The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  Singh liked her. She was in effect the first English-woman he had really spoken with since he arrived in England. Most of his time had been spent in a barracks at Woolwich. In his three months there he had met only other Indians and English officers. A woman would reply to a question in the NAAFI canteen, but conversations with women lasted only two or three sentences.

  He was the second son. The oldest son would go into the army, the next brother would be a doctor, a brother after that would become a businessman. An old tradition in his family. But all that had changed with the war. He joined a Sikh regiment and was shipped to England. After the first months in London he had volunteered himself into a unit of engineers that had been set up to deal with delayed-action and unexploded bombs. The word from on high in 1939 was naive: ‘Unexploded bombs are considered the responsibility of the Home Office, who are agreed that they should be collected by A.R.P. wardens and police and delivered to convenient dumps, where members of the armed forces will in due course detonate them.’

  It was not until 1940 that the War Office took over responsibility for bomb disposal, and then, in turn, handed it over to the Royal Engineers. Twenty-five bomb disposal units were set up. They lacked technical equipment and had in their possession only hammers, chisels and road-mending tools. There were no specialists.

  A bomb is a combination of the following parts:

  1. A container or bomb case.

  2. A fuze.

  3. An initiating charge, or gaine.

  4. A main charge of high explosive.

  5. Superstructionalfittings – fins, lifting lugs, kopfrings, etc.

  Eighty percent of bombs dropped by airplanes over Britain were thin-walled, general-purpose bombs. They usually ranged from a hundred pounds to a thousand. A 2,000-pound bomb was called a ‘Hermann’ or an ‘Esau.’ A 4,000-pound bomb was called a ‘Satan.’

  Singh, after long days of training, would fall asleep with diagrams and charts still in his hands. Half dreaming, he entered the maze of a cylinder alongside the picric acid and the gaine and the condensers until he reached the fuze deep within the main body. Then he was suddenly awake.

  When a bomb hit a target, the resistance caused a trembler to activate and ignite the flash pellet in the fuze. The minute explosion would leap into the gaine, causing the penthrite wax to detonate. This set off the picric acid, which in turn caused the main filling of TNT, amatol and aluminized powder, to explode. The journey from trembler to explosion lasted a microsecond.

  The most dangerous bombs were those dropped from low altitudes, which were not activated until they had landed. These unexploded bombs buried themselves in cities and fields and remained dormant until their trembler contacts were disturbed – by a farmer’s stick, a car wheel’s nudge, the bounce of a tennis ball against the casing – and then they would explode.

  Singh was moved by lorry with the other volunteers to the research department in Woolwich. This was a time when the casualty rate in bomb disposal units was appallingly high, considering how few unexploded bombs there were. In 1940, after France had fallen and Britain was in a state of siege, it got worse.

  By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.

  ‘This was a Heroic Age of bomb disposal, a period of individual prowess, when urgency and a lack of knowledge and equipment led to the taking of fantastic risks … It was, however, a Heroic Age whose protagonists remained obscure, since their actions were kept from the public for reasons of security. It was obviously undesirable to publish reports that might help the enemy to estimate the ability to deal with weapons.’

  In the car, driving down to Westbury, Singh had sat in front with Mr. Harts while Miss Morden rode in the back with Lord Suffolk. The khaki-painted Humber was famous. The mudguards were painted bright signal red – as all bomb disposal travel units were – and at night there was a blue filter over the left sidelight. Two days earlier a man walking near the famous chalk horse on the Downs had been blown up. When engineers arrived at the site they discovered that another bomb had landed in the middle of the historic location – in the stomach of the giant white horse of Westbury carved into the rolling chalk hills in 1778. Shortly after this event, all the chalk horses on the Downs – there were seven – had camouflage nets pegged down over them, not to protect them so much as stop them being obvious landmarks for bombing raids over England.

  From the backseat Lord Suffolk chatted about the migration of robins from the war zones of Europe, the history of bomb disposal, Devon cream. He was introducing the customs of England to the young Sikh as if it was a recently discovered culture. In spite of being Lord Suffolk he lived in Devon, and until war broke out his passion was the study of Lorna Doone and how authentic the novel was historically and geographically. Most winters he spent puttering around the villages of Brandon and Porlock, and he had convinced authorities that Exmoor was an ideal location for bomb-disposal training. There were twelve men under his command – made up of talents from various units, sappers and engineers, and Singh was one of them. They were based for most of the week at Richmond Park in London, being briefed on new methods or working on unexploded bombs while fallow deer drifted around them. But on weekends they would go down to Exmoor, where they would continue training during the day and afterwards be driven by Lord Suffolk to the church where Lorna Doone was shot during her wedding ceremony. ‘Either from this window or from that back door … shot right down the aisle – into her shoulder. Splendid shot, actually, though of course reprehensible. The villain was chased onto the moors and had his muscles ripped from his body.’ To Singh it sounded like a familiar Indian fable.

  Lord Suffolk’s closest friend in the area was a female aviator who hated society but loved Lord Suffolk. They went shooting together. She lived in a small cottage in Countisbury on a cliff that overlooked the Bristol Channel. Each village they passed in the Humber had its exotica described by Lord Suffolk. ‘This is the very best place to buy blackthorn walking sticks.’ As if Singh were thinking of stepping into the Tudor corner store in his uniform and turban to chat casually with the owners about canes. Lord Suffolk was the best of the English, he later told Hana. If there had been no war he would never have roused himself from Countisbury and his retreat, called Home Farm, where he mulled along with the wine, with the flies in the old back laundry, fifty years old, married but essentially bachelor in character, walking the cliffs each day to visit his aviator friend. He liked to fix things – old laundry tubs and plumbing generators and cooking spits run by a waterwheel. He had been helping Miss Swift, the aviator, collect information on the habits of badgers.

  The drive to the chalk horse at Westbury was therefore busy with anecdote and information. Even in wartime he knew the best place to stop for tea. He swept into Pamela’s Tea Room, his arm in a sling from an accident with guncotton, and shepherded in his clan – secretary, chauffeur and sapper – as if they were his children. How Lord Suffolk had persuaded the UXB Committee to allow him to set up his experimental bomb disposal outfit no one was sure, but with his background in inventions he probably had more qualifications than most. He was an autodidact, and he believed his mind could read the motives and spirit behind any invention. He had immediately invented the pocket shirt, which allowed fuzes and gadgets to be stored easily by a working sapper.

  They drank tea and waited for scones, discussing the in situ defusing of bombs.

  ‘I trust you, Mr. Singh, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Singh adored him. As far as he was concerned, Lord Suffolk was the first real gentleman he had met in England.

  ‘You know I trust you to do as well as I. Miss Morden will be with you to take notes. Mr. Harts will be farther back. If you need more equi
pment or more strength, blow on the police whistle and he will join you. He doesn’t advise but he understands perfectly. If he won’t do something it means he disagrees with you, and I’d take his advice. But you have total authority on the site. Here is my pistol. The fuzes are probably more sophisticated now, but you never know, you might be in luck.’

  Lord Suffolk was alluding to an incident that had made him famous. He had discovered a method for inhibiting a delayed-action fuze by pulling out his army revolver and firing a bullet through the fuze head, so arresting the movement of the clock body. The method was abandoned when the Germans introduced a new fuze in which the percussion cap and not the clock was uppermost.

  Kirpal Singh had been befriended, and he would never forget it. So far, half of his time during the war had taken place in the slipstream of this lord who had never stepped out of England and planned never to step out of Countisbury once the war ended. Singh had arrived in England knowing no one, distanced from his family in the Punjab. He was twenty-one years old. He had met no one but soldiers. So that when he read the notice asking for volunteers with an experimental bomb squad, even though he heard other sappers speak of Lord Suffolk as a madman, he had already decided that in a war you have to take control, and there was a greater chance of choice and life alongside a personality or an individual.

  He was the only Indian among the applicants, and Lord Suffolk was late. Fifteen of them were led into a library and asked by the secretary to wait. She remained at the desk, copying out names, while the soldiers joked about the interview and the test. He knew no one. He walked over to a wall and stared at a barometer, was about to touch it but pulled back, just putting his face close to it. Very Dry to Fair to Stormy. He muttered the words to himself with his new English pronunciation. ‘Wery dry. Very dry.’ He looked back at the others, peered around the room and caught the gaze of the middle-aged secretary. She watched him sternly. An Indian boy. He smiled and walked towards the bookshelves. Again he touched nothing. At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge. He found another, similar title. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. He turned and caught the woman’s eyes on him again. He felt as guilty as if he had put the book in his pocket. She had probably never seen a turban before. The English! They expect you to fight for them but won’t talk to you. Singh. And the ambiguities.

  They met a very hearty Lord Suffolk during lunch, who poured wine for anyone who wanted it, and laughed loudly at every attempt at a joke by the recruits. In the afternoon they were all given a strange exam in which a piece of machinery had to be put back together without any prior information of what it was used for. They were allowed two hours but could leave as soon as the problem was solved. Singh finished the exam quickly and spent the rest of the time inventing other objects that could be made from the various components. He sensed he would be admitted easily if it were not for his race. He had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits. Cars were never destroyed. Parts of them were carried across a village and readapted into a sewing machine or water pump. The backseat of a Ford was reupholstered and became a sofa. Most people in his village were more likely to carry a spanner or screw-driver than a pencil. A car’s irrelevant parts thus entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley or the spinning mechanism of an office chair. Antidotes to mechanized disaster were easily found. One cooled an overheating car engine not with new rubber hoses but by scooping up cow shit and patting it around the condenser. What he saw in England was a surfeit of parts that would keep the continent of India going for two hundred years.

  He was one of three applicants selected by Lord Suffolk. This man who had not even spoken to him (and had not laughed with him, simply because he had not joked) walked across the room and put his arm around his shoulder. The severe secretary turned out to be Miss Morden, and she bustled in with a tray that held two large glasses of sherry, handed one to Lord Suffolk and, saying, ‘I know you don’t drink,’ took the other one for herself and raised her glass to him. ‘Congratulations, your exam was splendid. Though I was sure you would be chosen, even before you took it.’

  ‘Miss Morden is a splendid judge of character. She has a nose for brilliance and character.’

  ‘Character, sir?’

  ‘Yes. It is not really necessary, of course, but we are going to be working together. We are very much a family here. Even before lunch Miss Morden had selected you.’

  ‘I found it quite a strain being unable to wink at you, Mr. Singh.’

  Lord Suffolk had his arm around Singh again and was walking him to the window.

  ‘I thought, as we do not have to begin till the middle of next week, I’d have some of the unit come down to Home Farm. We can pool our knowledge in Devon and get to know each other. You can drive down with us in the Humber.’

  So he had won passage, free of the chaotic machinery of the war. He stepped into a family, after a year abroad, as if he were the prodigal returned, offered a chair at the table, embraced with conversations.

  It was almost dark when they crossed the border from Somerset into Devon on the coastal road overlooking the Bristol Channel. Mr. Harts turned down the narrow path bordered with heather and rhododendrons, a dark blood colour in this last light. The driveway was three miles long.

  Apart from the trinity of Suffolk, Morden and Harts, there were six sappers who made up the unit. They walked the moors around the stone cottage over the weekend. Miss Morden and Lord Suffolk and his wife were joined by the aviatrix for the Saturday-night dinner. Miss Swift told Singh she had always wished to fly overland to India. Removed from his barracks, Singh had no idea of his location. There was a map on a roller high up on the ceiling. Alone one morning he pulled the roller down until it touched the floor. Countisbury and Area. Mapped by R. Fones. Drawn by desire of Mr. James Halliday.

  ‘Drawn by desire …’ He was beginning to love the English.

  He is with Hana in the night tent when he tells her about the explosion in Erith. A 250-kilogram bomb erupting as Lord Suffolk attempted to dismantle it. It also killed Mr. Fred Harts and Miss Morden and four sappers Lord Suffolk was training. May 1941. Singh had been with Suffolk’s unit for a year. He was working in London that day with Lieutenant Blackler, clearing the Elephant and Castle area of a Satan bomb. They had worked together at defusing the 4,000-pound bomb and were exhausted. He remembered halfway through he looked up and saw a couple of bomb disposal officers pointing in his direction and wondered what that was about. It probably meant they had found another bomb. It was after ten at night and he was dangerously tired. There was another one waiting for him. He turned back to work.

  When they had finished with the Satan he decided to save time and walked over to one of the officers, who had at first half turned away as if wanting to leave.

  ‘Yes. Where is it?’

  The man took his right hand, and he knew something was wrong. Lieutenant Blackler was behind him and the officer told them what had happened, and Lieutenant Blackler put his hands on Singh’s shoulders and gripped him.

  He drove to Erith. He had guessed what the officer was hesitating about asking him. He knew the man would not have come there just to tell him of the deaths. They were in a war, after all. It meant there was a second bomb somewhere in the vicinity, probably the same design, and this was the only chance to find out what had gone wrong.

  He wanted to do this alone. Lieutenant Blackler would stay in London. They were the last two left of the unit, and it would have been foolish to risk both. If Lord Suffolk had failed, it meant there was something new. He wanted to do this alone, in any case. When two men worked together there had to be a base of logic. You had to share and compromise decisions.

  He kept everything back from the surface of his emotions during the night drive. To keep his mind clear, they still had to be alive. Miss Morden drinking one large and stiff whisky before she got to the sherry. In this way she would be able to drink more slowly, appear more la
dylike for the rest of the evening. ‘You don’t drink, Mr. Singh, but if you did, you’d do what I do. One full whisky and then you can sip away like a good courtier.’ This was followed by her lazy, gravelly laugh. She was the only woman he was to meet in his life who carried two silver flasks with her. So she was still drinking, and Lord Suffolk was still nibbling at his Kipling cakes.

  The other bomb had fallen half a mile away. Another SC-250kg. It looked like the familiar kind. They had defused hundreds of them, most by rote. This was the way the war progressed. Every six months or so the enemy altered something. You learned the trick, the whim, the little descant, and taught it to the rest of the units. They were at a new stage now.

  He took no one with him. He would just have to remember each step. The sergeant who drove him was a man named Hardy, and he was to remain by the jeep. It was suggested he wait till the next morning, but he knew they would prefer him to do it now. The 250-kilogram SC was too common. If there was an alteration they had to know quickly. He made them telephone ahead for lights. He didn’t mind working tired, but he wanted proper lights, not just the beams of two jeeps.

  When he arrived in Erith the bomb zone was already lit. In daylight, on an innocent day, it would have been a field. Hedges, perhaps a pond. Now it was an arena. Cold, he borrowed Hardy’s sweater and put it on top of his. The lights would keep him warm, anyway. When he walked over to the bomb they were still alive in his mind. Exam.

  With the bright light, the porousness of the metal jumped into precise focus. Now he forgot everything except distrust. Lord Suffolk had said you can have a brilliant chess player at seventeen, even thirteen, who might beat a grand master. But you can never have a brilliant bridge player at that age. Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is two-handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. Sometimes for my exam I make them play bridge. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.