Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Clement’s training, as well as his analytical disposition, enabled him to see how reluctant he was to face his own lack of involvement in Joseph’s affairs. He had been far – often physically far – from the crucial events in Joseph’s career.

  He took from the drawer of his desk an envelope containing a letter and photograph Joseph had sent him in the early eighties. He was sorry to think that they had arrived in response to his duplicated form. When he was embarking on the research required for Adaptability, Clement had sent out the forms to large numbers of people, inviting memories of the beginning of the war in 1939. He had been impersonal; his brother’s response had been personal and immediate.

  Joseph had taken the printed question literally. His reply, in his hasty handwriting, concerned only the declaration of war, when he had just turned thirteen. On that day, 3rd September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, his sister Ellen was almost nine; Clement was little more than a toddler. Their parents, Ernest and Madge Winter, were in their late thirties or early forties.

  Madge Winter had taken the photograph on the family box Brownie. It was in black-and-white, with a white margin. Time had made it crisp and slightly concave. In Joseph’s writing on the back of the snap was the legend, ‘Taken an hour after war was declared.’

  The family was standing by the old square Morris. Ellen, in a check print dress, was holding baby Clement and grinning. Joseph, in holiday shorts, was wearing a large cap and grinning. Father looked sternly out of the car window, elbow and forearm disclosing a rolled-up shirt sleeve. His expression suggested he was mulling over his favourite phrase, ‘That’s what you get …’ Behind the car, part of a ruin could be seen. They had been holidaying on the north coast of Cornwall, by Tintagel, King Arthur’s castle.

  ‘I respond to your form at once, because the more obstinately 1939 gets forgotten by the population at large, the more obstinately I remember it,’ Joseph had written in his reply to the form.

  Even there, Clement reflected, Joseph revealed his character. Good-natured, rather self-mocking, yet in some way challenging, going against the grain.

  ‘There was a car park on the cliff top, large and open, and almost deserted except for our Morris and someone’s caravan. The caravan was drawn up so that it enjoyed views of the Atlantic. Rather a battered old thing, if I remember rightly (does one ever remember rightly?). Father pulled up next to it. We got out and Ellen and I ran to look at the cliffs, followed by cautionary screams from mother.

  ‘A fat man climbed out of the caravan, strolling across to engage my father in conversation. I went over to them after a while, in order to observe the fat man at close quarters. He smoked a pipe and wore a panama hat. Also old grey flannel trousers held up by braces, unless I invent that bit. He seemed a jolly man, although he and father were talking seriously about the international situation. It was a Sunday, and father showed him something in the newspaper.

  ‘The fat man said that his wife had turned him out of the caravan while she prepared lunch – speaking laughingly, he added that there wasn’t room for two large people inside when she was busy. He waved to her, I remember, and the woman looked out and waved back, with an extra wave for me.

  ‘She was cooking sausages and mash, and had their radio tuned to the Home Service. The radio said there was to be a special announcement. “This’ll be it,” said the fat man to father, calling to his wife to turn up the volume.

  ‘Mother and Ellen were walking off towards the ruins with the baby – with you. I stood beside father, staring out to sea. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day and the sausages smelt good.

  ‘I felt anxious. Perhaps I prayed. I was pretty religious at that age. Kids used to be. It seemed unlikely to me that Hitler would halt the invasion of Poland just because we asked him to, powerful though we believed Britain to be at that time. In a minute, up came the voice of Neville Chamberlain, to inform us that a state of war existed with Nazi Germany. The solemnity of his tone as much as the words impressed me deeply. I looked up at father. He just continued to stare out over the Atlantic. The fat man swore – politely, because I was there. His wife went on frying sausages.

  ‘She called her husband in for lunch after a while. I could hardly believe it. I imagined everything stopped when war began. We shook hands with the fat man. I was proud because he shook hands with me very readily and told me to do well. He dipped into a pocket and gave me sixpence before disappearing. While this comforted me father was annoyed with me for accepting it. He thought the man was common. No one had sausages for Sunday dinner, even on holiday, he said.

  ‘He headed for the ruins to break the news to mother. I followed. The sunlight and the sea remained completely unaltered.’

  Clement folded the letter along its old crease-lines, and reinserted it in its envelope. That had been one enormous difference between him and Joseph: the war. It had for ever separated them.

  His gaze alighted on the small package from his sister. As he took up his paperknife to open it, Sheila entered the room carrying the wine bottle, and sat down on his sofa.

  ‘How was Maureen?’

  ‘Oh, she’s still working to abolish marriage, the legalized way in which men suppress women.’ They both laughed. Since her separation from a drunken husband some years ago, Sheila’s friend Maureen Bowler had become a noted feminist.

  ‘You’ll take life easy for a few days, Sheila, darling? You need a rest after all the Green Mouth excitements in the States.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll fly down and have a few days in Marbella next month, if it’s not too hot. I’m not doing anything too serious at present. But I phoned Mrs F.’

  Mrs F. was Mrs Flowerbury, Sheila’s faithful secretary.

  ‘There’s a pile of stuff awaiting attention in my study. Mrs F. swore she was prepared to come even on Sunday.’

  ‘Silly woman!’

  ‘Well, her children are away and her husband’s got this contract in the Gulf. I think she’s glad to come here to fill in the time. As you know, some people have peculiar attitudes to time …’

  They chatted and drank wine for a while, until Sheila told Clement to open up Ellen’s package.

  From the wrapping he lifted seven venerable envelopes. They were accompanied by a letter from Ellen, penned in her small grey house in Salisbury on small grey notepaper.

  Holding up the paper, Clement read aloud. ‘“Knowing that you are working on Brother Joseph’s papers, I am sending you seven letters which he wrote to me from India. I was only fourteen at the time, he was my idolized elder brother. The letters have become fragile with time, like the rest of us. Treasure them well. I definitely” – underlined – “want them back before long.” And she ends with love to you and me, and a P.S. saying the dog is in good health.’

  ‘Nothing about Jean?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘She doesn’t mention Jean.’ Jean was the only child of the marriage between Ellen and Alwyn Pickering. She had become divorced three years earlier and was the source of excited anxiety to her mother, in which capacity she vied with Jessie, the dog.

  Of the seven envelopes Ellen had sent, two were plain. Five were official, with the words ACTIVE SERVICE printed boldly on them. All seven bore four anna stamps and Indian postmarks, dating from the time when Joseph was a soldier on his way to fight the Japanese in Burma. His age was eighteen, although he had passed himself off for a year older than he was.

  ‘They’re antiques!’ Sheila exclaimed.

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  Switching on his desk light, Clement began to read the letters in order, passing each to Sheila as he finished it.

  Even as he read, he thought, ‘I can’t simply use Joseph as a witness in my book. He’ll have to have a book to himself and I’ll have to write it. I can start with his war service.’

  The frayed letters, now over forty-two years old, were written in various inks and pencil on various pieces of paper. All testified
to a close link between brother and sister, excluding little Clem.

  Dimapur, India

  3rd Oct. 1944

  Dearest Ellen,

  Just a note to tell you that your loving brother is on the fringes of something triffic. Or trifficesque. An adventure. Like the ones we used to have together, imagining we were in the wilds. Now I am really going to be in the wilds. The real wilds. The wildly wild wilds.

  In fact if you could see me at present you’d guess something wild was in the wind. I’m sitting writing to you in a broken down old tent, relic of the Great War or the Crimea, in a terrible transit camp in a place called Dimapur, on the threatened eastern fringes of India. Look it up in your school atlas. The flies are dreadful, the whole camp is like an entrance to hell. Except hell is not as hot as Dimapur.

  We arrived here late last night, off the train from a place further north called Tinsoukia, four days after leaving Calcutta. I had been sixteen days on the move, shunted here and there by an inefficient administration, sleeping in trains (sometimes on the wooden luggage rack) and even on hard concrete station platforms among the natives. There were six of us arriving at 2 a.m. this morning, exhausted, to a not very friendly reception. Orderly corporals are a bad lot at the best of times. This one said he could do nothing till eight this morning. We had to sleep on the tables in the mess. So we did, for about three hours. (The mess is a concrete floor and a thatched roof, by the way.)

  At six, as day was dawning, we were woken by the cooks. Cooks are worse than corporals. We had to get up then while they prepared breakfast. Later on, we checked into this most derelict of tents and here we are. I’ve had a snooze. Now this note. We haven’t the faintest idea what will happen next – except that we are on our way to Burma to fight the Japs. I shall not name that country again. It’s against regs. Take it from me that it is less a country, more a state of mind. The Id of the modern world.

  The food would make you sick, but we’re used to it.

  There was a notice on Dimapur station which said NEW YORK 11,000 MILES, TOKYO 5,400 miles, LONDON 8,300 MILES. That’s how far we are from civilization.

  Our detail is under command of a cheerful sergeant called Ted Sutton. He’s from Yorkshire, a brickie foreman in civvy life, and one of the best men I ever met. Nothing upsets him, nor can you put anything over on him. Privately, I worship Ted and his cheerfulness. I’d follow him anywhere. No doubt I shall have to.

  I’m very cheerful. The awfulness is exciting. But I’m also a bit fed up (or Chokka, as we say here). I wanted to get to China. You know how I’ve always been mad about things Chinese. It’s quite close. Chunking’s the place to be – Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. Constantly bombed by the Japs, full of filth and mud, so I heard from a chap in a bar in Calcutta who’d been there. That’s where I long to be. (Okay, I’m daft, but it can’t be worse than – where we’re going …) I volunteered twice, knowing the Chinese are bound to be short of radio ops. But no joy. Funny, the Chinese aren’t trusted. Yet they’re our allies. (I saw some beautiful Chinese girls in Calcutta but never mind that!)

  Oh, we’re supposed to parade or something. I’ll post this here or God knows when there will be another chance. Here we go! Love to all.

  Milestone 81

  8th Oct. 1944

  Dear Ellen,

  Some address, eh? Some place!

  Plenty of through traffic, as you might expect. We’re literally perched on the edge of a road. And what a road! I wish you could see it. It would satisfy your craving for ‘mad things’!

  I wrote to you last from another world. Something has happened since then; that old world has gone. This is a different world – a sub-world of men only and grave intentions and festering discontent and rationed food and that particular brand of ‘organised chaos’ in which the British Army specializes. Well, before I get too philosophical, I’d better tell you how we got to Milestone 81.

  Was there ever such a day – or such a road! We started out from Dimapur (if you got my letter from there, which I doubt, because the camp was so appalling they probably burn all letters), where this road begins. It runs on to Kohima and Imphal – famous, legendary names, local equivalents of Valhalla. We travelled in a three-tonner, eight of us. All I could do was stand looking out of the back and marvel, along with a bloke from Warrington called Fergy. Some of the others – amazing! – weren’t interested, and didn’t look. I bet you would have done.

  Like the Burma Road, this road has been built by coolie labour – is still being built, because owing to landslides and rockfalls it is never completed. It’s been hacked out of jungle-clad mountainside. I’ve never seen such mountains. Jagged, steep – someone’s going to have to fight over mountains very similar. Many trucks have driven over the edge. It’s easy – just a moment’s lack of concentration … You can see the skeletons of crashed trucks down in the valleys, far below. Sometimes we passed strings of men, almost naked, with buckets balanced on poles over their shoulders – down far below, or far above the road. And here and there, too, working by the little threads of river in the valleys, peasants – bent in typical peasant posture, working. Even war brings them no relief from work.

  It’s a one-lane road, with lay-bys every so often to let convoys pass each other. Each milestone marked – each an achievement.

  At Milestone 81, I got decanted, and here I am. A real soldier now. In a WAR ZONE.

  Royal Signals is strong here, along with other units of the famous British 2 Division. We are now part of the multi-racial Fourteenth Army, more familiarly known as the Forgotten Army. The Forgotten Army. The name clings like mustard gas. Everyone here grumbles like fury. I have to hide the fact that I’m enjoying it all.

  Later. Sorry, interruption. I was talking about the people I now must work with. They have every right to grumble. They are more or less resting after the battle of Kohima. ‘One of the worst British battles of the war.’ Kohima’s only a few miles ahead of us. It’s now safe in British hands, what’s left of it, and all the Japs are dead. Very few prisoners taken.

  The chaps complain because they think they should be sent home, or at least be given leave in India. Instead they face another campaign. And they have only me to tell it to. I think they hate me – inexperienced, pale-skinned, and having missed the hard bits … Most of them have already served three years out here. No home leave. Offered no prospect at all of getting home as long as the war with Japan lasts … which could be a century.

  Morale’s low. You get the idea. They romanticize themselves as the Forgotten Army. Very bitter. I was still in the Fourth Form when they came out here.

  ‘What bloody good are you going to be, Winter?’ That’s what one bloke asked me yesterday. I can’t say how many times I’ve been told to ‘get some service in’ – which I am doing. Trouble is, we all go about in the bare buff, as they say, and everyone here is baked dark brown. I’m conspicuous because as yet I’m still lily white from England. Another week or two of this sun should cure that!

  The only person who has been friendly so far is a Birmingham man, Bert Lyons, whose father owns a bicycle shop. He and I had quite a good talk by the light of a small lantern last night. Bert seems to have the same kind of sense of wonder as you and I. He’s also a radio op.

  The Japs are still marching on India. Though we turned them back at Kohima, they are still regarded as almost unbeatable. Bert says it’s because they can live on so little – a handful of rice a day. Whereas we are decadent. He says the British Empire is finished. The Japs took over Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma itself so easily. It’s incredible. Are they going to rule half the world? Slim, the commander of the Forgotten Army, calls them ‘the most formidable fighting insects on Earth’. I guess dealing with Japs is a bit like that – fighting giaut invading insects from another world. The tales of their cruelty are legendary.

  Before reaching Milestone 81, we reinforcements had a chance to talk to some troops who had been in Orde Wingate’s Chindits – hero
es all – and they were in no doubt about just how tough all encounters with the Jap were likely to be. (If they got wounded in the jungle, these Chindits were given a shot of morphine and left with a revolver – to shoot themselves rather than fall into Jap hands.)

  Anyhow, I’m now a member of ‘S’ Signal Section – their sole new recruit. The other reinforcements are spread throughout the division. I’ve not been through ‘S’ section’s harrowing experiences, about which they constantly tell me. Am I welcome? Certainly not. I’m a representative of ‘The Blight’ (Blighty), the country thousands of miles distant which has ignored them and their exploits for so long. Thank God for Bert Lyons. ‘Don’t worry, we’re all puggle,’ he says – puggle being our word for le cafard…

  Such mighty things happening. Conversation so trivial – apart from those terrible experiences – some of which I now know by heart. God, what these poor so-and-sos have been through. And more to come.

  I’m off on duty now. Love to all.

  Milestone 81. Assam

  13th Oct. 1944

  Dear Ellen,

  Hope to hear from you some day. Letter from Mum, which I’ll answer soon. Perhaps you could show her this one to be going on with. The chaps here have mainly given up writing home.

  We’re still waiting to move forward. I’ll then have to be careful what I say. Of course our letters are censored by one of the officers for safety’s sake.

  I’ll tell you what our billet is like. Very picturesque, I assure you.

  I’m lodged in a tent consisting of a spread of brown tarpaulin over a patch of steep hillside. Lodged is the word. When I got here from Dimapur, five men already occupied the tent. If you can call it a tent. They made room for me, and so I found lodgement on the outer side, just about.

  My bed or charpoy is home-made. I can’t say I’m proud of my handiwork, but it’ll do. A bit Robinson Crusoe! It consists of a ground sheet stretched across four bamboo poles which are lashed together with old signal wire. This masterpiece is balanced on empty jerry cans, stacked so that the bed is roughly level on the uneven ground. My mosquito net is secured to ropes overhead, so low that the net is uncomfortably close to my face. Never mind – I can see the stars at night.