“Well, I knocked first, grandma.”
She looked at the clock: “I’d better get some tea ready for when the others come. I’ll get the sack if I don’t.” She went into the scullery to put the kettle on the gas. Brian wondered where his grandfather was, pushed the cat away from the fire with his foot: “Shall I get some coal up from the cellar, grandma?”
“Yes, you can do that. Fill me two buckets, there’s a good lad. It’ll save your grandad doing it later.” He clattered down the steps whistling. Sunlight came through the grating, showing many small pieces of coal at the foot of the neatly stacked heap. But he pulled down an unwieldy lump and smashed the half-hundredweight of it to pieces with the hammer. Then he filled the buckets and trundled them back up. “Wash your ’ands and I’ll gi’ you a piece o’ jam pasty,” his grandma said.
Black liquid streamed down the sides of the white sink, and his hands smelt pleasantly of carbolic. The table was laid, and a half-pasty and a cup of tea waited for him. “Pull up a chair and get that down you,” Mary said. The Evening Post had just clattered through the letter-box, and she went to get it. He interrupted her reading. “I’m going up to the Nook tomorrow to see what’s ’appened. Then I’ll go over the Cherry Orchard to see Ken and Alma Arlington.”
The paper rustled to her knees: “You’ll find it altered. The Nook’s down already, and I did hear that the Arlingtons was going to have to leave as well.”
He slept at home that night, and woke up the next morning with Fred on one side and Arthur on the other. Pushing Arthur’s knee from his back, he remembered he was to explore the Cherry Orchard, and an hour later he set off down the street, turning over the Lean towards New Bridge. From its summit he saw that, apart from the immediate fields below, the countryside had gone. Nothing was the same, and beyond the broad new boulevard were houses, in which direction there seemed no set point worth searching for any more. He could go on walking on and on and not meet anyone he knew, could lose himself in the mountains of Derbyshire and reach the Atlantic at Wales without being able to stop a friendly face and say: “Hello, how are you” and “Which is the way back to Nottingham?”
He leapt streams and climbed over stiles in the pocket still left. Flowers hid among hollows and hedgerows, or stood in the wind of hillocks. His hair blew about, and most of the sky was blue. A horse nibbled at clover, and Brian thought it was the same horse that had nibbled there during the last four years he had passed through the field on his way to the Nook.
Across the boulevard he entered streets of new houses, and at the corner where he should turn and see the Nook, neither smoke nor roof was visible. The hedge had been trampled down, and the gate torn from its hinges, and instead of ochred walls he looked through into space towards the dark shade of the yet untouched wood. Nettles and thorns caught his ankles, and only the foundations of the house remained, and he stood in them, walking from section to section, kitchen to parlour, and down into the pantry—filled with bricks, filth, and glass fragments that had once been part of windows showing him marvellous fields and gardens. It hadn’t taken them long to flatten it, he thought, and imagined it being done, beginning with roof and chimney-pots cascading into the yard, then the slow ripping down of walls, and lorries carting everything away.
The garden was a jungle, and he walked through it to the well. The fairytale headstock was no longer there, and he dropped stones down the depths still left: the noise of stone sailing down to stone hypnotized him as he lay over the parapet of rubble, a great pace sounding between the stone leaving his hand and striking the depths below.
The Cherry Orchard was untouched, still in the country. Noises of machinery fell away, giving place to the whistling of birds, and bushes bending in the wind. The silence made him afraid. In the distance he could see the two cottages of the Lakers and Arlingtons, but as he got near there was no sound of water being drawn from the squeaking pump.
Their gate was also smashed. The cottage doors were boarded up and chimney-pots hung slantwise, as if youths had taken shots at them with bricks. He stood still, unable to speak his thoughts that were too deep to be fished up by the bent pin of sentiment. But the disappearance of his friends disturbed him, and trying to put his thoughts into speech was like an iceberg that grows hands in the middle of the ocean attempting to lift itself out of the water. The wood at the end of the garden sent out bird sounds: but no twigs cracked unexpectedly under other children’s feet.
He went into the wood. Where had the Arlingtons and Lakers gone? He knew the land of Nottingham and a few miles beyond, but all was unexplored after that, and his consciousness of it slid over the rim of the world like the sailors in olden days who had no maps. But there were farms, he supposed, other towns and woods and fields, mountains and oceans that went on for ever and ever, until you came back to where you were standing now.
Clear water ran along the stream, and he leapt over. Where had they gone to live, though? He had been to Skegness on a train when he was three, and vaguely remembered the rhythm of the wheels, a green blur of fields as he fell into sleep on his mother’s knee. Then the grey boiling sea burst on to the sand. He brushed fingers over yellow ripples of bittersweet, unknowingly trampled the curved vetch. They’ve gone to another farm, I expect. I wish I could go somewhere, a long way off, to jungles and mountains, and islands. I’ll draw a map when I get home. He ripped leaves from an elderberry bush and rubbed the stain over his hands.
He lay down for a long drink, legs outspread and knees bare against humps of dried earth. Stones on the bottom were of different sizes and shades, with sand and green weed between, like a landscape, a miniature world under glass, uninhabited by minnows or waterboats: an ideal country of No-One-Else, ripe for filling and exploration. His eyes bulged as he swallowed and caterpillars of stone-cold water jerked into his stomach.
Reaching the footpath, he kicked loose stones about, running them gloriously into imaginary unguarded goal-posts. Whistling out of the wood, he charged over the new road and across the field, sat on the embankment fence to watch an express train go fleeing by. Must be going to Skeggy, he thought, forgetting to count the carriages. I wish I was on it.
The ground plan of the Nook was on view to the sky for a long time, because men and materials couldn’t be spared for building houses, due to a war that had started. Its clear markings stayed until the war ended, and Brian didn’t notice that it had been covered with prefabs until he came back from Malaya, by which time its obliteration was looked on as a good thing.
PART THREE
The Ropewalk
CHAPTER 16
Malaya soaked under rain. Brian swore he had never known anything like it: a mountainous backbone labouring against such a punishment of water. It seemed strange that the nearby sea could take so much and, walking to the door, he almost expected to see that the waves—after each flat-handed bash at the sand—had leapt over the beach and were worrying the billet support like ferocious green dogs. Sand was hurled like pepper through the open door. “For Christ’s sake, put wood in th’ole,” shouted a telephone operator. “That stuff’ll blind me; I wain’t be able to see my dirty pictures then.”
“Belt up,” Brian called back, enjoying the grey fury of the storm. “I want to see how much longer we’ve got before tekin’ to the boats.”
“I’d feel safer if I was in one now.” Bush-hats, wellington boots and capes: a hundred yards from breakfast at the mess had forced him to change every stitch. Dampness gave the illusion of cold, and those not on watch sat around in jerseys, a thing unknown since the landing from England five months ago. He remembered a conversation with a melancholic Welsh regular at the transit camp: “The grub’s rotten out there, man. You sleep in tents, what’s more.” His long Bible-backed face wagged over the pint Brian had treated him to: “I wouldn’t go to Malaya if they paid me danger money. Terrible. Insects drive you insane. Not to mention snakes getting in your bed. No pictures, not even on the walls. And boy, you should see it in the monso
on: so much rain you drown if you slip. I’m telling you—you couldn’t go to a worse place.” The memory of the sing-song voice whose owner didn’t take himself seriously made Brian laugh: he closed the door and went back to finish his letter.
“Dear Mam,”—he looked at the envelope already addressed, ON ACTIVE SERVICE scrawled across the top, which made him laugh because the war had been over a good two years. I can’t act, and I’m nobody’s bleeding servant. I’m just on a free trip, a poor man’s Cook’s Tour to the Far East. He threw the envelope away and addressed another, writing the initials OAS in the bottom left corner where he hoped no one would see them.
“Dear Mam, thanks for the Daily Mirrors. I had a good read when I was on watch in my hut in the paddy field, where I sit sending out morse code every day. I went to Pulau Timur the other day and got drunk. I go once a month when I get paid. I go with a gang of pals, and we take a boat two miles over the water.
“I hope everything’s O.K. in Nottingham. Does Pauline come to see you? If not, why don’t you visit her? She don’t have much time with the kid, and neither of us are having much married life, me being out here. Give my love to dad. I wish he could write to me sometime, because I’d like to hear from him.” A washbowl near his foot was set to catch water from the leaking roof, and he pushed it dead under the main fall when it missed a few drops. “It’s raining at the moment,” he wrote, and rounded the letter off: “Your loving son, Brian.”
Half an hour remained before going on watch, so he lay back for a drag, staring up through his mosquito-net at the rafters and palm-leaf roof. They’d dished out the new identity cards that day, and the photo turned it into a convict passport, with details splayed to the left of it: Aircraftsman Second Class Brian Seaton, nineteen, five feet nine, medium build and blue eyes. No distinguishing marks. That’s not much of a description, but I suppose it’s the best they can do because if I was a humpbacked cripple I wouldn’t be here, would I? He took the card from his shirt pocket. What a mug! I’ve gone thinner since I came, so I’d better be careful or else I’ll sweat mysen to death. I’ve got the same mad starers as the old man, except that mine are blue and I look a bit cross-eyed on this. A good tan and hair like pig bristles. Christ, I’d better put it away.
Maybe they got a file on all of us at Base, like coppers: “I sentence you to two years’ hard service in Malaya, which is the maximum sentence the law allows. That will perhaps teach you to be eighteen and think you can get away with it. Next case.” He imagined the extended dossier:
Politics: Socialist; used to read Soviet Weekly.
Sex-life: Plenty until he fell foul of the authorities and received his two years. Five-fingered widow now.
Complexes: Mother, father, and inferiority.
Patriotism: Nil. Wants watching.
Favourite film star: Jeanne Crain.
Anything worthwhile: Good at wireless-operating and earns his six bob a day. Works sixty hours a week—so we won’t let him go yet.
Discipline: None. Even wears civvies on duty.
An argument brewed up between Hansford and Kirkby. Hansford was a brawny dark-haired southerner, a nineteen-year-old know-all halfway between callow youth and a dead-set staidness. He had an upper lip permanently curled, a disfigurement of spirit rather than a physical defect, for it accentuated all his moods. When he was happy and good-natured in the canteen, others drew around him for the hilarious fun that was bound to break; but when broody and irascible, he infected the whole billet, with the risk that the others might turn on him. This vacillation in his harelipped nature—hardly any fault of his—tended to make him unpopular more than anything. He was naked now but for a small towel lapped around, stood truculently holding soap and flannel. He’d have been out the door in five seconds, except that, nosy and intelligent, he happened to hear Pete Kirkby tell someone that he hadn’t been called up but had volunteered. Hansford fastened the towel tighter around his waist, a set disbelieving expression that was in itself an insult to the person doubted. “You didn’t volunteer,” he said with a hard drawl, implying that no one could be that barmy. “Come off it. Tell us another one.”
“I did,” Kirkby answered calmly. Brian reached for a tobacco tin to make a cigarette. His tastes in smoking varied according to mood and, often, affluence. He tried a pipe, black Chinese stoogies, ready-rolled or tailor-mades—each label signifying calm or agitation, contempt or well-being. Hansford lifted his lip of incredulity still further: “Come off it, you bloody liar.”
“Belt up,” Brian called out. “It ain’t got owt to do with yo’ whether he volunteered or not.” Kirkby was an old pal, a Radford lad from a long time back, when they’d known each other at the cardboard-factory where both had worked at fifteen. Kirkby was short and well-built, as strong as a donkey, taciturn yet now and again struck with the bright light of humour, which had flared particularly when Brian in the factory tried to indoctrinate him with his own politics. As labourers they had worked like a team, lumping sacks of flour and alum from outside lorries to inside pastebins, or hanging up trolley after trolley of wet fresh-made cardboard in the stifling heat of the drying-rooms. “I volunteered because I was fed up,” Kirkby had the patience to explain. But Brian knew it wasn’t the right way to tackle Hansford, who responded: “Christ, I’d never get that fed up.”
“Don’t worry,” Kirkby said, “I’ll be out the same time as yo’, ’cause I only cut my throat for the Duration of the Present Emergency. I’d ’ave bin called up anyway.”
Brian blew clouds of tobacco smoke over his row of shining boots, hearing the dull woollen punch of breakers on the nearby sand and the shattering bouts of rain flailing the roof—punctuating deadly boredom between watches. Che-Din, the Malay youth, worked well to keep the shine on their boots. You’d think they were his pride: two lines of glistening toe-caps along each side of the billet—though Brian imagined he hated their guts even more than he did himself, which was saying a lot. Che-Din was small, compact, and delicate, sometimes came to work in a sari and trilby hat. He once pointed out a tree at which Malays and Chinese had been shot by the Japanese, and Brian asked him whether he preferred the Japs to rule in Malaya, or the British. Che-Din shrugged and said: “What does it matter? They both make us work for nearly nothing”—a response which infuriated the unpredictable Hansford, who threw a boot that clouted his shoulder, bringing tears of shame to Che-Din’s eyes and driving him from the billet for three days. “I didn’t mean to hit him,” Hansford said by way of apology to the others, who cursed him as much for the bad luck of his accurate aim as for the impulse that led him to pick up the boot.
“I suppose you got more than you bargained for when they sent you out to this bloody pigsty?” He sat on his bed, as if to set his argument in for the evening, when Kirkby only wanted to get back to his western. Yet Kirkby was sometimes flattered when people quarrelled with him: “I enjoy it out here. I’d never ’ave seen this country if I hadn’t joined up, would I?”
Hansford wiped his crutch. “I can think of better ways to see the world than being shipped out like cattle on a troop-ship.”
“So can I, mate. I’d never earn the dough to do it, though.”
“You should sign on,” Hansford said, a dry cocksure assumption that he’d got the upper hand. “Twenty-one years would do you just right.”
Kirkby grinned. “You think I’m loony?” trying to hide irritation behind his grin, but not succeeding. “Three years never hurt anybody.” Hansford descended to the centre laneway: “The best three years of your life, don’t forget.”
“Come off it,” Brian chipped in. “Every year’s the best year of your life.”
“Not if you’re in uniform.” Hansford turned from Brian’s effort to bring the argument against him, and looked hard at Kirkby as if he’d like to hit him but wasn’t sure of the reception he’d get. Brian could have told him. He was madder than Kirkby now, and Kirkby’s grin became genuine because he’d noticed it as well. “The three are going O.K. for
me,” he laughed.
“You must have a warped mind,” Hansford threw back. Others were listening, looking up from books, cigarettes, thought, or emptiness. “Not so much of the warped, Hansford,” Thompson, who was in for seven-and-five, shouted threateningly. “As long as my mind’s warped the way I want it to be,” Kirkby said, “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll be going back on the same banana boat as you, but I’m not griping all the same. I like the sun and I like swimming. I even get paid for being here. Not bad for a year or two.” Hansford could not penetrate such satisfaction: “You ought to get a job writing recruiting posters,” he said, and padded down the steps to take his shower. Brian stamped on his fag-butt with bare feet, then pulled on his wellington boots.
Quarter to six: he slung a cape over his shoulders, took up his haversack with: “See yo’ lot in the morning,” and walked into a wall of rain. He couldn’t hear himself think above the noise it made, as it spat out a gust that raced across his mouth. The covered lorry stood fifty yards away, and he climbed in the back. Singing came from a nearby billet, an antidote because so much rain was frightening, gave the impression it would never stop until the universe filled up and the world sank. Coconuts now and again fell like Big Bertha shrapnel: a quick swish as they came through branches and thumped themselves on to wet soil.
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