The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (41 page)

‘I'm bloody glad to see you, Jock! I was afraid you lot might move out and I'd be stuck in Calcutta on my own.'

‘Those poor gits wouldn'e play pontoon tonight – just because I fleeced them last night – so I thought I'd look you up!'

He winked at me. ‘We'll no be moving out yet awhile!' He bent lower, looking furtive in the way he had done when threatening to sort out old Spunk Bucket. He had been as good as his word. Spunk Bucket was in the fertilizer right up to his Adam's apple, even if he did not realize it yet. McGuffie had fixed him good and proper.

‘I told you I'd got a mucker up at Division, didn't I? Well, he was a good mucker – he helped me do the trick! I've shafted old Spunk Bucket right up the
gonga
!'

His story emerged in the form of total recall. His mucker at Division had slipped McGuffie a stencil kit and yellow paint. When we were stuck in the railway siding at Indore, Jock had got into one of the military bogie trucks full of stores, while we were asleep and he was supposed to be on guard. He had painted out the 2 Div flashes and identifications on the boxes and had readdressed them to 36 British Division, then involved with the Japanese somewhere up in the north of Burma. By now, these stores would be out of Howrah station and heading for the great blue yonder!

‘You're shitting me, Jock! You never did it!'

He passed me the bottle. ‘I fucking did, Stubby, lad, just
like I say – what you take me for? And I took care to chuck away the stencils afterwards. Spunk Bucket will fair be for it now and no mistake!'

I took a swig of warm beer, stunned by the thought of this sabotage.

‘But why did you do it, Jock?'

He extracted the bottle from my grasp and took a leisurely pull at the beer. ‘Neither you nor I have any talent for active service in Burma. It's a mug's game! As long as that consignment of equipment is travelling round India, Burma, Assam, and China, rear detail's chances of staying put right here in Calcutta is good. The war in Burma's hotting up again and it's no place for gentlemen. Norm and me fixed this trick up before we left Kanchapur. Now,
you'
ve got to swear blind never to say a word about this bit of subversion to a soul, understand? There are plenty of dodgy bastards in this man's Army as would like to see old Jock McGuffie in the glasshouse for keeps!'

I swore blind.

‘No' a word, mind! And now there's that bloody big sandy-haired sarge blowing off his mouth again!'

We could hear the sergeant shouting outside the tent. All visitors had to leave at once. Visiting time was over.

‘I'd best be on my way!' Jock said, rising and draining the bottle of beer. ‘You want to watch this lot here, too, I'm telling you, or they'll have that duff hand of yours cut off as soon as look at it, right up to the elbow. Here, I brought you another present – Jock looks after his mates!'

He fumbled in his capacious hip pocket and pulled out a crumpled paper-covered book, which I recognized as he tossed it to me. It was our prized copy of
The Night Times of Micheal Meatyard.

‘I made fucking sure that didn't get stencilled off to China!' Jock said.

It would be fair to say that McGuffie's news left me with mixed feelings. I had no wish to be in on his awful secret; he was surely guilty of sabotaging the war effort under the Defence of the Realm Act, or something equally unpleasant, while I was now an accessory who could be punished accordingly.

Whether or not his move would save us from the promised
hells of Burma and Assam was another matter. For those hunting grounds I had developed something between fervent curiosity and the death wish; none of the Forgotten relics in the ward could alter that. Scared though I was by the thought of going into action, I had now begun to long for it.

All next day was spent hanging about between the ward, the X-ray unit, and the clinic, with a couple of visits to the orderly room thrown in for light relief. My hand and arm were growing more painful. Although my temperature was lower I felt too feeble even to read the exploits of Micheal Meatyard. In fact, I was off sex, and checked my tool once or twice, to see if it wasn't really the pox that had got me. At three in the afternoon, an orderly came round and told me to undress and get into bed. At five-thirty, I had a visitor. This time it was Captain Eric Gore-Blakeley.

I endeavoured to come to attention in the bed. Had he found out about the stencils?

‘Sorry to hear about the broken bones, Stubbs. They tell me you have a temperature of a hundred-and-three. It's nothing in this heat, of course. Plenty of perfectly fit men are walking about with temperatures of a hundred-and-five. You've always been too fond of fighting.'

‘Beg pardon, sir, this wasn't fighting. I fell off the roof of the train at Indore!'

He looked at me. ‘That's what the MO told me you had told him … Well, Stubbs, you've done yourself some damage. I've recommended you stay here for a few days and recover fully before you are discharged.'

Such solicitude! I knew there must be something behind it, and his next words confirmed my suspicions.

‘As it happens, there has been a misunderstanding about some of our gear at Howrah station, so you are better out of the way.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Would you still be prepared to go on a wireless operator's course, Stubbs?'

‘I suppose so, sir.'

‘Good. I can't promise anything, of course, but there might be a course going locally.'

He was very neat in his officer's uniform, sweating slightly, and for once without his military air.

‘And what about Burma, sir? Would the rest of the unit,
the company and everything, go into action without us?'

‘They might be forced to. You probably know that a Jap offensive is building up and, although their lines of communication are pretty much stretched, they still have plenty of punch behind them. If the offensive is coming, it will be at any time, since the monsoons are only two or three months away.'

‘I'd rather join the company, sir, than be left behind.'

He did not answer that directly. ‘General Slim, the Commander of the Fourteenth Army, is in the area now. The various units of 2 Div are also coming together. It could be that word to move will come through in a very few days – even a few hours.'

‘What about our missing gear then, sir?'

He stood up. ‘There's a war on. Perhaps the Army Command would forget the idea of an investigation.'

He paused as he turned to go. ‘The rest of the rear detail is being transferred from the transit camp to a better camp nearby. We shan't lose touch with you, though. You won't get mislaid like the gear at Howrah!'

What did all that mean, I wondered, when he had left. Did he suspect me? Was he in fact planning to get rid of me in some way? Did he know Jock had visited me the previous evening? What was this fresh nonsense about a course?

All I could do was what one does most of in the Army: wait and see. But the waiting proved long and the visibility poor.

Next day, I was considerably better. The Forgotten Army jeered and spoke of malingerers who should get some service in when my temperature was pronounced to be down to normal. The sceptical medical captain informed me that I had cracked two bones and torn a flexor, whatever that was. My hand was bound up and my right arm put in a sling. I was excused fatigues and told to hang about camp.

The big sandy-haired sergeant of whom McGuffie had fallen foul proved to be perfectly friendly. He sought me out to give me advice. ‘You don't want to listen too hard to Bedpan Bertie – he'd have every malaria case shipped home to the Blight! There's nothing to do here all day – you go into town and enjoy yourself. As long as you're back through the main gate by ten-thirty nobody is going to worry what you're doing.'

‘Thanks, sarge, but I've not got a rupee to my name.'

‘We can't have that. Go to Corporal Harrison in the orderly room and tell him I sent you. He's a genius at causing money to circulate.'

Corporal Harrison was a chubby man with spectacles and fierce moustache. He polished the one and pulled the other, and produced fifteen rupees from a drawer, which sum he entered in my paybook. It was a week's pay.

Two days later, I was broke again – fifteen chips did not go far in Calcutta. The redoubtable Harrison paid me another week's pay.

‘It's all right for him,' one of the Forgotten Army types said dolefully. ‘He's got a load of dead 'uns on his payroll what peg out in this fucking camp and aren't never declared. You're living on dead man's wages, you are, mate.'

So I had a week exploring Calcutta on my own.

I tried to get in touch with my mates in the Mendips. To save money, I walked to the transit camp at Howrah. Our rear detail had upped and gone, leaving not a rack behind. Nobody knew anything about them, beyond the fact that they had moved in a fifteen-hundredweight Dodge truck early in the morning. A harassed lance-jack gave me a list of three other transit camps in the Calcutta area; but at this time troops were pouring in and out of the city, extra facilities were being set up, and in the confusion nobody seemed to know what was going on.

Another day, I walked to Sealdah railway station and found another transit camp. Nobody there had even heard of the Mendips.

At night, there was the irresistible temptation of the brothels – of being accosted, of giving in, of vanishing into the teeming stews, where cunt was as common as cockroaches. During the day, I wandered round the city, up to its gills in humanity, went round the gimcrack Jain temple, inspected the Rama Kristna Mart, watched the lorries, Sikh-driven taxis, and bullock-carts jostle each other over Howrah Bridge, looked at the docks, and had myself ferried down the Hooghly to the Botanical Gardens, where I sat under the biggest banyan tree in the world, propped up on its multitude of stilts like a too-successful beggar.

It was amazing to be alone again, away from other people. By the end of the week, with my arm out of the sling, I did a
little sketching, half bashful at this display of artistic temperament.

When I got back to the camp one lunchtime – despite Harrison's payments, I was almost broke again – the big sandy-haired sergeant called me over.

‘There's a message come over the blower for you soon as you'd cleared off this morning.'

‘From “A” Company?' I was leaning in the doorway.

‘Very likely. A
gharri'
s coming to pick you up here at sixteen hundred hours, and you've to report to 26 Reinforcement Camp.'

‘Where's that, sarge?'

‘I hate to tell you this, lad, but it's at Dimapur. You're going to have a chance to stop the Japs marching on India. It's action for you at last.'

It was stuffy in his little wooden office, almost as hot as outside. Among all the duty rosters and lists of units, there were pin-ups from ‘
SEAC
' hanging on the wall.

In a moment of revelation, I wondered what the fuck I had been doing with my life. A glimpse came to me of myself as a kid, clinging on to my big brother Nelson in terror, while he fended off a furiously barking dog. Nelson was in action near Monte Cassino – for all I knew he was dead now! I'd never really had the chance to be myself, whoever that was, had I? These last bloody years had been occupied with pretending to be a Mendip – and this is where it had got me.

Am I capable of understanding my own life? I write it all down, and it comes back like someone else's life. At that instant, half-inside the hot little office, with the sandy-haired sergeant watching me, I knew … no, I've forgotten what I knew then.

The month of March, 1944, was almost spent. The flow of events, of time itself, was heavier in the South-East Asian theatre of war than in Europe. In Europe, the Nazis were being smitten on every front, and victory seemed assured. In India, we had hardly made a start against the Japs, and the territory to be recovered was appalling in extent. The American general, ‘Vinegar Joe', was battling away with his Chinese troops in the north of Burma, and British troops had managed local gains in the Arakan. But the Japs still enjoyed
their dreadful reputation for being merciless as conquerors and impossible to defeat. Now they were moving west towards the gates of India, marching out of the plains of Central Burma – as even I knew from my reading of the newspaper.

So much for whatever plans McGuffie or Gor-Blimey might have. So much for me. Nodding to the sergeant, I went off to the marquee, a little pale about the gills. Dimapur was the capital of Dimapur State, next to Assam, on the very brink of Burma, and a long way forward from the randy glitter of Calcutta.

The dregs of the Fourteenth Army sensed there was something up, and soon got my news out of me. Shrieks of delight greeted it.

‘You lucky fucker! Now's your bloody chance to get some service in! About time you bloody base-wallahs did your share! You'll be marching the Dimapur Road in no time!'

One of the chief shits was a bent-nosed REME man called Cuxham. He was round-shouldered and talked indistinctly, spitting over his ‘
s
'es, as if he had an exceptionally tacky lower lip on which his protruding teeth were liable to stick. He strolled over as I was collecting my gear and said, 'Ffo, you're going to be a Chindit, iff that it?'

‘I just hope I'm going to rejoin my mates, that's all I know.'

‘You'll be lucky!'

‘What a fucking way to run an army!'

‘It'f no good, mate, they've diffcovered you're malingering – you're for it, you'll never ffee your matef again! You're jufft fucking Jap fodder, you are!'

I hit him smack in the mush. Not very hard but pleasureably hard. My right fist did not hurt a great deal – not as much as his face hurt him. Cuxham lurched away and went down the far end of the ward to sit on his
charpoy
and clutch his head. His mates all gathered round him, pressing Wog Players on him. One of them looked sickly over at me and called, ‘You're a cruel young bleeder, you are! Poor old Cuxy was caught by the Yellow-bellies in the Admin Box at Ngakyedauk – he didn't mean no harm.'