by Nevil Shute
Within three months he was back in England and at death’s door from the wound he got in the aeroplane. When she went down to see him at the hospital in Penzance, she discovered that he was no longer a free man; there was a little matter of three truckloads of Army sugar sold in the black market to be settled first. She knew him for a warm businessman in the office when she married him; she had not known that he was quite so hot as that. He was in hospital for a long time before court-martial; then he got a year’s imprisonment and was discharged from the Army, His Majesty having no further use for his services. He came back to her in February 1945, a perky, irrepressible little man in civvy clothes, apparently not conscious of any very great disgrace, and with that huge wound that terrified her till she got accustomed to it. From that time she had been a bad wife to him, and she knew it, and she hated him for it.
“I dunno if I ever told you much about that time,” he said. “There was four of us all in the ward together, at that place down in Penzance. Just the four of us together.” He hesitated, and then said, “They had a guard, you see.”
She nodded. “I remember.”
“I’d like to know what happened to them other chaps, the three of them,” he said. “They used to come and talk to me. Hours on end, they did.”
“Talk to you?”
“They used to come and sit inside the screen there was all round my bed, and talk to me. Hour after hour, sometimes.”
She stared at him. “What did they do that for?”
“The doctor ’n the sisters made them do it.” He turned to her. “I had my eyes all bandaged up after the operation ’cause they didn’t want me to see anything, and they gave me things to stop me wanting to move about in bed. I was lying there all strapped up like a mummy, and I couldn’t talk much, either. But I could hear things going on, ’n think about things, too. Funny, being like that, it was. So as the others got well one by one the sisters made them come ’n read a book to me, but they read pretty bad, so most times they just talked. I could answer them a little, but not much. They just kept talking to me.”
“What did they talk about?”
“Themselves, mostly. They were a bloody miserable lot—the miserablest lot of men I ever saw. But they were good to me.” He paused for a moment, and repeated very quietly, “Bloody good.”
“How do you mean?” she asked.
The beer was still strong in Mr Turner. He said, “They were sort of kind. Do anything for me, they would. I reckon that I might have passed out that time, spite of all the doctors and the nurses, if it hadn’t been for them chaps sitting with me, talking. God knows they had enough troubles of their own, but they got time for me in spite of everything.”
There was a long, thoughtful pause. Presently she said, “What’s this got to do with a nigger?”
“One o’ them was a nigger from America,” he said. “The last one to go out. He was the only one I ever see clearly—Dave Lesurier, his name was.” He pronounced it like an English surname. “Then there was Duggie Brent—he was a corporal in the paratroops. And then there was the pilot of the aeroplane, the second pilot I should say—Flying Officer Morgan. We was all in a mess one way or another excepting him, and yet in some ways he was in a worse mess than the lot of us.”
He turned to her. “I been thinking,” he said quietly, “I never seen any of them from that day to this, though we was all in such a mess together that you’d have thought we might have kept up, somehow or another, just a Christmas card or something. But we never. Well, I got through all right ’n turned the corner. I got a nice house here, mostly paid for, and a good job. Folks looking at me would say I was successful, wouldn’t they?”
She nodded slowly. “They would that, Jackie. We’re not up at the top, but we’re a long way from the bottom.”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” he said. “A long way from the bottom. But that time I was talking of we was right down at the bottom, all four of us, me and the other three. And when I was down there they was bloody nice to me. You just can’t think.”
“I see,” she said.
“I had it in my mind for a year or more I ought to try and find out what the others were doing,” he said quietly. “Maybe some of them are dead. That nigger, he was charged with attempted rape, and they give them pretty stiff sentences for that in the American Army. The others, too.… But I got by all right—I never starved in the winter yet, that’s what I say. We’ve got up a long way from the bottom, and we’ve got money for a nice house, and a car, ’n holidays, and after that we even save a little. And I been thinking,” he said quietly, “I been a bloody squirt not to have done something to find out about them other chaps, and see how they was getting on. They were bloody good to me when I needed it.”
He pulled out his cigarette case, and handed it to her. She took one and he placed one between his lips, and fumbled with his lighter in the left hand, and lit them. “Well, there we are,” he said. In the dim, moonlit garden there was privacy. “I’ve had it now. In a year’s time there won’t be no more of me. I don’t want to go out and leave these strings hanging loose. I want to find out what happened to them other three, case any of them wants a hand, or something.”
She stared at him, bewildered. This was a different Jackie from the one she knew, and she distrusted change. Injuries such as his when they went bad made people funny in the head, sometimes; this business of wanting to look for his companions in the prison ward seemed very odd to her. She tried to head him off.
“They’ll be all right,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t worry too much over it.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’m just going to find out and make sure they’re all right, so as I know.”
She said helplessly, “What are you going to do, then? Write a letter?”
“I dunno an address for any of them,” he said. “No good writing to the hospital, not after all these years. I’d better try the Air Ministry to get the pilot’s address, and the War Office for the corporal, I suppose. I dunno what to do about the nigger.”
“You’ll never find them after all this time,” she said. “How would you ever find a nigger that was in the American Army, after the war, and all?”
“I dunno,” he said. There was a long pause, and then he said, “I want to have a try.”
She sat deep in thought for a few moments. He was a bit queer, she decided. Clinically speaking, she was right; the obsession was probably related to his lesion. That did not help her in her immediate problem, what to do about it. She knew enough about her husband not to cross him directly; when once he got a fixed idea he held on to it like a dog with a bone. Moreover, for the first time in years she felt he needed her. She said, “What were they like, these three? Was there anything particular about them?”
He grinned. “Only they were all in such a bloody awful mess—like me.” He turned his head to her; in the white light she saw the gleam of his great wound. “Like me to tell you about them?”
She said, “Yes.”
He got up from his chair. “I’m just going in to spill some of this beer. Shall I bring out a rug when I come?”
It was the first time he had offered to do anything for her in a long time. She said, “Please. It’s getting kind of chilly out here; but it’s nice.”
He went into the house, and came back presently, and handed her the rug. She wrapped it around herself and settled down to listen to him talking. They sat there on the lawn in the warm summer night, in the quiet grace of the moon, and the stars faint in the bright light. It was windless, still, and silent. Around them, in the dormitory suburb, the world slept.
This paratroop corporal, Jackie said, was “a proper card.” He was a young chap, not more than twenty, a short, stocky young man with a thick mat of curly red hair; he wore it cut short in the Army style, but even so there was a lot of it. He had the grey eyes that go with it, and like most red-haired young men, he liked a bit of fun.
His name was Duggie Brent. In full, his name was D
ouglas Theodore Brent, but he considered Theodore to be a sissy name, and hid it up as much as possible. His father was a butcher in Romsey, and a lay reader at the Methodist chapel; when his son arrived, it seemed proper to christen him the Gift of God. In later years his father reconsidered that.
In fact, there was nothing much the matter with Duggie Brent except that he didn’t take kindly to the chapel and he took a great deal too kindly to young women. He had a way with them. He had his first girl trouble when he was fourteen, and that was only the first. By the time he was sixteen-and-a-half his father was paying a paternity order for him, and didn’t like it. When he was seventeen, in 1938, he joined the Territorials for fun, faking his age; in 1939 the war broke out and he was mobilised and sent to Durham. Every mother of girls in Romsey breathed a sign of relief.
In the Army they set to work to make a man of him. In that time of war they did not waste much effort in teaching him barrack square drill or dress parades. First they gave him a rifle and taught him how to use it. Then they put a bayonet on the rifle and set him running at a line of sandbag dummies. If you gave the rifle a sharp twist after the lunge, they said, the bayonet came out easily and the wound was a lot bigger.
The next thing they gave him was a Bren gun; he discovered that you could kill a lot of people with that in a very short time, if you got them in open country. In case the enemy were so unsporting as to lie in foxholes, however, they showed him how to use a hand grenade, and how to creep up, covered by his pals, with the Bren gun to lob these in among the Germans in the trench. After that came the Tommy gun, and later the Sten gun, and then he was graduated in the three-inch mortar.
All this was elementary, of course, mere high school stuff. He started on his college course in 1941 at an antitank school, where he was taught that much the quickest way to kill the people in the tank was to set the tank and all on fire. He did an interesting and instructive little course on Ronson Lighters. He learned that you could kill a lot of people with a couple of hundred gallons of blazing oil if you went about the matter with discretion and intelligence. After that he did a course of mines and minelaying, and then a very amusing little course in the preparation of booby traps.
In 1942 he volunteered for the Commandoes, and they really started to teach him to kill people. All that he had learned so far, he discovered, was routine stuff and unworthy of a serious student of the art of combat. Any fool could kill a German with a hand grenade which made a noise and woke up the whole neighbourhood; a man who knew his stuff could creep up in the darkness and do it with a knife from behind, grabbing the mouth and the nose with the other hand to prevent him crying out. You had to be careful not to get bitten, but like all these things it was quite easy when you got the way of it. You had to get into the right position; then you just went so, and so, and so—and there he was, kicking a bit, maybe but very dead.
That was how an average good man who knew his stuff and took an interest in his work would do the job. If you really aimed at the top flights of the art, however, and if you were quick and agile, a knife was quite unnecessary. Duggie Brent went through a course of Unarmed Combat at the end of 1942, where he was taught to kill an enemy with his bare hands. This was the real peak of his military education. By the time he went back to his unit he was able to attack an armed man three stone heavier than himself and kill him with his hands and feet alone in perfect silence.
In 1943 he did so, in the dark outside a public house just off the New Cross Road.
It happened on his embarkation leave, and he was out of the country on a transport for North Africa before the police got on to him. It was a sordid little quarrel between men who had drunk too much to mind their words, after a winter of waiting, exasperation, and irritation with the slow progress of the war. At that time Duggie Brent was walking out with a member of the A.T.S. whose home was at New Cross in the southeast of London. Her name was Phyllis Styles, and she was on leave from her A.A. station in Kent. They had tea together at a Lyons’ and then went to the Odeon cinema. They came out of that, arm in arm, at half-past nine, after three hours of delicious proximity, and to round off the evening they went to the Goat and Compasses for beer.
Mike Seddon was an Irish boilermaker who had made the Goat and Compasses his evening’s entertainment. The evidence did not disclose how much beer he had drunk before Brent and his girl arrived; moreover, it was not significant, because an Irish boilermaker can take an infinite amount of wartime beer before falling over, and as he regularly took home fifteen pounds in his wage pocket, he could afford it. The bar was crowded thick with people in that last hour, so that Brent and his girl and the boilermaker were thrust close together in a corner with their beer.
It was soon after Brent had transferred to the Parachute Regiment, and soon after the maroon beret had been introduced. Mr Seddon took exception to this sartorial idiosyncrasy. “You young fellows running round in fancy hats!” he said scornfully. “They don’t give me no fancy hat to wear. I don’t get no fancy hat. No fancy hat they don’t give me. And why—” he asked the crowd, raising his voice to the injury, “why aren’t they after giving me a fancy hat? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you why I don’t get no fancy hat. It’s because I do a mucking job of work. That’s why. That’s why they don’t give me no fancy hat. Because I do a mucking job of work to win the mucking war!”
There was a laugh. Corporal Brent, beer mug in hand, flushed angrily, and said, “What the hell do you think I do, then?”
The boilermaker was on his own home ground. He came to the Goat and Compasses each evening, and he knew the temper of the crowd and their frustration with the slow building up of war effort. He glanced at the corporal’s chest, innocent of decorations. He said, “Ah, well, just tell us now, me boy. Stand up and tell the whole bloody lot of us. What are you after doing now to win the mucking war?” He turned to the crowd. “Sit on his arse ’n polish his buttons in his fancy hat, that’s what he does. I do a job of work, I do, but they don’t give me no fancy hat.”
Brent opened his mouth to say that he was on embarkation leave and shut it again without speaking; there was no knowing what security snoopers might be within hearing in that crowd. He flushed angrily. He was sensitive to the fact that he had been mobilised in the Army for three-and-three-quarter years, and had never been out of England, and had seen no action at all.
“I do what the sergeant and the officers tells me,” he said angrily. “I don’t have no say.”
“Don’t do no work, either, in the mucking Army,” said Mr Seddon. “Do some of you lads good to come and do a mucking job of work ’stead of walking round with floosies in a fancy hat. A mucking job of work, that’s what’d do the Army good.”
“You lay off the Army and talk clean,” the corporal said furiously. “I got a lady with me.”
The girl laid her hand on his arm. “Come on, Duggie,” she said, “let’s get out of this.”
He shook her off. “I’m not going to have him talking that way,” he exclaimed. “He’s got no right to talk like that!”
“That’s right,” the boilermaker said, swaying a little, menacing, towards them. “You take him away, in his fancy hat ’n all. Bring him back when he’s opened the Second Front ’n I’ll give him a pint.” He paused a moment to consider the proposal. “Two bloody pints,” he said. “Bring him back when he’s done a mucking job of work.”
The wrangle continued for another few minutes with both tempers rising hot; then it was closing time and the barman moved them firmly out at the tail of the crowd, into the dark street.
There was no moon, and it was pitch dark in the blackout outside the pub. On the pavement the boilermaker stood swaying, fourteen or fifteen stone of him, massive and scornful. “The Second Front!” he sneered. “Sure there’ll be no Second Front at all, at all; not till they put some guts into the bloody Army. All the mucking soldiers do is walk round in a fancy hat ’n pick up tarts. Army tarts, in mucking uniform with fancy tarts’ hats, too.”
He shook her off. “That’s right,” he said. “Scum o’ bloody Dublin, over here to see what he can pick up ’n tell the German consul, I suppose. The country’s fair rotten with these bloody Irish bastards.” He turned away. “Come on, Phyl—we’ll leave the mugger be.”
The boilermaker reached out and aimed a kick at him; the heavy boot caught Brent squarely at the base of the spine, infinitely painful. Duggie Brent had never learned to box like a gentleman; there had been no time to teach him that. Blind with fury and with pain, he swung round and in the one movement flung his fancy hat, the maroon beret, straight in Mr Seddon’s face, the opening move in Unarmed Combat, to make your adversary blink and hide from him the terrible kick coming. In the same swing his heavy army boot landed with all his force in the pit of Mr Seddon’s stomach. The boilermaker doubled up with pain. Immediately his adversary was behind him, and there was a rigid, steely arm in battledress around his neck, the elbow passing his chin up and back against the pressure of a knee intolerable against his spine. He kicked and beat the air, but his opponent was behind him, fighting in a way that he had never known. His body was forced up against the wall and bent backwards with a fierce pain, and the arm pressing up his chin prevented him from making any but small, choking sounds.
It was certainly the corporal’s intention to hurt Mr Seddon, to cause him a great deal of pain. In his instruction, however, nobody had ever told him when to stop in order to avoid killing his man. To overcome the boilermaker he had to put out all his strength; I think in that last moment of fierce, straining tussle curiosity may have entered in. Suddenly there was a crack from the man’s back, and he yielded suddenly to the pressure, and gave a great choke, and ceased to struggle. It was a moment or so before Brent realised what he had done.