Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  As suddenly the hysteria coiled down. But she spoke with bitterness: ‘No, that’s the worst of it.’ She knew she had failed to express the fear knotted deep in her.

  With a thick finger, grained with coal dust, he brushed a stray snowflake off the tip of her nose.

  ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘It felt like a biff.’

  ‘Just a bundle of nerves you are!’ he said in a loving, gratified way. Then he coughed.

  ‘That cough!’ she cried, the irritation returning. ‘Why don’t you wear a hat and a muffler?’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ he growled, squirming in her irritation. ‘Didn’t you hear it’s bronchitis weather?’

  After they parted in their street she felt – for she was not one to stay ill-tempered and sulky for long – that she was lucky really. He was in a reserved occupation, and he was a good miner, with a place of his own down under. They were going to be married in three months’ time. He would be by her side for her to look after him.

  THEY CAME

  Alun Lewis

  The evening was slowly curdling the sky as the soldier trudged the last mile along the lane leading from the station to the Hampshire village where he was billeted. The hedgerows drew together in the dusk and the distance, bending their waving heads to each other as the fawn bird and the blackbird sang among the green hollies. The village lay merged in the soft seaward slope of the South Downs; the soldier shifted his rifle from left to right shoulder and rubbed his matted eyelashes with his knuckles. He was a young chap but, hampered by his heavy greatcoat and equipment, he dragged his legs like an old clerk going home late. He cleared his throat of all that the train journey, cigarettes and chocolate and tea and waiting had secreted in his mouth. He spat the thick saliva out. It hung on a twig.

  Someone was following him. When he heard the footsteps first he had hurried, annoyed by the interfering sound. But his kit was too clumsy to hurry in and he was too tired. So he dawdled, giving his pursuer a chance to pass him. But the footsteps stayed behind, keeping a mocking interval. He couldn’t stop himself listening to them, but he refused to look back. He became slowly angry with himself for letting them occupy his mind and possess his attention. After a while they seemed to come trotting out of the past in him, out of the Welsh mining village, the colliers gambling in the quarry, the county school where he learned of sex and of knowledge, and college where he had swotted and slacked in poverty, and boozed, and quarrelled in love. They were the footsteps of the heavy-jawed deacon of Zion, with his white grocer’s apron, and his hairy nostrils sniffing out corruption.

  But that was silly, he knew. Too tired to control his mind, that’s what it was. These footsteps were natural and English, the postman’s perhaps… but still they followed him, and the dark gods wrestling in him in the mining valley pricked their goaty ears at the sound of the pimping feet.

  He turned the corner into the village and went down the narrow street past the post office and the smithy, turned the corner under the AA sign and crossed the cobbled yard of the hotel where the officers’ and business men’s cars were parked. A shaggy old dog came frisking out of its straw-filled barrel in the corner, jumping and barking. He spoke to it and at once it grovelled on its belly. He always played with the dog in the mornings, between parades. The unit did its squad drill in the hotel yard, kitchen maids watching flirtatiously through the windows, giggling, and the lavatory smelling either of disinfectant or urine.

  He pushed open the little door in the big sliding doors of the garage which had been converted into a barrack room for the duration. The electric bulbs high in the cold roof dangled a weak light from the end of the twisted, wavering flex. Grey blankets folded over biscuits or straw palliasses down both sides of the room. Equipment hanging from nails on the whitewashed wall – in one corner a crucifix, over the thin, chaste, taciturn Irish boy’s bed. He was the only one in the room, sitting on his bed in the cold dark corner writing in his diary. He looked up and smiled politely, self-effacingly, said ‘Hallo. Had a good leave?’ and bent his narrow head again to read what he had written.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said the soldier, ‘except for raids. The first night I was home he raided us for three hours, the sod,’ he said, unbuckling his bayonet belt and slipping his whole kit off his shoulders.

  Last time he returned from leave, four months back, he had sat down on his bed and written to his wife. They had married on the first day of that leave and slept together for six nights. This time he didn’t ferret in his kitbag for notepaper and pencil. He went straight out.

  The hotel managament had set a room aside for the soldiers to booze in. It was a good-class hotel, richly and vulgarly furnished with plush mirrors and dwarf palms in green boxes. The auctioneers and lawyers and city men, the fishermen and golfers and bank managers, most of whom had weekend cottages or villas of retirement in commanding positions at the local beauty spots, spent the evening in the saloon bar and lounge, soaking and joking. So the soldiers were given a bare little bar parlour at the back, with a fire and a dartboard and two sawdust spittoons. The soldiers were glad of it. It was their own. They invited some of their pals from the village to play darts with them – the cobbler, the old dad who lived by himself in the church cottage and never shaved or washed, the poacher who brought them a plucked pheasant under his old coat sometimes – all the ones the soldiers liked popped in for an evening. A few girls too, before the dance in the church hall, on Tuesdays.

  Fred Garstang from Portsmouth and Ben Bryant, from Coventry, the two oldest soldiers in the unit – regulars who had never earned a stripe – were playing darts, two empty pint glasses on the mantelpiece by the chalk and duster.

  ‘Owdee, Taffy?’ they said in unison. ‘’Ave a good leave, lad?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he said automatically, ‘except for raids. The sod raided us for three hours the first night I was home.’

  ‘Damn. Just the wrong side of it,’ said Fred examining the quivering dart. ‘I deserve to lose this bloody game, Ben. I ’xpect you’re same as me, Taff; glad to get back to a bit of peace and quiet and a good sleep. My seven days in Pompey’s the worst I’ve ever spent in India, China, the Rhineland, Gallygurchy, or anywhere. But we’re nice and cosy here, thank God. They can keep their leave. I don’t want seven nights in an Anderson. I’d rather stay here, I would.’

  Old Fred never stopped talking once he started. The soldier tapped the counter with a shilling and leaned over to see whether the barmaid was on the other side of the partition. He saw her silky legs and the flutter of her skirt. He hit the counter harder, then, while he waited, wondered at his impatience. His body wasn’t thirsty; it was too damned tired to bother, too worn out. It was something else in him that wanted to get drunk, dead, dead drunk.

  The barmaid came along, smiling. She was natural with the soldiers. She smiled when she saw who it was and held her pretty clenched fist to him across the counter. He should have taken it and forced it gently open, of course. Instead, he just put his flat palm underneath it. She looked at him with a hurt-fawn reproach in her sailing eyes, and opening her hand let a toffee fall into his.

  ‘One from the wood, Madge,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll have to charge you for that,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he replied. ‘You always pay in this life.’

  ‘Why don’t you take the girl, Taffy?’ said old Fred as he came and sat by them, their darts over. ‘If I was your age…’

  He had been in the army since he was fifteen. Now he was past soldiering, wandering in the head sometimes, doing odd jobs; in peace-time he kept the lawns trimmed at the depot, now he was tin-man in the cooking shed, cleaning with Vim the pots and pans Ben Bryant used for cooking. ‘Vermicelli tastes all right,’ he said. ‘Better than anything you can pick up in the streets. Yellow or black or white, German or Irish. I’ve never had a Russian though, never. It’s not bad when you’re young, like a new crane when the jib runs out nice and smooth; it’s better than sitting in the trenches like an
old monkey, scratching yourself and not knowing whose leg it is or whose arm it is, looking in his pockets to see if there’s anything worth taking, and not knowing who’ll win the race, the bullet with your number on it or the leaky rod you’re nursing. But I like it here. It’s nice and peaceful up here, in the cookhouse all day. We ought to try some vermicelli, Ben, one day.’

  ‘Don’t you get impatient now, Freddy,’ Ben said with the calmness of a father of many children. ‘We’ll stuff your pillow full of it next Christmas and put a sprig of it on your chest. Don’t you worry, boy.’

  But old Fred went on talking like an old prophet in a volcanic world, about and about. ‘There’s no knowing when you’ve got to fight for your king and country,’ he said. ‘No matter who you are, Russian, or Frenchy, or Jerry – and the Yankee, too. He’ll be in it, boy. I’ve seen him die. It’s only natural, to my way of thinking. I wore a pair of gloves the Queen knitted herself, she did, last time. The Unknown Soldier I was, last time.’

  None of us are ourselves now, the Welsh boy sat thinking: neither what we were, nor what we will be. He drained his pint glass and crossed to the counter to Madge smiling there.

  ‘You never looked round all the way up from the station,’ she said, pulling her shoulder straps up under her grey jumper and exposing the white, rich flesh above her breasts.

  ‘So it was you followed me, eh?’ he said, sardonic.

  ‘Why didn’t you turn round?’ she asked. ‘Did you know it was me? You knew someone was behind you, I could tell.’

  ‘I didn’t turn round beccause I didn’t want to look back,’ he said.

  ‘And you mean to say you don’t know how the Hebrew puts out the eyes of a goldfinch?’ Freddy’s aggrieved voice swirled up.

  ‘Afraid of being homesick for your wife, eh?’ she jeered.

  He covered his eyes with his hand, tired out, and looked up at the vague, sensual woman playing upon his instincts there like a gipsy on a zither.

  ‘Not homesick,’ he said dryly. ‘Death-sick.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Well, she was killed in a raid,’ he shouted.

  He went up to the orderly room then, having forgotten to hand in his leave pass to the orderly corporal. The room was in the corner of an old warehouse. The building also housed the kitchen and the quartermaster’s stores. About the high bare rooms with their rotten dry floors and musty walls, rats galloped in the darkness; in the morning their dirt lay fresh on the mildewed sacks and the unit’s cat stretched her white paws and got a weak and lazy thrill from sniffing it.

  The orderly corporal was dozing over a Western novelette from Woolworths, hunched up in a pool of lamp and fire light.

  ‘Hallo, Taffy,’ he said. ‘Had a good leave?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he replied. ‘Except for raids. Am I on duty tomorrow?’

  ‘You’re on duty tonight, I’m afraid,’ the orderly corporal replied with the unctuous mock regret of one who enjoys detailing tired or refractory men for unexpected jobs. ‘Dave Finley had a cold on his chest this morning and didn’t get out of bed. So they fetched him out on a stretcher and the MO gave him pneumonia pills before Dave could stop him; so he’s got pneumonia now. You’ll go on guard at midnight and at six hours.’

  ‘OK.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘Better get some sleep,’ said the orderly corporal, yawning noisily. ‘Hell! I‘m browned off with this war.’

  The soldier yawned too, and laughed, and returned to the barrack room to lie down for a couple of hours. He rolled his blankets down on the floor and stretched out.

  Old Ben and Fred were back also, Ben fixing bachelor buttons into his best trousers and singing ‘Nelly Dean’ comfortably to himself, Fred muttering by the stove. ‘There’s some mean and hungry lads in this room,’ he said; ‘very hungry and mean. It’s an awful nature, that. They’ll borrow off you all right, but they won’t lend you the dirt off their soles. And always swanking in the mirror, and talking all the time, saying, Yes, they can do the job easy. The fools! Whip ’em! Whip ’em !’

  Ben was toasting bread on the point of his bayonet and boiling water in his billy. A tin of pilchards left over from tea was for them all.

  ‘Come on, Taffy. Have a bellyful while you can,’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said the soldier, restless on his blankets, ‘I don’t feel like food tonight, Ben, thanks.’

  ‘Ain’t you never bin hungry?’ Fred shouted, angrily. ‘You don’t know what food is, you youngsters don’t.’

  ‘I’ve been without food,’ the soldier said, thinking of the ’26 strike; and going without peas in the chip shop by the town clock in college, when a new book must be bought. But not now, when everything is free but freedom, and the doctor and dentist and cobbler send you no bills. What survives I don’t know, the soldier thought, rubbing his hot eyelids and shifting his legs on the spread-out blankets. What is it that survives?

  He got up and buckled his battle order together, adjusting his straps, slipping the pull-through through his Enfield, poIishing boots and buttons, tightening his helmet strap under his chin.

  ‘There was a religious woman used to come to our house,’ Ben was saying, ‘and one day she said to me, sociable like, “You’re a Guinness drinker, aren’t you, Mr Bryant?” and I says, “I am, mum.” And she says, “Well, can you tell me what’s wrong with the ostrich on them advertisements?”’

  The soldier went out to relieve the guard.

  They were only twenty soldiers altogether sent up here to guard a transmitting station hidden in the slopes of the Downs. A cushy job, safe as houses. There was a little stone shed, once used for sheep that were sick after lambing, in a chalky hollow on the forehead of the hill, which the guard used for sleeping in when they were off duty. Two hours on, four hours off, rain and sun and snow and stars. As the soldier toiled up the lane and across the high meadow to the shed, the milky moon came out from grey clouds and touched with lucid fingers the chopped branches piled in precise lengths at the foot of the wood. The pine trees moved softly as the moon touched their grey-green leaves, giving them a veil that looked like rainy snow, grey-white.

  The lane running up through the wood shortened alarmingly in perspective. A star fell. So surprising, so swift and delicate, the sudden short curved fall and extinction of the tiny lit world. But over it the Plough still stayed, like something imperishable in man. He leant against the gate, dizzy and light-headed, waves of soft heat running into his head. He swallowed something warm and thick; spitting it out, he saw it was blood. He stayed there a little, resting, and then went on.

  He went along the sandy lane, noticing as he always did the antique sculptures of sea and ice and rain, the smooth twisted flints, yellow and blue and mottled, lying in the white sand down which the water of winter scooped its way.

  At the top of the lane was the lambing shed – guard room. He slipped quickly through the door to prevent any light escaping. There was gunfire and the sound of bombs along the coast.

  The sergeant of the guard was lying on a palliasse in front of the stove. He got up slowly, groaning lazily.

  ‘So you’re back again, Taffy, are you?’ he said, a grudge in his too hearty welcome. ‘Relieving Dave Finley, eh? He’s swinging the lead, Dave is. I’ve a good mind to report him to the OC It’s tough on you, going on night guard after a day’s journey. Have a good leave, Taff?’

  ‘Not bad,’ the soldier replied, ‘except for the raids. Raided us the first night I was home.’

  ‘Everybody’s getting it,’ the sergeant replied, yawning. ‘They dropped two dozen incendiaries in our fields in Lincs last week.’

  He was drinking a billy can of cocoa which he had boiled on the fire, but he didn’t offer any. He had weak blue eyes, a receding chin, fresh features of characterless good looks, wavy hair combed and brilliantined. He was always on edge against Taffy, distrusting him, perhaps envying him. He lived in terror of losing a stripe and in constant hunger to
gain another promotion. He sucked and scraped the officers for this, zealously carrying out their orders with the finnicky short temper of a weak, house-proud woman. He polished the barrack-room floor and black-leaded the stove himself because the boys refused to do more than give the place a regulation lick. And he leaped at the chance of putting a man on the peg, he was always waiting to catch somebody cutting a church parade or nipping out of camp to meet a girl when he should be on duty. Yet he was mortally afraid of a quarrel, of unpopularity, and he was always jovial, glassily jovial, even to the Welsh boy whom he knew he couldn’t deceive.

  ‘Who am I to relieve on guard?’ the soldier asked.

  ‘Nobby Sherraton. He’s patrolling the ridge.’

  ‘OK.’ He slipped his rifle sling over his shoulder and put his helmet on. ‘You marching me out? Or shall I just go and send Nobby in?’

  For once laziness overcame discretion.

  ‘There’s nobody about. Just go yourself,’ the sergeant said, smiling, posing now as the informal honest soldier. ‘I’ll be seeing yer.’

  ‘Some day.’

  He left the hut and crossed the dry dead-white grass to the ridge where Nobby was on guard.

  Nobby was his mate.

  He had only been in the unit about a month. Before that he had been stationed just outside London and had done a lot of demolition and rescue work. He was from Mile End, and had roughed it. His hands and face showed that, his rough, blackened hands, cigarette-stained, his red blotchy face with the bulbous nose, and the good blue eyes under tiny lids, and short scraggy lashes and brows. His hair was mousy and thin. He had been on the dole most of the time. He had been an unsuccessful boxer; he cleared out of that game when his brother, also a boxer, became punch-drunk and blind. He had plenty of tales of the Mosley faction. He was sometimes paid five bob to break up their meetings. He always took his five bob, but he let the others do the breaking up. Who wants a black eye and a cut face for five bob? ’Tain’t worth it. He rarely said anything about women. He didn’t think much of lots of them; though like all Cockney youths he loved the ‘old lady’, his mother. He wasn’t married. No, sir.