by David Lodge
‘Oh sure! I’m going to sign on.’
‘Get out!’ said a voice from behind. ‘There’s only one thing worse than a Regular and that’s a National Serviceman what signs on.’
I looked round and saw Chalky White, who worked in the Q.M.’s Stores. He was a curious creature, by turns witty, naïve, boastful and timid. His long chin, hunched shoulders and the limping, hopping movement of his spindly legs always put me in mind of a wounded heron. We climbed into the coach.
‘After you,’ I said, motioning him into the inside of the seat. My action was prompted not by politeness but by self-interest: it was easier to sleep sitting on the outside, with one’s feet in the aisle.
‘Nice week-end, Chalky?’
‘Fair. Very fair. We played at this pub see. Got thirty bob each. Not bad eh? Oh I never felt more like singin’ the blues…’ Chalky drummed on the window ledge with his finger-tips. He played the washboard in a skiffle-group.
‘How about you, Jon? Good week-end?’
‘Very pleasant. I completed my plans for my holiday.’
‘What, after your release?’
‘That’s right.’
‘When’s that then?’
‘Next Wednesday.’
‘Next Wednesday!’ His voice rose several octaves. ‘I thought it wasn’t for three or four weeks yet.’
‘Wednesday’s the day, Chalky. On Tuesday I’ll be handing you my boots and uniform and the rest of the junk with the greatest of pleasure.’
It was difficult to refrain from this ceremony of rubbing your imminent release into everyone you spoke to, when for two years you had suffered the same thing from others.
‘How long have you got to push, Chalky?’
‘Nine bloody months,’ he replied gloomily.
‘Get some service in, youth,’ said a flat Midland voice. Lance-Corporal Boon, Orderly Room clerk, carefully placed his grip on the luggage rack, and sat down beside me on the other side of the aisle, spreading his hands over his fat khaki-clad thighs. Since being made up he wore uniform on leave—in order to show off his stripe at home, according to Chalky. As Chalky said, ‘It must be a pretty crummy place if they get worked up over a lousy stripe.’
‘I see they’ve got you down for a guard tomorrow night,’ observed Boon, looking at me.
‘Bollocks! First I’ve heard of it,’ I exclaimed.
‘It was on Squadron Orders on Friday,’ said Boon smugly. ‘But I suppose you didn’t see it, seeing you scived off at lunch-time.’
I had wangled permission from my superior, Captain Pirie, to leave early on Friday, on the pretext that I had to see the Prof. at college about my research. I had gone up by train and booked a coach ticket for the return journey only.
‘That bastard Fotherby, I bet,’ I said venomously. ‘I’ll fix that tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re due for a guard, aren’t you?’ said Boon. He took a proprietary interest in Squadron Orders, which he rolled off on a duplicator. He always enjoyed telling people that they were down for a duty, before they read it for themselves. ‘I noticed you haven’t done one for some time.’
‘Christ, Boon,’ I said. ‘Do you memorize every bloody guard anybody does? Haven’t you got something better to think about?’
‘Keep your hair on. I thought you’d like to know.’
‘That’s ’ard, that is,’ interposed Chalky, ‘Doin’ a guard in your last week.’
‘Hard?’ I muttered. ‘It’s bloody ridiculous. I know who it is. Sergeant-Major Fotherby, the new-broom boy. I’ll soon settle him.’
But inwardly I was not so confident. My whole strategy at Badmore had been directed towards securing my own comfort and convenience by ingratiating myself with key figures of authority. To my immediate superior, Captain Pirie, I was indispensable, and there was a tacit agreement between myself and the senior officers of the unit that I would contain Pirie’s innate tendency to commit acts of disastrous folly. But Captain Pirie, besides being President of the Regimental Institutes (that is, in charge of the welfare and recreational side of unit life) was also the Officer Commanding ‘A’ Squadron. And while I held sovereign sway over his activities as P.R.I., being myself the P.R.I, clerk, in his capacity as O.C. ‘A’ Squadron he was under the influence of the Squadron Sergeant-Major. For most of my time at Badmore this post had been filled by a bored veteran of the North African war, whose goodwill I had experienced no difficulty in enlisting, since I was able to get him sports equipment for his son at a considerable discount. A month before, however, he had departed, to be replaced by Sergeant-Major Fotherby, a sour, sardonic individual, whose most eloquent comment on Badmore was a harsh, contemptous laugh. I had lacked the time and—as my release was imminent—the inclination to win him over. And although Captain Pirie was in some ways frightened of me, he was even more frightened of Sergeant-Major Fotherby. I began, therefore, unwillingly to resign myself to doing the guard the following evening.
The coach was now full. Ben climbed into his seat and started the motor. We lurched into motion, and I settled back into my seat. The long, familiar journey was beginning,—for the last time in this direction.
As we passed London Airport a plane roared over our heads, lights winking from tail and wing-tips. Usually I felt a pang of envy at this sight. It always seemed a kind of travelling—exciting, adventurous, purposeful—essentially different from my wasteful shuttling backwards and forwards between London and Badmore. I nudged Chalky and remarked:
‘That’s me in four days’ time.’ But he was asleep.
Chalky slept until we swung off the A30 into the car park of the ‘Alnite Kaff’. We climbed out of the coach and walked stiffly into the hot, smoky café, blinking in the light. Chalky moved like a homing pigeon to the gaudy juke-box and selected a tune.
Bye bye love
Bye bye happiness
Hello loneliness
I think I’m gonna die
Bye bye my love bye bye.
I got two cups of tea and took them back to a table. The café, as always at this time, was full of soldiers returning to camp by car, motor-cycle or coach. They sat at the greasy tables, staring vacantly, exchanging few words, tapping their feet gratefully to the music, nourishing the memory of the leave just spent, planning the next one. There was an atmosphere of defeat in the air, the dejection of a retreating army. But for once it did not touch me. I was leaving the battle shortly. This was the last time I should visit the ‘Alnite’. I looked round me with a new attentiveness. Recently I had found myself registering the dull repetitive actions of my service life with this detached precision. It was a strange interior ritual, a litany to which the constant response was ‘This is the last time.’
As the coach drew away from the café Ben extinguished the lights inside. This was illegal, but was a welcome aid to sleep. At the back of the coach a quartet of Regulars were trying to prolong the beery euphoria of their week-end’s leave by singing bawdy songs.
We are from Green Street, good girls are we,
We take a pride in our virginitee.
But the majority of the passengers were, like myself, respectable week-end commuters, who preferred to pass the journey in a decent silence and, if possible, sleep. After several remonstrations the singers quietened down, and I dozed uneasily. Chalky’s head, the hair of which was almost solidified with Brylcreem and dirt, fell on to my shoulder. I shrugged it off, but it kept lolling back. I stood up on the pretext of getting something from the rack, and Chalky overbalanced. He woke up and swore at me.
‘You shouldn’t put your head on my shoulder,’ I explained. ‘I’m not your tart you know.’
‘Nah,’ he replied, ‘She’s got bigger tits for one thing.’
‘How d’you know they’re real, Chalky?’ asked a voice from the darkness. A little ripple of laughter spread round us.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ said Chalky sourly, settling himself to sleep again, this time inclining his head towards the window.
&nb
sp; But I found it difficult to sleep. The little exchange about Chalky’s girl brought back the moment on Pauline’s divan a few hours before. Our relationship was approaching a critical point. There was a ratchet on love-making: you couldn’t go back, you could only go on, or stay put. And there was a time-limit on staying put. Looking back over the last few weeks it seemed to me that the ratchet had been clicking over faster than usual lately. At Palma, anything might happen. I forced myself to be more exact: what might happen was that Pauline would be ready for me, would want me to take her. It was essential to decide in advance what course of action I would adopt in such a situation. Otherwise it might be awkward and embarrassing and spoil our holiday.
I considered the matter coolly. I had more or less decided that I would marry Pauline,—I couldn’t think of anyone who would be more suitable,—and I was slightly hesitant about applying the have-now-pay-later principle to her virginity. If I did deflower her it would not affect my intention to marry her, but it might blunt the edge of pleasurable anticipation. I have always tried to avoid occasion for regret, the most lingering of all the unpleasant emotions, by prudent foresight. This, then, was a consideration to be weighed carefully. On the other hand I had no intention of marrying till I had completed my research and obtained a satisfactory post. That would be at least two years from now. It seemed unlikely that our self-control would stretch over such a long period: and if it had to give way, would not our holiday in Palma be an appropriate time and place? And at the same time I could propose that we get engaged. Such a sizeable deposit would go a long way towards overcoming my reservations about the hire-purchase system.
The remaining problem was how to provide myself with contraceptives. I regretted the fact that I had not considered these matters before. For it was one of my duties as P.R.I. clerk to indent, from time to time, for contraceptive sheaths (10 percent discount) which were distributed by the regimental barber. They arrived regularly at the office, wrapped in plain brown paper parcels with a slip enclosed trusting that the goods would meet our requirements for planned parenthood. With a little more time at my disposal I could have obtained what I wanted through the comfortable anonymity of the post. But delivery usually took four or five days, and I couldn’t risk not having them when I left Badmore. I had little enough time to play with between leaving the camp and boarding the plane; and I couldn’t have a potentially embarrassing brown paper package following me around in the post. I would have to get them from Henry the barber.
At this point I must have dozed off. The next minute, as it seemed, I was woken by the lights which came on in the coach. We were back. I gave Chalky, hunched up against the window, a rough shake. He swore, and opened his eyes, blinking in the light. We stepped down from the coach, and stood for a moment buttoning our coats as Ben drove away to drop the rest of the passengers at another part of the camp.
The shape of a gutted tank of the First World War, which stood outside the camp on a grass mound, loomed up above us. Chalky cast a nervous glance at it as we moved away. The story went that it was haunted by a German soldier who had been burned alive inside it. The tank had been captured by the Germans and used by them, until a British patrol had recaptured it by setting fire to it. Two of the crew had escaped, but one had been trapped inside. I had never met anyone who had seen the ghost, but the story was widely believed, and many soldiers would make a long detour rather than enter the camp by this entrance when alone, late at night. Guards responsible for this part of the camp studiously avoided even getting the tank in sight.
As we turned the corner of one of the hangars a guard came towards us, his pick-shaft tapping on the ground like a wooden leg. He was a friend of Chalky’s, and asked him for a cigarette. Chalky gave him a bent Woodbine. At the Q.M.’s Stores Chalky and I separated.
I pushed open the door of number 4 hut and inhaled the familiar sweet-sour odour of dust, bad breath and perspiration. I switched on the light to plot a course across the hut which would avoid chairs and tables. Huts were not inspected on Sundays, and there was the usual squalid disorder. Tattered Sunday newspapers littered the floor: the pin-ups leered up at me with a jaded, ravished air. Mugs half-full of stagnant tea stood on tables marked with sticky rings. The windows were all shut. I opened two. Someone groaned and cursed. I switched off the light and felt my way across the floor to the far end of the hut where I had a small, partitioned-off cubicle known as a ‘bunk’. I switched on my bedside lamp, which illuminated a shelf of books, and the Toulouse-Lautrec poster I had pinned to the wall. Slipping gratefully into bed, I glanced at my watch. Three-thirty. Ben had done quite good time. Soon the autumn fogs would be holding him up. But not me.
As I waited for sleep I thought about Pauline, Palma, and my errand at the barber’s. A fragment of a poem by Mike, printed in the college magazine (the editor of which was subsequently forced to resign), floated into my mind. Something about The rubber-gloves of lechery. No, The rubber-gloves of prudent lechery, that was it. And there was an echo of Blake. After about ten minutes’ strenuous effort I had assembled seven lines:
It’s not the harlot’s cry,
But the contraceptive sheath
From street to street
Will weave old England’s winding sheet;
The rubber gloves of prudent lechery
Leave no traces
Rifling the virgin’s bottom drawer…
The lines didn’t scan or rhyme very well, but, recalling the general nature of Mike’s poetry, this was not necessarily an indication that my memory was at fault. Pleased with my success, I relaxed and fell swiftly asleep.
‘STAND UP, BRADY, Browne, Fallowfield, Higgins, Peterson.’
Mike and I, the first two named, stood up with the others. On the Monday after our arrival at Catterick, ‘C’ Squad was addressed by its N.C.O.—Corporal Baker, the tall, moustached corporal who had greeted us at the station. Corporal Baker was not, unfortunately for us, typical of the R.T.R. soldier. The Tanks (as distinct from the cavalry, who were burdened with an older tradition), tended to produce a particular type of trooper and N.C.O.: squat, stooped and grimy, with a healthy contempt for the wilder excesses of ‘bull’. Corporal Baker had somewhere acquired that fanatical reverence for meticulous turn-out and drill which made him, in the Army’s eyes, so admirably suited to the training of raw recruits. He was tall, thin and wiry; his skin was stretched tightly over the bones of his cheeks and jaw, and shone from the closeness of his shaves. His uniform was impeccably pressed and pleated, and his belt bit cruelly into his narrow waist. Every ounce of surplus flesh seemed to have been burned away by his energy and bad temper.
He looked at the six of us who were standing. The other members of the squad, National Servicemen and Regulars, also regarded us curiously.
‘The Personnel Officer,’ he began, with a faint sneer, ‘has seen fit to class you lot as Potential Officers. I want to get a few things straight before we start. You’ve been called Potential Officers because you’re supposed to be educated. Though Christ knows why, seeing that one of you failed his degree and another couldn’t even pass his School Certificate.’ He looked at Mike and Percy. ‘But even if some of you are supposed to be educated, even if you have degrees in every subject under the bleeding sun, that doesn’t mean you’re any better as soldiers. In my experience it makes you worse. You needn’t think that because you’re Potential Officers you’ve got a cushy time in front of you. You haven’t. Even if you manage to pass Uzbee and Wozbee, which I very much doubt, you’ve got several months of training at Mons which will make the next five weeks seem like a kindergarten. And they won’t be a kindergarten, I’ll see to that. As Potential Officers I shall expect your conduct and turnout to be outstanding. And if they aren’t, I’ll want to know the reason why.’
He surveyed us with a thin-lipped, malicious smile, displaying two rows of regular, sharply-pointed teeth. His cold blue eyes rested on each of us in turn. First me.
‘Name?’
‘Bro
wne.’
‘Browne, Corporal.’
‘Browne, Corporal.’
His eyes flickered to the papers in front of him. ‘You’ve been writing a lot of letters to the Army, Browne.’ (I had written once, as requested, to inform the authorities of my Finals result, and had taken the opportunity to reiterate my desire to go into the Education Corps. Evidently the letter had been forwarded to the 21st R.T.R.)
‘Only one.’
‘Corporal!’
‘Corporal.’
‘Wanted to go in the Education Corps, eh? That’s where all the scivers want to go. Sitting on your arse all day teaching a lot of nigs their ABC. Well you’re unlucky this time.’ His eyes wandered to Mike.
‘Name?’
‘Brady, Corporal.’
‘Well it’s nice to see you now you’ve had your hair cut. When you arrived I thought we’d called up a ginger rug.’ He waited for, and got his laugh. Mike presented a very altered appearance; deciding to go the whole hog he had directed the regimental barber to give him a crew-cut, which conformed to regulations, but enabled him to retain a certain grotesque individuality.
Baker dealt cursorily with Fallowfield and Peterson, Fallowfield was the blond ex-public schoolboy I had come up with in the train. Fortunately he was not in our hut. Peterson was also from a public school, but was separated from Fallowfield if not by a social abyss, at least by a pretty sizeable trench. Peterson was an Etonian, and carried about with him an almost tangible aura of nonchalant charm and confidence. His father had been in the Greys, and there was little doubt that if he conducted himself with a mere token show of enthusiasm he would get his commission. Fallowfield’s school, on the other hand, had only just crept into the Headmasters’ Conference. Although he might easily obtain a commission in one of the less exclusive infantry regiments, or in the Service Corps, it would not be easy for him to become an officer in the R.A.C., which still, as regards its officers, retained something of the traditional and entirely unjustified sense of superiority of the old cavalry. And it was such a commission that Fallowfield desired. He knew what efforts it would require, and in contrast to Peterson he was tense, anxious, and deadly serious. One could be sure that if the unthinkable happened, and neither got his commission, Peterson would adapt himself with cheerful amusement to life in the ranks, while Fallowfield would fret and pine.
