Caught, Back, Concluding

by Henry Green

  That night, so long ago, as he crept back, who would then have thought that he was in for two wars? And as he came along in shadow, up the sides of hedges, to get back home unheard, unseen, because his old man must not know he was out, as he came slinking like any other creature out at night, and there was that dog whimpering near, chained up on account of a bitch, he had seen another shadow moving in front towards their bit of garden at the back, creeping as he was but lower, more like a wild animal, heavier in shame because a woman, and, as he saw with a deep tremor, his own sister, out whoring maybe as he had been, up now from off her back no doubt, out of a low shadow cast by the moon.

  Well, he never married, and she came to keep house for him when the old people were gone. From that far evening to this he never mentioned that he had seen her. She did not marry, for all he knew she had never had to do with a man. Was her trouble over children the effect of ignorance, or the other way about? He did not even pause at the thought that she might afterwards, for the rest of her life, have suffered from a violent distaste, as had Mrs Lane’s little girl at the time. If he had not been so sleepy he would have smacked his lips as once again he remembered his own wench crying, pretty crying.

  He called to mind how disgusted it had made him, the sight of his sister, like a white wood shaving, when she darted, huddled, across the last still stretch of moonlight, intent on her next difficulty, the creep upstairs. (What he did not know was the year after year after year of entanglement before her, the senseless nightingale, the whining dog, repeating the same phrase over and over in the twining briars of her senses.) At that, not interested, he fell asleep.

  Richard, laid out on the bare floor of a gas-proofed basement, watched Piper settle down. The old man would tell his absent wife, whom he called mother, the next thing he was going to do, and in a loud voice. ‘Well, mother,’ he cried, ‘I think I’ll take me boots off now.’ This he did, and added to the already heavy stench, for the room was unventilated. ‘I think I’ll try a bit of sleep now, mother, yus, I think I’ll try a bit of sleep now.’ How utterly harmless you are, thought Richard, sleepless, and how wrong he was.

  Later, when it was his turn to guard the fire engines, or appliances as these are called, drawn up outside in the open, and, lifting wet blankets draped over the door, he came out into a gin-clear air pasted with blue moonlight, at no length his thoughts, for the first time except for that once when Pye had made out that Pye was the only sufferer by his sister’s tricks, turned to those he had left. In a sort of holy falseness he bade them farewell.

  There is, he thought, in any manifestation of the firmament by a dead calm at night, a grandeur, the remoteness of anything large that is highly polished. He was looking at what, on this occasion, came so bright that he might have been under a silly, bright plan of the whole geography of the skies.

  The fumes of what he had drunk had not lifted from him yet. A Rescue Squad, condemned by their leader to wear full gas clothing night and day, wandered up and down. The complete outfit, because it excludes air, is stifling, and they were too hot to sleep. They had had a bonus paid them. Each carried a bottle of whisky. Richard got his share from one after another as they went by.

  Every man jack was full of his little woman and the Edies, the Joans, and the little Marys, in their pinnies, he had left behind, sleeping in their little cots (most likely watching mum in bed with a stranger), in what each man was proud to call home.

  The Auxiliary on guard with him had been in the Navy. Some time ago this man had seen ‘King Kong,’ the film of an outsize in apes that was twenty foot tall. Roe’s explanation was that the experience had had a lasting effect on his adjectives. One in particular, ‘conga,’ he used to cover almost everything.

  ‘A conga night,’ he said. He called each Rescue man ‘cock.’ He remarked that their whisky was dodgy. He went by the name of ‘Shiner,’ because his surname was Wright.

  The Rescue men spoke huskily of their families. Richard half heard what they said. The black-out was new to all, this was their second night. It stilled the loudest voice, by that moonlight such as no town-dweller had seen except on honeymoon, if then, yet it encouraged men and women to keep quiet, not for repeated love, but by the menace in that highly polished sky which they felt might, at any moment, fall flat, and across which the stars began to skate or slither as he crouched drinking, nostrils dilated, the air he took in that fed, as will a forced draught, the fire which ran with the charged blood in his veins.

  He was not sorry when their relief came. Shiner, of course, said he felt ‘conga,’ and that he could have stayed out all night, but Richard, who was not used to keeping awake, was longing, by the great weight on his eyes, for as much sleep as he could get in the stench of Piper’s feet. He was to be disappointed. A great muffled din hit them as they came towards their gas-proofed shelter. When they raised the wet blanket across the opening they saw, in a deep violet light from three coloured bulbs invisibly wreathed with footrot, two Regular firemen, one with a twenty-eight-pound hammer, the other with a crowbar, racing cockroaches along a course they had prepared between Auxiliaries rolled in blankets on the floor out of which, as though about to rise from the dead, came heads and shoulders as they propped themselves up to watch.

  A man’s face, in that profound, dim blood of the flower, was dead white. As these two drunk firemen bellowed oaths while they pounded the boards to make those cockroaches go faster, as they hopped, crouching in sapphire shirt sleeves, someone shouting odds, then Richard knew this was the end. He saw it more than double, and could remember no more of that night although, so they told him next day, he had made as much noise as any. He had been asleep standing up but, even so, he had been eager, in common with most of the others, to curry favour by sharing these men’s phantasmal antics.

  When the bells went down next morning at five, and all were warned they were required at once to fight the whole Rescue Squad, now turned mutinous, the two Regulars dressed in about thirty seconds. In the grey water light of dawn, his wife’s eyes in tears forgotten, they showed no sign, even about their mouths, of the night they had spent. Richard was so stiff he could scarcely move. He was also extremely nervous. The only trace of those Rescue men was some shouting in the distance. He was still doing up his belt as Chopper, back already, for in the time it had taken Richard to get his gear on this man had dressed and been along to see, called out to Wal, ‘Why wait, let’s go,’ and pulled out his axe. Richard’s one thought now was, would he have time to piss. Then Pye came along, walking with exaggerated calm, but too worked up to speak educated. He said, ‘Now, Chopper, what’s the bloody rush? What are they goin’ to say at the station? Do you know they ’ad to wake the great Dodge ’isself to give me orders to call you lads out. I would never do it else. We’re not ’ere to control riots. Now we don’t want to get into nothing. An’ I’ve ’ad no orders direct, the Old Man was too wide for that, ’e can easy forget what ’e told Nobby I was to do. There’s the ’ole fighting squad from Bow Street up this lane. Let them take care of it. I said to Nobby on the other end, I says, ‘The Old Man can easy forget, can’t he? ’Ow do I stand? Oh, no thanks, no for yours truly.’ The Brigade broke a man, demoted ’im for something like it in nineteen eleven. I said to Nobby . . .’ and Pye carried on talking to the Regulars, Wal and Chopper. Piper said ‘That’s right’ to something Richard had not heard, for Richard could wait no longer. He had to. So he went up to Wal. He asked permission, as he might have done in class at school. This man looked at him expressionless, said no word, unbuttoned his own trousers and, for answer, sprang a leak on to the pavement. More modest, Richard moved to the wall.

  In the end they did nothing. The Auxiliaries were sent into the twenty-four hour canteen next door to have breakfast, where they discussed Pye’s motives. It was explained to Richard that Pye was thinking of his pension, small blame to him, and consequently of how much he could cover up. The opinion was that if one of his men had been injured Pye would not have been covere
d by his superiors. This was born out next day when Pye boasted of how he had got out of the difficulty. Although his instructions had come from the very top, from the Superintendent, to cover the Super Pye had invented a fire. Such a thing as this is known as ‘the Fire Brigade mind.’ The older men deplored its absence in Auxiliaries. Pye officially reported that the Rescue Squad had lit a small fire to warm themselves and of all things, that it had spread to a dustbin. He said buckets had been in use to put this blaze out. For several hours he had it in mind to set fire to a dustbin himself. He kept his men out of a fight, because it was their job to fight fires or, only if a Superintendent ordered such a thing in writing, to turn hose on riots. Dodge had given a verbal order to cover himself should something go wrong and the Chiefs hear of it. So Pye had played safe, or, as Shiner remarked, boxed clever.

  That morning war was declared. They had their first syren. Richard was too tired to take notice.

  In the local, after several hours sandbagging, when every civilian seemed cowed and many of the women had obviously been crying, Pye came out with his imaginary fire at dawn. He was highly delighted with the invention. ‘How was I to know,’ he asked, speaking freely, unrestrained, ‘if ’e meant it? You know what they’re like at the station. As I said to Nobby, I put it to ’im, if the Super wants me to call the lads out to fight, if ’e wants us to have our eyes gouged and ’atpins stuck through us where it would do most bloody damage, I says, why, what Mr Dodge thinks best is good enough for me only why don’t ’e tell me ’isself or pick up ’is pen. There’s typewriters enough for copyin’. “Mind you,” I said, “I don’t say ’e didn’t tell you Nobby. But will ’e remember in the morning, Nobby,” I says. I got to keep my nose clean, that’s what I told him.’

  ‘I get yer,’ Piper said.

  ‘As for you,’ Pye went on, ‘I ’ad to consider what chance a man like you stood with those boys in the Rescue. They’d castrate you, Piper, like a starved bullock. Or they’d wrap those long legs of yours round your neck and stuff the ’eels in your gob. And then where would your new denture be?’

  A number of the lads laughed. Piper flushed, said ‘Well, I don’t know.’ But the older men were shocked.

  ‘I got false teeth meself, look,’ Pye said, half ashamed. He near took them out. ‘There you are.’ He laughed.

  Shiner said to Richard, ‘’e’s a mad bastard, cock, no skylark.’

  While Pye did not often come into the local, for he was kept busy in the office, or watchroom as it is called, the two Regulars, Wal and Chopper, were always in the bar. They would talk a bit with Shiner because he had been in the Navy, all three of them had been gunners, but they would not say much to the rest. They accepted drinks, never paid for a round themselves, and let it be known they disapproved of Pye. They stole glasses each time they left. On this, the third day they had all been together, some of the Auxiliaries spent a great deal of time and money trying to get in with them.

  But Pye was a warm-hearted man. Richard was surprised to learn that Piper had gone to him about his friend Mary Howells, the charwoman he wanted taken on the staff as cook, and that Pye had promised to arrange this soon as ever they moved into permanent billets.

  Later on he carried out his promise. He was to regret it.

  On the fourth day, when Richard was still too nervous to eat, came a loving letter from his wife.

  After the first excitement of war died down, as it soon did when there were no raids, the fun and games started.

  The moment they opened, work was dropped. Everyone who could afford it went over to the local.

  ‘What’s it going to be Wal?’

  ‘Naw, this one’s on me,’ from another Auxiliary, ‘come on Wal.’

  ‘If it ain’t me old china, Chopper,’ said a third, ‘come on now, what are you ’aving?’

  They drank wallop, that is draught ale. Richard bought the Regulars more beer than anyone. He was as bad as the rest, and more successfully, because he had more money. With him it was a sign that he was returning to normal when he began to keep on asking questions.

  ‘D’you reckon they’ll be over this night?’ he asked, getting minimum replies, until his queries were as futile as, ‘And when you get to a job are you allowed to use a torch outside?’ Most of the questions he put these two men the other Auxiliaries answered, but they were too inexperienced to have a reply to this one. Chopper surpassed himself. He said:

  ‘Well Dick, there’s no smoke without there’s flame.’

  Months afterwards, when the blitz began, flame came to be called ‘a light,’ they talked of ‘putting the light out’ instead of ‘getting the flames down.’ But on those first evenings there was not one Auxiliary, fresh to the black-out, who could foresee the white flicker, then the red glow which spread and, close to, the greedy extravagance of fire which would be bombed and bombed and bombed again to increase the moth’s suicide it was for firemen.

  Those who would have a part to play, who were to have fires to put out, could strike attitudes in this saloon bar into which no outside air penetrated, so that ferns, hanging stiff in wire baskets from false beams, seemed carved out of painted iron plate. And the stray women, who looked older, with hats tilted this way and that, black and brown, their lips sealing wax, the skin of their faces the stop press, were unnaturally quiet, murmuring oh dear to the brown beer.

  ‘It brings everyone together, there’s that much to a war,’ Richard said to Chopper.

  ‘It does, Dick,’ he said.

  One of these women spoke.

  ‘When it doesn’t put blue water between,’ she said, but Richard did not notice. He had begun to eat again. Even now that he was able to fill his stomach he still did not think of his family except when he had a letter, or when, once each week, he wrote to Dy.

  Those Auxiliaries so inclined, who could not afford to buy the Regulars beer, sought favour in doing more work than the rest.

  This was a time when girls, taken out to night clubs by men in uniform, if he was a pilot she died in his arms that would soon, so she thought, be dead. In the hard idiom of the drum these women seemed already given up to the male in uniform so soon to go away, these girls, as they felt, soon to be killed themselves, so little time left, moth deathly gay, in a daze of giving.

  That same afternoon the train to Portsmouth had wives dragged along the platform hanging limp to door handles and snatched off by porters in the way a man, standing aside, will pick bulrushes out of a harvest waggon load of oats.

  Limp, dancing as never before entirely to his movements, long-haired sheaved heads too heavy for their bodies collapsed on pilots’ blue shoulders, these clubs were like hotels, from double bedrooms of which the guests came, gorged with love, sleep lovewalking.

  On the way to becoming adjusted, Richard began to look about him in daytime.

  At that period the Fire Service came next after pilots with the public. Auxiliaries were often given money by old ladies, they were stood drinks by aged gentlemen, and, when an appeal was made over the wireless for blankets, there was an abundance of these brought in next morning. Street cleaners called Richard ‘mate.’ Girls looked him straight, long in the eye as never before, complicity in theirs, blue, and blue, and blue. They seemed to him to drag as they passed.

  Pye, greatly excited, spoke jubilantly of his success at night. There had been one that he described as ‘a real cow, a countess.’

  On his way back from posting Dy’s letter an expensive girl, discreetly enamelled about her hollow face, eyes moist, amused, sang out ‘Fireman.’ She was foreign, disagreed with the way the landlord was building a wall of sandbags outside a window to her flat nearby, and asked if he could come up to give advice.

  As she shut the doors and pushed buttons she smiled, almost openly amused but also as though she was laughing at the fool she might quite likely make of herself now, so she seemed to imply, as he promoted his feelings, she had really noticed him for the first time.

  She did not say, ‘I don�
��t know what you will think of me,’ but ‘I hope this will not be a bore for you, no?’

  He muttered, overwhelmed by the luck he thought he ought to have, caught up in what he understood to be the way other people acted at this time.

  He had to wedge himself into a corner to let her get out of the lift. Her skin, where neck joined shoulder, covered by small colourless hairs, was cool to his eyes, like an unwet cake of soap. It was hot. She had run out in a frock. He was suddenly aware of his tunic, proofed against flame and water, heavy.

  She went inside a white room. An acetylene lamp triangle of sunlight cut into the floor. At the apex stood another girl, dark. This light, reflected up the bell of her skirt, made her translucent to the waist. She said, ‘Oh a fireman.’ He turned his eyes away, burned. He chanced on a rectangular table set back against the wall. It had a black glass top on which, in a scarlet bowl, was a cactus, painted white.

  At once he noted that he had passed a glass tank in the lobby, filled with cut daffodils. This made him uneasy.

  While his girl explained in broken English, laughing, calling the other Prudence, telling him, ‘My name to you will be Ilse,’ he felt his hands, which were gorged with blood, swollen with work. He made out to himself they had grown enormous, that the fingers hung at the thighs like strings of raw pork faggots, filthy as he was who had not been able to change his heavy sweat-charged clothes. For the first time he was conscious that he must smell bad while these girls were like bird’s feathers, cool and settled. He raised a vinegar-coloured palm to his chin, which was covered by that four-day growth of bristle.

  They asked him if he was very tired. They said he could have a bath in the flat any time. Ilse brought him Cointreau with water in a long glass and a cube of ice. He found it difficult to answer their questions. Prudence said they would rather be killed by blast than die of no fresh air. ‘It is like it is in Norway, just today,’ said Ilse.