‘Tak’ yer hands aff ma body!’ was all the thanks they got.
‘Look at the state ye’ve got me in! Me in ma best battle-dress, too! Lookarit! Covered in glaur!’
If anything, I’d have said immersion in the puddle had cleaned it slightly; his best battle-dress, so-called, would have evoked cries of revulsion along Skid Row. He subsided in the truck, grunting and mumping and pawing the water from the greasy line of medal ribbons tacked above his left breast-pocket, from which the button was inevitably missing. As I retrieved a sodden packet of Woodbines from the puddle where he had dropped it, I had a sudden thought.
‘McAuslan,’ I said, ‘have you got your travel warrant and paybooks?’ One thing I didn’t need was McAuslan without the documents necessary to speed him smoothly out of my life.
He suspended his toilet to rummage, breathing heavily, and produced from the recesses of his clothing two tattered lumps of paper, like very old manuscripts that have lain neglected in a damp tomb; they proved to be his Army paybooks, parts I and 2. But no travel warrant; he goggled dirtily when I demanded where it was, wiped his nose, and said he didnae know aboot that, but. So we had to wait, and I stamped impatiently and consulted my watch, while one of the Jocks ran back to company office, and by sheer luck returned with the warrant, which McAuslan had neglected to draw from the clerk.
‘Keep it, Sempill,’ I told the Jock. ‘Don’t let it, or him, out of your sight. You,’ I snarled at McAuslan, ‘sit still, or so help me I’ll turn you over to the redcaps for . . . for conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline, and you’ll never get out of the Army, see?’
‘Yessir. Right sir. No’ kiddin’, sir.’ The threat obviously got through to him. He was poking at the contents of his Woodbine packet; a few dripping little cylinders rapidly disintegrating into mush in his palm. ‘See ma bluidy fags.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ I said, ‘take these.’ And I thrust my cigarette packet into his hand, and ran to the cab. We broke the speed limit all the way up Leith Walk, and arrived at Waverley Station in the nick of time to catch the train. McAuslan was last aboard, roaring in panic as he retrieved his kitbag, which had somehow slipped half-down between train and platform as we moved off. From my carriage window I saw bag and man being dragged to safety by his mates; imagine King Kong on the Empire State Building, wearing a balmoral bonnet and being enveloped in rising clouds of steam, and you have the picture.
I can’t say I enjoyed that journey. Travel in British trains in the immediate post-war period was slow, uncomfortable, and involved frequent clanking halts in the middle of nowhere. It seemed inevitable that McAuslan would take it into his head to descend at one of these, and rootle under the wheels, or take off into the wilds of Berwickshire, or pull the communication cord. I stood nervously in the corridor all the way to Newcastle, being trampled and shoved and leaned on – you didn’t expect to get a seat in those days – and waiting for the noises of alarm and excursion to break out farther down the train, where he and his associates were. But he was reserving his energies, apparently, for when we got over the border.
Once we reached England, he began to exhibit his best form; his hangover had presumably receded. During the halt at Newcastle he lost his bonnet in the men’s lavatory and started an altercation in the refreshment room where, he alleged, they were trying to short-change him over the price of a pie and a cup of tea. (Since he could barely count beyond five, I wasn’t prepared to take his word for it.) At Durham he tried to climb, smoking and coughing thunderously, into a nonsmoker, whence he was ejected by an indignant dowager. He called her a cheeky auld bizzum and she threatened to complain to his commanding officer. (I was in the adjacent corridor, averting my gaze and trying to look inconspicuous.) At Darlington, where I allowed him one pint of beer at his earnest request, I was silly enough to take my eye off him, and when the guard’s whistle blew he was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately the train did one of those hesitant starts, clanking a few yards and stopping, and our frantic search eventually discovered him on another platform, wrestling with one of those little football machines, all encased in glass, in which two teams of tiny metal men kick at a ball in response to little levers which you work on the outside. Beautifully ugly little Victorian creations, which seem to have vanished now. McAuslan, full of animation, was yanking the handle and roaring: ‘Come away the Rangairs! Itsa goal! Aw, Wullie Waddell, he’s the wee boy!’
We pried him loose, ignoring his cries that he was entitled to his penny back, and just managed to get him into the guard’s van.
At York, which we reached in the afternoon, we parted. The Jocks were taken off by a warrant officer, and I went to the officers′ mess, relieved in the knowledge that McAuslan would spend his last two hours in the Army under competent military control.
‘See yez at the kittin’-oot centre,’ said he as we went our separate ways, and I confess to a momentary hope that we might miss each other; for all the attachment that had grown up between us in our chequered acquaintance, I’d had, on the whole, just about enough.
It’s one of the tricks of memory that all I can remember of my actual demobilisation is playing table billiards in the mess while waiting for the formalities to begin; of the process which turned me from a trusty friend of King George into a civilian I can recall nothing, beyond signing something, and being given a small booklet which was my actual discharge, and informed me that I was entitled to keep the permanent title of lieutenant, to wear my uniform for one more month, if I wanted to, and to consider myself a Reservist Class A. They thanked me, politely, and told me that if I followed the signs in the corridor I would arrive at the kitting-out centre, where I would be issued with civilian clothes, the gift of the Government.
It was a huge place, like an aircraft hangar, with row upon row of counters, and suits hanging on racks, and great square cardboard boxes. There were armies of little men helping the newly-fledged civilians to make their choice, and great throngs of figures in various stages of khaki undress wandering about, rather bewildered, feeling the material as though they didn’t quite believe it was there. I remember a stout captain in the Loyals, in his vest and service dress trousers, doubtfully examining a civilian shirt and saying that he didn’t care for stripes, actually, and a grizzled little corporal of Sherwood Foresters comparing a thick grey Army issue sock in one hand, and a dark blue civilian one in the other; his bare feet were thrust into black civilian shoes.
I took two shirts – any shirts – and collars, and a brass stud from the tray provided, and walked round to where the suits were. They were mostly brown and blue, and a long line of men in their underclothes were struggling into trousers, and adjusting braces, and queuing up for the long mirrors, in front of which they stood looking rather embarrassed, turning this way and that and patting their stomachs, while the rest of us waited our turn. The only thing in common was the close-cropped Army hair-style; for the rest there were pale-looking men who had spent their service in stores and offices, and bronzed mahogany muscle-men from the Far East and the North African garrisons – the man in front of me, bronzed and bare to the waist, had a crude blue-and-red tattoo on his arm, showing a knife impaling a skull, with underneath ‘Death Before Disonour’ (one spelling mistake for a Hogg Market tattooist wasn’t bad). Underneath his right shoulder, when he turned, was the white star-shape of a bullet wound, and I speculated on whether it was the Jap 300 rifle that had done it, and where – anywhere between Silchar Track and the Pegu Yomas, probably. Behind me was a stout and impatient exwarrant officer, holding in his belly under the unaccustomed brown worsted trousers, and muttering: ‘Bloody army, bloody organisation, can’t even get rid of us decently. Have you seen the quality of this rubbish? I wouldn’t give it for a blanket to our dog.’
The strange thing was, where you would have expected cheerful chatter and laughter, from men who had travelled hopefully for so long, and were now arriving, there was very little noise at all; indeed, they seemed quietly irritable, as tho
ugh the bleak utility of the new civilian clothing was symbolic, and they didn’t much like the look of it. Was this what civvy street was going to be like?
On a long table to one side lay the battle-dress jackets of those waiting to try their new suits; I wish I had a picture of it. There were the shoulder flashes – Buffs, Green Howards, Durhams, Ox and Bucks, Devons, K.O.Y.L.L, North Staffords, King’s Own, the yellow lion of the Scottish Division, the shoulder flash of the Sappers, the red and blue of the Artillery, the Welsh black pigtail flash, and my own green and yellow strip of tartan; the blancoed stripes and the cloth officers’ pips; the little red service chevrons, the Tate and Lyle badge of a regimental sergeant-major; the glittering crown and stripes of a colour-sergeant. And the ribbons – the well-known ′Spam′ of 1939-45, the yellowish rectangle of North Africa, the tricolour of France and Germany, the green-striped ribbon of the Italian campaign, the watered colours of the Atlantic Star, and the red-yellow-blue of Burma. And the badges in the caps – the Britannia of the Royal Norfolks, who alone can take a lady into barracks; the back-to-back of the Gloucesters, the red hackle of the Black Watch, the St Andrew’s Cross of the Camerons (‘two crossed bars o’ quarter-master’s soap wi’ auld Wimberley keekin’ ower the top,’ as the pipey used to say); the Maltese Cross of the Border Regiment, the flag-carrying lamb of the Queen’s, the brown cockade of Ulster, and the white horse of Hanover. A lot of service, a lot of time; a lot of long hot and cold marches to battles whose echoes had died away, and the owners, who had spent so many years earning the little badges, were now devoting all their minds to trouser-creases and shoulder-padding.
Most of them at least had some idea of what they ought to look like, from their dim recollections of prewar days; I didn’t. As I pulled up my reddish-brown herring-bone trousers – they seemed ridiculously loose and flappy-I realised that I had never worn a formal suit in my life. At school it had been blazer and flannels, and my kilt on Sundays. I tried the waistcoat and jacket and decided I looked like a Victorian commercial traveller. Still, it would do; I gave way to the ex-W.O. behind me, who bustled up to the mirror and exclaimed, ‘God sake, more like a bleedin’ kitbag with string round the middle than a bloody suit. There’s room for the whole bleedin’ Pioneer Corps in the crotch o’ this lot.’
I recovered my battle-dress jacket and kilt and went to try on a hat. They were trilbys, brown and blue, each with a tiny coloured feather peeping pathetically over the band. A stout, moustachioed Irish sergeant laid aside his rakish bonnet with its coffee-coloured plume, and placed a grey pork-pie on his cropped skull. He gulped at his reflection, and turned to me:
‘Jayzus, will you look at that! The bloody silly things they expect a man to put on his head.’
He must have thought exactly the same thing about his cockaded bonnet, once – but over the years he had grown into it, so to speak, his whiskers and personality had expanded with it, and now the civilian headgear looked ludicrous. He twitched it off and wandered off moodily in search of something else.
I tried on a hat; it felt and looked foolish and – what was the word? – trivial. Like the Ulsterman, I’d got used to the extravagance of military fashion. Why, in succession over the years I’d worn the rakishly-tilted forage cap, the tin hat, the old solar topee, the magnificent broad-brimmed bush hat of the Fourteenth Army (which isn’t just a hat, really, but a sort of portable umbrella-cum-hotel, with a razor-blade tucked into the band), the white-trimmed cap of the Indian Army cadet, the Highland tam-o’-shanter, and the red-and-white diced glengarry with its fluttering tails. Surprising, in the austere atmosphere of a modern war. And now, this insignificant thing with its tiny brim, perched foolishly above my ears. It didn’t even make me look like a gangster.
I stuffed it hurriedly into the big cardboard box I’d been given, adding it to the pile I’d collected. Shirts, shoes, socks, a quietish brown tie – I noticed that everyone else was doing the same thing. Nobody was going to venture out in his civvy duds - they would wear their uniforms at least until they got home, and gradually transform themselves into civilians. (Remember how on building sites, even well into the 1950s, you would see workmen putting on old, worn battle-dress jackets after their day’s work, or faded blue R.A.F. tunics? Others, like me, hung them away in cupboards to keep the moths happy, and tried them on twenty years after, puffing hopelessly as we tried to make them meet across middle-aged spread.)
I had resumed my uniform, and was tying up my box with string, when a voice floated over from behind a long rack of blue suits.
‘Name o’ Goad,’ it was saying. ‘Hi, Mac, this a’ ye’ve got? Nae glamour pants? Nae long jaickets? An’ no’ a pair o’ two-toned shoes in the placel Ye expect me to go oot wearin’ one o’ these b‘iler suits?’
I should have hurried away, but the sight of McAuslan playing Beau Brummel was too good to miss. I peeped cautiously round the end of the rack, and felt like Cortez when with eagle eyes he gazed on the Pacific.
McAuslan was surveying himself in a mirror, striking what he imagined to be a pose appropriate to a man about town; either that or he was trying to keep his trousers up with no hands. He was crouching slightly forward, arms back, like a swimmer preparing for a racing dive. On the back of his head was a brown pork-pie hat, in tasteful contrast to the dark blue serge trousers which were clinging, by surface tension, presumably, to his withers, and depending baggily to his calves – he still had his army boots on, I noticed – and the final flamboyant touch was provided by the identity discs on a dirty string which he still wore over a new civilian shirt and collar.
‘Bluidy awfu’,’ he remarked at last, to a weary-looking counterman. ‘Nae drape at a’. Youse fellas arenae in touch. The bottom o’ the breeks ought tae hang casual-like, ower the boots. See this lot – ma feet’s just stickin’ oot the end like a pair o’ candles oot o’ jeely-jars.’
‘Who the hell d’you think you are?’ said the counterman. ‘Ray Milland?’
‘Watch it,’ said McAuslan warningly, and waggled his feet to turn so that he could get a different view. This achieved the sought-after casual break of the trousers over the instep, inasmuch as the whole lot fell around his ankles, and he cursed and staggered about.
‘You’ll pay for that lot, if you damage them!’ cried the counterman. ‘For God’s sake, how can you try them on without braces? Here, let’s sort you out.’ And between them they hauled up the trousers, adjusted the braces, and considered the result.
‘Hellish,’ was McAuslan’s verdict. ‘The cut’s diabolical. See – ma flies is doon at ma bluidy knees.’
‘Monsieur hasn’t really got the figure, has he?’ said the counterman, a humorist in his way. ‘You don’t happen to have a third buttock, or something, do you?’
‘None o’ yer lip,’ said McAuslan, outraged. ‘Ah didnae dae six years sojerin’ just tae get pit oot in the street lookin’ like Charlie Chaplin. Fair does – could Ah go jiggin’ at the Barrowland or Green’s Playhoose in the like o’ these?’
‘Depends whether they go in for fancy dress,’ said the counterman, and McAuslan, turning in wrath, caught sight of me watching in stricken fascination. His gargoyle face lit up, and he cried:
‘Hi, Mr MacNeill! Jist the man! Gie’s a hand tae get sortit oot here, sir, wull ye? This fella’s got nae idea.’
Well, heaven knew I wasn’t short of practice in rendering the subject fit for public scrutiny; after two years of ‘sortin’ oot’ McAuslan I could have valeted Gollum. I helped to adjust his trousers, approved the fit of his jacket, joined in deploring the fact that it had ‘nae vents up the back; they’re a’ the rage wi’ the wide boys’, and assisted in the selection of a tie. This took a good twenty minutes, while I marvelled that the man who had been notoriously the scruffiest walking wreck in the ranks of the Western Allies should be so fastidious in his choice of neckwear.
‘Nae style,’ he sniffed, and wiped his nose. ‘But it’ll hiv tae do till I get doon the Barras.’ (The Barrows is a market in
down-town Glasgow where you can buy anything.) ‘It’s no bad, but.’ And he pawed with grubby fingers at the muted grey tie which the counterman and I had suggested. ‘Whit d’ye think, sir?’
‘Not bad at all,’ I said, and meant it. In a way, it was quite eery; there was McAuslan’s dirty face, frowning earnestly from under the brim of a neat trilby, with the rest of him most respectably concealed in a blue serge suit which, considering that he was built along the lines of an orang-utan, fitted him surprisingly well. If you’d held him still, and scrubbed his face and hands hard with surgical spirit, he’d have looked quite good. Not that Esquire would have been bidding for his services, but he was certainly passable. I guessed that five minutes would be all he’d need to turn his new apparel into something fit for scaring birds, but just at the moment he looked more presentable than I’ll swear he’d ever been in his life before.
He seemed to think so, too, for after shambling about a bit in front of the mirror, peering malevolently, he expressed himself satisfied – just.
‘Ah’ll tak’ it,’ he remarked, with the resigned air of a Regency buck overcome with ennui. ‘But the shoulders isnae padded worth a tosser.’
I’d thought he would want to stride forth in his new finery, but he insisted on packing it all into the box, and resuming his befouled and buttonless battle-dress tunic, his stained kilt, puttees, and boots, which restored him to the dishevelled and insanitary condition I knew so well.
‘Nae doot aboot it, uniform’s more smarter,’ he observed, adjusting his bonnet to the authentic coal-heaver slant over the brows. I caught sight of myself, watching him in the mirror, and was startled to see that I was smiling almost wistfully.
‘Right,’ said he, ‘we’re aff. Be seein’ ye, china,’ he added to the counterman, and we made our way out into the open air, carrying our new clothes in their fine cardboard boxes. In addition I had my ashplant and a small suitcase; McAuslan humphed along with his kitbag over his shoulder.