The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

At all debates and lectures a Political Officer was present, taking notes. The debate, ‘Quit India Now’ (Now being somewhat hypothetical: ‘There’s a War On – didn’t you know?’) was the theme of a letter to the camp newspaper, which Donald seemed to have taken over. When people complained that he was running a one-man show, he said, ‘Right, then, why don’t you muck in? Come on – start a camp newsletter, we could do with one.’ The complainer did start a newsletter, the gossip of the camp, but it languished and soon Donald was running that.

  Donald was summoned by Authority and told that there were limits and he was testing them. No more lectures on the political situation in India – understood?

  ‘How about a series on the history of India?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Authority agreed.

  But did not history include the British contribution, he argued, blandly, when taxed about the titles of the last three lectures: ‘Clive of India: The Flag Follows Trade.’ ‘The East India Company’ ‘The British Empire: Gain or Loss.’ Once again, standing to attention in front of a bench of senior officers, he argued that he had been given permission for history, hadn’t he? He was sure he had. Captain Hargreaves, who had said in Administration that he thought the India lectures were just the ticket, he could do with more of that, supported Donald, who asked why was it not in order for British soldiers who were fighting for democracy to hear the arguments on both sides? So he argued, pleasantly, the model of earnest willingness to serve.

  The lectures went ahead, the Other Ranks making an issue of it, attending them in force: it turned out that two of the lectures were being given by senior officers who were experts on this very subject. And at the question and answer sessions Donald stood up to say that it was not for them to reason why (the poem had appeared in his newspaper): they might listen but on no account could they express their thoughts.

  This was an impertinence so finely honed that Authority was at a loss what to do, but around the camp flew the rumour that severe punishment was being planned, using the extreme penalty for sedition.

  Real rebellion, if not sedition, did simmer. Years of boredom and the appalling heat were raising everyone’s moral temperature, and even without Donald’s inflammatory presence, all through the soldiers’ huts, Other Ranks were arguing about their own role in all this, the role of the British Army.

  Donald put on As You Like It. Who would have recognised in this flirtatious not to say winsome Rosalind the serious unsmiling young man whom everyone tended for some reason to leave alone. He didn’t drink much; he didn’t shine at the Officers’ Mess; he did play cricket well enough; when it was his turn to be camp librarian he was helpful, full of information. He was friendly with Other Ranks, who seemed actually to like him. And here he was, being applauded as Rosalind.

  From the Sergeants’ Mess came a little bouquet of flowers with a card, ‘To Fair Rosalind’. And the obligatory obscenities. If the sergeants played their traditional barking punishing role on the parade ground, they were tending toward good humour and even behaviour that could be described as avuncular, off it. The long ordeal of Camp X was wearing them down: ‘Like a mother to us,’ jested some young officers, for, no longer under the rule of the sergeants, but their nominal superiors while obeying their advice in everything, they could afford to jest. This jest reached the ears of Sergeant Perkins, who came into the hut occupied by James and Jack, saluted, and said, ‘Right, then, if I’m your mother, then I have to say the condition of this hut is a crying shame. Better clean it up before Captain Hargreaves gets to hear about it.’ And, saluting, he went out.

  The senior officers were in a dilemma. They knew all about the sedition that was brewing, even if it was sporadic and disorganised, and they knew that Donald was a focus. But boredom was the parent of this mischief and Donald combated boredom. Without him things would be worse. It was a question of balance. When the senior officers attended debates and lectures, it was not – as the paranoid soldiers believed – to spy on them but because the officers were as bored as they were. ‘The Atlantic Charter Unmasked’, ‘Whither Egypt?’ ‘Imperialism Past and Present’.

  In James’s desk was a calendar where a big red cross marked the birthdate of his son, Jimmy Reid. He had worked out the babe’s probable entrance to the world. He secretly celebrated the child’s first birthday and then his second. Another visit to the hills, with the Grants, allowed him to see the two-year-old, an explosion of charm and mischief. He adored that little boy and when he left the hills he had to hide tears. It is not possible to feel the pain of loss unchanged for ever. James’s grief had mellowed; it was there, but no longer was able to lay him low at a sound, a voice, the colour of the evening sky, a line of poetry, a bird’s call. He had not realised how much this cherished love, or grief, had diminished, but leaving that child it all came back, and Colonel Grant was reminded to say again, ‘Easy does it, James. Take it easy.’ And Mrs Grant, ‘How nice it is to see a young man taking an interest in children. Well done.’

  Those of us who have lived through such a time, the interminable time that need have no end – so it seems – know that what is left behind of the three, four years of endlessness is fear of being trapped again. But what is to be done about war? – tangling people in nets of circumstances. Nothing. Soldiers in India – who would have thought it, let’s say in 1939, as the war was being adumbrated in rousing speeches, that one of the results would be hundreds of thousands of young men, stuck like flies on a flypaper in India – not to mention Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, defending the bad against the worse. No one in 1939 wrote a poem beginning, ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’. Donald Enright actually managed a lecture, ‘Defending the Bad Against the Worse’, and was reprimanded. ‘But we’re fighting for democracy!’ he beamed at his superior officers, who frowned at him, uneasy, as unwilling to grasp this problem as they would be to take up a fistful of hot coals. He was a wonder, this Donald Enright, with his concert parties and his Shakespeare and his lectures. Who could deny it? ‘We told you before, you’re sailing too close to the wind.’ ‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I was rather thinking of a debate on “Problems of the Peace, Socialism or Capitalism?” Would that be in order, sir?’

  You could look at Camp X, stuck there in the middle of India – looking with a non-military, un-imperial eye – as an arbitrary aggregation of hundreds of young men, united only by a uniform. Which is how at times they saw themselves. Take this ditty, emerging somewhere from the collective unconscious of the camp:

  There’s a war on,

  You tell us they say there’s a war on,

  But where’s the war, the bloody bloody war,

  Clean your boots,

  Check your kit,

  Stand to attention,

  Stand at ease,

  Mind your Q’s, mind your P’s,

  There’s a bloody war on.

  Several hundreds of young men kept together by the uniform and the merest framework of discipline, the prescribed measures of saluting, the Yes Sirs, the No Sirs, the drills, and meanwhile months – no, years, now – of the upper ranks and the Other Ranks too made equal (almost) by a hundred non-military occasions, the concert parties, the theatre shows, the lectures: surely this must have frayed the fabric of discipline into ineffectiveness? Not so. First, the rumour: We’re being sent north-east to fight the bloody Japs. At once it was as if the whole camp snapped to attention. Then, the hard fact. It was true. Camp X fizzed with elation, they might be going off to a festival, not certain danger and possible death. At last, they would justify themselves, the whole bloody lunacy of their being here at all would make sense. James, too, as excited as the rest, but then, brought down: his name was not on the lists: he was not going.

  He sat in Administration behind his desk, all other desks but one deserted. At each desk a typewriter, folders, loose papers stirring in sluggish air from a dozen ceiling fans that chug-chugged like motors, and James’s mouth was a hard ugly line and he looked as if he
hadn’t slept. Captain Hargreaves was here to calm and to defuse, because it was in Administration that faces like James’s were to be expected.

  Second Lieutenant Reid and Captain Hargreaves were on Jimmy and Tommy terms except for sometimes, like now.

  ‘Tommy,’ began James, still sitting, but saw his superior officer’s monitoring frown and he stood up. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it isn’t fair.’

  Captain Hargreaves merely smiled, but James persisted. ‘It simply isn’t fair, it isn’t good enough – sir.’

  Why me? could have come next, but shame suppressed it.

  ‘Someone has to stay and keep things going, you know that, Second Lieutenant. We can’t just march off and leave the place empty.’

  James was quivering with the arbitrary injustice of it all.

  His senior officer went on, ‘There will be ten of us left in Administration, and some for Other Duties.’

  James remained at attention.

  ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ offered the captain but went red because of the bathos. He stood up.

  ‘Are you going with the rest, sir?’

  ‘Yes. As it happens. I am.’ And he escaped.

  Later, walking across to the Officers’ Mess, James encountered Major Briggs, who saw from the young man’s state that he must stop, so he stopped.

  James saluted.

  ‘I know what you are going to say, Lieutenant. But someone has to stay. And you are good at it. You can blame yourself if you like.’

  This joke fell well short of its target. James knew he was good at it. Pen-pushing and Admin: that’s what he was good at.

  ‘They also serve who only stand and wait … but you won’t be doing much of that. You’ll be working pretty hard, I’d say.’

  ‘But perhaps they don’t serve so much, sir?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ And the major put an end to this miserable conversation, because he knew how he’d feel, left behind in Camp X. James saluted. He saluted. That was that.

  Off went the division, in long trains and many lorries. Camp X was nearly empty. Those left behind to hold the fort drank bitterly in the various messes, and talked bitterly about their luck.

  James sat alone in Admin, with all the fans going and dust swirling about outside.

  ‘Darling. My darling Daphne. If you only knew how I rely on you. If I didn’t have you to think of now, with what has happened to me, then …’ And he described his situation. ‘And so I’m stuck here and the division has gone off, and my regiment. I often wonder, what was the point, all that time training in England, and then I missed the first Normandy invasion and Dunkirk, and we weren’t sent to Africa, and I might just as well have faked an excuse, my knee would have done, or gone down the coal mines. I sometimes think that would have been better. But then I wouldn’t have met you and that is what matters, the only thing that matters.’ And he repeated the refrain of his love for a page or two. Then, as always, he told her what he had been reading, ‘I found a lovely poem. Of course you must know it. It is called “Deirdre”. By James Stephens? It makes me think of you. “But there has been again no woman born/Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful/Of all the women born.” Deirdre and Daphne. And you are a queen. My Queen Daphne.’ And so he raved on for a page, then another, until it was time to go to the Officers’ Mess for dinner and the News.

  Their regiment was in the thick of it, up in Manipur and Kohima. There had been casualties.

  Weeks passed and back came the soldiers, not elated now, all that had left them, but they had been through it and looking at each others faces could see how they had all changed.

  Jack Reeves was wounded and in hospital. Again James lost his friend. Sergeant Perkins would be decorated for conspicuous gallantry. A few killed. ‘Reasonable casualties for what was achieved; we threw the Japs out of India.’

  But it did look as if the war was coming to a close, in Europe, at least. There would be an end. Soon. In Northern Europe it is when spring is on the horizon in the shape of longer days and earlier dawns that people subside into depression or think of suicide. Similarly now, with peace actually coming nearer every day, Camp X seethed and boiled with discontent. ‘So near and yet so far’ was the title of a poem in the camp newsletter. With the refrain, ‘So near to them, so far to us’ – them being the senior officers, who so often were to be observed taking off in Dakotas for Home. Officers and VIPs.

  Donald put on Romeo and Juliet, and James was Romeo, a male part at last, astonishing everyone, and added several letters to his pile of them to Daphne, which he would post when censorship was over.

  He also gave a lecture on Modern Poetry, while Donald sat proudly listening, for he was remembering how much James was his creation. And James said so: ‘I owe you a good deal,’ he said, ‘don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.’

  ‘Oh, jolly good show,’ said Donald.

  The end of the war in Europe, so now they could go home – but when? Oh, no, not now, don’t think it, the ships will be full for a long time yet, you must take your turn, it’s not only you, but the RAF boys from all the far-flung parts of Empire, so many impatient young men, not enough ships, wait, wait, you’ve stuck it out for nearly four years, haven’t you? Just be patient a bit longer.

  Not all could, or did. In two other camps, where they had been told they would be kept here, in India, to ‘maintain order’ to ‘contain unrest’ to ‘combat sedition’ to ‘preserve the British Empire’, disaffection broke out. ‘We didn’t join up to do the dirty work of the British Empire.’ ‘We joined up to fight Hitler.’ ‘You were called up and you will do as you are told.’

  Speeches, real riots, and the camps were a-boil.

  A couple of soldiers, ‘hot heads’, ‘incendiaries’, were court-martialled, but the Authority had listened, had taken heed. In Parliament at Home, questions were asked and speeches being made. And so the soldiers were going home.

  Some, who remembered the bad time they had had on the ship coming to India did not look forward to the sea voyage home. But this time it would not be around the Cape, the long long journey, but through the Suez Canal.

  But James had dreamed of making landfall at the Cape (though luck might just as well have taken him to Durban), and finding Daphne and his son and … there his thoughts became hazy. Yes, of course she had a husband, but she loved him, James, and there was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? The main thing, what he had to hold on to, was his child. His son – there could be no doubt about it, a love child, there could never have been more of a child of love than his and Daphne’s. Jimmy Reid, now four years old.

  Hundreds of young men who had seen no more of India and the Indians than what they observed of life on the roads, in the bazaars, or the networks of amenities that surrounded the army – servants, Eurasian girls who were spoken of by the sahibs and memsahibs as if they were so much dirt, or the Indian soldiers in the army who intermeshed hardly at all with the white army, or the cleaners at the camp – these young men left India without regrets, at best thinking that the war had given them a glimpse of what travel might be. They filed on to the ship that was to take them away from a continent they saw as thoroughly unwholesome and unsavoury. But this voyage could not be as terrible as that other; only half the length, and they were going home, Home, which shortened the distance. It was rough, and hot, particularly through the Suez Canal, and in the Bay of Biscay, as was to be expected, the waves chopped and churned and tossed them about and they were sick, but home was in sight – and there they were, at last, the white cliffs, as Vera Lynn had promised.

  ‘How was your voyage?’ asked his mother, and James, ‘Oh, not so bad, could have been worse.’

  On a dirty and rattling train James travelled through a land without light, so it seemed, a thin drizzly dark and faint blurs of light, and then in his home town, the street lights were dim and the windows, if not blacked out, showed parsimonious glimmers, and he was watching his feet as he walked. When he switch
ed on the light on the stairs his mother said, ‘Please, only when you have to,’ and on the landing a faded notice said, ‘Save Electricity – Don’t Switch It On’. His old room, where he dropped his kitbag unopened, to get down faster to his parents, was small, well, it always had been, but it was so dingy. The supper was in the kitchen because leaving the oven door open heated the room; once his mother had made a point of eating ‘properly’ in the dining-room. The three sat around the table which had a vase of autumn leaves on it, and Mrs Reid boasted that she had got ‘under the counter’ liver from the butcher, in honour of his coming home. She served three thin lengths of brown meat like leather straps, with onions and potatoes. James had told himself, having grown up, that his father was not an old man, but though he was not much over fifty Bill Reid was an old man now, with a fuzz of white hair around a red face. James’s mother was polite to him and smiled all the time. Her embrace when he arrived seemed embarrassed rather than warm. ‘You have filled out,’ she said. But she could not stop smiling and tried to blink away tears when he noticed them. His father, silent as ever, kept pushing the dishes of vegetables at him, nodding Help yourself, but while his eyes were moist too, he could not talk, even say, ‘Thank God you’re home,’ so the dishes of vegetables had to do instead. ‘Have some potatoes,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘At least we’ve got plenty of those.’ In the dim kitchen the three sat eating and smiling, and felt so powerfully for themselves and for each other that it was a relief when James said he was tired. He left his mother sitting under the light, the radio switched on, crocheting something, and his father went to the pub.

  ‘He’s got to tell his mates you are home,’ she said.

  James stood at his bedroom window and looked down at the darkened town. In India lights glared and blared, shadows moved blackly as the sun did, defining the hours. He had returned to a lightless land.

  He at once got a job at the Town Hall, but not starting at the bottom, because of his years administrating Camp X. It was a good job. He stayed in his room a lot, reading, ate the meals that were less even than the meagreness he had been brought up with: rationing suited his mother’s nature; she enjoyed eking out the bacon ration and making the meat ration stretch. The drear and dark of post-war England – well, he was home, and that was all that mattered. He thought of India and did not like his memories. Except for Jack Reeves, with whom he had exchanged addresses, and Donald, and Colonel Grant – and of course, the little child of those two visits – he did not care to remember India, which was not so much a place as an emotion of holding on, sticking it out.