The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (29 page)

I stood where I was, knowing that I must move to get on picket in time, trying to collect my emotions. All round me was the living night, ever present. Our characters were no more than outlines scrawled on the ruined wall of India. It didn't matter what you did – as long as you weren't found out. Even then, of what significance could our temporary actions be?

Picket was straightforward enough. The moon shone and the night world was beautiful. Of course the ache for women was worse than ever. Wanking did very little to ease it, although it was pleasurable in its own right. The mystery of India – of which I was acutely aware – positively demanded a mysterious woman with whom one could enact the necessary ritual. That night, I did it to myself standing up against a palm tree, rapidly in case I was discovered. Even as the spunk scattered in the dust, my intense vision of warm brown entangling limbs, red lips, and the darker scents of desire vanished; I was left holding a deflating and disappointed prick.

Disillusion was setting in; we called it ‘feeling
chokka
'. Our amphibious training was strenuous – and the more strenuous it became, the more pointless it felt, although we had then to learn how pointless it really was. At the end of the first week of February, we thankfully left the camp at Vadikhasundi and returned to Kanchapur. Although we greeted our old haunts with delight, the delight was short-lived.

Out in the wilds, we had accumulated some back pay. This was soon frittered away in the bazaars on night-dresses
for girl-friends, leather wallets that immediately disintegrated, and flashy silk scarves that incurred military discipline if worn. Geordie Wilkinson bought a wrist watch which stopped twenty-three hours later, and we never found the twister that flogged it to him. As we became broke, we became disenchanted. The demon sex was left to fight the military worm, and the worm generally conquered. Although the dark eyes and tender hot tits of my mystery girl still beckoned, I dared not defy the MPs again. To be caught would mean real trouble this time and, in a peacetime cantonment like Kanchapur, the police had everything organized.

So we endured the routine of parades, drills, games, and booze-ups, and went slowly round the bend. No doubt the lists were circulating. It would be a relief when ours came through, whatever it contained – and it could contain nothing good. Meanwhile, we were powerless.

Only on a crippled personal level was some freedom of action possible. Any fears I had that Ron Rusk might spread a lie about my supposed chicken-heartedness at Vadikhasundi vanished. Those swift blows to his ribs had done him a power of good. Whenever I appeared in line with my mess-tins, Rusk would now grin at me and ask, ‘Hello, Stubby, how are you doing?' – or, even more familiarly, ‘How's your belly off for spots?'

All the same, it was necessary to protect a bod's reputation. If you've given yourself a role in life, you've got to act it out. Men without women really go about spare, and I felt spare up to my earholes – especially at this time when I was all health, eagerness, and hard-ons – to find I was debarred from the world's great fucking match. So I embroidered a bit on what had happened by the Vadikhasundi lake and invented adventures in the Kanchapur bazaar to match the stories of other people's adventures. Yet funnily enough, I could never bring myself to say a word about the little hot girl I had had. I still felt soft about her.

It suited everybody's purpose, in this sterile waiting period, to lie and to believe other people's lies. Even the war situation encouraged fantasy. Japanese forces in Burma were still growing, and very little was being done about it. ‘Vinegar' Joe Stilwell in the north of the country was making a bit of a show with his Chinese troops, yet the Fourteenth Army just seemed to be sitting on its arse, apart from a few
skirmishes in the Arakan. We had done our amphibious training, and there was not a man in the unit who had not had his stomach filled with brackish water more than once; so why were we back in Kanchapur, killing time, doing nothing, not going to meet the Japs? What were we meant to be doing?

Naturally we invented lecherous fantasies and ‘gripped' at each other. Apart from pontoon, this was how we passed the long evenings in barracks.

One of the leaders of the pontoon school was Corporal Warren, a stringy old fellow who always expressed disgust for our stories. After a particularly filthy one from Ginger Gascadden, Warren waved a finger at him and said, ‘You're nothink but a bloody fool, Gas, mucking about with native women. Many's the time I've seen young lads like you go mad because of women!'

‘
Young lad!
Belt up, Corp, I'm twenty-fucking-five, got a couple of kids at home!'

‘All the more reason for you to watch it. I've seen blokes in hot countries go clean round the oojar because of the perverted practices of native women. When I was stationed in Malta—'

‘Don't give us that grip, Warry!' someone called.

‘When I was stationed in Malta, in Senglea Barracks in Valetta, there was a bloke there called Hunter as shot himself between the eyes with his rifle because of what a native woman done to him.'

‘Christ, what did she do?'

‘He had only come out from Blighty a couple of months. This was some Arab bint, I believe. See, these native bits of stuff are brought up different to what we are – you ask Aylmer! Ain't that right, Jack?'

‘Arr,' said Aylmer, nodding his head so slightly that we could only think that deep experience had almost conferred immobility on him.

‘They're brought up different from what we are,' Warren repeated. ‘Japanese girls, for instance, they sleep with the white of an egg up their holes every night till they're married, and they have to lay very still so it don't run out over the blankets.'

‘What do they do that for, for fuck's sake?' Wally asked.

‘It helps keep the hole fresh, doesn't it?'

‘What about this bloke in Malta or wherever it was?'

‘I tell you, he shot himself – right between the eyes. This Arab bint got some sort of a hold on him. If they really get a man, they aren't satisfied till they've sucked all the good out of him.'

We were all laughing and saying things like ‘Don't care if I do go blind!'

‘They will, they'll suck all the good out of you! So my advice to you, Gas, if you ever want to see your kiddies again, is don't get involved. If you want it so bad, you better go to one of these here gobble-wallahs. You know what they are, don't you? There's a
chicko
of about seven or eight as hangs about round the Golden Lion restaurant most nights – he's a lot safer than any women and you don't get involved. It's getting involved that causes the trouble.'

‘I'm not putting my fucking dick in anybody's mouth,' Geordie said. ‘I've sort of got too much respect for my dick!'

‘If you haven't, no one else has, Geordie!' Dusty Miller said. When we all laughed, Geordie went red.

So we dreamed our sordid dreams, or made them up. Guilt had so invaded the situation that everything was distorted. When we got it, we pretended we hadn't; when we didn't get it, we pretended we had.

Many of the Mendips were having it regular. In our squad, Dave Feather, a greying fatherly man, had a proper arrangement. His father kept a cycle shop in Bristol. Feather had a regular appointment in a shack behind Kanchapur's one garage; a woman turned up there with her pimp to meet him every Saturday afternoon. There were rumours that she was somebody important – rumours fed by Feather's way of being very discreet about this arrangement. He neither confirmed nor denied what went on by the garage once a week, and he was not the sort of bloke you pressed.

His oblique attitude, hinting at great things without actually claiming anything, was easy to imitate, doing good service for many who hoped humbly to pass as sexual athletes: for the life-distorting barrack-room ethos, to which all were supposed to conform, demanded that spunk should be shed somehow, anyhow, as often as beer was drunk. Our sergeants had one well used tag-line when they let us knock off fatigues for a ten-minute rest: ‘Right, break off for a smoke! Them as can't smoke go through the motions!' With sex, the same conformity was expected.

This fantasy-barrier was acknowledged in one or two pet clichés. That old saw, ‘Them as talks most does least' was frequently bandied about, valued as much for its symmetry as its wisdom. It overlooked the fact that many of the brigade's most arrant lechers, who had been known to fuck anything on four, three, two, one, or – since mangoes have no legs – no legs, said almost nothing that was not a disordered flow of verbal lust There was no rule that helped understanding of anyone's sexual life beyond this: that all men lied and distorted what they did. The process was often unthinking, a helpless response to the distortions of the system in which they grew up and grew old.

Self-aggrandizement was the commonest form of self-defence.

You always made yourself out better than you were. This was so commonly acknowledged that any attempt at reminiscence was immediately attacked. When Corporal Warren started to say, ‘When I was stationed in Malta', several voices cried ‘Grip on!', as if they feared that the self-inflations which must inevitably follow would somehow deflate them.

The assumption was that anyone speaking on any occasion when no checks on the accuracy of his statement were available would be bound to lie.

This I say with hindsight; at the time, I was just a BOR, eager not to think or feel. But I enjoyed listening to the stories Warren, Aylmer, and the other old soldiers told. Lies I could take – my old love, Virginia, had acclimatized me to them; it was the truth that came hard.

During this waiting time in Kanchapur, Geordie Wilkinson became pally with old Jack Aylmer, who did orderly duties and suffered from bad feet. I had taken an interest in Aylmer long before. Aylmer had one line of a song he sang, always the same line of the same song, which he left suspended in the air in a melancholy way:

‘Could I but see thee stand before me …'

This line haunted me. It was a snatch from the Flower Song from
Carmen
, and powerful enough to invest Aylmer with a whole history. I saw him as incredibly old – and indeed he must have been in his late thirties – with an ageing wife whom he loved very much; they lived together in a little cottage in Cornwall, the windows of which caught the spray from the Atlantic in rough water. He had been in some
profession, a solicitor perhaps, had failed at it, and now eked out a living, ably supported by his dear wife, as a market-gardener. The war had parted them and she had gone to live with a draper, but he never forgot her and sang his line of song to her over and over again.

Tickled by this vision of comic pathos, I took to drinking with Aylmer and Geordie in the WVS canteen. Of course, Aylmer's background as it emerged was not at all as I had pictured it. He came of a large family who lived above a hairdresser's shop in the Fulham Road, had worked in a glass factory, and moreover bore a picture of a biplane tattooed on his left buttock.

The attraction about Aylmer was that he was a gripper. He was generally disliked for this quality, and had few friends. No sooner did he begin a sentence ‘Back in 1936—', or ‘When the Mendips were in the Near East—' than cries of ‘He's gripping again!' would arise to silence him. Geordie and I, however, could tolerate his grips. He blossomed and told us marvellous tales of service life in odd parts of the globe. His self-aggrandizement was subtle, lying less in the stories – which were generally impersonal – than in the unspoken claim to omniscience behind them.

At the time, I had no means of knowing whether the things Aylmer told us were true or not: that on Malta, where the Mendips had been stationed, there was a four-thousand year-old prehistoric palace where human sacrifices were still carried out; that Chinese girls made the best mistresses; that several thousand BORs had deserted from the Army in India rather than go to Burma and lived hidden lives in the big cities; that in certain African tribes, the women were circumcized and had their clitorises removed; that Churchill got a payment of fifty pounds for every tank that bore his name; that in the wastelands behind Aden there was a temple now covered with sand which was full of gold dating from the time of the Crusades; that a Burmese tribe near Lashio ate a certain food which was deadly poison and then followed it down with another equally deadly which neutralized the first; that the respected Chiang Kai-shek, our Chinese ally, was a secret Fascist; that some day the Mendips were going to have to liberate Singapore from the sea approach; that Hindu mothers wanked off their boy-children to keep them happy and quiet; that a friend of Aylmer's, a truck-driver, had been stabbed in his sleep the
day after he had knocked down and killed a sacred cow wandering across the road; that another friend had died in his sleep when a deadly little
krait
, a small snake, slithered into his bed and bit him; that yet another friend, serving on detachment on the North-West Frontier, had had his blanket stolen from under him by the Pathans as he slept; that the Indians had invited Japan to invade and free them from the British and that Gandhi was in touch with Hirohito; that there were caves near Bombay filled with incredible erotic sculptures – voluptuous women with breasts like melons being fucked all ways by men and animals – which could so easily drive you mad that only officers above the rank of captain were allowed in; that as you sailed into Colombo harbour on a calm day, you could see an old East Indiaman sunk in clear water at the entrance to the harbour; that Gandhi liked young girls; that there were gay parrots flying among the trees in southern India which had been taught to speak Tamil by the locals; that the Americans wanted to take over the British Empire; that a Japanese soldier was issued with half a capful of rice a day and nothing more; that the Gurkhas were the best soldiers in the world and must be treated like whites; that prostitution was regarded as holy in many parts of the world, including Greece and Persia; that the third largest church dome in the world was on Malta; that there was a battalion of Poles serving in India who had walked to Delhi over the Himalayas from Poland when it was over-run by the Nazis, a distance of several thousand miles across the worst country in the world; that Hitler had got syphilis; that most of the past kings of England had also had syphilis, which accounted for the king's stutter; that the Pope had caught syphilis from one of his cardinal's wives; that the Yankee Air Force could not find its targets at night like the RAF, and so was confined to daylight raids; that the Italian army took droves of whores with them wherever they went; that there was a castle in the Highlands of Ethiopia built entirely from the skulls of some army massacred there in battle; that when the
Ark Royal
sank, a powerful British secret weapon went down with it; that the Americans were preparing a secret weapon that would blow Berlin off the map; that an octopus will die immediately if you bite it between the eyes; that near Mandalay stood a town as big as Brighton built entirely of pagodas of various sizes; that Malta is all that is left of a
land-bridge between Europe and Africa; that Churchill had delayed the Second Front in the hope that Hitler would defeat Russia; that by inserting a sixpence into a woman's twot you could tell if she had VD, because the coin would then turn green; that either Kipling or Noel Coward had written ‘Eskimo Nell'; and many other subjects upon which I was either totally uninformed or needed enlightenment.