by Gerald Kersh
Life has beaten him like iron on an anvil.
He comes from the region of Durham City. That is, he lived there before he came here. His origins lie a little farther north. His is the wild blood of the Border. He was a collier, once. He knows what it is to lie in the hot darkness pecking tons of hard coal out of the seam. He doesn’t have to tell you this: he wears the miner’s trade-mark—blue freckles of buried coal in his face. He talks a dialect difficult to comprehend. Since the moment of his arrival, three hours ago, he has spoken only three words. A harmless old man, a Scripture Reader, called, and asked the recruits to gather in a far corner of the room. Thurstan said: “Ah no gang,” meaning, “I will not go.” He is a dangerous man, a rebel, inflammable as firedamp, touchy as a half-broken pit pony and equally willing to kick or bite—obstinate, morose, savage as a caracal, quick as a lynx, courageous as a wild pig and twice as hard to stop. He has a wife, somewhere in the stormy north, whom he has forgotten like a parcel in a bus. There will be trouble with Thurstan. We can smell it, like something smouldering.
There always was trouble with Thurstan. Hadrian built a wall to keep him out, but he came right in and thumbed his busted nose at the iron might of Rome. He was always something of a rebel and a raider. A Thurstan drew a wicked bow alongside Robin Hood in the black age of the Robber Barons. He is unblended firewater; a patch of unmixed hot stuff, here because he wants a fight. He comes to war as his grandfathers went to feud. He can’t live without the thrill of the pounding heart and the slamming fist. He itches for the mad moment of the bayonet charge. When this moment comes, “controlled charge” will not include Thurstan. He will swell. He will yell. He will rush forward in front of everybody else, a live projectile, a horror, a bloodthirsty nightmare; the kind of fight-mad killer that panics an army. Whichever way he turns out, he’ll be dangerous. Thurstan would butt against a bull, gore against a boar, trade bites with a leopard, impervious to pain or fear.
Disciplined, that force of his will be overwhelming. Discipline to him will be the brass shell round the packed explosive. But to discipline Thurstan, you must make him like you. God help the sergeant that has to break in Thurstan. But God pity the Nazi that comes up against Thurstan let loose. He is the old, old wildfire of ancient Britain.
*
In this room also sits John Hodge, a giant, reading a small black book which, under his huge thumb, looks no bigger than a playing card. His left arm hangs over the bedrail. It has hung like that for fifteen minutes, during which time he has pored, motionless, over the same page. His great square-blocked head droops, pressing his massive chin into folds against his chest. Hodge sits astride the bed, dwarfing everything; still as a man carved out of one mighty chunk of ruddy brown rock. You look twice at his back before you notice the rise and fall which indicates that he breathes.
Suddenly he moves. He closes the book. A grave suspicion has been whispered, that this book is a Bible: this is not the kind of accusation one shouts round the place, for fear of slander; but it has been whispered. It has black, shiny covers. Perhaps he promised his mother that he would read a page or two every day; in which case, of course, one may say that there are extenuating circumstances. Hodge raises his arms and yawns. Chest rises, belly flattens, things like ropes run taut under the bronzed skin of his throat. The Cockney called Barker says: “Blimey, it’d take a hell of a drop to ’ang that geezer.” John Hodge is muscled like a Percheron stallion: his hands are hard and shiny like hoofs. A horse of a man; a work horse; patient, powerful, docile, and simple.
This is the story of John Hodge:
He was born to a farm labourer in Gloucestershire twenty-seven years ago. Fourteen years later he went to work on a farm. Week in, week out, for six hundred and seventy-six weeks, he worked stolidly. Then War came. John Hodge told the first lie of his life. He said he was a casual labourer, fearing that farming men might be reserved: The gentlemen gave him a railway warrant and four-and-six. He gave the four-and-six to his mother, who said nothing much, but privately wept. And he came here in a train.
Complete history of the main events of twenty-seven years in the life of a giant.
His father did the same in 1914. Back and back, generation upon generation, the seventeen-stone Hodge men, mild and unshakeable as the hills, went to the wars. There is something in their blood that makes them do it. You can slap a Hodge in the face without necessarily stirring him to fight; and in the event of an inescapable private quarrel he will go into action apologetically, uncomfortably. Ordinary insults arouse in him only a sad surprise. What does anybody want with him, Hodge who wants to hurt nobody? You could harness him to a plough, like a gelding; or to a millstone like Samson in Gaza. He asks only a little food and a bed, first for his mother and then for himself. He belongs to the earth; can tell you, intuitively, the productive potentiality of a field by the feel of a handful of its dirt; knows stock, and all the permutations and combinations of time and rain.
He wants nothing. He has got it. He is happy.
Yet he is here, a little worried about the subterfuge. Do you see?—he wasn’t a casual labourer, so now he’s a liar. He reckons that it was not a very bad lie … not like lying to avoid something, or to get something. Still, a lie is a lie….
Once upon a time another of the Hodge men, also tearing himself up by the roots on a point of conscience, similarly told a lie. He was walking with a limp. Somebody asked him why, and he said he had a bad leg. Well, he didn’t have a bad leg: far from it; he had a very good leg. But he couldn’t very well say he had a sword hidden in his breeches because he was going to join a band of good Protestants farther west in a species of uprising under a certain Duke of Monmouth. God approved: the Law didn’t. God, thought the ancient Hodge, would overlook the lie.
The Monmouth affair turned out badly. Monmouth ran; that pretty, gutless gentleman. It was a nasty business. The good peasants went down like wheat under hail, calling upon Heaven for gunpowder. Powder, for Christ’s sake, powder! It must have been one of the most piteous cries ever heard on a battlefield. The King’s troops poured over, and the good Hodge, laying about him like a stag at bay, died singing a Puritan hymn, leaving an orphan son.
It was bad, for Hodge to leave an orphan son; but it would have been worse if he hadn’t—for here is John Hodge! May I be with him at the last ditch!
In one of our fitful bursts of talk we had discussed the retreat from Dunkirk.
The Cockney, Bob Barker said: “But it was a bit o’ luck the sea was smooth, anyway.”
Hodge, opening astonished blue eyes, said: “Why, don’t ’ee see? The Lord God stretched out his hand over that water. He said: ‘Now you hold still, and let my children come away.’”
*
To that, Bob Barker said nothing. He knows when to laugh and when not to laugh. He is sardonic as a general rule, and believes in nothing much. If he laughs at Hodge, it will be in his sleeve. In his odd way he draws his own kind of power from his faculty for laughter. D’Annunzio told a story about a man like Barker in the last war.
I forget his actual words. The poet was looking over a little soggy black hell of shot-harrowed mud between front-line trenches. A handful of British soldiers held a trench. They were wounded, and tired almost to death. You must imagine the scene … the unutterable melancholy of autumnal Flanders, and the rain, and the cold, and the hopelessness, and the heartsickness, and the ache of throbbing wounds and empty bellies, and the helplessness of exhausted ammunition…. Suddenly one of the soldiers shouted: “Are we downhearted?”
A pause.
Then, from a pit of mud out in No Man’s Land, animated by its very last flicker of life a thing like a scarecrow out of a slaughterhouse leapt up, and screamed:
“Nao!” And died.
That could have been Barker.
He is a long, gaunt man of twenty-eight or so, with the kind of face one associates with adenoids. He hasn’t got adenoids, but looks as if he ought to have. His eyes are prominent, under thick, arched
eyebrows as mobile as caterpillars which almost meet at the beginning of his beaky nose. His upper lip is long and outstanding. His mouth is always half open, so that his chin, which at its firmest is far from prominent, seems to slip away down to his big, wobbling Adam’s-apple. He has a bass voice. When he swallows his throat expands and contracts in the tight compass of the white rayon scarf he wears knotted round it. The ends of this scarf are tucked into a flash waistcoat. Barker dresses for show. It is for Barker that unknown heroines in mass-production tailors’ shops sew on fantastic superabundancies of buttons, and fix incredible pleats in extraordinary coats. If anything new appears in the way of purple suitings or velvet collars, Barker will be the first to wear them. He knows, and carefully specifies, the circumference of his trouser legs—no less than twenty-four inches, though the heavens fall. He crams his big feet into torpedo-shaped shoes … unless the salesman tells him that America is wearing square toes, in which case Barker will wear square toes too.
For work, he wears his flash suits gone to seed. Barker shoves a barrow: fruit. He is the one permanent type of the Londoner—the indomitable, the virile, the astute, the nervy, the brave and cocky Cockney of the markets, who speaks a language, and has a background of colour and misery. His phraseology is debased. He uses slang. To Barker, a row is a Bull-an’-a-Cow; a suit is a Whistle, or Whistle-an’-Flute; a kid is a Gord-Forbid; a car is a Jam, or Jam-Jar; talk is Rabbit, or Rabbit-an’-Pork; beer is Pig’s Ear … and so on, up and down the language. He has a secret code; for sometimes Barker and his brothers have to hold their own against organised, English-speaking society: they can exchange conversation in slang and hint, spoken fast, and incomprehensible as Hungarian to the man or woman of polite pretensions. Barker has his own financial jargon. If the Stock Exchange can speak mysteriously of “Clo-to-clo” and “At the mark,” Barker can refer to “Forty tosheroons” or “Six o’ Clods.”
He loves a rhyme, has as keen an ear for euphony as James Agate, and speaks in irony and satire. “Who made that hole?” asks the Rookie, at the shell hole; and the Old Sweat replies: “Mice.” This is a Barker joke, pure and simple. If it is pouring with rain, he will say, not “Isn’t it a terrible day?” but “Ain’t it lovely?” As a free trader, he will starve rather than take a steady job. He has got to be his own master … even if he, as master, drives himself out at four in the morning and pushes himself round the streets with the barrow until midnight, when there is a chance of selling a bit of fruit at an advanced price to the girls and the drunks. He will short-change the prosperous without pity … or recklessly give stock away to the children of the poor. His father, a costermonger of the old school, was an Old Contemptible, who spent about a third of his Army life in the Glasshouse, but got a D.C.M. for some crazy impossibility with a bayonet against a machine gun. That same old man Barker, having, in his cups, bored ten thousand listeners with ten thousand bitter curses on the Army and all concerned with it for the last quarter of a century, now makes everybody’s life a misery with his savage denunciations of the corrupt authorities who, just because he has only one arm, turned him down in 1939. He says he hopes Hitler wins. If he hears anybody else say that you have to admit that Jerry hasn’t done too badly, he has to be held down while he brandishes his solitary fist and yells that Jerry doesn’t stand a chance and asks everybody to wait till he gets hold of Goering.
Bob Barker is much the same, only he is young and humorous. If he goes out under heavy fire and saves somebody’s life, he will say he did it because the man had some cigarettes. When he is decorated, he will curl his lip at his medal and call it a bit of tin … and secretly polish it for hours.
He says he volunteered out of spite, because of the shortage of bananas.
*
He admires above all things the quality of toughness. I don’t mean toughness in the current sense of the term—not the toughness one associates with naughty little hats, tight lips, scowls, criminality, and offensive manners. I mean the quality of resistance: the quality that makes man survive. Galileo would have been a Tough Guy to Barker because he couldn’t find it in himself to deny that the earth revolved round the sun. He would regard as tough the gangster who never squealed: also, Scott at the Antarctic or Sir Richard Grenville sailing into the guns of the armada of fifty-three, or Tom Sayres fighting with bare knuckles against Heenan, or Van Tromp hoisting at his masthead the broom with which he was going to sweep England off the seas, or Blake battering Van Tromp; or Ney fighting Wellington, or Wellington fighting Ney. Barker loves cold courage—in effect, the triumph of the soul over the nerves.
Thus, it is safe to prophesy a friendship between Bob Barker the Cockney and Harry Bullock of Bedfordshire.
Barker flips Bullock a Woodbine. Bullock gives Barker a light. He is a dark man, with a dour expression, a knotted forehead, a sombre glow in his eyes, and a swollen upper lip. Bullock is a bruiser. He is one of those boxers of whom nobody ever heard. His greatest fight was against one Nippy Oliver. Nobody ever heard of Nippy Oliver, either. Neither of those two fighters will ever get more than a five-pound note for an evening’s mauling. Yet Bullock thinks he could beat Farr. Maybe he could. If he couldn’t, Bullock would never know it. He has no idea of the meaning of defeat. If he lost his hands he would fight on with the stumps of his wrists, and feel that the advantage was somehow with him. He augmented what he earned in a boot factory by fighting in booths: shattering battles, murderous combats in which the ring ran red; for a few shillings a time. It began when the kid wanted a fairy-cycle for her birthday. He has never been knocked out. Something in Bullock holds on to consciousness and makes him always fight. He is big enough and heavy enough to fight anything on legs; gloomy, good-natured, taking all things seriously.
One of his front teeth is missing. This imparts something oddly wicked to his smile … to say nothing of the formidable look of his swollen lip, bridgeless nose, and left ear which resembles half a walnut.
Barker says: “Scrapper?”
“Yum.”
“Fourteen stone?”
“Thirteen-ten.”
“Ever meet Pinky Stallybrass?”
“Nump.”
“’E couldn’t ’arf go.”
“Yum?”
“A sof’-paw boxer. But stone me, wot a left!”
“Um …”
“’Oo you met?”
“Nippy Oliver.”
“Zat so?”
A Trained Soldier, with a pale, patient face fixed in an expression of permanent disgust says:
“Well, my chickerdees, come and get yer hair cut.”
There is a dreadful finality about this. Condemned men in American jails feel the same cold thrill that we feel, when their head is shaved to facilitate the passing of the shock that kills them.
“Haircut. Then medical inspection. Then good night,” says the glum man, rising and flipping away his cigarette end.
We go out. The wire-haired boy is as pale as ashes.
The rain holds off. The wind has stopped. The world is holding its breath. There is an awful silence in the barracks. I have a dreadful feeling that the world has paused in its spinning. Looking up, I see something that makes me jump. Sixteen barrage balloons stand still in the air. They look like bombs which have been falling but have stopped dead with the wind, the world, and time. In a moment there will be a sickening jerk…. Everything will move again…. Bugles will bray, the bombs will fall, and as life moves, so it will cease to move in one last red whirl of disintegration.
There is a dreamlike quality about this place, at this time.
First day at the Depot! It is too new to be real. We look round at the bare plane of concrete, as a new-born baby, being smacked into life, looks down at the counterpane. We don’t see it, but it gets into our minds. We’ll never quite remember, and never quite forget, what it looks like.
“If they spoil my quiff,” says Barker, fluffing up his forelock, “blimey if I don’t run away to sea.”
We straggle into th
e barber’s shop.
Later we were to hear dark, emphatic tales of barrack barbers; old soldiers’ stories, punctuated with fearful oaths and paragraphed with pregnant pauses, of atrocities committed with 4-0 Clippers on unsuspecting skulls. Ah, the good Old Soldier! He will make a history of oppression and a drama of unutterable crime out of every grain of sand in the midday cabbage.
Months later I was to hear Sergeant Tug’s tale of early sufferings in the barber’s chair.
Tug, with burning eyes, talking of that barber as an Armenian might talk of Turks; thrusting forward his flat-nosed, stubborn-jawed, dour, hard face, morosely smiling, and saying:
“You’re issued with a comb. Get it? A comb. And a brush. D’you foller me? A brush. What are you issued with a brush and a comb for? Answer me that? What for, I ask? I’ll tell you what for. To comb and brush your hair. Do you see that? To comb and brush your hair. Now listen to me. Some blokes round this camp are vague, if you get what I mean, vague about haircutting regulations. Right. Some say your hair mustn’t be more than two inches long on top. Be that as it may. I say, you got to be left with sufficient hair to brush and comb. King’s Regulations, by God! And to crop a man’s head is to defy the King. To defy the King and country! Do you foller me? It’s like saying Pooey to King George the Sixth. It’s like putting your thumb to your nose and wiggling all your fingers at Winston Churchill and the whole British Government, to go and take all the hair off of a man’s head.
