Brenda stopped to straighten the cardigan carried folded on her arm. She was critical: ‘I’ll bet you didn’t want to pinch ‘em. Not much. You’re a bright one, Arthur. You never know the difference between right and wrong.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I do. That’s what’s wrong if you ask me, because it don’t pay to know the difference, does it duck?’ He raised his head on the question mark, his face serious.
‘Sometimes it does. It keeps you out of trouble. And you were born for trouble. Help me over this stile, love.’
He took her hand as she climbed to the first step. ‘Born for trouble? Not me. If you want to know summat, I’ve had a peaceful life. I never did like trouble, or doing people harm. It upsets me too much, like boozing. Only sometimes I can’t keep off it. Hold your skirt down, duck, or I’ll see all you’ve got. This is where the courting couples come, and this is what starts it, when the man helps his young woman over a stile!’
She laughed: ‘The things you say. It was your idea anyway, to come down here, and you know how hard it is for a woman to get over a stile without showing a bit of her underclothes. Steady, hold my hand. Whoops! That’s it, now I’m down.’
He leapt over and they walked by a privet hedge, corn over the path waving like tinsel. ‘It’s a bastard, though, having to go back to the army every year. They won’t let a bloke live.’
She took his arm again. ‘It’s only fifteen days, and you know you don’t mind it. All the men like it, if you ask me.’
‘Maybe they do,’ he said. ‘But I don’t. I tell you I hate the army, and I allus have done. You can’t say that about me. I’m not daft enough to like it.’
‘Well, p’raps not. But I’m sure there are plenty as do. They just love to get a uniform on and go off with lots of other men. If there was a war, millions of ‘em ‘ud rush to join-up.’
Bramcote Hills had green fields around their ankles, clumps of stunted trees along its ridge, and crew-cut grass patches on the slopes. He imagined himself and two hundred others staggering, falling, having to run up the ankles with fixed bayonet, charging blind-drunk into trees. A few well-placed machine-guns and mortars and you could pin down a couple of battalions, he reasoned. ‘But not me. I’ll keep out of it. I hate it. I don’t even like to talk about it, in fact.’
The prospect of parting did not bother her as it bothered Arthur. To him her face indicated happiness at the thought of a fortnight’s freedom. ‘Never mind, Arthur, you’ll be back soon. It’s only once a year. And when this is over it’ll be Goose Fair, and then Christmas. Time flies; we’ll be getting old soon, I do know that.’
‘Not me,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re as old as you feel, and I ain’t got started yet on my life.’
‘No more you will, either, until you get married.’
‘Married? Me? No fear. I’d only marry you, because I love you, but that ain’t possible. And if I can’t marry you, duck, then it’s not likely as I’ll marry anybody else.’
She liked his forthrightness, but replied: ‘That’s what they all say, I suppose. But in another year you’ll have changed your mind. Everybody thinks they’ll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can’t.’
‘Well,’ Arthur said with a sly smile, ‘I don’t need to get married, do I. Don’t get married until you’ve got to, that’s my motto.’ He stabbed her playfully in the ribs with his fingers, then caught hold of her to kiss her.
‘Stop it,’ she cried. ‘You’ll squeeze the life out of me. Don’t kiss me here, there’s a man walking on that hill, and he’ll see us.’ She was irritated.
‘No, he won’t,’ he grinned.
‘And anyhow, do you think you get married just for that? If you think so, you’re wrong. Some people do, I suppose, but most of ‘em get married for other reasons.’
‘You sound like a know-all,’ he said, the sparks from either tinder-box waxing hot enough to set both their angers alight, ‘but I know a thing or two, as well. I’ll know when I’m ready to marry, and I’m not ready yet.’ He turned on her truculently: ‘I suppose you’d like it if I did get married?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said, happy now that she had angered him. ‘That’s just what I don’t want to happen, you know that. But if ever you want to, don’t let me stop you. Yes, laugh if you like, but you know what I mean. I know you love me now, but you might not in six months.’
Aye, he thought, we might all be dead in six months. So he danced on the path before her, laughing, bending his long legs up and down, disappearing into the tall corn and suddenly rushing out to try and frighten her. She had to laugh as well. ‘Go on,’ she cried. ‘You’re daft. I can never make you out.’
‘Well,’ he said breathlessly, his arm around her waist, ‘that’s what I think about you as well. But it don’t bother me much because I never tek much trouble to mek people out. That’s summat else as don’t pay.’ The gladness left him feeling as if the world’s gigantic wheels had turned in his particular direction with the intention of crushing him. Fifteen days in khaki were brandished before him like a knob-kerrie. The fact that Brenda did not seem very pained about him going away, and the wide blue sky of a summer evening, found no response in him, made him feel empty at the landscape’s colours and folds.
‘Where shall we go then, Arthur?’
He did not know. In more ways than one it was a big question. Action, he thought. That’s more my line. So he shed his morbidity in a second and steered her along the right-angled line of the hedge. Wheat hid them from view, and he kicked out at it, wanted to flatten it.
‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t trample it like that.’
‘What’s wrong? I enjoy doing it. Besides, what does it matter?’
‘Just as I said,’ she replied, faintly smiling. ‘You don’t know the difference between right and wrong.’
‘No I don’t. And I don’t want anybody to start teaching me, either.’
‘I suppose you’ve got the right idea. This is a good place,’ she said, looking into a smooth hollow at the bottom of the hedge. ‘I do love you, Arthur,’ she added. They sat down, and kissed each other passionately.
He stood on the platform at Derby station waiting for the Birmingham train, planted tall and straight by a disused chocolate machine, fresh from the buffet with a cup of tea and a bun inside him, so washed and shaven that his stained uniform detracted little from his air of smartness. There was a vacant seat nearby, but he scorned to bend the razor-edged creases in his trousers by sitting on it. He dwelt on the wild goodbye he had said to Brenda, out in the field until midnight and too late to catch the last bus. They had walked home under a bright moon, with a subtle note of doom let loose in so perfect a parting, the beginning of a forlorn end that could be fought against but not defeated. Nothing had been said, but both had felt it, and had betrayed it to each other in their too hard drive for gaiety. There was a bitterness in their passion, tender words without roots, and sarcasms that threw affection down like a glove that both were in too much of a hurry to take up.
‘Be safe,’ she had said. ‘Be good. I’ll see you soon.’
Happen so, he thought.
A porter rolled a loaded trolley along the platform. Arthur stood rigid, watching thin curtains of rain fall one after the other over the black engine sheds, a fine midsummer drizzle that gave him a feeling of boredom, and emptiness that he found intolerable. Five soldiers came noisily over the track bridge and descended to the platform, filling the cold damp air with bluff jokes. Arthur recognized them. They recognized Arthur. They clobbered towards him in their heavy boots and slung kitbags on to the seat. He was lost, embraced by their brawling noise, making it more solid with his own swearing, handshakes and backslaps. ‘If it ain’t owd Ernie Ambergate!’ They were bound for the same camp, and knew each other from last year.
Arthur was drunk every night. The fifteen days was a lon
g time, insupportable if sober, for he hated change, and hated the army more. He carried wire-cutters in his pocket to help him back into camp late at night, exulting as he lay in the ditch, snapping one strand of barbed wire after another and rolling it carefully back with his hand, feeling the damp earth on his trousers, grass blades tickling his face, and brambles chafing his ankles, crawling along on his stomach to keep down from the guardroom lights, until the gap in the fence would have admitted an armoured division.
On his first parade the sergeant-major exclaimed that he couldn’t make out the shape of Arthur’s head because there was so much hair on it, and Arthur jocularly agreed to get it cut, intending to forget about it until the fifteen days was over, which he did. ‘You’re a soldier now, not a Teddy-boy,’ the sergeant-major said, but Arthur knew he was wrong in either case. He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That’s what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that that’s what I am, I’m a dynamite-dealer, Stengun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan-lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.
On the second day he stood in the urinal staring at the wall’s grey surface with wild eyes, as if to penetrate the obscene scrawls that he had once found so funny, and see today’s racing lists and tomorrow’s winners set down plainly instead. The seconds he stood there passed like days, each a goods-train in his stomach, a dynamo in his brain, an anvil in his heart, a tool-vice clamped on to his mouth that nevertheless muttered: ‘Bastards. Bastards. Bastards’ — until Ambergate came in from breakfast and thumped him on the back, and Arthur turned with raised fist ready to give himself the pleasure of smashing him. But he stopped in time, for he could not do it to Ambergate, his collier pal from some lonely shaft of the Derbyshire foothills.
The days and nights did not pass quickly enough. On the range he was happy with the Bren, at the thought of bullets falling into the spout from the curving magazine and at the sound of them spitting like music at the boards. He liked firing, he had to admit. It gave him satisfaction to destroy, if only the board perched up above the butts. He would rather destroy something more tangible: houses or human beings: but that was impossible, yet. When it was not his turn at the sandbags he loved to stand and listen to the total bursting of bullets from the dozen guns firing, hearing the lifting and falling of sound, the absolutely untameable rhythms that ripped the air open with untrammelled joy.
Every night he went out with Ambergate to get drunk: on the long walks he plotted private war and revolution, arson and plunder, with Ambergate, bringing to the surface impossible dreams and treating them like jokes. Coming back from the village they forgot everything in the world but their own existence, the now, the this minute of their filled bellies and walking legs and chafed thighs on khaki serge. Arthur’s drunken chanting sped out like primeval madness over dark fields and woods, filling the best hours of fifteen days. They passed cottages bolted and barred to them, doors and windows spurning Arthur’s made-up songs that rolled and roared along like the explosion of some half-forgotten voice in the world.
One night he did the return journey alone, having somehow been parted from his pals in the pub. The clear, blue, burning day had ended, and the night was pitch-black and filled with jostling clouds. Hands in pockets, he whistled a tune, swaying with as much drink inside him as he could hold. A lightning flash, purple and brilliant, illuminated him in the middle of the lane. He saw trees grouped together that he had not noticed before. In the cannonade of thunder that followed his tune went unconsciously on, but the first flash ploughed a furrow through the depths of his mind into which entered the second broad wink of lightning. He felt afraid, and his legs began to tremble. ‘What’s up?’ he said. Then louder: ‘What’s up?’ He walked on in the dull even descent of the rain, counting each second between lightning and thunder. Then he resumed his whistling, a marching tune that kept him swinging along until he stopped to light a cigarette. The next flash seemed to tear the earth apart, giving an instantaneous explosion of thunder as though a powder factory had been touched off. The lane was arched with trees, and he was afraid of being struck down. It was the first time in years that a storm had frightened him. As a boy, when the time of summer storms came, he would run screaming from the street to hide in the darkened scullery or under the stairs, until the summer when the thunder changed to bombs and lightning to gun-flashes, showing him the harmlessness of thunder and lightning. He woke up one summer night during the war to the sound of explosions, and flashes crossing the bedroom window, hating to leave his bed and go to an air-raid shelter, wondering why the sirens hadn’t sounded a warning, or why neither he nor anyone else in the house had heard them. Fred sat up and told him it was only thunder. Only thunder! Smashin’! To its musical rumblings he went back to sleep, and remembering it now in his fear and weariness he walked on with a laugh until he saw the camp lights close by, when he no longer needed its refuge, and could go on walking through the storm for miles more.
He kicked open the billet door, unbuckled his webbing belt, and threw off his cap. The last thing he heard before collapsing into a heap was the thunder.
Lifted from the soft pit of slumber at eight the next morning, he was in bed, undressed, with blankets over him. He opened his eyes, but could not stir an arm to scratch himself. His limbs were fastened securely to the frame of the bed. Raising his head a few inches he saw that the billet was empty. They must all be at breakfast, he thought. Sun streamed in and turned the polished floor into a mirror, flooded the stove in light, illuminated tidy heaps of kit laid out on the made beds. His head ached, and he tried to free himself from the tight bonds that held him down. But they were firm, and would not give. In a few minutes he was sound asleep.
He was roused by the noise of those back from breakfast, by Ambergate stowing his tin mug in the kitbag. Moore offered Arthur a drink of tea.
‘Ernie,’ Arthur said in a flat croaking voice to Ambergate, ‘untie me.’
Moore held the tea down for him. ‘Drink this, then you’ll feel better.’
‘Untie me first.’
Seeing that no one would untie him, he drank the tea, gulping it down loudly. They laughed at his plight. ‘What bastard tied me up?’ he demanded.
‘You aren’t tied up,’ Moore said.
‘Not much I’m not. Who did it?’
Ambergate winked and explained: ‘When we came in last night you were flat out on the floor, and when we tried to get you in bed you lashed out. So we were going to leave you like that all night, but the CO came in and said: “What’s that prostrate swaddie doing huddled-up on the floor in a pool of piss?” “He’s passed-out, sir,” I said. “Then get ‘im into bed,” he shouted, as mad as buggery. “A bloody swaddie’s no good on the billet floor. Get the sod to bed.” “But sir,” I said, “every time I get near him, he gives me a clout with his pit-boot.” “Don’t be a bloody fool,” the CO said, “get him into bed. Look, I’ll show you how to do it.” Then, bogger me, Arthur, if you didn’t kick the CO as well, right in the nuts. It’s true right enough, ain’t it, lads? There, I told you. Well the CO nearly had a fit. “Tie him up,” he shouted like a mad bull. “Tie the bloody swaddie up. No bloody swaddie’s going to kick me where I daren’t show my mother. I’ll settle his goat in the morning, that I will.” So we had to tie you up, see? CO’s orders.’
‘You lying bastard,’ Arthur shouted. ‘You should be on the Empire. You’d get fifty bob a week. Now untie me.’
‘Not likely,’ Ambergate said among all the laughter. ‘You’ll only lash out again.’
‘Untie me.’
The sergeant poked his head into the billet door and screamed; ‘On p’rade, yo’ lot,’ and in half a minute the billet was empty, except for Arthur w
ho was tied to his bed and couldn’t move. Yet it wasn’t disagreeable to him, for he was tired and worn out: he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
At eleven the Orderly Officer walked through the billet.
‘Now, who’s this bloody fool still sleeping at this time of the day?’ he called out. ‘Hey, you, what are you doing?’
Arthur’s eyes opened. He tried to move his arms and legs, remembered, rolled his eyes, and closed them again. The OO shook him, prodded him: ‘For Christ’s sake, man, what are you doing here? Get up. Come on.’
Arthur looked up at last. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘What are you doing, still in bed?’ he snapped.
He thought up the first excuse: ‘I’m badly. I don’t feel well. I got pains in my head and stomach and I feel as though I’m tied to my bed.’
‘Fine, I must say. Well, why didn’t you go on sick parade?’
‘I didn’t wake up in time.’
The OO tut-tutted, as though he’d just about had enough of life. ‘Bloody Terriers,’ he swore. ‘I’ll send the sergeant in to see about getting you over to the sick quarters, then.’
The door slammed, and the billet was silent. The OO forgot to send the sergeant, and Arthur stayed in bed till teatime, obliviously sleeping, forgetting that he was tied up, the hours passing with such pleasant speed that he remarked to Ambergate later that they should leave him be, that he could think of no better way to spend his fifteen days, provided they gave him a drink of tea and a fag now and again.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Page 15
