We came out afterwards into the vivid twilight, Geordie discordantly whistling the theme song of the film, which necessitated a lot of manoeuvring of his Adam’s apple. I was trying to see if we could muster enough cash between us for three beers. And what was Aylmer singing? – Under his breath, his old fragment of unfinished song: ‘Could I but see thee stand before me …’
‘What is that fucking thing you keep singing?’ Geordie asked, breaching an unwritten Army law of privacy.
‘Just something my wife used to like, like,’ Aylmer said dismissively.
‘You never told us you were married!’ I said.
‘She died two and a-half years ago, in the Blitz. Get me pissed one night, and I’ll tell you all about it.’
We turned into our favourite café and found a corner table. I was marvelling inwardly to think of Aylmer married. Marriage in those days seemed so far beyond me. Although – how long ago that was – I had proposed marriage to my darling Virginia – I was unable to imagine what it would be like to sustain a long relationship with a woman. How enviable it sounded: but would I be up to it?
‘The Blitz was a bugger,’ said Geordie, as we ordered three beers on the strength of his last rupee. ‘I don’t reckon we ought to let up on the Germans until we’ve sort of flattened every one of their cities, the way they did London, like. It’s just my personal opinion, of course.’
‘One good thing about Burma – at least neither the Japs nor us have got any bastarding planes worth speaking about.’
‘You’re right there. What have we got? One lousy squadron of Spitfires!’
‘Isn’t it two by now?’
‘You’re in the Forgotten Army, mate, and don’t you forget it!’
‘That’s right, the Forgotten Army – Britain’s bloody Foreign Legion.’
‘That’s it – Join the Army and See the World!’
‘I didn’t bargain on having to march the fucker, too!’
While Geordie and I thus pleasantly rolled the conversational ball back and forth, we were drinking up and Aylmer was not saying much. All three of us were smoking like troopers, the waiters were doubling about the room, a fan was blowing warm air on us, and all told it was a pleasant evening. We were completely shut off from India, but by now I had begun to take that for granted.
‘You don’t know what the Blitz was really like,’ Aylmer said. ‘I was stationed in Hyde Park – I saw it all. I could tell you some terrible tales … It’s amazing what one lot of people will do to another. Like savages!’
Geordie said, ‘Sergeant Meadows’s house got blown up in the Blitz. Too bad he wasn’t in it.’
‘That’s nothing. I knew a bloke – I knew a bloke got circumcised from a bomb.’
Geordie and I burst into laughter. We roared and shook and creased up over our beer. We went red in the face and wept. We sobered down, looked at each other, and burst into laughter again. It wasn’t often Geordie laughed so much.
‘Don’t be so fucking wet! I’m telling you the truth,’ Aylmer said. ‘He was circumcised by a bloody bomb. It was in a pub in Bermondsey, The Lamb. He was drinking in the public bar with his mates, see, and he thought he’d go and take a slash, like. This was near closing-time one evening. So he goes into the Gents and he’s standing there having a pee and suddenly – boom! – the whole wall in front of him just caves in with nothing but blackness in front of him – still peeing, mind you!’
At the thought of this, we all three burst into laughter, until Aylmer went on. ‘Of course, he was pretty shattered because he never even heard the bomb coming down. And he looks down at his prick to find it’s bleeding as well as peeing. See, a bit of flying glass from the window cut his foreskin off as neat as a whistle – otherwise, he was completely okay!’
We were laughing, but I was not entirely comfortable; at this period I had not outgrown my resentment at my own circumcision. Every time I looked at that self-evident knob, I felt that some subtle quality had been lost.
‘I’ve never understood why they circumcised anyone,’ I said.
‘Christ was circumcised,’ Geordie said. ‘They’ve still got his foreskin in the Vatican. I remember a bloke in the factory, like, told me that.’
‘Fuck off! Still there all these years? It would have rotted away!’
‘Christ’s foreskin doesn’t rot. It’s eternal, like him. Any road, the officials at the Vatican keep it in a silver jug, like. So this bloke at the factory told me. I’m sure that’s what he said. Pilgrims make special journeys to see it – you ask one of the RCs. If you’re Christian, you’re supposed to be circumcised, just like the Jews.’
‘Jews aren’t Christian.’
‘They’re sort of Christian. Aren’t they sort of Christian, Jack? I don’t know.’
‘But even the Africans get circumcised, and they aren’t Christians,’ Aylmer said. He embarked on one of his histories, describing how the boys of African tribes were shut in special stockades for several months until the day of the ceremony, when the witch-doctor led them forth and did the deed. ‘These are big lads – fifteen or sixteen, and their cocks bleed like pigs with slit throats. Some of them die after a day or two.’
‘Bloody hell!’, we said, and ordered more beer rapidly, pooling the rest of our cash on the table.
‘The only real cure is to indulge in sexual intercourse at once with the women of the tribe. The juices of the vagina are healing, and if you’re lucky you’ll be okay after that. Else you bleed to death.’
‘Dirty buggers!’ Geordie said. ‘People do terrible things to each other, when you come to think …’
Next morning was the last day before the main party moved out of Kanchapur. The advance party under Captain Hale had already left.
As we returned from our pre-breakfast run, Geordie said, ‘I thought like us were going to get Aylmer’s story about how his wife was polished off by that bomb. You were a bit simple, weren’t you, mucker, I mean? I thought we were going to get it again!’
‘I’ve never heard it!’
‘You want to get some service in, then, mate!’
‘What happened to his wife, anyway?’
Geordie glared round the barrack-room, perhaps gathering his powers of narrative.
As we were stripping off our denims, he said, ‘Oh, him and his missus had gone back to their digs – or a flat I think he said it was. Anyroad, they were a bit plastered like on the night this happened – he was on leave or something – I forget the details – and anyroad they went to bed and fell asleep like, and when he woke up the ceiling was coming in – falling down, I mean – and he fell asleep again or something because he was so pissed, and when he woke up in the morning, a bloody great beam had come down across the bed like, and his missus was dead beside him, squashed under the beam.’
He laughed.
‘Poor sod! Enough to send anyone round the bend!’
We were grabbing up our mess-tins and eating irons – in Kanchapur, you were allowed to go down to mess hall half-dressed for breakfast.
‘Aye, well, anyroad, he couldn’t get the fucking beam off of her chest, no matter how hard he tugged, so he tried to get out through the door, and the door wouldn’t open, like, or something, because, you see, what had happened – he didn’t know it at the time – but what had happened, the blast from this bomb had blown the staircase away and jammed the door tight. So it couldn’t open. So he says. So he calls out the window, but there’s a bloody great crater outside – see, they try to bring a ladder, like, the neighbours or someone, but the crater’s in the way, and the fire engine can’t get because of the rubble. Fuck off, Page!’
This was said to Wally, who ran up and grabbed us as we were going down the stairs, dealing us both a swift pummel on the upper arm.
‘Is he giving you a lot of shit, Stubby? You want to do the bastard – he’s always gripping is our Wilkinson!’
‘Why don’t you shut your arse and give your mouth a chance, Page?’
‘He was telling
me about Aylmer and his missus, when she was killed by the bomb.’
‘Oh, that! Fucking wrap up! – You’d think old Jack was the only bloke what ever had his old woman die on him!’
‘Get on with it, then, Geordie, for fuck’s sake! What happened to him up in his bedroom?’
‘Nothing much,’ Geordie said, as we clanked into the mess room and moved to join the queue of men waiting for Rusk to wield his ladle. He looked round, trying to re-grasp the thread of story. ‘He was stuck up in the bedroom all day, like, with his dead missus all bloody on the bed. He nearly went off his nut, according to him. It started raining or something, see, near midday or some time, with the rain come in the ceiling like, because the roof had been blown off by this bloody great bomb, so he spent all his time till they rescued him trying to keep the rain off her mush. I may have got a few details wrong …’
‘Ywwr, bet he had one last bunk-up before they carted her away,’ Page said. ‘Dirty bastard …’
After the dollop of bergoo, it was bacon and soya-link, as usual: the diet of the Forgotten Army.
Love and death – how we laughed about them! Yet they made the rest of the business look pretty pale. All the incidentals of that day, occupied by packing up and throwing out, were bleached by them, as if by strong sunlight.
While throwing out old copies of Picturegoer, Leader and Picture Post – sent from home by my sister – I thought about leaving India. Had we ever been in India? It was a travesty! Here was the setting for a towering love affair, complete with mighty vegetation and ugly shadows – a country where love, Love, could reach a pitch unknown in the pallid UK climate: yet no lover presented herself. Women here went about in dreadful disguises, made-up as whores in rags or officers’ memsahibs in pleated tennis-skirts. And all forbidden!
In Burma or Assam, all that sort of thing would be out. War. Even the imagining of love would have to be put away. Nor even Jock McGuffie, with his mad schemes for dodging the column, could save me then.
There are times in a man’s life when he is preoccupied almost continually with the promptings of his cock. Those are the times when he should be able to follow the direction in which it points and find out how the pulse of the world beats.
What had there been instead? A couple of quick sniffs inside filthy brothels, and a hell of a lot too much bishop-bashing. I was tearing myself apart, like the Monkey God.
The CO of Kanchapur spoke to us on passing-out parade, neat, heavy, anonymous, standing immobile in the shade while we sweated immobile in the sun to listen to him.
‘ …You have acquitted yourselves well. You must be proud to know that you are now fully trained fighting-machines. Your training in combined operations has not been wasted. It has given you experience of any conditions you are likely to meet in Burma or Assam. You have been a splendid body of men to train, well worthy of the division to which you belong, well worthy of the objective for which you have been trained: the Liberation of Burma from the Japanese. And I only wish I was coming with you …’
‘You can have my fucking place, for one.’ That was Dusty Miller.
‘No talking in the ranks,’ Charley Meadows said.
Perhaps I hoped that McGuffie’s poison was an antidote to the poison of the Army. All these years later, I do not recall what I believed. I can look back on that young Horatio with the same amazement that I then felt for my fellow men.
So it was to McGuffie, down in the scruffy M/T Section, that I went when the day was over. He seemed to believe still that some amazing trick could be pulled which would save those of us on rear detail from getting farther east than Calcutta; so glib was he about this, I partly believed him. But first there was our last evening in Kanchapur.
‘Och, what you wanne go to Indore for, you dirty lecherous Sassenach? Them mankey whores in yon knocking-shop’ll give you a dose as soon as look at you. There’s no’ a one of them as isn’t rotten with siff. It’s no’ my place to lead a young lad like you into temptation, Stubby! – Besides, the fucking Redcaps would have my guts for garters if they could.’
‘Come on, Jock, you’ll be telling me next to stick to the old five-fingered widow, the way the rest of the old soldiers do!’
‘Aye, weel, she’ll no’ do you much good eether in this fucking stinking climate. It’s no’ a place for a white man. We’ve got fucking Churchill to thank for all this, sending us out to this bloody dump … Why not go over to Indore while we’re still in the land of the fucking living? At least we can get boozed up.’
‘I promised young Jackie Tertis I’d take him along to a whorehouse some time. Is it thik-hai if he comes too?’
‘Christ, man, we don’t want bairns along! Tertis is as bad as yon Geordie mucker of yours. If you want to go to Indore, let’s go to Indore – not muck about wi’ a Sunday School. Besides, I’ve still got yon office desk to deliver … Gore-Blakeley gave me a right bollocking about it.’
So to Indore we went, bumping over the lousy roads through the steaming purple night, and with beating heart I again found myself climbing the stairs up to that ill-lit landing in the knocking-shop. Life continued here as before, had continued here for – how long? Day and night, fucking in the cubicles and domestic conversation just outside. The two old crones were still working at their chores, one hunched over a sewing-machine, cranking away and barely glancing up as Jock and I rather drunkenly gained the landing. We had visited his friend in the hotel down the street.
‘Mebbe tonight I’ll give the old granny an airing,’ Jock said, pointing to the crone working the sewing-machine.
Beside the old granny stood a girl of about eight, shy and quiet and pretty, peeping at us. The hag in charge appeared and we began to argue about money, while the little girl watched.
I was befuddled and angry. I began to shout and wave my fists about. The hag was saying something I could not understand, stroking my arm to soothe me. The gesture maddened me more. I yelled at her not to paw me. A man in creased white trousers came up the stairs and stood about inconspicuously.
Eventually Jock cooled her and me down. We went through to the room we had visited before. It looked as ever, a long stuffy room, cluttered and dark – perhaps never lit except by the cheesy glow of a lamp in the street, which did little more than make the window-panes shine like clouds.
A woman rose up from a bed, a dark silhouette.
‘Hello, sweetheart!’
‘Hello – who are you?’
‘Hello, sweetheart. You like jig-jig?’
‘I want a look at you first.’
I grabbed hold of her – at least I was touching a woman, however loathsome she might be. Was it the same one I had grappled with before? I felt incredibly pissed and not in the mood to be fucked about.
I smacked her to keep her quiet.
She was wearing an ankle-length garment, perhaps an old nightdress. I stuck my hand up it and felt a crisp knot of pubic hair. Immediately, something in me realized its intentions, and my prick struggled erect inside my trousers. I got the woman down on the bed – no hesitations this time about how filthy it might be – and half-knelt beside her, feeling for matches in my pocket with one hand, while holding her down with the other. She was struggling. I would stand no nonsense. We were off tomorrow.
I got the matches out, let go of the bibi, struck one. She cried out and slapped at the light before it had a chance to grow. Swearing, I tried to light another. They were wretched Indian matches – one in three was a dud. Someone was behind me, trying to stop me striking a light.
‘No, sir, you disturb other customer make jig-jig!’
‘I want a fucking dekko! Let me alone!’
Elbowing them off, I got a match alight and stared down at the woman I had paid for. She stopped writhing as the light fell on her, merely putting her hands up defensively, so that their shadows fell across her face in bars. I dragged her hands away.
She was young, her teeth were white, her skin smooth! I let the match die and lay down beside her, ca
tching the smell of her as I tore my trousers off. My hands ran over her plump arms, over her body. I could hear myself groaning, while the hag by the bedside was trying to get two rupees off me for a french letter. Cursing, I gave her two half-rupee pieces and told her to fuck off.
The girl’s body was slightly oily. She was co-operating now. I inhaled its odours, natural and artificial, letting the musky smell work down to my parched roots while my fingers probed into her hot, tacky little crutch. She peeled the french letter on to my weapon in a prosaic housewifely manner while I – in what animal past was I, tunnelling through a dense familiar element, triumphant, cock-a-hoop?
When you’re having a shag, you must be in touch with all your ancestors right back to the Jurassic. It’s the moment – an escape into all the imagined freedoms of past matings. This girl wrapped her legs round me like a stone-age lass, and pummelled me with her heels on my bum as I shot my row with considerable force and splendour into what was probably a secondhand french letter.
She got up at once and started fiddling with something she dragged from under the bed – a towel or a rag. Her business was over, she had felt nothing. The deal was closed. And we were off in the morning!
She was really quite young and pretty. Suddenly I remembered the last night of my embarkation leave, when I’d nearly managed a knee-trembler with Our Syl in the air-raid shelter. It came back to me clear as could be – and how I had failed to get my oats.
‘I’m going to bloody have you again!’ I said. I grabbed the towel from her, pulled her sari away, got her vest right up under her armpits. Then I could see her body in the cloudy light, shining like milk, her breasts and the narrow thighs. I kissed her on the lips. She struggled, but I held her head in my hands and kissed her, pressing my tongue into her mouth, forcing my body against hers.
My hard-on came swinging up again, red in tooth and claw, positively suppurating inside its french letter. I slid it in and had her against the wall, slap up against the cockroach stains. She made no protest as I thrust away, beyond avoiding my mouth. Perhaps the taste of beer and fags didn’t appeal to her. I came almost as fast as I had done the first time, surging with joy. It was absolutely exhausting, and I collapsed on to the bed, my legs shaking, chuckling a bit.