The kindly ones (3 page)

For that reason, I always suspected that Billson would – to use her favourite phrase – ‘get her own back’ on Albert for calling her ‘Silly Suffolk’, even though I was at the same time unaware, of course, that her aggressiveness had its roots in love. Indeed, so far was I from guessing the true situation that, with some idea of arranging the world, as then known to me, in a neat pattern, I once suggested to Billson that she should marry Bracey. She laughed so heartily (like the maid damping the Insurance stamp on Mr Lloyd George’s tongue) at this certainly very presumptuous suggestion, while assuring me with such absolute candour of her own determination to remain for ever single, that – not for the last time within similar terms of reference – I was completely taken in.

‘Anyway,’ said Billson, ‘I wouldn’t have a soldier. None of my family would ever look at a
soldier
. Why, they’d disown me.’

This absolute disallowance of the profession of arms as the calling of a potential husband could not have been more explicitly expressed. Indeed, Billson’s words on that occasion gave substantial grounds for the defiant shape taken by Bracey’s bouts of gloom. There was good reason to feel depression if this was what women felt about his situation. A parallel prejudice against even military companionship, much less marriage, was shared by Edith.

‘Nice girls don’t walk out with soldiers,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t.’

‘Who says not?’

‘Everybody says not.’

‘But why not?’

‘Ask anybody.’

‘Not even the Life Guards?’

‘No.’

‘Nor the Blues?’

‘Tommies are all the same.’

That seemed to settle matters finally so far as Bracey was concerned. There appeared to be no hope. There was Mercy, the housemaid, but even my own reckless projects for adjusting everyone else’s personal affairs according to my whim did not include such a fate for Bracey. I could see that was not a rational proposition. In fact, it was out of the question. There were several reasons. In the first place, Mercy herself played little or no part in the complex of personalities who inhabited the Stonehurst kitchen – no emotional part, at least. Certainly Mercy herself had no desire to do so. She was a quite young girl from one of the villages in the neighbourhood, found for my mother by Mrs Gullick. Together with her parents, Mercy belonged to a local religious sect, so small that it embraced only about twenty individuals, all related to one another.

‘They don’t believe anyone else is going to Heaven,’ Edith said of this communion.

‘No one at all?’

‘Not a single soul.’

‘Why not?’

‘They say they’re the only ones saved.’

‘Why?’

‘Call themselves the Elect.’

‘They aren’t the only people going to Heaven.’

‘I should just about think not.’

‘They are silly to say that.’

‘Silly, no error.’

Billson went still further than Edith on the same theological issue.

‘That girl won’t be saved herself,’ she said. ‘Not if she goes about repeating such things of her neighbours. God won’t want her.’

The positivist character of Mercy’s religious beliefs, more especially in relation to the categorical damnation of the rest of mankind, was expressed outwardly in a taciturn demeanour, defined by Edith as ‘downright disobliging’, her creed no doubt discouraging frivolous graces of manner. In personal appearance, she was equally severe, almost deliberately unprepossessing.

‘
Her
face will never be her fortune,’ Albert once remarked, when Mercy had left the kitchen in a huff after some difference about washing up.

Even Bracey, with all his unvoiced disapproval of Albert, was forced to laugh at the wit, the aptness of this observation. Bracey was, in any case, cheerful enough between his ‘funny days’. If his spirits, at the lowest, were very low indeed, they also rose, at other moments, to heights never attained by Albert’s. On such occasions, when he felt all comparatively well with the world, Bracey would softly hum under his breath:

‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
May be merry and bright.
But I’m going to be married on Sunday;
Oh, I wish it was Sunday night.’

Earlier in the year, during one of these bursts of cheerfulness, Bracey had offered to take me to see a football match. This was an unexpected, a highly acceptable invitation. It always seemed to me a matter of complaint that, although my father was a soldier, we saw at Stonehurst, in practice, little or nothing of the army, that is to say, the army as such. We lived on this distant hilltop, miles away from the daily activities of troops, who were to be sighted only very occasionally on some local exercise to which summer manoeuvres had fortunately brought them. Even so much as the solitary outline of a Military Policeman was rare, jogging his horse across the heather, a heavy brushstroke of dark blue, surmounted by a tiny blob of crimson, moving in the sun through a Vuillard landscape of pinkish greys streaked with yellow and silver. I had mentioned to Bracey the sight of one of these lonely riders. He showed no warmth.

‘Them Redcaps ain’t loved all that.’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘Not likely.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Run a bloke in soon as look at him.’

‘What for?’

‘They’ll find somethink.’

‘What happens to him?’

‘Does a spell of clink.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Put behind bars.’

‘But they let him out sometime?’

‘Twenty-eight days, might be, if he’s lucky.’

‘In prison?’

‘Some blokes want to get even when they comes out.’

‘How?’

‘Waits behind a hedge on a dark night.’

‘And then            ‘

‘Takes the Redcap unawares like. Makes an ambush like. Give him a hiding.’

I accepted this picture of relaxed discipline in the spirit offered by Bracey, that is to say, without expression of praise or blame. Clearly he had described one of those aspects of army life kept, generally speaking, in the background, a world of violent action from which Stonehurst seemed for ever excluded.

Nor was our separation from the army only geographical. Military contacts were further lessened by my mother’s distaste – her morbid horror, almost – of officers’ wives who were ‘regimental’ – ladies who speculated on the Battalion’s chances of winning the Cup, or discussed with too exact knowledge the domestic crises in the life of Mrs Colour-Sergeant Jones. My mother did not, in fact, enjoy any form of ‘going out’, military or civilian. Before marriage, she had been keen enough on parties and balls, but, my father having little or no taste for such amusements, she forgot about them herself, then developed greater dislike than his own. Even in those distant days my parents had begun to live a life entirely enclosed by their own domestic interests. There was a certain amount of routine ‘calling’, of course; subalterns came to tennis-parties; children to nursery-tea.

Bracey’s invitation to the football match was therefore welcome, not so much because I was greatly interested in football but more on account of the closer contact the jaunt offered with army life. Permission was asked for the projected excursion. It was accorded by authority. Bracey and I set off together in a dog-cart, Bracey wearing blue walking-out dress, with slight screws of wax at each end of his moustache, a small vanity affected by him on important occasions. I had hoped he would be armed with a bayonet, but was disappointed. It seemed just worthwhile asking if he had merely forgotten it.

‘Only sergeants carries sidearms, walking out.’

‘Why?’

‘Regulation.’

‘Don’t you ever?’

‘On parade.’

‘Never else?’

‘Reckon we will when the Germans comes.’

The humorous possibilities of a German invasion I had often heard adumbrated. Sometimes my father – in spite of my mother’s extreme dislike of the subject, even in jest—would refer to this ludicrous, if at the same time rather sinister – certainly grossly insulting – incursion as something inevitable in the future, like a visit to the dentist or ultimately going to school.

‘You’ll carry a bayonet always if the Germans come?’

‘You bet.’

‘You’ll need it.’

‘Bayonet’s a man’s best friend in time of war,’ said Bracey.

‘And a rifle?’

‘And a rifle,’ Bracey conceded. ‘Rifle and bayonet’s a man’s best friend when he goes to battle.’

I thought a lot about that remark afterwards. Clearly its implications raised important moral issues, if not, indeed, conflicting judgments. I used to ponder, for example, what appeared to be its basic scepticism, so different from the supreme confidence in the claims of heroic companionship put forward in all the adventure stories one read. (Thirty years later, Sunny Farebrother – in contrast with Bracey – told me that, even though he cared little for most books, he sometimes re-read
For Name and Fame; or Through Khyber Passes
, simply because Henty’s narrative recalled to him so vividly the comradeship he had himself always enjoyed under arms.) Bracey shared none of the uplifting sentiments of the adventure stories. That was plain. Even within my own then strictly limited experience, I could see, unwillingly, that there might be something to be said for Bracey’s point of view. All the same, I knew Bracey had himself seen no active service. His opinion on such subjects must be purely theoretical. In short, the door was not irretrievably closed on the romantic approach. I felt glad of that. During the rest of our journey to the Barracks, however, Bracey did not enlarge further upon the theme of weapons
versus
friendship.

We had a brief conversation at the gate with the Orderly Corporal, stabled the pony, set off across the parade-ground. The asphalt square was deserted except for three figures pacing its far side, moving briskly and close together, as if attempting to keep warm in the sharp weather of early spring. This trio marched up and down continually, always turning about at the same point in their beat. The two outside soldiers wore equipment; the central file was beltless, his right hand done up in a white bandage.

‘Who are they?’

‘Prisoner and escort.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Exercising a bloke under arrest.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Chopped off his trigger finger.’

‘By accident?’

‘Course not.’

‘How, then?’

‘With a bill.’

‘On purpose?’

‘You bet.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Saw his name in Orders on the draft for India.’

‘Why didn’t he like that?’

‘Thought the climate wouldn’t suit him, I reckon.’

‘But he won’t have any finger.’

‘Won’t have to go to India neither.’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘Not particular.’

‘Why not?’

‘Nothing those young blokes won’t do.’

Once again Bracey expressed no judgment on the subject of this violent action, but I was aware on this occasion of a sense of disapproval stronger than any he had allowed to take shape in relation to assaulting Military Policemen. Here, certainly, was another story to make one ponder. I saw that the private soldier under arrest must have felt a very active dislike for the thought of army life in the East to have taken so extreme a step to avoid service there: a contrast with the builder of Stonehurst, deliberately reminding himself by the contents and architecture of his house of former Indian days. Like Bracey’s picture of ambushed Redcaps, the three khaki figures, sharply advancing and retiring across the far side of the square, demonstrated a seamy, menacing side of army life, one which perhaps explained to some extent the reprobation in which Edith and Billson held soldiers as husbands. These haphazard – indeed, decidedly disreputable – aspects of the military career by no means entirely repelled me; on the contrary, they provided an additional touch of uneasy excitement. At the same time I saw that such episodes must have encouraged Bracey to form his own strong views as to the ultimate unreliability of human nature, his reliance on bayonets rather than comrades. In fact his unspoken attitude towards this painful, infinitely disagreeable, occurrence fitted perfectly with that philosophy. What use, Bracey seemed by implication to argue, would this bandaged soldier be as a companion in arms, if he preferred the loss of a forefinger to the completion of his military engagements when their circumstances threatened to be uncongenial to himself? That was Bracey’s manner of looking at things, his inner world, perhaps to some extent the cause of his ‘funny days’. A bugle, shrill, yet desperately sad, sounded far away down the lines.

‘What is he blowing?’

‘Defaulters.’

We passed through hutted cantonments towards the football field.

‘Albert cut his finger the other day,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of blood.’

‘Lot of fuss too,’ said Bracey.

That was true. Albert’s world of feeling was a very different one from Bracey’s. A nervous man, he disliked violence, blood, suffragettes, anything of that kind. He was always for keeping the peace in the kitchen, even when his own scathing comments had started the trouble.

‘I should not wish to cross the Captain in any of his appetites,’ he had once remarked to my mother, when discussing with her what the savoury was to be on the menu for dinner that night.

Accordingly, Albert had been dreadfully alarmed when my father, on a day taken from duty to follow the local hounds, a rare occurrence (heaven knows what fox-hunting must have been like in that neighbourhood), having cut himself shaving that morning, managed in the course of breakfast, the wound reopening, to get blood all over his white breeches. Certainly the to-do made during the next half-hour justified perturbation on a cosmic scale. For my father all tragedies were major tragedies, this being especially his conviction if he were himself in any way concerned. On this occasion, he was beside himself. Bracey, on the other hand, showed calmness in the face of the appalling dooms fate seemed to have decreed on the bungalow and all its inhabitants. While my mother, distressed as ever by the absolutely unredeemed state of misery and rage that misfortune always provoked in my father’s spirit, attempted to prepare infinitesimal morsels of cotton-wool to stem the equally small, no less obstinate, flux of blood, Bracey found another pair of riding-breeches, assembled the equipment for extracting my father from his boots, fitted the new breeches, slid him into his boots again. Finally, all this in a quite remarkably short space of time for the completion of so formidable, so complicated, so ultimately thankless a series of operations, Bracey gave my father a leg into the saddle. The worst was over; too much time had not been lost. Later, when horse and rider had disappeared from sight on the way to the meet, the nervous strain he had been through caused Bracey to remain standing at attention, on and off, for several minutes together before he retired to the kitchen. I think the day turned out, in any case, no great success: rain fell; hounds streamed in full cry through a tangle of wire; my father was thrown, retaining his eyeglass in his eye, but hurting his back and ruining his hat for ever. In short, evil influences – possibly the demons of Stonehurst or even the Furies themselves – seemed malignantly at work. However, that was no fault of Bracey’s.