INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  At the end of June, the Wrens were evacuated under conditions of the utmost confusion. Alice, sitting on her luggage, looked out of the train at the verdant green of the Delta, and wondered what was in store for her. A tent in the desert? She waited in vain for that rolling expanse of sand to appear. It seemed that nowhere was anything done as thoroughly as in

  Hollywood. The country through which the train eventually passed was little more than scrubland. The palm trees were thin, their branches like upturned feather dusters; in the town, their trunks had been like giant pineapples.

  Once, as they passed through a gimcrack place reminiscent of a wild west shanty town, she saw a detachment of soldiers, resigned, blank-faced, leaning against a wall, no doubt waiting for transport. It seemed unlikely that at this moment they thought much of King and country; yet something in their stubborn, immobile faces, a certain kind of steadiness, sobered and touched her. What would become of them when the transport came to carry them into battle? A hot little gust of wind sent a swirl of sand into the air, and set a song going in her mind: ‘Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys will never reach the front/So the saucy rebel said, and ’twas a handsome boast/Had he not forgot, alas, to reckon with the host/While we were marching through Georgia . . .’ She remembered that she and Ben and Guy had sung this, walking on the sand of a Cornish beach. She wondered what had happened to Ben; he seemed to have dropped out of sight.

  Guy was on his way back from forty-eight-hour leave in Alexandria. He had tried to find Alice, but she was no longer at the address which Louise had given him. Everyone was on the move now, and Alice was probably at sea. He had heard that the Wrens had been evacuated. He was not sorry to have missed her. He found interruptions in the pattern of service life unsettling.

  At the present moment, he was suffering a particularly irritating interruption. A journalist who was doing a series of Men at War photographs for the Ministry of Information, was sharing his jeep. The man should have been in the charge of a liaison officer who had gone sick with amoebic dysentery. Guy had been pressed into taking him as far as Mersa Matruh; but the man had insisted on going further, and when Guy had asked whether he was authorized to move about as he chose, he had replied, ‘Don’t be so bloody pompous!’ He was a leery-looking individual with mournful eyes sodden with strong drink. Guy felt ill-at-ease in his company. He wondered what his driver thought of the fellow.

  In the distance, they could see a village. Nearby, sheep clustered like toadstools around a tree and men lay on the ground in what little shade they could find. The photographer pointed at them, ‘Bedouin?’

  ‘It’s not the name of a particular tribe,’ Guy said. ‘It’s a term for the nomadic people of the region.’

  The man sucked in his breath. ‘So they are Bedouin.’

  ‘Probably.’ Guy was doubtful himself. He did not know much about the indigenous people and this worried him inexplicably, in the way that some half-forgotten neglect can nag the mind.

  Heat bands shimmered on the gritty road. Further on, a boy herded goats, a blue hood over his head; he had a dark, unsmiling face, none of the city urchin’s gamin impudence. The photographer said, ‘God, how they must hate us, kicking up all this racket!’

  Guy said, ‘Their life is so remote from ours that he probably does not know how to respond to us.’

  ‘How would you expect him to respond?’

  They travelled in silence for a while. Guy stole a look at the face of his driver, but it was enigmatic as the goat-herd’s. He fretted about the goat-herd. I need too much reassurance, he told himself; I expect the whole world to open its arms in order to assure me that I am doing all right. He was startled by his self-awareness, and thought, this won’t do at all!

  The jeep drove on into the desert. Guy said to his companion, ‘Did you enjoy your stay in Alex?’

  ‘You could say that. I got myself a Greek girl. I suppose they’re fairly safe?’

  ‘Safe?’

  The man turned his head to look at Guy in amusement. Guy flushed, understanding his meaning. ‘I spent most of my leave trying to find my sister-in-law,’ he said.

  But he remembered now, that as he was walking along a street in Stanley Bay, a woman had emerged suddenly from one of the cafes. As she walked towards him, the sea breeze lifted chestnut hair and she tossed strands back from her face. He had felt a pain so intense it had seemed to dislocate his whole body. He had stood gasping in the street, tears blurring his eyes. When eventually he walked on, his vision still seemed to be blurred. The experience had been akin to drowning, except that it was not his past so much as what might have been which swam before his eyes: the years he had missed with Louise; the children growing up, the stages of their lives he would never share; all the joys of lover and parent denied him, which could never be recaptured. Usually, he succeeded in holding Louise and the children framed in his mind, like the still of a film. He imagined them waiting for him, untouched by time, thinking only of him, planning what they would do ‘when Daddy comes home’. The agony of longing and loss had shaken him. He could not stand too much of that.

  He looked towards the desert. ‘You won’t find it comfortable out here, you know,’ he said to the journalist. ‘Thirst is the worst thing.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Did you know that in the desert, a soldier’s water ration is just under a pint per day? And after using some of that to shave and wash, he is lucky if he has as much as a half-pint to drink.’

  ‘Does that include officers?’

  ‘Of course. There is no distinction in the desert.’ The man irritated Guy. ‘And salt must be added to that to replace the body salt lost in the heat.’

  The journalist stared moodily out at the sand without making any comment.

  Guy said, ‘When you’re not in action, you can’t think of anything else but your longing for water. You sleep whenever possible, just to forget.’

  His insistence reminded the journalist that he had brought his own supply of liquor. He took out a flask and made a brief gesture in Guy’s direction. Guy shook his head. The journalist refreshed himself, and continued to do so at frequent intervals.

  They came to a place strewn with the wreckage of battle, now half-covered in sand. ‘Tank.’ The journalist pointed to something which now resembled a half-submerged submarine. ‘You know their tie – brown, red, green – you know what it stands for? Through mud and blood to the cemetery beyond.’ The driver gave Guy a sideways glance. The journalist tapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop. The driver looked at Guy, who nodded.

  The journalist got out of the jeep to photograph a bayonet stuck up in the sand with a billycock hitched to it – a rough joke outlasting its laugh. ‘It will all blow over,’ he said when he returned. The smell of his breath preceded him into the jeep. ‘It has blown over the glories of lost civilizations.’ He waved a hand at the vast expanse of sand. ‘So it will blow over this. Won’t it?’ He glared at Guy.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They drove on. The journalist had become morose. ‘All gone. The cocky laughter, the blasphemies, all buried in sand.’

  Guy pleated his lips and looked ahead.

  Chapter Seven

  July-August 1942

  ‘Alice!’ Claire wrote. ‘It seems so strange. Where is everyone? Daddy dead. You and Guy and Ben so far away I can’t even imagine the places where you are. Even Mummy and Lou are in different places now that Lou has gone back to London. There isn’t anywhere where I belong. I’m a floating person. There is a place in my tummy that aches all the time. It’s no use praying about it. God isn’t there. I expect you have found that out by now?’

  She was writing from Dorset. It was July. She was eighteen and in a few weeks she would leave school for ever. In the autumn she would go to Oxford. She had known this was her destiny ever since, at the age of ten, she had heard her father telling the minister, ‘Of course, Claire is the clever one. My dearest wish is that she may get an Oxford scholarship.�
� She had imagined it would bring her happiness as well as him. Now, she was less sure. In her childhood, supported by home and school, her abilities had presented her with more rewards than problems. In Dorset things had not gone so well. She had encountered challenges of a different order.

  When Claire was billeted on the Armitages, Mrs Armitage wrote to her sister, ‘We have such a funny little gnome with us. Her late father seems to have been one of those Bible-thumping Methodists - I recall them in our childhood but I hadn’t realized the species survived into the Thirties. Our young Claire has a brain, but her capacity for rational thought is hampered by all this godly nonsense. It’s quite pathetic, but of course one mustn’t say anything. Even so, I think we come as quite a surprise to her. I see her looking at the book shelves and wondering where the Bible is! She is to read history, so I suppose one is permitted to do a little gentle guiding.’

  Mrs Priscilla Armitage was a woman of advanced ideas. She had no missionary zeal, however, and had little wish to convert others, since general acceptance must have made her ideas the less advanced. Her only aim in discussion was to lay waste the ideas of others without setting anything in their place. ‘My husband and I are humanists,’ she told Claire soon after her arrival. She spoke as though there were only the two of them. Mrs Armitage impressed Claire. Claire suited Mrs Armitage very well. Professor Armitage was too exhilarated by his present much-publicized quarrel with a fellow biochemist to register Claire – or his wife, for that matter – very clearly. Mrs Armitage, lacking her husband’s assured place in the world of academic contention, needed to exert herself rather more in small matters.

  On her first Sunday with the Armitages, Claire had said, ‘I usually go to chapel.’

  ‘Do you, my dear?’ Mrs Armitage had been as amused as if Claire had said she went to the circus. ‘Then of course you must go, and we will point you in the right direction.’

  From then on, although never overtly challenging Claire’s beliefs, she brought religion out for an airing every day to inspect its condition and find it ailing. Her idea of what Christians believed was based on what she would have liked them to believe – namely, that God was a benevolent father-figure who rewarded the good and punished the bad; and was always on hand to offer comfort, and ensure that the members of His flock never had to come face to face with the more unpleasant aspects of His creation. Any more mature idea of religious belief, she would have dismissed with the words, ‘Well, I would like to think that was so, but I’m afraid it is not what the majority believe.’

  Claire hated Mrs Armitage, not so much for her non-belief (her beloved friend, Heather, was not a believer) but for her amused attitude. Above all things, Claire needed to be taken seriously. She prayed to God to help her to overthrow Mrs Armitage; but day by day, Mrs Armitage prevailed. There is very little one can do with a person who accepts any argument one puts forward with an amused smile. ‘You have plenty of enthusiasm, my dear,’ Mrs Armitage assured Claire. ‘And if you are a little short in analytical thought, I daresay this will come in time.’ Claire lacked the expertise to test Mrs Armitage’s own capacity for analytical thought.

  From time to time, she applied to Heather for sympathy, but Heather was not helpful. ‘It will do you good!’ she said. ‘Other people had to listen to an awful lot of talk about religion when they came to your home. Now it’s your turn to have an earful of atheism.’

  ‘But she’s not fair! She keeps telling me what I think, and then she picks holes in it. But it’s not what I think – and she won’t listen.’

  ‘That’s the way people argue, silly! You create a weak case for your opponent, and then knock it down. I expect we’ll spend years at university doing that sort of thing.’

  ‘I wish it was all really as simple as that,’ Claire said miserably. Her problem with Christianity was not at all what Mrs Armitage imagined. It was not that Christianity offered certainties which Claire was finding it increasingly difficult to accept; but rather that the further she ventured, the more she discovered that whatever was being offered, it was not certainty. And it was certainty that Claire needed. Not for her the journey into the unknown, the quest for that other continent whose existence depends on a few unconfirmed travellers’ tales. The risk of failure was too high. Mrs Armitage would have been mortified had she known that Claire envied her the certainty of her unbelief.

  This was a climax in Claire’s life. Her beloved father, who could have sheltered her in his arms, was gone. Throughout her childhood, when she came home from an outing, one of her parents would be waiting for her, and always they would embrace; the warmth of physical love was never lacking in her home and now she missed it sorely. She longed for the companionship of her sisters – even their quarrels seemed precious now. Theirs had been a noisy, talkative house. Why, over dinner and supper of one day, they would have tucked into Mrs Armitage and disposed of her!

  Sometimes at night, before she went to sleep, Claire imagined her father still alive, visualized him striding up the path to fetch her away from this bleak place; and she went to sleep comforted. In the morning, she would wake heavy with the knowledge of his death.

  When her mother came to visit her, she tried to tell her something of this; but her mother, grieving in her own way, was unable to help her. Instinctively, then, Claire knew that no one would ever love her again as her

  father had loved her, that no one else would shelter her as he had sheltered her. All that warmth and security was in the past. From now on, everything gained in the way of love and understanding would have to be earned.

  Judith was at a loss as to how to help Claire. She had lately begun the painful process of reassessing her life with Stanley. When he took Judith away from Falmouth, he had said to Ellen Tippet, ‘We may only have met a few times, but I know your daughter.’

  ‘We’ll see what you make of her, then,’ Ellen had retorted. Wise in her fashion, she understood that by ‘knowing’ a person we impose on them the duty of being the person we would like them to be.

  During their marriage, Judith had often seemed to be the strong one. Stanley relied on her love and attention. She was resilient where he was easily discouraged; she was not quick to take offence while he was all too readily diminished; she breasted storms in which he floundered. Yet now, it seemed that it was only his incessant demands which had drawn her into being, and without them she was not sure who she was.

  She was a small packet in a large parcel, gradually being unwrapped of the things she was not. After Stanley’s death, a person he could not imagine would eventually emerge. Her development appeared to consist of a series of stages in which the things she was not were stripped from her. Would Stanley himself be one of these? It sometimes seemed to her that a widow must either live in the shadow of her husband or move beyond him.

  Claire, who had looked at her mother to sort everything out with brisk efficiency, was dismayed to find her strained and inattentive as a person listening to a conversation in another room.

  ‘You don’t care about me,’ she accused.

  Judith said, ‘I’m sorry, my love. This is something you will have to work out for yourself. It will be happening all the time when you are at university, so you may as well get used to it.’

  Claire hung her head. After a pause, she said, ‘Do you think we shall ever see Daddy again?’

  Judith turned away. ‘We don’t know, do we?’

  ‘We’re told we will.’

  ‘But not in what form,’ Judith said indifferently. It was now that she needed Stanley, not in eternity; she needed the sheer thrusting bulk of him now!

  Claire shivered, contemplating life with no one to blame for its awfulness.

  Judith said, ‘There’s only a week of term left. I’m going to take you back to the farm with me. I don’t like to leave you in this place.’

  It was the answer to everything. ‘To think,’ Claire wrote to Alice, ‘that we went down to the farm so many times when we were young and we never appreciate
d them! Alice, I have learnt so much while I have been here, just talking to Uncle Harry and Aunt Meg. Particularly Uncle Harry. I think he is the finest, best person I have ever known.

  ‘He never tells you what to think, but you feel that whatever you are talking about, he knows. It is all inside him; his face glows with it. We had a long talk yesterday about the meaning of suffering. He feels so deeply about all the injustices in the world – the people in the slums; the black soldiers expected to fight for the Americans and turned out of all the cafes by the white Americans; all the poor people in India and China. It was – well, rather like God groaning over His creation! I think this is the only way I am going to be able to go on believing in God – seeing the great goodness in people like Uncle Harry.

  ‘We talked about the miners, and the way people expect them to work so hard for the war effort, without asking for better conditions; while no one worries about munition workers profiteering! There is so much wickedness in the world, Alice; when you get to talking about it, it is quite overwhelming. Uncle Harry doesn’t have any answers; but he doesn’t have to provide answers because he is such a wonderful person that, in a way, he is the answer. I’m going to start trying to live more like him and see what I can do without.’

  She took this very seriously, and one of the first things which she found she must do without she came upon unexpectedly. It involved a decision far harder than any she had anticipated.

  While she was going through the little case she had packed of treasures salvaged from the wreck of her home, she found the exercise books in which she had written about the imaginary family, the Maitlands, which she and Alice had created when they were younger. She read the books, remembering how bleak Shepherd’s Bush had seemed when they moved there from Sussex, and how she and Alice had comforted themselves by inventing this family. The Maitlands lived in an old farmhouse. It was the place of their dreams, full of unexplored nooks and crannies, with a wild, secret garden in which anything might be made to happen. As she read, the thrill of pleasure she had felt at the time returned: she could smell the Cornish pasties cooking in the oven, feel the coldness of her feet tucked beneath her as she scribbled in her bedroom. The London fog pressed against the window pane, but the light was clear and bright in the enchanted world she and Alice were making together. Sadly, however, she noted, as she read on, that the Maitlands were much better off than the Fairleys; the boys went to boarding school and the girls had fancy names, like Stephanie and Imogen. She knew then that the stories had too much of luxury about them. They must go. In the late afternoon, she went into the yard and made a small bonfire, well away from the stables where the straw might catch alight. On this she burnt the stories. When finally she turned away from the ashes of her imagination, she felt she had freed herself from a ‘power’; the door to an unknown world had been closed. Yet she was sad; and as she walked in the twilight back to the farmhouse, a little shudder of fear went through her.