A House in Order

by Nigel Dennis

  That night it began to blow harder from the east (temp. approx. 28 deg.) and reminded me that I, not the guard, was the one who was too late. One good gust alone took all my paper panes out of the east wall and sent a dozen of my clumsy pots rolling over the staging. A running ceiling of clouds shut off the moon, and I had to lie between my blankets doing nothing, for fear of alarming the guard when he poked in his torch. I put things right next morning, but that wind gave me a reminder that everything I had done so far was nothing. Any fool can make a pot and stick a plant into it, but only a much bigger fool could imagine nursing a couple of hundred such through screaming winds. I know that in the back of my mind I was imagining the arrival of things that would pull me through – a hefty slab of creamy putty, some glass and a cutter; some proper pots found lying in a shed somewhere and dumped outside my door; odd bits of felt and another pair of blankets; a change of clothes; an overcoat; even a dirty old oil-heater, which I saw myself shining up and putting into working order. I suppose I imagined these things coming simply because they went with my rising hopes of staying alive, or perhaps because I took for granted that though I was not in the same prison as the others I could expect much the same helps. At my next inspection, I told myself, I would have something to show in the way of work and absolute obedience, and would probably be asked if I had enough to keep me going. I also expected some admiration, for having made a lot out of practically nothing, and in admiration, however restrained, I would find grounds for feeling safer.

  Within a week I began to pray that the inspection would come soon, because the weather turned completely in my favour and got my work off to a wonderful start. Those first cold blasts of winter are nearly always followed by warm days, and I got such a succession of these (approx. 70 deg.) that only a handful of my more delicate pottings had to be thrown away. I had time to sort out seeds, wash my foul uniform, clean up the shed and strengthen my pots and makeshift panes: I even started mixing some of my precious disinfectant and yellow soap and making a rudimentary sand out of them for killing pests. I took care to be busy whenever I saw officers passing down the garden path, but they were a serious lot, with plenty to do, and I never got a glance from one of them. I was not discouraged by this, because every day I could look down the sunny slope to the camp and thank my stars that I was not being marched in column to the fields to get up swedes and beet, or tramping in and out of the big gate shouldering perfectly aligned dustbins to the absurd bellowings of NCOs.

  But when no inspection came after a week, and then ten days, and then a fortnight, I began to feel worried and bewildered. The days were so short now, and it was absurd to think that an Indian summer could last longer. It was no consolation to pick up a pot and know that the roots inside it were taking hold: the very thought of having made such an advance made me worry more about how I could keep it up. One day I looked out and they were putting up wooden shutters all round the verandah, so as not to be caught napping when the weather turned; and the very next morning I woke up with a dreadful surprise, to find the greenhouse under snow.

  As I ran about, sorting out the plants that must come into the shed with me every night and making coverings for the ones that must stay out, I cooked up the wonderful notion that inspections took place, probably, at monthly intervals, and that all would be well if I kept my end up until the month was out. When I saw my guards in their tough winter coats for the first time, and even mittens on their hands, I told myself that it would naturally be troops first and prisoners last, but every dog would have his day. I couldn’t bear to look at the plants that had given in already and were drooping down their paper holders: they made my sunny hopes of pleasing the enemy with flowers too ridiculous and childish.

  I suppose it was what you would call a kind winter, in that it stayed away from its deadly forms until the month was out. Even in the garden, a lot of plants threw off the snow and stood up again in washy colours. Then four soldiers were marched in with bagging hooks and brooms and by evening there was only the smouldering end of a bonfire and the surviving shrubs in chopped forms of attention along the rows. One glance at them was enough to make my hopes disappear – their white wounds, all in the wrong places and dealt out in total ignorance of their needs – told me just what I might expect myself. My last burst of optimism came when I looked down and saw the prisoners below turn out in old, faded coats: I reasoned that there was an official date for winter issue and that it would soon apply to me. I was still telling myself this when the water stopped running from my brass tap and every drop of condensed water in the greenhouse turned into a solid bead. The guard no longer opened my door when he flashed his torch at me in the night, because it was too much effort to budge it from the frost, and my meals reached me as cold as ice-cream – once, with a free donation of more disinfectant and yellow soap. Now, when officers passed down the path, I stared hungrily at them, longing to attract their attention; but as on that very first day when I had been too frightened to announce myself by waving or calling, I got no further than the beginnings of a croak and the trembling of a cold finger. I spent most of every day banging backwards and forwards between the house door and the back of the shed, always carrying a pot to make my behaviour look sensible, but doing it really because my boots felt like ice bricks, and my whole body, up to my scalp, would never stop shivering: in fact, my whole uniform stood out as stiff as frozen armour, with me chattering inside it like a rattling stick. I went silly over the odd patches of felt and matting, winding them into belly-bands, shawls and incredible vests, only to get terrified of using them on myself instead of my plants, and putting them all off again, to wrap round the stiff pots and wilting shoots: when my own misery became unspeakable, I ran round doing the very opposite. A greenhouse catches every ray of sun and multiplies its power unbelievably much, so there were many mornings when I stood under my glass and felt myself and all my stuffings going through such a piercing thaw that I seemed to be covered in ice-water and stinking like a pond. Than I used to try and dry out my thawing stuffings by laying them on the staging; but by four in the afternoon the sun would be gone and all my coverings, still half-wet, would go onto me again and harden back into stiff ice within the half hour. In my earlier optimism, I had made bundles for a good many plants and hung them under the roof of the shed to wait for potting in the spring; but now, the sight of so much old paper and canvas just hanging in the frozen air was more than I could face and I took down these bundles every night and slept hugging them between my blankets. What I heaped on my feet, which never warmed day or night, was beyond description; it was a mound of junk that matched the bundles but never was enough to get the frozen iron out of my boots.

  I no longer felt the slightest fear, either for my life or of being beaten, because it was obvious that nobody had any designs on me at all: I simply didn’t exist. I survived on orders given two months before: these were carried out exactly as decreed, not forgetting the ration of yellow soap, the disinfectant, and taking away my bucket once a week. I got, in fact, exactly what I had asked for, not a scrap more or less – a perfect independence and solitude. Clearly, it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to live or die: so far as anyone else was concerned, the difference was neither here nor there. But why bother, then, to keep me at all? How did they forget me and still want me?

  I no longer wanted them. All my hopes now went where the weather sent them, which was back to where they had been when I ran down the road on the very first day, screaming to be locked up with the others. I no longer cared a scrap how many idiots and buffoons might surround me just so long as I could feel a moment’s warmth. Every day I looked through the glass across the snow to the prison camp and drove myself mad with imagining the heat that must be there – the huge piles of blankets, the warm steam of eight hundred bodies, the soups that would seem boiling by comparison with mine. When I watched them on the march, I could imagine the coldness of their hands and faces as they shovelled snow and carried food to the cattle, but t
he very thought of the mildness of their discomfort compared with my own misery made me both hate them and long to be with them. And what of the prison authorities? Had they totally forgotten a prisoner who was properly theirs? I thought of the terrifying face of the sergeant who had brought his four men for me before – and every day I imagined this monster tramping again up the frozen path with his men and the tears of relief that would pour down into my frozen beard as I tried to walk away with them. I even tortured myself thinking that I should not be able to walk so far and would be left to die on a frozen road only a few hundred yards from that wonderful heaven of stores and blankets. Then, I told myself that I would rather be left to the crows like that than freeze to death here like a ghost that everybody had forgotten.

  But like all my fancies so far, these latest ones turned out to be nonsense. I hadn’t been forgotten by anyone, and I found this out pretty soon on the worst night I had had so far, when there was a most horrible north wind that I hoped would be the end of me. At first, I didn’t hear the commotion that blew up outside, it just joined with the wind as part of the howling in my freezing ears. Then, a great blast of that wind burst in on me and I saw the monster sergeant at the greenhouse door, and flashes of light behind him. He was into my shed in a second and had me on my feet by the shoulder: whether I could walk or not was of no consequence because he pulled me after him as if I were a sack of bones. Then, abruptly, at the open door, he shouted something, dropped me, and was off into the darkness with incredible speed, while two of my guards ran up and lights came on on the verandah. One of the guards ran towards me, and picking me up by the neck just as the sergeant had done, dragged me into my hut again and dumped me: he then stationed himself at the door and was joined there later by the other. The two of them paced to and fro there until the morning, when they were relieved, and taken up the verandah steps by a corporal.

  At about three o’clock on the same afternoon, the young officer appeared on the verandah steps and nodded to my two guards. Then he went off again with his quick, lively step, and my guards followed, with me between them.

  We went into a big room that I had not seen before, but with the officers sitting in their usual row at the back, and the ‘student of character’ in the middle place. They were all laughing so much, but trying to control it, that they just sat quivering, and one gruff word from one of them sent them all shaking, like schoolboys. But what astonished me was that they could sit there laughing without their overcoats on: I stared at their collars and ties and thought they must all be mad to feel so happy in such a freeze. Then a whole pool of water began to form round my boots and drops of water ran down me as if I was a gutter, and still I stared in amazement at the officers and felt that the chattering of my teeth and the shaking of my body came from seeing them so lightly dressed in such a freezing room.

  They paid no attention to the puddles on the parquet all round me, and just went on sharing the pleasure they were getting from their joke. I knew that they were not laughing at me, because none of them even looked at me or seemed to know that I had come in. But after a while, the Colonel changed his tone and put on a serious face, which the others all copied at once. They then all fixed their eyes on me, but not with any real interest, and the interpreter began as usual:

  Q: The Colonel is aware that a most irregular and shameful attempt was made last night to kidnap you, by guards from the prison camp. He assumes you would not deny that this attempt took place?

  A: No. They came.

  Q: Had you seen any of them before?

  A: The sergeant.

  Q: Where had you seen the sergeant?

  A: When he came before, with a letter.

  Q: You are sure it was the same sergeant?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Would you sign your name and swear to it?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Good. Would you like a chair?

  A: Pardon, this room is so cold. I am freezing in it.

  Q: Take that chair and sit down. You will become used to the warmth in a few minutes…. The Colonel has drawn up a report of last night’s shocking incident. As you were the proposed victim, he would like your signature to the following statement, which we have drawn up for you. Your attention, please, while I read it to you:

  ‘On the night of January 23rd, at an hour I don’t know exactly, I was asleep as usual in the gardener’s quarters when my door was forced open and a sergeant in the uniform of the prison camp ran in and dragged me from my bed. I saw other men running about outside but I didn’t know who they were. I had seen the sergeant come before with a letter, so I knew him. When the alarm was given, the sergeant released me and ran away, and I returned to my quarters. I was bruised in many places by the sergeant’s violence and suffered extreme shock. I have no doubt that an attempt was made to take me from my quarters by force, which I am sure is contrary to military regulations.’

  Do you agree that that is correct?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Here is a pen. Can you hold it?

  A: Yes.

  Q: The Colonel asks: Do you not use the soap with which you are supplied?

  A: Oh, I try to.

  Q: He concludes that you could try harder. He asks if you realize that you are a privileged guest?

  A: Yes, of course.

  Q: He is going to be frank and tell you that just before this disgraceful incident occurred he had given up hope of being able to keep you here and was about to hand you over to the Commandant. Now, thanks to this scandalous incident, he will be able to prolong the battle on your behalf with better ammunition than he had before …

  Apparently, this was their joke, directed against the Commandant, because they all shook with laughter at it, only the Colonel keeping a very straight face.

  … He intends to appeal to higher authority against the Commandant’s flagrant invasion of these premises. As such appeals travel extremely slowly, pausing for long intervals at each desk they come to …

  Even the Colonel couldn’t refrain from laughing at this point.

  … he asks me to assure you that you need have no fear of being taken away for a considerable time. Is your mind, then, at rest?

  A: Yes, thank you.

  Q: The Colonel asks if you will kindly pray that the same rest may be granted to the Commandant’s?

  This was their last burst of amusement, and the Colonel rose from the table, without waiting for me to answer.

  When the guard shut my greenhouse door behind me, I stood in the dark like someone in a frozen cave and could hardly tell where I was. My eyes were filled with flashes of the electric lights in the officers’ room, and the darkness I was in now seemed to be a sheer impossibility. As for the coldness of everything, it was beyond imagining, though I could feel the ice under my boots well enough and feel the water in my clothes stop running and freeze my uniform into the old armour of stiff ice. I felt that if I had never been taken out, I might hope to live, but as it was, I was knowing my prison properly for the first time, and seeing that no person could stay alive in it. But at the same moment I found myself jumping up and down and slapping myself, in my old routine against freezing to death, while tears ran down my face because it broke my heart to think that if the Commandant had kept his patience for only a few more days, I should be in the warmth of the common prison. For an hour or two it seemed to me that to have taken me out of my frozen hole, warmed me, and then put me back to die, was the cruellest suffering I had had so far, and I couldn’t imagine accustoming myself again to a life that I had had so much time to get used to before. But like nearly all the things I fancied or believed, this turned out to be nonsense too. When I got between my blankets, full of icy food, with my junk bundle piled on my feet and my other bundles in my arms, everything was back to where it had been before – the same teeth chattering incessantly, the same roar of heart-beats in my ears, the same struggle to hug my bundles tighter to my body and work my toes in my boots. But I did remember one thing about the past day, and that was th
e date which had been put on the document. It signified that the days were growing longer. I heard myself repeat that word all night through the rattling of my teeth – ‘Longer’ – though I soon said it like a parrot without feeling that it meant anything.

  Next morning, I remembered it, and it meant nothing at all. The sky was low and grey with gales of snow whirling out of it in bursts and the country was like the tundra (approx. – 10). When I saw the prisoners march out and meet the blizzard in their stiff columns, I began to cry again and hate them for their cosy life: it drove me to rage to think that they would go home one day with tales of their sufferings in a winter prison, and sit by the fire describing proudly the discipline they had kept under awful trials … I went berserk that morning with tears and hatred, shaking my fist, laughing and sneering: I called them every degraded name I could think of, and when some of them, all in unison, began to sing – all about whores and beloved mothers – I let out a cat-call and burst into howls, so that my guard, very much annoyed, came to the door and drew a finger across his throat. The very next morning brought the first white sun of February – most magical of months to the greenhouse grower – but I was past recognizing it for what it was and only felt the miserableness of its pale and disturbing light. By next day, it was gone, and everything was black again, with the horrible, dirty ice solid as ever under my feet and me skipping on it like a deformed creature, my hands buried under my arms and my chin hugged to my chest. At some point in one of these dances, I lost my glasses, and the whole landscape beyond the garden disappeared: however much I stared, I could see nothing of the prison camp at all, which set my mind working at once trying to picture it in my mind’s eye, with absurd results. I didn’t stop at inventing blankets inches thick of fluffy wool and numberless radiators and stoves that filled the air with a sirocco: all the oafs inside whom I had hated so lately as cattle and despised all my life as vulgarians, turned into saints, and even the things that were most disgusting about them – their stupid, repetitive jokes and their odious forms of chummy behaviour – got changed in my mind to the habits of angels. I pictured myself with them over and over again, with a bench pulled up to the stove and room being made for me at the warmest end: they gave me warm, stolen socks and oiled boots and fed me with mugs of hot coffee: in their brainless language they tried to tell me how much they shared my sufferings, and swore with their usual obscenities that I’d ‘be OK now, cocky’ and ‘snug as a cat’s arse’ and God knows how many other bits of nonsense of that sort, all so maudlin that I spent half my time in tears, loving the plain goodness of simple idiots. Some of the absurdities I imagined were beyond belief – everyone died for me, everyone loved me, everyone was a soul bringing me bowls of hot food, and everyone wondered how I could have survived such horrors and swore to do his piece in comforting and rewarding me.