Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  The house painters arrived, a gang of German prisoners of war started to dig up the garden, and a severe cold spell struck southern England. We survived with only the usual quota of burst pipes, and saw a most unusual and beautiful sight. The day before the cold front hit Camberley the painters had given the outer wall of the passage its first coat of paint. Next morning the paint had frozen into marvellous crystal patterns. We told the painters to leave that wall untouched, and so it was preserved, the only graceful thing about the unlovely building, all the time we were there.

  A new course of students arrived and I formally joined the D.S. My chief work, like that of all the others, was to guide a seminar of eight or ten officers through all their work. The study of any phase of the military art usually began with an introductory lecture in Allenby Hall; then the students would read, in private study, various tomes and papers prepared by one of the D.S., who was in overall charge of that subject; then we would discuss the papers in the seminar, and end with indoor and outdoor exercises. My task in seminar was to guide, not control. I tried to generate enthusiasm and interest more than to lay down the law. I did not myself state the lessons to be learned but asked such questions as would lead a student to do so. I never took part in the heated arguments that arose, but tried to make sure they did arise.

  At the end I summed up, but even this only in the early stages; later, I would ask a student to do so. I corrected my seminar's examination papers and criticized their solutions to field exercises, both by the light of the Pink Paper, the D.S. Solution, which was prepared at the same time as the questions by the D.S. in charge of the subject. I soon learned that if I really wanted to arouse my students I would hint that the D.S. Solution was indeed infallible, the veritable Papal Word. Some were Roman Catholics, but none believed very much in the divineness of Authority. They would accept the D.S. Solution only in the purely mathematical problems of logistics. If a student had loaded 1,000 tons of ammunition into a hundred 3-ton trucks, he didn't argue with the Pink Paper which said he couldn't do it. But tactics, fortunately, are not reducible to arithmetic, and every student there had just returned from a long and arduous war. Each had his own ideas, based on his own experience, and if the D.S. Solution was ever accepted it was usually only because the students' solutions were as far from each other as they were from it.

  Still, it was exhilarating to hear them going at each other with ball ammunition... We tried that on the Sangro, and it didn't work... Yes, but at Vernon it did... You can't draw any conclusion from that. The Seine and the Sangro have quite different characteristics. Listening, I learned at least as much as I taught.

  The other part of a D.S.'s work was the overall responsibility for one of these studies. I was appointed Assistant to the Witch Doctors in charge of Jungle Warfare and Military Law, and, as the Indian Army instructor, was Hereditary Grand Master of Mountain Warfare.

  Spring came, the days passed lazily, garlanded with primroses and daffodils and bluebells. Martin pushed his wheeled toy donkey across the lawn, and soon would not need Donk's support. Mrs Cobden, the cat, scratched Susan for intolerable invasions of privacy. Barbara broke her record for the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle: 5 minutes 13 seconds. In the seminar room I surreptitiously studied the students' personalities: Did this one really know, or was he trying to blind us with science? Would that one's assurance stand up under the pressures of war? The weak sun filtered through the tall trees outside, sometimes a murmur of traffic reached us from the London road. At night in my study I corrected papers, a pot of red ink on one side and the D.S. Pink Paper on the other. Sometimes this took an hour and a half, sometimes six hours. Attack IV, for instance, was a written exercise for which I divided my seminar into three sub-seminars. Each sub-seminar had to prepare its own answer to the problem set, in the form of an Operation Order (about ten pages), a map overlay, three road movement graphs and five logistical annexures. This totalled some thirty pages as close-packed as a plum pudding; and there were three of them. If I were to do my duty as thoroughly as the students had done theirs, it took a long time.

  So, while Barbara knitted and ironed and read, and sometimes, muttering about the need for a military trade union, went to bed, I read and scribbled, scribbled and read. I had first to appraise each overall solution, that is, what they intended to do and how they intended to do it; and then catch every smallest error in the papers — each incorrect abbreviation, ambiguity, misspelling, mistype, arithmetical error — for at the Staff College we were really teaching two subjects at the same time, first, how to solve military problems, and secondly, the technique of translating the solutions into action. In the first part we were looking for originality and realism, in the second for care and accuracy, to ensure that soldiers were not sent to their deaths through a misprint or because the little word NOT had been carelessly omitted from an order. CARELESS was the favourite word of all D.S., here just as much as in the sister establishment of Quetta, where I had been a student. We wrote it all over the students' papers, large, in red ink; but after my first rapture at castigating other people's mistakes instead of having Roddy McLeod castigate mine, I tried to tone down my enthusiasm and took to reserving CARELESS for mortal errors. When I had corrected all the papers I would make notes on the exercise itself, for consideration by the D.S. who had prepared it, and then on each of my students, against the day when we would spend ten hours in the D.S. Room grading each and every one of them, a grading that would vitally affect their future careers.

  I found myself studying the techniques of writing. The lectures and discussion notes I prepared, the lessons I wanted the other D.S. to bring out, had to be put in writing. Some of the green Papers I got from other D.S. were effective, some were not. Why? There were many ways of expressing the same idea: how to find out which was the best? When Charles Earle of the Grenadiers looked over the first draft of my Mountain Warfare paper, he gently pointed out that what I had to say was great, but that my way of saying it was liable to arouse needless antagonism. I re-read my draft, and saw that Charles was right. Gradually I evolved a personal system of writing. First, I decided what effect I wanted to achieve. Second, I thought of the people on whom I wished to achieve that effect. Third, I built a structure of situations, phrases, and words, which should achieve that effect on those people. Fourth, I read what I had written, trying to be one of my readers; decided whether I had done what I set out to do, and made what changes were necessary. Sometimes I went through this process four times.

  Barbara bore the brunt, in the repeated re-typings I asked her to do. It was fortunate, for me at least, that she was such a good and fast typist. She had learned when secretary to a Member of Parliament before the war, and later when typing bulletins at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel on behalf of a rich godmother. 'Do you want me to wear long sleeves while typing?' she said, the first time I gave her a draft to do. 'What on earth for?' I asked. She said 'Those old clergymen who used to infest the S.P.G. insisted that we girls wear long sleeves, otherwise they got too aroused.' She sniffed scornfully. 'Though I didn't believe a word of it. All that aroused them were dirty jokes, I mean lavatory-dirty — poopoo, kaka, ah-ah, peepee. Ugh!'

  After the war, where deprivation and danger were interspersed, but never simultaneous, with peace and love, it was a strange hotch-potch sort of life... Children gurgling about the house as I marked the maps for my Mountain Warfare exercise... Mornings on the edge of the downs, shouting arguments against the whistling wind as to whether the tanks of the King's Dragoon Guards should attack this way or that way... England v. Wales at Twickenham and a sudden remembered tightening at the heart as 30,000 Welsh stood to sing 'Land of my Fathers' in deep, unrehearsed harmony: I had heard the Welsh miners sing so outside my window at school, when they were sleeping out on the heath on their hunger march to London... Walking that same heath on a rainy afternoon with Mike Calvert, now a student, reliving the Chindit campaign of three years earlier, when we had both been brigade comm
anders... Crossing the Thames at the head of a vast (pretend) army: Bill Dodds, the American instructor, crying, 'Is that muddy little crick the Thames?'... Holding Barbara in my arms at the Staff College Ball, wearing white tie and tails, drinking champagne and eating moules mariniêres in the supper room, my mind far from the splendid scene about us, my inner eyes peering into a fog-shrouded future.

  I spent some leisure hours on my hobby — railways — long neglected for harsher pursuits; and even taught Barbara and the children some of the finer points of the rite. Railways have always been something special to most male Britons: a people which names one of its stations Mow Cop & Scholar Green is unlikely to regard its railways as a mere means of transportation, and the railways have responded with an unflagging determination to amuse, mystify, and alarm the British traveller. One of the very first trains squashed a Cabinet minister in the presence of the victor of Waterloo, and they went on from there. Train fans (railroad buffs, they would be called in America) come from all ages and all walks of society. Had you taken a train in England in those last days of steam, you would always have seen a group of people gathered round the locomotive. You couldn't have known it, but the group would have comprised two or three schoolmasters, an eminent professor of mathematics, a solicitor's clerk, an army officer (that would be Neil Blair of the Black Watch, or myself), two rural deans, a bishop, and some twenty schoolboys in grey flannel shorts or trousers, blazers, and brightly ringed school caps. The adults would be gazing at the locomotive in rapt silence, the boys writing down its name and number in their notebooks, and exchanging shouts: '6002 King William IV Garn, I got her yesterday. I'll swop her for your Dynevor Castle.' The one sort of person you never saw train spotting was a female, of any age. They didn't even sit in the background, huddled up knitting while guarding the sandwiches, as fishermen's women do.

  The railway fan had an outlook all his own. He knew all about the engines, the lines, and the trains but, when in his rail ecstasy, about nothing else. Many were trained by William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was headmaster of Repton. He did not punish minor boyish deviltries with a caning or a gating, but lent the culprit his own copy of Bradshaw's Railway Guide, and ordered him to work out how to get from Sampford Peverell to Nigg, via Ingra Tor Halt, Alsop-en-le-Dale, and Crook of Devon, starting not earlier than 3.7 p.m. on a Sunday and stopping at every other station en route. The victims, and the friends they roped in to help, learned the dogged perseverance which built the British Empire, and also more about railways than they really cared for at the time: but the memories stuck, pride followed, and proselytism followed pride. If you had such an enthusiast in your compartment, he would be delighted to tell you when your train (or indeed any other train) reached Hetton-le-Hole; but it would not serve to ask him for information on any other subject. You might want to visit York because Constantine was proclaimed Roman emperor there in A.D. 306; the train fan knew only that the best time to go to York is 2 a.m., when the London kipper specials race through from Scotland. Edinburgh? It has the longest station platform in Britain. Cambridge? The second longest. Stratford-upon-Avon? There is said to be a very interesting old turntable in the goods yard...

  Two qualities attract the ordinary Briton, as distinct from the fan, to his railways. First, there is the atmosphere. An American train is friendly yet spacious; a British train is institutional, cosy, and tinged with threat. Most coaches (cars) are divided into small compartments, so one travels in isolated groups, arbitrarily selected. The lady opposite you in your little box might be the lovely and generous Countess of Bedworthy, or she might be a fugitive from Ruritania, with secret plans in her corsage. This atmosphere of pleasurable unease extends to S*X. Let me make clear that train fans, as such, are rigidly asexual, and station platforms are about the only places where elderly males associate with blooming boys without some pederasty being attempted or achieved. No, it is plain old lingam-yoni lust, and the compartment system, which cause the trouble. Before entering a compartment the wise traveller takes two precautions. First he decides what sex he is and if possible never gets into a compartment occupied by a lone member of any other sex. Second, he locates the communication cord and sits under it. British men, like others, have been known to think they are irresistible to women, and what better place than an empty compartment to prove it? And there are girls who sit prim as voles until the train is well into the Penge Tunnel, then leap up, tear their clothes, scratch their faces (and yours) and snarl 'Ten pounds or I'll pull the cord.' It is a difficult situation to explain away, though British magistrates are well aware of the racket. I read a story once where the hero, subject to this vexing insinuation, saved his name by pointing quietly to the three-inch ash on his cigar. It might be worth buying a good cigar for the purpose...

  But my railway hours were rare. For the most part our life was governed by the place and the time. Like everyone else we stood in queues, ration books in hand. Sweets, bacon, butter, margarine, fats, meat, all were rationed. Every purchase was preceded by family syndicate discussions: how much must we buy to entertain the Roddy McLeods (he had just arrived as Assistant Commandant): where can we 'win' extra cigarettes and whisky? Martin learned his first word: horse. At first he made an anagram out of it, and pronounced it shore. When his ear told him that was wrong, he tried Hor!, shouting it very loudly in the High Street from his pram. He was pointing at a distant horse, yes, but also at a stout lady about three feet away. Her expression lives in our memory. Mrs Cobden had kittens, of which we kept one, naming him Disraeli; and Susan found a nest of field mice in the garden, bringing all the babies in to show us. We shut Mrs Cobden and Disraeli into a closet and hurried the little mice back, fearing that the mother might not return to them; but she did. Susan always had a way with animals. The kennels of the Staff College foxhounds were just behind our bungalow, and Susan spent happy hours talking to them through the wire of their pens. When they were taken out for exercise by the Master of the Drag, she stood yelping with delight among them while the huge beasts bounded all over her, waving their sterns, and the Master cracked his whip and made faces of appalling ferocity. (It is a serious crime in England to be nice to foxhounds.)

  We were all learning something — in Barbara's case, how to cook. As a girl she had never opened a can or boiled a kettle. A string of nannies and governesses had interposed their sometimes harsh protection between her and life, between her and her parents. Then there was India, and shoals of servants. Here our domestic staff consisted of a batman, a retired soldier called Bache who did a little more cleaning about the house than he was supposed to, but no cooking; and Kate, a lady whose vocation was house cleaning and avocation the care and feeding of stray dogs. She usually brought along five or six, in a little pushcart, when she came to work for us. (Since then her collection has gone up to thirty or forty; she appears regularly in the picture papers and has become a figure of national fame.) Kate didn't cook either, so Barbara bought a cook book and opened it at page 1. Reading aloud carefully, with interspersed oaths, she filled a pan with water, put it on the stove, and selected two eggs... As for me, I had done much open-air cooking in my time, but lacked finesse as a butler. Told to heat the plates for a formal meal, I put the best Indian Tree dinner plates in the oven... with the roast. They stood up until we started to wash them after the meal; then the bottom fell neatly out of each one.

  If we looked only at each day, or out of the window, we were happy enough. Barbara had never quite recovered from the exhausting move so soon after Martin's birth. She was thin, anaemic and, in spite of our wishes and precautions, pregnant again — but happy because we were together and at peace. I was happy in my work. It was when we looked past the day, past Disraeli stalking Martin and Donk across the grass, that we were worried.

  On first arrival in England, after an absence of seven years, we had felt like strangers in a foreign land. We had forgotten how to buy rail tickets, what to order in pubs, how to drive in the traffic, how to speak to
shopkeepers and policemen. Now all that had come back, but still we did not feel at home. Our years in India — nine for Barbara and twelve for myself, plus five more as a child — had estranged our ways of thinking, or at least our capacity to accept. Neither of us is a drunkard, but we saw no reason why, if we wanted a drink at four o'clock in the afternoon and a man was willing to sell us one, he should not do so. In India it was none of the government's damned business when we chose to have a drink, but in England it was: pub hours were rigidly controlled under a regulation made in 1915 for a wartime situation and never since repealed. Then, all the shops in Camberley closed at 5 p.m. every day; on one afternoon a week they all closed at 1 p.m. This was not because the store owners wanted to close; it was the Early Closing law, and we disagreed with the spirit of that law. Surely the rights of working men and women assistants could be best protected by their unions, and by restrictions on individual working hours? And if a man chose to keep his own shop open all day and all night, what business was it of anyone else's?

  These and similar practices had become foreign to us. Plenty of other Englishmen felt the same. The difference between them and us was that we were not prepared to grin and bear it. After the geographical space and freedom of India, I felt that I was in prison. The restrictions on foreign exchange hit us particularly hard, because we needed to get out of prison, and because travel was our greatest pleasure — almost the object of our lives. As some work for Rolls-Royces, or country houses, or mink coats, we worked to travel, and we would not for long allow ourselves to be deprived of that right. (Even with the restrictions in force, we managed, by extreme frugality, to use a brief spring vacation to walk a hundred miles across the massif central in France.)