Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (5 page)

Months later I was to hear Sergeant Tug’s tale of early sufferings in the barber’s chair.

Tug, with burning eyes, talking of that barber as an Armenian might talk of Turks; thrusting forward his flat-nosed, stubborn-jawed, dour, hard face, morosely smiling, and saying:

“You’re issued with a comb. Get it? A comb. And a brush. D’you foller me? A brush. What are you issued with a brush and a comb for? Answer me that? What for, I ask? I’ll tell you what for. To comb and brush your hair. Do you see that? To comb and brush your hair.
Now listen to me. Some blokes round this camp are vague, if you get what I mean, vague about haircutting regulations. Right. Some say your hair mustn’t be more than two inches long on top. Be that as it may. I say,
you
got
to
be
left
with
sufficient
hair
to
brush
and
comb.
King’s Regulations, by God! And to crop a man’s head is to defy the King. To defy the King and country! Do you foller me? It’s like saying Pooey to King George the Sixth. It’s like putting your thumb to your nose and wiggling all your fingers at Winston Churchill and the whole British Government, to go and take all the hair off of a man’s head.

“So. I was proud of my headervair. Laugh. But I had a headervair any woman might have been proud of. Oh,
I
know it’s a lot of bull. But I was a youngster. And I tell you, I was proud of that headervair. And I says to the barber: ‘Leave it on top,’ and he says to me: ‘God blimey, where d’you think you are? In a bleeding orchestra? Fond of music, are you? A pansy, ha?’ And I says to the barber: ‘I’m not fond of music—cut out the insults.’ And he says to me: ‘Bend your ’ead forward and cut out the back answers.’ And I says to him: ‘Cut off that top bit that waves and so help me I won’t stand for it,’ and he says: ‘Oh, then lie down to it, Paderooski.’ And I waits. And I feels them clippers going up my neck, and so help me God Almighty in Heaven, I feels them clippers going right up to the top of my head. And I jumps out of that chair and I runs out of the barber’s shop, and I goes on parade with me hair uncut, and a sort of bald strip running from me neck to the top of me skull. And the officer says: ‘What the devil do you think that is?’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir. Am I here to be shaved like a convict, sir?’ And the officer says ‘No.’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir, the barber wanted to shave my head, sir.’ And the officer says: ‘Oh,’ and as true as I sit here that barber got fourteen days. Ah. Fourteen steady days. They run him into the moosh, they did, and they took him on Orders, and they give him fourteen solid days C.B. Yeah, it was jankers for that lousy rotten barber, for flying in the face of the King’s Regulations. My headervair.
I don’t mind telling you, it just about broke my heart, what they done to my headervair.

“That’s a fact. I was a good boy till then. But after that, I didn’t care for nothing or nobody, I didn’t! I been made up three times and busted three times, and when I was a Corporal they bust me for
something
I never done, ah, they did that! But Detention, Spud-Hole, Jankers, Reps, Royal Warrant, and everything else—nothing ’urt me so much as what they done to my lovely headervair.

“Murderers! Murderers! That’s what them barbers are, murderers! Jerry kills your body. But the barber, he murders your soul! Look at me now. Bald. Me mother cried when she saw me last. She cried, I tell you, she broke down and she cried like a child, and I don’t mind telling you that I broke down and cried with her, too…. I was ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I sobbed as if my heart was breaking, I did. And my old dad, a lump came into his throat; he couldn’t touch supper. I can show you a photo of myself with a headervair that’ll make you look up a bit … just like a mop. Call me a liar if you like. I say a mop. Everybody used to talk about my headervair. Girls used to say: ‘Tug, I envy you only one thing; your headervair.’ I got a picture of myself took in Ramsgit in 1910, when I was seven. Curls down to me shoulders. The Army ruined all that. I forgave ’em everything, but I’ll never forgive ’em that.”

And Sergeant Tug, who led a bayonet charge on the road to
Boulogne
, or thereabout, and carried six men’s equipment twenty-six miles, and looks upon the awful discipline of the peacetime Brigade of Guards as “cushy,” and has seventeen years of service behind him, and is as impregnable as a tank, fingers his scalp, from which the hair just naturally receded, and sighs, and scowls at the memory of the barber.

Somebody says: “Sarnt Tug—you got shot in France, didn’t you? What’s it feel like?”

He replies: “What’s that? Feel like? Oh … sort of hot and cold. Golden, it was … spun gold, my mum used to call it, and I’m not telling you a word of a lie. Spun gold. That’s life for you.”

“Where d’you get hit, Sarnt Tug?”

“Machine-gun bursts: thigh and backside: two in the face, teeth splintered to hell. Blimey, I was proud of that headervair …”

*

Recruits have been pouring in. The Corporal in the barber’s shop is harassed. Recruits are dreary cattle to shear … terrified, dumb, stupid, paralysed with novelty.

The floor is sprinkled with clippings, red, yellow, black, brown, and, above all, plain English mouse. The grim soldier is playing barbers: there are two cut-glass bottles on the shelf in front of the chair.

We cram ourselves into the room. The Corporal says: “Well,
siddown
, siddown, siddown, siddown, siddown … don’t block up the gangway.”

The wire-haired boy is first to take the chair. There isn’t a mirror: we can’t see his face; but a look of terrified expectancy spreads,
somehow
, to his neck. No doubt a neck looks like that when Monsieur Paris has his hand on the string of the guillotine. There is a
tickety-
tickety
-tickety-tickety
of clippers. It is like husking a coconut. Out of a mass of fibre emerges something pale, oval, top-knotted, and seamed. “Next,” says the Corporal. “What?” says the wire-haired boy. “Fancy a nice shampoo?” says the Corporal. The boy who used to have wire hair says: “I don’t mind.”

“Any particular kind of shampoo?”

“I don’t know. I don’t mind.”

“Ashes of Roses?”

“If you like.”

“Or would you rather have violets?”

“Well, I think I’d rather have violets.”

“Oh. And a friction? Or a nice massage?”

“Never mind about that. Just a shampoo.”

“Just a shampoo?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well go and put your head under the bloody tap.
Next!”

The boy rises unsteadily, feels his head with an incredulous hand, blinks, looks at his palm as if he expects to find blood upon it. “Where d’you come from?” the Corporal asks him.

“Widnes.”

“Then,” says the Corporal, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Next.”
He cuts a man’s hair in about forty-five seconds.

“It ain’t ’umane,” says Barker. “You ought to give us gas wiv ’air-cuts like these.”

“Next.”

Hodge’s naked head emerges, still massive. Thurstan, shorn of a dense dark growth, looks blacker and paler and even more dangerous.

“I’ve seen your face before,” says the Corporal to the glum man. “What’s your monicker?”

“Alison.”

“You been here before, ain’t that so?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re back, eh?”

“Worse luck.”

“You pore thing.”

One by one we pass under the clippers. He shears us like sheep. One man lurks near the door, half in and half out of the shop, as if he contemplates flight. He is very young and slender, dark and sunburnt yet lacking the look of one who lives in the open air.
Town
is written on his forehead, so to speak; the streets are his destiny. You can’t help feeling that he got his tan in a city park: like inordinate skill at billiards, it seems to indicate a misspent youth. This is John Johnson of Birmingham; of Brummagem, gentlemen, the breeding-ground of the fly boys from time immemorial.

He has talked too little and too much during his few hours in the Depot. He wants everything tough—in the silly sense of the term. When Bates, that garrulous and amiable brewer’s drayman from Leicester, said: “Well, Oi ’ope they’ll fill moi teeth,” it was John Johnson who snapped, in his aggressive burr: “Oi want ’em to take all
moine out. Oi can’t be bothered with teeth.” He has a lank, saturnine face; eyebrows which collide in a black plume in the middle of his low forehead; little green eyes, and a sloping chin. He keeps his mouth compressed; sports a green coat, green flannel trousers, green suède shoes, green fancy sports-shirt with pompons; a tricky cigarette case which won’t open and a cunning lighter which won’t light—to say nothing of a novel watch on a doggy leather lanyard, which like Johnson, looks smart but doesn’t work. When simple Bates said he earned a good, steady three pound two-and-six a week, Johnson said: “Oi drew twelve.” He carries a box of fat cigarettes, and a paper packet of little black cigarlets, which, he maintains, are too strong for ordinary men…. The tobacconist warns you that you smoke those cigarlets at your own risk: if you pass out cold in a sweat of nicotine poisoning, don’t come and ask for your money back. Nothing is too powerful for John Johnson of Brummagem.

Barker, to whom fly boys, both of Brummagem and The Smoke, are an open book, smiled at this, and said: “’E chews nails and spits rust. ’E shaves wiv a blow-lamp.” Barker knows fly boys as Professor Huxley knows flies … what they eat and drink, where they breed, if and when they sleep, how many eyes they have, and where they go in the winter time. But Bates permitted himself to be impressed, and said: “Are they noice?”

Bates, displaying his blond head, with anxiety in his big, bony Anglo-Saxon face; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, wide-cheeked and friendly, says: “Do Oi look funny? Do Oi?”

Johnson replies, with patronage: “All right. You’re in the Army now, yer know,” and comes away from the door. He has lank black hair, heavily creamed, extraordinarily long, carefully arranged with a
parting
one inch to the left of the centre. I believe he would sooner part with his right arm than lose that gallant mane. But he swaggers
forward
, now, and says:

“Cut it off, Corp-rerl. You can’t cut it too short for me. Oi can’t be bothered with it.”
Tickety-tickety-tickety,
chatter the clippers.

“One o’ the Brylcreem Boys, eh?” says the Corporal, with a little smile of enjoyment: he looks forward to heads of hair like this; they give a zest to his life; he talks of them in the Mess.
Tickety-tickety.
… Johnson is scalped. A raiding party of Iroquois couldn’t have done a much completer job on him.

“That looks noice,” says Bates.

“Honest?” asks Johnson.

“It makes yow look toof.”

“Tough, eh?” says Johnson, and represses a smile of gratification. “Don’t talk soppy. You wait a minute and I’ll give you one o’ my cigarlets.”

Bates has said exactly the right thing, for the first—and perhaps the last—time in his life. He beams, that simple soul; his face cracks into a smile like a split pumpkin. He has given pleasure: he is delighted beyond words. He lights one of the little black cigarlets. It isn’t anywhere near the stuff he rolls, for strength and irritant quality. Bates sucks in a cloud of smoke and blows it out.

“They’re noice and moild,” he says.

Johnson’s lips tighten again.

Clipped to the bone we walk back and wait for the Medical Officer to send for us.

*

A dentist looks at our teeth. An old sergeant, who appears to be nailed to an invisible backboard, shuffles eye-testing cards. There are some unscrupulous recruits who, having bad eyes, try and learn the rows of letters by heart, and so slink into the Guards. They have several cards, which they change from test to test. A big Exeter man named Septimus Plimsoll, seventh son of a seventh son, but far from psychic, is cast out as astigmatic.

“But my hair! They’ve cut my hair! They can’t turn me down now … they’ve cut my hair!” he says.

“Cutcha hair, son?” says the old Sergeant, looking at him.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. You go straight to Corporal Philips at the barber’s shop—tell him Sergeant Robson sentcha—don’t forget to
mention
my name—and he’ll give you your hair back agen. Next!”

We take off all our clothes except our trousers. Bodies emerge, pallid as maggots. You see, now, the herculean thews of Hodge; his biceps like grapefruit, his pectorals like breastplates; Thurstan, all tendon and gristle, with a back that writhes with muscle like a handful of worms; lanky Barker; the Widnes boy, still padded with puppy fat; the inconspicuous pale Dale; suety Shorrocks; Johnson, thin but fast-looking, with long flat muscles and not enough chest; Bullock, dark and knotty; Bates, starch-fed, starch-white, but built for power; Alison, the glum old soldier, with
Death
Rather
Than
Dishonour
tattooed on his left arm and
I
Love
Millie
on his bosom … outdoor workers with brown forearms and necks which make their torsos look like
cotton
vests … sedentary men, run to skin and bone … miners, with great backs and arms … a timber-feller, with wrestler’s shoulders grafted on to the body of a clerk … a steel-worker, like a
mummified
Carnera … men who push things and have loins like
Samson
… men who pull things, and have deltoids like half-moons and hams for forearms….

Barker says: “Hallo, Tarzan: if I ’ad me barrer ahtside I’d go an’ get yer a banana.”

The man he calls Tarzan smiles a slow, white smile. He is a tall, strong Cornishman called Penrowe; Barker’s nickname will stick to him, for he has a hairy chest. Barker, looking at him for the first time, said: “Look—a Five.” A Five is a Five-to-Two, or Jew. Penrowe has something vaguely Semitic about him—a swarthy skin, white teeth, glittering eyes of a hard hot brown, and a big hooked nose. Yet he, and his father, and his father’s father, lived in the West of England all their lives, and no Penrowe ever was anything but a good
English-man
. A Penrowe was among the first of the Englishmen who looked through a warm dawn and saw the New World loom on the western horizon. Sir Francis—they called him Franky—Drake knew the
Penrowes
.
A Penrowe went out with Grenville off Flores, in 1591. A Penrowe terrified his fellow villagers by smoking one of the first pipes of Elizabethan Cut Plug; and a Penrowe got a Spanish ball in his head when the Great Fleet Invincible, the hundred and twenty-nine ships of the Armada, sailed against the eighty ships of England. Eighty ships, and Admiral the Northwest Wind. “God blew and they were
scattered
.” But Penrowe helped, the black Cornishman; moody, calculating, proud, quarrelsome, hard man of the sea.