right up to the last minute, he’d try and reason a thing out. Then when it come to the fight he was a wildcat. He could of been Prime Minister. He could of been a General. He could of been anything. Only he come out of a dump without a chance on God’s earth. Okay. Better for him to be just Bill Nelson, maybe. I don’t know. It’s a funny thing he had to go back to Groombridge to die. What for, I wonder? God knows. I don’t. I don’t know
anything
. I don’t believe there is a God, anyway. I don’t believe anything. I can’t believe Bill’s dead…. It’s all wrong…. Dead wrong,
somewhere
. The idea of Bill getting his in a cellar with old women is…. But like Crowne said: any mug can go over with a bay net and a ration of rum, with other mugs charging. It takes a proper man to wait for it in a broken-down old cellar and still give the good old
Hi-de-Hi
!

“Nelson was a proper man.”

T
HERE
IS
a man called John Sparrowhawk, whom men call The Budgerigar. Once he was a Company Quartermaster-Sergeant. Now he is only a sergeant. Vague outlines, like birthmarks, in the bend of his stripes, indicate that little brass crowns used to be attached to his sleeves. He was reduced. There was an incident. The Budgerigar was in a café drinking a cup of tea. He says that he was quiet as a mouse. The general opinion is that The Budgerigar could not have been quiet if he was drinking tea. Anyway, he was interfering with nobody. He tells his story with terrible emphasis:

“I was drinking my tea …”

“Then what happened?” asks Hands. “Somebody thought you was drowning and dragged you out?”

“A civvie tries to pinch my respirator. He thinks I’m not looking and walks out with it. So I taps him on the shoulder, and says: ‘
Excuse
me.’”

“I know your taps on the shoulder,” says Hands. “You probably picked up a marble-topped table and tapped him with that. You
probably
drove him into the floor like a tack.”

“I taps him on the shoulder and says: ‘Excuse me, that’s my
respirator
.’ And this civvie tries to make a dash for it. So I caught him by the collar.”

“And his head came off,” says Hands.

“His collar came off. Then a military policeman pinches me. A civvie policeman pinches the civvie. He gets three months for trying to pinch my respirator. I get busted for trying to stop him. Justice. Justice! All
right, so they busted me. But I’ll be back. This isn’t the first time I’ve been busted. I should worry. I been in this mob more than twenty years. I’ve lost all hope. I lost all hope more than twenty-five years ago, or I’d never have joined this mob. I never did have no luck. Say I play pokey-dice. I can throw five kings in one, but somebody’s
certain
to throw five aces in one. Look at Hands. If Hands fell into the Thames he’d come out with a new suit of clothes on. With a pocket full of fishes he’d come out. But me, if I so much as spit it comes back and hits me in the eye. My luck is something unnatural.”

Hands says: “You shouldn’t smoke that pipe. That civvie probably needed that respirator.”

“Stealing soldiers’ respirators! Luck. Gah! The very first
Buckingham
Palace guard I ever did, just as the King comes in, I faints. It was my feelings. Could I help my feelings?”

“Lucky you did faint,” says Hands. “If the King had seen you he’d probably have fainted instead. A face like yours.”

Between Hands and The Budgerigar there exists a strange
friendship
. The Budgerigar, earnest and formidable, simple and
single-minded
, is a bull’s-eye for Hands to hit. Hands pretends never to take The Budgerigar seriously: The Budgerigar pretends that he has never heard anything Hands has ever said. They talk at each other. This has been going on for nearly nine years.

*

On hearing of the death of Nelson, The Budgerigar is silent. He swallows that tremendous piece of news as a quicksand swallows the wreck of a great ship. But at last he says: “And I stole his girl.”

“The blind girl?” asks Hands.

“I stole Bill Nelson’s girl.”

“No girl with eyes in her head could let you steal her.”

“Poor old Bill Nelson was courting a girl for nearly eighteen months. So it took me to do the dirty on him. On old Bill Nelson. Me. Spit in my eye. I’m a dirty swine. I never have no luck. If I bite a penny
bun, there’s a stone in it. If I want to do a pal a good turn, I do him a lousy turn. I’m a dirty swine. Yet in a way, it could be argued, mind you, that I done Bill a sort of a good turn, in a kind of a style, it might be, perhaps. Who knows? I kid myself along I might have been doing Bill a good turn all these years. But on the other hand, I don’t know …”

Hands says: “I know how it was. She was an old maid. What they call a spinster. She liked parrots. Parrots were expensive. She didn’t like to steal one, so she let you steal her. How’d you like your birdseed cooked, Polly?”

“I never have luck. Unlucky at cards, unlucky at love, unlucky in the Army, and unlucky in everything.”

Sergeant Crowne says: “Come to think of it, didn’t you go and marry Nelson’s young lady? What I mean … spliced, respectably married?”

Hands says: “Some people like horrible things. Look at the way kids like golliwogs. Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

“It was the dirtiest trick I ever played in all my natural puff,” says The Budgerigar.

“Well,” says Crowne, “the funny thing is, Budgey, Bill Nelson was always sort of under the impression that he dropped you a——” and he names an essential appendage of the masculine anatomy … one of those troubles that never comes singly. To drop one of these, in the jargon of Guardsmen, is to make a serious blunder. To drop one for somebody else is to let him down.

“Nelson never dropped me nothing,” says The Budgerigar. “He was courting a girl called Joan, a very pretty girl that used to be an attendant at the Kinema at Groombridge. Look—here’s a pitcher of her in 1930.”

The Budgerigar undoes a button, and pushes a hand into his tunic, and fishes out a wallet, and opens this wallet only a little way,
squinting
into it cautiously. Obviously, this wallet is full of secrets. He picks out a photograph. On the back of it somebody has written in a little peaky hand:

Dearest
fondest
love
from
Joan.

The photograph is of a young woman with an enormous quantity of light hair, one and a half times the normal area of eye and much more than her share of bosom. She must be a young woman who likes to make the most of what she has, whatever that may be. She has
managed
to get nearly twenty-two of her teeth into the picture. There is no doubt that she is holding her breath with a view to expanding her chest and pushing into the camera those organs that our grandfathers called Sacred Founts of Motherhood.

Sergeant Hands says: “She reminds me of Staff Sergeant Moggridge when he did an impersonation of Janet Gay nor at the concert in 1936. He got a bit of an old coconut mat for a wig, and put two pillows under his sweater. He done an apache dance with some sergeant dressed up like Rudolph Valentino——”

“Why, that was Piggy Hogg,” says Crowne. “The third ugliest man in the Brigade of Guards.”

“You’re thinking of Porky Pye.”

“I’m thinking of Piggy Hogg.”

“You’re not thinking of no Piggy Hogg, you’re thinking of Porky Pye.”

“I’m not thinking of no Porky Pye, I’m thinking of Piggy Hogg.”

“Betcha.”

“Wotcher betcha?”

“Betcha million pounds.”

The Budgerigar says: “But have you ever seen a prettier-looking girl? She was sort of engaged to Bill Nelson. He used to send her all his spare money to save up for the wedding. It was Bill that introduced us. When he had to go away, I was stationed in the Smoke. He said to me: ‘Budgey, sort of keep Joan company a bit when you got
nothing
better to do, Budgey. Because when I’m not there she pines. She frets, Budgey,’ Bill says, ‘so be a pal and cheer her up off and on, kind of style.’ Right you are. I sees her off and on and takes her out for a walk, or for a drink. No use taking her to the pictures, because she works in them. She’d seen the
Love
Parade
twenty-one times. Nothing
like what you’d think went on between us. I didn’t so much as hold her arm when we walked. So help me Jesus, I marched straight to attention at her side and I didn’t open my North-and-South. I never said a dicky-bird, because I was there to cheer her up and nothing more.

“One Sunday—it was May—so she asked me to walk over Parliament Hill. So we sat down on top of the hill, and so we had an ice. A
six
penny
ice.
Then she started to talk about things. She asked me did I believe in love? Did I believe in love?”

The Budgerigar, by instinct, drops into the staccato monotone of an N.C.O. giving evidence at a court-martial:

“I said I did not believe in love. She said: ‘Oh, but you must.’ I said: ‘What for?’ She said: ‘Lots of girls must fall in love with you.’ I said: ‘Not to the best of my knowledge and belief, Miss Joan.’ She said: ‘I know one who has, anyway.’ I said: ‘May I ast who?’ She said: ‘Oh, nobody,’ and then she bust into tears. I said: ‘Miss Joan, may I ast what is the matter?’ She said: ‘You are an experienced man. I want your advice. What would you do if you was a young girl,
properly
engaged to a man who had given you an amethyst ring, but who you had ceased to care for.’ I said: ‘Ho?’ She said: ‘Say you went and fell in love with another man?’

“‘If you was not properly engaged,’ I said, ‘I should go ahead. But then it would depend.’ She said: ‘Depend upon what?’ I said: ‘
Depend
on everything.’ She said: ‘What do you mean by everything?’ I said: ‘Nothing.’

“Then she said: ‘What would you do if you were a young girl and the man you were engaged to had sent you money for furniture, and then you had gone and lost this here money?’

“Then all of a sudden I fluffed. I said: ‘Do you mean to tell me you’ve gorn and lost my pal Bill Nelson’s money?’ She said: ‘A
matter
of thirty-two pounds.’ I said: ‘Now exactly where did you lost it?’ And she said: ‘If I knew exactly where I lost it, I would know exactly where to find it, but I don’t know, I just lost it.’ I said: ‘You should
have put it in the Post Office.’ She said: ‘I don’t trust Post Offices. Oh, what shall I do?’

“‘Well, I don’t know what you can do,’ I said, ‘but,’ I said, ‘Bill Nelson is my chum,’ I said, ‘and you are his young lady. It’d be a pity for there to be trouble between my china and his young lady. So I’ll lend you the money to put back,’ I said. Because, you see, I had about forty-odd quid saved up. My old Mum left me a matter of
seventy-five
-odd quid not long before. I had lent a matter of twenty-odd quid to a certain party, and still had most of the rest, because I always was a careful man with my money. So I tells her that I’m prepared to let her have this little bit of dough.

“‘But then,’ I said, ‘do you mean to tell me that on top of losing my pal’s money, you’ve gone and fancied some other geezer?’ She said: ‘I do. I have.’ I said: ‘Well, anyway, it is bad enough for you to go and break my pal’s heart. But it is even worse to go and lose the money he has earned serving his country with the sweat of his brow, so I’ll draw it out for you. And don’t you go losing it again,’ I said. ‘You didn’t go giving it to this other geezer, I hope? Because if you did, just point him out to me and with all due respects I will tie his legs in a hard knot round his neck and choke him.’ She said: ‘Oh no.’ I said: ‘S’matter fact, I think you better tell me who this kite is, so I can give him just a little bit of a hiding as a matter of form. Because you are Bill’s girl, and I am entitled to protect you.’

“‘You can’t do that,’ she said.

“‘Why not?’ I said.

“‘Because you can’t give yourself a hiding,’ she said, and at that she busts into tears again.

“I fluffed what she was getting at. ‘What
me
?’ I said. ‘You,’ she said. I said: ‘Lemme pay for these ices and go.’

“She cried like a fire picquet. She cried like a hydrant. Since they caught me with tear gas that time when I had a faulty respirator and got the full blast of the stuff in that test chamber, I never see such spontaneous tears. She had prominent eyes, kind of style, and it was
like squashing grapes. She said: ‘Oh, you drag a confession out of me and then you run away … you and your Bill. I’ll tell Bill all about you.’

“‘You’ll tell Bill all about what?’ I said.

“‘All about you,’ she said. ‘Making me love you.’

“‘Oo I never!’ I said.

“‘Oo you did,’ she said, ‘and I shall tell Bill.’

“‘I never touched you,’ I said.

“‘You never touched me on purpose,’ she said.

“‘You’re showing me up,’ I said. ‘People are looking.’

“‘My life is ruined,’ she said, ‘you beast, you beast, you beast.’

“I said: ‘What do you want me to do, for God’s sake?’

“‘You’ve got to marry me,’ she said.

“I said: ‘If I marry you will you promise to stop crying?’

“She said: ‘Yes.’

“So I said: ‘All right then. Stop crying.’

“I just can’t stand seeing women crying. It gets me groggy. I can’t bear it. I once promised to adopt a black woman’s child because she was crying. That’s why I joined the Army. A mulatto I wouldn’t have minded, but this was as black as coal, and I’d never seen her before in my life. You promise a thing, and there you are. She said: ‘Darling, all the time I knew you really cared for me.’

“I didn’t have any money smaller than a ten-shilling note, except a lucky five-shilling piece that my Mum’s aunt give me. I wanted to get away quick. I couldn’t very well leave half a quid. I left the dollar. I couldn’t hang about for change with millions of people laughing at me, and so there it was. I lost me lucky dollar. She said: ‘When is it to be?’ I said: ‘Gord knows.’ She said she’d arrange everything, and so she did. I begged and prayed to be sent East. They wouldn’t let me go. I nearly run away to join the Foreign Legion, but I didn’t know how to go about it. So we got spliced. We been married ten years. She’s been ill with her nerves all the time. Sort of laughs and cries and tears her hair whatever goes wrong. If she is not well she’s afraid
she’s going to die and she busts into tears. If she’s
not
not well, she’s afraid she’s going to be ill and she goes off the deep end. And so that’s how it is.”

“Any kids?” asks Crowne.

“No,” says The Budgerigar. “The first time I sort of tried … to kind of … have anything to do with her … she called the police. She said marriage was rude. So I never did. After losing that five-bob bit I never had no luck at all.”

Crowne says: “And you think you did Bill Nelson a dirty trick.”

“Well, I did steal his young lady,” says The Budgerigar.

“A doctor did me a bad turn like that once,” says Hands. “He stole a bit of grit out of my eye.”