The Complete McAuslan (49 page)

‘McAuslan,’ I said, breathing hard. ‘Go away. Go quickly, before I forget myself. Get your infernal carcase on jankers, and tell the Provost Sergeant he can kill you, and I’ll cover up for him – ’

‘Awright! Awright, sur! Ah’m gaun!’ He beat a shambling retreat, looking puzzled and slightly hurt. ‘Keep the heid, sur.’ He saluted with crestfallen dignity. ‘Ah wis just gaun tae say, ye’ll be needin’ anither batman, an’ ye could dae worse than Chick McGilvray; he’s Celtic-daft an’ a bit casual, but – awright, sur, Ah’m gaun! Ah’m gaun!’

You know, when our sister regiment, the Black Watch, was first raised centuries ago, it was unique in that every
private soldier
had his own batman – and in next to no time that great fighting regiment had mutinied. It was now clear to me why: several hundred batmen in the McAuslan mould had simply proved too great a strain.

On the principle that any recommendation of his must be accursed, I did not approach McGilvray. Instead I spoke sternly to Sergeant Telfer – who had the grace to admit that eagerness to get shot of McAuslan had warped his judgment – and told him I would engage replacements on a trial basis. There was no shortage of volunteers, for a batman’s life is a cushy billet, with perks and time off, but none of them was any real improvement on Coulter, although all were grace itself compared to the Dark Destroyer who had succeeded him.

There was Fletcher, Glasgow spiv, dead shot, and platoon dandy, who kept my kit immaculate – and wore it himself in his sorties after female talent. Next there was Forbes, nicknamed Heinie after Himmler; he was small, dark, and evil, a superb footballer who performed his duties with ruthless efficiency, but whose explosive temper bred friction with the other batmen. After him came Brown, alias Daft Bob, an amiable dreamer who supported Partick Thistle (that’s a tautology, really) and was always five minutes late; he was also given to taking afternoon naps on my bed with his boots on. And there was Riach, who came from Uist and belonged to that strict religious sect, the Wee Frees; he had a prejudice against working on the Sabbath, and only did it under protest. (I once asked him how, during active service in the Far East, he had brought himself to kill Japanese on Sunday, and he ground his teeth in a grim, distant way and said that was all right, it was a work of necessity and mercy.)

I parted from each trialist in turn, without rancour. Perhaps I was hard to please – no, I was impossible to please, partly because I disliked being waited on and feeling my privacy invaded, but also because it was dawning on me that Scots (as I should have learned from my grandmother) are not natural servants; they have too much inborn conceit of themselves for the job, and either tyrannise their employers, like my grandmother and Coulter (although I’m sure her technique was that of the rapier, where his was the bludgeon), or regard them as victims to be plundered in a patronising way. Of course there are exceptions; Hudson of
Upstairs, Downstairs
does exist, but you have to be exceptional yourself to employ him (I never thought the Bellamy family were quite up to him, and I doubt if he did either).

Anyway, there were no Hudsons in 12 Platoon, and I wondered how it was that the other young officers got by – MacKenzie, heir to a baronetcy, had an easy, owner-serf relationship with his orderly, and the rest of the subalterns seemed to take personal attendance for granted, without noticing it. That is the secret, of course: you have to be of the fine clay that isn’t even aware of servants, but regards them as robots or talking animals who just happen to be around, lubricating you unobtrusively through life. The moment you become sensitive to their mere presence, never mind their thoughts, you stamp yourself as a neurotic peasant, like me, unfit to be looked after. So I concluded – and it never occurred to me that I was someone’s grandson, and possibly seeking an unobtainable ideal.

Finally, in despair, I offered the job to McAuslan’s nominee, McGilvray, a grinning, tow-headed Glaswegian who confessed that he hadn’t volunteered because he didn’t think he was cut out for it – that was a change, anyway. Mind you, he was right, but he wasn’t alone in that, and he was a cheery, willing vandal who, beyond a tendency to knock the furniture about and gossip non-stop, had only one serious defect: I had to darn his socks. This after I had noticed him limping slightly, made him take off his plimsolls, and discovered two gaping holes repaired by whipping the edges together into fearsome ridges.

‘No wonder you get blisters, you Parkhead disaster,’ I rebuked him. ‘Did no one ever teach you to darn? Right, get me some wool and a needle and pay attention . . .’

Darning socks was a vital art in those days; if you couldn’t darn you couldn’t march – unless you were one of those eccentrics who dispensed with socks and filled their boots with tallow, and I wasn’t having him doing that, not within fifty yards of my perfumed bower. But my tuition was wasted; he just couldn’t darn, and before you knew it I was inspecting his socks regularly and mending them myself, while he beavered away on my brass and webbing and explained why Celtic weren’t winning these days. From time to time I would wonder resentfully why the hell I was doing this, but I knew that if I didn’t it wouldn’t get done at all, and you know how it is: line of least resistance, etc., and I couldn’t be bothered finding yet another batman – which was an utterly trivial matter anyway, alongside the important things that were happening to me at that time. Such as getting to know and work well with my platoon, discovering that mutual reliance which is a gift (and an honour) beyond price, enjoying the acceptance that comes in a Highland battalion when the Jocks stop calling you ‘MacNeill’ among themselves and give you a nickname (‘Darkie’, I discovered), getting my second pip, feeling at home in one of the world’s most famous regiments, preparing to go home on leave after three years . . .

The self-imposed task of darning McGilvray’s socks was a small price to pay for all of that. Mind you, I could have done without it; it was a piece of nonsense, really . . . perhaps when I came back off leave I’d find another batman. Yes, definitely.

It was a whole month’s leave, what they called L.I.A.P., meaning leave in advance of Python, which was the codeword for demobilisation. I qualified because, having been in the ranks in India, I’d been overseas longer than most of the subalterns; consequently I found myself barraged with requests to go and see their families. This was a phenomenon of the time which may be hard to understand in these days of instant world travel – anyone going home was expected to visit his comrades’ parents, just so that they could hear about their boy from someone who’d actually been with him. Letters weren’t the same as being able to talk to and touch someone who’d been with Jack or Billy; it was a great reassurance in those days.

So, apart from a commission to buy the Colonel half a dozen of his favourite Lovat pipes (‘and don’t let them fob you off with any damned Bulldogs or patent puffers, d’you hear?’) I had four or five addresses to call at in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. That was after I had undergone the extraordinary experience of ‘coming home from the war’, which must differ from person to person, I suppose, but is like nothing else in life. For this young soldier, unmarried and unattached, it was a going home to parents, a wonderful elated reunion full of laughter and babbling and maternal tears, and aunts exclaiming, and father shaking his head and grinning with satisfaction before going through to his surgery, bursting quietly with the news for his patients, and my MacNeill grandmother, ninety-three years old, bright-eyed and laughing softly in Gaelic as she preened herself in the Arab shawl I had brought her. (I wonder if she remembered my MacDonald grandmother’s remark to her as they listened together to Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939: ‘Well, Mrs MacNeill, the men will be going away again.’ Only a Highland matriarch would put it quite like that. If my MacNeill grandmother did remember, she was probably reflecting that now the last of the men was home; the first ones she had seen returning, as a little girl, had been from the Crimea.)

It was very happy, but it was strange. They looked the same to me, of course, but now and then I realised that they were recognising the boy of 18 whom they remembered, in this much bigger, sunburned young man of 21. That’s an odd feeling. So is standing alone in the quiet of your room, just as you remember it but a little smaller, staring at each familiar thing of childhood and thinking: that day of the Sittang ambush . . . that terrible slow-motion moment at Kinde Wood when the section went down around you in the cross-fire . . . that night when the Japs came up the Yindaw road, the little ungainly figures in the light of the burning trucks, passing by only a few yards away . . . that hectic slashing mêlée at the bunkers under the little gold pagoda where L— bought his lot and J—had his hat shot off and the ground was dark and wet with blood – while all
that
was happening, a world and a lifetime away,
this
was here: the quiet room, just as it had always been, just as it is now. The porcupine-quill inkstand that the old man brought home from East Africa, the copy of
Just William
with its torn spine, the bail you broke with your fast ball against Transitus (it must have been cheap wood), the ink-stain low down on the wallpaper that you made (quite deliberately) when you were eight . . . Nothing changed, except you. Never call yourself unlucky again.

I couldn’t sleep in bed that night. I did something I hadn’t done since Burma, except on a few night exercises: I went out into the garden with a blanket and rolled up under a bush. God knows why. It wasn’t affectation – I took good care that no one knew – nor was it sheer necessity, nor mere silliness in the exuberance of homecoming. At the time I felt it was a sort of gesture of thanksgiving, and only much later did I realise it was probably a reluctance to ‘come home’ to a life that I knew there could be no return to, now. Anyway, I didn’t sleep a bloody wink.

After just a few days at home (which was in Northern England) I took off for Scotland. My excuse was that I had to make the visits I had promised, but the truth was I was restless and impatient. Three years of adventure – because there’s no other word for that kaleidoscope of travel and warfare and excitement and change in strange lands among weird exotic peoples – had done its work, and once the elation of just being home, so long dreamed of, had passed, there was the anti-climax, the desire to be off and doing again. It was no big psychological deal of the kind you see in movies; I wasn’t battle-happy, or ‘mentally scarred’, or hung up with guilt, nor did patrols of miniature Japanese brew up under my bed (as happened to one of my section whenever we came out of the line: we used to tell him to take his kukhri to them, and when he had done so to his satisfaction, swearing and carving the air, we all went back to sleep again, him included). It was just that my life was now outside that home of boyhood, and I would never settle there again. Of course no word of this was said, but I’m sure my parents knew. Parents usually do.

I was nearly two weeks in Scotland, staying at small hotels and making my afternoon calls on families who had been forewarned of my coming; it was a succession of front-rooms and drawing-rooms, with the best tea-service and sandwiches and such extravagance of scones and home-made cakes as rationing allowed (I had to remind myself to go easy on the sugar, or I would have cleaned them out), while I was cross-examined about Drew or Angus or Gordon, and photographs of the poor perishers were trotted out which would have curled their toes under, and quiet aunts listened rapt in the background, and younger brothers and sisters regarded me with giggling awe. They were such nice folk, kind, proper, hanging on every word about their sons, tired after the war, touchingly glad that I had come to see them. It was fascinating, too, to compare the parents with the young men I knew, to discover that the dashing and ribald Lieutenant Grant was the son of a family so douce that they said grace even before afternoon tea; that the parents of the urbane Captain D—, who had put him through Merchiston and Oxford, lived in a tiny top-floor flat in Colinton; and that Second-Lieutenant Hunter, a pimply youth with protruding teeth, had a sister who was a dead ringer for Linda Darnell (and whose R.A.F. fiance stuck to her like glue all through tea).

But the most interesting calls were the last two. The first was to a blackened tenement in Glasgow’s East End, where McGilvray’s widowed mother lived with his invalid great-uncle, on the third floor above a mouldering close with peeling walls, urchins screaming on the stairs, and the green tramcars clanging by. Inside, the flat was bright and neat and cosy, with gleaming brass, a kettle singing on the open black-leaded grate, an old-fashioned alcove bed, and such a tea on the table as I had not seen yet, with gingerbread and Lyle’s golden syrup. Mrs McGilvray was a quick, anxious wee Glasgow body, scurrying with the tea-pot while Uncle chuckled and made sly jokes at her; he was a small wheezy comedian with a waxed moustache and a merry eye, dressed in his best blue serge with a flower in his buttonhole and a gold watch-chain across his portly middle; he half-rose to greet me, leaning on a stick and gasping cheerfully, called me ‘l’tenant’, informed me that he had been in the H.L.I. in the first war, and wha’ shot the cheese, hey? (This is a famous joke against my regiment.) When he had subsided, wiping his eye and chuckling ‘Ma Goad, ma Goad’, Mrs McGilvray questioned me nervously across the tea-cups: was Charlie well? Was Charlie behaving himself? Was Charlie giving me any bother? Was Charlie saving his pay or squandering it on drink, cards, and loose women? (This was actually a series of questions artfully disguised, but that was their purport.) Was Charlie attending Church? Was he taking care? Were his pals nice boys?

‘In Goad’s name, wumman,’ cried Uncle, ‘let the man get his teal Yattety-yattety-yattety! Charlie’s fine! Thur naethin’ wrang wi’ him. Sure that’s right, L’tenant?’

‘He’s fine,’ I said, ‘he’s a great lad.’

‘There y’are! Whit am Ah aye tellin’ ye? The boy’s fine!′