by Brian Aldiss
My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’
‘Cavaliers, and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano though he is an Inglesite.
‘We do not believe it,’ replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.’
The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
Book One
The Lair of the Monkey God
Book Two
The Old Five-fingered Widow
Book Three
God’s Own Country
Introduction
Whilst writing The Hand-Reared Boy, I began to consider a further book, where we might meet with my Stubbs when adult. Taking the time scale into consideration, it seemed likely that young Stubbs would join the army. A Soldier Erect is wholehearted in its awfulness. Here is Horatio Stubbs again, fresh from his adventures in the first novel of the trilogy.
We find him now complaining about a party, which was planned to celebrate his departure overseas with the Mendip Regiment to fight the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. (Burma until this date had been part of the British Empire.) Stubbs begins his account in the grumbling mode – a mode which endures, with the volume being turned up throughout the book. Complaint about war is hardly surprising, but the entire novel has implications beyond this, confronting us with passages full of filth, fear and frustrated fornications; passages engendered in large part by the horrors and hungers of global disruption.
Stubbs and his young mates, ill-informed as they are, have a hatred for the lower orders of Indian society with which they are forced to mingle. One might wonder what the Indians of today would make of these violent episodes and impressions, launched upon us with demonic energy.
A short extract might tell us what we are in for. Here are the words written on a card a beggar hands round on a dreary train journey. It reeks of human misery – yet I believe it to be a humorous triumph.
‘Sir,
This unfortunate idiot is a lunatic from the malayli states. He has not escaped. He asks you to be excused. This is not his fault. The bearer was always dumb. He cannot speak since after birth. The foolish fellow and his brothers are also speechless and without voice. He lost his parent. They early departed their sense. His younger sister is also blind and demented.
These three depend on this one. He laboured by the railway. Their mother was never known. His auntie died in the prime. His father was serving longwhile in South Indian Railway Co. Ltd., so Railway Officers have excused this imbecile and so kindly pay him charity and God help you.
Signed: A.R.M. Shoramanor Madras Dorosani Cristian.
Mrs Pandambai, B.A. (Oxen) Principal Theosophical Ladies’ College, Lucknow.
Please to Re-Turn This Notice After The Execution.’
Once we arrive in Burma with Stubbs we find things a little better. The Commander gives the order:
‘During this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima Garrison.’
There follows a record of hard and dangerous times, and though accounts of the war in Burma have drifted into several of my other books, here lies, I think, the most comprehensive account of a struggle staged so far from help and home.
Still moving, the novel is summarised by the resigned despondency of the sentences with which it concludes:
‘The early monsoon rain began to fall over our positions. Down the road, the guns were pounding away at Viswema.’
Brian Aldiss,
Oxford 2012
Book One
The Lair of the Monkey God
As the last party-guests were groping their way into the blackout, I belted upstairs and shut myself in my bedroom. My dressing-gown fell off its hook as the door slammed, dropping like a dying man, one arm melodramatically over the bed. I dragged my sports-jacket off my shoulders, rolled it into a bundle, and flung it into the far corner of the room, all of ten feet away.
On the top of the chest-of-drawers stood a carved bear, given to me on my tenth birthday by an uncle lately back from Switzerland, a bag of green apples, a framed photograph of Ida Lupino, my uniform dress cap, and three woollen vests. I swept them all off and climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, where I squatted, groaning and rolling my head from side to side.
God, what sodding, shagging, scab-devouring misery it all was! The humiliation – the ignobility – of the whole shitting shower! The creepy, crappy narrowness of my parents’ life! And that was supposed to be my embarkation leave party before I went abroad to serve my king and cunting country! If that was embarkation leave, roll on bloody germ warfare!
By kneeling up a little on the chest-of-drawers, I could press my head and shoulders against the ceiling and so resemble a deformed caryatid. Thinking vicious army thoughts, I pushed one side of my face against the flaking ceiling. My jaw slumped down, my tongue dripped saliva, my eyelids flickered like an ancient horror film, revealing acres of white-of-eye. At the same time, I managed to tremble and twitch in every muscle. Jesus, what a wet dream of a party that was! Party? I asked aloud, in tones of incredulity. Paaarty? Paaaa-ha-ha-ha-rty? Paaaa-urrgh-harty?
And I thought of the other blokes in ‘A’ Company. Their genial and loutish faces drifted before my inner eye, their blunt noses and short haircuts almost welcoming … Wally, Enoch, Geordie, old Chalkie White, Carter the Farter, Chota Morris … Tonight, they’d all be getting hopelessly pissed or screwing girls – or so they would stoutly claim when we got back to barracks tomorrow. And I – I, sober and unstuffed, would have to lie to save my face, to subscribe to the infantry myth that one spent one’s whole leave yarking it up some willing bit of stuff in a pub yard. I cramped my shoulders harder against the ceiling, hoping that I might burst through the lath-and-plaster into the gales of the false roof and erupt against the lagged water-tank. You mean to say that was the best they could do in the way of a party? For me, for the conquering hero, for the pride of the sodding Mendips?
The whole idea had been a farce from the beginning. My father had never shown one flicker of enthusiasm. My brother Nelson had managed to wangle leave from Edinburgh to see me – ‘for the last time’, as he expressed it – and the farewell party had been his idea. He had jockeyed the parents into it.
‘It’s not easy in wartime,’ my father said, shaking his head. ‘You youngsters don’t understand. I’m on warden duty, too, this week.’
‘Go on, Colonel Whale would let you have a bottle of whisky, since Horry’s going overseas. It’s a special occasion!’
‘Whisky? I’m not having whisky! It’d spoil the party! You’d only get drunk!’
‘That’s what whisky is for, Daddy,’ my sister Ann said, in her long-suffering voice. We’d become good at long-suffering voices, simply through imitation.
My mother quite liked the idea of a party if she could possibly scrounge the clothing coupons to buy a pretty dress. She felt so dowdy. That was one reason why she never wanted to see anyone these days. She looked unhappily round the sitting-room which, despite many years of punishing Stubbsian teetotalism, still held a faint beery aroma, in memory of the days when the house had been an inn.
‘It really needs a good spring-clean before anyone comes in here!’ Mother said, looking willowy and wan, mutely asking always to be forgiven for some great unspoken fault. ‘The windows look so awful with that sticky paper on them, and I just wish we could have some new curtains.’
Certainly the house did appear neglected, not only because of the war, but because my mother’s nervous disease was gaining on her. Housework was beyond her, she claimed. She grew more willowy by the week, to our irritation.
Eventually, Nelson and Ann and I browbeat father into holding a cele-ha-ha-bration. Ann was sixteen; she burst into tears and said she would not let her brother go overseas unless he had a party first.
So who do you think turned up that
evening, tramping dolefully up our steps and into the living-room, to sit affrontedly about in their suits and complain of the tastelessness of sausages, the decline of moral standards, and the military failings of the Russians, the Australians, the Canadians, the Americans, and the French? Why, flakey-scalped little Mr. Jeremy Church, father’s head clerk from the bank, with his cream-puff-faced wife Irene, very free with her ‘lakes’ and ‘dislakes’; and my grandma, getting on a bit now, but scoring a shrewd blow against the times in which we lived by revealing how sandbags were all filled with nothing but ordinary seaside sand; and the Moles from the grocery, prim but patriotic, bringing with them an old aunt of Mrs. Mole’s, who had been bombed out of her London flat and wasn’t afraid to tell you about it; and mother’s friend Mrs. Lilly Crane, whose husband was in something-or-other, with her daughter Henrietta, sub-titled ‘The Enigma’ by Ann; and Nelson’s current girl friend, Valerie, watching for Nelson’s signal to scram as soon as convenient; and dear old Miss Lewis from next door who still went to church every Sunday, rain or shine, although she was pushing a hundred-and-something, or could it be two hundred-and-something?; and a sexy friend of Ann’s, Sylvia Rudge. Sixteen of us all told, the only people left in the East Midlands that mortality and conscription had spared. A dead lively lot. Mother handed the dates round with her renowned Light Touch, smiling sadly in my direction as one and all offered their condolences that she was having her younger son snatched from her. More of a funeral than a celebration.
Average age of party – fifty? Ninety? Who cared? I crouched on my perch trying to work out when the visitors had last – if ever – had it in. It was hard to imagine that the females were penetrable or, if penetrable, that the males were capable of penetrating them. Did Mr. Mole occasionally manage a subterranean passage up Mrs. Mole, over a sack of demerara, under a flag-draped photo of Winnie with his two fingers in the air?
From my disadvantage point, I could watch my reflection in the mirror of the wardrobe, which stood near the door and opposite the chest-of-drawers. Now there was a born shagger, if ever I saw one, given the chance. I stuck my feet in the top (sock and handkerchief) drawer and spread my arms out along the ceiling. The sight reminded me of something. Pulling the hair down over my eyes, I pantomimed a corny crucifixion scene, with plenty of bleary and reproachful dekkos up at the plaster. ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I looked more like Hitler throwing one of his fits than Christ in final aggs.
Why this obsession with Christ, for God’s sake? Perhaps I’d been Christ in a previous existence – during my mid-teens, I had nursed a sneaking belief in the theory of reincarnation. Oh Christ, don’t let me have been Christ! I dropped the crucifixion act and made monkey faces at myself.
You could rule out all the women at the party straight away, except for Valerie, Henrietta Crane, and Sylvia. Valerie was Nelson’s bit of crumpet, so that left Henrietta Crane and Sylvia. That’ll show you how desperate I was, not to rule out Henrietta Crane straight away! The Enigma was in her mid-twenties – perhaps five years older than I. A heavily-powdered girl or was it just that she had never been dusted?, who looked as if her clothes, flesh, eyes, hair, everything, were made out of a single ambiguous material – stale sponge cake, say. Even I, despite frequent practice shots, could not imagine her undressed, or even with her hair down. Did she ever run for a bus, or fart, or burst out laughing? Henrietta Crane was the sort of girl you didn’t have to go near to know that her breath would smell of Kensitas cigarettes and Milk of Magnesia. You never find girls like that any more, thank God. They were all scrapped at the end of the war.
Which left our Syl. As the party warmed up – i.e., came to something approaching room-temperature – Ann was working our gramophone, then giving out with a Carroll Gibbons recording of That Old Black Magic, and Sylvia was standing beside her, jiffling to the tunes. It was a wind-up gramophone, brought out of the air-raid shelter now that we were not having air raids any more, so that it needed the two of them to keep it cranked and loaded. I prowled round the perimeter of the little conversations, attracted by Sylvia’s jiffle.
Her bum moved round to about ten o’clock and then worked anticlockwise to about two-thirty, after which it repeated the gambit. Since she was putting more weight on one leg than on the other, her buttocks were not quite in synch: the left was with Carroll Gibbons, while the right worked on a wilder melody of its own. What a sight! I could feel my pulses getting sludgey. Sod it, I had to have it in tonight – tomorrow, fuck knows what would happen tomorrow! My stomach gave a thin whine at the mere thought of tomorrow … At least Syl could move, unlike Henrietta Crane. Syl was small and rather shifty-looking, but by no means as ancient as The Enigma. Lumps of breast could be seen under a blue dress, although they were unable to coincide entirely with the tit-positions sewn into the dress. Of course, it would be an old dress of her mother’s cut down. I’d met Our Syl’s mother, but did not let that put me off. I smiled, she smiled, still working the buttocks in friendly fashion. Or perhaps they worked by themselves.
‘So you’re off then, Horatio?’
‘The war’s been taking too long. The War Office has sent for me at last.’
‘… “I hear your name, and I’m aflame …” Lushy song! What do you look like in your uniform? Smashing, I bet! All dressed for action!’
‘How’d you like to see me in nothing at all?’
‘Horatio, what do you mean?’
‘Stripped for action!’
‘Ooh, we’ve got a right one here!’ she told Ann.
Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a glass in her hand. ‘Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn’t let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!’
‘I only just came over—’
‘Circulate, dear – And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!’ These family pleasantries all sotto voce.
If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in Wake Island, which I had seen five times in the camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father’s instinct to have no booze during the evening. ‘It only spoils the party.’ No, come on, he didn’t really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother’s sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green glasses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old turd he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.
‘See you later,’ I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting sexual innuendo they would take.
I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.
The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake – vests, spencers, brassieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my sexual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey vulvas. The prick gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.
Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her – more for the sake of ‘A’ Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surreptitiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my arse.
‘So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta – and your mother. Didn’t have any trouble getting here in the blackout?’
‘So
you’ve just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?’ That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.
‘That’s right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.’
‘Just two days, in fact.’
I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath … ‘Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight …’ ‘Yes, that’s right, just two days, in fact!’ said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.
‘And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?’
‘First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.’
‘Well, that is the Army, isn’t it? Where are you going to go?’
‘That’s a military secret, Mrs. Crane, which I am unhappily unable to reveal.’ A military secret securely kept from me, I might have added. While we talked, Henrietta Crane kept looking at her mother, rather than me, her fat little lips glistening as she sipped the burgundy. There was a faint hope that if I waited long enough (say five days) she might get pissed and shed all her moral standards; if her moral standards were in proportion to the number of her underclothes – I was convinced that such a relationship existed – then the hope was faint indeed, and more than one bottle of Church’s burgundy would be called for.
‘Will you be fighting then?’ Mrs. Crane asked. Her thin Midland accent made the verb sound the way Southerners say ‘farting’, while her tone suggested that, whatever I was going to do, it was best I did it quietly in a back street.
‘Aye, I expect I’ll be doing a bit of farting,’ I replied.
More in stupor than in anger, I said to Henrietta, ‘It’s getting stuffy in here with all this fag smoke, and the room starts to stink of beer when it warms up. Would you like to come and see our air-raid shelter out the back?’