by David Lodge
‘What’s it about then?’
‘Literature.’
‘Yer, but what’s it about. Anything ’ot in it, like?’
‘It’s not a story. It’s literary criticism. It’s——’
‘Wodjer wanner read that sort of crap for?’ he interrupted, handing back the book.
‘I happen to be interested in it.’
‘Won’t do you any good, will it?’
‘As a matter of fact it will, though that’s not why I’m reading it.’
‘Why, what good will it do yer?’
‘I hope to make the study of literature my career.’
‘Gerna be a teacher I s’pose. But what good will it do yer? Or the kids yer teach. What use is lit’rature?’
I opened my mouth to launch into a defence of the study of literature… getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said … and then closed my mouth. I was not eager to return to the university because I thought my research would be of any use, to myself, or to others. All human activity was useless, but some kinds were more pleasant than others. The Army had taught me that much philosophy. There was no such thing as communication operating over the whole of society. In fact, there was no such thing as society: just a collection of little self-contained boxes, roped untidily together and set adrift to float aimlessly on the waters of time, the occupants of each box convinced that theirs was the most important box, heedless of the claims of the rest. Success did not consist in getting into the box where most power was exercised: there were many people who were powerful and unhappy. Success consisted in determining which box would be most pleasant for you, and getting into it. If you were forced to inhabit an unpleasant box for a time, then you could make it as comfortable as possible until you could get out. Luck or cunning were the most effective attributes in this world, and cunning, though it worked more slowly, was the more reliable.
‘What’s it mean, anyhow, the name?’ asked Earnshaw from the desk to which he had returned.
‘What name?’
‘That book. Seven types of whatever it is.’
‘Oh, “ambiguity”. It means a word or statement which can have more than one meaning.’
Earnshaw laughed incredulously.
‘You’re a queer bugger and no mistake,’ he said.
Luck or cunning. And if you didn’t have either, you were like Mike, at home in no box, vainly trying to ignore the existence of boxes, tossed and buffeted by the pitiless winds that blew outside them. For it was better to be in the most uncomfortable box than outside, in the confusion of the elements.
‘’Ere, if you’re so clever,’ said Earnshaw, coming back to my bunk. ‘See if you can do this.’ He spread out six pennies in a triangle and challenged me to put them in a straight line in two moves. His conviction that my education had been useless seemed to be confirmed by my inability to solve the puzzle. There was a low rumble in the distance.
‘Thunder. There’ll be a storm soon,’ said Earnshaw, sweeping the pennies into his palm. But the storm receded, or was circling. The hours passed without relief from the close, oppressive atmosphere.
At ten Earnshaw said he would have a sleep for a few hours.
‘Wake me at two, then you can have a kip. And keep your ears pricked for the Adjutant. He’s a keen bastard,—and so is Fotherby. They’re likely to try and catch us napping.’
‘O.K., Sergeant.’
I seated myself at the desk, and poured a cup of coffee from the flask I had brought with me. The darkness outside was lit occasionally by a flicker of sheet lightning on the horizon. Hobson’s boots shuffled on the path outside. He was not moving very far from the guard-room. I went to the window and called out unkindly: ‘You’re supposed to patrol this whole block, you know. Don’t stay up this end all the time.’ He gave me a scared, reproachful look, and moved off in the direction of the tank.
Chalky was telling Norman about a Scotsman in his hut who talked in his sleep about his sexual adventures. I strained my ears to catch his words.
‘“Are ye cold,” he says—he must have had this tart in a ditch or something—“Are ye cold, Jenny? Och, your poor wee tits are cold, Jenny, let me warm them for ye,”—no, I’m not kidding, just like that, you can ask anyone in the hut. “Keep your head down, Jenny, there’s someone coming,” he says. We were all round the bed, pissing ourselves trying not to laugh out loud and wake him up. Then Nobby Clarke put his helmet in Jock’s hands, and he ran his hands over it, smooth like, and “Och, you’ve a lovely arse on you, Jenny,” he says …’
It was the hour for lubricious dreams. I wondered idly in what circumstances I would learn the last secrets of Pauline’s clean-smelling body, and find that mental anaesthesia which I looked for between her smooth white thighs. In the hotel bedroom at siesta time perhaps, the strong Mediterranean sunlight broken up by the venetian blinds into golden bars that burned into her naked torso. Or as we rubbed each other dry and glowing with rough towels after a midnight swim; her skin would taste of salt …
There was a noise of someone running towards the guardroom, and a frenzied knocking on the door. Sergeant Earnshaw threw off his blanket and leapt to his feet, cursing under his breath.
‘Go and see who it is,’ he said to me, buckling on his belt.
When I opened the door Hobson almost fell across the threshold, pale and quivering with fright. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.
‘Well?’ said Earnshaw.
‘I’ve seen the ghost!’ blurted out Hobson.
Earnshaw flung down his belt in disgust.
‘For fuggsake, is that what you woke me up for. I’ve a good mind to put you on a charge.’
Hobson turned pleadingly to me. ‘It’s true, Corporal. I saw ’im, by the tank. There was a flash of lightning, and I saw ’im. ’E ’ad one of them long German coats on, like you see in the pictures.’
‘Why didn’t you challenge him?’ demanded Earnshaw.
Hobson stared blankly: ‘Because ’e was a ghost, Sarge.’
Earnshaw stepped over to Hobson, grasped the lapels of his battle-dress, and lifted the unfortunate youth on to his toes. ‘Now listen to me,’ he bellowed. ‘There is no bleeding ghost. Get back to your post in ten seconds from now, or I’ll have you in the guard-room so fast your feet won’t touch.’ The formula came out before the speaker realized that he was already in the guard-room, but the words had their effect. Hobson stumbled miserably out into the dark. Earnshaw turned to me.
‘You’d better go out and have a look. Someone may be snooping around.’
I picked up a flashlight, and stepped out on to the veranda. The heavy warm air seemed to part in front of me, and close behind, like water.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ I said to Hobson, who was cowering against a wall.
He kept close to me as we approached the tank, and his pace faltered as another flash of lightning on the horizon silhouetted the antique outline of the vehicle. Never having been troubled by fears of the supernatural, I enjoyed a sense of superiority over the terrified trooper as we came up to the tank. It was just a shell, the disembowelled carcass of a prehistoric animal. The back had been removed so that one could climb into it. I did so, and flashed my torch round, illuminating nothing but a few cigarette stubs and a small heap of dog’s excrement. It was difficult to believe that this narrow evil-smelling room had ever churned through the mud of Flanders field, crunching the bones of dying men, bullets rattling like hail on its thin plate. Tanks, ‘mobile coffins’ as Mike had described them once. It was easier to imagine that this had been the fiery grave of a German soldier. It had the look, and the smell, of a vacated tomb.
The ground outside was hard, and yielded no clues.
‘You must have been dreaming,’ I said to Hobson as we walked away.
‘I wasn’t, Corporal, honest.’ Then, abandoning the attempt to convince me, he added with more urgency: ‘Don’t make me stay out here any longer.’
&n
bsp; I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s nearly half past ten anyway. Stay near the guard-room for a few minutes, and I’ll send the next man out to relieve you.’
Ten to one. ‘The still point of the turning world.’ I sat perched on a high stool behind the high desk, under the glare of the electric light. Chalky’s footsteps slowly approached, passed, receded, beginning another circle. Earnshaw and Norman snored, irritatingly at different tempos. For a time they would snore alternately, then Norman would slowly begin to overtake Earnshaw, draw level with him, then pass him. Hobson, his blanket drawn over his head to keep out the light, or the ghost, sighed and whimpered in his sleep. Empson’s words danced before my blood-shot eyes. I pushed the book aside, and picked up a newspaper which Earnshaw had brought with him. I flipped idly through the crumpled pages: gossip column, woman’s page, film starlet stooping to reveal her breasts, competitions. Win a new Aston Martin or £3000, cash. Whoever chose the cars in these competitions, I wondered. And if nobody, why not just offer the cash? Suddenly! A new way of life. An advertisement showed a young couple in a luxurious bed, watching a television set placed on a shelf at their feet. ‘George! Take your hand away. It’s Wagon Train next.’ Well, what odds, if they found it pleasant? An editorial drew my attention.
The Minister for Defence announced in the Commons yesterday that the Government hopes to bring conscription to an end within four years.
The nation is proud of its National Servicemen. They have fought bravely, shoulder to shoulder, with their Regular comrades in Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, Suez. Industry in booming Britain will welcome the labour released by the ending of conscription. Mothers will sleep easier at night.
But this last thought prompts another. National Service has done much to teach the younger generation independence, initiative, responsibility,—qualities which have stood this country in good stead in two World Wars. We must not send the youth of Britain from the barrack-square to the street-corner. Some substitute must be found which will have the same beneficial effects of character-training as National Service …
Mentally I phrased a reply: ‘I think it will be difficult to find a substitute which will inculcate bad habits, bad language, idleness, slothfulness, drunkenness, and the amiable philosophy of “I’m all right Jack” half so successfully as National Service …’ But the ignorance of newspapers was invincible. Journalism was another useless, self-compensating activity, like literary research, like soldiering itself.
The leader-writer went on to suggest that an extension of the Outward Bound schools would be the answer. I had nothing against the Outward Bound schools. If people enjoyed impressing the Duke of Edinburgh by scrambling over mountains and sleeping in the open, I would not wish to stop them. Evidently they found it pleasant. But the suggestion that such activities bore any resemblance to National Service struck me as ludicrous. I had never slept in the open, or under canvas, in the whole of my two years; nor, for that matter, had I taken part in any tactical exercise, nor fired a rifle more than twice, not indeed done or learned anything that might have made me the slightest bit more use in time of war than I had been when I first caught the train from King’s Cross to Catterick. I had long ceased to feel any resentment about this, but I did rather resent suggestions that anything else was the case.
Yes, I had long since ceased to feel any resentment about National Service. Once one had accepted the fact that the whole thing was pointless and futile, it was easy enough to accommodate oneself to its trivial demands, and to make oneself reasonably comfortable. And yet, if it was quite meaningless, why in these last few days did my thoughts revert so insistently to my first weeks at Catterick, as if from them, and their contrast with my existence at Badmore, I hoped to tease out a meaning?
Perhaps it was just the insidious flattery of time, which persuades us that what is about to come to an end must have meant something, must have been significant. Who has left a hospital, in which he has suffered misery, pain and embarrassment, without a sudden, treacherous pang of regret, an irrational surge of affection for the fellow patients who kept him awake with their selfish groans, for the nurses who only got the hypo in properly at the third attempt, for the surgeon who let his wound get infected? I suppose even released convicts feel the same as the prison doors close behind them; and perhaps, too, even the souls winging their way through the gates of purgatory when their time is up.
National Service was like a very long, very tedious journey on the Inner Circle. You boarded the train with a lot of others, and for a while it was very crowded, very uncomfortable; but after a while the crowd thinned, you got a seat, new faces got in, old faces got out; the slogans on the advertisements got tiresomely familiar, but you sat on, until, after a very long time, you got out yourself, at the station where you had originally boarded the train, and were borne by the escalator back into the light and air. It was natural, then, that as you approached your destination, you should try to connect the end of your journey with the beginning, try to recall all the shapes and forms of humanity that had shoved and jostled and brawled and snored in the narrow, swaying compartment. Fallowfield, more like a seminarian than a cadet, Peterson with his Old Etonian smile, Gordon Kemp, good-humoured and generous; Hardcastle squaring up to Mike’s bare white torso over Percy’s kneeling form; little Barnes recommending The Lady Of The Lake; Baker, his face contorted by a rictus of anger; Mason, conducting his sexual seminars in the overheated classroom. Many were nameless: the mentally deficient shambling happily out of Amiens Camp in civilian clothes, the youth reading out the letter from the girl who had jilted him, the soldier—Jones, was it?—searching fruitlessly in the sodden grass at my side for the fifth shell-case. An endless succession of figures, many blurred by time, rose up and passed across my mind like the ghosts in Macbeth. Where were they all now? One of them was snoring only ten feet away. But Norman, oddly enough, provided no link between my first and last days in the Army. Norman at Badmore was a differen creature from Norman at Catterick—like a strange, sinister shape in a child’s darkened bedroom, which the morning light reveals as a harmless, if ugly piece of furniture. Where were the rest now? All, like me, awaiting release, polishing their boots for the last time, pushing their last guard, gloating over their comrades?
No, not all. Some would not be released. Percy would not be released. Gordon Kemp, shot in the back as he walked down a sun-lit street in Cyprus, would not be released. And Fallowfield had already been released: the strain of the officer cadet course had been too much for him; he had taken an over-dose of aspirin, but they had found him in time, and he had been medically discharged. Ironic, that he, of all people, should have gained his freedom, the freedom he did not want. As for the rest, where were they now?
I did not really care. They had no importance for me, except that at one time they had formed fragments of a mosaic in which a particular experience of my own had been delineated. Now I stooped to wipe away the dust of two years, and reveal the forgotten faces; but as the years passed I would tread over them again, more and more indifferent to the picture that was slowly disappearing beneath my feet. There was only one visage that would take some time and effort to efface, that stared up at me like a gaunt Byzantine saint, and would continue to stare. It would be difficult to lay that ghost.
The telephone rang. A routine call from V.P. guard-room. I walked slowly across the room to answer it.
‘Montgomery guard-room. Corporal Browne speaking.’
The voice that replied was breathless and excited. ‘This is Sergeant Mayhew, V.P. guard-room. Someone’s just got away with a truck.’
‘What?’
‘A truck. Somebody’s just stolen a bloody truck. They got into the hangars, and drove it past the guards.’
‘Who did?’
‘How do I know for Christ’s sake. You’d better send up the Armed Picket.’
‘Hold on a minute.’ I went over to Earnshaw and shook his shoulder. He surfaced grudgingly from sleep.
‘Whatisit?’
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br /> ‘V.P. is on the phone. Someone’s stolen a truck. They want us to send up the Armed Picket.’ He stared at me for a moment, then leapt to his feet.
‘Well, don’t just stand there. Press the bloody bell.’
He ran across the room to press the bell himself. We listened, but heard nothing.
‘Bloody thing must have broken. Go and wake them up. And be quick about it.’ He seized the phone and began talking excitedly to Mayhew. I ran out of the guard-room to the Armed Picket hut. I switched on the light and hammered on a tin locker with my fist.
‘Wake up, wake up !’
Some of them sat up in their beds, blinking in the light and rubbing their eyes. I located the N.C.O. with some difficulty, and woke him up.
‘This is a fine bloody game,’ he grumbled, pulling on his boots.
‘It’s no game. Somebody’s stolen a truck from V.P.’
‘What are we supposed to do about it? They may be half way to Salisbury by now.’
‘I don’t know, but you’d better get cracking.’
For fifteen minutes confusion reigned. Most of the soldiers had taken their boots off, and fumbled awkwardly with bootlaces. The N.C.O. couldn’t find the key to the rack in which the rifles were locked, and in the end we had to break it open. At last the rifles were distributed, and the Armed Picket drove off in the duty truck. Lightning flickered, and there was a loud thunderclap. Running back to the guard-room I bumped into Chalky.
‘What’s up?’
‘Truck pinched from V.P.’
‘Blimey! Somebody’s gernna be in trouble. ’Ere, ’ave you got a ground-sheet? It’s gernna rain.’
‘Haven’t time.’ I ran on.
Earnshaw was still on the phone when I re-entered the guard-room. ‘I’m trying to get the Adjutant,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t seem to be at the Mess.’
‘The Armed Picket’s gone off.’
