by Alan Judd
‘It was a bit nasty, wasn’t it?’
Back at the Factory Chatsworth confessed his jealousy. ‘It was quite funny, though. You made the most awful cock-up on the radio. You sounded so vague and academic that everyone sort of lost interest, till your wireless operator came on. He sounded panic-stricken. Not very coherent. Rather let you down. Pity you didn’t shoot any of them. I’d like to see what an SLR would do to a face at close range. And if you could’ve screwed one of the women at the same time the fine would probably have been forty quid. Would’ve made a great headline – “Assault Commando officer rapes and kills women. Many dead.” Daresay they’d be queuing at the gates.’
Tim remarked that the whole thing sounded rather unprofessional but Edward said, ‘Twenty quid, what a coincidence. Funny the way the CO’s mind works. If you’d knocked off one of the women he’d probably have made it forty. Nasty situation, though. Nasty women, too. Rather you than me, old son.’
Charles’s meeting with Janet took place only three days after the incident with the mob. The arrangements were made – mostly at the top of his voice – over the coin-box telephone installed in the part of the Factory used as the soldiers’ canteen. As he had expected, he was not allowed to have a night off – Edward was not prepared even to put that to the CO – but he was permitted to take two hours off in order to have tea in the centre of Belfast. Because of the way the battalion worked, and expected to work, this did not seem to him ungenerous. He had to wear civilian clothes and to carry a Browning in a shoulder-holster. Janet spent the night of the wedding in Dublin and was given a lift to Belfast the following day by some people who lived in nearby Holywood.
They met outside a cinema showing a war film, one of the most popular forms of escapism in Belfast. They kissed briefly and self-consciously. Janet seemed prettier and more elegant than he remembered, an impression perhaps strengthened by contrast with the natives of Belfast who were, on the whole, squat and ill-favoured. She was tall and slim, with curly hair that was darker than it had been. She still had about her the brittle sheen of London social life, but there was a new promptness and decisiveness, an obvious confidence, that made him wonder whether she had a new man, or whether it was simply that life was treating her well. It was not a question that he cared to go into then. It was better left until after Ireland, if there was to be such a time.
‘What’s that?’ she said after she had pressed against him. ‘You’re not carrying a gun, are you?’
‘Yes, I have to. Only a pistol.’
‘Oh my God, Charles, whatever’s happening to you? Only a pistol, for God’s sake. What a thing to say.’
He did not want to stand in the street talking about it. He felt conspicuous and awkward in civilian clothes in any case and felt as though the Browning might make him walk lopsided or with one shoulder held higher than the other. They went to the nearest café where a very young waitress served them tea at a dirty table, slopping it into their saucers. Charles would have preferred to go to the Europa Hotel but was unsure of his ability to explain away the Browning to the searchers at the entrance without drawing attention to himself. Janet talked about the Dublin wedding, which had been a very social affair. The people who had given her a lift had lent her their car for the afternoon and were to give her a lift to the airport that night if Charles could not.
‘I’ve only got two hours,’ he said. ‘One and three-quarters now.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Why can’t they let you have longer?’
‘Because they won’t.’
‘But why not?’
‘They just won’t. I was lucky to get this. We don’t have time off. Everyone else is working. We’re supposed to be fighting a war.’
‘It’s your own stupid fault for joining.’
The conversation was becoming familiar, and he had neither the desire nor the time to rework old ground. He wanted to go to bed with her and had hoped she might have somewhere to stay where they could have done it. ‘I could’ve booked a room in an hotel but I didn’t know how long I was going to have, nor how long you were going to have,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Well, it wouldn’t be worth it for two hours, would it?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Unless you just want a quick screw and then back to barracks. That’s what soldiers do when they’re fighting a war, isn’t it?’
‘It wasn’t just that.’ He had to acknowledge, but had not time to ponder upon, the eternal duplicity of the male. He asked her about her work among the deprived families of Wandsworth, questioning her in a detail that extended far beyond his real interest. She spoke enthusiastically about it and soon became more relaxed and friendly.
‘It’s such a pity you’ve only got two hours,’ she said, taking his hand upon the table. ‘I do miss you.’
‘I miss you,’ he said, and again postponed thought.
They walked around the centre of Belfast, holding hands and dawdling in the drizzle. He felt less conspicuous as part of a couple. ‘It all looks so ordinary,’ she said. ‘Just as though it’s had a few fires, that’s all. It’s difficult to believe what you hear about it.’
He found that introducing the city to a newcomer was a wholly unexpected pleasure. ‘The difficulty is that the extraordinary happens in the context of the ordinary. If it were a foreign city with foreign road signs and everything it would all be much easier to cope with and probably less of a strain. But the fact that it’s so ordinarily and shabbily British makes it that much more difficult and sinister. And the people who live in it love it. It’s got real heart for them. If they leave it they nearly aways come back.’
‘I can understand all that, but I can’t believe it’s really necessary for you to walk around with a gun under your jacket like some sort of amateur James Bond.’
‘But that’s just what I’m saying. It’s because it seems ordinary that you don’t believe it’s necessary. You need to see the other side of the city before you can understand that.’
‘Are you sure you’re not deluding yourselves and creating the very thing you claim to be opposing?’
‘As sure as I can be.’ He looked at her calmly confident gaze as they passed through the crowds, and despaired of being able to convey the horrible unease which the apparent ordinariness of it all gave him. The week before, a policeman in plain clothes had been shot dead in his car in the Crumlin Road as he waited at the traffic lights. His fiancée was seriously injured. Charles despaired, too, of ever being able adequately to describe to her what had happened in the cul-de-sac the other evening. ‘We live in different worlds,’ he added uselessly.
She took her hand away from his. ‘You didn’t have to choose this one.’
Her car was in one of the city centre car parks and he accepted her offer of a lift back to the Factory because time was pressing. He didn’t want her to drive into any of the dangerous areas but since she had said she would anyway – to see how people lived – he thought it better to let her drop him off and then drive back than to go wandering off alone in some such place as the new estate where strange cars driven by unknown English women were likely to attract hostile attention.
They took the borrowed Mini along the Falls Road and he pointed out well-known trouble spots. Signs of recent rioting were gratifyingly visible. She was impressed, though still would not admit the need for him to carry a pistol. ‘I mean, it’s like carrying a pistol in Dublin,’ she said. ‘It would be absurd.’
‘Dublin is not like Belfast.’
‘You’ve never been there.’
‘That makes no difference.’
‘Of course it does.’
He pointed to a corner shop. ‘A man was murdered in there four weeks ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some Protestant extremists walked in and shot him.’
‘What did you do about it?’
‘We weren’t here then.’
They were waiting to turn right into one of the narrow street
s that led eventually to the Factory, but their way was blocked by a group of women standing talking in the entrance to the street. Charles was so struck by their likeness to the harridans in the cul-de-sac that for some moments he relived his experiences of that evening, caught and frozen in a flash-back. He did not notice Janet’s growing impatience until she hooted indignantly. The women turned and looked down on them. A couple began swearing at them and very quickly several more people, including two men, came out of the corner shop to see what the trouble was. The next few seconds were a maze of vivid impressions for Charles in which the past was indistinguishable from the present. The ugly, hateful, contorted faces, the raised voices and harsh accents, the suddenness of it all and the ten-fold leap in tension brought him as near to blind panic as he had ever been. He did not know what was happening nor even whether he was doing anything about it. He sat in a kind of heavy, cold numbness, unable to respond. He was distantly aware of Janet shouting something through her open window and then the car jerked forward, the women parted and the narrow street was clear before them.
Janet accelerated angrily. ‘Really,’ she said, sounding, Charles thought afterwards, very like her mother, ‘anyone would think they owned the road, carrying on like that. Who on earth do they think they are? Stupid old bags. And one of them was holding a baby, did you see? She called me an English bitch. I told her she wasn’t fit to be a mother, standing in the middle of the road like that with a baby in her arms. If it hadn’t been for the baby I’d have run her over, the old cow. That’s just what she reminded me of, you know, a great, bellowing, stupid, ugly old cow.’
Charles said nothing at first. Very slowly, so that she would not notice, he took his hand away from the butt of his pistol, which he had grasped under his jacket. He did not remember gripping it. His mouth was dry, his throat tight and the palm of his hand tingling hot. He swallowed with some difficulty. ‘They are pretty awful, some of these people,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid my giving them a piece of my mind won’t have done much good for neighbourhood community relations. But, there you are, if they behave like that they must expect it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Serves them right if they’re unhappy.’ She changed gear and turned corners with unnecessary speed as he directed her towards the Factory. She pulled up abruptly outside the main gates, watched by the sentries. ‘God, what an awful place. D’you really have to live in there? I don’t know how you stand it.’
They kissed goodbye, a little awkwardly. ‘Write soon,’ she said.
‘I will.’
‘You’re all hot. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. It’s just coming back, you know.’
‘Are you sure, Charles? You’re sweating. You haven’t got ’flu or something, have you?’
‘Perhaps that’s it. I’ll let you know.’
‘I hope you’re all right. Look after yourself.’
‘And you.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’ He got out and she drove off with a wave, obviously buoyed up by her confrontation with the women. He walked slowly in through the gate.
‘Some ’ave all the luck, sir,’ said one of the sentries, with a grin.
Seconds after he had reported back into the ops room Chatsworth pounced upon him. ‘Did you screw her?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘There was nowhere to do it.’ It was a truthful response, but truthful in a trivial way. It was untruthful in that it allowed Chatsworth to assume that Charles shared his view of the relationship. Perhaps he did, ultimately, but the truth at that time was that he did not know how he viewed it.
‘Very unenterprising of you,’ said Chatsworth, disappointed. ‘There must be an empty sangar somewhere on the Peace Line. You’d have been all right as long as there wasn’t a riot.’
Charles was on duty until four the following morning, but when he finally crawled into his bed he was still preoccupied with his reaction to the women in the street that afternoon. Janet had reacted decisively and effectively. What she had done could even be called healthy and normal. He felt that his own reaction had been more than simple indecision. It had amounted to a paralysis of the conscious powers. Perhaps there was some excuse after the events in the cul-de-sac the other evening, or perhaps less because he should have learnt. He imagined that Janet would have coped with the cul-de-sac better than he had. She would certainly have fired the rubber-bullet gun, for all her stated dislike of violence. He, on the other hand, could well have shot someone dead that afternoon, acting unconsciously and unnecessarily out of fear. Fear, after all, was what it seemed to come down to.
5
Life in the Factory was monotonous but, paradoxically, the time seemed to pass quickly. Charles often had the feeling that there was much he should remember, perhaps even record in a diary, yet successive days and nights were so much alike that he could not sort one from the other. Features of military life that seemed at first to be undyingly memorable soon became so obvious and mundane that they were no longer noticed and were soon forgotten. Overall, it was the drudgery and the pettiness that were ingrained most deeply into his soul. Incidental details, such as what should be worn with what and when, had an importance which sometimes overshadowed even operational matters. At their worst these could give to Army life a horror unimagined by mere civilians, as Charles now realised. It was no one’s fault that the horror was so little known. The experience could not be conveyed to those who had not had it. It was like fear and suffering, an experience so particular to each man as to be ultimately untranslatable, except in general terms. Radio-watching during the long hours of the night, patrolling the dirty, unhappy and unfriendly streets, returning to a grim and noisy home where there was no possibility of privacy, eating, living and working with the same people amidst the sounds and smells of a hundred and twenty men cramped into poor conditions all contributed to a life which seemed literally to be monotone. The streets were no relief from the Factory nor the Factory from the streets, but it was necessary to keep changing one for the other in order to make both more bearable.
Yet the time passed quickly, perhaps because it was broken up. Even though the same activities were repeated day and night their order varied and the time of doing them varied. The working day, or night, was about seventeen hours, seven days a week; sleep was irregular and frequently disturbed; anyone who had a few minutes with nothing to do simply closed his eyes and usually experienced a rapid succession of very vivid dreams from which he could nevertheless emerge immediately because he never fully ceased to hear what was going on around him. Duties and watches were simply got through; no one thought further ahead than the end of the next one; tomorrow was irrelevant to today and yet it all would end sometime, and so the present was made endurable.
Henry Sandy came one day with a complicated form. He was supposed to compile a medical report on the working and living conditions of the soldiers. At a time when everyone looked pale and tired, he looked still worse.
‘You look like death warmed up,’ said Edward.
Henry proffered cigarettes to the smokers. ‘Shagged out,’ he explained. Henry and his medical team lived at the military hospital, where there was an abundance of nurses. The kindest interpretation of their behaviour, which he himself provided, was that his and his team’s debaucheries were a vicarious acting-out of the frustrated desires of the rest of the battalion.
‘Wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t make it sound as though you didn’t enjoy it,’ said Chatsworth. ‘You make it sound like a duty.’
‘That’s what it’s becoming,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not sure I do enjoy it. I don’t think I do really. I think I do it just to see if I’m right in thinking I’m not going to enjoy it. And I am.’
‘Why keep on doing it?’
‘In case I’m wrong, I s’pose. You never know your luck.’ He grinned and then giggled. ‘That’s not really why. I don’t know why. I just do it whenever I can. Perhaps I’m too em
otionally immature to say no, though Christ knows there’s little enough emotion involved.’
‘Well, I lack emotional maturity as well,’ said Chatsworth. ‘And I also lack the opportunity to be immature. What about me and Charles coming out one evening if we could fiddle it? Reporting sick or something.’
‘Great. Whenever you like. I can easily lay on a couple of nurses. I’m not sure that Charles really wants to, though.’
‘’Course he does. He’s just so emotionally mature that he’s frightened to admit it.’
Henry spent about an hour going over the Factory, ticking boxes on his form. When he returned to the ops room he said: ‘It’s unfit for human habitation. Too little light, poor ventilation, inadequate washing and toilet facilities, too much noise, too many people and the cookhouse is illegal.’
‘Could’ve told you that on the phone,’ said Edward. ‘Fit for soldiers, not fit for civil servants. God, imagine if they tried to send some of those fat bums in the MOD somewhere like this. Wish they would. Send a few of them out here for a week and they might spend a bit more money on the poor bloody Ackies who do their fighting for them.’ Edward, mug of tea in hand, overflowed with righteous indignation. ‘So what’s the good of your form, Henry? What’s going to happen, eh? What are they going to do about it? Sod-all, I bet.’
Henry shrugged. ‘They might close the cookhouse.’
Henry then had to inspect the sentry positions along the Peace Line, and so Charles took him round with a section that was doing a routine foot patrol. Most of the positions were incorporated into barriers that cut across streets, through which only pedestrians were allowed. Thus many streets were cut in half, Protestants on one side, Catholics on the other. The houses nearest the Peace Line, where they still stood, were usually unoccupied. They were blackened and scarred by riots and pockmarked by bullets. Flush against the wire defences at one point on the Catholic side, a row of new houses had been built to replace the dozen or so that had been burnt in that area during the early riots. They stretched right across a broad street with their blank rear walls facing the Protestants. Children played against the barriers for most of the day, whether there was school or not.
