They halted us in the square, and there were Army boys on a big tank with an enormous gun, taking pictures of us as we dismissed. A voice somewhere in the parade bellowed: “’Ey, ’ev ye got a pull-through for that goon? There's a lal feller ’ere needs pullin' through, ’is legs is bad!”
It might have been Grandarse, and the lal feller might have been Nick, but since he didn't cry: “We'll all git killed!” I guess it must have been two other chaps.
I didn't stay for the VIP lunch afterwards. I had a notion that not many of those who had marched would have been invited, and I had no wish to sit down with the good and great, worthy folk though I know they were. I walked along Castle Street and English Street to the station, having divested myself of my gongs in the Crown and Mitre bogs, and caught the train, thinking wrap up all my care and woe, so long, lads, and thanks. How the years go by, and how changed everything is, and how much you see around you today that you didn't fight for, and sometimes you can feel betrayed and pretty fed up. But think of the Carlisle people clapping, and “’Ey, gran'pa!” Aye, it was worth it. By God, it was worth it.
Watching the evening celebrations of VJ-50 on TV that night, the rockets and the floodlights, the Queen and the huge crowds, the music and the cheering, and the amber streaks in the western sky, I thought to myself: the sun set on the British Empire a long time ago, irrevocably, unfortunately, and inevitably, but what you're seeing now, this night of VJ-50, is the last reflection of that imperial sun, gone beneath the horizon, but reminding generations who never knew the Empire and its heartland, of what once was. The British were happy that night of VJ-50, with a sense of something well done, not just in 1945, but for centuries before.
My daughter Caro and her husband (his father was a prisoner of the Japanese) took their children to see the fireworks on the Thames, and amidst all the noise and merrymaking our little granddaughter, Genny, aged six, who is English-Scottish-Welsh, raised her paper cup of lemonade and cried: “A toast—to victory!” And the people laughed and cheered.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The dialects of Cumberland are among the purest and, to the outsider, least comprehensible in the English-speaking world. Rendering them phonetically is difficult, but I have tried because that is the way my comrades talked, and to translate their conversation into normal English would be to change the characters of the speakers out of recognition; they were the way they spoke: tough, strong, forthright, and frequently aggressive. But while I hope I have conveyed their accent, I have to rely on meaning and context to suggest the style in which their speech was delivered. For example, the Cumbrian voice is well suited to derision; everyone knows the common English expression of disbelief, “Get away!” and the equally familiar North Country “Give over!”, meaning “Stop it”, but as rendered by the Cumbrian “Girraweh!” and “Give ower!” have respectively a snarling contempt and a violence which have to be heard. At its heaviest, the accent is a harsh, rasping growl, and it is this as much as the occasionally archaic vocabulary which baffles the foreigner. Just to give one quick example of pure Cumbrian, I give the translation of:
“Have you seen a donkey jump over a gate?” which is
“Est seen a coody loup ower a yett?”
That sentence, in Cumbrian, illustrates one of the most distinctive features of the county's speech—the occasional use of the second person singular: “Est” or “Esta” is “Hast thou”. I emphasise occasional use; the Cumbrian, especially the countryman, will use “thou” (pronounced “thoo” or “tha”) and “you” or “ye” indiscriminately. “You will” in Carlisle may be spoken as “you'll” or “ye'll”, but out on the fellside it is liable to be “tha'lt” (“thou wilt”). Similarly, his assent may be “yes”, “yiss”, or “aye”; he alternates “well” and “weel”; “go” may be “gaw”, “gan”, or “ga”; he may say “how” perfectly normally, but he may also say “’oo”. The list is endless: “don't” is usually “doan't” or “dawn't”, but occasionally it is “divvn't”—and don't (or divvn't) ask me why.
I have said the dialect is pure, because it is both ancient and grammatical; Chaucer might well understand a modern Cumbrian better than he would a modern Londoner. But it has its antique ungrammatical lapses, too—“Ah's” (“I is”) and “Thoo's” (“Thou is”) are examples to balance against the purity of “Th'art” (“Thou art”) and “looksta” and “sista” (“lookest thou” and “seest thou”).
All of which may convince the uninitiated that my characters might as well be speaking Turkish; in fact, I don't think their speech will be too difficult to understand, and where I think it may be I have appended footnote translations. The glossary at the end consists largely of Hindustani words and slang expressions current in the British Army fifty years ago.
G.M.F.
GLOSSARY
Foreign words are Hindustani unless otherwise stated
admi man
bait food, snack
basha native house, hut
bibi, bint girl
bidi native cheroot
bund embankment
bundook rifle
burgoo porridge (Turkish, burghal)
bus finished, the end
chaggle canvas water-bag
chah tea
charpoy native rope bed
chaung river gully, watercourse (Burmese)
cheeny sugar
chota wallah little fellow
coggage paper kaguz)
connor food (khana)
dah machete (Burmese)
dekko look see
Denton Holme a district of Carlisle
dersi tailor
dhobi laundryman
dhoti loincloth
dood milk
doolally mad (from Deolali, Indian transit camp famous for sunstroke)
durwan porter, doorkeeper
duser other
ek one (numeral)
glasshouse military prison (from the glass roof at Aldershot)
gongs war medals
goolie ball (gola)
ham I (personal pronoun)
havildar sergeant
housewife hold-all for needle, thread, etc.
idderao! come here!
indaba affair, concern (Swahili, council)
isker thing (Arabic)
jao go
jawan soldier
jildi quickly
khud jungle hill
klifty steal
kukri Gurkha short sword
lathi policeman's staff
maidan plain, exercise ground
mallum understand
marra (lit. “marrow”), comrade, pal
mera my
naik corporal
nappy-wallah barber
nullah gully, dry watercourse
pani water
pialla enamelled mug
punji poisoned stake, booby-trap
sarf karo to clean (up), hence, to kill
shabash! bravo!
stag guard, sentry-go
sub-cheese everything, the lot (also “sub-muckin”)
tairo wait, hold on
tum thou
tik hai all right, good
About the Author
George MacDonald Fraser served in the Border Regiment in Burma during the Second World War, and in the Gordon Highlanders. He has worked on newspapers in Britain and Canada, and has written many bestselling novels in addition to the eleven volumes of the Flashman Papers. Thousands of readers around the world have been delighted by the three volumes of stories about Private McAuslan, thoughtfully described as ‘the biggest walking disaster to hit the British Army since Ancient Pistol’. He has also written numerous films, most notably The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers and the James Bond film,Octopussy.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
“George MacDonald Fraser, creator of Flashman, is one of the finest fiction entertainers of the day. But the suc
cess of the Flashman books is also founded upon the author's wonderful instinct for the British soldier, and for the reality of war…His book should be read by all those who cannot understand why so many of those who endure and survive war retain a gratitude for the experience of comradeship, for the memory of love between companions in terrible experience, to the end of their days”
MAX HASTINGS, Daily Telegraph
“As a re-creation of old-fashioned warfare, illustrating what it really means to be one of the forward element engaged in winkling out and mopping up, this book is a crackling performance, livened by fierce comedy and enriched by anger”
E. S. TURNER, London Review of Books
“He is still the best and funniest storyteller we have…What sets it apart is the brutal honesty and sparkle of the writing”
MICHAEL FATHERS, Independent
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
THE FLASHMAN PAPERS
(in chronological order)
FLASHMAN
(Britain, India, and Afghanistan, 1839–42)
ROYAL FLASH
(England 1842–43, Germany 1847–48)
FLASHMAN'S LADY
(England, Borneo, and Madagascar, 1842–45)
FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT
(Indian Punjab 1845–46)
FLASH FOR FREEDOM!
(England, West Africa, U.S.A. 1848–49)
FLASHMAN AND THE REDSKINS
(U.S.A. 1849–50 and 1875–76)
FLASHMAN AT THE CHARGE
(England, Crimea, and Central Asia, 1854–55)
FLASHMAN IN THE GREAT GAME
(Scotland, India, 1856–58)
FLASHMAN AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD
(India, South Africa, U.S.A., 1858–59)
FLASHMAN AND THE DRAGON
(China, 1860)
FLASHMAN AND THE TIGER
Mr American
The Pyrates
The Candlemass Road
Black Ajax
SHORT STORIES HISTORY
The General Danced at Dawn The Steel Bonnets:
McAuslan in the Rough The Story of the Anglo-Scottish
The Sheikh and the Dustbin Border Reivers
The Hollywood History of the World
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Harvill 1993
Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1993
George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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EPub Edition © 1993 ISBN: 9780007325764
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