by Alan Hackney
Ever since these labours he had sat in the front room of the place, with an air of languid, potential ferocity (as if one would not be surprised to see him suddenly snatch and dissect a harmless insect), perpetually stroking an intense cat, which protruded from his jacket, and watching a fabulously large and incessant stream of customers.
For this, the war had been largely responsible. The obvious demi-mondaine character of the place was attractive to some. To others, who might hardly scrape up a ration book among a round dozen, it was an essential source of food.
Stanley was fascinated by the tail of the cat throughout his lunch. It hung down like a subsidiary beard over the Armenian’s stomach and switched about here and there, hovering like the hand of an indecisive pickpocket. The Armenian’s stare was patient and objective. It took in Catherine’s elegant clothing (she had always shopped at Harrods even through the lean periods which had been Philip’s frequent lot over the three years of their marriage) and rejected with something like courtesy the warm glance she accorded him.
Catherine talked incessantly till the coffee, for which the Parapluie was execrated by even its most enthusiastic patrons, waving gaily to every third customer, and telling the name, life history (and in case of doubt, the sex) of each to her brother.
“Well, look here,” said Philip. “There’s probably no time for the Brass Farthing before they close. It’s two.”
Stanley started.
“My train!” he moaned. “It’s at 2.5!”
He scrabbled feverishly under the table for his webbing equipment.
“Good gracious,” said Catherine. “Will you be arrested? My poor sweet! Can’t you ring them up and explain? I always used to do that, in the Land Army. Some farmers were quite beastly at first, but they soon got the idea. Shall I ring up?”
“No,” said Stanley hastily. “No. I’d better get to Victoria and see what can be done. Wait a minute.” He got out his warrant and studied the back of it.
“R.T.O.” he said. “That’s it. See the R.T.O.”
They caught a bus.
At Victoria Catherine said: “I’ll look after your umbrella, darling. You’ll give them a twitch going in with that.”
Stanley went into the R.T.O.’s office and joined a queue.
It might have been a queue in the Buttery of his college. A curious collection of obvious ex-undergraduates in ill-fitting battledresses and equipment were having their passes stamped with rapidity by an R.E. sergeant, prematurely grizzled and hollow-eyed. As he stamped them he made briskly opinionated comments to another apathetic sergeant at his side.
“Look at these geezers,” he said, stamping away. “You ever seen a shower like this come in? Done up like a sackapertaters. Think they was workin’ their tickets, steada first day called up. Bus broke down! Left me case in the Tube! One bloke says: ‘I come over dizzy sudden.’ I said: ‘Yer,’ I said, ‘comin’ the old soldier already?’ All you men!” he honked abruptly. “Catch the 3.5!”
They all drifted outside and clustered loosely together, as if they were seeking warmth and would have got closer but for not having been introduced.
Catherine came up again with a packet of sandwiches, and hooked Stanley’s umbrella into his webbing belt.
*
The electric train braked relentlessly. A large man, standing to get down a wicker hamper from the rack, sat down suddenly on Stanley with a furious cry of “Bastard!”
“Gravestone East!” shrilled a voice outside. It was a porter, female and muscular.
Stanley heaved his suitcase to the barrier and out into the station-yard. The loose group formed up again and made its way hopefully to an army lorry. Here they waited for ten minutes till a driver slammed into the cab and drove indifferently away, leaving them in the roadway.
A corporal of the military police came up to them.
“Barracks?” he said briefly. “Mile up on the right. Best get weavin’, else be late.”
Meekly they picked up their belongings and straggled up the road, past mean shops and a peeling hoarding, and then along the faded green railings of the barracks.
At the gate stood two sergeants and a group of corporals.
“Guard-Room, Guard-Room!” they said, pointing. “Report in.”
They were snappy and prim. Their stripes gleamed with white ink. One or two of the corporals, in an excess of energy, stamped their iron heels on the asphalt with absent-minded precision.
Stanley queued with the others in the Guard-Room and then waited outside.
The barracks had originally centred round the drill square. To the right of the gate stood the Officers’ Mess and Quarters, girdled by some gap-toothed urban shrubbery. Across the expanse of the square were large buildings in Council Estate red brick bearing names of campaigns: Assam, Mesopotamia, Peninsula. These were newer than the Officers’ Quarters, and had replaced the wooden buildings of the former mule lines. To the far left ran a long hotchpotch of yellow brick, grey-slated, single-storey edifices, now serving as offices and stores, while immediately inside the gates, on the left, stood the rickety “F” Block, an ugly, flimsy, two-storey structure in buff-painted weather-boarding. It seemed doubtful whether it could support the slates of its roof, but it had, in fact, survived a whole series of condemnations.
The Duke of Wellington had thought little of it on its erection. Successive Commanding Officers had put in for its demolition, and on the eve of the Crimean War it had been condemned. Hostilities, however, had brought a timely reprieve, and it survived till 1897, when preparations were again made for pulling it down. The outbreak of the Boer War had saved it once more and it was used as a vast blanket store. 1914, again, was no time to be fussy, and for four years a series of drafts slept uncomfortably in it, while cold winds poked in at them from all the seams of its woodwork. When in 1939 its demolition had been finally agreed on by the War Office, the then Commanding Officer, an acute mind, made a bet with the Quartermaster that war would break out that year. One small outhouse had actually been cleared when the international conflict put a stop to all building and it again acquired an enhanced value. Drafts still passed through it, and it was taken care of by two wizened men of Depot Company, who walked a daily hundred and fifty yards to running water for their wash and shave.
The barracks had spread lopsidedly from the square down towards the river. A red-brick Naafi and an echoing Nissen gymnasium near the stone cook-houses hid from the main road a whole poultry farm of black creosoted huts, where a large part of the barracks’ greatly expanded population now lived. Several fine old elms had been cut down to ensure symmetrical lines for these huts, but they were all set at an angle to the other buildings of the barracks, and squatted aloof and brooding down the slope to the calm and stately River Gravel which gave the town its name.
Stanley leaned on his umbrella and contemplated as much of it as he could see.
“RIGHT!” shouted a sergeant. “Getfellininfrees!”
The Quartermaster kitted them out, and they marched again, doubly loaded, for an inoculation.
“Tet-tox and T.A.B.,” said the sergeant briskly. “Your lucky day. Lovely. Gittinthere!”
The medical officer worked through them systematically. “Roll your sleeves right up,” said an orderly, swabbing with spirit. “Both arms.”
“Sergeant,” said Stanley. “This battledress. It looks peculiar.”
“Q.M. issued you with it, didn’t he, lad?" asked the sergeant.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s all right,” said the sergeant promptly. “All that whitish sort of stuff: anti-gas impregnated that one is. Lovely.”
The battledress seemed to be patched with a pale yellow powder. The material was stiff, and the unpowdered areas were an ugly, greenish hue. No one else’s seemed like it.
“Outside!” shouted the sergeant. “Gefellin!”
They marched to hand in their civilian documents and sign for their Army pay-books, and then joined another throng to be sorted ou
t into huts. Lists were called out.
“You lot,” said a corporal. “Into Sebastopol, on your right. Kit on the bed and out sharp for tea parade. Move!”
After tea the corporal said:
“See this? Corporal Sutton’s bed, ’ere, is laid out like yours must be. Take a good look. Ask what you can’t see; blankets folded, holdall, housewife, laid out in front, boots with all studs in down the bottom end, so; no civvy kit allowed, all to be packed off home. After six o’clock make your bed down. All right? Scrub webbing and brasses up pukka till arpass sem supper.”
*
“Gather round here,” said the corporal. “Siddown, siddown. Right. Now you’re in the Army. What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. Nobody likes the Army. You got to do what you’re told. You got to be smart and soldierlike. And what’s that? That’s smart. When you’re walkin’ about the town, no ’ands in pockets, d’you follow me? And this town, being it’s a garrison town, is a very notorious place. Shockin’. Terrible. There’s women ’ere, lot of women ’ere, that fancy soldiers. You may laugh. You may smile. Why, only the other night … but we’ll skip that for the moment. Only my advice to you is: be very very careful. The M.O.’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. I’m Corporal Miller. That’s Corporal Sutton, doin’ ’is brasses still. Your platoon sarnt’s Sarnt Morris, Comp’ny Commander Major ’Arkness. C.O.’s Lootenant-Colonel Ellis. It’s all pinned up on the door, words and music. You got to know the whole issue. Corp Sutton’ll talk to you now about your training, and I shall be orf up the town. Any questions? Right. Cheero.”
“When do we have any leave, Corporal, please?”
“Not yet you don’t. Right. Cheero.”
“Ten minutes about training,” said Lance-Corporal Sutton, “then ready for into bed. Lights out blows in forty minutes, after which time no lights, no smokin’, no talkin’; everyone into bed until such time as it blows reveille. Right. Trainin’ you do ’ere’ll be rifle, Bren, and proficiency in the ’andling of these weapons under all conditions, anti-gas trainin’ and a nice drop of P.T., to get you worked up to a proper standard of fitness in order to kill the enemy. Your first week’s is up on the door there with all the other bull. Now start askin’ questions.”
“I say,” said Stanley, “Corporal Sutton sleeps in his shirt and underpants.”
Ten-thirty. A bugle.
“All right?” asked Lance-Corporal Sutton at the light switch. “All in? Fag out, that man. Right.”
He took a last look round, lean nobbly legs under the tails of the drab khaki shirt.
“Remember, reveille blows six sharp. When it blows, feet on the floor, everyone, straight away. Right?”
A voice outside called authoritatively: “Giddat light out!”
“Barlux,” said Lance-Corporal Sutton, switching it out.
CHAPTER THREE
CATHERINE BRANDISHED A postcard at Philip.
“They didn’t arrest Stanley, darling,” she announced. “They’re in some tiresome hut called Sebastopol—imagine! They seem to be all undergraduates, too. Extraordinary. Oh, and he’s just had tea. In a bucket—or, I imagine, from a bucket. Loathsome. They’d been there two hours when he wrote it and he was just going to make his bed down. I must say it sounds frightfully cushy. Still, I don’t think you would have liked it, heart or no heart. Never mind, darling. I’m sure a little hat like Stanley’s wouldn’t have suited you. Anyway, your heart’s nice enough for me.”
She kissed him.
“Are you listening?” she said, crashing her fist on his chest.
Philip was still asleep. He had been fire-watching with two bearded men at the college of art where he taught. The bearded men had been boring about Marxist heresies till four in the morning. The year before, the same two had been passionately not on speaking terms while an incendiary bomb spluttered on the far corner of their roof. Not until Philip had come up from his watch below had it been shoved off (and by him) into the street.
Philip awoke and clawed amorously at her.
“That’s enough,” said Catherine. “Remember Nita.”
*
Sarah brought the postcard in to Mr. Windrush in his study.
“Master Stanley,” she said, “he got there.”
Mr. Windrush read it and frowned.
“He didn’t arrive there till 4.10,” he remarked. “I distinctly remember organising a train that got in at 2.46.”
He got down a Bradshaw and a Southern Railway time-table and began checking.
*
When the bugle blew for reveille all Sebastopol was already awake. An insistent whistle from the radio loudspeaker in the hut had been gnawing at them for a full half-hour. As the bugle blew, the whistle stopped and a voice said: “This is the B.B.C. Forces Programme. Good morning, everybody.”
Corporal Miller and Lance-Corporal Sutton padded at once to the wash-basins with cries of: “Out of it! Both feet on the floor! That man! Sun’s scorchin’ yer eyeballs out!”
Stanley got up and queued at the wash-basins.
The radio was by now in full voice. A coloured group were intoning:
“Pork chops and gravy,
Pork chops and gravy,
Pork chops and gravy,
I want a pork-a chop-a Charlie
With some corn bread.”
When Stanley came back from a cold-water shave it was playing a vigorous rumba.
After breakfast there were “room jobs”.
“Windrush. Don’t say ‘Hullo’, lad. Corp’r’l.”
“Corporal.”
“You’re on door-knobs. They must be clean. They must shine. Bags of shine. Git moving.”
“Corporal.”
*
Eight-twenty-five.
“Stand by yer beds. Come on, come on! Doncher know there’s a war on? Get them beds lined up. That one’s a bit longer? Boloney. Gititinthere! Get them boots right way up, lad. That respirator, bit more further over this way. Waters! Your knife-fork-and-spoon not showin’? Stand by yer beds! Romney, dress back a bit there. Watch it! Room! Room-SHUN! STILL! P’toon present and correct, Sarnt.”
Sergeant Morris looked briefly round, a large browned man with large, impeccable boots. His voice creaked like old rigging.
“Right. Outside in threes. Move.”
Outside they waited.
Sergeant Morris emerged.
“Pay attention. My name’s Sergeant Morris. Address me as ‘SERGEANT’ not ‘SARGE’. Got me? Follow me? Right. The room is a disgrace. I’m telling you. A disgrace. More like a shithouse. First day, of course. First day. Yerss. Now you go back in and get it pukka.”
*
Eight-thirty-five.
“Right. Good deal better. Outside in threes, now, move. Now what we’re going on with now is see round the barracks, see where everything is, in an orderly fashion. March round in threes. Before we go any further, first thing at the beginning. Remember. You play ball with me, do as you’re told, always on time, which is to say five minutes early, work well, and I’ll play ball with you. Only, play any funny business and—watch it. Your feet won’t touch the floor. Straight in you’ll be. Straight in the nick. Do I have to tell you this? Do I? You’re supposed to be potential officers. You have to set an example. Don’t you? Don’t you, Number Three, Rear Rank? Windrush, is it? Pace to the rear, do up that fly button—this isn’t a circus. Well, see you do. After this, draw rifles. Naafi break ten to ten-fifteen. C.O.’s lecture ten-twenty. M.O.’s lecture eleven-twenty to dinner. Any questions? Right.”
They were lined up in threes on the asphalt path outside Sebastopol, and the three ranks completely filled its width. Sergeant Morris stood for his address three inches in front of the front rank. His chest suddenly filled.
“Squad!” he breathed. “Squad-SHAH! Move … to … the-right-in-threes, RAHOIT TAH. By-the-left, QUICKMARCH.”
Immediately there was no peace. Every inch of the journey was accompanied by voices of stern encouragement. The least pause in
Sergeant Morris’s commentary was seized on by the attendant corporals, who filled in with: “Eft, ite, eft, ite, eft.”
“Chin up, chest out, look yer own ’eight. Eft, ite, eft. Cover down front to rear. Dressing, dressing by the left. Look up! Watch them arms—up, back, up, back—look up! Dressing! Eft, ite, eft. Change-direction-left, LEHEFT WEEUL. Eft, ite, eft. Cover down, now. Arms! Arms! Leave that ’ydrant alone, lad; trippin’ over it. It’s been ’ere longer than you ’ave. Eft, ite, eft. Bags of swank!”
With such tumult they reached the gymnasium.
“Squad … ALT. Stand-at ease. On your left the new gym-er-nasium, where you will do your physical training. You are not permitted to wear boots in the gym-er-nasium. Straight ahead of you, middle distance, the thirty-yard range. Squad … SHAH. Byderleft, QUICKMARCH.”
Again the shouting and the tumult.
“Squad … ALT. On your right, the Naafi, not now open, for tea and wads, write your letters ’ome, buy beer. No alcoholic liquor will be brought into barrack-rooms; keep it in the Naafi and you’ll be laughing, bring it in the barrack-room and you’ll be on a fizzer. All right? Byderleft, QUICKMARCH.… Squad … ALT. In front of you, ‘B’ Company Office, Comp’ny Commander Major ’Arkness. Half left, ‘A’ Company Office, Comp’ny Commander Captain Redfern. Left again, ‘H.Q.’ Company Office, Comp’ny Commander Major Simpson. ‘B’ Company Stores behind the office, M.I. Room to the right. Depot Company Office, right of that, Comp’ny Commander Major Hitchcock. Behind Depot Company Office, the A.T.S. Quarters, out of bounds to all ranks. It is also an offence to fra’ernise with the A.T.S. Do I make myself clear? In any shape or form. Any shape or form of fra’ernising, I mean, not A.T.S. Okeydoke? All clear? Right? Right. Squad … SHAH … Squad … ALT. On your left, ‘F’ Block. Squad … SHAH.…”
