Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (3 page)

—that is to say, given reasonable luck. He reckons that very few men lose
both
hands….

He sits, pink and stubborn, like a skinned bulldog. His expression does not change. He has got his left-hand dog-teeth into the hole they have bitten through the stem of his pipe; pincers could not wrest it from his mouth before he chose to lay it down. Somebody asks him why he volunteered so soon. A year or two might pass before the thirty-sixes are called; and in that time a lot might happen….

“If we’ve to fight,” says Shorrocks, “let’s get it over and done wi’. Let’s get on wi’ it. I look at it lak this: it takes months to train a man.
Ah. A year, eh? Ah. I reckon that year between now and t’ call-up o’ t’ thirty-sixes as eighteen months. Ah. Any’ow I don’t like foreigners gettin’ cheeky. So let’s get on wi’ it, and quick, too.”

His little blue eyes glitter as he talks, and he spits rather than puffs the smoke of his pipe. You agree with Shorrocks or you quarrel with him. He is a man of unyielding spirit. He loves England for one smoky dent in her wind-blasted northern moors—the unlovely valley of Rockbottom which reeks to the rainy sky.

The wars of all the world never moved a hair of his scanty eyebrows. He never gave a damn for all the Japs in China. He wanted only to be left alone.

In this he gets his way, in the end.

There were other Shorrockses, just like this one. They were the
dawn-men
of Britain. There is little doubt that they looked much the same; had the same stubborn, rosy, primeval English face; the same stalwart carriage; and talked something like the same language. If Shorrocks on the bed wants to “talk broad,” or lapse into Lancashire dialect, up pops the old Angle. He never yielded a thing—not even a phrase—to foreign influence!

The ancient Shorrocks went about his business in the same way and the same place when there was a bit of a Roman villa standing where the Jubilee Memorial Tower stands today. The Romans had come and gone. Shorrocks ploughed his land, and rose at dawn, and lay down at dark, and owed no man a farthing; kept a cautious eye on what came in and what went out, and cared not a rap for the heaving world.
Yorkshire
was a foreign land. Leicester was a traveller’s story. London was a legend. Soldiers were a pain; they ate and drank but grew no barley for bread and beer. Shorrocks was unimpressible. He wanted nothing. He had Rockbottom. He had a world.

And when they said that the wild men were coming from the north—giants with winged helmets, swordsmen in long boats—Shorrocks snorted and sniffed and called the panting newsmonger a Silly Fewel, and told him to be damned.

But when he smelt the smoke of something burning, and heard that the long boats were up the Ribble, Shorrocks put down his scythe and put on a steel cap—not unlike his best black bowler—and got down a buckler and honed up an axe, and told Gurth to look after the swine, and kissed his wife, and went out to do battle with the raiders. He fought like the pig-headed yeoman that he was, and is. In due course he came back; or didn’t come back. But he got what he gave himself for.

Rockbottom remained with the Shorrockses.

Snatch the cubs from under the she-wolf. Filch the kittens from the wildcat. Then try to take something that Shorrocks lay claim to—his wife, his child, his living, his prejudices; or England.

*

What is this strange stuff that runs in English veins? God knows, who shakes the cocktail of human blood. The English mixture is smooth and dangerous, always well iced, yet full of an insidious fire. Many
elements
go to make it. The English lay no claim to racial purity.

Racial purity! If blood were pure, man would still have no chin and walk on all fours. Even if there were unadulterated primeval blood, who would boast of it? A liquor might as well boast of being crude from the still. Rotgut might as reasonably vaunt its mad harshness over the gentle strength of a tempered liqueur.

The predominant English flavour is potent but bland, like good old blended whisky. You blend a whisky by balancing proportions of many different crude whiskies of various ages and qualities, until you happen upon something individual and of its kind perfect. In a blend, you mix the rough with the smooth, and so achieve a happy medium; power and sweetness.

Blood is like that, especially English blood, which of all the blood in the world is the most widely and subtly mixed.

Sometimes some ingredient predominates. Thurstan, for instance, although he has the national flavour, is a little too fiery. He is knockout drops, taken in immoderate quantities; best left alone. Shorrocks has the heavy, strong, fundamental stuff predominant in him—the Blend would
be lost without it, but on its own it can become a shade monotonous.

Dale is one representative sample of the balanced whole—the decent Dale, who sits next to Shorrocks on the bed.

*

Dale is the Man In The Street if ever I saw one.

Abiding by all written and unwritten laws, right or wrong; adhering to all established beliefs, wise or foolish; patient as an ox, unopinionated as a spring lamb; moderate of appetite, diffident of manner—he looks at you with the clear, anxiously trusting eye of a child who has once or twice been unjustly punished. He is: he has: he is the English Man In The Street.

Dale is a Londoner. He was born in the black heart of that monstrous jungle of soot-eroded brick round Battle Bridge. Now, he has a home in Ilford, which, to him, is deep countryside; practically agricultural. He is a good, steady boy, married to his female counterpart who loves him and whom he loves. Their home is their own. They were saving up for a baby as for a piano when the War broke out. When they had so much put away, then they were going to have a family—for Dale loves to pay his way, and feels easy in his mind only as long as no man calls him debtor. He was happy on his wedding day; but even happier, in a deep and strange kind of way, when he posted the last instalment on the furniture.

Once he was an office boy. Now he is a fairly highly-placed clerk in the offices of a firm that has sold wine since 1755. Dale is proud of this date. If you take him to a pub, he will ask for a small glass of Sheraton Port, which is the produce of his employer. Not that he likes port very much: he is simply loyal in all matters, and feels that in supporting the Company he is also doing right by himself. If he worked for a brewer, then he would drink beer; though never more than a little of it, since any expenditure beyond his budget would take milk out of the bottle of his unborn son—or, as his wife insists, daughter. He knows his job and does exactly what is required of him. He can tell you that a
hogshead
of Claret holds forty-six gallons, while a hogshead of Hock holds
thirty, and one of Brandy fifty-seven. Don’t ask him why: it doesn’t concern him. Dale will accept all the discrepancies of life without a murmur.

His face seems familiar to you. You feel you’ve seen it before. So you have. Where? Everywhere. Agencies pick that face for the type of Mister Everyman. The streets are full of it. At Cup Finals myriads of it make a great pink bank in the rain. It has straight, ordinary features; eyes neither grey nor blue; complexion neither fresh nor pale; hair neither light nor dark … everything about him is
ish
—greyish, bluish, brownish; in size tallish; in dress darkish—the whole noticeably
unconspicuous
and unmistakably English.

The coming night will be the first he will ever have spent away from his wife. He has started to write a letter, already, but having written the words:
Dear
Mavis,
I
have
arrived
safely,
chews his pencil disconsolately, not knowing what more to say; or rather, having so many things he knows he wants to say, that he does not know where or how to begin. He won’t sleep a wink. At home he couldn’t shut an eye unless he was lying on the outside of the bed and could hear his watch ticking. Dale is a man of habit. His habits are chains which he has forged about himself in the thirty years of his peaceful and
uneventful
life.

Then why is he here, now, when others of his age group still await the call-up?

Ask Time. Ask History. A lamb to lead, a ram to oppose: such is Dale. He heard the trumpet and smelt the smoke. Somewhere in Dale’s veins something craned up crowing like a fighting cock. He screwed the cap on his fountain pen and asked what they would kindly let him volunteer for. Vacancies in the Guards. Guards? Since Dunkirk, good God yes, alas! Dale is here for examination by the Guards M.O. (You need two A
1
’s to get in here … but these townsmen, under their serge and shirtings, have good strong hearts and straight bones.)

He is thinking:
Tomorrow’s
Saturday.
Mavis
will
spend
her
first
week
end
without
me,
in
six
years.
He is depressed to the verge of tears.

There was another occasion, when another Dale spoiled his good wife’s week end. Sunday was his only day off, too. He was a George Dale, exactly like this one. He ruined the family Sunday on June 18th, 1815, when he put in a bit of overtime from ten in the morning to five in the afternoon. He, also, worked in a counting house. But that Sabbath he put paid to the account of a Dictator called Napoleon, and the day of reckoning goes down in history as Waterloo.

*

Greyish-white as the paper on which Dale is trying to write;
threatening
as the sky; sullen as a thundercloud, Thurstan sits behind him,
rolling
a cigarette and staring at the floor.

He has the habit of staring at a thing as if he hated it. His eyes are holes full of shadows, in which dim, menacing things wait, slightly stirring. There is a rumour that he has been in jail. Who knows? Or perhaps his pallor is natural to him; some men are born pale. It may be that Thurstan has done time: lots of people have. If he did, it was for some outburst of violence, rather than petty larceny or sneak-thievery, for there is a savage recklessness in every line and curve of the man.

His lean hand with its bitten nails holds the tobacco against the paper. Blue veins like whipcord writhe over and around tendons that jump and snap taut like wires in a musical instrument. That would be a bad hand to have on your windpipe. The knuckles are dented and scarred. From one angle the hand looks like pincers: from another it resembles an old mallet. Thurstan is not a big man: he just touches the minimum five-foot-nine-and-a-half. And he is fleshless. His cheeks are sunken: he has had bad times. He can’t possibly weigh more than nine stone. Yet there is about him an air of appalling force; a nervous power that could drive him through an iron plate. Was he a boxer? He won’t talk. His nose is smashed to the four points of the compass … but boxers don’t have such knuckles. You do not often see scars such as Thurstan has on his face. It is not that they are very terrible scars: simply that they are queer. High up on his right cheekbones there is a rough oval of white indentations. Tooth marks! Where he comes from, men fight
with fangs and claws and hoofs. His forehead is marked with two depressions, circular in outline, equal in depth and size. You may make scars like that by hitting soft wood with a carpenter’s hammer—and that is what somebody did to Thurstan, only there is nothing soft about his ferocious little skull. You would hate to receive such blows. You would hate, still more, to be the man who dealt them, if Thurstan lay under your hammer.

Life has beaten him like iron on an anvil.

He comes from the region of Durham City. That is, he lived there before he came here. His origins lie a little farther north. His is the wild blood of the Border. He was a collier, once. He knows what it is to lie in the hot darkness pecking tons of hard coal out of the seam. He doesn’t have to tell you this: he wears the miner’s trade-mark—blue freckles of buried coal in his face. He talks a dialect difficult to
comprehend
. Since the moment of his arrival, three hours ago, he has spoken only three words. A harmless old man, a Scripture Reader, called, and asked the recruits to gather in a far corner of the room. Thurstan said: “Ah no gang,” meaning, “I will not go.” He is a dangerous man, a rebel, inflammable as firedamp, touchy as a half-broken pit pony and equally willing to kick or bite—obstinate, morose, savage as a caracal, quick as a lynx, courageous as a wild pig and twice as hard to stop. He has a wife, somewhere in the stormy north, whom he has forgotten like a parcel in a bus. There will be trouble with Thurstan. We can smell it, like something smouldering.

There always was trouble with Thurstan. Hadrian built a wall to keep him out, but he came right in and thumbed his busted nose at the iron might of Rome. He was always something of a rebel and a raider. A Thurstan drew a wicked bow alongside Robin Hood in the black age of the Robber Barons. He is unblended firewater; a patch of unmixed hot stuff, here because he wants a fight. He comes to war as his
grandfathers
went to feud. He can’t live without the thrill of the pounding heart and the slamming fist. He itches for the mad moment of the bayonet charge. When this moment comes, “controlled charge” will not
include Thurstan. He will swell. He will yell. He will rush forward in front of everybody else, a live projectile, a horror, a bloodthirsty nightmare; the kind of fight-mad killer that panics an army. Whichever way he turns out, he’ll be dangerous. Thurstan would butt against a bull, gore against a boar, trade bites with a leopard, impervious to pain or fear.

Disciplined, that force of his will be overwhelming. Discipline to him will be the brass shell round the packed explosive. But to discipline Thurstan, you must make him like you. God help the sergeant that has to break in Thurstan. But God pity the Nazi that comes up against Thurstan let loose. He is the old, old wildfire of ancient Britain.

*

In this room also sits John Hodge, a giant, reading a small black book which, under his huge thumb, looks no bigger than a playing card. His left arm hangs over the bedrail. It has hung like that for fifteen minutes, during which time he has pored, motionless, over the same page. His great square-blocked head droops, pressing his massive chin into folds against his chest. Hodge sits astride the bed, dwarfing
everything
; still as a man carved out of one mighty chunk of ruddy brown rock. You look twice at his back before you notice the rise and fall which indicates that he breathes.