Forgotten Life
Forgotten Life
Brian Aldiss
The second volume in the acclaimed Squire Quartet, available for the first time as an ebook.Spanning fifty years and three continents – from pre-war Suffolk, to the Far East in the 1940s, to Oxford and America in the present day – Forgotten Life is a novel of immense scope, encompassing comedy and tragedy, joy and grief, as its three main characters try to work out the most difficult problem of all – the meaning of their own lives.Brian says: ‘This novel, which in retrospect can be seen to have a similar ground plan to Non-Stop, written thirty years earlier, was more warmly received than any other Aldiss novel, not simply by its reviewers but by readers.’Features a new introduction by the author.
Forgotten Life
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.
Brian Aldiss
Forgotten Life
Dedication
for
Margaret
jo
svaki dan
Contents
Cover (#ulink_8030ee8c-35ed-5040-a2d1-cdeefbc262ae)
Forgotten Life
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Book One
Angel
1
It was almost roses, roses, all the way. The fans…
2
Clement Winter left home shortly after nine the next morning,…
3
Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and…
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a…
5
The past immediately becomes history. Even yesterday has undergone a…
6
About a mile from my billet, in a modest side…
7
There was at that time a song very popular in…
8
The crate of film was dumped in the foyer of…
9
Clement shaved in mild good humour. He had no objection…
10
And so I found myself, helpless, with a little kaleidoscope…
Book Two
Anima
11
‘You have been a bit absent-minded since we got home,…
12
Sheila was sympathetic.
13
When Clement awoke next morning, Sheila had already left the…
14
Sheila, her husband, and his brother dined together in the…
15
An old moon was waning above the roof-tops of North…
16
Clement entered the hallway of his house to find a…
17
Clement’s night was a restless one. Often he imagined Sheila,…
18
Inset in the front door of the house in Rawlinson…
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
He walked; all round the slumb’ring Glade
Shone the SUBLIME. Through elm and birch
Old cottages led to the Church
While winding Stour a sail display’d
By many a sunlit mound and bend.
But on goes he with inward muse,
And still the DARKNESS him pursues;
He murmurs, ‘Stay, I have no Friend,
No Love, no ABSOLUTION claimed,
And all that IS is ever maimed.’
‘The Calm’ from
A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk
William Westlake, 1801
Of all persons, those in distress stand most in need of our good offices. And, for that reason, the Author of nature hath planted in the breast of every human creature a powerful advocate to plead their cause.
In man, and in some other animals, there are signs of distress, which nature hath both taught them to use, and taught all men to understand without any interpreter. These natural signs are more eloquent than language; they move our hearts, and produce a sympathy, and a desire to give relief.
There are few hearts so hard, but great distress will conquer their anger, their indignation, and every malevolent affection.
Essays on the Power of the Mind
Thomas Reid, Edinburgh, 1820
Lo, how it guards the son from War’s alarm,
The loving Shelter of a Mother’s arms;
Snatch him too young away and count the Cost,
A tortured Spirit, rostered with the Lost.
from ‘Miss Montagu’s Portrait’
William Westlake, 1790
Introduction
Forgotten Life opens in razzmatazz style, with American fans of Green Mouth’s ‘Kerinth’ novels seeing her off at JFK airport as she prepares to fly back to Britain.
On the flight, she slowly becomes Sheila Winter again, wife of Clement Winter. She has travelled around the States for twenty-three days, signed many of the 1.5 million copies of her latest book, given a two-hour-long speech, gone without sleep, lived on pills, and more than once had had sexual intercourse with her Hispanic New York editor.
When the Winters are home and secure in their large Victorian house in North Oxford, Sheila falls asleep in a chair. Clement goes upstairs to his study, and it is then we come to the heart of the book.
This volume shows the division between the well-established Oxford don, Clement Winter, living in Rawlinson Road, Oxford, and his footloose elder brother, Joseph Winter, who has just died. Clement is finishing his work on Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars. He works from his home and from Carisbrooke, his college. He is a qualified analytical psychologist.
Now he must do something about his dead brother’s relics.
One thing I hoped to emphasise was the inevitable divide that existed between those who went through World War II and those who did not - even if the two were brothers.
Joseph, the older brother, had fought the Japanese in Burma in 1944. He wrote letters, not to Clem but to their sister, Ellen. Some of those letters, worn by time, have found their way into Clement’s hands.
In them, Joseph speaks of the fighting. He speaks too of a deserters’ camp in Calcutta, where men lived in squalor, existing by thieving from other army units, rather than facing the terrors raised by the Japanese Imperial Army.
A substantial part of Forgotten Life is taken up by Joe’s efforts to record the fighting in Burma, where he formed part of the ‘Forgotten Army’ – a label claimed at the time, which remains even now – as well as his search for the house where he and a Chinese woman had become lovers. Baffled, Joe cannot decide if he had ever found that house. Time, as Joe has to come to admit, brings change. The quiet little town in Sumatra he knew in the old days becomes a roaring and confused city. It proves futile to search for the past.
One might call the plot-line simple; the characters are more complex. There is a time in life when the two brothers are together again, and Joe his sardonic self. But the few years’ difference between them proves too much: Joe fought in a war, on the other side of the globe; Clem did not. Many families made this discovery. Perhaps it is what made the novel popular.
Brian Aldiss
Oxford, 2012
BOOK ONE
1
It was almost roses, roses, all the way. The fans kept on laughing and joking, even into the asperities of JFK Airport.
SPEAK TO US GREEN MOUTH, cried their noble banners, in priceless fan embroidery, too overwhelmed to give punctuation a single hemstiched thought.
RAZZMATAZZ FOR TAZZ.
‘Don’t leave us! We’ll make ya President!’
What measure was the unit of laughter? The ha? A million units of ha were expended as the admiring throng gladly, proudly, lugged Green Mouth’s luggage to the First Class Check-In. Every one of the faithful needed to lay a plump hand on the sacred suitcases.
More units, as baggage moved on the metal loop away into concealed realms, piece by precious piece. More units, as the throng shuffled slowly towards Duty Freeze Zone and final farewells. More units, pained now, before they could possibly say goodbye to her. A little chorus of units trickled among the streams of ha-less humanity filling the lounges.
Green Mouth was always at the centre of the chorus, triumphal, regal. Almost silent herself, the catalyst against whom the ha-units she generated beat in vain. It was a fine performance, Dr Clement Winter told himself. He should not worry. There was no real cause for worry.
The noise, the banners, the nervous mirth, provoked Green Mouth continually to smile her grim smile, and to chuckle her grim chuckle, which even the most admiring could not effectively imitate. Laughter was not for her but for the acolytes. Chuckles were power-based, laughter was weakness. She floated slowly towards SHOW PASSPORTS, stately as a cinema butler, be-ringed hand up to shoulder to adjust green cloak.
Some of those jostling near asked her questions, harmless things intended as no more than tribute. To these questions, Green Mouth tossed remarks of some brevity: ‘We’ll have to see about that.’ ‘That’s one for my agent.’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘We’d all like to know that.’
Each little coded reply provoked more units of ha. The throng loved, thrilled to, such effortless arrogance. They ate them like dog biscuits. And of course there was grief in every ha, for Green Mouth was about to desert them.
Green Mouth was deserting them. She was now leaving the United States of America behind, leaving it forsaken to make out on its own as best it could. The mere idea was ha-inducing. So Clement told himself, squeezing out his amusement as the throng elbowed him.
The fans had a fantasy ready to account for the desertion. Green Mouth had been Called. Tazz of Kerinth had called her on telepathic beam. A New Cause awaited Green Mouth. So she was about to leave Planet Earth for another galaxy, wrapped in her ample green cloak, wearing that neat little tiara – handmade by admirers in Churubusco, Indiana – in among her blonde curls. This was what they told each other, among has, to console themselves for the cruel facts of life.
No wonder the mundane passengers, outside the charmed ha-ing circle, turned momentarily to stare. Envy must account for those surly looks.
At the inescapable moment of parting, a group of the laughingest fans, calling themselves the Inner Circle of Kerinth, who had travelled with Green Mouth and Clement all the way from Boston, unfurled their largest banner. It bore the slogan featuring in the publisher’s current publicity campaign: GREEN MOUTH SEZ IT ALL. A bugle ha-haed, sky high.
Clapping, cheering. Ha-ing, weeping. Other passengers pushed out of the way. Special people only in this throng – men and women, or rather, boys and girls, weighty around stomach and hips, protuberant of buttock and breast, most having achieved, if not maturity, avoirdupois, all be-badged if not actually in fancy costume, all addicts of Green Mouth’s pre-pubertal planet. Cameras and videocams at the alert, all clustered about their heroine for the last shot, a last kiss, an embrace or, failing those, a mere touch.
How fortunate that she was, in her forty-sixth year, so statuesque that she could withstand their ardour, like a rock in a surging tide, or perhaps Brünnhilde standing in for Andromeda on her rock. She could recall all the names of the faithful – all their first names. She had a word for each personally, even if it was only ‘Bye’. Her little Hispanic editor from Swain Books Inc. was thanked last and with greatest warmth. Against his lips, as he stood on tiptoe, were crushed most enthusiastically those pursed green lips. Clement turned away. When he looked again, she and the camp-followers were parted. The desertion was made flesh.
The ha count dies. The fans are swept aside by brisk business passengers equipped with the latest briefcases. They look deflated, tawdry, as they furl up their banners. Alcohol and drugs and hangovers increase their sorrow. Some weep, some begin to skip or dance.
None of this matters. The hall is already peopled with eccentrics, drawn to this parting of the ways like cats on a quayside. Some speak out for various religions, thrusting pamphlets on the unwary. Some tout lost or mislaid causes. Some cry aloud injustices in various distant homelands. Some merely try to sell earrings. Big blacks skate grandly by on wooden wheels, Flying Dutchpersons able to ignore the world, their ears plugged with microsound. Although accustomed to the USA, Clement remains amazed at how busy airports are on Sundays.
The Kerinth fans are lost now. Mother has gone away, her sons and daughters are scattered. They drift off to drink calorific shakes in nearby bars, pink, green, brown, or Your Choice.
A last imperial wave of braceleted wrist and Green Mouth is through the final barrier. Clement follows humbly, given status by being i/c documents. Green Mouth seats herself on a plastic seat. Two nearby English passengers shrink away.
‘Buy a bottle of Smirnoff, Clem – to take home to Michelin,’ says Green Mouth. She is not above such mundane details, but she stares ahead as if she had not spoken. He moves towards the Duty Free. He understands she wishes to be alone with her carbonated emotions. She has to come back to Earth before she can leave terra firma.
Clement Winter was a thin man, which suited his self-effacing qualities. There was about him an air of one for whom life has been slightly insufficient, or who has been slightly insufficient for life. He wore a striped light jacket with matching tie, a white shirt, and a pair of blue trousers. His hair was not chestnut enough to notice and now, in his fiftieth year, somewhat frayed about the edges. His hands hung from his sleeves. Only in his face, running a little to fat, was there a lively darting thing; it was as though his head had generally had more luck than the rest of him.
He purchased the vodka his wife wanted and returned to her via the bookstall, where War Lord of Kerinth was in the No. 2 Bestsellers slot. War Lord of Kerinth had 1.5 million copies in print hardcover, each wrapped in its sizzling jacket by S. S. Bronbell and stamped with the legend cooked up at Swain by the little Hispanic editor, ‘Green Mouth Sez It All’. As he passed the stall, Clement saw a middle-aged woman in a smart ice-blue suit take a copy over to the checkout point. She did not even glance at the price. The volume, bulked up as it was, resembled a glutinous box of chocolates.
No one could mistake Green Mouth. She sat upright in her plastic seat, a dowager duchess at least, her ample mouth that brilliantly repellent green, the same shade echoed about her eyes, her eyelashes tinted gold. He sat beside her, tucking the vodka into a carrier. Her distinctive hand-luggage, bearing its open green mouths, came between them.
‘Sheila,’ he said.
The name, he considered, was like a projectile, a component of some vast SDI programme of the mind, bursting into her personal umwelt, carrying with it unwelcome news of her ordinary humanity. She responded only with a grunt, possibly a grunt of pain, completely ha-free.
‘You were wonderful,’ he said. Using the past tense on her like a can-opener. She had to start getting back sometime. There was jet-lag. There was reality-lag. Best to keep them separate.
‘Wonderful,’ he repeated, choosing more of a dying fall this time. And then their flight was called in an electronic voice as soft as the cooing of doves.
On the Boeing, muzak was playing: ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’. As Clement hung the green cloak on a rail, he glanced through into Economy, where the hordes were fighting to stash away liquor in overhead lockers, mussing each other’s hair and tempers in the process. Every year, as civilization ticked by, thousands of gallons of alcohol were ferried back and forth across the Atlantic, each precious bottle of the stuff requiring a human attendant. It was one of the paradoxes of modern living which kept living modern.
Clement hoped that when the hostesses had seen to his wife’s minor problems, which always cropped up, and preferably had recognized her, and more preferably had read all her books, she would remove the viridian lipstick and deflate back into being Sheila Winter again. She always said she liked to travel anonymously; and that was fine, as long as everyone knew who you were.
Sure enough, as he returned to his seat, or armchair as Pan-Am liked to call it, the hostesses were flocking round with the champagne, professing to be fans of Kerinth, every one. 1.5 million copies hardcover certainly wasn’t hay. And to think the first Kerinth novel, Brute of Kerinth, had been published originally in a paperback edition of no more than sixty thousand copies. Not so much wonderful as a miracle – their personal miracle.
Green Mouth was gracious as always. Sure, she’d love to visit the flight deck after dinner. Sure, she always flew Pan-Am. Champagne was poured again. They drank. Clement drank. Good for Kerinth; it stood between him and Economy.
She still retained her Green Mouth face even when her eyes closed. She must be tired after four days in Boston of constant limelight and the tour before that. Never more than six hours’ sleep a night. Much drink, taken without flinching. Saying nice things about Swain. Hearing nice things from Swain. All energy-sapping. But never a word of complaint.
Her face, under its paint, was large, brown, homely, and lightly creased. The teeth had been fixed so that she did not look as once she had like something that had just run in the Grand National. Sheila Winter was rather a handsome woman, though there was a heavy jaw, speaking of determination, perhaps of rather a glum kind. In her ears were little mazooms of emerald, designed for her by a French fan in California. Not so little, either. They threatened to execute a pincer movement along the planes of Green Mouth’s cheeks, just as – how often – mazooms had menaced the World of Kerinth before brave Tazz had tamed one of them.
Without opening her eyes, she ran her green nails along his jacket sleeve. ‘Wonderful,’ she said.
Once the plane was airborne, the captain spoke over the intercom, telling the passengers at what height they would be travelling and at what time they were due to hit the coast of Ireland – at which announcement all the English passengers looked alarmed. But the champagne came round again, and the feline hostesses, and Green Mouth began to talk without looking at Clement. She was delivering a monologue. Clement felt no need to reply; he understood. The weary brain was off-loading like a computer. Sheila had been travelling round the States for twenty-three days, promoting the latest Kerinth novel from coast to coast in eighteen cities. And for the last four days she had been incarcerated in the Luxor Hotel in Boston (where Clement had joined her), as Guest of Honour at the XIX Fantacon, known in her honour as the Kerincon, the constant target of attention for five thousand fans, many of them attired only in leopard skin and sword.
She had gone without sleep. She had lived on pills. She had rarely ceased drinking or talking. She had given interviews. She had answered endless questions – often the same questions – with good grace. She had received gifts. She had signed many of the 1.5 million copies of her book. She had made a two-hour-long speech, full of attractive pathos about her happy childhood and not lacking in ha-quota either. She had thrown a wildly expensive party in her hotel suite for publishers, friends, and special fans. She had been laid more than once by her diminutive Hispanic editor, all in the spirit of fun. She had posed for photographs for Locus and anyone else who asked. She had smiled her grim smile most of the time. She had smoked almost incessantly, showered often, and accepted with an amusing speech the High Homeric Fantasy Award for being Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy.
No wonder her brain wanted to talk. The sump had to be drained, the gurge regurgitated.
High above the grey and tedious Atlantic, she paused once to emit a simultaneous yawn and belch.
‘But how are you feeling?’ Clement asked.
Her hand sought his, and then she looked at him through cloudy eyes. ‘Fucking awful, darling,’ said Green Mouth.
She was returning to reality. He summoned the hostess for some more champagne.
Monday morning. Home again. Shoes off time. Safe. Secure in the Victorian brick wilderness of North Oxford. Their square-windowed house in Rawlinson Road was shielded from the gaze of passers-by by an enormous horse chestnut tree which some absent-minded builder had forgotten to destroy while he had the chance, possibly during the celebrations attendant on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
The hired chauffeur stacked their luggage in the hall and left.
Sheila went into the front room and reclined with care on the sofa under the lace-curtained window. Her green lipstick and eye shadow had been removed in the toilet of the 747. She now looked merely pale, merely enervated, merely English.
‘Are you going to make us a cup of tea?’ she called.
Clement was taking the cases upstairs.
‘Good idea. Hang on a moment.’ Michelin, who lived with them, was out.
The time was 10.50. Or alternatively, 5.50, New York time.
His head rang.
In their bedroom, he set down the cases and opened one of them. In it, approved by Customs, lay Green Mouth’s latest prize, the High Homeric Fantasy Award, sculpted in fibre glass.
To please her, possibly to revive her, he took it downstairs and placed it on a table before her. She smiled wanly.
‘Oh, that!’ said the Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy. It is magnificent. It consists of a bust of Homer with two little cupid wings sprouting from his grey locks, just above his ears. This is no mere ha flim-flam. This is a literary award, bestowed by earnest young judges of the various sexes. On the back of the revered Greek story-teller’s head are etched the titles of the ten Kerinth novels and the one collection of short stories, with their dates of publication.
What’s more, this award is electronic. Inside the skull is concealed a lithium battery smaller than a dime. Clement switches on. Homer’s blind eyes light up. The wings flap at a dignified pace. Homer nods.
Sheila smiled. ‘Wonderful, but … tea?’
He brought her tea in her Libra mug, accompanied by two Hedex, and sat on the edge of the sofa clutching his own mug.
‘You could go up and lie on the bed.’
She nodded, clasping the mug between stubby fingers, looking down into the tea. ‘I wonder if Michelin made any biscuits.’
After they had sipped for a while in silence, she yawned and looked rather sullenly round the room, as if to orient herself.
It was not a remarkable room, except that successive owners had spared the elaborate Victorian fireplace, before which an electric fire now stood. Sheila had chosen a blue, green and gold decor, and had not pushed the green too heavily. The wallpaper was a dark blue, the chairs and sofa were green and gold. Gold birds fluttered in the folds of blue and green curtains. A large rococo-framed gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece. To the left of the fireplace stood a glass cabinet housing some of Sheila’s awards for fiction, including the International Otherworld Fiction Award sculpture of Tazz riding a mazoom. In the bookcase to the other side of the fireplace, above the sets of Dickens, Galsworthy, and Dornford Yates, her own books were on display, with Brute of Kerinth, the first in the series, facing outwards into the room.
Postcards from all over the world were ranged along the mantelshelf, like illustrations from other people’s lives lived under bright blue skies. Photographs of Green Mouth mixing with important people hung framed on the wall behind the door. Beneath them was a small eighteenth-century side-table bearing a large Chinese vase converted into a table-lamp. Similar conversions involved the mock gas brackets which projected from the wall over the fireplace. The white leather rhino which served as a footrest – present from a grateful and enriched publisher in Germany – had never seen the forests of Sumatra.
The stillness in the room was also in a sense man-made. The Winters had had all the windows double-glazed, to shut out noise from the street.
To the rear of the room, by a curtained archway leading through to the conservatory, a music stack with discs, records and cassettes waited in an alcove. There hung an enormous gouache, painted for a bygone dust jacket, of Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, standing bolt upright with a spear and a sort of dog, gazing into the purple future.
Beyond the queen stood a bureau at which Sheila often sat to answer her fanmail. Her study suite was upstairs on the first floor. Clement’s little study was up another flight, on the second floor, under the eaves that pointed in the direction of the University.
‘Back to reality,’ she said, setting down her mug. ‘I suppose Michelin is in Summertown shopping.’
‘She’ll be back soon. Shall we have a snort of something?’
‘Shall we? Just wine for me.’
‘Wine it is.’ He went through to the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of Mouton Cadet, whistling as he did so.
Michelin had collected up the mail and piled it on the dresser. As he put the corkscrew back into the drawer, Clement looked it over. Most of the letters were for Sheila, addressed to her under her famous pseudonym; most of them came from the United States. Sorting casually through the collection, he found some bills and a small package addressed to him. He recognized his sister Ellen’s writing.
The package was registered. Evidently Michelin had signed for it. He frowned, but made no attempt to open it just yet. Like Sheila, he felt a reluctance to allow the real world back in: the world of bills. On Kerinth, bills were never presented or paid; no one worked, except peasants. Sisters, if they sent packets, sent them by hand – probably by a messenger on a telepathic erlkring. The messenger would arrive in a lather, perhaps seriously wounded, and the packet would contain something portentous. A lover’s heart, perhaps, as in The Heart of Kerinth.
Was Ellen sending him something equally vital?
He suppressed such questions, left the package on the dresser, and went back into the front room to Sheila, carrying the bottle and two glasses.
After the first glass, she fell asleep. He spread a tartan rug gently over her. He stood regarding her. With her eyes closed she looked characterless, despite the noble nose and noticeable chin.
Taking the opportunity, Clement went quietly upstairs to his study. There his dead brother’s papers awaited him, stacked on the desk, tumbling out of boxes on the floor; the mortal remains of Joseph Winter in folders and old brown paper bundles. For all practical purposes, Joseph in death had taken over Clement’s study.
When Sheila had made her remark, commonplace enough, about coming back to reality, she had spoken, Clement thought, with contempt as well as resignation. Reality for him meant something different, something with the texture of puzzlement, for to enter his study was to feel himself entangled in the affairs of his late brother.
Some time soon, he would have to drive over again to his dead brother’s flat. It was two months since Joseph had suffered his final heart attack. His flat remained, ensconced in that limbo of small London streets where Chiswick subsides ignobly into Acton amid a welter of little furniture dealers, junk shops, discount stores, and auto repair shops. There Joseph Winter had lived in his semi-academic obscurity with a succession of women, while books and documents had piled up around him.
Clement felt only mild curiosity about the women. The books and documents, willed to him, were his responsibility. He had collected some, almost at random, culling them from wardrobes and mantelpieces. He was also engaged with a series of secondhand booksellers, trying to screw from them a tolerably fair price for Joseph’s old volumes, some of which, dealing with Joseph’s subject, South East Asian history, were of value.
The question of the books could be resolved. They were the subjects of a mere financial transaction. It was the unpublished work, particularly that dealing with Joseph’s private life, which presented more than a problem, a challenge, which made Clement feel that his own life was being called into account.
Clement slumped in his chair, forearms resting on his knees, so that his hands dangled in space.
‘Joseph,’ he said aloud – quietly, bearing in mind that Sheila was asleep – ‘what am I going to do about you?’
Since the brothers had never known what to do about each other in life, it appeared unlikely that the question would be resolved now, when one of them had folded up his mortal tent and stolen away.
2
Clement Winter left home shortly after nine the next morning, keeping an eye open for his next-door neighbours, the Farrers, whom he detested. It was a Tuesday, quite a sensible, neutral day of the week – the day, in fact, when he usually held his clinic; but this week as last he had cancelled it, using the excuse of his American trip. Which was as well; jet-lag still made him feel slightly dissociated. Both his legs ached, the left in particular. He walked consciously upright, but a little stiffly.
This walk was his daily exercise. The car remained in the garage. He had changed his more daring American rig for a familiar light grey suit from Aquascutum, as better suited to the environs of Carisbrooke College.
Sheila was still in bed, presumably divesting herself of her Green Mouth personality at leisure. Though he guessed she would soon be working again. Michelin had taken her breakfast up on a tray: orange juice, a mixture of Alpen and All-Bran, two slices of brown wholemeal toast, and a mug of best Arabian coffee with cream. Clement had looked in on her after his breakfast and had taken her the Independent. They had murmured endearments to each other.
Now he was playing the role of one more Oxford don, greying, distinguished, as he walked down the Banbury Road to Carisbrooke.
Boston had been cold and rainy. Oxford was remarkably hot. A June heatwave lay over the British Isles. The newspapers were already circulating tales of old ladies fainting in the streets. In Oxford, Clement reflected, it would be old dons.
As he entered the College grounds, a slightly falsetto tooting sounded behind him. Turning, he saw a blue car of no significance drawing into the car park. His research assistant, Arthur Stranks, waved at him from the driver’s seat.
Out of politeness, Clement turned back, and stood waiting while Arthur parked the car and climbed out, to walk sideways towards his boss so as to keep the car within his sight.
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ he said. ‘I bought her last week, er, in Kidlington, zero miles on the clock. Cheri’s mad about her.’
‘I’m not much of an expert on cars,’ Clement said, searching the new acquisition for some kind of distinguishing mark. He recalled that previously Arthur had driven a dilapidated Mini with printed jokes in the rear window. ‘What is it?’
‘She’s the new Zastava Caribbean,’ Arthur said, standing on tiptoe in his trainers, a habit by which he expressed enthusiasm as well as elasticity. ‘Jugoslav-made, newly imported. The Kidlington garage is the only garage in all Oxfordshire where you can buy it. Sole agents. Er – Cheri and I will be able to drive everywhere in it.’
‘Except, presumably, the Caribbean.’
Arthur laughed good-naturedly. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said.
They walked along together.
‘I’ve promised not to drive too fast,’ Arthur said. ‘Not with Cheri in her condition.’
Clement recalled that Mrs Stranks, who had changed her name from Cherry to Cheri – to be more interesting, her husband said – was newly pregnant.
In Clement’s room, the accustomed piles of papers and books awaited him. He looked about with a show of pleasure. Here at least, he could bring some sense and order into life.
Arthur Stranks blinked a welcome through his glasses and nodded his head a bit.
‘I hope the New York conference was a success? Fun? You get the material you needed?’ His manner was solicitous.
‘Some of it, some of it. I had a long conversation with Prof Stauffer and I’ve brought back photocopies of a bundle of his material.’
Arthur looked interested and did some more nodding. He had tidied the room while Clement was away, and the old box files now stood in military array under the wide window. The photograph of Willy Wilkes-Smith, the late Master of Carisbrooke, Clement’s friend, still hung awry behind the door. Clement went over and straightened it.
Two stacks of wire baskets, six baskets tall, stood on the broad central table. They contained documents, together with photographs and cuttings culled from European and transatlantic sources. One day, with the aid of Arthur, a secretary who came twice a week, and a computer, all this paper, with which the room was slowly filling, would be processed into more paper: into, to be precise, Clement’s next work, a study entitled, Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars. The title was a compromise between the academic respectability he had already achieved and the popular acclaim he felt he deserved; of course the publishers would probably change it anyhow.
‘Er, the breakdowns of the VD figures have arrived from the National Archives in Washington. Came on Thursday.’
‘Good.’ He began to open letters. ‘How’s Cheri? Any morning sickness?’
‘Cheri’s fine. Great.’
They looked at each other across the room, expressionlessly. Clement, in a fit of good will, put down the letter he was holding and commenced to tell Arthur something about the Modern History conference he had attended before flying to Boston to meet Green Mouth.
Clement, who was rather a distant man, discovered in Arthur a desire to get a little too close in their relationship. Also, there was the generation gap, much though he might try to discount it – indeed, he disliked the very phrase. At forty-nine, Clement was conscious of his age. His once curly hair now harboured ash to dilute its previous chestnut and, even more regrettably, was thinning in a silly fashion, behind and in front. His ruddy cheeks had become patchily sallow, in a way that made him uncomfortable before his mirror. Although no hypochondriac, he imagined himself due for a heart attack at times, and had cut down accordingly on the College port. Caring little about politics, he still clung to his liberal socialist principles, born in the early days of Harold Wilson, the first Prime Minister he had voted for, and believed those principles helped keep his faculties from ossifying.
Arthur Stranks was twenty-two and sallow to start with, a stubby young bespectacled man with a pleasant air of wishing to please. His dark hair was cut flat on top; the Scrubbing Brush cut was how Clement and Sheila thought of it. As if to assert a wildness of character acquaintances would not otherwise have suspected him of possessing, Arthur had a small tattoo on his left wrist, a bird of prey with something resembling a rat in its beak, probably holding some arcane sexual significance, thought Clement. He knew his assistant for one of Mrs Thatcher’s conformists, tethered to his job and monetarist respectability, but there was another side to Stranks, a side represented in part by Mrs Stranks, Cheri, a rather silent lady of sidelong glances, sighs, and a self-evident bosom, who was always to be seen – at least by Clement – in very tight stone-washed jeans. Regarding Stranks, Clement found himself thinking of the bird with the rat and of Cheri.
Stranks had made it clear from the first that he considered it a privilege to work for Dr Clement Winter. In an early attempt to be friendly, Sheila and Clement had taken the Strankses to Covent Garden to Janaček’s opera Jen
fa. A few months later the Strankses had invited the Winters to what was at first described simply as ‘a concert’. After accepting, Clement discovered that it was a rock concert.
When the day came, Sheila was too busy finishing a novel to go out. She had excused herself, and Clement had gone on his own with Arthur and Cheri to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre to see Tina Turner live.
He was the only person in the audience in a suit.
The show, the noise, the audience, the enthusiasm, had overwhelmed him. Until that evening, he had never heard of Tina Turner. She was a light coffee-coloured lady wearing a tight-fitting white two-piece which laced up over her exuberant breast, and, even more effectively, a huge wig like a lion’s mane. As she screamed her songs at the audience, the mane shook with fervour. The stage could barely contain Tina Turner. She prowled and stamped about it, shrieking her strange love laments, as if seeking a way of getting at the audience and devouring it.
She was a marvellous and, to Clement, a terrifying spectacle. His ideal of feminine beauty had been formed at about the age of ten, when he distinctly recalled rubbing a pubescent penis against a photograph of Miss Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr had been presented as static, even icy, with the best bits (as he had put it to himself) always chastely concealed. This secretiveness, this pretended show of privacy, had enhanced Hedy Lamarr’s stunning beauty. All such artifices were flung out to allow Tina Turner’s beauty full play. He was looking at a new age, heralded triumphantly by the singing, the stamping, the tossing mane.
And, like the other males in the audience, Clement was filled with lust. That was what he found terrifying. Savage though Tina might appear, barbaric though the noise was, he saw or imagined a delicacy to her limbs, her hands with their long red claws. In particular, there was a sunny good humour about the whole performance from which it took him days to recover.
The audience, clapping and shouting, was another matter. Art and Cheri beside him were suddenly half-naked, which was to say in T-shirts; paying him no attention, they became part of the mass-mind. Clement, too, dropping his jacket on the floor, also gave in. The whole great cavern became a pool of amplified noise and heat and emotion. And Tina Turner, her carnivorous teeth gleaming at the fun of it all.
The next morning found Clement out of sorts with himself. He sent his suit to the cleaners in Summertown. There were worlds which were not his.
Since then, Clement had kept a mental distance from his assistant. He feared that Stranks and his wife, who had really looked astonishing in that T-shirt, might invite him again into those lower depths. And was affronted that they never did.
Now he averted his eyes from the sinister tattoo, and called his attention back to the reason that had brought them to this untidy room.
‘Better pick up the threads again,’ said Clement, after they had talked for some while. He rubbed his hands together, staging enthusiasm, but doing no more than frown at his chair.
‘How’s Sheila?’ Arthur needed more conversation before starting work. ‘Er – her side of things go okay?’ He had the habit of beginning most sentences with ‘Er’, often accompanied by a quick and useless adjustment of the spectacles.
‘Oh, her tour went like a bomb. She’s good on television, and they’re respectful to the English accent, you know. Especially in the south. She’s a bit exhausted – no wonder.’
‘Should think so. She likes America?’
‘Very much so. Whiskey sours. And of course she is so popular there. The Americans have an enthusiasm we lack.’
‘They’re not so critical, are they?’
Clement found this rather an unfortunate remark, but all he said, as he sat down, was, ‘You and Cheri must come round again soon. Sheila will tell you all about it.’
The last time Arthur and Cheri had come round to Rawlinson Road had been quite a success. He had read a couple of Green Mouth novels; no doubt the essentially conservative nature of epic fantasy had its appeal. Clement had spent much of the evening talking to Cheri. It had not been unpleasant. He remembered now that at sight of the tiny swimming pool she had said brightly, ‘I must bring my costume next time.’
Arthur was still postponing a move towards the table.
‘Er, I was reading about Zola in one of the weeklies.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Emile Zola … Seems as if when he was writing his novels he was transported into a sort of totally different thingey – state of being. Rather like being possessed – a state of possession. Terrible visions, intense nightmares, dreams of er, sexual ecstasy, intimations of murder. Quite different from his normal life. A different plane of being … I wondered if – excluding the murder business, of course – if other writers also experienced that kind of transformation … A different frame of mind entirely.’
Clement laughed briefly. ‘You’d have to ask my wife that question.’
Something in Clement’s tone caused Arthur to fall silent. He retreated to his own desk. His trainers made squeegee noises on the parquet flooring.
This was a signal for Clement to resign himself to work. He pulled various items from his briefcase, arranging them on the table before him.
The main bulk of work on Adaptability was already finished, although some chapters required last-minute revision. There were appendices to be drawn up – mainly Arthur’s task – the vexatious notes to be gone over, and various references to be checked. He would be only a few months over his publisher’s deadline. Yet, he realized, the trip to the States, the appearance at the symposium – where American full professors seemed to lead such affluent lives – and the outing to see his wife in action at Fantacon XIX, had unsettled him. He regarded the cordilleras of paper before him without appetite. They certainly would not be printed up in an edition of 1.5 million.
He found himself thinking again of his dead brother. He owed Joseph something. Consanguinity could not be denied.
Sighing, he began to sort through some newspaper cuttings which Arthur had amassed while he was away. One of them caught his attention. It was a brief account, cut from the Independent, of a massacre which had occurred in the Lisenitsky Forest, on the outskirts of Lvov, in the Ukraine, in September 1943.
The details were brief but clear. Following the fall of Mussolini, Italy surrendered unconditionally early that September. Italian forces were still fighting alongside the Nazis. Many of them were left politically and physically stranded by the armistice. 229,000 Italians were serving on the Eastern front. 89,000 of them were killed or disappeared without trace. The Germans were hard-pressed by the Russians after the failure of their Sixth Army to take Stalingrad. When 2,000 Italians refused to fight at the front and demanded repatriation, the Germans, ruthless as ever, simply rounded them up in a sand pit and shot them all. Trees were then planted over the site to conceal it. Over forty years later, the site had been discovered by some children from Lvov.
It was only a small incident in a long war; but it touched closely on the theme of Clement’s book, the break-up of families and relationships throughout Europe as the result of two world wars. In his years in Berlin, Clement had counselled women whose husbands or sons had disappeared into the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union, never to be heard of again.
Making a precis of the facts on a file card, Clement handed it over to Arthur to store the entry in the computer. After some thought, he scribbled a line to the Independent correspondent in Moscow, asking for verification and, if possible, amplification of the facts. The sole witness to the massacre, according to Tass, quoted in the paper, was a woman who had been a schoolgirl of sixteen at the time.
This was only one of a number of similar massacres. In Babi Yar, outside Kiev, the Nazis had massacred 200,000 of their so-called enemies. In Katyn, near Smolensk, Russians had murdered over 4,000 Polish officers.
What had that schoolgirl been doing, wandering innocently in the woods near Lvov? And what effect had sight of that massacre had on her later life? According to her testimony, some of the Italian soldiers had been playing guitars. He saw her through the double-glazed windows of his room, wandering among the willows on the banks of the Isis. She had crept nearer to see who could be playing guitars so happily in the middle of a war. Then came the rifle shots and the cries. She stood behind a tree, fearful. Then she had run for home and not dared to speak of what she had heard and seen.
Clement received these destructions with binocular vision. They happened a long time ago in a distant place. They were also contemporaneous, happening close at hand. Violence remained in the air. Most people in Europe were governed by force. It was inevitable that savagery would break out again. Even understanding was no defence against that.
Since that schoolgirl witness had been born, Hitler’s evil empire had been destroyed. Other evils had sprung up. Her own town, Lvov, had passed from Poland to become part of the Soviet Empire. The century had produced new states of doubtful legality. The new states raised armies which marched or clashed along the shifted frontiers. The victors exacted duties, levies, and taxes – above all a moral tax – on those within their borders.
He sighed and turned back to his desk. Under all his horror at the massacres lay a fascination he sought to conceal even from himself. The fascination kept him at his work. Such massacres as the schoolgirl witnessed represented a rare time when life became greater than the imagination. Generally, the reverse was true.
Over coffee in the common room, Clement bumped into Harry Raine, Master of Carisbrooke. Raine, tall, decrepit by design, spare, thin of jowl, began to talk immediately about problems of invigilation. ‘The day of examining and being examined is upon us. You timed your return from the feverish charms of the New World well,’ he told Clement, with his ghostly smile.
He dislikes me, Clement thought, because my wife makes a lot of money from her writing and I never say a word against it.
He was not sure if this were really so, since Harry sometimes gave the impression – it was something in that ghostly smile which displayed the strangely grouped grey teeth – of disliking everyone. But he never asked after Sheila.
She’s too much a challenge to his antiquated set of values, Clement thought. And he doesn’t like women either. Hence his hugely pompous manner – enough to put off any sensible girl.
Going home that evening, Clement Winter walked to the shops in Summertown, met a few acquaintances, chatted, and collected from the delicatessen smoked herring, bean salad, and a brand of walnut ice-cream which Sheila particularly enjoyed. He was aware that he was probably duplicating Michelin’s efforts earlier; but he wished to reassure his wife that the good things of life had not necessarily stopped just because they were back in England again.
As he entered Rawlinson Road, he passed his neighbour, John Farrer. Farrer was short and bald and given to tweed suits and heavy lace-up shoes when not wearing city clothes. He was ‘in insurance’, and his whole demeanour from the plodding walk onward summed up the banality of the Here and Now, in Clement’s opinion. This would have been insufficient to stop the Winters from speaking to him; it was John Farrer who had decided not to speak to, and even to ignore the existence of, his neighbours. They passed by on the pavement, within a foot of each other, staring straight ahead.
Clement could not resist it. He winked as they were passing.
The wink was to say, ‘Bourgeois Man, you wear your silly thick jacket, even in a heatwave. Right down to your soul you’re over-dressed.’ It was also to say, ‘Aren’t we comic, carrying on this silly feud when we are neighbours?’
It was also to say, ‘I believe I’m superior to you because I can see the funny side of all this …’
The wink was not returned. Stony-faced, the banality of the Here and Now marched on by. Clement turned in at his own gate.
His house, like many of the others in this most superior road, was an example of bland but condescending English architectural manners, with no one feature overwhelming another. Nor did it vie with the neighbouring houses – with the Farrers’ house, for instance. All the same, its essential features had been assembled in such a way that it appeared different from any of the others in the street, and the facade was crowded with too much detail, the windows too large, the porch too heavy, the gables too pointed, for complete discretion. I’m prosperous, the house said, as Clement went in, and I think you should know it.
When he entered the building, he found his wife sitting in the kitchen by the Aga, in a familiar attitude when talking, with one arm bent and tucked behind her head, chatting over the phone to a friend, recounting the ardours and triumphs of the American tour. A cold cup of coffee stood on the table by her. It took Clement only a moment to deduce that the friend at the other end of the line was Maureen Bowler; internal evidence suggested as much. Sheila used a special voice when talking with her feminist friend.
Sheila was wrapped in her blue towelling robe, resting her bare feet on the table. She smiled and waved at Clement without interrupting the flow of her conversation. She was saying, ‘I told them that my idea of the fantastic was not just yesterday’s fantastic, which has become familiar through constant use – unicorns and all that – but something really fantastic, like a whole world on which every living organism has achieved consciousness … Yes, that’s it, like the planet Amarnia in Kerinth Invaded. And then Larry Ivens got up and tried to argue that nothing was fantastic any more—’
He went over to the refrigerator and put the herring and ice-cream in it. Going to the walk-in larder, he took a bottle of white wine from the stone floor. Uncorking it, he poured two glasses, one of which he passed to Sheila. They made toasting gestures to each other and drank; Sheila in addition waggled her toes.
He took his glass upstairs, where Joseph’s papers awaited him. It was noticeably warmer on the second floor. He stood about, opened a window, and then switched on the radio. From Radio Three came the sound of a fellow with an abnormally high voice singing about somewhere called Wenlock Edge. Clement switched him off again, and stood surveying the collection of papers and boxes accumulated here.
His American trip had merely postponed a decision he must now make. He must decide to what use to put his brother’s life now that his brother had finished with it. There was also Joseph’s flat in Acton, with all his books and possessions, to be disposed of.
Indecision was not a habit with him. Yet he pottered about now, the very picture of indecision. He had to admit it: Joseph worried him.
Joseph had been the adventurous one. Clement had had no adventures in life. His social work, his analysis in West Berlin, his visiting professorships in the States – all had a sheltered quality, compared with Joseph’s way of knocking about the world on next to nothing.
Clement had gone to university, unlike his brother and sister, or anyone else in the Winter family. His parents would never have aspired so high. Yet the three years in Birmingham – so he felt, looking back – had been largely wasted, as far as living was concerned. He had made few friends, joined few societies, played no games. He had filled up his days with work, poisoning himself with coffee and the cigarettes he now loathed.
Introspection had led him to become absorbed in the deficiencies of the human character. Within those labyrinths, Clement found himself able to exercise endless patience, like a naturalist in dense jungle, content to wait for hours, and to endure a thousand insect bites and stings, in order to glimpse some rare species. Such a species was now delivered to him in the shape of his elder brother’s papers, and he didn’t know what to do with them, or what pattern to extract from them.
After graduating, he had done social work in London and Coventry, later specializing in psychiatric work at the Maudsley Hospital, where he came to deal with post-war trauma victims. The war, like a heavy monsoon, had made some people and ruined others, and the losers formed a long queue at Clement’s door, demanding attention.
That queue had captured his intense compassion. He had gone to study in Berlin, and there underwent a course of analysis with T. F. Schulz, emerging as a qualified analytical psychologist in 1969. It was in Berlin he had met the young Sheila Tomlinson, long before she set foot on Kerinth.
Back in England, the queue of the maladjusted still awaited him. Marriage to Sheila did not greatly disrupt work on the queue. Only when their one child, Juliet, died, did Clement exert himself and change the course of his career, becoming a professor of sociology in 1973, and publishing his best-received work, Personality and Aggression, in 1974. Later, he worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. By then Sheila was enjoying her first literary success, and Clement had to take a certain amount of teasing, much of it only superficially good-natured, from his colleagues. Academics hated fantasy, feeling themselves surrounded by it; nor were they more cordial to success.
The situation had been better in the States, where success was still regarded as a fun thing, and where he had taken several visiting fellowships in the late seventies. Carisbrooke College, less conventional than older Oxford colleges, had made him a fellow in 1981.
Joseph had followed a less academic course.
Clement’s temperate qualities enabled him to enter keenly into the problems of others. But those problems had merely been traffic through the plain of his own life. His one adventure, apart from the determination needed to get to university, had lain in marrying Sheila; she, too, had been part of that traffic, born the month Paris fell to the German invader, seeking a stability she had lost, and willing to find a substitute for it in Clement’s cautious embrace.
Twelve years Clement’s senior, Joseph had been just old enough to see action in the war, swept overseas in the struggle which had convulsed the world. In Clement’s considered opinion, years of soldiering had awoken something primitive in his brother’s nature, a rebellious and, from some points of view, admirable quality, which had enabled him ever after to live an independent life of struggle, punctuated by periods of insolvency and hazardous travel in the Far East. And of course many affairs with women. Joseph had never settled for anything; nor had he settled down. He had never been able to settle down. That some of his existential problems remained unresolved seemed evident from the muddle of papers in Clement’s room; he had left scattered evidence of his existence, almost as a challenge to his brother, whose duty in life it was to understand.
Clement’s training, as well as his analytical disposition, enabled him to see how reluctant he was to face his own lack of involvement in Joseph’s affairs. He had been far – often physically far – from the crucial events in Joseph’s career.
He took from the drawer of his desk an envelope containing a letter and photograph Joseph had sent him in the early eighties. He was sorry to think that they had arrived in response to his duplicated form. When he was embarking on the research required for Adaptability, Clement had sent out the forms to large numbers of people, inviting memories of the beginning of the war in 1939. He had been impersonal; his brother’s response had been personal and immediate.
Joseph had taken the printed question literally. His reply, in his hasty handwriting, concerned only the declaration of war, when he had just turned thirteen. On that day, 3rd September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, his sister Ellen was almost nine; Clement was little more than a toddler. Their parents, Ernest and Madge Winter, were in their late thirties or early forties.
Madge Winter had taken the photograph on the family box Brownie. It was in black-and-white, with a white margin. Time had made it crisp and slightly concave. In Joseph’s writing on the back of the snap was the legend, ‘Taken an hour after war was declared.’
The family was standing by the old square Morris. Ellen, in a check print dress, was holding baby Clement and grinning. Joseph, in holiday shorts, was wearing a large cap and grinning. Father looked sternly out of the car window, elbow and forearm disclosing a rolled-up shirt sleeve. His expression suggested he was mulling over his favourite phrase, ‘That’s what you get …’ Behind the car, part of a ruin could be seen. They had been holidaying on the north coast of Cornwall, by Tintagel, King Arthur’s castle.
‘I respond to your form at once, because the more obstinately 1939 gets forgotten by the population at large, the more obstinately I remember it,’ Joseph had written in his reply to the form.
Even there, Clement reflected, Joseph revealed his character. Good-natured, rather self-mocking, yet in some way challenging, going against the grain.
‘There was a car park on the cliff top, large and open, and almost deserted except for our Morris and someone’s caravan. The caravan was drawn up so that it enjoyed views of the Atlantic. Rather a battered old thing, if I remember rightly (does one ever remember rightly?). Father pulled up next to it. We got out and Ellen and I ran to look at the cliffs, followed by cautionary screams from mother.
‘A fat man climbed out of the caravan, strolling across to engage my father in conversation. I went over to them after a while, in order to observe the fat man at close quarters. He smoked a pipe and wore a panama hat. Also old grey flannel trousers held up by braces, unless I invent that bit. He seemed a jolly man, although he and father were talking seriously about the international situation. It was a Sunday, and father showed him something in the newspaper.
‘The fat man said that his wife had turned him out of the caravan while she prepared lunch – speaking laughingly, he added that there wasn’t room for two large people inside when she was busy. He waved to her, I remember, and the woman looked out and waved back, with an extra wave for me.
‘She was cooking sausages and mash, and had their radio tuned to the Home Service. The radio said there was to be a special announcement. “This’ll be it,” said the fat man to father, calling to his wife to turn up the volume.
‘Mother and Ellen were walking off towards the ruins with the baby – with you. I stood beside father, staring out to sea. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day and the sausages smelt good.
‘I felt anxious. Perhaps I prayed. I was pretty religious at that age. Kids used to be. It seemed unlikely to me that Hitler would halt the invasion of Poland just because we asked him to, powerful though we believed Britain to be at that time. In a minute, up came the voice of Neville Chamberlain, to inform us that a state of war existed with Nazi Germany. The solemnity of his tone as much as the words impressed me deeply. I looked up at father. He just continued to stare out over the Atlantic. The fat man swore – politely, because I was there. His wife went on frying sausages.
‘She called her husband in for lunch after a while. I could hardly believe it. I imagined everything stopped when war began. We shook hands with the fat man. I was proud because he shook hands with me very readily and told me to do well. He dipped into a pocket and gave me sixpence before disappearing. While this comforted me father was annoyed with me for accepting it. He thought the man was common. No one had sausages for Sunday dinner, even on holiday, he said.
‘He headed for the ruins to break the news to mother. I followed. The sunlight and the sea remained completely unaltered.’
Clement folded the letter along its old crease-lines, and reinserted it in its envelope. That had been one enormous difference between him and Joseph: the war. It had for ever separated them.
His gaze alighted on the small package from his sister. As he took up his paperknife to open it, Sheila entered the room carrying the wine bottle, and sat down on his sofa.
‘How was Maureen?’
‘Oh, she’s still working to abolish marriage, the legalized way in which men suppress women.’ They both laughed. Since her separation from a drunken husband some years ago, Sheila’s friend Maureen Bowler had become a noted feminist.
‘You’ll take life easy for a few days, Sheila, darling? You need a rest after all the Green Mouth excitements in the States.’
‘Perhaps we’ll fly down and have a few days in Marbella next month, if it’s not too hot. I’m not doing anything too serious at present. But I phoned Mrs F.’
Mrs F. was Mrs Flowerbury, Sheila’s faithful secretary.
‘There’s a pile of stuff awaiting attention in my study. Mrs F. swore she was prepared to come even on Sunday.’
‘Silly woman!’
‘Well, her children are away and her husband’s got this contract in the Gulf. I think she’s glad to come here to fill in the time. As you know, some people have peculiar attitudes to time …’
They chatted and drank wine for a while, until Sheila told Clement to open up Ellen’s package.
From the wrapping he lifted seven venerable envelopes. They were accompanied by a letter from Ellen, penned in her small grey house in Salisbury on small grey notepaper.
Holding up the paper, Clement read aloud. ‘“Knowing that you are working on Brother Joseph’s papers, I am sending you seven letters which he wrote to me from India. I was only fourteen at the time, he was my idolized elder brother. The letters have become fragile with time, like the rest of us. Treasure them well. I definitely” – underlined – “want them back before long.” And she ends with love to you and me, and a P.S. saying the dog is in good health.’
‘Nothing about Jean?’ Sheila asked.
‘She doesn’t mention Jean.’ Jean was the only child of the marriage between Ellen and Alwyn Pickering. She had become divorced three years earlier and was the source of excited anxiety to her mother, in which capacity she vied with Jessie, the dog.
Of the seven envelopes Ellen had sent, two were plain. Five were official, with the words ACTIVE SERVICE printed boldly on them. All seven bore four anna stamps and Indian postmarks, dating from the time when Joseph was a soldier on his way to fight the Japanese in Burma. His age was eighteen, although he had passed himself off for a year older than he was.
‘They’re antiques!’ Sheila exclaimed.
‘We all are.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Switching on his desk light, Clement began to read the letters in order, passing each to Sheila as he finished it.
Even as he read, he thought, ‘I can’t simply use Joseph as a witness in my book. He’ll have to have a book to himself and I’ll have to write it. I can start with his war service.’
The frayed letters, now over forty-two years old, were written in various inks and pencil on various pieces of paper. All testified to a close link between brother and sister, excluding little Clem.
Dimapur, India
3rd Oct. 1944
Dearest Ellen,
Just a note to tell you that your loving brother is on the fringes of something triffic. Or trifficesque. An adventure. Like the ones we used to have together, imagining we were in the wilds. Now I am really going to be in the wilds. The real wilds. The wildly wild wilds.
In fact if you could see me at present you’d guess something wild was in the wind. I’m sitting writing to you in a broken down old tent, relic of the Great War or the Crimea, in a terrible transit camp in a place called Dimapur, on the threatened eastern fringes of India. Look it up in your school atlas. The flies are dreadful, the whole camp is like an entrance to hell. Except hell is not as hot as Dimapur.
We arrived here late last night, off the train from a place further north called Tinsoukia, four days after leaving Calcutta. I had been sixteen days on the move, shunted here and there by an inefficient administration, sleeping in trains (sometimes on the wooden luggage rack) and even on hard concrete station platforms among the natives. There were six of us arriving at 2 a.m. this morning, exhausted, to a not very friendly reception. Orderly corporals are a bad lot at the best of times. This one said he could do nothing till eight this morning. We had to sleep on the tables in the mess. So we did, for about three hours. (The mess is a concrete floor and a thatched roof, by the way.)
At six, as day was dawning, we were woken by the cooks. Cooks are worse than corporals. We had to get up then while they prepared breakfast. Later on, we checked into this most derelict of tents and here we are. I’ve had a snooze. Now this note. We haven’t the faintest idea what will happen next – except that we are on our way to Burma to fight the Japs. I shall not name that country again. It’s against regs. Take it from me that it is less a country, more a state of mind. The Id of the modern world.
The food would make you sick, but we’re used to it.
There was a notice on Dimapur station which said NEW YORK 11,000 MILES, TOKYO 5,400 miles, LONDON 8,300 MILES. That’s how far we are from civilization.
Our detail is under command of a cheerful sergeant called Ted Sutton. He’s from Yorkshire, a brickie foreman in civvy life, and one of the best men I ever met. Nothing upsets him, nor can you put anything over on him. Privately, I worship Ted and his cheerfulness. I’d follow him anywhere. No doubt I shall have to.
I’m very cheerful. The awfulness is exciting. But I’m also a bit fed up (or Chokka, as we say here). I wanted to get to China. You know how I’ve always been mad about things Chinese. It’s quite close. Chunking’s the place to be – Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. Constantly bombed by the Japs, full of filth and mud, so I heard from a chap in a bar in Calcutta who’d been there. That’s where I long to be. (Okay, I’m daft, but it can’t be worse than – where we’re going …) I volunteered twice, knowing the Chinese are bound to be short of radio ops. But no joy. Funny, the Chinese aren’t trusted. Yet they’re our allies. (I saw some beautiful Chinese girls in Calcutta but never mind that!)
Oh, we’re supposed to parade or something. I’ll post this here or God knows when there will be another chance. Here we go! Love to all.
Milestone 81
8th Oct. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Some address, eh? Some place!
Plenty of through traffic, as you might expect. We’re literally perched on the edge of a road. And what a road! I wish you could see it. It would satisfy your craving for ‘mad things’!
I wrote to you last from another world. Something has happened since then; that old world has gone. This is a different world – a sub-world of men only and grave intentions and festering discontent and rationed food and that particular brand of ‘organised chaos’ in which the British Army specializes. Well, before I get too philosophical, I’d better tell you how we got to Milestone 81.
Was there ever such a day – or such a road! We started out from Dimapur (if you got my letter from there, which I doubt, because the camp was so appalling they probably burn all letters), where this road begins. It runs on to Kohima and Imphal – famous, legendary names, local equivalents of Valhalla. We travelled in a three-tonner, eight of us. All I could do was stand looking out of the back and marvel, along with a bloke from Warrington called Fergy. Some of the others – amazing! – weren’t interested, and didn’t look. I bet you would have done.
Like the Burma Road, this road has been built by coolie labour – is still being built, because owing to landslides and rockfalls it is never completed. It’s been hacked out of jungle-clad mountainside. I’ve never seen such mountains. Jagged, steep – someone’s going to have to fight over mountains very similar. Many trucks have driven over the edge. It’s easy – just a moment’s lack of concentration … You can see the skeletons of crashed trucks down in the valleys, far below. Sometimes we passed strings of men, almost naked, with buckets balanced on poles over their shoulders – down far below, or far above the road. And here and there, too, working by the little threads of river in the valleys, peasants – bent in typical peasant posture, working. Even war brings them no relief from work.
It’s a one-lane road, with lay-bys every so often to let convoys pass each other. Each milestone marked – each an achievement.
At Milestone 81, I got decanted, and here I am. A real soldier now. In a WAR ZONE.
Royal Signals is strong here, along with other units of the famous British 2 Division. We are now part of the multi-racial Fourteenth Army, more familiarly known as the Forgotten Army. The Forgotten Army. The name clings like mustard gas. Everyone here grumbles like fury. I have to hide the fact that I’m enjoying it all.
Later. Sorry, interruption. I was talking about the people I now must work with. They have every right to grumble. They are more or less resting after the battle of Kohima. ‘One of the worst British battles of the war.’ Kohima’s only a few miles ahead of us. It’s now safe in British hands, what’s left of it, and all the Japs are dead. Very few prisoners taken.
The chaps complain because they think they should be sent home, or at least be given leave in India. Instead they face another campaign. And they have only me to tell it to. I think they hate me – inexperienced, pale-skinned, and having missed the hard bits … Most of them have already served three years out here. No home leave. Offered no prospect at all of getting home as long as the war with Japan lasts … which could be a century.
Morale’s low. You get the idea. They romanticize themselves as the Forgotten Army. Very bitter. I was still in the Fourth Form when they came out here.
‘What bloody good are you going to be, Winter?’ That’s what one bloke asked me yesterday. I can’t say how many times I’ve been told to ‘get some service in’ – which I am doing. Trouble is, we all go about in the bare buff, as they say, and everyone here is baked dark brown. I’m conspicuous because as yet I’m still lily white from England. Another week or two of this sun should cure that!
The only person who has been friendly so far is a Birmingham man, Bert Lyons, whose father owns a bicycle shop. He and I had quite a good talk by the light of a small lantern last night. Bert seems to have the same kind of sense of wonder as you and I. He’s also a radio op.
The Japs are still marching on India. Though we turned them back at Kohima, they are still regarded as almost unbeatable. Bert says it’s because they can live on so little – a handful of rice a day. Whereas we are decadent. He says the British Empire is finished. The Japs took over Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma itself so easily. It’s incredible. Are they going to rule half the world? Slim, the commander of the Forgotten Army, calls them ‘the most formidable fighting insects on Earth’. I guess dealing with Japs is a bit like that – fighting giaut invading insects from another world. The tales of their cruelty are legendary.
Before reaching Milestone 81, we reinforcements had a chance to talk to some troops who had been in Orde Wingate’s Chindits – heroes all – and they were in no doubt about just how tough all encounters with the Jap were likely to be. (If they got wounded in the jungle, these Chindits were given a shot of morphine and left with a revolver – to shoot themselves rather than fall into Jap hands.)
Anyhow, I’m now a member of ‘S’ Signal Section – their sole new recruit. The other reinforcements are spread throughout the division. I’ve not been through ‘S’ section’s harrowing experiences, about which they constantly tell me. Am I welcome? Certainly not. I’m a representative of ‘The Blight’ (Blighty), the country thousands of miles distant which has ignored them and their exploits for so long. Thank God for Bert Lyons. ‘Don’t worry, we’re all puggle,’ he says – puggle being our word for le cafard…
Such mighty things happening. Conversation so trivial – apart from those terrible experiences – some of which I now know by heart. God, what these poor so-and-sos have been through. And more to come.
I’m off on duty now. Love to all.
Milestone 81. Assam
13th Oct. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Hope to hear from you some day. Letter from Mum, which I’ll answer soon. Perhaps you could show her this one to be going on with. The chaps here have mainly given up writing home.
We’re still waiting to move forward. I’ll then have to be careful what I say. Of course our letters are censored by one of the officers for safety’s sake.
I’ll tell you what our billet is like. Very picturesque, I assure you.
I’m lodged in a tent consisting of a spread of brown tarpaulin over a patch of steep hillside. Lodged is the word. When I got here from Dimapur, five men already occupied the tent. If you can call it a tent. They made room for me, and so I found lodgement on the outer side, just about.
My bed or charpoy is home-made. I can’t say I’m proud of my handiwork, but it’ll do. A bit Robinson Crusoe! It consists of a ground sheet stretched across four bamboo poles which are lashed together with old signal wire. This masterpiece is balanced on empty jerry cans, stacked so that the bed is roughly level on the uneven ground. My mosquito net is secured to ropes overhead, so low that the net is uncomfortably close to my face. Never mind – I can see the stars at night.
Apparently we are 4,300 feet above sea level. It’s as if we were perched on the top of Ben Nevis. From my charpoy, I can see a hill whose peak is a thousand feet higher than we are. It towers above us, jungle-clad all the way. Not long ago, it swarmed with Japs. By propping myself up on one elbow, I can see the great road, winding and winding on for miles, always carrying its slow crawl of convoys. What a window on the world! Behind me, on the slope where we are perched, is an untidy waste land, only partly cleared. It was also Jap-infested until recently. In it still remain all the vantage points, fire bays, and tunnels the Japs dug. They were killed by grenades and flame-throwers, and their bodies walled-in where they lay. No wonder the hillside has a thriving rat population …
I was asleep last night when a rat jumped on to my charpoy and ran across the net over my face. I struck out violently at it – and dislodged my charpoy from its pile of cans. Consequently I was pitched right out of the tent, where I rolled some way down the slope, naked as the day I was born. The other blokes just laughed or swore because I had woken them. I had to laugh myself.
Mum asks if we have any entertainment. Three nights ago, the Army Cinema rolled up and showed us Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, which I now know nearly by heart. The men just sat about on the hillside, watching. You should – or shouldn’t – have heard what they said they’d do to Margaret Lockwood. Out here, a white woman is almost a mythological creature.
Can’t be bothered to write more. I like this place – it’s so weird, though everyone takes it for granted. We haven’t even got a NAAFI, where you might linger over a beer or a coffee.
One entertainment is to watch the agile Naga women climb up and down the steep hillsides to harvest tea in the distant valley. They don’t look as good as Margaret Lockwood. They scale the slopes with huge wicker baskets secured to their backs by wide leather straps running round the forehead. It’s a tough life, and they can’t let the war get in their way. Do they consider their surroundings beautiful, I wonder?
Love to all.
Milestone 81. Assam (Nagaland)
18th Nov. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Still in the same spot. This outdoor life must be depraving: what do you think? Yesterday I stole something …
My orders were to report to the MO for various injections – TAB and so on. The MO – how typical of an officer – had appropriated for himself what passes out here for a ‘cushy billet’, a bungalow belonging to a tea planter who is now probably sitting out his life in New Delhi (unless the Japs got him). It felt quite odd to be ‘indoors’. The waiting room in which I was made to kick my heels for a good half-hour actually boasted a couple of cane armchairs and a crammed bookcase. What an anachronism! Books! On one shelf was a paperback with a title that immediately attracted me. I started reading it there and then.
Right after the first page, I knew that that book had to become part of the booty of war. ‘Loot what you can’ is an ancient warrior’s slogan. Even a 1/3d Pelican. By the time the doctor summoned me, it was safe inside my bush shirt. The book is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and tells of the rise and fall of poor suffering humanity over the next few billion years. (Are we rising or falling just now?)
Stapledon is an even better companion than Bert Lyons. He’ll come into action with me (we’re due to go forward soon). He provides an antidote to the triviality of daily conversation (which is in contrast to the majesty of our surroundings), which centres largely round the subjects of Kohima, sex, and the possibilities of getting home. Only Stapledon and his preoccupations seem a match for these stirring times. A cure for transience.
End of true confession. Sorry to write in pencil.
Love to all.
Milestone 81. Nagaland
30 Nov. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Many thanks for the letter with all the sordid details of your birthday. Or at least some of them. You’re really getting a big girl – and who is this fellow Mark who is taking such an interest in you? Full details please. The mouth organ sounds like a great attraction.
Sorry I wasn’t with you to have a slice of that cake. Rations or no rations, Mum obviously did well. Our rations here are awful. I won’t go into details, but I’m always hungry. Everything we eat has to come down that winding road from Dimapur which I described to you earlier. Sometimes the ration wagon rolls over the cliffside. Then we go short. The chaps in my tent talk about cooking up rats, and swear that rats and canned Indian peas taste good – but that’s just to impress the newcomer in their midst, I hope.
Forgive this awful colour ink – all I could find.
Rumours abound. We are at last about to move forward into action. So they tell us.
‘I heard the Captain say
We’re going to move today.
I only hope the blinking sergeant-major knows the way …’
This camp, now so familiar, is temporary. Everything is temporary along the Dimapur road. Maybe one day they will let it all revert to jungle. The air’s so fresh and good here and I’m secretly so excited.
It’s not only the air that’s fresh. So’s the water. Washing is quite an adventure. I wish I could draw. Facilities are just about nil at Milestone 81. Our only place to wash is at the mouth of a huge cast-iron pipe which snakes down the hillside and terminates here at a concrete base. The pipe vibrates with power and water gushes forth, splashing everywhere. In order to wash, you have to strip off entirely and then fling yourself into the stream. It’s like jumping in front of a cannon! It’s easiest to take the full force of the water smack in the chest – difficult to do because slippery green algae grow on the ever-wet concrete.
The water’s freezing cold. It’s come down from five thousand feet in a great hurry. Soaping is mighty difficult. However, my hardened campaigner friends tell me that it could be the last running water we’ll see for months. (They’re ever optimistic.)
We’ve just been issued with new chemical stuff called DDT. We’ve had to dip our shirts in it and run the liquid along the seams of our trousers. This will prevent lice and other nasty things at a time when it looks as if we shall be unable to wash clothes for months at a stretch.
You see what a funny life your brother leads. It’s better than school. And to toughen us up, we’ve been made to climb down into the valley and back, with kit. I tried to get a piggy-back off one of the Naga women, but no luck. We can’t climb the mountain above us, because that’s where the Nagas live and they must not be disturbed.
Yours till the cows come home.
Manipur, I think
20th Dec. 1944
My dear Ellen,
Guess what? It’s Christmas Day! Yes, 20th December.
The world has done one of its marvellous changes. Everything is different. I’m different. I’m rolling forward into ACTION. Imagine! This green and dusty world is slipping towards jungle warfare …
We knew something was up on the fifteenth and sixteenth. Our unit on that day had its collective haircut. Weren’t knights of old shriven before battle? Shriven and shorn? Well, at least we’ve been shorn.
Ahead of us lie danger and a desperate land full of terrors and destitute of barbers …
The very next day – we packed up everything and started rolling forward. A whole division, 2 Div, moving to our forward positions before the actual assault.
At the last minute, the CO addressed us, gave us a briefing. ‘You will all be proud to fight for king and country …’ He doesn’t know his men. But he concluded by quoting Shakespeare:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s Day.
Among the common soldiery was many a moist eye. Amazing to see us all respond to poetry. Or maybe it was funk.
I have to scribble these lines just to tell you about the journey, hoping not to anger the censor. Because it really was legendary – legendary! Not to be measured in miles or the time on a clockface. A move across a great division, like the division between life and death—
—Into a land without civilians. Without civilization. Not a place for ordinary human life. You couldn’t buy a ticket to get here.
A mysterious mountain country – without living inhabitants, without real roads, without towns, without flags or currencies. The writhing, thunderous, plenitudinous route to war. A newly invented route, patched together out of lanes, jungle tracks, chaungs (a chaung being a sandy stream bed reliably dry in the dry season). On this gallant road we embarked at a dim and secret hour of night, with even our voices muffled, for every sound carries in the thin air. We’re travelling from Milestone 81 – home! – to a rendezvous in the country I can’t name, called Yzagio. This rather imaginary highway we travel is christened the Tiddim Road. Six months ago, it was all dense jungle and raging rivers. And in Japanese territory.
If you will have nothing of this legend, then I have to admit that this way of the conquerors lasts only about two hundred miles. On it, my girl, we left the old mundane world behind.
After we had passed the blackened remains of Kohima – like all you ever imagined of the Great War – we went from Nagaland into the old state of Manipur. Ragged and brutalized Imphal went by, possessed solely by pigs and vultures. The mountains became more gigantic, the way more unlikely, like something in a dream. All our vehicles proceed at a crawl, in bottom gear most of the time. Headlights are muffled. We ourselves wear a secret, anonymous air. Dispatch riders patrol up and down the convoy, seeing to it that the trucks keep even distance, neither too far from nor too close to the next vehicle. All this in a great fog of dust, the very material of secrecy.
I’m travelling in a three-tonner with some of ‘S’ Section and its stores. The stores include immense rolls of barbed wire. So excited was I last night that I climbed over the barbed wire as we moved, until most of me was out on the cab roof, from where I got a fine view of the shrouded nomansland all round us. In that awkward position I fell asleep.
Shouting and noise. Daylight. I awoke. I was hanging far over the side of the vehicle, between cab and body, my legs trapped in a roll of barbed wire, upside-down. In my sleep I had slipped right off the smooth cab. But for the embrace of the wire, I would certainly have fallen to the ground and been run over in the dark.
That was this morning. I live to tell the tale. God knows where we are in place or time – because today we were served our Christmas dinner. Imagine, 20th December! Very surrealist.
We ate in an empty grain store, all built of bamboo and dry leaves. Being a greedy little thing, you’ll like to know what we got for this monster feast. Well, it was probably better than you will do on the 25th. We started with chicken noodle soup, followed by canned chicken, canned mutton, sausage stuffing, beans, potatoes and gravy, all washed down by two cans of beer, and followed by Christmas duff with sauce and canned pears. Then coffee. A marvellous blow-out!
By way of presents, each man got a handful of sweets and biscuits and half a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. The CO then made a brief speech and offered us this toast: ‘To our wives and sweethearts!’ (The old meanie didn’t say anything about sisters…)
This meal has marked not only the putting away of the old order but the imposition of half-rations. Fancy – the food was bad enough at Milestone 81. But from now on all food has to be supplied by air, so half-rations it is.
Soon it will be dark. That’s the end of Christmas Day and then we’ll be on the wonderful road again. I tell you these things. Try to understand. Something really extraordinary is happening to your old brother.
God knows when this’ll be posted but – Happy Christmas!
Somewhere
31st Dec. 1944
Dear Ellen,
How are things at home? How is the mouth organ player? You all seem very far away. There are great psychological barriers in communicating rather than in just firing off letters for their own sweet sakes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the outer world exists any more.
And I’ve got other problems … For instance, I was hauled up before an officer I had better not name (he will probably read this letter before you do) in the Censorship office. Apparently I have been giving too much away in my letters and endangering security. (You might be a Jap agent in England, sending all my letters on to High Command in Tokyo, or something similarly daft.) There I stood, rigid at attention in my soiled jungle greens; there he sat immaculate in khaki, putting me right. On such situations the British Empire is founded.
In future any references to place names or troop movements will be deleted from my letters. There is to be no further attempt to convey a picture of what is happening in these possibly most exciting days of my life. I made a protest, but it’s like butting your blinking head against an advancing tank. Any attempts to evade regulations will be punished.
It was hard enough in the first place, trying to describe life here to you. Now I’m forbidden to try to convey a picture! So here’s what may prove to be my last try.
I mean the picture is like one of those marvellous Brueghels (in this culturally deprived area I have even forgotten how you spell that weird Flemish name …). Is there one called The Conversion of St Paul? Where there are thousands of people on horseback and on foot in the tall mountains and, although St Paul is having his moment right in the middle of the picture, no one is taking a blind bit of notice. We’re doing this incredible thing and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice – just grumbling about where their next packet of fags is coming from …
Later. Oh, burps. Now the first day of 1945. No celebrations last night, bringing more complaints. Fancy wanting to celebrate. I was collared to shift heavy stores. Too exhausted then to do anything more than sleep.
We’re at a place called – but I named it once and daren’t do so again or they’ll keelhaul me under the nearest 3-tonner. Great amassment of vehicles. People all strolling round, brown as berries, smoking among the branchless trees. (Hope that doesn’t give our positions away.) Half-rations. God in his heaven, CO in his mobile home. Only the Japs missing from the picture. (You could perhaps get Dad to send me some ciggies if he’s feeling generous.)
Oh, I can’t concentrate. Something comes between us, and you know who he is.
Well, I’ll just tell you how we got here. I think it was the night after I last wrote that we got on the road again, the whole division, all very orderly. (I don’t tell you which division, so it’s safe …) I was more careful about how I travelled, not wanting to meet my end yet – dying for your country should not entail being run over by your own 3-tonner! Yet the sight of endless trucks trundling like elephants in convoy is irresistible. Are they off to the Elephants’ Graveyard or a solemn heavyweight orgy? Some stops, some starts, yet on the whole a steady funeral pace. Huge chunks of landscape phantasmal in the dusty dark.
Sleep, huddled in a silly position on a crate. Waking next morning very early to behold a wondrous sight.
Is dawn a secret shy and cold,
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
Are we still on terra firma
Or merely moving into – another land?
Answers in the affirmative c/o The Censor, please. The convoy was winding about the endless mountains, intruding into a Chinese landscape. Mountains filled our view, heaps of them. Beyond each mountain, more mountains, thickly afforested. Clouds floated below us, lit by the early sun. Clouds and smaller clouds of dust. For wherever the mountains went, there too went the road, coiling tirelessly – and, for all its inexhaustible miles, covered with X Div vehicles. What an astonishing sight! My first experience of travelling mountainous country. We could see the road winding above and behind us; it was the way we had come. And there it all was to be seen and enjoyed. We were outdoors, and not sitting inside at desks, over boring lesson books.
Green, blue, gold, were the colours of the distance. Closer at hand, only the sandy grey of dust and vehicles. The trucks in their passage threw up dust over all the trees lining the way. Everything without wheels stood absolutely motionless, as if breeze had never been invented, as if the dust had killed off the jungle.
So we made our advance over that marvellous ____Road, across the mountains of Manipur and those of the ____Range, until we reached the more level ground on which our present site (no names, no pack-drill) stands. We are parked in a scraggy and ant-infested forest, while the division sorts itself out in order of battle and puts in maintenance on all vehicles.
Later. Sorry to go on in pencil, but I’m now in the signal office. On duty but little traffic coming over the wires, so I’ll continue for a while.
It’s hot. I’m sweating.
The signal office is a 3-ton lorry, its flap at the rear raised horizontally to extend the floor-space. You climb into the lorry by a rusty ladder with three widely spaced wooden rungs. Inside, at the end nearest the cab, sits the Signal Master in all his glory. He’s an officer (of course). He has a table with a field phone. Before him are piles of paper, code names, references, maps, diagrams, documents.
To one side of the lorry are two long narrow tables on which stand four Fullerphones. These chesty, unhappy little instruments play an important role in keeping the division in touch with itself and with other nearby units. On the floor are four piles of Fullerphone boxes, and on these the Fullerphone operators have to sit. They are translating the buzzings in their earphones into words on paper – as I’m doing between scribbling to you.
A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. He’s an important man. At the moment it’s our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.
With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting – at present it’s Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.
A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.
Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. It’s our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.
Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards don’t smoke.
Bert’s my relief. He’s working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of ‘S’ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up writing home long ago – part of the myth of the Forgotten Army). They are no longer astonished that I can send and transmit Morse almost as rapidly, as stylishly, as they. What they can’t get over is the fact that I appear to be enjoying myself. Nor can I.
Love to all.
3
Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and took them over to the window sill, to tuck them in Box File No. 2, in which he kept anything of his brother’s relating to the war period.
‘Good letters,’ Sheila said. She had sat immobile, as was her way, to read them through. ‘Joe’s excitement comes through. He seems to have had no qualms about going to war.’
‘That’s true.’ Glancing out of the window, he saw Alice Farrer in her front garden next door. Holding her green watering-can, she was sprinkling the roots of her pseudoacacia. It was her excuse to have a good look at what was happening in the street. The fact that very little ever happened did not deter her. She used her nose as a tracking device to follow two girl students who walked slowly along the pavement, talking, completely unaware of her.
‘He had made up his mind by then there were worse things than going to war.’ He spoke as he turned back into the room. He was fascinated by Alice Farrer only to the extent that he could say honestly that nothing she did would ever interest him.
‘Such as what, exactly? His unhappy childhood?’
‘That, too, I suppose. But I was thinking of an incident he once told me about. Maybe he told me twice. It was about something which had made a great impression on him. It took place outside Calcutta, and so it would have happened just before the first of these letters to Ellen. In any case, the incident was too horrific for him to wish to report it to a little sister.
‘The group he was in was led by the Sergeant Sutton he mentions in one of Ellen’s letters. After travelling across India from Bombay, they reached a transit camp somewhere on the outskirts of Calcutta. Joe gave me a vivid account of the squalor, and of seeing a water buffalo dying in the railway marshalling yards – shunting yards, we used to call them – surrounded by vultures, who set about tearing it to shreds while it still had life.
‘Owing to some confusion in the rail timetables, not uncommon in those days of crisis, with the Japanese army at the gates of India, Joe’s detachment had to leave their train and go to this camp somewhere nearby. It was just a collection of ragged tents beside a railway embankment, no signs of discipline or cleanliness anywhere. Full of flies and filth.
‘Joe and Sutton went to the office to apply for money to continue their journey to Burma. I suppose at that time the movement of troops would be towards the east only, across India to the war zone. He said it was like a peristaltic movement. Everyone was drawn into it. But he and Sutton found that this camp was full of deserters, who had got that far and then jumped off trains at Calcutta, rather than face the Japanese. Deserters ran the camp. There was nowhere they could go – they certainly couldn’t make it back to England. So they stayed put, waiting for the war to finish. If the camp was inspected, the deserters simply melted into Calcutta, where no one could find them. They lived by making false returns to various legitimate units nearby. The money was spent on food, booze, and whores. The whores came into the camp – quite against army regulations, of course.’
He glanced out of the window again. ‘The old bitch next door is watering her tree once more. Anyhow, Joe and Co had to stay in the deserters’ camp that night. The camp was run by a renegade RSM, a Glasgow man, an alcoholic. He approached Sergeant Sutton, inviting him to stay there, since he wanted a sergeant under his command. Joe thought there was some talk of a drug racket, I don’t know what.
‘They had a crisis in the camp. I’ve never told you this, have I? The RSM had an NCO with him who was severely ill from amoebic dysentery and complications. He died the night Joe was in the camp. The RSM sent a detail of four men out at midnight with storm lanterns to bury the body under a railway bridge, where it wouldn’t be discovered. They hadn’t got a padre for any kind of service, because all padres were officers, and an officer would have had them rounded up and shot.
‘Sergeant Sutton said to Joe and the others, while the burial was going on, “Do you want to stay here or go on to Burma?” All the detachment, fresh out from England, were profoundly shocked by what was happening. Of course, the idea of Burma was also not to be taken lightly. So Joe said to Sergeant Sutton, “What do you think, sarge?”
‘And the sergeant said, “I’d sooner be killed in battle than stay in this fucking sink of iniquity another night.” Next morning, they marched back to the Calcutta station – Howrah, I think it was called. They swore to the RSM that they would say nothing about the illegal camp, and of course they kept their word.
‘Joe derived a profound moral from that episode. I’ve always thought of him as very courageous – not heroic, I don’t mean, but courageous – and he probably saw the war itself as somehow cleaner or more honest than the fear which was the reason for the camp’s existence. He saw how easily men could deteriorate.’
Sheila had moved over to the window and was gazing out at the sunlit street.
‘It makes a good story. Terrifying. It would make a play. Did the RSM threaten them before letting them leave? With a gun, I mean?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘I think he’d have to. Burying the body at dead of night is a nice touch, but they could have left the body out for the vultures. Would that be a quicker way of disposing of the body?’
‘Sheila, this really happened.’
‘Yes, I know.’
When she had gone downstairs to get on with her own work, and he heard her typewriter tapping in the room below his, he thought of how her mind was at work on the story. It would probably surface, with added drama, in a future Kerinth novel. He merely wanted to strengthen the story, not add to it. He wanted it clear and as it had been, over forty years ago. Yet even he, telling it to Sheila, had added something. The bit about the whores coming into the camp seemed all too likely; but that had not been anything Joseph had told him. He remembered now that Joseph had said, in passing, that the deserters got fearfully drunk on palm wine every night, in order to escape from their miserable circumstances. Had he said palm wine? It was difficult to remember.
Precision was not the only function of memory.
All the untidy clutter of papers in his room came from Joseph’s flat in Acton. He had to get clear in his own mind his brother’s early years. Then he could make decisions on how to deploy the material.
He picked up from his desk a photograph he had taken a year before Joseph’s death, showing Joseph and Sheila walking together on Port Meadow. In the background was Joseph’s girl friend – his final girl friend – Lucy Traill.
Joseph was laughing, his mouth open, his face creased with humour. His tall, spare figure was leaning slightly forward. He liked to walk briskly. His hair, as always too long, was a streaky white and grey.
It was his wife’s features that Clement mainly studied. Because of the aspect of stillness in Sheila’s nature, she photographed well. Her broad face and well-defined nose and mouth were in evidence as she smiled at whatever the joke was. He thought, ‘No photograph can ever do her justice. Nor for that matter does my memory. I fail to set up a moving picture of her in my mind. That’s why I’m always eager to see her again, even if she has been out of the room for less than an hour. How I love that face! I couldn’t explain to anyone what it means to me, to see it every day.
‘I must be over-dependent on her. Why aren’t I more detached, as I am with others – with Arthur Stranks, for instance? Sheila would probably be shocked if she knew with what intensity I love her face and the woman. What a weakling I am! And she went to bed with that wretched little Hernandez …’
He was wasting time. To celebrate the publication of War Lord of Kerinth, he was arranging a party for Sheila in nine days’ time, on the Thursday of the following week. He made a few phone calls to local friends, inviting them to come. Then he returned to the question of his brother.
In Box File No. 2 lay a battered exercise book, in which Joseph had sought to retain some of his memories of the war years, in particular his time in Burma. The letters to his sister explained why Joseph had scarcely written home at all during the Burmese campaign. The censorship would not permit him to give a truthful account. And the censor already had an eye on Joseph. Joseph perhaps recalled Frederick the Great’s epigram that the common soldier had to fear his officer more than the enemy.
The battered exercise book was of Indian origin, bound in a coarsely woven cover. The narrative it contained was undated. The handwriting, in miscellaneous inks, some now badly faded, varied sufficiently for Clement to infer that the greater part of the account had been composed shortly after Joseph’s division had returned from Burma to India for rest and recuperation.
This was his brother’s first attempt at anything like an historical narrative, his first step towards the historian he was later to become. To lend the original narrative a clearer perspective, Joseph had inserted a few passages later, generally of a reflective nature. For an instance, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was mentioned.
First came the title. Joseph had made it deliberately grandiose.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGN OF
2ND BRITISH DIVISION
UNDER GEN. NICHOLSON
AGAINST THE JAP ARMY AND
THE RECONQUEST OF MANDALAY
1944–1945
By Signalman Joseph Winter
Nights were filled with gunfire when the various units of 2 Div crossed the River Chindwin, against stiff opposition from the Japs situated on the eastern bank. Those nights were climatologically beautiful. The Burmese moon is like no other moon. It woke unvoiceable yearnings in the men involved in the great struggle.
Of all those beautiful dangerous nights, one in particular stands out.
I had had to be away from my unit, and a driver was sent in a Jeep to collect me and catch up with the advance. He was in no mood to hurry; I could not make him hurry; and darkness overtook us before we had done much more than start on our way forward. The sun plunged down into the earth and the stars immediately shone forth overhead, streaming along in the grip of the galactic current.
We were two insignificant creatures in a machine on a plain that ran clear to the Irrawaddy. The driver had no intention of driving by night. We ate K-rations and slept one on either side of the Jeep rolled in blankets, with the marvellous sky unfettered overhead. Far from being dwarfed by it, I felt that it filled me and made me vast; I was indivisible from it. A war was passing over the starlit land with its ‘bright and battering sandal’, and I was part of its great process.
Burma was beautiful, a country worth fighting for. Nothing else was asked – at the time. I was eighteen years of age.
We woke at dawn with a bird calling. We were chilly in our thin uniforms before the sun came up. We brewed up mugs of tea, ate a hunk of bread, and moved on. ‘Bloody cold,’ we said.
Nothing was to be seen all round us but plain and, distantly, tops of trees. I found no way in which we could share the magnificent experience of the night; perhaps such exciting experiences are always enjoyed alone – unless one has a girl there. In any case the driver was a man of few words.
The track across the plain led us to the River Chindwin, where a Bailey bridge had been built. It was strongly guarded. Men lounged about, brown-naked to the waist, smoking, rifles on their shoulders, sweat-rags tied round their necks. We called out cheery greetings as we crossed that splendid river, its name honoured in the East. Fine dust hung in the air, sun shone on the water as it ran dark and flat between its sandy banks. It was as peaceful a scene as you could wish. Only two nights earlier, men had died at that spot.
Myingyang, the town on the far side of the river, had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Smoke still drifted among the ruined trees. Everything – remains of houses and bungalows – took on tones of black; smoke issued from their gaping black mouths. Tree stumps still burned quietly.
Black also were the piles of corpses gathered up neatly here and there and now left to ripen like grapes in the sun. They were swollen as if about to burst, and stank with the powerful smell of death. So much for the remains of the Japanese Army.
The Jeep driver stopped at one of the biggest piles. He went over to it and helped himself to a pair of boots from one of the dead. I cannot say how this offended me. A fat porker was feeding among the corpses, scarcely able to waddle. The driver, kicking the animal out of the way, beckoned me over. I would not leave the Jeep. He selected the pair of boots he wanted, dragging them off the corpse, kneeling in the sunlight to do so. He fitted the boots on to his own feet before coming back to the vehicle. I could not look the man in the eye.
To everything that happened at that period in time, an extra weight of significance was added. It was as though I travelled back through time to witness the traits of man and nature at their most basic, as though our movement through trees was also a movement through centuries. My understanding of the world, which had hitherto been rather childish, or child-based, advanced greatly, so that everything that happened, down to the movement of my own muscles, was surrounded by a nimbus of truth, in which the ugly was perceived as being as sacred as the beautiful. The blessed sunlight contributed to this revelatory mood.
I was a little mad in the nights, as in the days. The world turned – I heard its axis rotate. One night early in the campaign we were bivouacked by the improvised road which, in the wet season, served as a river bed. A Burmese moon shone through the trees – the moon seeming always to be at the full, when Chinese Buddhist thought has it that the Yin (female) influence is at its most strong. I could not sleep, pent in my little bivouac, for an overwhelming feeling of excitement, so was forced to get up and walk among the dust-saturated trees and shadows. Muffled trucks and guns rumbled out of the silver darkness and into the opaque distance. I stood by the road, unable to leave it, letting the dust settle on me. The behemoths, with dim orange headlights for eyes, were the sole occupants of this world.
Of course what I longed for then – there and then – in my hot little heart, was love or, less abstractly, a woman to love.
Greater than the Chindwin is the river into which it flows, the unmeasurable, immemorial Irrawaddy. The waters of the Irrawaddy are fed both by tributaries rising nearby and distant tributaries which rise in regions of rock and ice up in the Himalayas, so that, like life itself, the river consists of alternating currents of warm and cold streams; and no swimmer can tell which he will encounter next, the warm or the cold. Just to stand looking at the Irrawaddy after the weeks and miles of drought we had put behind us was to drink deep, and to feel its flow as something profound – a main artery in the life of the planet.
For a brief period after rejoining my unit I was able to swim alone in the great river, flinging myself in from the sandy bank, for once unmindful of Japs, snakes, and signal offices. The river immediately took hold of one with its dark effortless power. A river-steamer had been sunk in mid-stream, and lay at an angle on the river-bed with all its superstructure in the sunlight. Long tresses of weed, anchored to its bows, pointed tremulously downstream. It was possible to reach the boat after prolonged battles with the currents, and the water, green as lizard skin, suddenly gave way to scaly hull. With a heave, I was there, over the railings and lying fish-naked on the slant of deck. Ferns and small trees grew on the deck house, giant bees toasted themselves on the sere planking. There it was possible to squat, dangling one hand in the race, a part of that stationary voyage upstream, Captain of the Wreck.
Solitude was precious, because rare. Most of the time, we men of the Forgotten Army crowded together. Life was gregarious for safety reasons. Those of us on ‘S’ Relief grew to know each other very well. Despite our uncertain movements, our routine was fixed. It went in three-day cycles: first day, afternoon shift from 1 p.m. till 6; second day, morning shift from 8 a.m. till 1 p.m., and night shift from 6 p.m. till 8 the next morning; third day, off duty after 8 a.m. to sleep, probably with guard or similar duties in the afternoon or evening. This routine, or something like it, was to be mine for almost three years, in action or out of it. In Burma, night duty generally meant no sleep at all, with signals being passed all the time. Sometimes, it was possible to doze for half-an-hour, head on your arm at the table; more rarely, you could curl up under a blanket in a corner of the office for an hour.
During the Mandalay campaign, my job was to work that prehistoric line instrument, the Fullerphone. About the size of a shoe-box, and black, the Fullerphone scarcely resembled a weapon with which to defeat the ferocious Jap Army. It held none of the glamour of a wireless set. Being solely a line instrument, it had to be connected with forward units or rear units – brigade or Division HQ – which entailed, in a mobile war, the perpetual laying of cable.
The Fullerphone gave off a misanthropic buzz. But it did send and receive Morse. We worked at up to eighty letters a minute. We held the various units of the advance together. We kept everyone in touch. We were good.
When coming off the all-night shift, after perhaps twelve hours of intensive work by dim lights, we did not expect comfort. Sometimes, we had an hour in which to pack up everything, take down the signal office, and start another move. At the best of times, we could get breakfast and then sleep.
The cooks were compelled to wait for us until we came off duty. This did not please them, since sometimes, inevitably, we were late. The food – probably a fried egg and a soya link and a mug of tea – would be cooling or cold. Washing our mess tins was a particularly dismaying business. Two dixies filled with what had been hot water stood at the entrance to the mess area (we sat on the ground or on logs to eat); one dixie was for washing mess tins and ‘eating irons’, the other for a post-wash rinse. By the time we got to them, the liquid in the dixies resembled a particularly rich vomit. Water was scarce. We had to use what was there. Since we had nothing on which to dry tins and cutlery, we used our mosquito nets; by the end of the campaign, the nets had developed a ripe aroma.
Sleep after a busy night was not always easy. Our bivouacs were pitched over slit trenches, and so stood out away from shade, since no one attempts to dig slit trenches, an unrewarding occupation at the best of times, near the roots of trees. Temperatures under the canvas rose as rapidly as the sun. Inside our fragrant mosquito nets, necessary to keep off flies, the heat was suffocating. We fricasséed as we slept.
And there was a local defiler of sleep. Central Burma is the habitat of the Morse Code bird. The Morse Code bird sits in the leaves of the palm tree outside signalmen’s tents and utters random bursts of Morse Code. Dit dit-dit-dit dit-dah-dit-dit dit-dah dah dit … Endlessly, meaninglessly, while the weary brain of the operator who has been passing Morse all night perforce tries to transcribe the bird’s nonsense. Full grown men have been known to run naked, screaming, from their trenches, trying to drive the offender away. No raven of Edgar Allan Poe’s was ever more ill-omened than the Morse Code bird.
Few animals were to be seen; the birds were mainly those of the kind that earned their living by eating the dead. We passed through a copse outside Myingyang where Japanese troops lay scattered in death. Turkey-like vultures with creamy feathers ran among them, guts so swollen with food that they could scarcely hop into the lowest branches of the trees to escape us. The Japanese, British and Indians had between them made of Burma a terrible waste; ordinary life was suspended while the evil dream of war went by, first in a tide one way, then in a tide the other.
Our portion of tide moved forward about once a week. At one period, we pitched camp near Yeu. The four or five bivouacs of ‘S’ Relief were clustered near two large palms tethered to the ground by cordons of vines and creepers. Before us was open land, looking towards a canal; behind was a thicket, very noisy at night with the sound of things scuttling through the dead undergrowth. We were nervous in that camp, not knowing exactly where the enemy was. As the sun was setting on our first evening there, we heard noises in the topknots of the palms. Looking up, we saw black snakes dangling far above us. We came to realize that the snakes were the tails of some kind of big cat. The Cockneys among us became particularly nervous; war was one thing, tangling with wild life quite another.
The night was moonlit, the heartbreaking moonlight of a still Burma night, when the Moon hangs like a sacred gong in the next field but one, ancient with wisdom, gold with desire. I lay awake under my mosquito net, my rifle by my side. After a while, crashing noises sounded from the nearest tree. A shadow fell outside the bivouac. One of the cats was standing there.
Because we had camped so near to the tree for purposes of concealment, and because we had arrived in the dark the previous night, we had not dug slit trenches as usual. Our slender cover was propped up on poles in order to make it easier to enter and leave the tent. The big cat strolled in. I lay there, resting on one elbow, afraid to move. The cat came closer. It looked in at me. Only the net separated our faces. Neither of us spoke. Then it walked out the rear of the tent and was gone.
What communication could I have had with it?
That camp remains in memory my favourite. It was one of the few sites where there were Burmese nearby. They had not fled at our approach. They had harvested the crop on the field by whose perimeter we stayed and were busy threshing grain while we were there. We watched the operation with interest, talked to them, called to the women, and offered them cigarettes. Beyond the field of stubble was a grain field, the crop very much broken down, and beyond that lay a canal, with low-growing blossom trees on its banks and nine inches of water flowing in it. The whole neighbourhood was attractive, with small white pagodas here and there like silver pepper-pots set randomly on a lawn.
But it was water that was the attraction. Water we had not seen for six weeks at that time. Sweat and dust alone had kept our bodies clean. It was possible to lie in the canal and be almost totally submerged in water. All the relief went for a bathe that first day. Thereafter, they considered that nine inches of water was too tame, and so I went alone, accompanied only by Sid Feather’s rhesus monkey, Minnie. Minnie ran beside me on her long lead like a dog. In the water, she would enjoy a swim and then come and perch on my shoulder to dry herself. I lay there prone, watching a busy kingfisher which fished in the water from one of the low trees. The sun burned overhead, war was miles away. I communed with nature.
The trouble with communing with nature is that she does not commune back. One day, when returning through the flattened cereal crop from the canal, I almost stepped on a great snake, straw coloured, basking in the sun. It reared up to strike. Minnie immediately scaled the nearest tree, which happened to be me, and stood on the top of my head, screaming furiously and throwing handfuls of my hair at the snake.
Perhaps Minnie saved the day. The snake did not strike. It suddenly made off, shaking out its long coils. I watched it thrash its way through the burnished stalks. It was six or more feet long. It made its way rapidly across the field. Shaken, I walked back to camp. Minnie remained clinging to my ears until we were in safer surroundings.
The fear of snakes always haunted us. Army training in India taught us that the first thing we did on waking was lean out of bed and tip our boots upside down, in order to eject any nasties which might have lodged there during the night. It was a habit which took years to break, even in relatively scorpion-free England.
Although I never became fond of the army, I found a developing passion for the natural world, that great green system which encompassed us. It could bring my heart up from my boots. Burma is a varied country, by no means all jungle as some imagine. Its variety was beautiful and the Burmese appeared to have lived in harmony with its variety, embellishing it with their pagodas, and not overwhelming it – as India was overwhelmed – with humankind. But the Burmese had by and large vanished, taking cover like rabbits under the wing of war. We entered their buildings, moodily looking for souvenirs and poking about, rifles in hand, in the manner of invading soldiery. Some of the wooden houses were enchanting. I remember one in particular, with a verandah contained behind an ornamental rail. Of the four stilts on which it stood, only three remained. Inside, all was as it had been. Although chairs remained in place, everything listed to starboard, like a sinking ship.
In this surreal landscape, the British were surreal objects. The ethos of the Forgotten Army was to look as wild as possible. We wore trousers with puttees and boots, to keep out insects, and bush hats. Our torsoes were mahogany brown, our backsides alabaster white. It was the custom to tie bits of the coloured signal scarves dropped with our airborne rations round our hats to serve as puggarees, and to grow our hair long. ‘In the depths of the Burmese jungle lived a strange white race …’ For me, this costume remained a kind of dressing up; for the older members of the army, it had become second nature. Many of them described themselves as puggle. It was the sun, the heat, the awful food, they’d tell you.
The maddest in ‘S’ Relief was Steve Dutt. It was rumoured that his father was a general; Steve was just a private and an orderly. A sweet-natured man, he was never heard to raise his voice in conversation. He would sit about, listening to our talk, smiling, stroking his moustache. His recreation was to drill himself as if he were a platoon. On these occasions, he put on a sergeant-major’s voice.
‘Steve Dutt, Steve Dutt, harten-shun. As you were. Wait for it. Steve Dutt, harten-SHUN. Saloope arms. By the right, quick – wait for the order, Dutt. Quick – MARCH. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep. Let’s see you swing that arm. Plenty of bullshit. Keep in line.
‘Steve Dutt, Ri-ight TURN. Chin up. Look to your front, man. Harbout TURN. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep.’
And so on. True, we all on occasions drilled ourselves, but it was Steve Dutt who drilled himself continually, for a half-hour at a time, up and down in whatever clear ground there was. We would hear him at night, outside the bivouacs. No one thought anything of it.
‘By the right, number. One, two, three, four, five – six. As you were. Wake up, Dutt, you know what comes after five, don’t you? Dutt, by the right, number. One, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight, nine, ten. Pick up your dressing. Squad, diss – I want to see you smartly away. Diss-MISS.’
Then he would come in. ‘Sergeant put me through it today,’ he’d say cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette.
A few of us in ‘S’ Relief had small lanterns. We would sit and chat in the entrance of someone’s bivvy after dark. We spoke our own lingo of English and fractured Urdu. The conversation would often turn to London. There were frequent arguments about which number bus ran through Cockfosters, or where it went after it left the High Street.
My mates were homesick, and would talk about ‘our mum’ doing this or that, or ‘my old woman’ doing this or that, or how they went down to see the Spurs play every Saturday. Their small home worlds were continually resurrected. Homesickness was something I never felt. The present was too vivid.
Another favourite topic was how forgotten we were in this unearthly part of the world, and how we never featured in the news. It was the rule to find nothing good about overseas. To declare that one felt passionately about Burma would have been to invite ostracism, or else the scornful, ‘Wait till you’ve got a bit of service in.’
The man I was most fond of in ‘S’ Relief, after Bert Lyons, was Ron Grade. Ron was a slow-spoken farmer from Pinner way. One of his eyes was beyond his control and would wander about in the course of conversation. Ron was the only man with a camera; perhaps it was a sign of the interest he took in the world for which the others cared little.
Ron never ran out of film. He seemed to photograph everything, dead Japs, distant landscapes, ‘S’ Relief in transit. It must have been his roving eye. The few snaps I have of those times come from Ron’s camera. He photographed us when at last we reached the Mu river. So delighted was ‘S’ Relief by the charm of running water that Sid Feather drove us to bathe every time we were off duty.
Since the spirit of Romanticism is connected with ruin and destruction, the Mu site must be one of the most romantic places to choose for a swim. Two railway bridges had once crossed the river at this point, a low wooden bridge and a grander one, metal on sturdy brick piers. Both bridges had been blown up by the British in their retreat from Mandalay. Both had been blown up with engines and rolling stock on them, so that the invading Jap should have no use of them.
The wooden bridge had disappeared – swept downstream or eaten by ants. What remained to mark the spot was a small tank engine, only half-submerged by the river in its shrunken dry season state.
The greater bridge had left greater remains. Two stout double piers had not fallen in the doubtless hasty explosions, so that between it and the eastern, Mandalay-bound shore, a totally unworkable span of line had stayed in place, slightly buckled and laden with two locomotives and a selection of carriages and trucks which straggled back to the land. Vegetation was already devouring the rearmost trucks.
The next span, the one which, in the wet season, would cover the mid-point of the Mu, had fallen down. Left balanced on its pier were a locomotive and tender. The tender stood with its tail in the air on top of the pier; the engine, to which it remained attached, hung down, buffers clear of the water by some feet. There it dangled, in that precarious position, for three years of war. The metals were too hot to touch – that we knew from the sunken tank engine, on which we could climb only after splashing it with cooling water.
We went every day to the surviving narrow, green, fast-running channel of the Mu, rushing deeply entrenched in its bed of sand; and every day the engineering ruin presided over our relaxation.
In her book, The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay remarks, ‘The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.’
Our three-year-old ruin was also part of world history; it had already become a symbol of the end of a myth, the myth of white supremacy. We did not know it then, but never again would the British ride from Mandalay to Dimapur in their first class carriages, relegating the Wog to the third, as if the land belonged to them. The Forgotten Army might – indeed, would – drive the Jap from Burma; but it was beyond even our powers to restore the country to the British crown. The tide of history had turned and, whatever his later victories, the white man had been defeated – in many cases with remarkable ease, in Hong Kong, the N.E.I., Singapore, and Burma. The British, not the most pragmatic of races, recognized their defeat in victory, and left their former colonies and dependencies with comparative good grace, so that some measure of good will attached to their memory. Not so the Dutch and French. The latter, in particular, clinging to Indo-China – a struggle in which the Americans soon rashly involved themselves – would bring further chaos to the regions of S.E. Asia, with the battle of Dien Bien Phu breaking out not ten years after the time we bathed below the broken bridge over the Mu.
I still have a faded photograph of the bridge, with ‘S’ Relief naked below it. Ron took the photograph.
Ron was not just a keen photographer. He was a pleasant man to be with – one of those people who, by some inner quality, make us feel slightly better than we are.
Ron never showed irritation or swore like the rest of us. ‘S’ Relief benefited from his presence when the battle for the Chindwin was on.
The Japs held the east bank of the Chindwin, the British the west. The fighting continued for several nights and days. Our signal office kept moving, sometimes only half a mile at a time. The firing could clearly be heard. In that period, the section had to be split up, and the detachment I was on worked six nights out of nine, passing messages all the while. In the day we had guard duty. It was a time of maximum exhaustion, and the Morse Code birds were at their most punitive. The constant hammer of shellfire, like a maniac pounding his sleepless pillow, was rendered more unreal by the brilliant sunlight; recalling my uncle’s experiences of World War I, I had believed warfare was conducted to the accompaniment of rain, or at least the famous North European drizzle.
During this crisis period, Ron and I were sent on detachment to run a radio link on our own. This was the only time we encountered live Japs; on other occasions, we had seen them, reassuringly, trotting along with the naked point of a bayonet at their backs, prisoners.
There was no ‘front’ in the accepted sense. For forward momentum to be sustained, the tanks had to drive onward as fast as possible, giving the enemy no chance to rest or recoup. Any odd contingents of Japs left behind, separated by freak of war from the main body, could be mopped up later. So there was no way of telling when Japs might not pop up and surrender or, more likely, attack. Ron and I were dumped under three large trees with empty expanses on one side and a chaung on the other. We had some rations and water and the wireless set, and were told that a truck would collect us ‘within twenty-four hours’. Till then, the set was to be continually manned and, for our own safety, we were not to show a light, except for the one on the 22 set.
The night was moonlit and still. We had dug ourselves a trench in the sandy soil and were crouching over the set together. Ron had the headphones on and was receiving when I became certain I heard a low voice from the direction of the chaung. I took up a firing position with my rifle, and nudged Ron. Coolly, he went on scribbling down the message with his right hand, while taking up his rifle in his left.
When the message finished, he signed off and took up position beside me, still wearing headphones. We were in moonlight, dappled by the filtering branches of the trees. I felt that this made us highly visible; in fact, it was probably a help in dimming out the tiny downward-directed light on the set. We crouched together, aiming into the dark.
Bushes grew round the banks of the chaung. Night birds scuttled in the dry undergrowth. We began to think our nerves were playing us up, and that the slight breeze accounted for the supposed voices. Certainly the bushes were swaying slightly. I stared fixedly at them – to become suddenly aware that three figures stood behind their uncertain shapes, head and shoulders showing.
I squeezed the trigger and fired at once. Ron fired at the same moment.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder. The world seemed full of noise. Above that noise I heard a shrill cry. I ceased fire.
A long silence fell. Gradually the noises of the furtive birds in the undergrowth returned. Neither Ron nor I dared to get up.
Another message was offered over the wireless. Ron gave the wait signal, and then we rose and went forward together, rifles raised.
The Japs had run off, all but one. He lay face downwards in the sand of the chaung. Next morning, we examined him in a squeamish way. A bullet had gone through his chest. He was a poor thin diseased specimen.
Then I was glad it was Ron with me. We argued a bit about which one of us had shot him, but did not pursue the matter too far. Ron said laughingly, ‘You must have shot him. With my wandering eye, I’m not much of a marksman.’ Neither of us wanted full responsibility.
Not until several years later, when I was back in England, did the nightmares come. Then I woke screaming. The Japs were after me again. And again it would be moonlight. But those nightmares, like so many other things, gradually worked their way through the system and were dissipated into thin air.
Ron and I ate our frugal breakfasts a few paces away from the dead Jap. About midday, the linesmen showed up in their truck and took us back to Signal HQ. We reported the Jap, and were briefly regarded as heroes by the rest of ‘S’ Section. But there was a war to be going on with, and the incident was soon forgotten – except in the fertile beds of Ron’s and my memory.
Japanese resistance broke. The Chindwin was crossed, and bridged by long Bailey bridges. We were now on the famous Road to Mandalay, still a good cobbled road, its miles marked by two waves of war, burning villages from which Japs had just retreated, and the rusty carcasses of old cars, abandoned during the retreat towards India, three years earlier. In contrast to this thrilling chaos, the trees with which the sides of the road were planted looked suburban, painted as their trunks were with whitewash up to a height of four feet.
This was the habitat of death. The victorious Japs were victorious no longer. Their units were in retreat, their soldiers often starving and diseased. Very little mercy was shown them; their reputations were too ghastly for that; for too long, the British had looked on them as both superhuman and subhuman. ‘Though kings they were, as men they died.’
We drove among the paraphernalia of defeat: burnt-out Japanese trucks by the roadside, overturned 8-wheelers, scattered ammunition, dead bodies, vehicles and buildings burning quietly to themselves in the middle of nowhere. We drove. The infantrymen slogged it all on foot, every mile. We were now about 400 miles from the old base, Dimapur.
Even when in grimly victorious mood, the Fourteenth Army remained bitter. Newsreels were shown with the odd film show, so that we were accustomed to seeing coverage of triumphal Allied advances in Italy, France and Belgium. Entry into towns was always marked by pretty girls rushing out to present the soldiers with wine or flowers or, even better, kisses. These were the traditional rewards of liberators. The miserable ‘towns’ we liberated, sometimes little more than names on Ordnance Survey maps, were utterly deserted. No pretty girls came running to us. The fruits of victory had a bitter taste.
Since time immemorial, the prizes for soldiers after a battle have been loot, drink, and women. In that respect, ours was a remarkably chaste war.
Three Indian soldiers were caught raping a Burmese woman. She was very irate about the whole business and said, ‘Just when I was getting interested, they gave up.’ We took this story for truth at the time.
At this stage in the great upheaval of nations, the division I was to join in the future, 26 Indian Division, was in action in one of the worst areas of Burma, the dreaded Arakan, mopping up the Japs on Ramree Island. Such names as Arakan and Ramree acquired a special and dread significance.
The object of 2 Div’s immediate attention was Mandalay. The Japs were now withdrawing from round the city, where they could muster eight divisions against our five. Commander Bill Slim’s plan was to switch IV Corps, to which we belonged, from the north to the south to attack Meiktila while XXXIII Corps attacked from the north. Meiktila was a focus for road, rail, and air communications south of Mandalay; Mandalay was of relatively little strategic but of immense symbolic importance, its name known all over the world – a poor man’s inland Singapore.
Mandalay fell towards the end of March after an intense struggle. In Meiktila, even Japanese hospital patients were ordered to fight to the death. The Japs fought in strong-points, alleys, and cellars. They were all exterminated by bullet, bayonet, or flame-thrower.
When I rolled into Mandalay in our signal truck, I was all but prostrate from dysentery, though still working. The city had once been a seat of Buddhist learning, and its hill was covered with white icing pagodas, many of them damaged in the fighting. The thick walls of Fort Dufferin were also much damaged. But Slim had given orders that Mandalay should not be bombed.
It was an empty city, doomed and desolate. The smell of corruption hung over it, while birds sat on trees overhead, waiting. Stray dogs wandered about the streets, many of them suspiciously fat, but disconsolate. Perhaps they, like us, felt a sense of anti-climax.
Before we left Burma, there was one more adventure. 2 Div had completed its task with the defeat of the Japanese in the plains and the retaking of Mandalay. It was the task of other units to drive the Japs south towards Rangoon and, if possible, eliminate them entirely. We were to be flown out – an unusual operation in those days on that front.
I was one of the rear detail. Four of us manned a skeleton signal office in a small tent. After we had passed the last traffic, we closed down for good. There was now no one to answer our signals.
The radio and line apparatus we loaded into a Dodge truck, which set off into the wilderness. We returned to pick up our kit. We had camped under a large tree with generously spreading branches. For the flight back to a base in Bengal, we were allowed only 40 lbs. of personal kit; the rest had to be dumped – pegdoed, in our corruption of Urdu. A lot of pegdoing went on in India and Burma. So we got our packs on our backs and our kitbags on our shoulders with our bivouacs and mosquito nets, and started to walk to the airfield. Behind us, a wind whipped up dust, fluttering the pages of the books, so lovingly accumulated, which I had been forced to pegdo. Stapledon’s Last and First Men was left behind. The wind grew stronger, whipping about our legs, reminding us that the monsoons were on the way to revivify the torn land. Out of their hiding places among tossing bushes came dark figures, rushing forward and seizing the abandoned loot. Partridge raised his rifle, half in fun. Before the tree was out of sight, the Burmese had borne all our pegdoed possessions away.
The airstrip was marked only by a small windsock, rippling in the new winds. The strip consisted of a runway of knee-high grass perhaps two hundred yards wide and a mile or more long. Perhaps it had once been designed as a fire-break. Nothing was to be seen but grass and trees, stretching across the plain. No one else was about, not a shack, not a truck, no personnel in sight. We had water and rations but no means of communication with the world.
The four of us settled in the shade of the trees and waited, smoking, chatting. Idle chat. I had found no way of communicating my inward feelings to my friends, sensing that anything I said on an emotional level would be laughed at. Nor did I impart my feelings to my parents; my few letters home were miracles of superficiality. Now, under the trees, I found myself alone in having some regrets at leaving Burma. With a great victory behind us and the unknown ahead, here was surely an hour of communing. We continued to talk in trivialities, all perhaps afraid to reveal our true selves.
One thing we vowed, sprawling in the shade, was that when we got back to the Blight we would tell everyone what we had been through. We would – as the expression had it – ‘grip them ragged’. The Ancient Mariner would have nothing on us. It can be seen that this process of telling all would have had great therapeutic value. I was with three men who were about to be sent home after long service abroad; for myself, I had still a lot of time to serve out. So I never knew if the requisite grips were applied. But for me, returning to Blighty when the war had been over some while, and put out of mind, I found that no one wished to hear. The jungle experience was too alien.
Why did no novelists or poets spring up to celebrate the experience of Burma from the common soldier’s point of view? It was an undemocratic war. Only officers spoke about it later – heroes like Bernard Fergusson and ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, and of course Slim’s own fine book on the campaigns, Defeat into Victory. They all stuck to autobiography or fact. Hardly a poet spoke up. There was Alun Lewis, but he shot himself before going into action.
One of Lewis’s poems tells how:
But leisurely my fellow soldiers stroll among the trees.
The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.
It’s a lie, an officer’s snotty lie; Lewis did not know what he was talking about. Delightful irony reposed in singing those ‘dance-songs’. Their superficiality, like our chatter, served to cover momentous upheavals of feeling. ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Moonlight Cocktail’ had marvellous surreal effect in our jungle hideouts.
We woke the next morning under the great trees, eating a hunk of bread and marmalade for breakfast without washing. The place was as waterless as a desert – and as deserted. No sign of our plane, and the monsoon-bearing wind blew stronger. The smell of smoke came to us.
Hour succeeded hour. We strolled about in the sun, hats off – it was our pride that we never got sunstroke or wore topis, as an earlier generation of regular soldiers had done. The smoke could be seen. It thickened until gradually it shrouded the blue sky. A forest fire was approaching. We could hear its roar and crackle. It was as if a stampede of animals was coming our way.
What were we to do? There was no escaping from our position. The fire was approaching at brisk walking pace, burning up the trees in huge brands on either side of the airstrip, triumphant and furious. Rapidly it came, and still no rescuing plane.
We moved into the centre of the grass strip. Jungle blouses went on, to protect our skins from flying sparks. The sky was black, the whole forest on either side blazing red. We crouched to the ground. The heat seemed to swell about us.
The fires on either side moved parallel with each other like friendly rival expresses. Linking them across the open space ran a wave of flame, consuming the grass, turning what was green black, leaving behind it cindered ground. It dashed towards us like a rip tide.
Standing, we heaved our kit on to our backs. As the wave reached us, we jumped. That is how you evade a forest fire. You jump over it.
‘So much for fucking Burma,’ said Bert Lyons.
There we stood, in a land of black ash. The great fire swept majestically on, about its own purposes, leaving smouldering destruction on either flank. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we lit up cigarettes.
‘Where’s that bloody plane?’ we asked.
We spent another night out in the open, on the burnt earth. Next morning, an aged Dakota with the American star on its wings landed on the black airstrip; we climbed readily enough into its hold, and soon were flying westward, over the Chin Hills towards India and a quieter life.
History is what happens to contemporary events when they have receded enough for us to draw a moral from them. What is the moral of the Burma campaign?
That change is all. Three years after the victory of the Forgotten Army, Burma was granted independence. Although the Japanese had packed their bags and left, Britain was unable to regain the confidence of the Burmese people, who had twice seen their fair country reduced to a battlefield – Burma, that most religious of countries. Nor could the brave Indian Army be relied on to hold down Burma by force. India was being returned to the Indians. That was the British will: while behind that will was American pressure; righteous to a fault about British and Dutch Far East possessions, the United States nevertheless let itself be led into another war that has been seen since to have caused more damage and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, and surrounding regions than even the Japanese dreamed of.
Nineteen thousand men of British and Commonwealth origin – the greatest number being Indian other ranks – died in the Irrawaddy crossings by Mandalay and Meiktila. In the earlier battle of Kohima, over two thousand men of British 2 Div, for which I was a pale-skinned reinforcement, died. All told, in Burma, there were seventy-one thousand British and Commonwealth casualties. Japanese casualties have been numbered at 185,000.
A memorial was erected to the British dead at Kohima. On the memorial is carved a free translation of a Greek epitaph, which reads:
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
Sadly, it was no one’s tomorrow, despite the brave words. The British got out. The Burmese then sank under a repressive regime. Various kinds of struggle still divide it. Visitors from outside are scarcely welcome.
The bamboo grows beside the rivers where once we so bravely, so fruitlessly, drove from Milestone 81, through Kohima and Imphal, down the Tiddim Road, across Chindwin and Irrawaddy, to a ruined Mandalay. A lot of tomorrows lie buried along the route.
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.
‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’
‘Got another party?’
‘Yes, another party …’
‘Oh, well, enjoy yourself.’
He went downstairs slowly, dragging his steps so that anyone observing him might imagine there was something weighty on his mind. Downstairs, where the temperature was cooler, Sheila was in the conservatory pouring herself another glass of white wine.
‘Where’s your glass?’
‘Oh, I left it on my desk upstairs.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get another. It’s so hot, Michelin has laid a table outside by the pool for us. She’s just gone.’
‘Another party …’
‘Good drinking evening.’
She was pouring wine slowly into the glass she had taken from the cabinet, letting the neck of the bottle chink once against the rim of the glass to emphasize the benefaction of what she was doing. It seemed to him, watching her, that her strong nose was slightly less sharp this evening, as if a certain watchfulness, apparent in her manner during their time in the States, had now relaxed.
Passing him the brimming glass, she said, ‘If you go outside, I’ll bring the food. It’s all ready.’
The garden was still mainly in sunlight, slanting over the old brick walls. The little pool was in the shadow cast by the Farrers’ house next door. But it was warm there, and in the patio area Michelin had laid a pink linen cloth on their white conservatory table.
‘Did you have a dip?’ he asked, when she emerged with avocados.
‘I spent a whole hour on the phone catching up with news since we’ve been away.’ She passed on various items of gossip.
‘The film contract’s come alive again,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
They chatted about the Kerinth film contract with Obispo Artists. A letter had been awaiting her from Tarleton Broker, film agent in London for the Green Mouth novels. A deal with Obispo had been on and off for over a year; now they were involved with a director-producer called Calvin Boas Lee, whom both Sheila and Clement had met, and liked tolerably. Now the deal was alive. Tarleton had a contract ready. After they had demolished most of Michelin’s strawberry shortcake, Sheila produced Tarleton’s letter, and they read it over between them.
‘So I’ll go up to London on Thursday and work over the contract page by page with Tarleton.’
‘Looks as if you’re going to be rich and famous. Even more of both.’
She pulled a face at him. ‘Don’t say it. It frightens me. Poor me. Everyone will hate me even more.’
‘Love you even more.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll keep my head. Promise.’
‘Don’t count your chickens, love.’
‘That’s right …’
Thursday, the day that Sheila took the train up to London to see her film agent, was also the day of the week when Clement drove to Headington for his regular appointment with a fellow analyst. This analyst, a Jungian like Clement, was a Czech exile called Mrs Vikki Emerova. They had known each other for some years, and occasionally met in the Department of Psychiatry in the Warneford, or at official functions. He always addressed her as Mrs Emerova, and she him as Dr Winter.
Clement’s clinic, which these days he held only once a week, was in central Oxford. Mrs Emerova had a downstairs room in a small Edwardian house with a neglected garden off Headington High Street. Headington was full of similar houses with similar rooms, each occupied by people much like Mrs Emerova. The Emerovas of this world sat in chairs listening to the woes of people sitting opposite them. Anything could be said to them. One could talk in intimate detail about sexual perversions, or one could enter on a lengthy diversion concerning politics. One could be fearfully academic or downright coarse. The Mrs Emerovas would never flinch.
Unnatural though this arrangement might appear, many of the academics of Oxford, burdened with personal problems, made their pilgrimage weekly to the shabby rooms in the discreet houses of Headington.
In the back garden at Mrs Emerova’s were three ancient apple trees, and nothing else. The grass did not seem to grow. It was never short and never particularly long. Perhaps, Clement surmised, there were special nurseries – garden centres, they were called nowadays – in the wilds beyond Headington, in Wheatley and Holton and Horspath and Garsington which supplied special grass seed for analysts’ gardens, guaranteed to lull their clients with its monotony. His own clinic had no garden.
Once a year, in the Headington spring, the three ancient apple trees burst into blossom. Hope sprang into the breasts of the analysands. Christ may have died for them, God might have created the world for them … All was possible … But come the autumn and the fruits were as green and acid as the lives of those who looked out upon them from Mrs Vikki Emerova’s window.
‘But she had it off with him in the next room. This was in Boston. In our hotel – the well-named Luxor Hotel. A little Spanish type, five feet one and pretty weedy, I’d say. Always had a smarmy sort of grin for Sheila. I watched him. I saw him last year and was friendly. Arthur Hernandez. More properly Arturo, I’m sure. Her editor at Swain Books – not that he seems to do much editing. Those guys have generally tried their hand at writing, had no joy at it, but ever after think they have special insights into writers’ lives. He’s probably straight out of university, probably only twenty-three or twenty-four – half her age. No real experience of life. They probably did it last year too, and I never found out. There I was, being nice to him. Oh, of course he was all over me when I arrived at the Luxor from New York. By that time, they’d probably been doing it all round the States. It’s the sense of betrayal … I can’t see how Sheila could possibly – And all the time he was “Green Mouth” this and “Green Mouth” that. I said to him, “Look, when we’re not performing in public, couldn’t you relax and call her Sheila? Green Mouth is only her trade name.” And he said, “Oh, I do zees only to show respect.” Respect, and the whole time he was bloody well shafting her. I mean, there are rules about these things, and the Americans know that as well as anyone else. I’ve never been anti-American. Rather the reverse. Of course, Arthur Bloody Hernandez is probably from Puerto Rico. I wondered if I wrote to Swain and complained if they’d sack him. Sheila is their most valuable property. They wouldn’t want to lose her. Of course, I suppose they might argue that it was Arthur Hernandez, damn him, by offering his services, who kept her there instead of with a bigger organization. I know Random House made overtures. They have business arrangements with her publisher on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe I should try to persuade her to – no, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t work.’
‘You feel more anger against him than against Sheila?’
‘Really, I don’t blame her. Well, not much. I have always been generous. Quite generous – in fact, more generous in that respect than she’s ever been with me, by a long chalk. It was just a passing fancy – well, no real harm done. One must have a perspective, yet all the while the other person just goes on acting however they feel like, without restraint. I really don’t think Sheila has much power of self-analysis. You can see that in her novels. No kind of self-analysis. Her characters, even the sensitive ones, just barge ahead and act. She is very warm natured. All credit for that. I do try to be generous. Even when I walked in and caught them at it – there was her big soft white bum, Mrs Emerova, she on top and you could hardly see him at all, except for two nasty little thin hairy legs, like a beetle crushed by a cream puff – I’ll never forget it. You may – you should – try to be detached but it still hurts deeply to catch your wife in flagrante delicto, and on top, too. Jealousy is hard to eradicate. She gave me such a look. I simply backed away into the sitting room. Knocked over a vase of flowers. Couldn’t think what to say. At such a time, you find yourself completely at a loss. Now why should I have felt such a fool? I suppose it’s because – there’s a whole tradition behind it, a whole rich tradition. The cuckolded male is a figure of fun, even to himself. It’s not so bad for a woman who catches her husband at it. She tends to engage more sympathy, don’t you consider? It’s something to do with the shape of the sexual organs, basically, I suppose. The male equipment looks a lot funnier than those rather pretty little purses you women have. I just stood there shaking but, in a minute, out he came, all dishevelled and looking a bigger fool than I felt, tucking in his shirt. When he saw me, he made a dash for the door to the corridor, so I ran after him and managed a good kick up the arse to help him on his way. That was the most satisfying bit of the whole affair. I rather hurt my left leg doing it.’
‘Kicking him satisfied you?’
‘What do you think? Then out she came, dressed, but hair dishevelled. Wanted a drink and a cigarette. Did I tell you she smokes when she’s on these tours? Cigars if nothing else is available. She’s like a demon. Well, it is all a bit testing. I sympathize with her and I do see why she’s got to do it. And I said to her, quite quietly and decently, “I know you’re under pressure but this has got to stop”, and she said, in a sort of level voice, “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” That’s what she said. “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” As cool as you like, Mrs Emerova. I’ll tell you the effect that sentence had on me, shall I? She never wrote a sentence half as powerful. It just destroyed me. I suppose I didn’t look any different. She gave me a drink from the drinks cabinet and I drank it. But something went inside me. I still feel … of course I do. It was bad enough to be told she was enjoying it. One does enjoy these affairs. The surreptitiousness, the sense of … But to rub it in … And then to say point blank that she meant to continue, whatever I felt about it. What I felt about it didn’t matter to her in the slightest. How can you recover from that? It’s so unlike her. Generally she’s so considerate. But perhaps she’s been like that all the time. I mean, how long have we been married – and all the time she was secretly quite indifferent to what my feelings were if they got in the way of her pleasure? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Christ, what an insult. It’s as if I’m bleeding inside and yet, now we’re back home, I have to continue as normal. We both continue as normal, as if nothing had happened. It’s grounds for divorce, isn’t it?’
‘Do you want a divorce?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It’s a crowning insult, isn’t it?’
‘Did she mean it as an insult? Was she not also upset at that moment?’
‘I should hope she was! Isn’t it at such moments that the truth slips out? How often had they had it off together? Not just in Boston. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles. Can you imagine, they might have done it in Salt Lake City? Ugh … At least I seem to have put paid to Hernandez. I made sure they weren’t alone together for the rest of the time we were there. And I don’t think he had the appetite for it after being found out. Men don’t, do they? There are rules to the game, you know, and if you’re caught out, fine, then however much it costs you say you’re sorry and you stop. You stop, don’t you, for the sake of the other person’s feelings? Isn’t that the rule? You and the other woman know you run that risk. If found out – all over. Finish. Isn’t that the rule?’
‘Do you think of it as a game with rules?’
‘There are rules, aren’t there? Remember your ethology. In everything there are rules, in every species. Otherwise civilization falls apart. Even when two nations threaten each other, rules remain. If that wasn’t so, then the planet would have been destroyed long ago. Even nations which hate each other obey rules, almost unwittingly. How much more so between individuals. How am I going to live now? Am I supposed to go on as if nothing had happened?’
‘What has really happened? Sheila returned to England with you, didn’t she?’
‘I can’t talk to you, Mrs Emerova. You’re supposed to offer me something, you know. A therapist is supposed to use his or her own feelings in the service of the patient. That’s me. How should I best behave in this mess?’
‘Do you feel it is a mess? Your marriage is continuing, isn’t it?’
‘It’s continuing, yes. But for how long? What’s she thinking? Is she longing for Hernandez every moment of the day? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” It puts me off my stroke, I don’t mind admitting. Yes, I do mind admitting it. I feel that when we have intercourse she’ll just be thinking of him all the while, and making comparisons.’
‘Does that make you feel inferior?’
‘Oh, Christ, it makes me feel bereaved. Our calling has little defence against bereavement. How am I to know what she’s thinking?’
‘May you not suppose that she wants everything to continue as normal?’
‘What right has she to hope that? I’m the one who should be deciding about that! Instead, I’m arranging for a party for her next Thursday, to celebrate her latest effusion …’
‘Doesn’t that suggest that you both want everything to continue as normal?’
‘Well, it can’t continue as normal, can it? That’s not possible. Not while I still have so much anger inside me. Okay, under the stress of the tour, when she’s the cat’s whiskers and the whole world’s bending an ear to her, I quite understand that then she’s feeling so good that she wants the odd extra bit of adulation – I mean, this guy Hernandez, he has no interest in her as such, he’s only interested because she’s the grand and glorious Green Mouth who brings so much money into his company, whose new novel has got 1.5 million copies in print. It’s impersonal on both sides, in a way, all part of the big Green Mouth act – I understand that, it’s my business to understand. Good for her! But “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Am I supposed not to feel angry and hurt because I’m an analyst? What do you expect?’
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Brian Aldiss
The second volume in the acclaimed Squire Quartet, available for the first time as an ebook.Spanning fifty years and three continents – from pre-war Suffolk, to the Far East in the 1940s, to Oxford and America in the present day – Forgotten Life is a novel of immense scope, encompassing comedy and tragedy, joy and grief, as its three main characters try to work out the most difficult problem of all – the meaning of their own lives.Brian says: ‘This novel, which in retrospect can be seen to have a similar ground plan to Non-Stop, written thirty years earlier, was more warmly received than any other Aldiss novel, not simply by its reviewers but by readers.’Features a new introduction by the author.
Forgotten Life
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.
Brian Aldiss
Forgotten Life
Dedication
for
Margaret
jo
svaki dan
Contents
Cover (#ulink_8030ee8c-35ed-5040-a2d1-cdeefbc262ae)
Forgotten Life
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Book One
Angel
1
It was almost roses, roses, all the way. The fans…
2
Clement Winter left home shortly after nine the next morning,…
3
Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and…
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a…
5
The past immediately becomes history. Even yesterday has undergone a…
6
About a mile from my billet, in a modest side…
7
There was at that time a song very popular in…
8
The crate of film was dumped in the foyer of…
9
Clement shaved in mild good humour. He had no objection…
10
And so I found myself, helpless, with a little kaleidoscope…
Book Two
Anima
11
‘You have been a bit absent-minded since we got home,…
12
Sheila was sympathetic.
13
When Clement awoke next morning, Sheila had already left the…
14
Sheila, her husband, and his brother dined together in the…
15
An old moon was waning above the roof-tops of North…
16
Clement entered the hallway of his house to find a…
17
Clement’s night was a restless one. Often he imagined Sheila,…
18
Inset in the front door of the house in Rawlinson…
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
He walked; all round the slumb’ring Glade
Shone the SUBLIME. Through elm and birch
Old cottages led to the Church
While winding Stour a sail display’d
By many a sunlit mound and bend.
But on goes he with inward muse,
And still the DARKNESS him pursues;
He murmurs, ‘Stay, I have no Friend,
No Love, no ABSOLUTION claimed,
And all that IS is ever maimed.’
‘The Calm’ from
A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk
William Westlake, 1801
Of all persons, those in distress stand most in need of our good offices. And, for that reason, the Author of nature hath planted in the breast of every human creature a powerful advocate to plead their cause.
In man, and in some other animals, there are signs of distress, which nature hath both taught them to use, and taught all men to understand without any interpreter. These natural signs are more eloquent than language; they move our hearts, and produce a sympathy, and a desire to give relief.
There are few hearts so hard, but great distress will conquer their anger, their indignation, and every malevolent affection.
Essays on the Power of the Mind
Thomas Reid, Edinburgh, 1820
Lo, how it guards the son from War’s alarm,
The loving Shelter of a Mother’s arms;
Snatch him too young away and count the Cost,
A tortured Spirit, rostered with the Lost.
from ‘Miss Montagu’s Portrait’
William Westlake, 1790
Introduction
Forgotten Life opens in razzmatazz style, with American fans of Green Mouth’s ‘Kerinth’ novels seeing her off at JFK airport as she prepares to fly back to Britain.
On the flight, she slowly becomes Sheila Winter again, wife of Clement Winter. She has travelled around the States for twenty-three days, signed many of the 1.5 million copies of her latest book, given a two-hour-long speech, gone without sleep, lived on pills, and more than once had had sexual intercourse with her Hispanic New York editor.
When the Winters are home and secure in their large Victorian house in North Oxford, Sheila falls asleep in a chair. Clement goes upstairs to his study, and it is then we come to the heart of the book.
This volume shows the division between the well-established Oxford don, Clement Winter, living in Rawlinson Road, Oxford, and his footloose elder brother, Joseph Winter, who has just died. Clement is finishing his work on Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars. He works from his home and from Carisbrooke, his college. He is a qualified analytical psychologist.
Now he must do something about his dead brother’s relics.
One thing I hoped to emphasise was the inevitable divide that existed between those who went through World War II and those who did not - even if the two were brothers.
Joseph, the older brother, had fought the Japanese in Burma in 1944. He wrote letters, not to Clem but to their sister, Ellen. Some of those letters, worn by time, have found their way into Clement’s hands.
In them, Joseph speaks of the fighting. He speaks too of a deserters’ camp in Calcutta, where men lived in squalor, existing by thieving from other army units, rather than facing the terrors raised by the Japanese Imperial Army.
A substantial part of Forgotten Life is taken up by Joe’s efforts to record the fighting in Burma, where he formed part of the ‘Forgotten Army’ – a label claimed at the time, which remains even now – as well as his search for the house where he and a Chinese woman had become lovers. Baffled, Joe cannot decide if he had ever found that house. Time, as Joe has to come to admit, brings change. The quiet little town in Sumatra he knew in the old days becomes a roaring and confused city. It proves futile to search for the past.
One might call the plot-line simple; the characters are more complex. There is a time in life when the two brothers are together again, and Joe his sardonic self. But the few years’ difference between them proves too much: Joe fought in a war, on the other side of the globe; Clem did not. Many families made this discovery. Perhaps it is what made the novel popular.
Brian Aldiss
Oxford, 2012
BOOK ONE
1
It was almost roses, roses, all the way. The fans kept on laughing and joking, even into the asperities of JFK Airport.
SPEAK TO US GREEN MOUTH, cried their noble banners, in priceless fan embroidery, too overwhelmed to give punctuation a single hemstiched thought.
RAZZMATAZZ FOR TAZZ.
‘Don’t leave us! We’ll make ya President!’
What measure was the unit of laughter? The ha? A million units of ha were expended as the admiring throng gladly, proudly, lugged Green Mouth’s luggage to the First Class Check-In. Every one of the faithful needed to lay a plump hand on the sacred suitcases.
More units, as baggage moved on the metal loop away into concealed realms, piece by precious piece. More units, as the throng shuffled slowly towards Duty Freeze Zone and final farewells. More units, pained now, before they could possibly say goodbye to her. A little chorus of units trickled among the streams of ha-less humanity filling the lounges.
Green Mouth was always at the centre of the chorus, triumphal, regal. Almost silent herself, the catalyst against whom the ha-units she generated beat in vain. It was a fine performance, Dr Clement Winter told himself. He should not worry. There was no real cause for worry.
The noise, the banners, the nervous mirth, provoked Green Mouth continually to smile her grim smile, and to chuckle her grim chuckle, which even the most admiring could not effectively imitate. Laughter was not for her but for the acolytes. Chuckles were power-based, laughter was weakness. She floated slowly towards SHOW PASSPORTS, stately as a cinema butler, be-ringed hand up to shoulder to adjust green cloak.
Some of those jostling near asked her questions, harmless things intended as no more than tribute. To these questions, Green Mouth tossed remarks of some brevity: ‘We’ll have to see about that.’ ‘That’s one for my agent.’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘We’d all like to know that.’
Each little coded reply provoked more units of ha. The throng loved, thrilled to, such effortless arrogance. They ate them like dog biscuits. And of course there was grief in every ha, for Green Mouth was about to desert them.
Green Mouth was deserting them. She was now leaving the United States of America behind, leaving it forsaken to make out on its own as best it could. The mere idea was ha-inducing. So Clement told himself, squeezing out his amusement as the throng elbowed him.
The fans had a fantasy ready to account for the desertion. Green Mouth had been Called. Tazz of Kerinth had called her on telepathic beam. A New Cause awaited Green Mouth. So she was about to leave Planet Earth for another galaxy, wrapped in her ample green cloak, wearing that neat little tiara – handmade by admirers in Churubusco, Indiana – in among her blonde curls. This was what they told each other, among has, to console themselves for the cruel facts of life.
No wonder the mundane passengers, outside the charmed ha-ing circle, turned momentarily to stare. Envy must account for those surly looks.
At the inescapable moment of parting, a group of the laughingest fans, calling themselves the Inner Circle of Kerinth, who had travelled with Green Mouth and Clement all the way from Boston, unfurled their largest banner. It bore the slogan featuring in the publisher’s current publicity campaign: GREEN MOUTH SEZ IT ALL. A bugle ha-haed, sky high.
Clapping, cheering. Ha-ing, weeping. Other passengers pushed out of the way. Special people only in this throng – men and women, or rather, boys and girls, weighty around stomach and hips, protuberant of buttock and breast, most having achieved, if not maturity, avoirdupois, all be-badged if not actually in fancy costume, all addicts of Green Mouth’s pre-pubertal planet. Cameras and videocams at the alert, all clustered about their heroine for the last shot, a last kiss, an embrace or, failing those, a mere touch.
How fortunate that she was, in her forty-sixth year, so statuesque that she could withstand their ardour, like a rock in a surging tide, or perhaps Brünnhilde standing in for Andromeda on her rock. She could recall all the names of the faithful – all their first names. She had a word for each personally, even if it was only ‘Bye’. Her little Hispanic editor from Swain Books Inc. was thanked last and with greatest warmth. Against his lips, as he stood on tiptoe, were crushed most enthusiastically those pursed green lips. Clement turned away. When he looked again, she and the camp-followers were parted. The desertion was made flesh.
The ha count dies. The fans are swept aside by brisk business passengers equipped with the latest briefcases. They look deflated, tawdry, as they furl up their banners. Alcohol and drugs and hangovers increase their sorrow. Some weep, some begin to skip or dance.
None of this matters. The hall is already peopled with eccentrics, drawn to this parting of the ways like cats on a quayside. Some speak out for various religions, thrusting pamphlets on the unwary. Some tout lost or mislaid causes. Some cry aloud injustices in various distant homelands. Some merely try to sell earrings. Big blacks skate grandly by on wooden wheels, Flying Dutchpersons able to ignore the world, their ears plugged with microsound. Although accustomed to the USA, Clement remains amazed at how busy airports are on Sundays.
The Kerinth fans are lost now. Mother has gone away, her sons and daughters are scattered. They drift off to drink calorific shakes in nearby bars, pink, green, brown, or Your Choice.
A last imperial wave of braceleted wrist and Green Mouth is through the final barrier. Clement follows humbly, given status by being i/c documents. Green Mouth seats herself on a plastic seat. Two nearby English passengers shrink away.
‘Buy a bottle of Smirnoff, Clem – to take home to Michelin,’ says Green Mouth. She is not above such mundane details, but she stares ahead as if she had not spoken. He moves towards the Duty Free. He understands she wishes to be alone with her carbonated emotions. She has to come back to Earth before she can leave terra firma.
Clement Winter was a thin man, which suited his self-effacing qualities. There was about him an air of one for whom life has been slightly insufficient, or who has been slightly insufficient for life. He wore a striped light jacket with matching tie, a white shirt, and a pair of blue trousers. His hair was not chestnut enough to notice and now, in his fiftieth year, somewhat frayed about the edges. His hands hung from his sleeves. Only in his face, running a little to fat, was there a lively darting thing; it was as though his head had generally had more luck than the rest of him.
He purchased the vodka his wife wanted and returned to her via the bookstall, where War Lord of Kerinth was in the No. 2 Bestsellers slot. War Lord of Kerinth had 1.5 million copies in print hardcover, each wrapped in its sizzling jacket by S. S. Bronbell and stamped with the legend cooked up at Swain by the little Hispanic editor, ‘Green Mouth Sez It All’. As he passed the stall, Clement saw a middle-aged woman in a smart ice-blue suit take a copy over to the checkout point. She did not even glance at the price. The volume, bulked up as it was, resembled a glutinous box of chocolates.
No one could mistake Green Mouth. She sat upright in her plastic seat, a dowager duchess at least, her ample mouth that brilliantly repellent green, the same shade echoed about her eyes, her eyelashes tinted gold. He sat beside her, tucking the vodka into a carrier. Her distinctive hand-luggage, bearing its open green mouths, came between them.
‘Sheila,’ he said.
The name, he considered, was like a projectile, a component of some vast SDI programme of the mind, bursting into her personal umwelt, carrying with it unwelcome news of her ordinary humanity. She responded only with a grunt, possibly a grunt of pain, completely ha-free.
‘You were wonderful,’ he said. Using the past tense on her like a can-opener. She had to start getting back sometime. There was jet-lag. There was reality-lag. Best to keep them separate.
‘Wonderful,’ he repeated, choosing more of a dying fall this time. And then their flight was called in an electronic voice as soft as the cooing of doves.
On the Boeing, muzak was playing: ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’. As Clement hung the green cloak on a rail, he glanced through into Economy, where the hordes were fighting to stash away liquor in overhead lockers, mussing each other’s hair and tempers in the process. Every year, as civilization ticked by, thousands of gallons of alcohol were ferried back and forth across the Atlantic, each precious bottle of the stuff requiring a human attendant. It was one of the paradoxes of modern living which kept living modern.
Clement hoped that when the hostesses had seen to his wife’s minor problems, which always cropped up, and preferably had recognized her, and more preferably had read all her books, she would remove the viridian lipstick and deflate back into being Sheila Winter again. She always said she liked to travel anonymously; and that was fine, as long as everyone knew who you were.
Sure enough, as he returned to his seat, or armchair as Pan-Am liked to call it, the hostesses were flocking round with the champagne, professing to be fans of Kerinth, every one. 1.5 million copies hardcover certainly wasn’t hay. And to think the first Kerinth novel, Brute of Kerinth, had been published originally in a paperback edition of no more than sixty thousand copies. Not so much wonderful as a miracle – their personal miracle.
Green Mouth was gracious as always. Sure, she’d love to visit the flight deck after dinner. Sure, she always flew Pan-Am. Champagne was poured again. They drank. Clement drank. Good for Kerinth; it stood between him and Economy.
She still retained her Green Mouth face even when her eyes closed. She must be tired after four days in Boston of constant limelight and the tour before that. Never more than six hours’ sleep a night. Much drink, taken without flinching. Saying nice things about Swain. Hearing nice things from Swain. All energy-sapping. But never a word of complaint.
Her face, under its paint, was large, brown, homely, and lightly creased. The teeth had been fixed so that she did not look as once she had like something that had just run in the Grand National. Sheila Winter was rather a handsome woman, though there was a heavy jaw, speaking of determination, perhaps of rather a glum kind. In her ears were little mazooms of emerald, designed for her by a French fan in California. Not so little, either. They threatened to execute a pincer movement along the planes of Green Mouth’s cheeks, just as – how often – mazooms had menaced the World of Kerinth before brave Tazz had tamed one of them.
Without opening her eyes, she ran her green nails along his jacket sleeve. ‘Wonderful,’ she said.
Once the plane was airborne, the captain spoke over the intercom, telling the passengers at what height they would be travelling and at what time they were due to hit the coast of Ireland – at which announcement all the English passengers looked alarmed. But the champagne came round again, and the feline hostesses, and Green Mouth began to talk without looking at Clement. She was delivering a monologue. Clement felt no need to reply; he understood. The weary brain was off-loading like a computer. Sheila had been travelling round the States for twenty-three days, promoting the latest Kerinth novel from coast to coast in eighteen cities. And for the last four days she had been incarcerated in the Luxor Hotel in Boston (where Clement had joined her), as Guest of Honour at the XIX Fantacon, known in her honour as the Kerincon, the constant target of attention for five thousand fans, many of them attired only in leopard skin and sword.
She had gone without sleep. She had lived on pills. She had rarely ceased drinking or talking. She had given interviews. She had answered endless questions – often the same questions – with good grace. She had received gifts. She had signed many of the 1.5 million copies of her book. She had made a two-hour-long speech, full of attractive pathos about her happy childhood and not lacking in ha-quota either. She had thrown a wildly expensive party in her hotel suite for publishers, friends, and special fans. She had been laid more than once by her diminutive Hispanic editor, all in the spirit of fun. She had posed for photographs for Locus and anyone else who asked. She had smiled her grim smile most of the time. She had smoked almost incessantly, showered often, and accepted with an amusing speech the High Homeric Fantasy Award for being Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy.
No wonder her brain wanted to talk. The sump had to be drained, the gurge regurgitated.
High above the grey and tedious Atlantic, she paused once to emit a simultaneous yawn and belch.
‘But how are you feeling?’ Clement asked.
Her hand sought his, and then she looked at him through cloudy eyes. ‘Fucking awful, darling,’ said Green Mouth.
She was returning to reality. He summoned the hostess for some more champagne.
Monday morning. Home again. Shoes off time. Safe. Secure in the Victorian brick wilderness of North Oxford. Their square-windowed house in Rawlinson Road was shielded from the gaze of passers-by by an enormous horse chestnut tree which some absent-minded builder had forgotten to destroy while he had the chance, possibly during the celebrations attendant on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
The hired chauffeur stacked their luggage in the hall and left.
Sheila went into the front room and reclined with care on the sofa under the lace-curtained window. Her green lipstick and eye shadow had been removed in the toilet of the 747. She now looked merely pale, merely enervated, merely English.
‘Are you going to make us a cup of tea?’ she called.
Clement was taking the cases upstairs.
‘Good idea. Hang on a moment.’ Michelin, who lived with them, was out.
The time was 10.50. Or alternatively, 5.50, New York time.
His head rang.
In their bedroom, he set down the cases and opened one of them. In it, approved by Customs, lay Green Mouth’s latest prize, the High Homeric Fantasy Award, sculpted in fibre glass.
To please her, possibly to revive her, he took it downstairs and placed it on a table before her. She smiled wanly.
‘Oh, that!’ said the Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy. It is magnificent. It consists of a bust of Homer with two little cupid wings sprouting from his grey locks, just above his ears. This is no mere ha flim-flam. This is a literary award, bestowed by earnest young judges of the various sexes. On the back of the revered Greek story-teller’s head are etched the titles of the ten Kerinth novels and the one collection of short stories, with their dates of publication.
What’s more, this award is electronic. Inside the skull is concealed a lithium battery smaller than a dime. Clement switches on. Homer’s blind eyes light up. The wings flap at a dignified pace. Homer nods.
Sheila smiled. ‘Wonderful, but … tea?’
He brought her tea in her Libra mug, accompanied by two Hedex, and sat on the edge of the sofa clutching his own mug.
‘You could go up and lie on the bed.’
She nodded, clasping the mug between stubby fingers, looking down into the tea. ‘I wonder if Michelin made any biscuits.’
After they had sipped for a while in silence, she yawned and looked rather sullenly round the room, as if to orient herself.
It was not a remarkable room, except that successive owners had spared the elaborate Victorian fireplace, before which an electric fire now stood. Sheila had chosen a blue, green and gold decor, and had not pushed the green too heavily. The wallpaper was a dark blue, the chairs and sofa were green and gold. Gold birds fluttered in the folds of blue and green curtains. A large rococo-framed gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece. To the left of the fireplace stood a glass cabinet housing some of Sheila’s awards for fiction, including the International Otherworld Fiction Award sculpture of Tazz riding a mazoom. In the bookcase to the other side of the fireplace, above the sets of Dickens, Galsworthy, and Dornford Yates, her own books were on display, with Brute of Kerinth, the first in the series, facing outwards into the room.
Postcards from all over the world were ranged along the mantelshelf, like illustrations from other people’s lives lived under bright blue skies. Photographs of Green Mouth mixing with important people hung framed on the wall behind the door. Beneath them was a small eighteenth-century side-table bearing a large Chinese vase converted into a table-lamp. Similar conversions involved the mock gas brackets which projected from the wall over the fireplace. The white leather rhino which served as a footrest – present from a grateful and enriched publisher in Germany – had never seen the forests of Sumatra.
The stillness in the room was also in a sense man-made. The Winters had had all the windows double-glazed, to shut out noise from the street.
To the rear of the room, by a curtained archway leading through to the conservatory, a music stack with discs, records and cassettes waited in an alcove. There hung an enormous gouache, painted for a bygone dust jacket, of Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, standing bolt upright with a spear and a sort of dog, gazing into the purple future.
Beyond the queen stood a bureau at which Sheila often sat to answer her fanmail. Her study suite was upstairs on the first floor. Clement’s little study was up another flight, on the second floor, under the eaves that pointed in the direction of the University.
‘Back to reality,’ she said, setting down her mug. ‘I suppose Michelin is in Summertown shopping.’
‘She’ll be back soon. Shall we have a snort of something?’
‘Shall we? Just wine for me.’
‘Wine it is.’ He went through to the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of Mouton Cadet, whistling as he did so.
Michelin had collected up the mail and piled it on the dresser. As he put the corkscrew back into the drawer, Clement looked it over. Most of the letters were for Sheila, addressed to her under her famous pseudonym; most of them came from the United States. Sorting casually through the collection, he found some bills and a small package addressed to him. He recognized his sister Ellen’s writing.
The package was registered. Evidently Michelin had signed for it. He frowned, but made no attempt to open it just yet. Like Sheila, he felt a reluctance to allow the real world back in: the world of bills. On Kerinth, bills were never presented or paid; no one worked, except peasants. Sisters, if they sent packets, sent them by hand – probably by a messenger on a telepathic erlkring. The messenger would arrive in a lather, perhaps seriously wounded, and the packet would contain something portentous. A lover’s heart, perhaps, as in The Heart of Kerinth.
Was Ellen sending him something equally vital?
He suppressed such questions, left the package on the dresser, and went back into the front room to Sheila, carrying the bottle and two glasses.
After the first glass, she fell asleep. He spread a tartan rug gently over her. He stood regarding her. With her eyes closed she looked characterless, despite the noble nose and noticeable chin.
Taking the opportunity, Clement went quietly upstairs to his study. There his dead brother’s papers awaited him, stacked on the desk, tumbling out of boxes on the floor; the mortal remains of Joseph Winter in folders and old brown paper bundles. For all practical purposes, Joseph in death had taken over Clement’s study.
When Sheila had made her remark, commonplace enough, about coming back to reality, she had spoken, Clement thought, with contempt as well as resignation. Reality for him meant something different, something with the texture of puzzlement, for to enter his study was to feel himself entangled in the affairs of his late brother.
Some time soon, he would have to drive over again to his dead brother’s flat. It was two months since Joseph had suffered his final heart attack. His flat remained, ensconced in that limbo of small London streets where Chiswick subsides ignobly into Acton amid a welter of little furniture dealers, junk shops, discount stores, and auto repair shops. There Joseph Winter had lived in his semi-academic obscurity with a succession of women, while books and documents had piled up around him.
Clement felt only mild curiosity about the women. The books and documents, willed to him, were his responsibility. He had collected some, almost at random, culling them from wardrobes and mantelpieces. He was also engaged with a series of secondhand booksellers, trying to screw from them a tolerably fair price for Joseph’s old volumes, some of which, dealing with Joseph’s subject, South East Asian history, were of value.
The question of the books could be resolved. They were the subjects of a mere financial transaction. It was the unpublished work, particularly that dealing with Joseph’s private life, which presented more than a problem, a challenge, which made Clement feel that his own life was being called into account.
Clement slumped in his chair, forearms resting on his knees, so that his hands dangled in space.
‘Joseph,’ he said aloud – quietly, bearing in mind that Sheila was asleep – ‘what am I going to do about you?’
Since the brothers had never known what to do about each other in life, it appeared unlikely that the question would be resolved now, when one of them had folded up his mortal tent and stolen away.
2
Clement Winter left home shortly after nine the next morning, keeping an eye open for his next-door neighbours, the Farrers, whom he detested. It was a Tuesday, quite a sensible, neutral day of the week – the day, in fact, when he usually held his clinic; but this week as last he had cancelled it, using the excuse of his American trip. Which was as well; jet-lag still made him feel slightly dissociated. Both his legs ached, the left in particular. He walked consciously upright, but a little stiffly.
This walk was his daily exercise. The car remained in the garage. He had changed his more daring American rig for a familiar light grey suit from Aquascutum, as better suited to the environs of Carisbrooke College.
Sheila was still in bed, presumably divesting herself of her Green Mouth personality at leisure. Though he guessed she would soon be working again. Michelin had taken her breakfast up on a tray: orange juice, a mixture of Alpen and All-Bran, two slices of brown wholemeal toast, and a mug of best Arabian coffee with cream. Clement had looked in on her after his breakfast and had taken her the Independent. They had murmured endearments to each other.
Now he was playing the role of one more Oxford don, greying, distinguished, as he walked down the Banbury Road to Carisbrooke.
Boston had been cold and rainy. Oxford was remarkably hot. A June heatwave lay over the British Isles. The newspapers were already circulating tales of old ladies fainting in the streets. In Oxford, Clement reflected, it would be old dons.
As he entered the College grounds, a slightly falsetto tooting sounded behind him. Turning, he saw a blue car of no significance drawing into the car park. His research assistant, Arthur Stranks, waved at him from the driver’s seat.
Out of politeness, Clement turned back, and stood waiting while Arthur parked the car and climbed out, to walk sideways towards his boss so as to keep the car within his sight.
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ he said. ‘I bought her last week, er, in Kidlington, zero miles on the clock. Cheri’s mad about her.’
‘I’m not much of an expert on cars,’ Clement said, searching the new acquisition for some kind of distinguishing mark. He recalled that previously Arthur had driven a dilapidated Mini with printed jokes in the rear window. ‘What is it?’
‘She’s the new Zastava Caribbean,’ Arthur said, standing on tiptoe in his trainers, a habit by which he expressed enthusiasm as well as elasticity. ‘Jugoslav-made, newly imported. The Kidlington garage is the only garage in all Oxfordshire where you can buy it. Sole agents. Er – Cheri and I will be able to drive everywhere in it.’
‘Except, presumably, the Caribbean.’
Arthur laughed good-naturedly. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said.
They walked along together.
‘I’ve promised not to drive too fast,’ Arthur said. ‘Not with Cheri in her condition.’
Clement recalled that Mrs Stranks, who had changed her name from Cherry to Cheri – to be more interesting, her husband said – was newly pregnant.
In Clement’s room, the accustomed piles of papers and books awaited him. He looked about with a show of pleasure. Here at least, he could bring some sense and order into life.
Arthur Stranks blinked a welcome through his glasses and nodded his head a bit.
‘I hope the New York conference was a success? Fun? You get the material you needed?’ His manner was solicitous.
‘Some of it, some of it. I had a long conversation with Prof Stauffer and I’ve brought back photocopies of a bundle of his material.’
Arthur looked interested and did some more nodding. He had tidied the room while Clement was away, and the old box files now stood in military array under the wide window. The photograph of Willy Wilkes-Smith, the late Master of Carisbrooke, Clement’s friend, still hung awry behind the door. Clement went over and straightened it.
Two stacks of wire baskets, six baskets tall, stood on the broad central table. They contained documents, together with photographs and cuttings culled from European and transatlantic sources. One day, with the aid of Arthur, a secretary who came twice a week, and a computer, all this paper, with which the room was slowly filling, would be processed into more paper: into, to be precise, Clement’s next work, a study entitled, Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars. The title was a compromise between the academic respectability he had already achieved and the popular acclaim he felt he deserved; of course the publishers would probably change it anyhow.
‘Er, the breakdowns of the VD figures have arrived from the National Archives in Washington. Came on Thursday.’
‘Good.’ He began to open letters. ‘How’s Cheri? Any morning sickness?’
‘Cheri’s fine. Great.’
They looked at each other across the room, expressionlessly. Clement, in a fit of good will, put down the letter he was holding and commenced to tell Arthur something about the Modern History conference he had attended before flying to Boston to meet Green Mouth.
Clement, who was rather a distant man, discovered in Arthur a desire to get a little too close in their relationship. Also, there was the generation gap, much though he might try to discount it – indeed, he disliked the very phrase. At forty-nine, Clement was conscious of his age. His once curly hair now harboured ash to dilute its previous chestnut and, even more regrettably, was thinning in a silly fashion, behind and in front. His ruddy cheeks had become patchily sallow, in a way that made him uncomfortable before his mirror. Although no hypochondriac, he imagined himself due for a heart attack at times, and had cut down accordingly on the College port. Caring little about politics, he still clung to his liberal socialist principles, born in the early days of Harold Wilson, the first Prime Minister he had voted for, and believed those principles helped keep his faculties from ossifying.
Arthur Stranks was twenty-two and sallow to start with, a stubby young bespectacled man with a pleasant air of wishing to please. His dark hair was cut flat on top; the Scrubbing Brush cut was how Clement and Sheila thought of it. As if to assert a wildness of character acquaintances would not otherwise have suspected him of possessing, Arthur had a small tattoo on his left wrist, a bird of prey with something resembling a rat in its beak, probably holding some arcane sexual significance, thought Clement. He knew his assistant for one of Mrs Thatcher’s conformists, tethered to his job and monetarist respectability, but there was another side to Stranks, a side represented in part by Mrs Stranks, Cheri, a rather silent lady of sidelong glances, sighs, and a self-evident bosom, who was always to be seen – at least by Clement – in very tight stone-washed jeans. Regarding Stranks, Clement found himself thinking of the bird with the rat and of Cheri.
Stranks had made it clear from the first that he considered it a privilege to work for Dr Clement Winter. In an early attempt to be friendly, Sheila and Clement had taken the Strankses to Covent Garden to Janaček’s opera Jen
fa. A few months later the Strankses had invited the Winters to what was at first described simply as ‘a concert’. After accepting, Clement discovered that it was a rock concert.
When the day came, Sheila was too busy finishing a novel to go out. She had excused herself, and Clement had gone on his own with Arthur and Cheri to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre to see Tina Turner live.
He was the only person in the audience in a suit.
The show, the noise, the audience, the enthusiasm, had overwhelmed him. Until that evening, he had never heard of Tina Turner. She was a light coffee-coloured lady wearing a tight-fitting white two-piece which laced up over her exuberant breast, and, even more effectively, a huge wig like a lion’s mane. As she screamed her songs at the audience, the mane shook with fervour. The stage could barely contain Tina Turner. She prowled and stamped about it, shrieking her strange love laments, as if seeking a way of getting at the audience and devouring it.
She was a marvellous and, to Clement, a terrifying spectacle. His ideal of feminine beauty had been formed at about the age of ten, when he distinctly recalled rubbing a pubescent penis against a photograph of Miss Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr had been presented as static, even icy, with the best bits (as he had put it to himself) always chastely concealed. This secretiveness, this pretended show of privacy, had enhanced Hedy Lamarr’s stunning beauty. All such artifices were flung out to allow Tina Turner’s beauty full play. He was looking at a new age, heralded triumphantly by the singing, the stamping, the tossing mane.
And, like the other males in the audience, Clement was filled with lust. That was what he found terrifying. Savage though Tina might appear, barbaric though the noise was, he saw or imagined a delicacy to her limbs, her hands with their long red claws. In particular, there was a sunny good humour about the whole performance from which it took him days to recover.
The audience, clapping and shouting, was another matter. Art and Cheri beside him were suddenly half-naked, which was to say in T-shirts; paying him no attention, they became part of the mass-mind. Clement, too, dropping his jacket on the floor, also gave in. The whole great cavern became a pool of amplified noise and heat and emotion. And Tina Turner, her carnivorous teeth gleaming at the fun of it all.
The next morning found Clement out of sorts with himself. He sent his suit to the cleaners in Summertown. There were worlds which were not his.
Since then, Clement had kept a mental distance from his assistant. He feared that Stranks and his wife, who had really looked astonishing in that T-shirt, might invite him again into those lower depths. And was affronted that they never did.
Now he averted his eyes from the sinister tattoo, and called his attention back to the reason that had brought them to this untidy room.
‘Better pick up the threads again,’ said Clement, after they had talked for some while. He rubbed his hands together, staging enthusiasm, but doing no more than frown at his chair.
‘How’s Sheila?’ Arthur needed more conversation before starting work. ‘Er – her side of things go okay?’ He had the habit of beginning most sentences with ‘Er’, often accompanied by a quick and useless adjustment of the spectacles.
‘Oh, her tour went like a bomb. She’s good on television, and they’re respectful to the English accent, you know. Especially in the south. She’s a bit exhausted – no wonder.’
‘Should think so. She likes America?’
‘Very much so. Whiskey sours. And of course she is so popular there. The Americans have an enthusiasm we lack.’
‘They’re not so critical, are they?’
Clement found this rather an unfortunate remark, but all he said, as he sat down, was, ‘You and Cheri must come round again soon. Sheila will tell you all about it.’
The last time Arthur and Cheri had come round to Rawlinson Road had been quite a success. He had read a couple of Green Mouth novels; no doubt the essentially conservative nature of epic fantasy had its appeal. Clement had spent much of the evening talking to Cheri. It had not been unpleasant. He remembered now that at sight of the tiny swimming pool she had said brightly, ‘I must bring my costume next time.’
Arthur was still postponing a move towards the table.
‘Er, I was reading about Zola in one of the weeklies.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Emile Zola … Seems as if when he was writing his novels he was transported into a sort of totally different thingey – state of being. Rather like being possessed – a state of possession. Terrible visions, intense nightmares, dreams of er, sexual ecstasy, intimations of murder. Quite different from his normal life. A different plane of being … I wondered if – excluding the murder business, of course – if other writers also experienced that kind of transformation … A different frame of mind entirely.’
Clement laughed briefly. ‘You’d have to ask my wife that question.’
Something in Clement’s tone caused Arthur to fall silent. He retreated to his own desk. His trainers made squeegee noises on the parquet flooring.
This was a signal for Clement to resign himself to work. He pulled various items from his briefcase, arranging them on the table before him.
The main bulk of work on Adaptability was already finished, although some chapters required last-minute revision. There were appendices to be drawn up – mainly Arthur’s task – the vexatious notes to be gone over, and various references to be checked. He would be only a few months over his publisher’s deadline. Yet, he realized, the trip to the States, the appearance at the symposium – where American full professors seemed to lead such affluent lives – and the outing to see his wife in action at Fantacon XIX, had unsettled him. He regarded the cordilleras of paper before him without appetite. They certainly would not be printed up in an edition of 1.5 million.
He found himself thinking again of his dead brother. He owed Joseph something. Consanguinity could not be denied.
Sighing, he began to sort through some newspaper cuttings which Arthur had amassed while he was away. One of them caught his attention. It was a brief account, cut from the Independent, of a massacre which had occurred in the Lisenitsky Forest, on the outskirts of Lvov, in the Ukraine, in September 1943.
The details were brief but clear. Following the fall of Mussolini, Italy surrendered unconditionally early that September. Italian forces were still fighting alongside the Nazis. Many of them were left politically and physically stranded by the armistice. 229,000 Italians were serving on the Eastern front. 89,000 of them were killed or disappeared without trace. The Germans were hard-pressed by the Russians after the failure of their Sixth Army to take Stalingrad. When 2,000 Italians refused to fight at the front and demanded repatriation, the Germans, ruthless as ever, simply rounded them up in a sand pit and shot them all. Trees were then planted over the site to conceal it. Over forty years later, the site had been discovered by some children from Lvov.
It was only a small incident in a long war; but it touched closely on the theme of Clement’s book, the break-up of families and relationships throughout Europe as the result of two world wars. In his years in Berlin, Clement had counselled women whose husbands or sons had disappeared into the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union, never to be heard of again.
Making a precis of the facts on a file card, Clement handed it over to Arthur to store the entry in the computer. After some thought, he scribbled a line to the Independent correspondent in Moscow, asking for verification and, if possible, amplification of the facts. The sole witness to the massacre, according to Tass, quoted in the paper, was a woman who had been a schoolgirl of sixteen at the time.
This was only one of a number of similar massacres. In Babi Yar, outside Kiev, the Nazis had massacred 200,000 of their so-called enemies. In Katyn, near Smolensk, Russians had murdered over 4,000 Polish officers.
What had that schoolgirl been doing, wandering innocently in the woods near Lvov? And what effect had sight of that massacre had on her later life? According to her testimony, some of the Italian soldiers had been playing guitars. He saw her through the double-glazed windows of his room, wandering among the willows on the banks of the Isis. She had crept nearer to see who could be playing guitars so happily in the middle of a war. Then came the rifle shots and the cries. She stood behind a tree, fearful. Then she had run for home and not dared to speak of what she had heard and seen.
Clement received these destructions with binocular vision. They happened a long time ago in a distant place. They were also contemporaneous, happening close at hand. Violence remained in the air. Most people in Europe were governed by force. It was inevitable that savagery would break out again. Even understanding was no defence against that.
Since that schoolgirl witness had been born, Hitler’s evil empire had been destroyed. Other evils had sprung up. Her own town, Lvov, had passed from Poland to become part of the Soviet Empire. The century had produced new states of doubtful legality. The new states raised armies which marched or clashed along the shifted frontiers. The victors exacted duties, levies, and taxes – above all a moral tax – on those within their borders.
He sighed and turned back to his desk. Under all his horror at the massacres lay a fascination he sought to conceal even from himself. The fascination kept him at his work. Such massacres as the schoolgirl witnessed represented a rare time when life became greater than the imagination. Generally, the reverse was true.
Over coffee in the common room, Clement bumped into Harry Raine, Master of Carisbrooke. Raine, tall, decrepit by design, spare, thin of jowl, began to talk immediately about problems of invigilation. ‘The day of examining and being examined is upon us. You timed your return from the feverish charms of the New World well,’ he told Clement, with his ghostly smile.
He dislikes me, Clement thought, because my wife makes a lot of money from her writing and I never say a word against it.
He was not sure if this were really so, since Harry sometimes gave the impression – it was something in that ghostly smile which displayed the strangely grouped grey teeth – of disliking everyone. But he never asked after Sheila.
She’s too much a challenge to his antiquated set of values, Clement thought. And he doesn’t like women either. Hence his hugely pompous manner – enough to put off any sensible girl.
Going home that evening, Clement Winter walked to the shops in Summertown, met a few acquaintances, chatted, and collected from the delicatessen smoked herring, bean salad, and a brand of walnut ice-cream which Sheila particularly enjoyed. He was aware that he was probably duplicating Michelin’s efforts earlier; but he wished to reassure his wife that the good things of life had not necessarily stopped just because they were back in England again.
As he entered Rawlinson Road, he passed his neighbour, John Farrer. Farrer was short and bald and given to tweed suits and heavy lace-up shoes when not wearing city clothes. He was ‘in insurance’, and his whole demeanour from the plodding walk onward summed up the banality of the Here and Now, in Clement’s opinion. This would have been insufficient to stop the Winters from speaking to him; it was John Farrer who had decided not to speak to, and even to ignore the existence of, his neighbours. They passed by on the pavement, within a foot of each other, staring straight ahead.
Clement could not resist it. He winked as they were passing.
The wink was to say, ‘Bourgeois Man, you wear your silly thick jacket, even in a heatwave. Right down to your soul you’re over-dressed.’ It was also to say, ‘Aren’t we comic, carrying on this silly feud when we are neighbours?’
It was also to say, ‘I believe I’m superior to you because I can see the funny side of all this …’
The wink was not returned. Stony-faced, the banality of the Here and Now marched on by. Clement turned in at his own gate.
His house, like many of the others in this most superior road, was an example of bland but condescending English architectural manners, with no one feature overwhelming another. Nor did it vie with the neighbouring houses – with the Farrers’ house, for instance. All the same, its essential features had been assembled in such a way that it appeared different from any of the others in the street, and the facade was crowded with too much detail, the windows too large, the porch too heavy, the gables too pointed, for complete discretion. I’m prosperous, the house said, as Clement went in, and I think you should know it.
When he entered the building, he found his wife sitting in the kitchen by the Aga, in a familiar attitude when talking, with one arm bent and tucked behind her head, chatting over the phone to a friend, recounting the ardours and triumphs of the American tour. A cold cup of coffee stood on the table by her. It took Clement only a moment to deduce that the friend at the other end of the line was Maureen Bowler; internal evidence suggested as much. Sheila used a special voice when talking with her feminist friend.
Sheila was wrapped in her blue towelling robe, resting her bare feet on the table. She smiled and waved at Clement without interrupting the flow of her conversation. She was saying, ‘I told them that my idea of the fantastic was not just yesterday’s fantastic, which has become familiar through constant use – unicorns and all that – but something really fantastic, like a whole world on which every living organism has achieved consciousness … Yes, that’s it, like the planet Amarnia in Kerinth Invaded. And then Larry Ivens got up and tried to argue that nothing was fantastic any more—’
He went over to the refrigerator and put the herring and ice-cream in it. Going to the walk-in larder, he took a bottle of white wine from the stone floor. Uncorking it, he poured two glasses, one of which he passed to Sheila. They made toasting gestures to each other and drank; Sheila in addition waggled her toes.
He took his glass upstairs, where Joseph’s papers awaited him. It was noticeably warmer on the second floor. He stood about, opened a window, and then switched on the radio. From Radio Three came the sound of a fellow with an abnormally high voice singing about somewhere called Wenlock Edge. Clement switched him off again, and stood surveying the collection of papers and boxes accumulated here.
His American trip had merely postponed a decision he must now make. He must decide to what use to put his brother’s life now that his brother had finished with it. There was also Joseph’s flat in Acton, with all his books and possessions, to be disposed of.
Indecision was not a habit with him. Yet he pottered about now, the very picture of indecision. He had to admit it: Joseph worried him.
Joseph had been the adventurous one. Clement had had no adventures in life. His social work, his analysis in West Berlin, his visiting professorships in the States – all had a sheltered quality, compared with Joseph’s way of knocking about the world on next to nothing.
Clement had gone to university, unlike his brother and sister, or anyone else in the Winter family. His parents would never have aspired so high. Yet the three years in Birmingham – so he felt, looking back – had been largely wasted, as far as living was concerned. He had made few friends, joined few societies, played no games. He had filled up his days with work, poisoning himself with coffee and the cigarettes he now loathed.
Introspection had led him to become absorbed in the deficiencies of the human character. Within those labyrinths, Clement found himself able to exercise endless patience, like a naturalist in dense jungle, content to wait for hours, and to endure a thousand insect bites and stings, in order to glimpse some rare species. Such a species was now delivered to him in the shape of his elder brother’s papers, and he didn’t know what to do with them, or what pattern to extract from them.
After graduating, he had done social work in London and Coventry, later specializing in psychiatric work at the Maudsley Hospital, where he came to deal with post-war trauma victims. The war, like a heavy monsoon, had made some people and ruined others, and the losers formed a long queue at Clement’s door, demanding attention.
That queue had captured his intense compassion. He had gone to study in Berlin, and there underwent a course of analysis with T. F. Schulz, emerging as a qualified analytical psychologist in 1969. It was in Berlin he had met the young Sheila Tomlinson, long before she set foot on Kerinth.
Back in England, the queue of the maladjusted still awaited him. Marriage to Sheila did not greatly disrupt work on the queue. Only when their one child, Juliet, died, did Clement exert himself and change the course of his career, becoming a professor of sociology in 1973, and publishing his best-received work, Personality and Aggression, in 1974. Later, he worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. By then Sheila was enjoying her first literary success, and Clement had to take a certain amount of teasing, much of it only superficially good-natured, from his colleagues. Academics hated fantasy, feeling themselves surrounded by it; nor were they more cordial to success.
The situation had been better in the States, where success was still regarded as a fun thing, and where he had taken several visiting fellowships in the late seventies. Carisbrooke College, less conventional than older Oxford colleges, had made him a fellow in 1981.
Joseph had followed a less academic course.
Clement’s temperate qualities enabled him to enter keenly into the problems of others. But those problems had merely been traffic through the plain of his own life. His one adventure, apart from the determination needed to get to university, had lain in marrying Sheila; she, too, had been part of that traffic, born the month Paris fell to the German invader, seeking a stability she had lost, and willing to find a substitute for it in Clement’s cautious embrace.
Twelve years Clement’s senior, Joseph had been just old enough to see action in the war, swept overseas in the struggle which had convulsed the world. In Clement’s considered opinion, years of soldiering had awoken something primitive in his brother’s nature, a rebellious and, from some points of view, admirable quality, which had enabled him ever after to live an independent life of struggle, punctuated by periods of insolvency and hazardous travel in the Far East. And of course many affairs with women. Joseph had never settled for anything; nor had he settled down. He had never been able to settle down. That some of his existential problems remained unresolved seemed evident from the muddle of papers in Clement’s room; he had left scattered evidence of his existence, almost as a challenge to his brother, whose duty in life it was to understand.
Clement’s training, as well as his analytical disposition, enabled him to see how reluctant he was to face his own lack of involvement in Joseph’s affairs. He had been far – often physically far – from the crucial events in Joseph’s career.
He took from the drawer of his desk an envelope containing a letter and photograph Joseph had sent him in the early eighties. He was sorry to think that they had arrived in response to his duplicated form. When he was embarking on the research required for Adaptability, Clement had sent out the forms to large numbers of people, inviting memories of the beginning of the war in 1939. He had been impersonal; his brother’s response had been personal and immediate.
Joseph had taken the printed question literally. His reply, in his hasty handwriting, concerned only the declaration of war, when he had just turned thirteen. On that day, 3rd September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, his sister Ellen was almost nine; Clement was little more than a toddler. Their parents, Ernest and Madge Winter, were in their late thirties or early forties.
Madge Winter had taken the photograph on the family box Brownie. It was in black-and-white, with a white margin. Time had made it crisp and slightly concave. In Joseph’s writing on the back of the snap was the legend, ‘Taken an hour after war was declared.’
The family was standing by the old square Morris. Ellen, in a check print dress, was holding baby Clement and grinning. Joseph, in holiday shorts, was wearing a large cap and grinning. Father looked sternly out of the car window, elbow and forearm disclosing a rolled-up shirt sleeve. His expression suggested he was mulling over his favourite phrase, ‘That’s what you get …’ Behind the car, part of a ruin could be seen. They had been holidaying on the north coast of Cornwall, by Tintagel, King Arthur’s castle.
‘I respond to your form at once, because the more obstinately 1939 gets forgotten by the population at large, the more obstinately I remember it,’ Joseph had written in his reply to the form.
Even there, Clement reflected, Joseph revealed his character. Good-natured, rather self-mocking, yet in some way challenging, going against the grain.
‘There was a car park on the cliff top, large and open, and almost deserted except for our Morris and someone’s caravan. The caravan was drawn up so that it enjoyed views of the Atlantic. Rather a battered old thing, if I remember rightly (does one ever remember rightly?). Father pulled up next to it. We got out and Ellen and I ran to look at the cliffs, followed by cautionary screams from mother.
‘A fat man climbed out of the caravan, strolling across to engage my father in conversation. I went over to them after a while, in order to observe the fat man at close quarters. He smoked a pipe and wore a panama hat. Also old grey flannel trousers held up by braces, unless I invent that bit. He seemed a jolly man, although he and father were talking seriously about the international situation. It was a Sunday, and father showed him something in the newspaper.
‘The fat man said that his wife had turned him out of the caravan while she prepared lunch – speaking laughingly, he added that there wasn’t room for two large people inside when she was busy. He waved to her, I remember, and the woman looked out and waved back, with an extra wave for me.
‘She was cooking sausages and mash, and had their radio tuned to the Home Service. The radio said there was to be a special announcement. “This’ll be it,” said the fat man to father, calling to his wife to turn up the volume.
‘Mother and Ellen were walking off towards the ruins with the baby – with you. I stood beside father, staring out to sea. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day and the sausages smelt good.
‘I felt anxious. Perhaps I prayed. I was pretty religious at that age. Kids used to be. It seemed unlikely to me that Hitler would halt the invasion of Poland just because we asked him to, powerful though we believed Britain to be at that time. In a minute, up came the voice of Neville Chamberlain, to inform us that a state of war existed with Nazi Germany. The solemnity of his tone as much as the words impressed me deeply. I looked up at father. He just continued to stare out over the Atlantic. The fat man swore – politely, because I was there. His wife went on frying sausages.
‘She called her husband in for lunch after a while. I could hardly believe it. I imagined everything stopped when war began. We shook hands with the fat man. I was proud because he shook hands with me very readily and told me to do well. He dipped into a pocket and gave me sixpence before disappearing. While this comforted me father was annoyed with me for accepting it. He thought the man was common. No one had sausages for Sunday dinner, even on holiday, he said.
‘He headed for the ruins to break the news to mother. I followed. The sunlight and the sea remained completely unaltered.’
Clement folded the letter along its old crease-lines, and reinserted it in its envelope. That had been one enormous difference between him and Joseph: the war. It had for ever separated them.
His gaze alighted on the small package from his sister. As he took up his paperknife to open it, Sheila entered the room carrying the wine bottle, and sat down on his sofa.
‘How was Maureen?’
‘Oh, she’s still working to abolish marriage, the legalized way in which men suppress women.’ They both laughed. Since her separation from a drunken husband some years ago, Sheila’s friend Maureen Bowler had become a noted feminist.
‘You’ll take life easy for a few days, Sheila, darling? You need a rest after all the Green Mouth excitements in the States.’
‘Perhaps we’ll fly down and have a few days in Marbella next month, if it’s not too hot. I’m not doing anything too serious at present. But I phoned Mrs F.’
Mrs F. was Mrs Flowerbury, Sheila’s faithful secretary.
‘There’s a pile of stuff awaiting attention in my study. Mrs F. swore she was prepared to come even on Sunday.’
‘Silly woman!’
‘Well, her children are away and her husband’s got this contract in the Gulf. I think she’s glad to come here to fill in the time. As you know, some people have peculiar attitudes to time …’
They chatted and drank wine for a while, until Sheila told Clement to open up Ellen’s package.
From the wrapping he lifted seven venerable envelopes. They were accompanied by a letter from Ellen, penned in her small grey house in Salisbury on small grey notepaper.
Holding up the paper, Clement read aloud. ‘“Knowing that you are working on Brother Joseph’s papers, I am sending you seven letters which he wrote to me from India. I was only fourteen at the time, he was my idolized elder brother. The letters have become fragile with time, like the rest of us. Treasure them well. I definitely” – underlined – “want them back before long.” And she ends with love to you and me, and a P.S. saying the dog is in good health.’
‘Nothing about Jean?’ Sheila asked.
‘She doesn’t mention Jean.’ Jean was the only child of the marriage between Ellen and Alwyn Pickering. She had become divorced three years earlier and was the source of excited anxiety to her mother, in which capacity she vied with Jessie, the dog.
Of the seven envelopes Ellen had sent, two were plain. Five were official, with the words ACTIVE SERVICE printed boldly on them. All seven bore four anna stamps and Indian postmarks, dating from the time when Joseph was a soldier on his way to fight the Japanese in Burma. His age was eighteen, although he had passed himself off for a year older than he was.
‘They’re antiques!’ Sheila exclaimed.
‘We all are.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Switching on his desk light, Clement began to read the letters in order, passing each to Sheila as he finished it.
Even as he read, he thought, ‘I can’t simply use Joseph as a witness in my book. He’ll have to have a book to himself and I’ll have to write it. I can start with his war service.’
The frayed letters, now over forty-two years old, were written in various inks and pencil on various pieces of paper. All testified to a close link between brother and sister, excluding little Clem.
Dimapur, India
3rd Oct. 1944
Dearest Ellen,
Just a note to tell you that your loving brother is on the fringes of something triffic. Or trifficesque. An adventure. Like the ones we used to have together, imagining we were in the wilds. Now I am really going to be in the wilds. The real wilds. The wildly wild wilds.
In fact if you could see me at present you’d guess something wild was in the wind. I’m sitting writing to you in a broken down old tent, relic of the Great War or the Crimea, in a terrible transit camp in a place called Dimapur, on the threatened eastern fringes of India. Look it up in your school atlas. The flies are dreadful, the whole camp is like an entrance to hell. Except hell is not as hot as Dimapur.
We arrived here late last night, off the train from a place further north called Tinsoukia, four days after leaving Calcutta. I had been sixteen days on the move, shunted here and there by an inefficient administration, sleeping in trains (sometimes on the wooden luggage rack) and even on hard concrete station platforms among the natives. There were six of us arriving at 2 a.m. this morning, exhausted, to a not very friendly reception. Orderly corporals are a bad lot at the best of times. This one said he could do nothing till eight this morning. We had to sleep on the tables in the mess. So we did, for about three hours. (The mess is a concrete floor and a thatched roof, by the way.)
At six, as day was dawning, we were woken by the cooks. Cooks are worse than corporals. We had to get up then while they prepared breakfast. Later on, we checked into this most derelict of tents and here we are. I’ve had a snooze. Now this note. We haven’t the faintest idea what will happen next – except that we are on our way to Burma to fight the Japs. I shall not name that country again. It’s against regs. Take it from me that it is less a country, more a state of mind. The Id of the modern world.
The food would make you sick, but we’re used to it.
There was a notice on Dimapur station which said NEW YORK 11,000 MILES, TOKYO 5,400 miles, LONDON 8,300 MILES. That’s how far we are from civilization.
Our detail is under command of a cheerful sergeant called Ted Sutton. He’s from Yorkshire, a brickie foreman in civvy life, and one of the best men I ever met. Nothing upsets him, nor can you put anything over on him. Privately, I worship Ted and his cheerfulness. I’d follow him anywhere. No doubt I shall have to.
I’m very cheerful. The awfulness is exciting. But I’m also a bit fed up (or Chokka, as we say here). I wanted to get to China. You know how I’ve always been mad about things Chinese. It’s quite close. Chunking’s the place to be – Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. Constantly bombed by the Japs, full of filth and mud, so I heard from a chap in a bar in Calcutta who’d been there. That’s where I long to be. (Okay, I’m daft, but it can’t be worse than – where we’re going …) I volunteered twice, knowing the Chinese are bound to be short of radio ops. But no joy. Funny, the Chinese aren’t trusted. Yet they’re our allies. (I saw some beautiful Chinese girls in Calcutta but never mind that!)
Oh, we’re supposed to parade or something. I’ll post this here or God knows when there will be another chance. Here we go! Love to all.
Milestone 81
8th Oct. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Some address, eh? Some place!
Plenty of through traffic, as you might expect. We’re literally perched on the edge of a road. And what a road! I wish you could see it. It would satisfy your craving for ‘mad things’!
I wrote to you last from another world. Something has happened since then; that old world has gone. This is a different world – a sub-world of men only and grave intentions and festering discontent and rationed food and that particular brand of ‘organised chaos’ in which the British Army specializes. Well, before I get too philosophical, I’d better tell you how we got to Milestone 81.
Was there ever such a day – or such a road! We started out from Dimapur (if you got my letter from there, which I doubt, because the camp was so appalling they probably burn all letters), where this road begins. It runs on to Kohima and Imphal – famous, legendary names, local equivalents of Valhalla. We travelled in a three-tonner, eight of us. All I could do was stand looking out of the back and marvel, along with a bloke from Warrington called Fergy. Some of the others – amazing! – weren’t interested, and didn’t look. I bet you would have done.
Like the Burma Road, this road has been built by coolie labour – is still being built, because owing to landslides and rockfalls it is never completed. It’s been hacked out of jungle-clad mountainside. I’ve never seen such mountains. Jagged, steep – someone’s going to have to fight over mountains very similar. Many trucks have driven over the edge. It’s easy – just a moment’s lack of concentration … You can see the skeletons of crashed trucks down in the valleys, far below. Sometimes we passed strings of men, almost naked, with buckets balanced on poles over their shoulders – down far below, or far above the road. And here and there, too, working by the little threads of river in the valleys, peasants – bent in typical peasant posture, working. Even war brings them no relief from work.
It’s a one-lane road, with lay-bys every so often to let convoys pass each other. Each milestone marked – each an achievement.
At Milestone 81, I got decanted, and here I am. A real soldier now. In a WAR ZONE.
Royal Signals is strong here, along with other units of the famous British 2 Division. We are now part of the multi-racial Fourteenth Army, more familiarly known as the Forgotten Army. The Forgotten Army. The name clings like mustard gas. Everyone here grumbles like fury. I have to hide the fact that I’m enjoying it all.
Later. Sorry, interruption. I was talking about the people I now must work with. They have every right to grumble. They are more or less resting after the battle of Kohima. ‘One of the worst British battles of the war.’ Kohima’s only a few miles ahead of us. It’s now safe in British hands, what’s left of it, and all the Japs are dead. Very few prisoners taken.
The chaps complain because they think they should be sent home, or at least be given leave in India. Instead they face another campaign. And they have only me to tell it to. I think they hate me – inexperienced, pale-skinned, and having missed the hard bits … Most of them have already served three years out here. No home leave. Offered no prospect at all of getting home as long as the war with Japan lasts … which could be a century.
Morale’s low. You get the idea. They romanticize themselves as the Forgotten Army. Very bitter. I was still in the Fourth Form when they came out here.
‘What bloody good are you going to be, Winter?’ That’s what one bloke asked me yesterday. I can’t say how many times I’ve been told to ‘get some service in’ – which I am doing. Trouble is, we all go about in the bare buff, as they say, and everyone here is baked dark brown. I’m conspicuous because as yet I’m still lily white from England. Another week or two of this sun should cure that!
The only person who has been friendly so far is a Birmingham man, Bert Lyons, whose father owns a bicycle shop. He and I had quite a good talk by the light of a small lantern last night. Bert seems to have the same kind of sense of wonder as you and I. He’s also a radio op.
The Japs are still marching on India. Though we turned them back at Kohima, they are still regarded as almost unbeatable. Bert says it’s because they can live on so little – a handful of rice a day. Whereas we are decadent. He says the British Empire is finished. The Japs took over Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma itself so easily. It’s incredible. Are they going to rule half the world? Slim, the commander of the Forgotten Army, calls them ‘the most formidable fighting insects on Earth’. I guess dealing with Japs is a bit like that – fighting giaut invading insects from another world. The tales of their cruelty are legendary.
Before reaching Milestone 81, we reinforcements had a chance to talk to some troops who had been in Orde Wingate’s Chindits – heroes all – and they were in no doubt about just how tough all encounters with the Jap were likely to be. (If they got wounded in the jungle, these Chindits were given a shot of morphine and left with a revolver – to shoot themselves rather than fall into Jap hands.)
Anyhow, I’m now a member of ‘S’ Signal Section – their sole new recruit. The other reinforcements are spread throughout the division. I’ve not been through ‘S’ section’s harrowing experiences, about which they constantly tell me. Am I welcome? Certainly not. I’m a representative of ‘The Blight’ (Blighty), the country thousands of miles distant which has ignored them and their exploits for so long. Thank God for Bert Lyons. ‘Don’t worry, we’re all puggle,’ he says – puggle being our word for le cafard…
Such mighty things happening. Conversation so trivial – apart from those terrible experiences – some of which I now know by heart. God, what these poor so-and-sos have been through. And more to come.
I’m off on duty now. Love to all.
Milestone 81. Assam
13th Oct. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Hope to hear from you some day. Letter from Mum, which I’ll answer soon. Perhaps you could show her this one to be going on with. The chaps here have mainly given up writing home.
We’re still waiting to move forward. I’ll then have to be careful what I say. Of course our letters are censored by one of the officers for safety’s sake.
I’ll tell you what our billet is like. Very picturesque, I assure you.
I’m lodged in a tent consisting of a spread of brown tarpaulin over a patch of steep hillside. Lodged is the word. When I got here from Dimapur, five men already occupied the tent. If you can call it a tent. They made room for me, and so I found lodgement on the outer side, just about.
My bed or charpoy is home-made. I can’t say I’m proud of my handiwork, but it’ll do. A bit Robinson Crusoe! It consists of a ground sheet stretched across four bamboo poles which are lashed together with old signal wire. This masterpiece is balanced on empty jerry cans, stacked so that the bed is roughly level on the uneven ground. My mosquito net is secured to ropes overhead, so low that the net is uncomfortably close to my face. Never mind – I can see the stars at night.
Apparently we are 4,300 feet above sea level. It’s as if we were perched on the top of Ben Nevis. From my charpoy, I can see a hill whose peak is a thousand feet higher than we are. It towers above us, jungle-clad all the way. Not long ago, it swarmed with Japs. By propping myself up on one elbow, I can see the great road, winding and winding on for miles, always carrying its slow crawl of convoys. What a window on the world! Behind me, on the slope where we are perched, is an untidy waste land, only partly cleared. It was also Jap-infested until recently. In it still remain all the vantage points, fire bays, and tunnels the Japs dug. They were killed by grenades and flame-throwers, and their bodies walled-in where they lay. No wonder the hillside has a thriving rat population …
I was asleep last night when a rat jumped on to my charpoy and ran across the net over my face. I struck out violently at it – and dislodged my charpoy from its pile of cans. Consequently I was pitched right out of the tent, where I rolled some way down the slope, naked as the day I was born. The other blokes just laughed or swore because I had woken them. I had to laugh myself.
Mum asks if we have any entertainment. Three nights ago, the Army Cinema rolled up and showed us Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, which I now know nearly by heart. The men just sat about on the hillside, watching. You should – or shouldn’t – have heard what they said they’d do to Margaret Lockwood. Out here, a white woman is almost a mythological creature.
Can’t be bothered to write more. I like this place – it’s so weird, though everyone takes it for granted. We haven’t even got a NAAFI, where you might linger over a beer or a coffee.
One entertainment is to watch the agile Naga women climb up and down the steep hillsides to harvest tea in the distant valley. They don’t look as good as Margaret Lockwood. They scale the slopes with huge wicker baskets secured to their backs by wide leather straps running round the forehead. It’s a tough life, and they can’t let the war get in their way. Do they consider their surroundings beautiful, I wonder?
Love to all.
Milestone 81. Assam (Nagaland)
18th Nov. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Still in the same spot. This outdoor life must be depraving: what do you think? Yesterday I stole something …
My orders were to report to the MO for various injections – TAB and so on. The MO – how typical of an officer – had appropriated for himself what passes out here for a ‘cushy billet’, a bungalow belonging to a tea planter who is now probably sitting out his life in New Delhi (unless the Japs got him). It felt quite odd to be ‘indoors’. The waiting room in which I was made to kick my heels for a good half-hour actually boasted a couple of cane armchairs and a crammed bookcase. What an anachronism! Books! On one shelf was a paperback with a title that immediately attracted me. I started reading it there and then.
Right after the first page, I knew that that book had to become part of the booty of war. ‘Loot what you can’ is an ancient warrior’s slogan. Even a 1/3d Pelican. By the time the doctor summoned me, it was safe inside my bush shirt. The book is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and tells of the rise and fall of poor suffering humanity over the next few billion years. (Are we rising or falling just now?)
Stapledon is an even better companion than Bert Lyons. He’ll come into action with me (we’re due to go forward soon). He provides an antidote to the triviality of daily conversation (which is in contrast to the majesty of our surroundings), which centres largely round the subjects of Kohima, sex, and the possibilities of getting home. Only Stapledon and his preoccupations seem a match for these stirring times. A cure for transience.
End of true confession. Sorry to write in pencil.
Love to all.
Milestone 81. Nagaland
30 Nov. 1944
Dear Ellen,
Many thanks for the letter with all the sordid details of your birthday. Or at least some of them. You’re really getting a big girl – and who is this fellow Mark who is taking such an interest in you? Full details please. The mouth organ sounds like a great attraction.
Sorry I wasn’t with you to have a slice of that cake. Rations or no rations, Mum obviously did well. Our rations here are awful. I won’t go into details, but I’m always hungry. Everything we eat has to come down that winding road from Dimapur which I described to you earlier. Sometimes the ration wagon rolls over the cliffside. Then we go short. The chaps in my tent talk about cooking up rats, and swear that rats and canned Indian peas taste good – but that’s just to impress the newcomer in their midst, I hope.
Forgive this awful colour ink – all I could find.
Rumours abound. We are at last about to move forward into action. So they tell us.
‘I heard the Captain say
We’re going to move today.
I only hope the blinking sergeant-major knows the way …’
This camp, now so familiar, is temporary. Everything is temporary along the Dimapur road. Maybe one day they will let it all revert to jungle. The air’s so fresh and good here and I’m secretly so excited.
It’s not only the air that’s fresh. So’s the water. Washing is quite an adventure. I wish I could draw. Facilities are just about nil at Milestone 81. Our only place to wash is at the mouth of a huge cast-iron pipe which snakes down the hillside and terminates here at a concrete base. The pipe vibrates with power and water gushes forth, splashing everywhere. In order to wash, you have to strip off entirely and then fling yourself into the stream. It’s like jumping in front of a cannon! It’s easiest to take the full force of the water smack in the chest – difficult to do because slippery green algae grow on the ever-wet concrete.
The water’s freezing cold. It’s come down from five thousand feet in a great hurry. Soaping is mighty difficult. However, my hardened campaigner friends tell me that it could be the last running water we’ll see for months. (They’re ever optimistic.)
We’ve just been issued with new chemical stuff called DDT. We’ve had to dip our shirts in it and run the liquid along the seams of our trousers. This will prevent lice and other nasty things at a time when it looks as if we shall be unable to wash clothes for months at a stretch.
You see what a funny life your brother leads. It’s better than school. And to toughen us up, we’ve been made to climb down into the valley and back, with kit. I tried to get a piggy-back off one of the Naga women, but no luck. We can’t climb the mountain above us, because that’s where the Nagas live and they must not be disturbed.
Yours till the cows come home.
Manipur, I think
20th Dec. 1944
My dear Ellen,
Guess what? It’s Christmas Day! Yes, 20th December.
The world has done one of its marvellous changes. Everything is different. I’m different. I’m rolling forward into ACTION. Imagine! This green and dusty world is slipping towards jungle warfare …
We knew something was up on the fifteenth and sixteenth. Our unit on that day had its collective haircut. Weren’t knights of old shriven before battle? Shriven and shorn? Well, at least we’ve been shorn.
Ahead of us lie danger and a desperate land full of terrors and destitute of barbers …
The very next day – we packed up everything and started rolling forward. A whole division, 2 Div, moving to our forward positions before the actual assault.
At the last minute, the CO addressed us, gave us a briefing. ‘You will all be proud to fight for king and country …’ He doesn’t know his men. But he concluded by quoting Shakespeare:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s Day.
Among the common soldiery was many a moist eye. Amazing to see us all respond to poetry. Or maybe it was funk.
I have to scribble these lines just to tell you about the journey, hoping not to anger the censor. Because it really was legendary – legendary! Not to be measured in miles or the time on a clockface. A move across a great division, like the division between life and death—
—Into a land without civilians. Without civilization. Not a place for ordinary human life. You couldn’t buy a ticket to get here.
A mysterious mountain country – without living inhabitants, without real roads, without towns, without flags or currencies. The writhing, thunderous, plenitudinous route to war. A newly invented route, patched together out of lanes, jungle tracks, chaungs (a chaung being a sandy stream bed reliably dry in the dry season). On this gallant road we embarked at a dim and secret hour of night, with even our voices muffled, for every sound carries in the thin air. We’re travelling from Milestone 81 – home! – to a rendezvous in the country I can’t name, called Yzagio. This rather imaginary highway we travel is christened the Tiddim Road. Six months ago, it was all dense jungle and raging rivers. And in Japanese territory.
If you will have nothing of this legend, then I have to admit that this way of the conquerors lasts only about two hundred miles. On it, my girl, we left the old mundane world behind.
After we had passed the blackened remains of Kohima – like all you ever imagined of the Great War – we went from Nagaland into the old state of Manipur. Ragged and brutalized Imphal went by, possessed solely by pigs and vultures. The mountains became more gigantic, the way more unlikely, like something in a dream. All our vehicles proceed at a crawl, in bottom gear most of the time. Headlights are muffled. We ourselves wear a secret, anonymous air. Dispatch riders patrol up and down the convoy, seeing to it that the trucks keep even distance, neither too far from nor too close to the next vehicle. All this in a great fog of dust, the very material of secrecy.
I’m travelling in a three-tonner with some of ‘S’ Section and its stores. The stores include immense rolls of barbed wire. So excited was I last night that I climbed over the barbed wire as we moved, until most of me was out on the cab roof, from where I got a fine view of the shrouded nomansland all round us. In that awkward position I fell asleep.
Shouting and noise. Daylight. I awoke. I was hanging far over the side of the vehicle, between cab and body, my legs trapped in a roll of barbed wire, upside-down. In my sleep I had slipped right off the smooth cab. But for the embrace of the wire, I would certainly have fallen to the ground and been run over in the dark.
That was this morning. I live to tell the tale. God knows where we are in place or time – because today we were served our Christmas dinner. Imagine, 20th December! Very surrealist.
We ate in an empty grain store, all built of bamboo and dry leaves. Being a greedy little thing, you’ll like to know what we got for this monster feast. Well, it was probably better than you will do on the 25th. We started with chicken noodle soup, followed by canned chicken, canned mutton, sausage stuffing, beans, potatoes and gravy, all washed down by two cans of beer, and followed by Christmas duff with sauce and canned pears. Then coffee. A marvellous blow-out!
By way of presents, each man got a handful of sweets and biscuits and half a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. The CO then made a brief speech and offered us this toast: ‘To our wives and sweethearts!’ (The old meanie didn’t say anything about sisters…)
This meal has marked not only the putting away of the old order but the imposition of half-rations. Fancy – the food was bad enough at Milestone 81. But from now on all food has to be supplied by air, so half-rations it is.
Soon it will be dark. That’s the end of Christmas Day and then we’ll be on the wonderful road again. I tell you these things. Try to understand. Something really extraordinary is happening to your old brother.
God knows when this’ll be posted but – Happy Christmas!
Somewhere
31st Dec. 1944
Dear Ellen,
How are things at home? How is the mouth organ player? You all seem very far away. There are great psychological barriers in communicating rather than in just firing off letters for their own sweet sakes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the outer world exists any more.
And I’ve got other problems … For instance, I was hauled up before an officer I had better not name (he will probably read this letter before you do) in the Censorship office. Apparently I have been giving too much away in my letters and endangering security. (You might be a Jap agent in England, sending all my letters on to High Command in Tokyo, or something similarly daft.) There I stood, rigid at attention in my soiled jungle greens; there he sat immaculate in khaki, putting me right. On such situations the British Empire is founded.
In future any references to place names or troop movements will be deleted from my letters. There is to be no further attempt to convey a picture of what is happening in these possibly most exciting days of my life. I made a protest, but it’s like butting your blinking head against an advancing tank. Any attempts to evade regulations will be punished.
It was hard enough in the first place, trying to describe life here to you. Now I’m forbidden to try to convey a picture! So here’s what may prove to be my last try.
I mean the picture is like one of those marvellous Brueghels (in this culturally deprived area I have even forgotten how you spell that weird Flemish name …). Is there one called The Conversion of St Paul? Where there are thousands of people on horseback and on foot in the tall mountains and, although St Paul is having his moment right in the middle of the picture, no one is taking a blind bit of notice. We’re doing this incredible thing and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice – just grumbling about where their next packet of fags is coming from …
Later. Oh, burps. Now the first day of 1945. No celebrations last night, bringing more complaints. Fancy wanting to celebrate. I was collared to shift heavy stores. Too exhausted then to do anything more than sleep.
We’re at a place called – but I named it once and daren’t do so again or they’ll keelhaul me under the nearest 3-tonner. Great amassment of vehicles. People all strolling round, brown as berries, smoking among the branchless trees. (Hope that doesn’t give our positions away.) Half-rations. God in his heaven, CO in his mobile home. Only the Japs missing from the picture. (You could perhaps get Dad to send me some ciggies if he’s feeling generous.)
Oh, I can’t concentrate. Something comes between us, and you know who he is.
Well, I’ll just tell you how we got here. I think it was the night after I last wrote that we got on the road again, the whole division, all very orderly. (I don’t tell you which division, so it’s safe …) I was more careful about how I travelled, not wanting to meet my end yet – dying for your country should not entail being run over by your own 3-tonner! Yet the sight of endless trucks trundling like elephants in convoy is irresistible. Are they off to the Elephants’ Graveyard or a solemn heavyweight orgy? Some stops, some starts, yet on the whole a steady funeral pace. Huge chunks of landscape phantasmal in the dusty dark.
Sleep, huddled in a silly position on a crate. Waking next morning very early to behold a wondrous sight.
Is dawn a secret shy and cold,
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
Are we still on terra firma
Or merely moving into – another land?
Answers in the affirmative c/o The Censor, please. The convoy was winding about the endless mountains, intruding into a Chinese landscape. Mountains filled our view, heaps of them. Beyond each mountain, more mountains, thickly afforested. Clouds floated below us, lit by the early sun. Clouds and smaller clouds of dust. For wherever the mountains went, there too went the road, coiling tirelessly – and, for all its inexhaustible miles, covered with X Div vehicles. What an astonishing sight! My first experience of travelling mountainous country. We could see the road winding above and behind us; it was the way we had come. And there it all was to be seen and enjoyed. We were outdoors, and not sitting inside at desks, over boring lesson books.
Green, blue, gold, were the colours of the distance. Closer at hand, only the sandy grey of dust and vehicles. The trucks in their passage threw up dust over all the trees lining the way. Everything without wheels stood absolutely motionless, as if breeze had never been invented, as if the dust had killed off the jungle.
So we made our advance over that marvellous ____Road, across the mountains of Manipur and those of the ____Range, until we reached the more level ground on which our present site (no names, no pack-drill) stands. We are parked in a scraggy and ant-infested forest, while the division sorts itself out in order of battle and puts in maintenance on all vehicles.
Later. Sorry to go on in pencil, but I’m now in the signal office. On duty but little traffic coming over the wires, so I’ll continue for a while.
It’s hot. I’m sweating.
The signal office is a 3-ton lorry, its flap at the rear raised horizontally to extend the floor-space. You climb into the lorry by a rusty ladder with three widely spaced wooden rungs. Inside, at the end nearest the cab, sits the Signal Master in all his glory. He’s an officer (of course). He has a table with a field phone. Before him are piles of paper, code names, references, maps, diagrams, documents.
To one side of the lorry are two long narrow tables on which stand four Fullerphones. These chesty, unhappy little instruments play an important role in keeping the division in touch with itself and with other nearby units. On the floor are four piles of Fullerphone boxes, and on these the Fullerphone operators have to sit. They are translating the buzzings in their earphones into words on paper – as I’m doing between scribbling to you.
A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. He’s an important man. At the moment it’s our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.
With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting – at present it’s Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.
A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.
Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. It’s our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.
Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards don’t smoke.
Bert’s my relief. He’s working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of ‘S’ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up writing home long ago – part of the myth of the Forgotten Army). They are no longer astonished that I can send and transmit Morse almost as rapidly, as stylishly, as they. What they can’t get over is the fact that I appear to be enjoying myself. Nor can I.
Love to all.
3
Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and took them over to the window sill, to tuck them in Box File No. 2, in which he kept anything of his brother’s relating to the war period.
‘Good letters,’ Sheila said. She had sat immobile, as was her way, to read them through. ‘Joe’s excitement comes through. He seems to have had no qualms about going to war.’
‘That’s true.’ Glancing out of the window, he saw Alice Farrer in her front garden next door. Holding her green watering-can, she was sprinkling the roots of her pseudoacacia. It was her excuse to have a good look at what was happening in the street. The fact that very little ever happened did not deter her. She used her nose as a tracking device to follow two girl students who walked slowly along the pavement, talking, completely unaware of her.
‘He had made up his mind by then there were worse things than going to war.’ He spoke as he turned back into the room. He was fascinated by Alice Farrer only to the extent that he could say honestly that nothing she did would ever interest him.
‘Such as what, exactly? His unhappy childhood?’
‘That, too, I suppose. But I was thinking of an incident he once told me about. Maybe he told me twice. It was about something which had made a great impression on him. It took place outside Calcutta, and so it would have happened just before the first of these letters to Ellen. In any case, the incident was too horrific for him to wish to report it to a little sister.
‘The group he was in was led by the Sergeant Sutton he mentions in one of Ellen’s letters. After travelling across India from Bombay, they reached a transit camp somewhere on the outskirts of Calcutta. Joe gave me a vivid account of the squalor, and of seeing a water buffalo dying in the railway marshalling yards – shunting yards, we used to call them – surrounded by vultures, who set about tearing it to shreds while it still had life.
‘Owing to some confusion in the rail timetables, not uncommon in those days of crisis, with the Japanese army at the gates of India, Joe’s detachment had to leave their train and go to this camp somewhere nearby. It was just a collection of ragged tents beside a railway embankment, no signs of discipline or cleanliness anywhere. Full of flies and filth.
‘Joe and Sutton went to the office to apply for money to continue their journey to Burma. I suppose at that time the movement of troops would be towards the east only, across India to the war zone. He said it was like a peristaltic movement. Everyone was drawn into it. But he and Sutton found that this camp was full of deserters, who had got that far and then jumped off trains at Calcutta, rather than face the Japanese. Deserters ran the camp. There was nowhere they could go – they certainly couldn’t make it back to England. So they stayed put, waiting for the war to finish. If the camp was inspected, the deserters simply melted into Calcutta, where no one could find them. They lived by making false returns to various legitimate units nearby. The money was spent on food, booze, and whores. The whores came into the camp – quite against army regulations, of course.’
He glanced out of the window again. ‘The old bitch next door is watering her tree once more. Anyhow, Joe and Co had to stay in the deserters’ camp that night. The camp was run by a renegade RSM, a Glasgow man, an alcoholic. He approached Sergeant Sutton, inviting him to stay there, since he wanted a sergeant under his command. Joe thought there was some talk of a drug racket, I don’t know what.
‘They had a crisis in the camp. I’ve never told you this, have I? The RSM had an NCO with him who was severely ill from amoebic dysentery and complications. He died the night Joe was in the camp. The RSM sent a detail of four men out at midnight with storm lanterns to bury the body under a railway bridge, where it wouldn’t be discovered. They hadn’t got a padre for any kind of service, because all padres were officers, and an officer would have had them rounded up and shot.
‘Sergeant Sutton said to Joe and the others, while the burial was going on, “Do you want to stay here or go on to Burma?” All the detachment, fresh out from England, were profoundly shocked by what was happening. Of course, the idea of Burma was also not to be taken lightly. So Joe said to Sergeant Sutton, “What do you think, sarge?”
‘And the sergeant said, “I’d sooner be killed in battle than stay in this fucking sink of iniquity another night.” Next morning, they marched back to the Calcutta station – Howrah, I think it was called. They swore to the RSM that they would say nothing about the illegal camp, and of course they kept their word.
‘Joe derived a profound moral from that episode. I’ve always thought of him as very courageous – not heroic, I don’t mean, but courageous – and he probably saw the war itself as somehow cleaner or more honest than the fear which was the reason for the camp’s existence. He saw how easily men could deteriorate.’
Sheila had moved over to the window and was gazing out at the sunlit street.
‘It makes a good story. Terrifying. It would make a play. Did the RSM threaten them before letting them leave? With a gun, I mean?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘I think he’d have to. Burying the body at dead of night is a nice touch, but they could have left the body out for the vultures. Would that be a quicker way of disposing of the body?’
‘Sheila, this really happened.’
‘Yes, I know.’
When she had gone downstairs to get on with her own work, and he heard her typewriter tapping in the room below his, he thought of how her mind was at work on the story. It would probably surface, with added drama, in a future Kerinth novel. He merely wanted to strengthen the story, not add to it. He wanted it clear and as it had been, over forty years ago. Yet even he, telling it to Sheila, had added something. The bit about the whores coming into the camp seemed all too likely; but that had not been anything Joseph had told him. He remembered now that Joseph had said, in passing, that the deserters got fearfully drunk on palm wine every night, in order to escape from their miserable circumstances. Had he said palm wine? It was difficult to remember.
Precision was not the only function of memory.
All the untidy clutter of papers in his room came from Joseph’s flat in Acton. He had to get clear in his own mind his brother’s early years. Then he could make decisions on how to deploy the material.
He picked up from his desk a photograph he had taken a year before Joseph’s death, showing Joseph and Sheila walking together on Port Meadow. In the background was Joseph’s girl friend – his final girl friend – Lucy Traill.
Joseph was laughing, his mouth open, his face creased with humour. His tall, spare figure was leaning slightly forward. He liked to walk briskly. His hair, as always too long, was a streaky white and grey.
It was his wife’s features that Clement mainly studied. Because of the aspect of stillness in Sheila’s nature, she photographed well. Her broad face and well-defined nose and mouth were in evidence as she smiled at whatever the joke was. He thought, ‘No photograph can ever do her justice. Nor for that matter does my memory. I fail to set up a moving picture of her in my mind. That’s why I’m always eager to see her again, even if she has been out of the room for less than an hour. How I love that face! I couldn’t explain to anyone what it means to me, to see it every day.
‘I must be over-dependent on her. Why aren’t I more detached, as I am with others – with Arthur Stranks, for instance? Sheila would probably be shocked if she knew with what intensity I love her face and the woman. What a weakling I am! And she went to bed with that wretched little Hernandez …’
He was wasting time. To celebrate the publication of War Lord of Kerinth, he was arranging a party for Sheila in nine days’ time, on the Thursday of the following week. He made a few phone calls to local friends, inviting them to come. Then he returned to the question of his brother.
In Box File No. 2 lay a battered exercise book, in which Joseph had sought to retain some of his memories of the war years, in particular his time in Burma. The letters to his sister explained why Joseph had scarcely written home at all during the Burmese campaign. The censorship would not permit him to give a truthful account. And the censor already had an eye on Joseph. Joseph perhaps recalled Frederick the Great’s epigram that the common soldier had to fear his officer more than the enemy.
The battered exercise book was of Indian origin, bound in a coarsely woven cover. The narrative it contained was undated. The handwriting, in miscellaneous inks, some now badly faded, varied sufficiently for Clement to infer that the greater part of the account had been composed shortly after Joseph’s division had returned from Burma to India for rest and recuperation.
This was his brother’s first attempt at anything like an historical narrative, his first step towards the historian he was later to become. To lend the original narrative a clearer perspective, Joseph had inserted a few passages later, generally of a reflective nature. For an instance, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was mentioned.
First came the title. Joseph had made it deliberately grandiose.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGN OF
2ND BRITISH DIVISION
UNDER GEN. NICHOLSON
AGAINST THE JAP ARMY AND
THE RECONQUEST OF MANDALAY
1944–1945
By Signalman Joseph Winter
Nights were filled with gunfire when the various units of 2 Div crossed the River Chindwin, against stiff opposition from the Japs situated on the eastern bank. Those nights were climatologically beautiful. The Burmese moon is like no other moon. It woke unvoiceable yearnings in the men involved in the great struggle.
Of all those beautiful dangerous nights, one in particular stands out.
I had had to be away from my unit, and a driver was sent in a Jeep to collect me and catch up with the advance. He was in no mood to hurry; I could not make him hurry; and darkness overtook us before we had done much more than start on our way forward. The sun plunged down into the earth and the stars immediately shone forth overhead, streaming along in the grip of the galactic current.
We were two insignificant creatures in a machine on a plain that ran clear to the Irrawaddy. The driver had no intention of driving by night. We ate K-rations and slept one on either side of the Jeep rolled in blankets, with the marvellous sky unfettered overhead. Far from being dwarfed by it, I felt that it filled me and made me vast; I was indivisible from it. A war was passing over the starlit land with its ‘bright and battering sandal’, and I was part of its great process.
Burma was beautiful, a country worth fighting for. Nothing else was asked – at the time. I was eighteen years of age.
We woke at dawn with a bird calling. We were chilly in our thin uniforms before the sun came up. We brewed up mugs of tea, ate a hunk of bread, and moved on. ‘Bloody cold,’ we said.
Nothing was to be seen all round us but plain and, distantly, tops of trees. I found no way in which we could share the magnificent experience of the night; perhaps such exciting experiences are always enjoyed alone – unless one has a girl there. In any case the driver was a man of few words.
The track across the plain led us to the River Chindwin, where a Bailey bridge had been built. It was strongly guarded. Men lounged about, brown-naked to the waist, smoking, rifles on their shoulders, sweat-rags tied round their necks. We called out cheery greetings as we crossed that splendid river, its name honoured in the East. Fine dust hung in the air, sun shone on the water as it ran dark and flat between its sandy banks. It was as peaceful a scene as you could wish. Only two nights earlier, men had died at that spot.
Myingyang, the town on the far side of the river, had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Smoke still drifted among the ruined trees. Everything – remains of houses and bungalows – took on tones of black; smoke issued from their gaping black mouths. Tree stumps still burned quietly.
Black also were the piles of corpses gathered up neatly here and there and now left to ripen like grapes in the sun. They were swollen as if about to burst, and stank with the powerful smell of death. So much for the remains of the Japanese Army.
The Jeep driver stopped at one of the biggest piles. He went over to it and helped himself to a pair of boots from one of the dead. I cannot say how this offended me. A fat porker was feeding among the corpses, scarcely able to waddle. The driver, kicking the animal out of the way, beckoned me over. I would not leave the Jeep. He selected the pair of boots he wanted, dragging them off the corpse, kneeling in the sunlight to do so. He fitted the boots on to his own feet before coming back to the vehicle. I could not look the man in the eye.
To everything that happened at that period in time, an extra weight of significance was added. It was as though I travelled back through time to witness the traits of man and nature at their most basic, as though our movement through trees was also a movement through centuries. My understanding of the world, which had hitherto been rather childish, or child-based, advanced greatly, so that everything that happened, down to the movement of my own muscles, was surrounded by a nimbus of truth, in which the ugly was perceived as being as sacred as the beautiful. The blessed sunlight contributed to this revelatory mood.
I was a little mad in the nights, as in the days. The world turned – I heard its axis rotate. One night early in the campaign we were bivouacked by the improvised road which, in the wet season, served as a river bed. A Burmese moon shone through the trees – the moon seeming always to be at the full, when Chinese Buddhist thought has it that the Yin (female) influence is at its most strong. I could not sleep, pent in my little bivouac, for an overwhelming feeling of excitement, so was forced to get up and walk among the dust-saturated trees and shadows. Muffled trucks and guns rumbled out of the silver darkness and into the opaque distance. I stood by the road, unable to leave it, letting the dust settle on me. The behemoths, with dim orange headlights for eyes, were the sole occupants of this world.
Of course what I longed for then – there and then – in my hot little heart, was love or, less abstractly, a woman to love.
Greater than the Chindwin is the river into which it flows, the unmeasurable, immemorial Irrawaddy. The waters of the Irrawaddy are fed both by tributaries rising nearby and distant tributaries which rise in regions of rock and ice up in the Himalayas, so that, like life itself, the river consists of alternating currents of warm and cold streams; and no swimmer can tell which he will encounter next, the warm or the cold. Just to stand looking at the Irrawaddy after the weeks and miles of drought we had put behind us was to drink deep, and to feel its flow as something profound – a main artery in the life of the planet.
For a brief period after rejoining my unit I was able to swim alone in the great river, flinging myself in from the sandy bank, for once unmindful of Japs, snakes, and signal offices. The river immediately took hold of one with its dark effortless power. A river-steamer had been sunk in mid-stream, and lay at an angle on the river-bed with all its superstructure in the sunlight. Long tresses of weed, anchored to its bows, pointed tremulously downstream. It was possible to reach the boat after prolonged battles with the currents, and the water, green as lizard skin, suddenly gave way to scaly hull. With a heave, I was there, over the railings and lying fish-naked on the slant of deck. Ferns and small trees grew on the deck house, giant bees toasted themselves on the sere planking. There it was possible to squat, dangling one hand in the race, a part of that stationary voyage upstream, Captain of the Wreck.
Solitude was precious, because rare. Most of the time, we men of the Forgotten Army crowded together. Life was gregarious for safety reasons. Those of us on ‘S’ Relief grew to know each other very well. Despite our uncertain movements, our routine was fixed. It went in three-day cycles: first day, afternoon shift from 1 p.m. till 6; second day, morning shift from 8 a.m. till 1 p.m., and night shift from 6 p.m. till 8 the next morning; third day, off duty after 8 a.m. to sleep, probably with guard or similar duties in the afternoon or evening. This routine, or something like it, was to be mine for almost three years, in action or out of it. In Burma, night duty generally meant no sleep at all, with signals being passed all the time. Sometimes, it was possible to doze for half-an-hour, head on your arm at the table; more rarely, you could curl up under a blanket in a corner of the office for an hour.
During the Mandalay campaign, my job was to work that prehistoric line instrument, the Fullerphone. About the size of a shoe-box, and black, the Fullerphone scarcely resembled a weapon with which to defeat the ferocious Jap Army. It held none of the glamour of a wireless set. Being solely a line instrument, it had to be connected with forward units or rear units – brigade or Division HQ – which entailed, in a mobile war, the perpetual laying of cable.
The Fullerphone gave off a misanthropic buzz. But it did send and receive Morse. We worked at up to eighty letters a minute. We held the various units of the advance together. We kept everyone in touch. We were good.
When coming off the all-night shift, after perhaps twelve hours of intensive work by dim lights, we did not expect comfort. Sometimes, we had an hour in which to pack up everything, take down the signal office, and start another move. At the best of times, we could get breakfast and then sleep.
The cooks were compelled to wait for us until we came off duty. This did not please them, since sometimes, inevitably, we were late. The food – probably a fried egg and a soya link and a mug of tea – would be cooling or cold. Washing our mess tins was a particularly dismaying business. Two dixies filled with what had been hot water stood at the entrance to the mess area (we sat on the ground or on logs to eat); one dixie was for washing mess tins and ‘eating irons’, the other for a post-wash rinse. By the time we got to them, the liquid in the dixies resembled a particularly rich vomit. Water was scarce. We had to use what was there. Since we had nothing on which to dry tins and cutlery, we used our mosquito nets; by the end of the campaign, the nets had developed a ripe aroma.
Sleep after a busy night was not always easy. Our bivouacs were pitched over slit trenches, and so stood out away from shade, since no one attempts to dig slit trenches, an unrewarding occupation at the best of times, near the roots of trees. Temperatures under the canvas rose as rapidly as the sun. Inside our fragrant mosquito nets, necessary to keep off flies, the heat was suffocating. We fricasséed as we slept.
And there was a local defiler of sleep. Central Burma is the habitat of the Morse Code bird. The Morse Code bird sits in the leaves of the palm tree outside signalmen’s tents and utters random bursts of Morse Code. Dit dit-dit-dit dit-dah-dit-dit dit-dah dah dit … Endlessly, meaninglessly, while the weary brain of the operator who has been passing Morse all night perforce tries to transcribe the bird’s nonsense. Full grown men have been known to run naked, screaming, from their trenches, trying to drive the offender away. No raven of Edgar Allan Poe’s was ever more ill-omened than the Morse Code bird.
Few animals were to be seen; the birds were mainly those of the kind that earned their living by eating the dead. We passed through a copse outside Myingyang where Japanese troops lay scattered in death. Turkey-like vultures with creamy feathers ran among them, guts so swollen with food that they could scarcely hop into the lowest branches of the trees to escape us. The Japanese, British and Indians had between them made of Burma a terrible waste; ordinary life was suspended while the evil dream of war went by, first in a tide one way, then in a tide the other.
Our portion of tide moved forward about once a week. At one period, we pitched camp near Yeu. The four or five bivouacs of ‘S’ Relief were clustered near two large palms tethered to the ground by cordons of vines and creepers. Before us was open land, looking towards a canal; behind was a thicket, very noisy at night with the sound of things scuttling through the dead undergrowth. We were nervous in that camp, not knowing exactly where the enemy was. As the sun was setting on our first evening there, we heard noises in the topknots of the palms. Looking up, we saw black snakes dangling far above us. We came to realize that the snakes were the tails of some kind of big cat. The Cockneys among us became particularly nervous; war was one thing, tangling with wild life quite another.
The night was moonlit, the heartbreaking moonlight of a still Burma night, when the Moon hangs like a sacred gong in the next field but one, ancient with wisdom, gold with desire. I lay awake under my mosquito net, my rifle by my side. After a while, crashing noises sounded from the nearest tree. A shadow fell outside the bivouac. One of the cats was standing there.
Because we had camped so near to the tree for purposes of concealment, and because we had arrived in the dark the previous night, we had not dug slit trenches as usual. Our slender cover was propped up on poles in order to make it easier to enter and leave the tent. The big cat strolled in. I lay there, resting on one elbow, afraid to move. The cat came closer. It looked in at me. Only the net separated our faces. Neither of us spoke. Then it walked out the rear of the tent and was gone.
What communication could I have had with it?
That camp remains in memory my favourite. It was one of the few sites where there were Burmese nearby. They had not fled at our approach. They had harvested the crop on the field by whose perimeter we stayed and were busy threshing grain while we were there. We watched the operation with interest, talked to them, called to the women, and offered them cigarettes. Beyond the field of stubble was a grain field, the crop very much broken down, and beyond that lay a canal, with low-growing blossom trees on its banks and nine inches of water flowing in it. The whole neighbourhood was attractive, with small white pagodas here and there like silver pepper-pots set randomly on a lawn.
But it was water that was the attraction. Water we had not seen for six weeks at that time. Sweat and dust alone had kept our bodies clean. It was possible to lie in the canal and be almost totally submerged in water. All the relief went for a bathe that first day. Thereafter, they considered that nine inches of water was too tame, and so I went alone, accompanied only by Sid Feather’s rhesus monkey, Minnie. Minnie ran beside me on her long lead like a dog. In the water, she would enjoy a swim and then come and perch on my shoulder to dry herself. I lay there prone, watching a busy kingfisher which fished in the water from one of the low trees. The sun burned overhead, war was miles away. I communed with nature.
The trouble with communing with nature is that she does not commune back. One day, when returning through the flattened cereal crop from the canal, I almost stepped on a great snake, straw coloured, basking in the sun. It reared up to strike. Minnie immediately scaled the nearest tree, which happened to be me, and stood on the top of my head, screaming furiously and throwing handfuls of my hair at the snake.
Perhaps Minnie saved the day. The snake did not strike. It suddenly made off, shaking out its long coils. I watched it thrash its way through the burnished stalks. It was six or more feet long. It made its way rapidly across the field. Shaken, I walked back to camp. Minnie remained clinging to my ears until we were in safer surroundings.
The fear of snakes always haunted us. Army training in India taught us that the first thing we did on waking was lean out of bed and tip our boots upside down, in order to eject any nasties which might have lodged there during the night. It was a habit which took years to break, even in relatively scorpion-free England.
Although I never became fond of the army, I found a developing passion for the natural world, that great green system which encompassed us. It could bring my heart up from my boots. Burma is a varied country, by no means all jungle as some imagine. Its variety was beautiful and the Burmese appeared to have lived in harmony with its variety, embellishing it with their pagodas, and not overwhelming it – as India was overwhelmed – with humankind. But the Burmese had by and large vanished, taking cover like rabbits under the wing of war. We entered their buildings, moodily looking for souvenirs and poking about, rifles in hand, in the manner of invading soldiery. Some of the wooden houses were enchanting. I remember one in particular, with a verandah contained behind an ornamental rail. Of the four stilts on which it stood, only three remained. Inside, all was as it had been. Although chairs remained in place, everything listed to starboard, like a sinking ship.
In this surreal landscape, the British were surreal objects. The ethos of the Forgotten Army was to look as wild as possible. We wore trousers with puttees and boots, to keep out insects, and bush hats. Our torsoes were mahogany brown, our backsides alabaster white. It was the custom to tie bits of the coloured signal scarves dropped with our airborne rations round our hats to serve as puggarees, and to grow our hair long. ‘In the depths of the Burmese jungle lived a strange white race …’ For me, this costume remained a kind of dressing up; for the older members of the army, it had become second nature. Many of them described themselves as puggle. It was the sun, the heat, the awful food, they’d tell you.
The maddest in ‘S’ Relief was Steve Dutt. It was rumoured that his father was a general; Steve was just a private and an orderly. A sweet-natured man, he was never heard to raise his voice in conversation. He would sit about, listening to our talk, smiling, stroking his moustache. His recreation was to drill himself as if he were a platoon. On these occasions, he put on a sergeant-major’s voice.
‘Steve Dutt, Steve Dutt, harten-shun. As you were. Wait for it. Steve Dutt, harten-SHUN. Saloope arms. By the right, quick – wait for the order, Dutt. Quick – MARCH. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep. Let’s see you swing that arm. Plenty of bullshit. Keep in line.
‘Steve Dutt, Ri-ight TURN. Chin up. Look to your front, man. Harbout TURN. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep.’
And so on. True, we all on occasions drilled ourselves, but it was Steve Dutt who drilled himself continually, for a half-hour at a time, up and down in whatever clear ground there was. We would hear him at night, outside the bivouacs. No one thought anything of it.
‘By the right, number. One, two, three, four, five – six. As you were. Wake up, Dutt, you know what comes after five, don’t you? Dutt, by the right, number. One, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight, nine, ten. Pick up your dressing. Squad, diss – I want to see you smartly away. Diss-MISS.’
Then he would come in. ‘Sergeant put me through it today,’ he’d say cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette.
A few of us in ‘S’ Relief had small lanterns. We would sit and chat in the entrance of someone’s bivvy after dark. We spoke our own lingo of English and fractured Urdu. The conversation would often turn to London. There were frequent arguments about which number bus ran through Cockfosters, or where it went after it left the High Street.
My mates were homesick, and would talk about ‘our mum’ doing this or that, or ‘my old woman’ doing this or that, or how they went down to see the Spurs play every Saturday. Their small home worlds were continually resurrected. Homesickness was something I never felt. The present was too vivid.
Another favourite topic was how forgotten we were in this unearthly part of the world, and how we never featured in the news. It was the rule to find nothing good about overseas. To declare that one felt passionately about Burma would have been to invite ostracism, or else the scornful, ‘Wait till you’ve got a bit of service in.’
The man I was most fond of in ‘S’ Relief, after Bert Lyons, was Ron Grade. Ron was a slow-spoken farmer from Pinner way. One of his eyes was beyond his control and would wander about in the course of conversation. Ron was the only man with a camera; perhaps it was a sign of the interest he took in the world for which the others cared little.
Ron never ran out of film. He seemed to photograph everything, dead Japs, distant landscapes, ‘S’ Relief in transit. It must have been his roving eye. The few snaps I have of those times come from Ron’s camera. He photographed us when at last we reached the Mu river. So delighted was ‘S’ Relief by the charm of running water that Sid Feather drove us to bathe every time we were off duty.
Since the spirit of Romanticism is connected with ruin and destruction, the Mu site must be one of the most romantic places to choose for a swim. Two railway bridges had once crossed the river at this point, a low wooden bridge and a grander one, metal on sturdy brick piers. Both bridges had been blown up by the British in their retreat from Mandalay. Both had been blown up with engines and rolling stock on them, so that the invading Jap should have no use of them.
The wooden bridge had disappeared – swept downstream or eaten by ants. What remained to mark the spot was a small tank engine, only half-submerged by the river in its shrunken dry season state.
The greater bridge had left greater remains. Two stout double piers had not fallen in the doubtless hasty explosions, so that between it and the eastern, Mandalay-bound shore, a totally unworkable span of line had stayed in place, slightly buckled and laden with two locomotives and a selection of carriages and trucks which straggled back to the land. Vegetation was already devouring the rearmost trucks.
The next span, the one which, in the wet season, would cover the mid-point of the Mu, had fallen down. Left balanced on its pier were a locomotive and tender. The tender stood with its tail in the air on top of the pier; the engine, to which it remained attached, hung down, buffers clear of the water by some feet. There it dangled, in that precarious position, for three years of war. The metals were too hot to touch – that we knew from the sunken tank engine, on which we could climb only after splashing it with cooling water.
We went every day to the surviving narrow, green, fast-running channel of the Mu, rushing deeply entrenched in its bed of sand; and every day the engineering ruin presided over our relaxation.
In her book, The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay remarks, ‘The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.’
Our three-year-old ruin was also part of world history; it had already become a symbol of the end of a myth, the myth of white supremacy. We did not know it then, but never again would the British ride from Mandalay to Dimapur in their first class carriages, relegating the Wog to the third, as if the land belonged to them. The Forgotten Army might – indeed, would – drive the Jap from Burma; but it was beyond even our powers to restore the country to the British crown. The tide of history had turned and, whatever his later victories, the white man had been defeated – in many cases with remarkable ease, in Hong Kong, the N.E.I., Singapore, and Burma. The British, not the most pragmatic of races, recognized their defeat in victory, and left their former colonies and dependencies with comparative good grace, so that some measure of good will attached to their memory. Not so the Dutch and French. The latter, in particular, clinging to Indo-China – a struggle in which the Americans soon rashly involved themselves – would bring further chaos to the regions of S.E. Asia, with the battle of Dien Bien Phu breaking out not ten years after the time we bathed below the broken bridge over the Mu.
I still have a faded photograph of the bridge, with ‘S’ Relief naked below it. Ron took the photograph.
Ron was not just a keen photographer. He was a pleasant man to be with – one of those people who, by some inner quality, make us feel slightly better than we are.
Ron never showed irritation or swore like the rest of us. ‘S’ Relief benefited from his presence when the battle for the Chindwin was on.
The Japs held the east bank of the Chindwin, the British the west. The fighting continued for several nights and days. Our signal office kept moving, sometimes only half a mile at a time. The firing could clearly be heard. In that period, the section had to be split up, and the detachment I was on worked six nights out of nine, passing messages all the while. In the day we had guard duty. It was a time of maximum exhaustion, and the Morse Code birds were at their most punitive. The constant hammer of shellfire, like a maniac pounding his sleepless pillow, was rendered more unreal by the brilliant sunlight; recalling my uncle’s experiences of World War I, I had believed warfare was conducted to the accompaniment of rain, or at least the famous North European drizzle.
During this crisis period, Ron and I were sent on detachment to run a radio link on our own. This was the only time we encountered live Japs; on other occasions, we had seen them, reassuringly, trotting along with the naked point of a bayonet at their backs, prisoners.
There was no ‘front’ in the accepted sense. For forward momentum to be sustained, the tanks had to drive onward as fast as possible, giving the enemy no chance to rest or recoup. Any odd contingents of Japs left behind, separated by freak of war from the main body, could be mopped up later. So there was no way of telling when Japs might not pop up and surrender or, more likely, attack. Ron and I were dumped under three large trees with empty expanses on one side and a chaung on the other. We had some rations and water and the wireless set, and were told that a truck would collect us ‘within twenty-four hours’. Till then, the set was to be continually manned and, for our own safety, we were not to show a light, except for the one on the 22 set.
The night was moonlit and still. We had dug ourselves a trench in the sandy soil and were crouching over the set together. Ron had the headphones on and was receiving when I became certain I heard a low voice from the direction of the chaung. I took up a firing position with my rifle, and nudged Ron. Coolly, he went on scribbling down the message with his right hand, while taking up his rifle in his left.
When the message finished, he signed off and took up position beside me, still wearing headphones. We were in moonlight, dappled by the filtering branches of the trees. I felt that this made us highly visible; in fact, it was probably a help in dimming out the tiny downward-directed light on the set. We crouched together, aiming into the dark.
Bushes grew round the banks of the chaung. Night birds scuttled in the dry undergrowth. We began to think our nerves were playing us up, and that the slight breeze accounted for the supposed voices. Certainly the bushes were swaying slightly. I stared fixedly at them – to become suddenly aware that three figures stood behind their uncertain shapes, head and shoulders showing.
I squeezed the trigger and fired at once. Ron fired at the same moment.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder. The world seemed full of noise. Above that noise I heard a shrill cry. I ceased fire.
A long silence fell. Gradually the noises of the furtive birds in the undergrowth returned. Neither Ron nor I dared to get up.
Another message was offered over the wireless. Ron gave the wait signal, and then we rose and went forward together, rifles raised.
The Japs had run off, all but one. He lay face downwards in the sand of the chaung. Next morning, we examined him in a squeamish way. A bullet had gone through his chest. He was a poor thin diseased specimen.
Then I was glad it was Ron with me. We argued a bit about which one of us had shot him, but did not pursue the matter too far. Ron said laughingly, ‘You must have shot him. With my wandering eye, I’m not much of a marksman.’ Neither of us wanted full responsibility.
Not until several years later, when I was back in England, did the nightmares come. Then I woke screaming. The Japs were after me again. And again it would be moonlight. But those nightmares, like so many other things, gradually worked their way through the system and were dissipated into thin air.
Ron and I ate our frugal breakfasts a few paces away from the dead Jap. About midday, the linesmen showed up in their truck and took us back to Signal HQ. We reported the Jap, and were briefly regarded as heroes by the rest of ‘S’ Section. But there was a war to be going on with, and the incident was soon forgotten – except in the fertile beds of Ron’s and my memory.
Japanese resistance broke. The Chindwin was crossed, and bridged by long Bailey bridges. We were now on the famous Road to Mandalay, still a good cobbled road, its miles marked by two waves of war, burning villages from which Japs had just retreated, and the rusty carcasses of old cars, abandoned during the retreat towards India, three years earlier. In contrast to this thrilling chaos, the trees with which the sides of the road were planted looked suburban, painted as their trunks were with whitewash up to a height of four feet.
This was the habitat of death. The victorious Japs were victorious no longer. Their units were in retreat, their soldiers often starving and diseased. Very little mercy was shown them; their reputations were too ghastly for that; for too long, the British had looked on them as both superhuman and subhuman. ‘Though kings they were, as men they died.’
We drove among the paraphernalia of defeat: burnt-out Japanese trucks by the roadside, overturned 8-wheelers, scattered ammunition, dead bodies, vehicles and buildings burning quietly to themselves in the middle of nowhere. We drove. The infantrymen slogged it all on foot, every mile. We were now about 400 miles from the old base, Dimapur.
Even when in grimly victorious mood, the Fourteenth Army remained bitter. Newsreels were shown with the odd film show, so that we were accustomed to seeing coverage of triumphal Allied advances in Italy, France and Belgium. Entry into towns was always marked by pretty girls rushing out to present the soldiers with wine or flowers or, even better, kisses. These were the traditional rewards of liberators. The miserable ‘towns’ we liberated, sometimes little more than names on Ordnance Survey maps, were utterly deserted. No pretty girls came running to us. The fruits of victory had a bitter taste.
Since time immemorial, the prizes for soldiers after a battle have been loot, drink, and women. In that respect, ours was a remarkably chaste war.
Three Indian soldiers were caught raping a Burmese woman. She was very irate about the whole business and said, ‘Just when I was getting interested, they gave up.’ We took this story for truth at the time.
At this stage in the great upheaval of nations, the division I was to join in the future, 26 Indian Division, was in action in one of the worst areas of Burma, the dreaded Arakan, mopping up the Japs on Ramree Island. Such names as Arakan and Ramree acquired a special and dread significance.
The object of 2 Div’s immediate attention was Mandalay. The Japs were now withdrawing from round the city, where they could muster eight divisions against our five. Commander Bill Slim’s plan was to switch IV Corps, to which we belonged, from the north to the south to attack Meiktila while XXXIII Corps attacked from the north. Meiktila was a focus for road, rail, and air communications south of Mandalay; Mandalay was of relatively little strategic but of immense symbolic importance, its name known all over the world – a poor man’s inland Singapore.
Mandalay fell towards the end of March after an intense struggle. In Meiktila, even Japanese hospital patients were ordered to fight to the death. The Japs fought in strong-points, alleys, and cellars. They were all exterminated by bullet, bayonet, or flame-thrower.
When I rolled into Mandalay in our signal truck, I was all but prostrate from dysentery, though still working. The city had once been a seat of Buddhist learning, and its hill was covered with white icing pagodas, many of them damaged in the fighting. The thick walls of Fort Dufferin were also much damaged. But Slim had given orders that Mandalay should not be bombed.
It was an empty city, doomed and desolate. The smell of corruption hung over it, while birds sat on trees overhead, waiting. Stray dogs wandered about the streets, many of them suspiciously fat, but disconsolate. Perhaps they, like us, felt a sense of anti-climax.
Before we left Burma, there was one more adventure. 2 Div had completed its task with the defeat of the Japanese in the plains and the retaking of Mandalay. It was the task of other units to drive the Japs south towards Rangoon and, if possible, eliminate them entirely. We were to be flown out – an unusual operation in those days on that front.
I was one of the rear detail. Four of us manned a skeleton signal office in a small tent. After we had passed the last traffic, we closed down for good. There was now no one to answer our signals.
The radio and line apparatus we loaded into a Dodge truck, which set off into the wilderness. We returned to pick up our kit. We had camped under a large tree with generously spreading branches. For the flight back to a base in Bengal, we were allowed only 40 lbs. of personal kit; the rest had to be dumped – pegdoed, in our corruption of Urdu. A lot of pegdoing went on in India and Burma. So we got our packs on our backs and our kitbags on our shoulders with our bivouacs and mosquito nets, and started to walk to the airfield. Behind us, a wind whipped up dust, fluttering the pages of the books, so lovingly accumulated, which I had been forced to pegdo. Stapledon’s Last and First Men was left behind. The wind grew stronger, whipping about our legs, reminding us that the monsoons were on the way to revivify the torn land. Out of their hiding places among tossing bushes came dark figures, rushing forward and seizing the abandoned loot. Partridge raised his rifle, half in fun. Before the tree was out of sight, the Burmese had borne all our pegdoed possessions away.
The airstrip was marked only by a small windsock, rippling in the new winds. The strip consisted of a runway of knee-high grass perhaps two hundred yards wide and a mile or more long. Perhaps it had once been designed as a fire-break. Nothing was to be seen but grass and trees, stretching across the plain. No one else was about, not a shack, not a truck, no personnel in sight. We had water and rations but no means of communication with the world.
The four of us settled in the shade of the trees and waited, smoking, chatting. Idle chat. I had found no way of communicating my inward feelings to my friends, sensing that anything I said on an emotional level would be laughed at. Nor did I impart my feelings to my parents; my few letters home were miracles of superficiality. Now, under the trees, I found myself alone in having some regrets at leaving Burma. With a great victory behind us and the unknown ahead, here was surely an hour of communing. We continued to talk in trivialities, all perhaps afraid to reveal our true selves.
One thing we vowed, sprawling in the shade, was that when we got back to the Blight we would tell everyone what we had been through. We would – as the expression had it – ‘grip them ragged’. The Ancient Mariner would have nothing on us. It can be seen that this process of telling all would have had great therapeutic value. I was with three men who were about to be sent home after long service abroad; for myself, I had still a lot of time to serve out. So I never knew if the requisite grips were applied. But for me, returning to Blighty when the war had been over some while, and put out of mind, I found that no one wished to hear. The jungle experience was too alien.
Why did no novelists or poets spring up to celebrate the experience of Burma from the common soldier’s point of view? It was an undemocratic war. Only officers spoke about it later – heroes like Bernard Fergusson and ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, and of course Slim’s own fine book on the campaigns, Defeat into Victory. They all stuck to autobiography or fact. Hardly a poet spoke up. There was Alun Lewis, but he shot himself before going into action.
One of Lewis’s poems tells how:
But leisurely my fellow soldiers stroll among the trees.
The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.
It’s a lie, an officer’s snotty lie; Lewis did not know what he was talking about. Delightful irony reposed in singing those ‘dance-songs’. Their superficiality, like our chatter, served to cover momentous upheavals of feeling. ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Moonlight Cocktail’ had marvellous surreal effect in our jungle hideouts.
We woke the next morning under the great trees, eating a hunk of bread and marmalade for breakfast without washing. The place was as waterless as a desert – and as deserted. No sign of our plane, and the monsoon-bearing wind blew stronger. The smell of smoke came to us.
Hour succeeded hour. We strolled about in the sun, hats off – it was our pride that we never got sunstroke or wore topis, as an earlier generation of regular soldiers had done. The smoke could be seen. It thickened until gradually it shrouded the blue sky. A forest fire was approaching. We could hear its roar and crackle. It was as if a stampede of animals was coming our way.
What were we to do? There was no escaping from our position. The fire was approaching at brisk walking pace, burning up the trees in huge brands on either side of the airstrip, triumphant and furious. Rapidly it came, and still no rescuing plane.
We moved into the centre of the grass strip. Jungle blouses went on, to protect our skins from flying sparks. The sky was black, the whole forest on either side blazing red. We crouched to the ground. The heat seemed to swell about us.
The fires on either side moved parallel with each other like friendly rival expresses. Linking them across the open space ran a wave of flame, consuming the grass, turning what was green black, leaving behind it cindered ground. It dashed towards us like a rip tide.
Standing, we heaved our kit on to our backs. As the wave reached us, we jumped. That is how you evade a forest fire. You jump over it.
‘So much for fucking Burma,’ said Bert Lyons.
There we stood, in a land of black ash. The great fire swept majestically on, about its own purposes, leaving smouldering destruction on either flank. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we lit up cigarettes.
‘Where’s that bloody plane?’ we asked.
We spent another night out in the open, on the burnt earth. Next morning, an aged Dakota with the American star on its wings landed on the black airstrip; we climbed readily enough into its hold, and soon were flying westward, over the Chin Hills towards India and a quieter life.
History is what happens to contemporary events when they have receded enough for us to draw a moral from them. What is the moral of the Burma campaign?
That change is all. Three years after the victory of the Forgotten Army, Burma was granted independence. Although the Japanese had packed their bags and left, Britain was unable to regain the confidence of the Burmese people, who had twice seen their fair country reduced to a battlefield – Burma, that most religious of countries. Nor could the brave Indian Army be relied on to hold down Burma by force. India was being returned to the Indians. That was the British will: while behind that will was American pressure; righteous to a fault about British and Dutch Far East possessions, the United States nevertheless let itself be led into another war that has been seen since to have caused more damage and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, and surrounding regions than even the Japanese dreamed of.
Nineteen thousand men of British and Commonwealth origin – the greatest number being Indian other ranks – died in the Irrawaddy crossings by Mandalay and Meiktila. In the earlier battle of Kohima, over two thousand men of British 2 Div, for which I was a pale-skinned reinforcement, died. All told, in Burma, there were seventy-one thousand British and Commonwealth casualties. Japanese casualties have been numbered at 185,000.
A memorial was erected to the British dead at Kohima. On the memorial is carved a free translation of a Greek epitaph, which reads:
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
Sadly, it was no one’s tomorrow, despite the brave words. The British got out. The Burmese then sank under a repressive regime. Various kinds of struggle still divide it. Visitors from outside are scarcely welcome.
The bamboo grows beside the rivers where once we so bravely, so fruitlessly, drove from Milestone 81, through Kohima and Imphal, down the Tiddim Road, across Chindwin and Irrawaddy, to a ruined Mandalay. A lot of tomorrows lie buried along the route.
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.
‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’
‘Got another party?’
‘Yes, another party …’
‘Oh, well, enjoy yourself.’
He went downstairs slowly, dragging his steps so that anyone observing him might imagine there was something weighty on his mind. Downstairs, where the temperature was cooler, Sheila was in the conservatory pouring herself another glass of white wine.
‘Where’s your glass?’
‘Oh, I left it on my desk upstairs.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get another. It’s so hot, Michelin has laid a table outside by the pool for us. She’s just gone.’
‘Another party …’
‘Good drinking evening.’
She was pouring wine slowly into the glass she had taken from the cabinet, letting the neck of the bottle chink once against the rim of the glass to emphasize the benefaction of what she was doing. It seemed to him, watching her, that her strong nose was slightly less sharp this evening, as if a certain watchfulness, apparent in her manner during their time in the States, had now relaxed.
Passing him the brimming glass, she said, ‘If you go outside, I’ll bring the food. It’s all ready.’
The garden was still mainly in sunlight, slanting over the old brick walls. The little pool was in the shadow cast by the Farrers’ house next door. But it was warm there, and in the patio area Michelin had laid a pink linen cloth on their white conservatory table.
‘Did you have a dip?’ he asked, when she emerged with avocados.
‘I spent a whole hour on the phone catching up with news since we’ve been away.’ She passed on various items of gossip.
‘The film contract’s come alive again,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
They chatted about the Kerinth film contract with Obispo Artists. A letter had been awaiting her from Tarleton Broker, film agent in London for the Green Mouth novels. A deal with Obispo had been on and off for over a year; now they were involved with a director-producer called Calvin Boas Lee, whom both Sheila and Clement had met, and liked tolerably. Now the deal was alive. Tarleton had a contract ready. After they had demolished most of Michelin’s strawberry shortcake, Sheila produced Tarleton’s letter, and they read it over between them.
‘So I’ll go up to London on Thursday and work over the contract page by page with Tarleton.’
‘Looks as if you’re going to be rich and famous. Even more of both.’
She pulled a face at him. ‘Don’t say it. It frightens me. Poor me. Everyone will hate me even more.’
‘Love you even more.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll keep my head. Promise.’
‘Don’t count your chickens, love.’
‘That’s right …’
Thursday, the day that Sheila took the train up to London to see her film agent, was also the day of the week when Clement drove to Headington for his regular appointment with a fellow analyst. This analyst, a Jungian like Clement, was a Czech exile called Mrs Vikki Emerova. They had known each other for some years, and occasionally met in the Department of Psychiatry in the Warneford, or at official functions. He always addressed her as Mrs Emerova, and she him as Dr Winter.
Clement’s clinic, which these days he held only once a week, was in central Oxford. Mrs Emerova had a downstairs room in a small Edwardian house with a neglected garden off Headington High Street. Headington was full of similar houses with similar rooms, each occupied by people much like Mrs Emerova. The Emerovas of this world sat in chairs listening to the woes of people sitting opposite them. Anything could be said to them. One could talk in intimate detail about sexual perversions, or one could enter on a lengthy diversion concerning politics. One could be fearfully academic or downright coarse. The Mrs Emerovas would never flinch.
Unnatural though this arrangement might appear, many of the academics of Oxford, burdened with personal problems, made their pilgrimage weekly to the shabby rooms in the discreet houses of Headington.
In the back garden at Mrs Emerova’s were three ancient apple trees, and nothing else. The grass did not seem to grow. It was never short and never particularly long. Perhaps, Clement surmised, there were special nurseries – garden centres, they were called nowadays – in the wilds beyond Headington, in Wheatley and Holton and Horspath and Garsington which supplied special grass seed for analysts’ gardens, guaranteed to lull their clients with its monotony. His own clinic had no garden.
Once a year, in the Headington spring, the three ancient apple trees burst into blossom. Hope sprang into the breasts of the analysands. Christ may have died for them, God might have created the world for them … All was possible … But come the autumn and the fruits were as green and acid as the lives of those who looked out upon them from Mrs Vikki Emerova’s window.
‘But she had it off with him in the next room. This was in Boston. In our hotel – the well-named Luxor Hotel. A little Spanish type, five feet one and pretty weedy, I’d say. Always had a smarmy sort of grin for Sheila. I watched him. I saw him last year and was friendly. Arthur Hernandez. More properly Arturo, I’m sure. Her editor at Swain Books – not that he seems to do much editing. Those guys have generally tried their hand at writing, had no joy at it, but ever after think they have special insights into writers’ lives. He’s probably straight out of university, probably only twenty-three or twenty-four – half her age. No real experience of life. They probably did it last year too, and I never found out. There I was, being nice to him. Oh, of course he was all over me when I arrived at the Luxor from New York. By that time, they’d probably been doing it all round the States. It’s the sense of betrayal … I can’t see how Sheila could possibly – And all the time he was “Green Mouth” this and “Green Mouth” that. I said to him, “Look, when we’re not performing in public, couldn’t you relax and call her Sheila? Green Mouth is only her trade name.” And he said, “Oh, I do zees only to show respect.” Respect, and the whole time he was bloody well shafting her. I mean, there are rules about these things, and the Americans know that as well as anyone else. I’ve never been anti-American. Rather the reverse. Of course, Arthur Bloody Hernandez is probably from Puerto Rico. I wondered if I wrote to Swain and complained if they’d sack him. Sheila is their most valuable property. They wouldn’t want to lose her. Of course, I suppose they might argue that it was Arthur Hernandez, damn him, by offering his services, who kept her there instead of with a bigger organization. I know Random House made overtures. They have business arrangements with her publisher on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe I should try to persuade her to – no, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t work.’
‘You feel more anger against him than against Sheila?’
‘Really, I don’t blame her. Well, not much. I have always been generous. Quite generous – in fact, more generous in that respect than she’s ever been with me, by a long chalk. It was just a passing fancy – well, no real harm done. One must have a perspective, yet all the while the other person just goes on acting however they feel like, without restraint. I really don’t think Sheila has much power of self-analysis. You can see that in her novels. No kind of self-analysis. Her characters, even the sensitive ones, just barge ahead and act. She is very warm natured. All credit for that. I do try to be generous. Even when I walked in and caught them at it – there was her big soft white bum, Mrs Emerova, she on top and you could hardly see him at all, except for two nasty little thin hairy legs, like a beetle crushed by a cream puff – I’ll never forget it. You may – you should – try to be detached but it still hurts deeply to catch your wife in flagrante delicto, and on top, too. Jealousy is hard to eradicate. She gave me such a look. I simply backed away into the sitting room. Knocked over a vase of flowers. Couldn’t think what to say. At such a time, you find yourself completely at a loss. Now why should I have felt such a fool? I suppose it’s because – there’s a whole tradition behind it, a whole rich tradition. The cuckolded male is a figure of fun, even to himself. It’s not so bad for a woman who catches her husband at it. She tends to engage more sympathy, don’t you consider? It’s something to do with the shape of the sexual organs, basically, I suppose. The male equipment looks a lot funnier than those rather pretty little purses you women have. I just stood there shaking but, in a minute, out he came, all dishevelled and looking a bigger fool than I felt, tucking in his shirt. When he saw me, he made a dash for the door to the corridor, so I ran after him and managed a good kick up the arse to help him on his way. That was the most satisfying bit of the whole affair. I rather hurt my left leg doing it.’
‘Kicking him satisfied you?’
‘What do you think? Then out she came, dressed, but hair dishevelled. Wanted a drink and a cigarette. Did I tell you she smokes when she’s on these tours? Cigars if nothing else is available. She’s like a demon. Well, it is all a bit testing. I sympathize with her and I do see why she’s got to do it. And I said to her, quite quietly and decently, “I know you’re under pressure but this has got to stop”, and she said, in a sort of level voice, “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” That’s what she said. “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” As cool as you like, Mrs Emerova. I’ll tell you the effect that sentence had on me, shall I? She never wrote a sentence half as powerful. It just destroyed me. I suppose I didn’t look any different. She gave me a drink from the drinks cabinet and I drank it. But something went inside me. I still feel … of course I do. It was bad enough to be told she was enjoying it. One does enjoy these affairs. The surreptitiousness, the sense of … But to rub it in … And then to say point blank that she meant to continue, whatever I felt about it. What I felt about it didn’t matter to her in the slightest. How can you recover from that? It’s so unlike her. Generally she’s so considerate. But perhaps she’s been like that all the time. I mean, how long have we been married – and all the time she was secretly quite indifferent to what my feelings were if they got in the way of her pleasure? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Christ, what an insult. It’s as if I’m bleeding inside and yet, now we’re back home, I have to continue as normal. We both continue as normal, as if nothing had happened. It’s grounds for divorce, isn’t it?’
‘Do you want a divorce?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It’s a crowning insult, isn’t it?’
‘Did she mean it as an insult? Was she not also upset at that moment?’
‘I should hope she was! Isn’t it at such moments that the truth slips out? How often had they had it off together? Not just in Boston. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles. Can you imagine, they might have done it in Salt Lake City? Ugh … At least I seem to have put paid to Hernandez. I made sure they weren’t alone together for the rest of the time we were there. And I don’t think he had the appetite for it after being found out. Men don’t, do they? There are rules to the game, you know, and if you’re caught out, fine, then however much it costs you say you’re sorry and you stop. You stop, don’t you, for the sake of the other person’s feelings? Isn’t that the rule? You and the other woman know you run that risk. If found out – all over. Finish. Isn’t that the rule?’
‘Do you think of it as a game with rules?’
‘There are rules, aren’t there? Remember your ethology. In everything there are rules, in every species. Otherwise civilization falls apart. Even when two nations threaten each other, rules remain. If that wasn’t so, then the planet would have been destroyed long ago. Even nations which hate each other obey rules, almost unwittingly. How much more so between individuals. How am I going to live now? Am I supposed to go on as if nothing had happened?’
‘What has really happened? Sheila returned to England with you, didn’t she?’
‘I can’t talk to you, Mrs Emerova. You’re supposed to offer me something, you know. A therapist is supposed to use his or her own feelings in the service of the patient. That’s me. How should I best behave in this mess?’
‘Do you feel it is a mess? Your marriage is continuing, isn’t it?’
‘It’s continuing, yes. But for how long? What’s she thinking? Is she longing for Hernandez every moment of the day? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” It puts me off my stroke, I don’t mind admitting. Yes, I do mind admitting it. I feel that when we have intercourse she’ll just be thinking of him all the while, and making comparisons.’
‘Does that make you feel inferior?’
‘Oh, Christ, it makes me feel bereaved. Our calling has little defence against bereavement. How am I to know what she’s thinking?’
‘May you not suppose that she wants everything to continue as normal?’
‘What right has she to hope that? I’m the one who should be deciding about that! Instead, I’m arranging for a party for her next Thursday, to celebrate her latest effusion …’
‘Doesn’t that suggest that you both want everything to continue as normal?’
‘Well, it can’t continue as normal, can it? That’s not possible. Not while I still have so much anger inside me. Okay, under the stress of the tour, when she’s the cat’s whiskers and the whole world’s bending an ear to her, I quite understand that then she’s feeling so good that she wants the odd extra bit of adulation – I mean, this guy Hernandez, he has no interest in her as such, he’s only interested because she’s the grand and glorious Green Mouth who brings so much money into his company, whose new novel has got 1.5 million copies in print. It’s impersonal on both sides, in a way, all part of the big Green Mouth act – I understand that, it’s my business to understand. Good for her! But “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Am I supposed not to feel angry and hurt because I’m an analyst? What do you expect?’
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Brian Aldiss
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The second volume in the acclaimed Squire Quartet, available for the first time as an ebook.Spanning fifty years and three continents – from pre-war Suffolk, to the Far East in the 1940s, to Oxford and America in the present day – Forgotten Life is a novel of immense scope, encompassing comedy and tragedy, joy and grief, as its three main characters try to work out the most difficult problem of all – the meaning of their own lives.Brian says: ‘This novel, which in retrospect can be seen to have a similar ground plan to Non-Stop, written thirty years earlier, was more warmly received than any other Aldiss novel, not simply by its reviewers but by readers.’Features a new introduction by the author.