The Grandmothers (25 page)

Of his platoon five were killed and two wounded. His platoon was merged with another, similarly diminished. His unit - his family - gone. And Haul, his friend, was in hospital with a head wound. James heard that Donald was wounded while in a boat coming back from Dunkirk. He got weekend leave to visit Donald, whose head was bandaged, and so was his arm. He looked pretty bad, but before James had even entered the ward the nurses told him that Donald was the life and soul of the place. ‘He keeps us all cheerful’ People came in to Donald’s room to joke, to have a laugh, and a youth was there when James arrived, and was there when he took his leave, sitting on a visitor’s chair watching Donald, bemused with admiration. James thought: that was me. Donald needs his acolyte, he needs someone to educate, well, fair enough.

He stayed as long as visiting hours permitted, watching his younger self, and admiring Donald, to whom he owed everything - so he reflected, while admitting that probably Donald never thought of him at all. But as James left, Donald did give him books and pamphlets.

The Battle of Britain began, Churchill made his stirring speeches, but things were not much improved in the camps of the West Country: the fighting was going on in the skies further over towards Europe. James could have gone into the airforce. Why hadn’t he? It was because his father had been a soldier, and it hadn’t occurred to him. If it had, he would probably be dead by now, or would be soon. Those fliers in the RAF were his age. By now he would have bought it over the sea, and been lost in the drink; he might have pranged over land and burned in a pyre of flesh and Spitfire. The RAF slang was now pervading language: a form of homage to dead heroes.

Because his father had been a soldier, he had become one. Because his father had not been an officer, he had refused to go to Andover to take the War Office Selection Board examination to find out if he was officer material. He had not wanted to leave his platoon, his mates, particularly Paul. It occurred to him that he must have been lonely, to feel that if he left his platoon he would be leaving his family.

James’s company, much changed from since before Dunkirk, heard a rumour they were to be sent off out of Britain into action, and home leave was announced and then cancelled. Instead of North Africa - not that they knew then North Africa was where the fighting was to be - they were despatched to a camp in Northumberland. The trouble was, too many men had been called up. Not knowing how the war was going to shape ‘They’ had overdone it. Hundreds of thousands of young men were in camps ready for action. The sergeants and corporals shouted that they didn’t know their luck: they could have been sent down coal mines. Would they have liked that better, perhaps? Had they fancied a career at the coalface? Well, then, count your blessings. Boredom. They were so bored that some believed they were ill. Boredom in some undefined and undiagnosed way undermines, slows minds, and skews thinking. Rumours, even the most stupid, flourish like newly evolved viruses.

Concert parties came to cheer them up. Vera Lynn’s voice solaced them from the radios in every hut. An Education Officer organised all kinds of useful lectures and everybody went because it was something to do. Again, there wasn’t much for them in the local town, when they were issued passes. In the half-a-dozen pubs, the beer was always running out. The cafes offered dubious sausages and scrambled eggs made out of dried egg from America. Some food was better, because of vegetables and fruit from the local towns: the countryside was close here. Paul would have liked that, but he had been posted to another company. Meat and eggs went to London, where rich people danced and ate in restaurants in which rationing was unknown. So they all believed. There were few girls. James’s first sexual experience was standing up with a landgirl against a wall in an alley. He hated it, the girl and himself, but this nasty little event made him dream more than ever of the real girl, his girl, who was waiting for him. He silenced his ever-ready mocking voice when it threatened his dreams of tenderness, and of a love that could not be anything like his parents’. Nor like the noisy combative marriage of Donald’s parents. No, like every soldier in that great camp of hungry young men, his girl was going to be different.

James had sometimes drunk a beer with his father or a sherry with his mother, but now he tried to drink to get drunk, and hated that too. ‘Not everyone is cut out to be a soldier, ‘jeered his inner interlocutor, while he observed his mates drinking themselves sodden, and taking anything they could get from the too few girls.

There was a pleasant interruption in the boredom. From the camp, soldiers who volunteered went to the local farms to help with farm work at harvest time. James always volunteered and wondered if his destiny was to be a farmer. He actually managed a few hours’ lovemaking with a farmer’s daughter who was sighing with remorse all the time because her fiance was in North Africa, fighting. ‘I love him, I do!’ The harvest ended. Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked the States. Things were looking up, so the pundits said, though one could be excused for thinking they were at their worst.

‘You’re being saved for the best,’ jested the sergeants, more matey now, perhaps because they were as bored as their charges. James spent any spare hour on his bed reading. He read the books Donald had given him, the usual mix of poetry and real literature with pamphlets. ‘The Second Front - No “Let India Go” - through these he merely leafed, feeling guilty, his mind freezing with boredom, but listening to Walten our two souls have left this mortal clay, And seeking mine, you think that mine is lost - Look for me first in that Elysiatt glade …

Beautiful, bleak Northumberland: perhaps this would be their final resting place, perhaps they would die here forgotten by humanity and the War Office. Why should they ever leave it, if they hadn’t yet? Such are the slowed mad thoughts of people who have had to be patient too long.

And then, for no apparent reason, it was over. They all believed they were oft” to yet another camp, because of the law that what is seems as if it must always be. Their regiment had been forgotten. ‘Someone had blundered,’ is the soldier’s perennial thought.

But no, they were going to India. Not that they were told it was India: careless talk costs lives, but they could figure it out. The Japs were coming closer to India, and the Indian army was set to fight them. Anything, anywhere, just get us out of this place, waiting, drilling for hours every day to keep fit.

James put his things in his kitbag, with his precious books of poetry. He knew that if he hadn’t had poetry and books during the last months - no, years, now - he would have found himself in the bin. And he had Donald to thank for it, thank for everything. That summer, just before the war, it shone there in his memory, as strong a dream as his dreams for a future of love and peace, peace and love. He thought, ‘After the war, it will be like that.’ Meaning, like the happy months of summer schools, friendly debates, a bitter argument, the frank and fair exchange, all hope and excitement and promise. What was this war for, if not to create that, a world of generous friendship and comradeship and generous girls, among whom would be his girl, the one girl.

He went to say goodbye to his parents. His father asked if he had had the chance of being an officer, and he replied yes, but he hadn’t wanted it. ‘Then more fool, you,’ said his father. His mother, weeping, told him to take care of himself.

The great ship in its camouflage dress, designed to make it look from a distance like a blur or a cloud or perhaps a school of flying fishes, at any rate something ephemeral, now seemed solid, sinister, even furtive, standing there in the dock, and those who had known it as a luxury ship of the famous Union-Castle Line, in peacetime always decked in bright holiday colours, would not now have owned it. ‘That the Bristol Castle*.’

Five thousand soldiers, with their attendant officers crammed the dockside and backed up into the surrounding streets, waiting to board. Of these it is safe to say the majority had scarcely seen the sea, except perhaps for a day’s outing (the Thirties did not run much to holidays for the poor) nor had they seen ships and shipping. Luxury ships had not occupied their imaginations as even remote possibilities for themselves, seen only on newsreels or as headlines in newspapers. ‘The Queen Mary arrived in New York this morning, bauds playing to welcome the Duke of…’ a film star … an opera singer … a boxer.

Five thousand soldiers and their officers would fit into a space designed for 780 passengers and crew, and they were embarking on a seven-thousand-mile journey to Cape Town and then on, thousands of miles, to - where else? - India.

The Bristol Castle had no name now just as their destinations had none.

She stood in her tiers, or decks, a neat symbol of the society they were defending, the two top layers, the best, where their officers would go, with the ship’s officers, then down, down, down, deck after deck, until a mass of soldiers would fill the worst parts of the ship. Just like the world, if it comes to that - to be tedious.

Up the gangways they stepped, while their sergeants and corporals stood above, watching, barking directions, which they had been given by the ship’s officers, for they knew as little about the geography of a ship as their charges.

James Reid was at the tail end of the embarking, with his platoon, their corporal beside them, as dismayed as they were. Corporal ‘Nobby’ Clark (soldiers called Clark are always Nobby), eyes on the watch for error, a fleshy man often in a perspiration with anxiety, was one of those who find organisation difficult, and have to overdo it. His men put up with him: they had had plenty of time for patience in those months and months of waiting. Beside James was Rupert Fitch, a farmer’s son from Kent. He was a lean flat-bodied young man, a horseman, with bold fine features, lightly freckled, and pale hair already receding from a high forehead. James, still dreaming sometimes of perhaps finding himself (how?) a farmer, felt towards Rupert something of the wistful admiration that Paul Bryant had felt for himself, and he, long ago (three years), for Donald. Rupert Fitch never had to be told the why or how of anything: it was as if the army was an extension of his young life planting and reaping. ‘Permission to speak, Corporal,’ he would say to a corporal or a sergeant as an equal, familiar - at ease. ‘Wouldn’t it be better, Sergeant, if we …’ took that direction, instead of the one ordered; suggested to Supplies that such and such a dubbin - for boots - would be better than what they had. Certainly officer material, but like James, he had refused. ‘Not my style,’ he had said. On the farm he had mucked in with the men, and that was what he liked.

A tall stooping dark youth, with hot defensive eyes and a way of clenching his fists like a boxer expecting attack, was Harold Murray, who worked in his father’s shop, selling men’s cut-price clothes. Johnnie Payne sold vegetables with his father from a stall in Bermondsey. He had been taking lessons from James in bookkeeping, which would come in useful after the war. These five men knew each other well, but the other five of B Platoon were new, moved in some reshuffle ordained from above that the soldiers could see no reason for.

Corporal Clark at last shouted the order to march, to his platoon, and on to the ship they went, low down, E Deck, just above the water line. Then down a ladder, and they were in their quarters, a space that had a table wedged between bulkheads, and a cupboard with china, and another where their hammocks were. The space not filled with the table accommodated the ten of them standing up with a few inches between them, as it would when they would be lying down horizontal in their hammocks. Their gear piled up against a wall seemed to take half of what room there was. ‘Up on deck’ came the order, and B Platoon, with hundreds, thousands of men, watched England slide away, white cliffs and all, while the gulls squawked around the ship. Waves were already sending up spray. The light was going. An obscured sunset stained a brownish sky red. On E Deck a minute flicker of light showed the steps going down. And down they went again, into stuffy darkness smelling of paint and new wood. Dark. In peacetime this ship blazed light as it moved, gilding and silvering the sea. Once these ships had taken a month for a voyage, but the time shortened to three weeks, and then the aim of two weeks was in sight - but why not dawdle, take your time, in a ship designed for pleasure? Now no light was supposed to show, the ship was blacked out, like the homes in England, like England, and down in their quarters B Platoon took in the fact that there was a single dull yellow bulb.

The holds were stocked with the food of wartime England, worse than they had been eating in camp. Supper was bread and a stew, mostly potatoes. Already the strong tea was slopping about in their mugs, which were sliding despite the little ledges designed to keep them from sliding. Not one of these men had ever suffered seasickness, and now they wondered if they had caught something, and Johnnie Payne said he wanted to get his head down. ‘You’re queasy,’ said Corporal Clark, who wasn’t feeling too good himself. ‘Better sling your hammocks.’ Jokes and jollying traditionally accompany the first time anyone slings a hammock, but the ship was beginning to swing. The lavatories, they already knew, were insufficient: queues were forming. Corporal Clark, who had never known defiance from his men, now, having told them to get into their hammocks, saw them bolting up to the deck, to lean over the rail. Since they were there, he joined them. All along the railings were men being sick.

Up here with the wind on them they felt better, but they were staring out into the dark unknown. They could hear the waves hissing but see nothing. They knew how much danger they were in. This was not a convoy, which has to travel at the pace of the slowest vessel. Troopships, full of precious soldiers, enormous, must dominate the convoy, presenting themselves as targets. This ship was travelling with two destroyers to guard it from U-boats, but it was a long way to Cape Town, and they must stop at Freetown to refuel and restock, and submarines haunted both ports, and roamed about the Atlantic. Ships had been sunk recently. All this they knew. No one had told them, no one could have told them, yet they all knew.