Quartered Safe Out Here (28 page)

Perhaps that image of them is imprinted so strongly on my mind because that is how I last saw them, on one of those dusty, languid summer afternoons, on my last day in Fourteenth Army. What am I talking about? My last day in Fourteenth Army will be the day they shovel me under. But it was the day on which I was summoned to the company basha and handed my pay-book by the O.C., with a travel warrant to Meiktila and on to Chittagong where the selection board were crouched to spring.

“Well, let's hope we're seeing the last of you,” he said, grinning. “Wonder where they'll send you, if you pass? There are four officer training schools for the Indian Army, you know—Dehra Dun for gentlemen, Bangalore for soldiers, Mhow for schoolboys, and Belgaum—can't remember what it's for, headcases, maybe. Well, good luck, and remember not to scratch your arse or giggle—they can't stand gigglers.”

I went out practising my expression of grim resolve, and with unsteady hands leafed through my pay-book to the vital entry which Long John had written—but he had been kinder than I deserved; it wouldn't be his fault if I failed. Then I got my kit together, big pack, small
pack, blanket and groundsheet, rifle and bayonet and kukri. I charged my magazine out of sheer habit, and then took my bandolier with its remaining rounds and my two grenades to the Q.M. store. There was about half an hour before the 15cwt truck came to ferry me and other travellers north—it would be odd, going back through Penwegon and Pyawbwe and Meiktila again; they would be busier, in one way, with support troops and establishments, but much quieter in another. And there wouldn't be a thing stirring in the temple wood, or in the little village with the high banks where I'd nearly done for Nick, or on the sandy ground where I'd talked geometry with the Duke. It was all past and done with.

I can't say those thoughts were in my mind, then; I was probably too excited and anxious about going before the selection board. But they occur naturally now, nearly half a century after, and I wonder what I think about it all.

Glad I was there; I wouldn't have missed it for anything. A good thing to have done, and to have been, as Samuel Johnson so wisely observed. No regrets about it, and much gratitude. I can almost hear an interviewer saying: “What about guilt?”, to which I could only reply: “What's to be guilty about? I didn't ask for the bloody war.” He might speculate, because it seems to be the fashion nowadays, on guilt for having survived where others did not—which is one of the silliest notions I have ever heard. If you feel someone got killed because you let them down, that's
a reason for guilt, no question—but to feel guilty because the man next to you caught it when you didn't, that's pointless. Remember him, revere him, but don't feel guilty.

It's terribly trite, no doubt, but like most trite things it's absolutely true: the best comment on infantry war, the best philosophy, and above all the best advice, was written in four lines by Rudyard Kipling. It isn't jingoistic, it's realistic; it has nothing to do with the higher questions of morality, but it has deep meaning for anyone who finds himself, as so many have done and will continue to do, facing the moment.

There was just time to walk the hundred yards to Nine Section's billet to say good-bye—after all, I might pass the examiners and never see Burma again. But the basha was empty, except for a young fellow sweeping the floor; from the newness of his jungle-green trousers and the fact that the dye hadn't soaked out of his vest, he was obviously a newcomer.

I asked where they were, and he said they'd gone out the day before to a village not far away, and were due back today, but he didn't know when. “Trouble?” I asked, but he didn't think so, just routine. He himself
had arrived yesterday, and seen them only briefly before they set out.

“Ah wish they'd took us wid them,” he added wistfully, “but corp'ral told us tae settle in, like.”

Something about him made me feel terribly old. I asked where he was from.

“Ah came oop f'ae Rangoon, but—”

“No, I mean where in Cumberland.”

He brightened. “Brampton. Ye knaw it, it's aboot ten mile—”

“Yes, the Howard Arms. What's your name?”

“Storey, corp'ral.”

Well, that figured. “You'll be at home, then. They're a good bunch.”

“Aye?” There was a shade of doubt in his voice. “Ah dunno…some o' them's foony boogers.” I made an inquiring noise. “They were on aboot the coostard gun.”

“The custard gun? That's a new one. Go on.”

“Weel, the big stoot feller, dunno ’is name—”

“Grandarse.”

“Aw, aye—weel, ’e wes tellin' us, that of a' the weapons the Japs ’ev got, the coostard gun's the woorst, because it fires coostard pies, an' if one o' them boorsts near ye—” he began to laugh “—an' the coostard splashes ye, ye've ’ed it!”

“That sounds like Grandarse.”

“An' the lal feller they ca'd Nick, ’e sez the coostard's bad enoof, but if the croost ’its yer, an' rings yer neck, it'll tak' yer ’eid off!” He held on to his broom,
heaving with mirth. “They aren't ’alf a daft boonch, eh?”

“Too true. Well, look, will you tell them Jock was in, just to say so long? I'm flying out to India.”

“Reet, corp. Ah'll tell ’em tarra-well.”

“Thanks.” Tarra-well. “And good luck.”

I was in the back of the 15cwt, and the driver was heaving up the tailboard, when they hove in view, the dusty file swinging up the dirt road, and I heard Forster's raucous voice raised in Parker's signature tune. There wasn't a chance to get out, for the engine was idling, the driver was going round to his seat, and their corporal, who must have been a real regimental idiot, was actually calling the step—left-right, dear God, when they'd been on patrol. Change and decay, I thought, and then one of them spotted me and let out a yell.

“’Ey, look at yon! ’Ey, Jock, w'eer ye gan, lad?”

“Going out to India!” I shouted, as the truck began to move.

“Ye w'at? By God, it's awreet for soom, eh?”

“Boogerin' off w'en oor back's turned, an' a'—”

“I came to the billet,” I shouted, “but you weren't—”

“Bloody ’ell! ’E's bin gan through oor kit for fags! We'll be smeukin' grass an' goat-shit!”

“Shoot the booger, ’e's desertin'!”

“Sharrup!” cried the corporal. “Keep the step!”

“Aw, fook off, you! So long, Jock lad!”

“Wiv my permish you'll get a commish!”

“’Ey, Jock! Git stoofed!” (God bless, Foshie.)

“Tarra, son!”

“’Bye, Jock!”

I wanted to shout back, but I couldn't. I could only wave, as the truck gathered speed, and for some daft reason—it must have been Forster's raucous singing when they first came into view—the only sound I could make was a whisper to myself of the words running through my head:

But if I couldn't call good-bye, there was something else I could do. It came to me as I looked back, the thought: you must never forget this moment. Fix it in your mind forever, because it's the ending to a chapter of your life, and you'll never see anything like it again. Salt it away in your memory, so that you'll always be able to close your eyes and see the single file of dark green figures in the dusty sunlight, marching at ease, the bush-hats tilted, the rifles slung. That's something you must always remember.

Up before the colonel in the morning
He gave me a rocket and a warning:

And I have remembered.

On the fiftieth anniversary of VJ-Day I made a special trip to Carlisle for the Cathedral service, wearing my medals for the first and probably the last time. I hadn't intended to go. I'm not one for formal reunions, with British Legion standards and intonations of Laurence Binyon, and never felt comfortable watching the big Burma bash in the Albert Hall on TV (or the Remembrance Sunday show, for that matter, with its energetic Sea Scouts climbing poles and artillery teams assembling guns to the cheer-leading of a commentator, before the petals shower down). I don't know why this kind of thing doesn't attract me. I think it's because it has bugger-all to do with Tich Little (no, give him his real name now, Ike Blakeley) going down before Kinde Wood, or John Luke (Gale in the book) dropping in the bunker entrance, or going in under the guns at Pyawbwe. I don't need a reunion to remember them; they'll be with me always. But of course their kinsfolk weren't at Kinde or Pyawbwe, and must take their
memories from the last time they saw them, and I guess the Remembrance ceremonies are a comfort to them.

The annual 9th Border service at the Cathedral, and the booze and sandwiches at the Castle later, are different. There are never that many of us, forty maybe, and it's good to gossip and be jolly. Camaraderie, that's what they are about, and old times, and seeing Sam Wilson and Dalgleish and Jimmy Gibson well and hearty. None of Nine Section survives, so far as I know, and Tommy Martin, whose voice (pure Denton Holme gravel) was always in my ears when I wrote the dialogue passages, died a couple of years back. But, as I say, that kind of occasion is different, or was, for now we've held the last of them.

VJ-50 was something else. I had supposed, in advance, that it would be used as a great propaganda occasion by the anti-bomb brigade, who would have a field day about the obscenity, inhumanity, etc, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, the VE-Day 50th anniversary had been marred, for me, by the great outcry not long before over Dresden, with a member of the Royal Family being dragooned, no doubt unwillingly, into apologising for that bombing. As if it was his damned business; he wasn't even born. To think of our air crews, people like Bill Hetherington, my wife Kathy's Canadian cousin, killed in action, and Bob Fowler with his parachute on fire, and contrast that with a British Royal having to humble himself before the nation who started it all, and gave Hitler their full backing. But I must be calm. Anyway, it wasn't a good augury for VJ-50.

In the event, it was a terrific success. The sun shone in London, and the old buffers turned out, and Prince Philip took part in the march past, and it was all glorious. XIVth Army were the country's darlings—“no longer forgotten”, as the pundits kept saying. (Quite honestly, I never thought we were.) Hiroshima and Nagasaki never got a look-in, probably because our case had been stated, unanswerably, in the TV programmes in the run-up to the day itself. The P.O.W.s had a good airing, the horrors of the railway were described, and at last the message got home that if it hadn't been for the bombs the prisoners would probably have been massacred, and Allied casualties would have been horrific. Anyway, the country was in no mood to be sorry for the Japs.

I had taken part in two or three TV programmes, about the war, and the Japs, and “guilt”, and was able to say on the air what I've said in this book. I hope I put it fairly; I noticed that most of those interviewed said the same thing; we were not forgiving. The man I was most pleased to hear was Bishop Montefiore, whom no one could accuse of being a blood-lusting reactionary; no one listening to him could doubt that the bombing was right.

Anyway, I had decided to give the Carlisle Cathedral service a miss. I declined an invitation to read the Kohima Epitaph at the service (the thought of Lancecorporal Fraser doing that on national TV, when there were so many worthier people available, was unbearable), but at the last minute I decided I'd like
to be there. Long John Petty had died just a couple of weeks earlier, I hadn't been able to get to his funeral, and for some reason that helped to make up my mind. I bummed an eleventh-hour invitation, and went over the day before, staying at the Crown and Mitre, next door to the Cathedral.

In the morning I put on my good suit, regimental tie, and the
gongs
, and loafed out in good time to have a walk round the old city before the service. They already had the barriers up, but there weren't many folk about, only a couple of young policemen outside the hotel. They noticed the gongs—and saluted! I must say that took me flat aback; I mumbled something and took off, thinking, how nice of them. I tooled about Scotch Street and Fisher Street and Long Lane and the Cathedral grounds, and then went in when the crowds started to arrive.

There were a lot of grey heads and Burma Stars in the pews, naturally, with the VIPs down in the nave, but I had one of the choir stalls (Canon 11) which heave you out if you go to sleep—or so they used to tell us when we attended the old Grammar School's service on Ascension Day. Some port-wine-faced berk tried to pinch my seat, but I looked at him and he faded.

I didn't care for the sermon. The preacher struck me as rather trendy, and I got the impression that he was a bit of a reconciler and forgiver. The hell with that. Also, they had some ghastly new version of “Who would true valour see?”—imagine, someone, some appalling brute that perishes, actually thought he could write
better verse than Bunyan! Well, the hell with him, too; I sang the old words, hobgoblins, foul fiends, and all. Likewise in the National Anthem, while the rest were singing the unutterable, sanctimonious, politically correct pap of the new third verse, I'm glad to say I was confounding their politics and frustrating their knavish tricks at full belt.

The chap who spoke the sort of layman's part of the service felt he had to say something about forgiveness, too, but I'm sure he didn't mean it. I thought of Oliver Cromwell standing in the Cathedral 350 years earlier, giving orders for the stabling of his cavalry mounts in the nave (a bit gross, but that's Old Noll for you), and thought to myself that he wouldn't have had much time for forgiving the Huns and Japs, either.

The whole performance being on national TV, I was delighted when Long John's picture came up on the screen, and Johnny Burgess's, and I thought: “Ah's wid tha, marras.”

Afterwards, the “veterans”, as they call us (in my youth a veteran was a 30-year service man) fell in outside to march to the Town Hall. I had determined that I was not going to make a spectacle of myself by shambling in the ranks at my time of life, but when I saw them forming up I thought, what the hell, it's the last time, and fell in, too. There were King's Own behind me (they amalgamated with the Borders years ago), and of course they were belly-aching about how it was all Border Regiment today, and why hadn't the service been held in Lancaster? For the very good reason that
the Border Regiment had three battalions in Burma, and no regiment better typified XIVth Army infantry.

They marched us to the Town Hall, a couple of hundred of us, old as sin and not two pounds of us hanging straight. The people behind the barriers began clapping, which I confess took me by surprise, and I found my eyes stinging. I thought we'd stop at the Town Hall, but damned if they didn't march us back along Castle Street, and the people still clapping and cheering, and I heard a little girl's voice piping: “’Ey, theer's gran'pa! ’Ey, gran'pa!” Lucky gran'pa, whoever he was.

It was blazing sunshine, and by the time we got abreast of Tullie House there was a fair amount of wheezing and gasping audible in the ranks, and more than one exclamation of “Booger me!” God knows what the band was playing, but as we staggered up the causeway and under the Castle gateway they struck up “John Peel”, and I thought, by God, you're privileged, for this is the last march of the old Border Regiment, Lucas's Foot, founded 1702 (Richard Steele of essay fame was one of its junior officers), the old 34th of Arroyo and China and the frontier and God knows where else, the inheritors of the men who garrisoned this Castle and held this border eight hundred years ago, and after those three regimental centuries we're coming off parade for the very last time, and there'll be no more Border Regiment ever again. Oh, I know there's the amalgamated KORB, but we're the last of the real Border.

They halted us in the square, and there were Army
boys on a big tank with an enormous gun, taking pictures of us as we dismissed. A voice somewhere in the parade bellowed: “’Ey, ’ev ye got a pull-through for that goon? There's a lal feller ’ere needs pullin' through, ’is legs is bad!”

It might have been Grandarse, and the lal feller might have been Nick, but since he didn't cry: “We'll all git killed!” I guess it must have been two other chaps.

I didn't stay for the VIP lunch afterwards. I had a notion that not many of those who had marched would have been invited, and I had no wish to sit down with the good and great, worthy folk though I know they were. I walked along Castle Street and English Street to the station, having divested myself of my gongs in the Crown and Mitre bogs, and caught the train, thinking wrap up all my care and woe, so long, lads, and thanks. How the years go by, and how changed everything is, and how much you see around you today that you didn't fight for, and sometimes you can feel betrayed and pretty fed up. But think of the Carlisle people clapping, and “’Ey, gran'pa!” Aye, it was worth it. By God, it was worth it.

Watching the evening celebrations of VJ-50 on TV that night, the rockets and the floodlights, the Queen and the huge crowds, the music and the cheering, and the amber streaks in the western sky, I thought to myself: the sun set on the British Empire a long time ago, irrevocably, unfortunately, and inevitably, but what you're seeing now, this night of VJ-50, is the last reflection of that imperial sun, gone beneath the horizon, but
reminding generations who never knew the Empire and its heartland, of what once was. The British were happy that night of VJ-50, with a sense of something well done, not just in 1945, but for centuries before.

My daughter Caro and her husband (his father was a prisoner of the Japanese) took their children to see the fireworks on the Thames, and amidst all the noise and merrymaking our little granddaughter, Genny, aged six, who is English-Scottish-Welsh, raised her paper cup of lemonade and cried: “A toast—to victory!” And the people laughed and cheered.