Aylmer was a treasure-house of information and misinformation, like many another old soldier. I had a feeling that if I could only remember all that he said, I could master the entire world picture. He gave me confirmation that the world was as complex as I was beginning to suspect, full of conspiracies and contradictions and irreconcilables.
Yet the other squaddies always shut Aylmer up with their cry of ‘Grip on!’
‘They just don’t want to bloody know,’ Geordie said when we discussed the matter. ‘They’ll never listen to anybody, like. They know fuck all and they want to keep it that way. As long as they sort of stay bloody pig-iggerant, they’re thik-hai. That’s what I reckon, anyroad …’
Geordie was probably right. Part of the Army philosophy was to simplify everything down to basics, from furnishings and food to routine.
‘I suppose you don’t know anything about the Hindu gods – Hanuman and so on?’ I asked Aylmer, when Geordie and I were having a mango ice cream with him one evening in the bazaar.
‘I don’t know much about it, Stubby. The whole Hindu religion is so involved that you can’t make anything of it unless you are actually born a Hindu. Some white professors have gone mad studying the ins-and-outs of it.’
‘Even Stubby wouldn’t want to go as far as that!’ Geordie said, and we laughed.
‘Have they got a leading god? There seem to be so many of them.’
‘The two leading ones are Siva and Vishnu. Vishnu represents law and order – sort of a provost-marshal. Siva stands for destruction and regeneration.’
‘He’s the pansy-looking one with the flute?’
‘That’s supposed to be how he looks sometimes. Sometimes he takes other forms. They can change around as they feel like it.’
‘It sounds a funny sort of religion to me, though the one with the flute-thing looks quite nice,’ Geordie said. ‘I mean to say, are the gods good or bad?’
‘They’re a mixture. Some gods are good and bad, just like humans, and then there are demons and everything.’
Geordie laughed. ‘What a lot of primitive superstition! I mean, you’ve got to admit, it is sort of fucking primitive!’
‘Yeah, it’s a bit primitive, because it’s been going on like this in India now for ten thousand years or more with no change at all. It’s responsible for the caste system, is Hinduism, in the same way the Church of England is responsible for the class system in Blighty, only of course it’s worse here. Myself, I think Queen Victoria was wrong to say the British shouldn’t meddle with religious beliefs in India. The Wogs are not going to progress, as far as I can see, till the whole subcheeze of their religion is swept away.’
‘I bet the bloody Japs would sweep it away – I mean, if they invaded India and took it over, like,’ Geordie said, his Adam’s apple bobbing and his hands waving as he sought to convey a complex idea. ‘I mean to say, they wouldn’t be like Stubby here, like. He’s dotty on them Wog gods, aren’t you, Stubby, me old oppo?’
Aylmer had seen the picture of Hanuman above my charpoy. I had made a sketch of him, too, and later I had bought a picture of Parvati, the pretty pink wife of Siva, posturing in sugary fashion on a water-lily leaf. Parvati came from the stall-keeper who had sold me the monkey god. Later I bought from him an incarnation of Vishnu as Narasimha, with a lion’s face and many arms. These three amazing creatures all stared out at the Mendips from above my bunk, glowing between Jinx Falkenberg and Ida Lupino.
‘Stubby draws them, too,’ Geordie said. ‘You know, copies them, like. I reckon it’s bad for him – a fine young lad like him.’
Geordie looked anxiously at me, in case I thought he was taking the micky too hard.
‘You’re a bit of an artist, are you?’ Aylmer said. He had a small sandy moustache which he pressed into his upper lip now and again.
‘It’s just to amuse myself.’ I felt embarrassed. But personal confession was not in Aylmer’s line; he preferred general discourse.
‘Although all these Hindu gods are so ancient and uncivilized, the odd thing is that Sigmund Freud, the German who invented psycho-analysis, found that we have all these gods and demons, like, in our own minds.’
‘What, Hindu gods?’ I exclaimed. ‘I’d never heard of any of them till I came to this fucking place.’
‘I don’t mean literally, you nut, but the things they stand for, good and bad and all the rest. Sin and sex and all that. You know we’re supposed to be descended from the same tribe as the Indians, so we have the same basic beliefs, like.’
This was too much even for me. ‘Fuck off, Aylmer! You mean to tell me we think the same as these Wogs? Then how is it we don’t all go round barefoot at home, spitting betel nut?’
‘I’ve seen kids going round barefoot at home,’ Geordie observed. ‘You want to come up Jarrow way, you do!’
‘Look, I’ll explain what I mean,’ Aylmer said patiently.
He began to do so, but at that moment, strolling up the street whistling, came Wally Page, Enoch Ford and young Jackie Tertis. We exchanged whistles and insults with them, and then sloped down to join them. They were going to get pissed in the canteen, they said.
‘What are you hanging about with Aylmer for?’ Wally asked. ‘Bloody old know-all!’
The Indians in the restaurant stood anxiously by until we paid the bill and moved off towards barracks. The purple air was as warm as ever; fruit bats circled in the tall jacarandas that lined the road to the barracks. Once I looked back to see where Aylmer was. He was following along behind the group, two or three paces back. Once I heard him utter his only line of song.
‘Could I but see thee stand before me …’
Two hours later, we were all pretty well slewed – except Aylmer, who had gone to bed. We were laughing and shouting good night to each other. Geordie was singing Bless ’Em All.
This, I thought rosily, this was true comradeship! Even old Geordie was better with a few beers in him. What particularly appealed – though I was far from analysing it that night, and many succeeding ones – was everyone’s lack of pretension. At public school, at bloody Branwells, our class instincts were so fierce that we rarely spoke about our home-life; the ban, strong but unspoken, operated particularly against parents, those bringers of Life and Class; they were so firmly tabu that you referred to them – when you were forced to refer to them at all – as My People. As if they were stuffed with formaldehyde and kept in a jar.
With Wally and Enoch and Carter the Farter and the lads, it was otherwise. They revealed crude details about their home-life that thrilled and shocked me. Wally in particular! Wally had actually fucked girls behind the sofa in his own home. His parents were often drunk – his mother had once set light to the net curtain and the house had nearly burnt down. His sister used to let the old man from next door feel her in the outside bog, in exchange for sweets. And his father! – Page senior, from Wally’s inconsequential account, was an embodiment of lusty lower-class life, a factory hand who fought people in boozers and at football matches, had shaken his fist at their Member of Parliament, had driven a car over a cliff, and, having been caught by Wally fucking a neighbour’s daughter up against the wall of a boozer after closing time, had uttered this immortal piece of advice: ‘Don’t you ’ang round ’ere sniffing at my crumpet – you’re old enough to sniff out your own crumpet!’
This utter abandonment of standards thrilled me. Over our beers, Wally and Enoch were trading tales of girls they had had, in the army and out of it. On this topic, they were true buddies – only on politics did they divide, when Enoch propounded Communism and Wally spoke up for Winston Churchill and the king. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to relate my own sexual chronicles, though I cursed myself for my squeamishness; about Virginia and Esmeralda at least I still felt a great deal of sentiment, and sentiment seemed to be precisely what Wally and Enoch were free from. Their pushers, their bits of skirt, were evidently dispatched with amazing aplomb, in an absent-minded succession of blow-throughs. Or so
they told it.
Although I admired this freedom from the lame tradition in which I had been brought up – the tradition whereby a girl was supposed to be loaded with chocolates, fair words and moonlight first – I was unable to hide a feeling that these quick fucks here and there had been remarkably perfunctory, not to say brief. The object always seemed to be to come your muck, as Enoch called it, as fast as possible. Once, someone mentioned that the Hindus stretched their lovemaking out for perhaps an hour at a time.
‘Dirty bastards!’ Wally said. ‘“Whip it in, whip it out, and wipe it”, that’s my motto.’
The one reservation to my admiration which I would admit at this time was that Wally and Enoch, like many others whose stories I listened to, were apparently completely blind to the look of the girl’s face. ‘She were an ugly cow, but by Christ she could fuck!’ was Enoch’s summary of one woman he had had in the factory where he worked. This blindness extended amazingly to an indifference to the woman’s body. I often wondered if Wally – or any of the others – had ever contemplated a girl’s naked body and been moved by the sight. They seemed to have had so many opportunities and squandered them so recklessly.
For all that, surely quantity was a good substitute for quality? By the time we broke up that evening, Enoch giving his extraordinary whoop of ‘Honey pears!’, I was once more full of envy of their free way of life.
I wove my way to the shitter, to find that young Jackie Tertis was there before me, his round baby face gleaming with sweat.
‘Oooh, I ain’t used to so much booze!’ he groaned. Next moment, he was spewing all over the floor.
Hopping out of the way, I went to have a long pee, leaning my head wearily against the wall as I let it flow. Bed I wanted.
‘Jesus Fucking Christ! I can’t take this sodding shitting Wog beer!’ Jackie said, after one last heave. ‘Makes me spew my ring every time! I wish I was home, that’s a fact!’
Tertis was only eighteen, the baby of the platoon.
‘They say the first five years are the worst. Buck up, you’ll feel better now you’ve got it off your kidneys!’
‘I don’t feel better. Blimey, I feel fucking awful!’ He looked awful, his face pale and glistening, his hair disordered, and with a fair spatter of sick all down his bush-jacket.
‘Come on, let’s get over to the barracks, get some kip.’
As we crossed the square, he said, recovering a little, ‘I didn’t used to drink, you know, Stubby. My dad’s a teetotaller. He’d be that mad if he could see me now. Me old ma died a couple of years ago and things haven’t been the same. I wish I was home!’
‘You’re better away from home getting your knees brown.’
He sniffed. I wondered if he was going to start weeping. ‘It’s all right for you – you’re a regular. My life’s been different from you lot. Shall I tell you something, Stubby?’
‘Come on, Tertis, you’re pissed, I’m pissed – let’s get to fucking kip!’
But he stopped at the bottom of the steps to the barracks. I went up on to the stone verandah. Draggingly, he followed and said, ‘I wouldn’t tell you this if I wasn’t pissed – for God’s sake don’t tell Page or the others, but I’ve never had a girl. Never fucked one, I mean, not in my bloody fornicating life.’
‘Ah, fuck off! What about that bird you said you fucked up a lane when you were blackberrying?’
‘I had to make something up. I didn’t get to fuck her – I had a girl, I mean I’ve still got her, I think, because we talked about getting married and everything, but I mean we were in bloody love, and I never fucked her. She did let me feel her tits once. I was longing to yark it up her but I didn’t dare.’
We stood in the great shade of the building. Distantly, dogs were barking. There was never complete silence: the place was too big for that. The stone under my hand was cool.
‘She’s got really lovely tits,’ Tertis said, with conviction. ‘Very firm tits. Oh God, I wish she was fucking here now. I’d fuck her now, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d be right in there!’
‘Why didn’t you fuck her then?’
‘It’s different in fucking Blighty, isn’t it? Blighty’s full of restrictions. I wonder if I’m going to throw up again?’
‘You want to stick to the old five-fingered widow.’
‘Don’t tell me nothing about that!’
‘That’s what they say.’
The sun was gone and it would be back in strength next morning as sure as eggs were eggs. It sounded as if those fucking piyards had gone mad. It was just wonderful to be warm at ten o’clock at night and watch the lightning flicker pale about the horizon. I sat down on a step and lit up a Wog Player’s, flipping one to Tertis. Tertis sat clumsily beside me and lit up too.
‘You aren’t going to spew again, are you?’ I asked.
‘Hope not.’
A jackal was doing its nut in the distance. That was what had started the dogs off. It had an irritating yip like an insane schoolgirl giggle. You hated bastarding jackals without ever seeing one. A sort of bisexual thing, like a Hindu devil, laughing its dick off at the edge of nowhere.
‘Stubby, you’ve fucked one of these bibis, haven’t you? Wally said you had.’
I inhaled deeply and let the fag smoke whistle out through my teeth.
‘Have you ever seen a woman in the nude, Jackie? You know, stark bollock-naked?’
Leaning towards me in a drunken exaggerated fashion, he said, ‘No. I wish I had. The next time you go to a brothel, perhaps I could come along with you – just to fucking see what it’s like.’
‘It’s the most marvellous thing in the world to see a woman bollock-naked, to stare at it all and feel it and see her enjoying it.’
‘Oh Christ, shut up!’
‘Your dick up round your neck … They’re glad of it too, glad to be seen. They aren’t just women, they’re human. For all old Wally says, a fuck’s hardly a fuck unless you can get ’em naked.’
‘Oh Christ, shut up or I’ll have to go and wank my fucking self off again. It’s this fucking climate. I can’t stop myself doing it.’
‘You want to keep yourself morally pure, Tertis, like the CO said.’
‘Come on, don’t shit me, Stubby! I have to keep on bashing my bishop – it makes me feel awful. It’s twitching in my pants if I just mention its name!’
I stubbed my cigarette against the stone and climbed to my feet. It was an unwritten breach of Army code to air this sort of confidence. We all had troubles – the same troubles.
‘You want to sleep with fucking boxing gloves on, mate,’ I said, and went in in search of my charpoy.
Directly I was under the mosquito net, I was asleep, beer-sodden and careless if not entirely carefree. The next thing I heard was Ernie Dutt bellowing in the morning, in the time-approved manner, ‘Wakey-wakey, you lads, out of those stinking wanking-pits at the double!’
That’s you, Tertis, you turd, I thought. Sluggishly, I joined in the bunfight that went on before morning parade and inspection.
Book Two
The Old Five-fingered Widow
SCENE: Kanchapur Barracks. Dazzling sunlight. Private Aylmer and Signaller Stubbs, whitewash brushes in hand, are on fatigues. Sergeant Meadows arrives to see how they are progressing.
Sgt M: Come on, come on, you two! Let’s see a bit of action!