Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  “So. I was proud of my headervair. Laugh. But I had a headervair any woman might have been proud of. Oh, I know it’s a lot of bull. But I was a youngster. And I tell you, I was proud of that headervair. And I says to the barber: ‘Leave it on top,’ and he says to me: ‘God blimey, where d’you think you are? In a bleeding orchestra? Fond of music, are you? A pansy, ha?’ And I says to the barber: ‘I’m not fond of music—cut out the insults.’ And he says to me: ‘Bend your ’ead forward and cut out the back answers.’ And I says to him: ‘Cut off that top bit that waves and so help me I won’t stand for it,’ and he says: ‘Oh, then lie down to it, Paderooski.’ And I waits. And I feels them clippers going up my neck, and so help me God Almighty in Heaven, I feels them clippers going right up to the top of my head. And I jumps out of that chair and I runs out of the barber’s shop, and I goes on parade with me hair uncut, and a sort of bald strip running from me neck to the top of me skull. And the officer says: ‘What the devil do you think that is?’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir. Am I here to be shaved like a convict, sir?’ And the officer says ‘No.’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir, the barber wanted to shave my head, sir.’ And the officer says: ‘Oh,’ and as true as I sit here that barber got fourteen days. Ah. Fourteen steady days. They run him into the moosh, they did, and they took him on Orders, and they give him fourteen solid days C.B. Yeah, it was jankers for that lousy rotten barber, for flying in the face of the King’s Regulations. My headervair. I don’t mind telling you, it just about broke my heart, what they done to my headervair.

  “That’s a fact. I was a good boy till then. But after that, I didn’t care for nothing or nobody, I didn’t! I been made up three times and busted three times, and when I was a Corporal they bust me for something I never done, ah, they did that! But Detention, Spud-Hole, Jankers, Reps, Royal Warrant, and everything else—nothing ’urt me so much as what they done to my lovely headervair.

  “Murderers! Murderers! That’s what them barbers are, murderers! Jerry kills your body. But the barber, he murders your soul! Look at me now. Bald. Me mother cried when she saw me last. She cried, I tell you, she broke down and she cried like a child, and I don’t mind telling you that I broke down and cried with her, too…. I was ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I sobbed as if my heart was breaking, I did. And my old dad, a lump came into his throat; he couldn’t touch supper. I can show you a photo of myself with a headervair that’ll make you look up a bit … just like a mop. Call me a liar if you like. I say a mop. Everybody used to talk about my headervair. Girls used to say: ‘Tug, I envy you only one thing; your headervair.’ I got a picture of myself took in Ramsgit in 1910, when I was seven. Curls down to me shoulders. The Army ruined all that. I forgave ’em everything, but I’ll never forgive ’em that.”

  And Sergeant Tug, who led a bayonet charge on the road to Boulogne, or thereabout, and carried six men’s equipment twenty-six miles, and looks upon the awful discipline of the peacetime Brigade of Guards as “cushy,” and has seventeen years of service behind him, and is as impregnable as a tank, fingers his scalp, from which the hair just naturally receded, and sighs, and scowls at the memory of the barber.

  Somebody says: “Sarnt Tug—you got shot in France, didn’t you? What’s it feel like?”

  He replies: “What’s that? Feel like? Oh … sort of hot and cold. Golden, it was … spun gold, my mum used to call it, and I’m not telling you a word of a lie. Spun gold. That’s life for you.”

  “Where d’you get hit, Sarnt Tug?”

  “Machine-gun bursts: thigh and backside: two in the face, teeth splintered to hell. Blimey, I was proud of that headervair …”

  *

  Recruits have been pouring in. The Corporal in the barber’s shop is harassed. Recruits are dreary cattle to shear … terrified, dumb, stupid, paralysed with novelty.

  The floor is sprinkled with clippings, red, yellow, black, brown, and, above all, plain English mouse. The grim soldier is playing barbers: there are two cut-glass bottles on the shelf in front of the chair.

  We cram ourselves into the room. The Corporal says: “Well, siddown, siddown, siddown, siddown, siddown … don’t block up the gangway.”

  The wire-haired boy is first to take the chair. There isn’t a mirror: we can’t see his face; but a look of terrified expectancy spreads, somehow, to his neck. No doubt a neck looks like that when Monsieur Paris has his hand on the string of the guillotine. There is a tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety of clippers. It is like husking a coconut. Out of a mass of fibre emerges something pale, oval, top-knotted, and seamed. “Next,” says the Corporal. “What?” says the wire-haired boy. “Fancy a nice shampoo?” says the Corporal. The boy who used to have wire hair says: “I don’t mind.”

  “Any particular kind of shampoo?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t mind.”

  “Ashes of Roses?”

  “If you like.”

  “Or would you rather have violets?”

  “Well, I think I’d rather have violets.”

  “Oh. And a friction? Or a nice massage?”

  “Never mind about that. Just a shampoo.”

  “Just a shampoo?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Well go and put your head under the bloody tap. Next!”

  The boy rises unsteadily, feels his head with an incredulous hand, blinks, looks at his palm as if he expects to find blood upon it. “Where d’you come from?” the Corporal asks him.

  “Widnes.”

  “Then,” says the Corporal, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Next.” He cuts a man’s hair in about forty-five seconds.

  “It ain’t ’umane,” says Barker. “You ought to give us gas wiv ’air-cuts like these.”

  “Next.”

  Hodge’s naked head emerges, still massive. Thurstan, shorn of a dense dark growth, looks blacker and paler and even more dangerous.

  “I’ve seen your face before,” says the Corporal to the glum man. “What’s your monicker?”

  “Alison.”

  “You been here before, ain’t that so?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And now you’re back, eh?”

  “Worse luck.”

  “You pore thing.”

  One by one we pass under the clippers. He shears us like sheep. One man lurks near the door, half in and half out of the shop, as if he contemplates flight. He is very young and slender, dark and sunburnt yet lacking the look of one who lives in the open air. Town is written on his forehead, so to speak; the streets are his destiny. You can’t help feeling that he got his tan in a city park: like inordinate skill at billiards, it seems to indicate a misspent youth. This is John Johnson of Birmingham; of Brummagem, gentlemen, the breeding-ground of the fly boys from time immemorial.

  He has talked too little and too much during his few hours in the Depot. He wants everything tough—in the silly sense of the term. When Bates, that garrulous and amiable brewer’s drayman from Leicester, said: “Well, Oi ’ope they’ll fill moi teeth,” it was John Johnson who snapped, in his aggressive burr: “Oi want ’em to take all moine out. Oi can’t be bothered with teeth.” He has a lank, saturnine face; eyebrows which collide in a black plume in the middle of his low forehead; little green eyes, and a sloping chin. He keeps his mouth compressed; sports a green coat, green flannel trousers, green suède shoes, green fancy sports-shirt with pompons; a tricky cigarette case which won’t open and a cunning lighter which won’t light—to say nothing of a novel watch on a doggy leather lanyard, which like Johnson, looks smart but doesn’t work. When simple Bates said he earned a good, steady three pound two-and-six a week, Johnson said: “Oi drew twelve.” He carries a box of fat cigarettes, and a paper packet of little black cigarlets, which, he maintains, are too strong for ordinary men…. The tobacconist warns you that you smoke those cigarlets at your own risk: if you pass out cold in a sweat of nicotine poisoning, don’t come and ask for your money back. Nothing is too powerful for
John Johnson of Brummagem.

  Barker, to whom fly boys, both of Brummagem and The Smoke, are an open book, smiled at this, and said: “’E chews nails and spits rust. ’E shaves wiv a blow-lamp.” Barker knows fly boys as Professor Huxley knows flies … what they eat and drink, where they breed, if and when they sleep, how many eyes they have, and where they go in the winter time. But Bates permitted himself to be impressed, and said: “Are they noice?”

  Bates, displaying his blond head, with anxiety in his big, bony Anglo-Saxon face; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, wide-cheeked and friendly, says: “Do Oi look funny? Do Oi?”

  Johnson replies, with patronage: “All right. You’re in the Army now, yer know,” and comes away from the door. He has lank black hair, heavily creamed, extraordinarily long, carefully arranged with a parting one inch to the left of the centre. I believe he would sooner part with his right arm than lose that gallant mane. But he swaggers forward, now, and says:

  “Cut it off, Corp-rerl. You can’t cut it too short for me. Oi can’t be bothered with it.” Tickety-tickety-tickety, chatter the clippers.

  “One o’ the Brylcreem Boys, eh?” says the Corporal, with a little smile of enjoyment: he looks forward to heads of hair like this; they give a zest to his life; he talks of them in the Mess. Tickety-tickety. … Johnson is scalped. A raiding party of Iroquois couldn’t have done a much completer job on him.

  “That looks noice,” says Bates.

  “Honest?” asks Johnson.

  “It makes yow look toof.”

  “Tough, eh?” says Johnson, and represses a smile of gratification. “Don’t talk soppy. You wait a minute and I’ll give you one o’ my cigarlets.”

  Bates has said exactly the right thing, for the first—and perhaps the last—time in his life. He beams, that simple soul; his face cracks into a smile like a split pumpkin. He has given pleasure: he is delighted beyond words. He lights one of the little black cigarlets. It isn’t anywhere near the stuff he rolls, for strength and irritant quality. Bates sucks in a cloud of smoke and blows it out.

  “They’re noice and moild,” he says.

  Johnson’s lips tighten again.

  Clipped to the bone we walk back and wait for the Medical Officer to send for us.

  *

  A dentist looks at our teeth. An old sergeant, who appears to be nailed to an invisible backboard, shuffles eye-testing cards. There are some unscrupulous recruits who, having bad eyes, try and learn the rows of letters by heart, and so slink into the Guards. They have several cards, which they change from test to test. A big Exeter man named Septimus Plimsoll, seventh son of a seventh son, but far from psychic, is cast out as astigmatic.

  “But my hair! They’ve cut my hair! They can’t turn me down now … they’ve cut my hair!” he says.

  “Cutcha hair, son?” says the old Sergeant, looking at him.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. You go straight to Corporal Philips at the barber’s shop—tell him Sergeant Robson sentcha—don’t forget to mention my name—and he’ll give you your hair back agen. Next!”

  We take off all our clothes except our trousers. Bodies emerge, pallid as maggots. You see, now, the herculean thews of Hodge; his biceps like grapefruit, his pectorals like breastplates; Thurstan, all tendon and gristle, with a back that writhes with muscle like a handful of worms; lanky Barker; the Widnes boy, still padded with puppy fat; the inconspicuous pale Dale; suety Shorrocks; Johnson, thin but fast-looking, with long flat muscles and not enough chest; Bullock, dark and knotty; Bates, starch-fed, starch-white, but built for power; Alison, the glum old soldier, with Death Rather Than Dishonour tattooed on his left arm and I Love Millie on his bosom … outdoor workers with brown forearms and necks which make their torsos look like cotton vests … sedentary men, run to skin and bone … miners, with great backs and arms … a timber-feller, with wrestler’s shoulders grafted on to the body of a clerk … a steel-worker, like a mummified Carnera … men who push things and have loins like Samson … men who pull things, and have deltoids like half-moons and hams for forearms….

  Barker says: “Hallo, Tarzan: if I ’ad me barrer ahtside I’d go an’ get yer a banana.”

  The man he calls Tarzan smiles a slow, white smile. He is a tall, strong Cornishman called Penrowe; Barker’s nickname will stick to him, for he has a hairy chest. Barker, looking at him for the first time, said: “Look—a Five.” A Five is a Five-to-Two, or Jew. Penrowe has something vaguely Semitic about him—a swarthy skin, white teeth, glittering eyes of a hard hot brown, and a big hooked nose. Yet he, and his father, and his father’s father, lived in the West of England all their lives, and no Penrowe ever was anything but a good English-man. A Penrowe was among the first of the Englishmen who looked through a warm dawn and saw the New World loom on the western horizon. Sir Francis—they called him Franky—Drake knew the Penrowes. A Penrowe went out with Grenville off Flores, in 1591. A Penrowe terrified his fellow villagers by smoking one of the first pipes of Elizabethan Cut Plug; and a Penrowe got a Spanish ball in his head when the Great Fleet Invincible, the hundred and twenty-nine ships of the Armada, sailed against the eighty ships of England. Eighty ships, and Admiral the Northwest Wind. “God blew and they were scattered.” But Penrowe helped, the black Cornishman; moody, calculating, proud, quarrelsome, hard man of the sea.

  The sea is in his blood, and has been since the beginning of history. The sea washes its sons inland sometimes: our Penrowe comes from some messy hole in the ground where they get china clay. He has two brothers in the Merchant Service, at present engaged in the stout old Cornish sport of harassing the modern equivalent of the Dons on the high seas.

  But what dark stranger left that complexion and that profile in England? Who left the name of Marazion in the West? The very first of all the sea-rovers, the Phœnicians; dark, Hebraic-looking gentlemen, out to do business, as usual. They called at Britain to barter trade goods for tin, before the Romans came, before the Three Wise Men cut their first teeth. The remote, forgotten grandmother of Penrowe saw the coloured sails of their great galleys, and saw them land—very dark, very suave, very well dressed, and smelling of perfume, with dress-lengths of exclusive materials and all kinds of household goods. They had come out of the Great Sea, over as rough a piece of water as anybody could wish to struggle against, right over the rim of the world, just to trade … the eternal, wandering Semites with their eyes that itched for new prospects. They were the first mariners. They came and went in Britain, always on friendly terms. The time came when Ancient Briton women brought forth dark, curly-headed boys and girls in the far West of this country. And then, no doubt, there slunk into the blood a restlessness and a yearning … a craving for the unknown seas.

  And here is Penrowe, English as Land’s End but dark as high Barbary, with his hairy torso and high square shoulders, holding up his trousers and waiting for the M.O. to listen to the strange strong blood pumping through his powerful heart….

  *

  Penrowe, swarthy Phœnician; Hodge, Bates, straight clear Saxon, fair as corn; Thurstan, black Gael. These are three rough, stinging, formidable elements in the Blend of Blood. What a devil of an island this is—this mixing-bowl of all that is most fierce and enduring in man, stirred by war in its beginnings and matured in its iron-bound cask of tradition in the rat-infested cellar of the centuries! Ancient Briton…. Ancient Roman—look at Allan of Cumberland, an English yeoman from the Pennine Chain, the Backbone of England—with the high-bridged nose and fine-drawn face of one of the Roman gentlemen who lived here, and laid the Great Wall, and Watling Street, and Uxbridge Road so long ago. The Romans were in Britain for four hundred and sixty-six years: they left blood, too! The red-headed monsters of Arthurian legend, the Saxons, came after them; and then the Norsemen cracked through. Johansen and Holm have been Yorkshiremen for centuries; yet there are no two between Heligoland and Hammerfest whom you could more easily visualise in a longboat under a ragged sail on a grey sea. And the Normans came, w
ith a dash of Baltic madness and a dash of Gallic finesse; and we hated their guts, but assimilated all they had. Angle, Jute, Pict, Scot—it all soaked in. And you see it here, blended into a type, yet distinguishable in its separate elements … fermenting into Thurstan, mellowing into Dale—blood of the stolid Shorrocks, blood of the light John Johnson—blood of the cold English, the mad English—rough as Usquebaugh, smooth as Mead—strong red liquor!

  *

  Most of us are stolid and reserved, shy of strangers and of the sound of our own voices.

  But there is a dark fire under the crust, and a hard current under the ice of the poker-faced Englishman. The expressionless Englishman, mouse-whiskered and talking at the ends of his teeth and greeting his best-beloved friend with a curt “Hallo,” demanding mutton chops and strong tea of the luxurious restaurateur of the Hermitage, yet drinking like a Russian, duelling like a Hungarian, gambling like a Chinaman, or swearing like a Croat if the occasion demanded it, was always a little mad and curiously colourful to the amazed peoples of the Continent when he went on tour.

  Heavy and immobile, or high-strung and variable blond; enigmatic black; mercurial red; or primary blond, red, and black ground into the prevalent common nondescript brown—in these men there is a strange wayward will. Dash of ferocious Britain, spot of aromatic Asia, jigger of crazy Celt, splash of gentle and murderous Saxon, tinge of iron Roman, shot of haughty Norman, drip of fierce Norse—the elements, even when they are blended to neutrality, give birth to something queerly individual. You can imagine the baffled astonishment of Napoleon, when Wellington, in Spain, imported some hounds and rode after local foxes in the blue coat of the Salisbury Hunt … grown men, tough soldiers, but serious gentlemen, mon vieux, dozens of them, all riding belly-to-earth after a species of vermin, blowing shrill notes out of a little brass trumpet! And these same gents, with the dead-faced shopkeepers who followed them and took it all for granted, were the rock against which the Irresistible broke itself.