by William Boyd
Last night we stayed up late, talking. I said that I assumed all his plans for making a trip to Vienna must now be abandoned.
‘No can do, dear boy,’ he said. ‘But as soon as this damn war ends, I’ll be there. With a bit of luck it might not last that long.’
I sit in the spare bedroom, under the eaves of this little cottage, writing this up, wondering what to do as everything seems to conspire against me. There is a stiff gale blowing up tonight, ripping the first leaves off the trees. I suppose I should try to find another job as the theatres show no sign of closing but the thought of auditions makes me feel sick. From somewhere in the lane the lid of a dustbin has been lifted off and sent clattering and spinning down the alleyway, its tinny percussion discordant and unnerving beneath the sudden giant rushings of the wind off the sea.
7. Illegal and Enemy Aliens
A fine rain had started falling as the lorry shuddered to a halt outside the camp. Lysander and the new detachment of guards jumped down from the rear.
‘Fuck me,’ Lance Corporal Merrilees said. ‘Fucking rain.’
‘Meant to clear up this afternoon,’ Lysander said, taking his cap off and looking up at the mass of grey clouds above his head. Cold drops hit his upturned face.
‘All right for you, Actor, ain’t it? All fucking warm and cosy.’
Merrilees led his section off around the perimeter wire and Lysander kicked the mud of his boots before going up the steps into the clubhouse.
The Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had been the Bishop’s Bay Golf Club before the war started and before it was requisitioned by the Home Office as a holding facility for ‘illegal and enemy aliens’. A few miles west down the coast from Swansea, round the headland from the Mumbles, it had been transformed into a fenced prison camp of some forty wooden huts, each sleeping twenty people on bunk beds, constructed along the length of the eighteenth fairway. The clubhouse became the administrative centre and the members’ lounge was reconfigured into the camp’s canteen, capable of serving three sittings of two hundred prisoners a time, if required. The camp’s population fluctuated between four hundred and six hundred internees, men, women and children. Other areas of the golf course had been wired off as football and hockey pitches but there was not much demand for these, Lysander had noticed. The prevailing mood amongst the internees was one of glum injustice; grumbling and petulant lethargy their principal pastimes.
Lysander knocked on the camp-commandant’s door. ‘Capt. J. St.J. Teesdale’ it said on a temporary sign outside. Lysander stepped inside on Teesdale’s cry of ‘Enter!’ and forced himself to smile and say, ‘Good morning, sir.’ Teesdale had arrived only two weeks before and was finding his new authority something of a trial and a burden. He was nineteen years old and having some trouble growing his first moustache.
‘Morning, Rief,’ he said. ‘Nasty-looking one for the middle of May.’
‘Ne’er cast a clout ’til May be out,’ Lysander said.
‘Say again?’
‘An ancient adage, sir. Summer doesn’t start until May is over.’
‘Right.’ He looked at some papers on his desk. ‘I’m afraid it’s Frau Schumacher, first up. Insisting on seeing a doctor again.’
Lysander collected his ledger and a bundle of files and empty forms and followed Teesdale from the Club Secretary’s office to the ‘19th Hole’ bar. Here a couple of middle-aged typists from Swansea coped with the camp’s administration, with the help of a solitary telephone, seated at desks at one end of the long room, while at the other, in front of a wide bay window, was a long trestle table where the day’s meetings and interviews took place. Through the window was a panorama of a choppy Bristol Channel with its massed continents of clouds – mouse-grey and menacing – beyond the links and the first tee. The walls were covered with framed photographs of golfers past – foursomes and monthly medal winners and amateur champions of the South Wales golfing fraternity holding silver trophies aloft. The bar had been cleared of its bottles and glasses, its shelves filled with rows of cardboard box files, one for each internee. Lysander found it one of the most depressing rooms he’d ever occupied.
Frau Schumacher sat at the trestle table, her back to the window, her arms folded across her chest belligerently, her chubby features set in a dark, implacable frown. She started to cough as she saw Lysander and Teesdale come in. Lysander took his seat opposite; Teesdale drew his chair out of range of Frau Schumacher’s staccato volley of dry coughs. Lysander opened Frau Schumacher’s file.
‘Guten Morgen, Frau Schumacher, wie geht es Ihnen heute?’
It took an hour to persuade Frau Schumacher to go back to her hut with the promise, in writing, that she would see a doctor within twenty-four hours, or sooner, if one could be found in Swansea. Lysander didn’t dislike her, even though he saw her almost every two days, as almost everyone who was held in Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had a long line of genuine grievances, not least their incarceration. There were merchant seamen – including half a dozen morose Turks – whose German colliers had been impounded in Swansea docks at the declaration of war; some twenty schoolchildren from Munich (awaiting repatriation) who had been visiting Wales on a late-summer cycling holiday; many proprietors of local businesses – butchers, tea-shop owners, an undertaker, music teachers – who had German names or ancestry. Frau Schumacher herself had been visiting her cousin in Llanelli, who was married to a Welshman named Jones. The household had been woken on the morning of August 5 and Frau Schumacher arrested – she had been due to return to Bremen on the sixth.
Bad luck, Lysander thought, rotten luck, stepping outside for some fresh air, already feeling tired after an hour’s translating of the Schumacher gripes and grudges. He turned up the collar of his tunic and jammed his cap on his head, searching his pockets for his cigarettes. He found them, lit one and wandered down a fairway towards the line of low dunes and the narrow beach beyond. Somebody shouted, ‘Hey, Actor!’ from one of the watchtowers and he replied with a cheery thumbs-up.
It was still drizzling but he didn’t really care, content to stand alone on the beach and watch the wind whip the foam from the waves of the restless, steely sea. Ilfracombe was just about opposite, he calculated, many miles away out of sight on the other side of the wide channel. He’d been on holiday there once, in 1895, when he was nine. He remembered trying to persuade his father to come shrimping with him and failing. ‘No, darling boy, shrimping’s not for me.’ He finished his cigarette and threw it towards the waves and strolled back towards the clubhouse. A small queue of internees had formed and they looked at Lysander expressionlessly as he walked past.
‘Busy day,’ Teesdale said, as they watched the first man shuffle in. ‘How come you speak German so well, Rief?’
‘I lived in Vienna before the war,’ Lysander said, thinking – what a simple expression, seven words, and what multitudes did they contain. He should have them carved on his tombstone.
‘Better get started,’ he said, sensing that Teesdale wanted to chat.
‘What school did you go to, by the way?’
‘I went to many schools, sir. Peripatetic childhood.’
Of all the stupid decisions he had made in his life, Lysander thought, perhaps the stupidest had occurred that morning he had left Hamo’s cottage in Winchelsea and went to Rye to catch the train back to London. He had half an hour to wait and so had wandered aimlessly into town, his head full of bitter thoughts of Hettie and his unseen baby boy, Lothar, soon to be Udo Hoff’s son, in name, at any rate. In the window of an empty greengrocer’s shop he saw a large printed banner. ‘E.S.L.I. “THE MARTLETTS”. DO YOUR BIT FOR ENGLAND, LADS!’ A plump sergeant lounged in the doorway and caught Lysander’s eye.
‘You’re a fine-looking fellow. Strong and lively, I’ll warrant. Just the sort we need.’
And so Lysander had heeded this unlikely siren, had entered the shop and enlisted. He became Private 10099 in the 2/5th (service) battalion of the East Sussex Light Infantry regiment
. Two days later he reported to the E.S.L.I. depot in Eastbourne for six weeks of basic training. It was an act of penance more than one of duty, he told himself. At least he was doing something and all he craved was mindless routine and mindless discipline. He would go to France to fight the common foe and somewhere in the romantic back of his mind he had a vision of himself marching triumphantly into Vienna to claim a first joyful meeting with his little boy.
‘Night, Mr Rief,’ one of the typists said as she left. Lysander was standing in the entry hall of the clubhouse waiting for the lorry to take him back to the company billet in Swansea. The romantic vision had faded fast. Swansea was as close as he’d come to France and the front line. The 2/5th (service) battalion of the E.S.L.I. had been assigned to guard coastal defences in South Wales. After a few months of patrolling the quaysides of Swansea and Port Talbot, laying barbed-wire entanglements on beaches or sitting in freezing trenches dug beside gun batteries overlooking the Bristol Channel, relief of sorts had come when ‘C’ company of the battalion, his company, had been ordered to provide shifts of perimeter guards and prisoner escorts for the newly established Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp. Lysander had volunteered to help with the translating of the internees’ many problems, had become indispensable, and so began to spend his days on duty sitting at the long table in the bar of the golf club. It was now May 1915. Greville Varley was in Mesopotamia, a lieutenant in the Dorsetshire regiment. The Lusitania had been sunk. The landings at Gallipoli did not seem to have gone well. Italy had declared war on Austro-Hungary. This monstrous global conflict was in its tenth month, and he had never even –
‘Got a couple of minutes, Rief?’ Teesdale was leaning out of his doorway. Lysander went back into the office, where Teesdale offered him a seat and a cigarette. Lysander felt very old sitting opposite young Teesdale with his near-invisible moustache. Old and tired.
‘Have you ever thought of putting yourself up for a commission?’ Teesdale asked.
‘I don’t want to be an officer, sir. I’m happy as an ordinary soldier.’
‘You’d have a more comfortable life. You’d have a servant. A proper bed. Eat food off a plate.’
‘I’m perfectly content, sir.’
‘It’s all wrong, Rief. You’re a fish out of water – an educated man who speaks a foreign language with enviable fluency.’
‘Believe it or not I’m actually very happy,’ he lied.
‘What did you do before the war?’
‘I was an actor.’
Teesdale sat up in his chair.
‘Lysander Rief. Lysander Rief . . . Of course. Yes! D’you know, I think I actually saw you in a play.’ Teesdale frowned and clicked his fingers, trying to remember. ‘1912. Horsham College Sixth Form Dramatic Society. We had a trip up to London . . . What did we see?’
Lysander ran through the plays he had been in during 1912.
‘Evangeline, It Was No One’s Fault, Gather Ye Rosebuds . . .’
‘That’s it – Gather Ye Rosebuds. Blanche Blondel. Gorgeous woman. Stunning creature.’
‘Very pretty, yes.’
‘Lysander Rief – how extraordinary. I say, you wouldn’t sign me your autograph, would you?’
‘A pleasure, sir.’
‘Make it out to James.’
Lysander sat on his bed, took his boots off and began to unwind his puttees. ‘C’ Company was billeted in the warehouse of a former sawmill and the place was redolent of sap, freshly planked wood and sawdust. It was dry and well sealed, containing four rows of wooden-frame chicken-wire beds with a big communal latrine dug outside. They were fed copiously and regularly and there were many pubs in the neighbourhood. Most of the men in ‘C’ company spent their off-duty hours as drunk as possible. There were always a dozen or so men on a charge. The warehouse yard had been swept hundreds of times, its walls and building benefitting from at least seven coats of whitewash. Idle drunken hands were put to hard work by the NCOs. Lysander kept out of trouble.
He lay down, hearing the chicken wire beneath his palliasse creak and ping under his weight, and closed his eyes. Two more days and he had a week’s leave coming. London.
‘Oi, Actor!’
He looked up. Lance Corporal Merrilees stood there. Frank Merrilees was very dark with a weak chin, in his early twenties, with a sharp, malicious mind.
‘Coming to the pub?’
They liked drinking with Lysander, he knew, because he had more money and would stand extra rounds. He was happy to conform to their expectations, buying, not popularity, but peace. The other men left him alone; he didn’t have to participate in the mindless bickering, persecution and mockery that occupied the others.
‘Good idea,’ he said, sitting up again and reaching for his boots.
The pub Merrilees liked was called The Anchor. Lysander wondered if it was anywhere near the port – he had no sense, even after weeks at the sawmill, what district of Swansea they lived in. He was shuttled to and from the billet to the camp in the back of a lorry, Swansea’s modest, rain-bright streets visible through the flapping canvas opening at the rear – that was the geographical extent of his war.
The Anchor was only a few streets’ walk away – no public transport required, which perhaps explained why it was so favoured. There was a saloon bar and a small snug, entry to which was denied the E.S.L.I soldiers. Along with Merrilees came four others of his cronies, all well known to Lysander, his drinking companions – Alfie ‘Fingers’ Doig, Nelson Waller, Mick Eltherington and Horace Lefroy. When they bought a round Lysander paid for the tumblers of spirits – whisky, brandy, rum, gin – that accompanied the pints of watery beer. That was why they tolerated him. The language as they chatted was always richly profane – fucking this and cunting that – and like the internees their conversation was a coarse litany of resentments and slights suffered, posited acts of brutal revenge or fantasies of sexual fulfilment.
‘Taps shut, lads,’ the barmaid called.
‘Let me get the last round in,’ Lysander suggested.
‘You’re an officer and a gentleman, Actor,’ Merrilees said, his eyes unfocussed. The others loudly agreed.
Lysander took the tray of six empty pint glasses and five tumblers up to the bar and gave his order to the barmaid, looking at her again as she pulled the pints. He recognized her, but her hair had changed colour since he was last here – it was now dyed a strange carroty-auburn. He seemed to remember she used to be fair-haired. She was petite but her stays gave her a hitched-up shelf of bosom, half-revealed by the V-neck of her satin blouse. Petite like Hettie, he found himself thinking. Her nose was bent slightly askew and she had a cleft in her chin that echoed the visible crease between her breasts. She had thick dark eyebrows.
‘And three gins and two whiskies,’ he added as she finished the pints. ‘I like your hair,’ he said. ‘It’s changed.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m a redhead, really, going back to nature.’ She had a strong Welsh accent.
Lysander took his pint off the tray and signalled to Waller to come and pick it up. The pub was slowly emptying but he’d rather talk to this girl than swear and curse with the soldiers.
‘You come in here a lot, you soldier-boys.’
‘It’s our favourite pub,’ he said. ‘We’re billeted at the old sawmill, down the road.’
‘But you’re not like them lot, are you?’ she said, looking at him shrewdly. ‘I can hear it in your voice, like.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Cerridwyn,’ she said. ‘Old Welsh name – it means “fair poetess”.’
‘Cerridwyn,’ he repeated. ‘Lovely name for a poetess. I write a bit of poetry, myself.’ He didn’t know what made him tell her that.
‘Oh, yes? Don’t we all?’ Heavy scepticism. ‘Give us a line or two then.’
Lysander, almost without thinking, began:
‘She’s always the most beautiful girl,
Bewitchingly lovely and true,
Perhaps
if I name her, you’ll know her:
She answers to “Love” – and she’s You.’
Cerridwyn was impressed, he saw – moved, even. Perhaps no one had recited poetry to her before.
‘You never writ that,’ she said. ‘You learned it.’
‘I can’t prove it. But it’s all mine, I’m afraid.’
‘Well – sounds lovely to me. What’s that last line again?’
‘“She answers to ‘Love’ – and she’s You.’’’
Suddenly he felt the urge to possess her, to unfasten that satin blouse and unpin her lurid hair. In an instant, also, he saw that she had registered this change in the look he was giving her. How does this happen, he wondered? What atavistic signals do we inadvertently send out?
‘It’s my day off on Monday,’ she said, meaningfully.
‘I’m going to London on leave on Monday,’ he said.
‘Never been to London.’
‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘You could show me around, like.’
‘I’d love to.’ This was madness, Lysander knew. ‘I’ll meet you at Swansea station. Nine o’clock. At the ticket office.’
‘Ach. You won’t be there.’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘What’s your name?’ she asked making it sound like a challenge, a test of his sincerity.
‘Lysander Rief.’
‘Strange name.’
‘No stranger than Cerridwyn.’
Merrilees lurched up and said they’d better be getting back.
‘Nine o’clock, Monday morning,’ Lysander said, over his shoulder, taking Merrilees’s elbow and helping him out.
On the way back to the sawmill there was a lot of foul-mouthed lewd banter about Lysander and the barmaid. Lysander switched his mind off and let the speculation swirl around him. He was thinking, pleasurably: train to London, slap-up lunch in a chop-house or an oyster bar. A little hotel he knew in Paddington. Ticket home to Swansea on the milk train for Cerridwyn. An adventure for them both.