Try as I would, it had been impossible to rouse the Commandant to take action about my bedding. When I’d mentioned the fleas, she had merely lifted her eyebrows and asked me whether I realized that there was a War On. In consequence, the creatures had so increased and multiplied that they now caused me infinitely more discomfort than the nightly shelling from enemy batteries across the sea. Worse, Iris—admittedly a more competent authority than I was on such matters—declared that certain bites on my neck and arms had been inflicted by an even more sinister insect than the flea.
Once more I appealed to the Commandant. The moment was ill-chosen, for I saw—though only when it was too late—that the Ossifer was waiting in the lobby to take her out. In vain did I strip my sleeve and show my scars. My petition for proper bedding was turned down. As for the insects, the Commandant said she didn’t believe there was anything of the sort anywhere in the billets and if there was, I must have brought them with me. Upon which she joined the Ossifer and was seen no more that day.
Besides one free afternoon a week, we were allowed two hours off after dinner when we had finished the washing-up.
Most of this time was spent by me in the yard outside the kitchen, trying desperately to dislodge any possible occupant from the curious assortment of bags and blankets of which my bed was made. When I’d finished my shaking, brushing and beating, I’d leave everything out on the clothes-line to flap a while in the piercing north-east blast that blew with almost unparalleled force during the whole time I was there. I would then withdraw to the bathroom, light a cigarette to drown the odour of cabbage that always seeped through from the kitchen and escape into the Morte d’Arthur. It was the only book I had.
The bathroom was the one place in which I could hope for any sort of privacy. Pleasantly warmed by the hot-water tank, it was not at all a bad spot in which to take refuge from the horrors of the canteen. What was more, the book possessed certain magical qualities which affected me almost as though it were hashish.
I’d only to open it and there I was, standing on enchanted ground, the song of the sea echoing in my ears and the long pageant of the ancient legends unfolding themselves before my eyes. Each place-name had its picture, especially in Cornwall: but most of all Tintagel and the stretch of coast that guards it like a fortress above the sea.
To me the very name was evocative as the Shepherd’s Call in the Third Act of Tristan; a charmed word that caused visions to materialize. One saw the flash of armour; heard the breaking of lances; felt the anguish shot with radiance, the secret life, the almost intangible silence that soaked its walls.
Owing to my distressing lack of any time-sense (due, possibly, to having always lived the same kind of life and relied on the sound of a bell for every change of occupation), I now and again omitted to appear for tea. Lily, therefore, who seemed to have a kind of nannie-complex where I was concerned, used to bang on the bathroom door when she herself went down. I was thus saved from vituperation on the part of Maudie as well as from what was considerably more distressing—a hungry afternoon.
Lily was one of those wingless angels whom Providence has set upon my path at various stages of my misspent life to safeguard me from calamities which would otherwise have been inevitable. She could have been my granddaughter; her superior knowledge of life, however, caused our positions to be reversed.
Lily’s home was in Poplar. (I’d no idea where that was: from her description, it sounded pretty awful.) Her father—killed by a bomb at the beginning of the blitzkrieg—had been a dustman. Her mother was a cleaner who rose at 5 a.m. to prepare breakfast for her seven children before setting out for the Government office in the City which had to be ‘done out’ before the staff arrived at eight.
Lily was the salt of the earth. She sent home every penny of her weekly wages except eighteen-pence for the necessities of life. Now and again her mother sent back to her a shilling or two; otherwise she never had a farthing to spend on what she liked. Her judgment was one of the soundest I’ve encountered; her heart was unalloyed gold. Every girl in the canteen told her their troubles and went to her for counsel. The whole time I was there I never heard her say a word against man, woman or child.
‘Tell you what, Judy,’ she remarked to me one day (they had seen on a letter the nickname by which I was known to certain of my friends, since when I had been ‘Jee-oody’ to the whole canteen) ‘this here ain’t reelly your cupper tea.’
I couldn’t have agreed more. I was sorry, however, that it was so evident, for I’d tried hard to throw myself whole-bodiedly, if not always, perhaps, whole-heartedly—into the job.
No, Lily continued. I wasn’t, she considered, the sort for domestic work. An office job, she suggested, would be ever so much more in my line. She, Maudie and Iris, she explained to me, didn’t mind it because scrubbing and washing-up and peeling spuds came natural to them, they having been brought up to it. Seven in a room, too—or, for that matter, three in a bed—just didn’t mean a thing to them, nor yet insects running about on you when you was in bed. And as for the rough edge of Maudie’s tongue—well, it was no worse than most of them was used to from their mums. They all liked the canteen because the food was lovely, ever so much better than they’d get at home. The work wasn’t too hard, either: and then, there was no denying, they did have a smashing good time with the boys.
That night, lying awake after the usual enemy bombardment after midnight, I thought upon these things.
Lily, I reflected, had been right when she declared so emphatically that the B.A.C.S. was no place for me. I hated it with everything in me. The complete lack of privacy. The crowded sleeping-quarters. The coarse talk and sometimes revolting behaviour of certain of the girls. The exhausting work—consisting, in my case, uniquely of peeling potatoes, scouring saucepans and scrubbing floors. The petty bullying and spiteful abuse of Maudie, recognized by everyone as ‘having got her knife into me’, and the stuffy, sleepless, bomb-and-shell-infested nights.
Not that the raids alarmed me. I’d grown accustomed to bombs before leaving the convent. Besides, I hadn’t the slightest objection to being killed. But night after night of those endless, ear-splitting explosions all round, and as often as not very nearly on the top of one, coupled with the all but total lack of sleep, began slowly to wear me down. My nerves began to fray. I found that I no longer possessed the resilience of youth.
On the whole, I think that what I most hated (next, of course, to the incursions of insect life—a perpetual torture) was having to serve in the canteen.
To-day, after nearly eight years of battering by the world, my skin has thickened so that I see things differently. Then, however, I was still fresh from my twenty-eight years of enclosure; sensitive, almost unbelievably inhibited, still looking at everything from the angle of religious life.
Now I wish I knew how to convey to you the almost brutal violence of the contrast between the convent and the canteen. Actually, I doubt whether anyone who had not themselves lived ‘enclosed’ for many years could ever fully grasp it.
Nuns, you see, are the most devastatingly neat, clean, quiet, tidy, well-behaved creatures in existence. Every one of their movements is studiedly ‘religious’; every one of their words is careful, accurate and suitably refined. (Anyone who receives letters from nuns cannot but be struck by the stereotyped phrases which embellish them; the ‘religious’ endings—‘Yours devotedly in Xto’, ‘Yours sincerely in Christ’, and so on … all a part of the same system by which a religious is moulded into something completely alien to the spirit of this world.) They move about gently and quietly, hands joined, heads a little bowed and eyes cast down. What is more, the atmosphere which surrounds them is intensely and peculiarly feminine; an atmosphere from which anything even remotely associated with the masculine element of life has been inexorably expelled. Try to picture a row of exquisitely symmetrical madonna lilies (from which, of course, the perfume has been carefully removed), growing inside a shaded glass-house and watered daily with
an elixir composed of milk (pasteurized) and snow. That may give you a notion of what I am trying to convey; though even that is a very poor symbol of the reality.
Judge, then, of my feelings when, for the first time, I found myself serving in the canteen separated by only a wooden counter from what appeared to me as a horde of excited hooligans.
They were young; they were rowdy: they were bursting with animal spirits and they were determined to give and to get as much fun as they possibly could with the girls. Their hands and nails were grimy and smelt of nicotine; their persons exhaled an odour of sweat and khaki which, with their hot breath and dubbined boots, produced a slightly overpowering atmosphere. They upset their tea, roared with laughter, thumped one another, danced about, leaned across the counter to help themselves to anything they fancied, swore, sang and bellowed cheerfully for tea, cakes, chocolate, potato chips and cigarettes. It was Bedlam; I felt like the man in the psalms when the fat bulls of Bashan—vituli multi, tauri pingues—encircled him.
I had the shock of my life when, on my first appearance, I was saluted on every side with friendly roars of ‘’Ullo, ducks!’
I had never before been so addressed. I was scandalized.
Soon, however, I discovered that the men never dreamed of calling the canteen hands anything else, unless perhaps it might be ‘sugar’ or ‘sweety-pie’ or some such revolting endearment imported from overseas. I managed, however, to camouflage my alarm and embarrassment by assuming a sphinx-like if slightly crooked smile and saying nothing. This, to my relief, produced a great impression. My prestige was ensured.
Another thing that made me dread serving in the canteen was my stupidity about arithmetic. Both at home and at school I’d so hated sums that I’d refused to have anything to do with them. Now I had to pay for my folly. I was perpetually in difficulties about giving change. Maudie soon discovered this and added to my confusion by acid comments. Humiliation became my daily bread.
Among the soldiers was one who, from the first, attracted my attention.
The men called him ‘Yippy’. His face struck me as the saddest I had ever seen. His extreme youth, and the cheeky, almost impish cast of his features, made the bleak tragedy in his eyes the more remarkable.
I have sometimes wondered whether there may not be some vague, physical sympathy between the rootless members of the human race; those who have been completely severed from their backgrounds by the guillotine of circumstance. They are a small minority; ghosts who flit through life detached from everything being, fortunately, rare. Their solitude of spirit is, however, so intense as to be sometimes physically evident. It was so with Yippy. I recognized it at once.
I got to know him because it was always to me that he applied when he wanted anything at the canteen. Then, one day when I’d been down to Wisthaven we got off the same bus and walked back together in the cold and windy darkness of Joker’s Lane. It was then that he told me his story.
Only two months ago, his entire family—parents, sisters, wife and three small children—had been blown to atoms by a land-mine that had fallen on his home. It had destroyed not only everything but everybody that he possessed.
Now, when anybody confides to one a tragedy of that magnitude, there really isn’t very much that one can say. All the same, I did—very diffidently—try to get through to him in his terrible loneliness. And I somehow believe—though as likely as not, I am mistaken—that the philosophy of life that I tried to suggest to him (simply because it alone had saved me from shipwreck) did bring him a certain amount of comfort. Or perhaps what was at the moment more useful to him—a glimmer or two of hope.
He was a childlike person. In our subsequent conversations it became increasingly evident to me that of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
(9)
Some months after all this, I was talking to a certain holy Jesuit about my adventures at the Royal Barracks. (At least, I suppose he was holy; one has only to read the Life of St. Ignatius to see at once that an unholy Jesuit would be a contradiction in terms.)
‘Do tell me,’ he asked, ‘what it was that made you finally throw up the job at Wisthaven?’
So I explained.
I told him that I was too old to be dumped down to work with a crowd of girls young enough to be my grandchildren. I felt like Methuselah among the Innocents: the squarest of pegs in the roundest of possible holes. Moreover, what was the point of holding down a job that I detested when my country—so far as I was aware—could gain absolutely nothing by my sacrifice? The canteen already had too many girls at work there. Indeed, the only members of the community who stood to gain anything from my presence in Wisthaven were the bugs and fleas.
The moment I’d uttered the words I felt that I’d been too realist. For in all my life I’ve never seen a man look more shocked and horrified. He couldn’t have worn a more appalled expression if I’d said something flagrantly obscene.
‘You … you don’t mean to say …’
‘Yes, I do, Father!’ I replied emphatically. ‘There were simply armies of them. All night and every night. And—well, the fact is, it was rather more than I could stand.’
He looked at me with a kind of pained horror that was far more eloquent than words.
I have mentioned that little incident because, strange to say, it did a lot to reassure me. (I had wondered more than once whether perhaps I ought to have put up a tougher fight against the insect life of the canteen.) If, however, merely to mention the names of these revolting creatures was sufficient to make a strong man wilt, it could not, after all, have been so very blameworthy on my part to let myself be driven away by the ferocity of their attack.
There was a spice of adventure about my departure from Wisthaven which caused me considerable glee.
It began on the day I gave notice, after going for my weekly wages to the office of the Commandant.
‘But you can’t do that,’ she snapped crossly. ‘You’ve signed on for the duration. Notice indeed! I never heard of such a thing!’
This annoyed me, because I had been careful to do nothing of the sort. Besides, I was long past the age-limit of the last group called up for compulsory war work and was therefore free to do as I chose. As, however, it was the Commandant’s Saturday Off and the Ossifer was kicking his heels in the hall till she should be ready to join him, I held my peace. (In my family, we are always most dangerous when we say least.)
The moment the Commandant was out of the house, I packed my suitcase. I then descended to the kitchen, where the girls were gossiping over their mid-morning buns and tea.
They appeared to be much impressed by my daring in what they called ‘’oppin’ it’ without permission from the Commandant. Some of them seemed so sorry to say good-bye that I was touched. The tender-hearted Lily produced a pocket-handkerchief. Iris raided the Commandant’s locked office by the open window to get me my ration book. Even Maudie was galvanized into temporary amiability and fried me a sausage so that I should have, as she expressed it, ‘something inside of me’ before I went.
We discussed my plan of action. The great snag was the trouble I’d had over my identity card the previous day. I forget exactly why it was, but the official who always boarded the bus at the barrier and examined those tiresome bits of cardboard every time one went to Wisthaven had told me he couldn’t let me through again until the matter had been rectified. And as the Food Office shut at midday on Saturdays and it was already nearly dinner-time, it seemed that I was in rather a fix.
I said my good-byes, wondering how I should fare if I risked it and just tried my luck once again at the barrier. It was while I was crossing the courtyard that the great idea came to me.
I made a bee-line for the spot in which I knew Yippy was usually to be found at this hour.
Unfortunately, when discovered, Yippy was a little difficult to persuade. I didn’t realize, he insisted, the kind of stink—(that, if I remember rightly, was the expression he used)—there’d be if he was copped. ’E’d ’ave
the ’ole ruddy Wore Roffice about ’is ears.
However, I went on and on at him till at last he gave in. (Most people do this, I’ve discovered, if one is careful to use the right technique.)
Ten minutes later, he was driving the enormous army lorry with which his uncomfortable existence was so inseparably bound up, down the road into Wisthaven. Nobody guessed that inside, neatly curled up between two packing cases and concealed beneath a large and evil-smelling sheet of tarpaulin, was a fugitive from the canteen.
My aunt and uncle looked more surprised than pleased to see me when I marched yet once again into their house in Portland Place.
They listened sympathetically, however, to the story of my adventures and very kindly offered to put me up until I had discovered another job.
1 An interesting account of the mitigations of Rule practised at these seasons in the old Benedictine monasteries can be read in Abbot Gasquet’s Medieval Monasteries, cf. especially the chapter on ‘The Infirmarian and His Work’.
CHAPTER NINE
(1)
THE next few weeks were the blackest patch in my post-conventual career. Even to look back at them after three years gives me a faint sensation of nightmare.
Various domestic upsets induced an atmosphere of depression which air-raids, prolonged visits to the dentist, suppressed influenza and a fortnight of fog and icy drizzle did nothing to alleviate.
Worse, the squalor of the Wisthaven episode had entered deeply into my soul. I felt smirched. Carbolic baths and the fresh fragrance of immaculate sheets helped, to a certain extent, to restore my morale; but something had gone from me. Whether I should ever regain it remained to be seen.
My first concern was to find another job. No matter how kind and hospitable one’s relations might be, one couldn’t plant oneself indefinitely upon them. So once more the little honey-coloured forms from the Ministry of Labour began fluttering in through the letter-box.
I Leap Over the Wall Page 22
