He did a belly-crawl away from the front line every few minutes and lay on his back until hands and knees had cooled, then he rolled over and went forward again. I’ll bet there aren’t things much worse at sea. You might die quick there in a storm by drowning, but here you could easily snuff it by inches, of consumption—though God knows I can’t say which is worse: a life on the treadmill or to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Thank God I don’t have to take my pick. A shovel’s all I need, so’s I can dig myself out of a grave as well as into it like I’ve done today, or look like doing if I’m lucky and get cracking faster than I’m doing now. It’s no good staying here too long, buried like a corpse in the dusty guts of Robinson’s old factory, shovelling the gold of my heart out for all I know, hour after bleeding hour where I can’t see a thing—though I expect I’d make a good collier. Even though I’m not small, I’m getting practice sticking a thing like this, so if I’m lucky I’ll get to be a Bevin Boy instead of being sent to fight the Germans, though I’d rather do neither but go my own way to Kingdom Come.
He was working faster than he’d done all day, driven by some inner motor to a higher speed instead of slackening off, slicing the spade into the last few feet of soot to be cleared, scooping it into the pans, and using the flat of his hand as a sweeping brush to gather into a heap what the spade was too clumsy to reach.
The day had gone: he hadn’t seen it get light and wouldn’t see it get dark. I’d go off my loaf if it was like this every day. It occurred to him that he was working too fast, heart racing and throat bone-dry, arms aching too much to control. Why? he wondered. What for? he asked himself. Come on, can you tell me that? Why are you going so mad-headed? Why don’t you take your sweat, you barmy bleeder? He had already stopped, pushed back the pans, and lay full length, a blissful going like a pint of thick mild into his limbs. What’s the point of going so hard? If you don’t finish today, you’ll finish tomorrow.
But he wanted to get out of the earth, to see daylight and smell fresh air, to walk in the wind-thumped streets even if only to see the odd star above dark rooftops, to be out, away, a thousand miles off. He opened his eyes: “I’ll leave this putrid firm. I’ll get my release and go somewhere else, even if I have to bike five miles there and back every day. I’ve had enough of this, one way or another.” The thought made him happy and his spade scooped at the wall of soot. Between lying half-asleep and a refreshed burst of action, his mind had been blank; he wasn’t aware of thinking about getting back to work or making a decision—but a spark of life had exploded in his limbs and he was going forward even faster, ripping away the obstacle to he didn’t know where.
A spade that didn’t belong to him flew past his face and chipped a piece out of the brickwork, and suddenly Bill Eddison’s voice bellowed a foot away from the blackness in front: “Well, if it ain’t owd Brian! We’ve finished the bleeding thing at last.” They threw their arms around each other, and went on laughing in their victory.
CHAPTER 19
Alone in the camp library, a mug of tea at his elbow just left by the char-wallah, he unrolled an outline survey map of Pulau Timur. A fresh batch of radio operators had been flown up from Singapore, and fourteen days’ leave at Muka holiday camp had at last been handed out to him. He felt fresh after a shower, not yet sweat-soaked from the uprisen sun, dressed in immaculate white shirt and shorts brought back by the Chinese dhobi woman an hour since: his finger traced the coast up from Muong and stopped at Muka—a palm-lined bay facing Gunong Barat across the few miles of flat, variously marked blues of the water. Between swigs of tea his eyes roamed the map: printed in 1940, he noticed, a time for history books—over the hill and far away, an iceberg melted by the ever-turning suns of time, a year he remembered vividly as the date when his cousins Colin and Dave one by one went into the army and one by one, after a few weeks, came out again. He watched them return when everybody else seemed to be going, a strange thing, though underneath his quiet curiosity at their khaki uniforms draped over a chair-back like the skin-trophy of some animal was a profound and unquestionable certainty that they were doing something right and good. Ada helped them, and so did the rest, for both climate and tradition were right for it. Out of a dozen able-bodied men in all remotely connected branches of the family, only two went into the army and stayed, and one was killed in Tunisia. “I told you so,” was the verdict of the rest, who either deserted or found their way into some sort of reserved occupation. It must be a record, Brian thought, for one family. Nobody can say we didn’t do our bit for freedom; though what I’m doing here I don’t know—except that there isn’t a war on.
His world and everybody else’s had changed since then, and it had been about time, though his life at the moment seemed like an island set aside from the main coastline of his well-trod continent. Malaya was an interlude, he felt, and he was set out in the blue, like the song that had been sweeping and saturating the country for the past six months: “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” records of it being played in the cafes, whistled, sung, let forth like opium from wireless sets. On Radio Malaya’s request programme it was called for by dozens of people, Malays, Chinese, British, week by week, an inundation of names so that eventually the announcer didn’t bother to read the list but just let the sugary music fill out over the country. For weeks also Brian hadn’t been able to cut it from his mind. One minute he liked the tune, then hated it, but whistled it unknowingly as he crossed the airstrip every morning, walking from the control tower with waterbottle and haversack swinging against his thighs, crossing the burning runway into the scrub-waste of the other side—out, it seemed, into the middle of nowhere, with the blue horizon burning all round.
But in the emptiness a square patch of ground had been cleared and set off for a new DF hut, and it was his work to help two mechanics unpack a straddle of enormous crates and fit hut sides, roof, and aerials into position. The three of them laboured all day in the sun, stripped to the waist and burned brown. The new hut would be a luxury box compared to the old one, set on dry ground and fed by electricity through a half-buried cable alongside a new track that would take lorries right up to the door. The station when finished and fully rigged would be operated day and night, a twenty-four-hour watch whether planes were up or not—though Brian knew that no one would give a sod about a nod or two of sleep at the deepest pitch of the morning. For weeks there had been talk of building a new DF hut, and now, out of the weak-willed climate, one had arrived and was being knit together by plan and numbers as if it were a Meccano set. A new PBX had been set up as well, and several radar devices installed in the runway. There was even talk of replacing the antique control tower by an indestructible skyscraper. The airstrip was being tarted up for a night out—as if for a war or something, Brian thought, a cramp in his guts at the idea of it. Everyone was busier on the camp also, giving it an alien breath of being there for some purpose, which it hadn’t possessed when he first arrived. He noticed it caught in the increased rush at meal-times, in the latrines when in a hurry for a shower before dashing off to see Mimi, in the signals section when more channels were being worked than ever before, or in the new smartness of those who worked in the long headquarters hut. Sometimes you’d think a bloody war was already on, except that he felt the main combat as yet to be between himself and the threat of discipline emanating from HQ. The shift workers of the signals section were the last to be touched by it: they were excused all parades and guard duties, allowed in late for meals on production of a chit, which any enterprising wireless operator could take from the signals officer’s drawer and sign himself. If the orderly officer came through the billet late in the morning and wanted to know why he was dead to the world and tight-rolled in his sheet, he grunted from under his net that he’d been on watch the night before—so that the OO walked on, a bit quieter, if anything. The seven months’ hard studying for a sparks badge certainly paid off.
It was a simple map, and easy to memorize. He sat back in a wooden armchair to drink his tea, a
nd wait in peace until the lorry drew up at eleven to take a gang of them across to the island. A fortnight’s leave had been something to anticipate and when that was over he could look forward to operating the new DF hut, and then something else would turn up, and finally he would find himself on the boat chopping the blue waves back to England. Time went faster when there were agreeable events to hope for—when they arrived you noticed that the intervening weeks or months had been killed mercilessly stone-dead, hadn’t even the value in memory of the sloughed-off dried skin of a snake.
Already “Roll on the Boat” had become a catch-phrase of liberation: if capable of flying an Auster or Tiger Moth, he would have sky-written it above the sloping greenback of Pulau Timur—but contented himself with sending it by morse during what seemed the empty hours of his nightwatch, only to hear the initials ROTB throatily repeated from some half-asleep operator at Karachi or Mingaladon, a quartet trail of four-letter symbols piped out of electrical contacts by a heart-guided but distant hand. Locked fast in the Devil’s Island of conscription, everyone wanted to go home, to drop gun, spanner, morse key, pen, or cookhouse spatula, and bat like boggery to the nearest blue-lined troopship. Inconspicuous chalk marks behind their beds digited the months already served, as well as giving the current demob group ready for release, and after a while the figures looked to him like some magical transposition of formulae for exploding the atoms that held their prison bars in place.
He held himself from the gala of hope and speculation, living too much in the present to imagine going back to Nottingham. Not that hooks didn’t exist to draw him there, for he had been married to Pauline nearly a year before leaving England, and she had a kid of his to keep her company while he was away. On the other hand, he had spent no more than a few weeks with her, and there had been no real married life between them yet. She was no great letter-writer, and a year apart was too long a time to keep the ropes fast around him. He was unable to make chalk marks at the back of his bed, though he knew to a day that ten months of his time abroad were still to be somehow gone through, and that to exhibit these future scars called for a waste of energy and spirit that he couldn’t bring himself to spare so easily.
He grew turbulent and black, ready to smash down the peace of this long hut walled up with books because he didn’t know the reason for it. The sound of lorries lassoing the MT section with noise, and gangs passing by to the NAAFT, didn’t draw him out of it. “That’s wonderful, Brian,” Mimi said when he told her of his fourteen days’ leave. “You haven’t had a holiday since you came.” He wondered why she was so happy: she’ll miss me, after all, as well as me missing her. Yet his suspicions never lasted long, and her response reassured him, gentle and concerned as she lay on the bed and leaned over to kiss him. A blind urge to contrariness took hold of him, a hatred of the death-like placidity that seemed to lurk at the heart of her, and without waiting for the kisses he sat up and pulled her down, pressing the immobility of her mouth against his own to kill the passion in himself in an effort to get at hers.
She drew back, seeing all, he thought, yet giving nothing. “I’ll be away for three bloody weeks,” he shouted. “Are you bothered or aren’t you?”—immediately regretting the explosion of his big mouth. This wasn’t the way to go on, her silence and eyes were telling him. What is, then? Christ Almighty, what is? He had to be satisfied with the act of love alone, and it wasn’t enough.
“I’m sad as well, Brian.” Her smooth nakedness rubbed against him, dispelled the stabs of his deeper gloom. “I wish you weren’t going.”
“So do I.”
“No, you don’t. It’s good for you to have a rest. You need it. You work too hard, much harder than the others.” Maybe she’s right: them fourteen-hour stretches are driving me round the double bend and halfway up the fucking zigzags, though on the other hand it’s nothing at all when you come to think on it. “They run a bus from Muka,” he grinned. “I’ll be able to see you every night at the Boston Lights—if you can spare me a dance.”
“Yes,” she said vaguely, unanswering, a neutrality he would never be able to break down—though he’d never stop trying. She placed her hand in his groin, but he was stone-cold, and his black mood returned, filling him with an impulse to smash her for trying a trick like that. “You got a better idea, then?” he asked roughly.
Her hand pulled away. “Come and see me if you like.” An endless tape, he thought, that wants snipping with scissors, then maybe it’ll finish and begin to give off the real thing. A wind roughed-up the treetops outside, a nervous agitation that completed nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his shirt. “Don’t bleeding-well put yoursen out, will yer? If yer don’t want me to come, say so.” She gripped him tight, her lips between his shoulder blades before his shirt could swing into place. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“I don’t give a sod.”
“I’ll come out and see you at Muka. We can find a lonely spot on the beach for a picnic. I’ll take the morning ferry and then the bus. How do you like that?”
A blinding flash caught her in the face, knocked her against the wall. When the knife fell deeply enough between them, all was well. Her small fists struck back, and they were holding each other on the bed, buried under a tree of kisses while the wind moaned outside.
He walked to the billet for his pack. Pete Kirkby and Baker were due out on the same lorry. Baker was a Londoner (his old man a Stock Exchange fluctuator who had made a small fortune), tall with steel-grey eyes, short-sighted under rimless spectacles, fair hair shorn to a crewcut. “Any sign of the lorry yet?” Kirkby asked.
“It’s on the airstrip running races with its shadow to pass the time away,” Brian said. Baker fell back on his charpoy, worn out after a night on watch: “All I want is sleep. I’m browned off with sending morse night after night.”
“I was up as well,” Kirkby said, stuffing trunks and slippers into his pack; “took a thousand-group message from some whoring slob at Singapore at four this morning. It was wicked. The bloke there was too shagged to send and I was too wanked to get it. I nearly went up the pole. We didn’t finish till six: two solid hours. If this leave hadn’t come I’d have fastened myself to a transmitter and switched the power on.”
Baker gathered his aeromodel plans and stowed a supply of balsa strips into his case, hoping to finish a new design in time for a competition. As he looked through the open doors, there was a glaze over his eyes that had gone beyond fatigue, a puzzling stare such as might precede a fit of madness and set him running into the breakers for a longer sleep than he really needed. He was undisturbed by a fly that crawled over his knee. Brian felt he had been miscast as a wireless operator: his morse lacked rhythm, leapt from his key-contacts in a way that jangled the ears of operators trying to receive it several hundred miles away. He disliked the discipline of radio procedure, possibly because he’d had too much of similar endurances at the minor public school he often boasted of having been to. He was contemptuous of wireless operating, saying that if you had a natural sense of split-timing and a parrot-sized memory to hold all the rules and pages of Q-signs, then you had reached the limits of your job—which as far as he was concerned made it work for inferior minds since it gave a satisfaction too complete to be valuable or exhilarating. His passion was for a deeper form of life, engines, motorbicycles, model aeroplanes, something unpredictable in motion and performance to be made out of bits and pieces. According to his story, he had been a madman on the dirt-track in England, splitting the silence of Surrey back-lanes on Sunday afternoons with an equally daredevil girl riding pillion and screaming into his ear for him to do a ton. His low forehead, aquiline nose, and thin straight lips gave an impression of a supercilious pride that often drew anger when others in the billet suspected it might be justified, though the haughty look was little more than a mask of control over fires of recklessness burning underneath.
Kirkby folded a wad of redbacks into his wallet, and they went out to the lorry. Bake
r wore a bright green floral shirt open at the chest and flapping down over Betty Grable shorts, a Christmas tree of cameras and luggage. They sat fifteen minutes on the open back, raging against the dilatory driver who’d vanished behind the cookhouse. “We’ll miss the ferry if he ain’t careful,” Kirkby groused. “We could a made our own way and bin over at Muka hours ago.” Baker launched into a bout of singing in response to Brian’s remark that Muka would be paradise without a squeak of morse for fourteen days.
He reached into his pack for a white trilby, which he bashed into shape and put on. “For Christ’s sake, stop your row,” came a shout from a nearby billet. “I’m trying to get my head down.”
“Belt up,” Baker railed, “and get some overseas time in. You pink-kneed ponce.”
“Bugger off,” the voice called back, a little wearier for not having the blazing sun overhead or such a well-developed string of hackles as Baker. “I’ve been out here five years.”
“Tell me another,” Baker shouted. “I was in Baghdad before you were in your dad’s bag.”
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