by Unknown
And then the rest. Advanced all morning, patrols reporting enemy position and direction, then contact lost, much swanning around looking for them, at one point they appear to have melted into the sand, or were never there in the first place, then my headphones jammed with excited orders, they are spotted again at 7000 yards. Relieved to find I am still sane, functioning O.K., almost calm. Switch over to talk to the crew. We have a new gunner, Jennings. He is fresh from the Delta – his first time in action, which I hadn’t realised till the night before, a stocky lad from Aylesbury, barely into his twenties I imagine. Hadn’t had much time to get to know him, he seemed efficient enough, a bit silent I thought but we were all too busy in the usual flap of last-minute checks to do much about him. And now I realised there was something wrong – first I couldn’t get an answer out of him at all, then he didn’t make sense, went on muttering things I couldn’t catch. I said ‘Jennings, are you O.K.?’ – but the CO’s voice was coming over now on the other set and I had to switch off and the next fifteen minutes or so were chaos – orders and counter-orders, our B squadron in action against a bunch of German Mark IIIs, we were told to move up and give support, then had to wheel round to take on another lot they hadn’t spotted. I told Jennings to get the range and be ready to open fire, and all I could get from him was a whimpering noise, terrible, like a tormented animal. And then words – the same thing over and over again: ‘Please get me out of here. Please get me out of here. Please get me out of here.’ I tried talking to him calmly and steadily, not bawling him out, telling him to take his time, steady up, just do the things he’d been taught to do. But now I could see the enemy tanks, coming on fast, and a couple of shots slammed past us and seconds later my sergeant’s tank was hit and brewed up at once. We couldn’t carry on like this, a sitting duck, so I pulled back both remaining tanks to a hull-down position in a dip behind us and tried once again to persuade Jennings to get a grip on himself. But it was hopeless. All the time he was moaning and whimpering – out of his mind clearly poor little blighter.
God knows why we weren’t hit. The Mark Ills kept on firing. There was nothing I could do – short of throwing Jennings out of the tank and taking over the gun myself. But then the commander was saying there was another of them coming up and we were to pull back for the time being until he could bring up support from our friends to the east. We withdrew out of range and the Germans chased for a bit and then held back and I reported that my gunner was a casualty and asked for the MO, the CO saying angrily ‘What the hell’s up with you – you weren’t hit?’
I got Jennings out of the tank. The rest of the crew hung about awkwardly, not wanting to talk about it, lighting cigarettes. Jennings sat slumped with his head in his hands – he’d been sick and his battle-dress was flecked with yellow vomit. I tried talking to him, told him not to worry, he’d be all right presently, things like that, but I don’t think he took anything in. He looked up at me once, and his eyes were like a child’s, but a child that’s seen some nameless horror, the pupils swollen, black pits in a white face. So I stopped trying and we hung around there fidgeting and presently the MO’s truck came bustling up and the doctor jumped down and took one look at Jennings and said ‘O.K., old chap, come on then.’ And as soon as he’d taken Jennings off the rest of the crew began joking, exaggerated, feverish, like I’ve seen men do after a near miss, and I felt myself as though I’d shaken something off, something unlucky, contaminating – I didn’t want to think about him: his face, his voice.
Our squadron had lost three tanks that day. The crew had baled out of one and the gunner transferred to mine. The next day was unmitigated hell – to and fro actions from dawn till late in the afternoon. By the end of it I was functioning like an automaton, beyond feeling or caring, but then when we leaguered we were told the scale of enemy losses and that we’d pushed them right back from their positions and exhilaration took over and we sat around congratulating ourselves in a sudden tide of confidence and bonhomie. No one mentioned Jennings again except the CO who said ‘Chap of yours cracked up, I gather – bad show,’ in an embarrassed sort of way. And I remembered that men were shot for cowardice on the Somme. Now it was just a bad show, which seemed like progress of a kind.
I have put this down – Jennings, my own duel between mind and matter – because one day I am going to want to think about it. This is as it was, raw and untreated. At some point I shall want to make sense of it – if there is sense to be made. C. asked me once – the first time I met her – what it was like out here. I found it hard to explain. Well, at one point it was like this. So this is for her too, perhaps. Maybe one day she will help me make sense of it. She intends to write history books, after all, so it will be within her line of business.
That was last week. The story continues; I am still in it. Stagnation again, sitting around, waiting for supplies and reinforcements – rumours that there will be a big push at any moment. Time to think again – a kind of thinking that is on two different planes, one taken up with here and now, with the tank, the men, the equipment, the CO, with what this man has said and that one has done, with the way a brother officer eats with his mouth open (and how in the middle of all this one can be irritated by someone’s table manners God only knows). And the other – the other level of thought – so far removed that it is as though one were two people; I think of how once I was brash enough to believe I could dictate to life instead of which it has turned on me with its fangs bared. I think of all the things I haven’t done and all the things I intend to do still. I think of C., who features in most of these. I read a tattered copy of DOMBEY AND SON hunched in a bivouac in the shade of the tank, crawling with flies, and am lost, transported, for hours on end, beyond all this, anaesthetised – ah, the miracle of words, of narrative. I make idle, childish lists, to amuse myself: the Greek gods, English wild flowers, American presidents, French novelists.
P.M. – same day. My tank has an oil-seal gone. I’m told I can take it back and get a replacement from Field Workshop. A welcome break.
Here the diary ends. Below the last entry Jennifer Southern has written, in now faded ink, ‘My brother was killed in an enemy air attack while undertaking this task.’
17
And so, eventually, we contemplate this apart, years apart. We are no longer in the same story, and when I read what you wrote I think of all that you do not know. You are left behind, in another place and another time, and I am someone else, not the C. of whom you thought, the C. you remembered, but an unimaginable Claudia from whom you would recoil, perhaps. A stranger, inhabiting a world you would not recognise. I find this hard to bear.
I am twice your age. You are young; I am old. You are in some ways unreachable, shut away beyond a glass screen of time; you know nothing of forty years of history and forty years of my life; you seem innocent, like a person in another century. But you are also, now, a part of me, as immediate and as close as my own other selves, all the Claudias of whom I am composed; I talk to you almost as I would talk to myself.
Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no. You are not absent so long as you are in my head. That, of course, is not what you meant; you were thinking of the extinction of the flesh. But it is true; I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.
You asked me to make sense of it. I can’t. Your voice is louder now than the narrative I know – or think that I know. I know what happened next; I know that Rommel was pushed out of Africa and that we won the war. I know all that has ensued. This dispassionate sequence explains – or purports to explain – why the war happened and how it evolved and what its effects have been. Your experience – raw and untreated – does not seem to contribute to any of that. It is on a different plane. I cannot analyse and dissect it, draw conclusions, construct arguments. You tell me about gazelles and dead men, guns and stars, a boy who is afraid; it is all clearer to me than any chronicle of events but I cannot make sense of it, perhaps because there is none to be made. It might be easier if I
believed in God, but I don’t. All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appals and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world’s. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
It is late afternoon. Claudia lies with her eyes closed; she breathes loudly, an irregular rasping that makes the bed from which it comes the focal point of the room, though there is no one but Claudia to be aware of this. But she can feel it, drifting in and out of some pounding sea that is full of the din of her own existence. She comes to the surface, opens her eyes, and sees that it is raining. The sky has darkened, and the room with it; the window is struck as though by tiny pellets and water slides down it in bands so that all beyond is distorted – the branches of a tree and through them rooftops and more distant trees. And then the rain stops. Gradually, the room is filled with light; the bare criss-crossing branches of the tree are hung with drops and as the sun comes out it catches the drops and they flash with colour – blue, yellow, green, pink. The branches are black against a golden orange sky, black and brilliant. Claudia gazes at this; it is as though the spectacle has been laid on for her pleasure and she is filled with elation, a surge of joy, of well-being, of wonder.
The sun sinks and the glittering tree is extinguished. The room darkens again. Presently it is quite dim; the window is violet now, showing the black tracery of branches and a line of houses packed with squares of light. And within the room a change has taken place. It is empty. Void. It has the stillness of a place in which there are only inanimate objects: metal, wood, glass, plastic. No life. Something creaks; the involuntary sound of expansion or contraction. Beyond the window a car starts up, an aeroplane passes overhead. The world moves on. And beside the bed the radio gives the time signal and a voice starts to read the six o’clock news.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Moon Tiger
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
