The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (18 page)

They were words of farewell. I stood there, looking as she receded from me. I called to her, broke into a run, thrust my little silver token into her gloved hand. She walked on with it.

Circumnavigating bushes, dodging behind the park railings, I kept her in sight until her slight figure was obscured behind a building.

She walked off into the streets of London, those quiet grey Sunday streets, with her gas-mask swinging on her hip, and I never encountered her again. For a long while, when I had other girls, far more orthodox girls, when I was in uniform and they came and gaily went, I would recall Virginia – recall her dear lack of vividness with such vividness! – and fear for her in the double jungle: the real jungle of London and the equally real one that she had built in her own mind. For I understood by then how beyond help she was.

As she turned around, I saw part of her backside, leaned over and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum; the evening sunshine made it all bright – how strange I should recollect that so clearly, but I have always recollected sunshine.

My Secret Life
, by ‘Walter'

‘Cavaliers, and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine.
Es mucho hombre.
There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano though he is an Inglesite.

‘We do not believe it,' replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.'

The Bible in Spain
, by George Borrow

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Introduction

Book One

The Lair of the Monkey God

Book Two

The Old Five-fingered Widow

Book Three

God's Own Country

Whilst writing
The Hand-Reared Boy
, I began to consider a further book, where we might meet with my Stubbs when adult. Taking the time scale into consideration, it seemed likely that young Stubbs would join the army.
A Soldier Erect
is wholehearted in its awfulness. Here is Horatio Stubbs again, fresh from his adventures in the first novel of the trilogy.

We find him now complaining about a party, which was planned to celebrate his departure overseas with the Mendip Regiment to fight the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. (Burma until this date had been part of the British Empire.) Stubbs begins his account in the grumbling mode – a mode which endures, with the volume being turned up throughout the book. Complaint about war is hardly surprising, but the entire novel has implications beyond this, confronting us with passages full of filth, fear and frustrated fornications; passages engendered in large part by the horrors and hungers of global disruption.

Stubbs and his young mates, ill-informed as they are, have a hatred for the lower orders of Indian society with which they are forced to mingle. One might wonder what the Indians of today would make of these violent episodes and impressions, launched upon us with demonic energy.

A short extract might tell us what we are in for. Here are the words written on a card a beggar hands round on a dreary train journey. It reeks of human misery – yet I believe it to be a humorous triumph.

‘Sir,
This unfortunate idiot is a lunatic from the malayli states. He has not escaped. He asks you to be excused. This is not his fault. The bearer was always dumb. He cannot speak since after birth. The foolish fellow and his brothers are also speechless and without voice. He lost his parent. They early departed their sense. His younger sister is also blind and demented.
These three depend on this one. He laboured by the railway. Their mother was
never known. His auntie died in the prime. His father was serving longwhile in South Indian Railway Co. Ltd., so Railway Officers have excused this imbecile and so kindly pay him charity and God help you.

Signed: A.R.M. Shoramanor Madras Dorosani Cristian.
Mrs Pandambai, B.A. (Oxen) Principal Theosophical Ladies' College, Lucknow.
Please to Re-Turn This Notice After The Execution.'

Once we arrive in Burma with Stubbs we find things a little better. The Commander gives the order:

‘During this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima Garrison.'

There follows a record of hard and dangerous times, and though accounts of the war in Burma have drifted into several of my other books, here lies, I think, the most comprehensive account of a struggle staged so far from help and home.

Still moving, the novel is summarised by the resigned despondency of the sentences with which it concludes:

‘The early monsoon rain began to fall over our positions. Down the road, the guns were pounding away at Viswema.'

Brian Aldiss,

Oxford 2012

As the last party-guests were groping their way into the blackout, I belted upstairs and shut myself in my bedroom. My dressing-gown fell off its hook as the door slammed, dropping like a dying man, one arm melodramatically over the bed. I dragged my sports-jacket off my shoulders, rolled it into a bundle, and flung it into the far corner of the room, all of ten feet away.

On the top of the chest-of-drawers stood a carved bear, given to me on my tenth birthday by an uncle lately back from Switzerland, a bag of green apples, a framed photograph of Ida Lupino, my uniform dress cap, and three woollen vests. I swept them all off and climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, where I squatted, groaning and rolling my head from side to side.

God, what sodding, shagging, scab-devouring misery it all was! The humiliation – the
ignobility
– of the whole shitting shower! The creepy, crappy narrowness of my parents' life! And that was supposed to be my embarkation leave party before I went abroad to serve my king and cunting country! If that was embarkation leave, roll on bloody germ warfare!

By kneeling up a little on the chest-of-drawers, I could press my head and shoulders against the ceiling and so resemble a deformed caryatid. Thinking vicious army thoughts, I pushed one side of my face against the flaking ceiling. My jaw slumped down, my tongue dripped saliva, my eyelids flickered like an ancient horror film, revealing acres of white-of-eye. At the same time, I managed to tremble and twitch in every muscle. Jesus, what a wet dream of a party that was! Party? I asked aloud, in tones of incredulity. Paaarty? Paaaa-ha-ha-ha-rty? Paaaa-urrgh-harty?

And I thought of the other blokes in ‘A' Company. Their genial and loutish faces drifted before my inner eye, their blunt noses and short haircuts almost welcoming … Wally, Enoch, Geordie, old Chalkie White, Carter the Farter, Chota Morris … Tonight, they'd all be getting hopelessly pissed or screwing girls – or so they would stoutly claim when we got back to barracks tomorrow. And I – I, sober and unstuffed, would have to lie to save my face, to subscribe to the infantry myth that one spent one's whole leave yarking it up some willing bit of stuff in a pub yard. I cramped my shoulders harder against the ceiling, hoping that I might burst through the lath-and-plaster into the gales of the false roof and erupt against the lagged water-tank. You mean to say that was the best they could do in the way of a party? For me, for the conquering hero, for the pride of the sodding Mendips?

The whole idea had been a farce from the beginning. My father had never shown one flicker of enthusiasm. My brother Nelson had managed to wangle leave from Edinburgh to see me – ‘for the last time', as he expressed it – and the farewell party had been his idea. He had jockeyed the parents into it.

‘It's not easy in wartime,' my father said, shaking his head. ‘You youngsters don't understand. I'm on warden duty, too, this week.'

‘Go on, Colonel Whale would let you have a bottle of whisky, since Horry's going overseas. It's a special occasion!'

‘Whisky? I'm not having whisky! It'd spoil the party! You'd only get drunk!'

‘That's what whisky is
for
, Daddy,' my sister Ann said, in her long-suffering voice. We'd become good at long-suffering voices, simply through imitation.

My mother quite liked the idea of a party if she could possibly scrounge the clothing coupons to buy a pretty dress. She felt so dowdy. That was one reason why she never wanted to see anyone these days. She looked unhappily round the sitting-room which, despite many years of punishing Stubbsian teetotalism, still held a faint beery aroma, in memory of the days when the house had been an inn.

‘It really needs a good spring-clean before anyone comes in here!' Mother said, looking willowy and wan, mutely asking always to be forgiven for some great unspoken fault.
‘The windows look so awful with that sticky paper on them, and I just wish we could have some new curtains.'

Certainly the house did appear neglected, not only because of the war, but because my mother's nervous disease was gaining on her. Housework was beyond her, she claimed. She grew more willowy by the week, to our irritation.

Eventually, Nelson and Ann and I browbeat father into holding a cele-ha-ha-bration. Ann was sixteen; she burst into tears and said she would not let her brother go overseas unless he had a party first.

So who do you think turned up that evening, tramping dolefully up our steps and into the living-room, to sit affrontedly about in their suits and complain of the tastelessness of sausages, the decline of moral standards, and the military failings of the Russians, the Australians, the Canadians, the Americans, and the French? Why, flakey-scalped little Mr. Jeremy Church, father's head clerk from the bank, with his cream-puff-faced wife Irene, very free with her ‘lakes' and ‘dislakes'; and my grandma, getting on a bit now, but scoring a shrewd blow against the times in which we lived by revealing how sandbags were all filled with nothing but ordinary seaside sand; and the Moles from the grocery, prim but patriotic, bringing with them an old aunt of Mrs. Mole's, who had been bombed out of her London flat and wasn't afraid to tell you about it; and mother's friend Mrs. Lilly Crane, whose husband was in something-or-other, with her daughter Henrietta, sub-titled ‘The Enigma' by Ann; and Nelson's current girl friend, Valerie, watching for Nelson's signal to scram as soon as convenient; and dear old Miss Lewis from next door who still went to church every Sunday, rain or shine, although she was pushing a hundred-and-something, or could it be two hundred-and-something?; and a sexy friend of Ann's, Sylvia Rudge. Sixteen of us all told, the only people left in the East Midlands that mortality and conscription had spared. A dead lively lot. Mother handed the dates round with her renowned Light Touch, smiling sadly in my direction as one and all offered their condolences that she was having her younger son snatched from her. More of a funeral than a celebration.

Average age of party – fifty? Ninety? Who cared? I crouched on my perch trying to work out when the visitors had last – if ever – had it in. It was hard to imagine that the females were penetrable or, if penetrable, that the males
were capable of penetrating them. Did Mr. Mole occasionally manage a subterranean passage up Mrs. Mole, over a sack of demerara, under a flag-draped photo of Winnie with his two fingers in the air?

From my disadvantage point, I could watch my reflection in the mirror of the wardrobe, which stood near the door and opposite the chest-of-drawers. Now
there
was a born shagger, if ever I saw one, given the chance. I stuck my feet in the top (sock and handkerchief) drawer and spread my arms out along the ceiling. The sight reminded me of something. Pulling the hair down over my eyes, I pantomimed a corny crucifixion scene, with plenty of bleary and reproachful dekkos up at the plaster. ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' I looked more like Hitler throwing one of his fits than Christ in final aggs.

Why this obsession with Christ, for God's sake? Perhaps I'd
been
Christ in a previous existence – during my mid-teens, I had nursed a sneaking belief in the theory of reincarnation. Oh Christ, don't let me have been Christ! I dropped the crucifixion act and made monkey faces at myself.

You could rule out all the women at the party straight away, except for Valerie, Henrietta Crane, and Sylvia. Valerie was Nelson's bit of crumpet, so that left Henrietta Crane and Sylvia. That'll show you how desperate I was, not to rule out Henrietta Crane straight away! The Enigma was in her mid-twenties – perhaps five years older than I. A heavily-powdered girl or was it just that she had never been dusted?, who looked as if her clothes, flesh, eyes, hair, everything, were made out of a single ambiguous material – stale sponge cake, say. Even I, despite frequent practice shots, could not imagine her undressed, or even with her hair down. Did she ever run for a bus, or fart, or burst out laughing? Henrietta Crane was the sort of girl you didn't have to go near to know that her breath would smell of Kensitas cigarettes and Milk of Magnesia. You never find girls like that any more, thank God. They were all scrapped at the end of the war.