At the Break of Day

by Margaret Graham

  ‘You should have known,’ he screamed again.

  They marched, out of step, into the cookhouse, drinking sweet thick tea, eating greasy tinned tomatoes, and bacon, then tipping the remains into slop bins whose putrid smell reached out into the steamy hall. They moved along, sluicing their cutlery in the lukewarm tank. Bits clung to the forks and the knives.

  Then back to the barracks and the lavatories. The floors were swept, the windows polished. Jack took the ablutions instead of Sid because Sid was shaking and pale. He had called out for his mother just before dawn.

  Jack handed him his window cloth, and with Sam from Liverpool hurled buckets down the clogged stinking pans so that the inspecting officer wouldn’t complain, wondering all the time how this mad-house could be allowed to exist.

  They had their hair cut, the shears pulling and scraping far up their necks. They had a medical inspection in the afternoon, sitting on benches in a building which stank of urine and disinfectant and gleamed with green and white paint. They all passed and all groaned.

  That night they blancoed their webbing, pressed their clothing, ironing over a sheet of brown paper which had been wetted with a shaving brush. They breathed in the pungent smell of steam and scorched paper, feeling the heat on their faces, their heads already bursting with the ache of tiredness. There were only two irons between the thirty of them. The night was endless. The music blared. Sid slept and Jack pressed his then wrote to Maisie asking her to send spare pyjamas and underpants so that he could keep the Army issue ready at all times for inspection.

  He wrote to Rosie, sitting on the floor because the bed was laid out for inspection. He told her that all he could smell was scorched, damp, brown paper, all he could hear was cursing, all he could feel was the ache of tiredness. The ache of missing her.

  ‘God, I’m bushed,’ groaned Nigel.

  They spent the last hour of the night on the floor, to avoid messing up their beds, Sid and Nigel too. They were scared, Jack was scared, of the Sergeant with the swagger stick and eyes like bullets and for the second night he was too tired to dream of Rosie.

  They were right to be scared. The Sergeant tipped their pressed clothes, their lockers out on to the cold stone floor but they didn’t turn and look. They stood to attention at the foot of their beds, their faces set, their minds raw with anger, with despair, with the confusion of tiredness.

  ‘You’re a bloody shower,’ the Sergeant shrieked.

  They had their injections that day then they polished the studs on the soles of their boots, the brasses again, the windows, the tables, the buckets, the floors. They polished the words off the lid of the boot polish tin, set it to one side for inspection and bought another for use.

  They pressed the military frieze into sharp creases again. They covered everything in newspaper so that nothing would get dirty between the evening and the morning. They moved by numbers, they didn’t think, they didn’t feel, they didn’t dream.

  ‘God, I’m bushed, exquisitely bushed,’ Nigel groaned.

  ‘Go to sleep then,’ Jack murmured. ‘Give us all a break.’

  The next day they drilled. The rifles were heavy, their shoulders were sore from them. They marched, they halted, they turned, they about-turned. Sid stumbled on the turn, every time. The Corporal swore. They stopped for a smoke break, Jack, Nigel and the others, but Sid was marched up and down, up and down, and still he stumbled and his face looked like the faces of the sisters who had been separated in Somerset, like Lee’s when his father turned from him.

  Then they all marched, again and again, and their boots rubbed but they were not allowed to stop for lunch because Sid still couldn’t turn and that night Sam cursed Sid, and the others did too, and tipped him out of his bed and threw his locker over because the minutes had ticked away for tea break too, and still he had made mistakes.

  ‘Get out of it,’ Jack shouted and Nigel helped him push them away.

  They picked up Sid’s things, turned their backs to his tears, giving him privacy, shielding him so that the others couldn’t see either. They were tired, dog tired, but they laid out their beds for inspection, then Sid’s, and walked him to the Naafi though their feet were raw and burned with each step.

  ‘Just a quick one,’ Jack said.

  ‘Builds up the sugar level,’ Nigel murmured, his lids drooping.

  They bought Sid beer and listened as he told them that he got so worried he couldn’t think and it was then that he made mistakes and he didn’t think he could bear it.

  They bought him more beer so that he would feel too ill to think and the next day he didn’t stumble or the next, or the next, and he bought them the beers those nights. But the next week the Corporal shouted at him, rode him, cursed him again until he stumbled on the turn again the next day and the beers in the evening didn’t help.

  Jack watched as the boy’s hands began to shake, and the taunts began again as the whole squad was punished, missing lunch, missing tea. He watched as the light faded from Sid’s eyes and felt anger above his tiredness.

  So when the Corporal lined them up and the Sergeant marched with clipped strides down the ranks, pointing his stick at Jack, he moved it to one side, his eyes hard like the Sergeant’s, his hands sweating with the fear he wouldn’t show. He didn’t want Sid to suffer any more.

  He could cope. He was stronger, he was nineteen, a man. Much older than the sister who had been killed by a car when she ran away from the town to the village to see her Sarah. Much older than Lee who had been pushed aside by Ollie.

  He was marched away, sworn at, cursed, pushed, his head yanked back by his short hair.

  ‘Got a nice little job for you,’ the Corporal said, his voice low, his lips thin. ‘You’re not going to know what day of the bleeding week it is when you’ve finished, sonny.’

  He was handed scissors and spent the afternoon on hands and knees cutting the grass around the parade ground. The ants scrambled amongst the grass, the dandelions were acrid, their milk spilling white on to the ground. His thumb and finger were blistered. He changed hands. That thumb and finger became blistered too.

  He changed again, the sun sharp on his neck. He could hear the Corporal, and the boots.

  ‘Forward march.

  ‘Halt.

  ‘Turn.

  ‘About turn.

  ‘Smoke Break.

  ‘Forward march.

  ‘Halt.

  ‘Turn.

  ‘About turn.’

  His thumb and fingers were bleeding, he padded them with grass he had cut. It was cool but with each cut the pain dug deep.

  He didn’t break for tea. He worked on until the ants and the sun had gone. And then in full kit, he doubled around the tarmacked square on blistered feet which bled warm blood into his boots. But Sid was left alone and that helped the pain of his hands and feet as he lay on the floor all night because there was an inspection in the morning.

  The next day he was told to shin up, then jump from gym ropes he could hardly clasp by a sweating instructor who moved the mat as he jumped and laughed as the rope burned his hand and then the mat burned his shins. He laughed as his elbow, then his shoulder crashed on to the hard polished floor.

  ‘Think you know more than the Army, do you?’ the instructor ground out. ‘Think you can cheek a Sergeant, do you? We’ll see about that.’

  He was put on fatigues because he was last out of the changing rooms when the instructor hid his boots, slapping his rubber slipper in his hand as he laughed, whipping it across Jack’s back. But he wouldn’t show the pain, or the anger.

  The next day he drilled with raw feet, threw his rifle against his bruised shoulder and held the butt in a hand that throbbed and bled but he showed nothing. There was no smoke break for him and he winked at Sid and Nigel as he marched, looking at the sky, the clouds, thinking of Lee, of Rosie.

  He scrubbed the walls in the cookhouse all evening and watched the cockroaches scuttling out from behind the pipes. But none of this mattered. He
was tough, he could take it. He was alive. He was nineteen. Rosie loved him. Lee was all right. Maisie and Ollie were all right. Rosie had written and said so.

  The next week the Corporal found a speck of dirt on the back of Jack’s buckle and grinned as he extended his punishment. He spent the evening syphoning petrol then rubbing graffiti off the lavatory walls with it, tasting it, smelling it. He vomited all night in the latrines.

  But he could take it, he told Sid and Nigel who came and stood by him. It was Sam’s bloody handwriting.

  ‘How exquisite,’ Nigel said.

  They laughed, all of them, even Sam, who polished Jack’s boots for him that night, and bought him a beer, while Sid stayed behind and laid out his kit. Nigel bought him another and because he was such a tight arse Jack wondered why.

  ‘You’re keeping that bastard off our backs. We’re extraordinarily grateful, you know.’

  He didn’t understand why Jack laughed, why he laughed even when he lay on the floor beside his bed, and neither did Jack himself, especially in the dead of night when the laughter choked into silent tears and he churned between images of the sisters and Lee and Rosie.

  He peeled potatoes when the Corporal decided his locker was a disgrace, though there was nothing wrong with it. He watched the squad run to PE in baggy shorts and singlets, carrying their plimsolls, wearing their boots, their pale hairy legs thickening already from the drill. He thought of Butlins, of Harold, and cut into the potato once more. Rosie had written, she still loved him. Lee was happy. Maisie and Ollie were fine. And he was fine. He was nineteen. He could take it.

  Sid shared his food parcels with Nigel and Jack. They were all fitter by the fourth week. The Corporal still shouted, still punished, but Jack hadn’t broken. The men were his friends, they cheered as he cut the grass, yet again. They helped him off with his pack after he had been doubled round the square, yet again.

  They woke him when he slept too soundly during the education talks in a room thick with smoke as they were told, yet again, of the Empire, and the pox, and they grinned when he winked at them. But he was nearly finished. He was nearly broken. He had no dignity left, no power to save himself. No nothing. Just Rosie’s letters and the thought of the hand that had written the words.

  In the fifth week the Corporal left his bike outside the hut when the Sergeant had ordered it to be put away and the Corporal left their squad with the Sergeant’s language still thick on the air. The men blew up johnnies bought from the barber and let them fly from the door as he passed.

  The Lance-Jack took his place, a new stripe on his arm and a voice which was not so loud, not so cruel, and now the fatigues ended and Jack slept at night. At last he slept and had the time and the privacy to dream of Rosie.

  In September his squad cursed and swore on the assault course, feeling the skin scrape off their stomachs as they scrambled up and over the nets carrying packs filled with bricks, feeling the straps cutting into their shoulders, humping Sid up before them because last one home got fatigues.

  They plunged from logs into murky water-filled ditches, spitting out filth, pushing against the weight of the pack, forcing their heads up and the panic down. They raced and beat the squad from Waterloo barracks in the cross country and the Lance-Jack bought them all beers.

  They sat up that night and cheered as Nigel sang and danced and Sam called, ‘You’d make a lovely tart.’

  Jack wrote to Rosie and told her. They watched new squads arrive and stumble and scramble, and tossed them cigarettes and told them it would be a bleeding picnic.

  They shot on the rifle range, feeling the Yorkshire breeze in their hair, the first hint of winter in its coldness, lying full stretch on their stomachs. He wrote to Rosie and told her of the smell of the ground which still had the summer tight in its grasp, of the men, who were now moulding into a team, almost in spite of themselves.

  They were paid.

  ‘One pace forward.

  ‘Two, three, salute.

  ‘Two, three, take pay.

  ‘Take paybook.’ Open top left pocket.

  ‘Pay and paybook correct, sir.’ Place pay and paybook in pocket.

  ‘Two, three, salute.

  ‘Two, three, about turn.

  ‘Left right, left right.’ Three bags full. Sir. There were drinks in the Naafi. Only a few days more then a transit camp. Postings came in. Sid was a clerk, Nigel a Sergeant in Education. He didn’t want a commission now. He was one of the men. Jack was a squaddie.

  The next day, the last before the passing-out parade, they squatted on the grass with the weak late summer sun on their faces around a Sten gun which was taken to pieces by a dirty-fingered NCO.

  Jack said, ‘Be gentle with the grass, Corp. It’s been very carefully cut.’ The squad laughed, the Corporal too.

  The Corporal put the gun together, then took it apart again. Jack could smell the oil, see it beneath the Corporal’s fingernails, and he remembered Ed in that Somerset village. The oil beneath his fingers as he threw the ball to Jack, the drawl as he shouted at him to pitch it higher next time, the sun shining on his red hair. Where was he now? Why had he never written?

  The gun was in pieces again. They tried to put it together and failed. They tried again and succeeded and the smell of the oil was heavy and it was the same as the smell on Ed’s hand as he had ruffled his hair and asked when his mom was coming down again.

  ‘The aim of war,’ said the Corporal, ‘is to kill the enemy.’

  Sam murmured, ‘Don’t tempt me, sunshine.’

  The others laughed and the Corporal called the comedian out to the front, standing Sam there, pointing to his head.

  ‘Don’t aim at his head. You’ll miss, and if you hit it, you’ll find there’s no brain, just air if it’s like this specimen.’

  Jack pulled at the grass, floating it down in the faint breeze.

  ‘Don’t aim at his legs. You won’t kill him.’

  Had Ed killed anyone? Had he sat in the sun and listened and learned. Ed had needed to. They didn’t. The war was over. Frank got over-worried. There was the bomb now. There wouldn’t be another war.

  ‘Aim at the body. That’ll get them.’

  Jack had applied to become a clerk. It was a cushy number but he had been refused. The officer said his schooling was incomplete though his IQ was high and that he would be directed towards the Infantry because his rifle range report had been good. Jack looked at the Corporal and then at the Sten. At least he’d never have to kill anyone. And nothing mattered now, because basic training was over. He was going home after passing out tomorrow. For two whole days he would be home, with Rosie.

  CHAPTER 11

  The carriage was as full of smoke as it had been on the journey up to Yorkshire, and the floor as littered with cigarette stubs, but now it was different. They had passed out. They would not have to go through anything like that again. Nothing as bad ever again.

  They were to be clerks, teachers, wireless operators, or squaddies and then their lives could begin again. And for the next thirty-six hours they were going home. They all laughed again, as Sid won a hand of cards and Nigel dealt another on the table they had made by heaping a coat over a kitbag.

  Jack looked out of the window, the cards worn and slippery in his hand. Rain raced down and across the glass, jagged from the slipstream, and he could see little, but as they drew near London the houses grew thicker. There were chimneys belching smoke, there were the same damaged buildings. Nothing had changed in two months. But what about the people? What about his family? Were they all right?

  The train was drawing in, shunting, slowing, stopping. They hauled kitbags out on to the platform, then up on to their shoulders, walking in a group. The smell of London was the same but Jack felt as he had done when he returned from Somerset. Strange, different. And his home had been different too. Was it now?

  They took the Underground or other trains, waved, slapped shoulders and couldn’t say to one another how they felt. This had been a
family, and now they might never see one another again. So they waved, laughed, looked away, looked back, and Nigel, Sid and Jack stood still, looked, nodded then drifted into the crowd. What else could they do?

  Rosie was waiting at home, at the entrance to his back yard. The rain had stopped, the fog had settled, raw, close. He saw her as he walked down the alley, leaning against the wall, her scarf round her mouth, her coat belted, the collar up. He watched her straighten and run and heard the thud as his kitbag rolled from his shoulders into the drain and then she was there, in his arms. He pulled down the scarf, kissed her warm lips, searched her mouth with his, felt her against him, her arms around him, and the strangeness was gone. She was here. He was home.

  ‘They’re all right,’ she said into his neck. ‘There’s been no rows. No trouble.’

  Then there was the sound of running feet, panting breath, and Lee was there, clasping his leg, crying, laughing, punching, and Jack picked him up, threw him into the air, caught him, hugged him. He hadn’t changed. It had only been weeks. It seemed like years.

  Ollie and Maisie bought in beer from the pub, and Rosie ate with them because Maisie said every minute was precious when you were in love. Rosie looked away from the bleakness of her eyes, back to Jack who sat balancing on two legs of the chair. He was broader, fitter. A man. And when he had held her she had felt shy against his strength, against the roughness of his stubbled chin, against the voice which was deeper, stronger.

  ‘Do you still love me?’ she had asked.

  ‘More than ever. You are what I dreamed of at night. You are my world. You keep me going and you keep my family safe for me. I shall never love anyone else.’

  She had felt the pulse in his throat as she touched his neck and then his hands where the scissors had scarred. She picked up his hands and kissed them.

  The two days passed too quickly. Rosie waved from the back yard. He wouldn’t let her go with him to the station where they would be pushed and pulled by the crowd, where he would see her face as the train left.