The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (36 page)

‘Nonsense, man, don't argue! There's a touch of nonconformity in you, isn't there, Stubbs?'

‘Sir?'

‘I've seen those pictures above your bunk, those gruesome Hindu gods.'

There wasn't much I could say to this. We let his statement lie between us, undisturbed apart from the shuffling movements of the Indian orderly, who was pushing boxes of badges, regimental, along shelves. Most of us had pictures above our beds, mainly girls, cut from the
Daily Mirror
or
Lilliput
or
Razzle
; they were standard wanking-pit equipment, as the phrase went. Among my nudes lurked the Monkey God and other evil deities which not all the platoon's jibes had induced me to take down.

‘Are you interested in Hindu gods, Stubbs?'

‘I s'pose I am, sort of, sir.' I was as adept in my way as McGuffie in adopting the current idiom.

Gor-Blimey just stared at me, then said, ‘I shall be in charge of rear detail when we move out of Kanchapur. A signaller might be needed. You'll come under Corporal Dutt. Okay? Your name will come up on Orders in a day or so.'

‘Very good, sir.' Christ!

He was making to go. Norm emerged from the shadows, pinching out an inch of cigarette as he came.

‘If I might make a suggestion, sir, since I've seen many a rear detail leave here and sometimes kit getting lifted – you know how it is, sir. It might help to have a good reliable driver i/c the M/T move. Perhaps I might suggest Driver McGuffie, who's proved his worth.'

‘How reliable is he?'

‘Oh, he's very
reliable
, sir, and of course he knows everyone.'

‘Well, I'll be speaking to him this afternoon.'

‘Thank you, sir! I'll leave it in your hands, then.'

Gor-Blimey left after the usual cascade of salutes. Norm nodded to me superciliously. ‘It was touch-and-go there
then!' By screwing his head round to one side, he managed to light up his inch of cigarette without burning his nose.

‘How do you mean?'

‘What I say – it was touch-and-go there for a minute! I thought the bugger was after your ring. I wouldn't trust him further than what I could throw him.'

‘Piss off!'

‘Don't you tell me to piss off, mate! You've been busted, and don't you forget it.'

‘I'll bust your fucking nose!'

He pointed a yellowed finger to his stripes. ‘What do you think these are, then? Scotch mist? Look, mate, I've got nothing against you but you want to get some service in. I thought Jock was a mate of yours?'

‘What if he is?'

‘Well, then, you want to speak up for your mates, don't you? The way I did. If you want to get on in this man's Army, you got to know who your mates are and stick by them, and never mind all the rest of the shower.'

‘I'll remember what you say.'

He had now sidled behind his counter and stood there with his hands resting on it, blowing smoke from his morsel of cigarette.

‘I'll tell you summink else. You want to watch your step with me, or you'll be in trouble, see?'

At that particular moment, my inclination was to get out of the stores and enjoy a breath of air unflavoured by old denims.

‘I'm not looking for trouble! I came in here perfectly friendly with Jock, didn't I? What are you getting so snooty for? You were sucking up to officers a couple of minutes ago.'

‘This place is out of bounds, you know that? Except to my mates. Another thing, you call me Corporal, get it? You want to watch your step with me, mate, 'cos I can be a bit dodgey at times, like. I've got a lot of friends round this camp, more than what you might think, see? What did Jock want, anyhow?'

‘Something about a mate of his at Div, I believe.'

‘What mate at Div?'

‘He didn't happen to tell me. All right if I go now?'

He took the fag out of his mouth and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. ‘What are you waiting for?'

You could tell the real regular soldiers, I thought. They formed an army within an army. People like McGuffie and the detestable Norm, and Rusk in the cookhouse were regulars by temperament. Conscripts like Wally Page and Enoch and Geordie were mere innocents by comparison. It was much like old lags versus first offenders in prison.

The lists were coming home, like rooks in evening light. Our prison was altering shape, propelling us towards Burma and the fighting for which we had been trained. Ali confirmed it: ‘You go Calcutta first, sah'b, then across the Bramaputra River to the Burma Land.' But Ali had been making similar noises for some weeks.

The atmosphere in the barracks changed slightly. We could hear the jungle noises from the East. They made our last few days in Kanchapur unreal.

I managed a letter home. I walked alone near Kanchapur, making one or two crude landscape sketches on a signals message pad – the relic of a craft I had learnt mainly for Veronica's sake. I played football, drank, laughed, swore, determined to have one last woman before we went into action and all got blown to bits.

The nightly piss-ups grew more riotous, the morning runs more strenuous. On the last night but one before the main force moved out of Kanchapur, I was almost flat broke, and went down to the Vaudette with Aylmer and Geordie to sit in the four anna seats and watch Humphrey Bogart in ‘Casablanca', a Warner Brothers film; Warner Brothers were then my favourite studio, because they had Ida Lupino on the payroll.

We came out afterwards into the vivid twilight, Geordie discordantly whistling the theme song of the film, which necessitated a lot of manoeuvring of his Adam's apple. I was trying to see if we could muster enough cash between us for three beers. And what was Aylmer singing? – Under his breath, his old fragment of unfinished song: ‘Could I but see thee stand before me …'

‘What is that fucking thing you keep singing?' Geordie asked, breaching an unwritten Army law of privacy.

‘Just something my wife used to like, like,' Aylmer said dismissively.

‘You never told us you were married!' I said.

‘She died two and a-half years ago, in the Blitz. Get me pissed one night, and I'll tell you all about it.'

We turned into our favourite café and found a corner table. I was marvelling inwardly to think of Aylmer married. Marriage in those days seemed so far beyond me. Although – how long ago that was – I had proposed marriage to my darling Virginia – I was unable to imagine what it would be like to sustain a long relationship with a woman. How enviable it sounded: but would I be up to it?

‘The Blitz was a bugger,' said Geordie, as we ordered three beers on the strength of his last rupee. ‘I don't reckon we ought to let up on the Germans until we've sort of flattened every one of their cities, the way they did London, like. It's just my personal opinion, of course.'

‘One good thing about Burma – at least neither the Japs nor us have got any bastarding planes worth speaking about.'

‘You're right there. What have we got? One lousy squadron of Spitfires!'

‘Isn't it two by now?'

‘You're in the Forgotten Army, mate, and don't you forget it!'

‘That's right, the Forgotten Army – Britain's bloody Foreign Legion.'

‘That's it – Join the Army and See the World!'

‘I didn't bargain on having to
march
the fucker, too!'

While Geordie and I thus pleasantly rolled the conversational ball back and forth, we were drinking up and Aylmer was not saying much. All three of us were smoking like troopers, the waiters were doubling about the room, a fan was blowing warm air on us, and all told it was a pleasant evening. We were completely shut off from India, but by now I had begun to take that for granted.

‘You don't know what the Blitz was really like,' Aylmer said. ‘I was stationed in Hyde Park – I saw it all. I could tell you some terrible tales … It's amazing what one lot of people will do to another. Like savages!'

Geordie said, ‘Sergeant Meadows's house got blown up in the Blitz. Too bad he wasn't in it.'

‘That's nothing. I knew a bloke – I knew a bloke got circumcised from a bomb.'

Geordie and I burst into laughter. We roared and shook and creased up over our beer. We went red in the face and wept. We sobered down, looked at each other, and burst into laughter again. It wasn't often Geordie laughed so much.

‘Don't be so fucking wet! I'm telling you the truth,' Aylmer said. ‘He was circumcised by a bloody bomb. It was in a pub in Bermondsey, The Lamb. He was drinking in the public bar with his mates, see, and he thought he'd go and take a slash, like. This was near closing-time one evening. So he goes into the Gents and he's standing there having a pee and suddenly – boom! – the whole wall in front of him just caves in with nothing but blackness in front of him – still peeing, mind you!'

At the thought of this, we all three burst into laughter, until Aylmer went on. ‘Of course, he was pretty shattered because he never even heard the bomb coming down. And he looks down at his prick to find it's bleeding as well as peeing. See, a bit of flying glass from the window cut his foreskin off as neat as a whistle – otherwise, he was completely okay!'

We were laughing, but I was not entirely comfortable; at this period I had not outgrown my resentment at my own circumcision. Every time I looked at that self-evident knob, I felt that some subtle quality had been lost.

‘I've never understood why they circumcised anyone,' I said.

‘Christ was circumcised,' Geordie said. ‘They've still got his foreskin in the Vatican. I remember a bloke in the factory, like, told me that.'

‘Fuck off! Still there all these years? It would have rotted away!'

‘Christ's foreskin doesn't rot. It's eternal, like him. Any road, the officials at the Vatican keep it in a silver jug, like. So this bloke at the factory told me. I'm sure that's what he said. Pilgrims make special journeys to see it – you ask one of the RCs. If you're Christian, you're supposed to be circumcised, just like the Jews.'

‘Jews aren't Christian.'

‘They're sort of Christian. Aren't they sort of Christian, Jack? I don't know.'

‘But even the Africans get circumcised, and they aren't Christians,' Aylmer said. He embarked on one of his histories, describing how the boys of African tribes were shut in special stockades for several months until the day of the ceremony, when the witch-doctor led them forth and did the deed. ‘These are big lads – fifteen or sixteen, and their cocks bleed like pigs with slit throats. Some of them die after a day or two.'

‘Bloody hell!', we said, and ordered more beer rapidly, pooling the rest of our cash on the table.

‘The only real cure is to indulge in sexual intercourse at once with the women of the tribe. The juices of the vagina are healing, and if you're lucky you'll be okay after that. Else you bleed to death.'

‘Dirty buggers!' Geordie said. ‘People do terrible things to each other, when you come to think …'

Next morning was the last day before the main party moved out of Kanchapur. The advance party under Captain Hale had already left.

As we returned from our pre-breakfast run, Geordie said, ‘I thought like us were going to get Aylmer's story about how his wife was polished off by that bomb. You were a bit simple, weren't you, mucker, I mean? I thought we were going to get it again!'

‘I've never heard it!'

‘You want to get some service in, then, mate!'

‘What happened to his wife, anyway?'

Geordie glared round the barrack-room, perhaps gathering his powers of narrative.

As we were stripping off our denims, he said, ‘Oh, him and his missus had gone back to their digs – or a flat I think he said it was. Anyroad, they were a bit plastered like on the night this happened – he was on leave or something – I forget the details – and anyroad they went to bed and fell asleep like, and when he woke up the ceiling was coming in – falling down, I mean – and he fell asleep again or something because he was so pissed, and when he woke up in the morning, a bloody great beam had come down across the bed like, and his missus was dead beside him, squashed under the beam.'

He laughed.

‘Poor sod! Enough to send anyone round the bend!'

We were grabbing up our mess-tins and eating irons – in Kanchapur, you were allowed to go down to mess hall half-dressed for breakfast.

‘Aye, well, anyroad, he couldn't get the fucking beam off of her chest, no matter how hard he tugged, so he tried to get out through the door, and the door wouldn't open, like, or something, because, you see, what had happened – he didn't
know it at the time – but what had happened, the blast from this bomb had blown the staircase away and jammed the door tight. So it
couldn't
open. So he says. So he calls out the window, but there's a bloody great crater outside – see, they try to bring a ladder, like, the neighbours or someone, but the crater's in the way, and the fire engine can't get because of the rubble. Fuck off, Page!'

This was said to Wally, who ran up and grabbed us as we were going down the stairs, dealing us both a swift pummel on the upper arm.

‘Is he giving you a lot of shit, Stubby? You want to do the bastard – he's always gripping is our Wilkinson!'

‘Why don't you shut your arse and give your mouth a chance, Page?'

‘He was telling me about Aylmer and his missus, when she was killed by the bomb.'

‘Oh, that! Fucking wrap up! – You'd think old Jack was the only bloke what ever had his old woman die on him!'

‘Get on with it, then, Geordie, for fuck's sake! What happened to him up in his bedroom?'

‘Nothing much,' Geordie said, as we clanked into the mess room and moved to join the queue of men waiting for Rusk to wield his ladle. He looked round, trying to re-grasp the thread of story. ‘He was stuck up in the bedroom all day, like, with his dead missus all bloody on the bed. He nearly went off his nut, according to him. It started raining or something, see, near midday or some time, with the rain come in the ceiling like, because the roof had been blown off by this bloody great bomb, so he spent all his time till they rescued him trying to keep the rain off her mush. I may have got a few details wrong …'