The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Horry’s just going to tell us,’ Di said, almost simultaneously waving impatiently at me to continue and wiping the beer froth from his lips.

  ‘I thought I’d go and have a shufti at the bibi and, just as I was getting there, I glanced back – and who do I see but our Sergeant Fucking Meadows!’

  ‘Likely he was going to have a basinful himself, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Di said, grinning. ‘They’re dead crafty, these sergeants.’

  ‘He was hanging about waiting to catch someone, that’s what I reckon. Spying on us! So I didn’t let on I’d spotted him, but I thought, “Christ, now I’m in the shit, what do I do now?” I mean, if I’d turned back, I’d have walked right into him. So then I had this bright idea – I thought I’d have him on, just for a lark.’

  We all sat there pulling at our fags and swigging beer. The canteen lights came on. Night had arrived. ‘Go on,’ they said.

  I laughed. ‘I had this bloody daft idea that I’d pretend I was going to have a swim in the lake.’

  They all laughed. ‘Didn’t I always say as you were round the fucking bend, Horry? Swim in that mucky pond, full of buffalo shit!’

  ‘It’s not all that bad, mate – it’s pretty clean, by Wog standards. Anyhow, I knew old Charley was watching, so I stripped off—’

  ‘You stripped off into the nude?’

  ‘You know me, Di – shit or bust! I stripped right off, ran along the bank, and dived straight into the fucking pani!’

  They were incredulous, amused, horrified. They laughed and tried to make me admit I had done no such thing. Taffy Evans called another mate of his over to hear the tale.

  ‘I always said as you was fuckin’ puggle, mate!’ Geordie said, laughing. ‘What a right carry-on! I don’t know … What did Meadows do?’

  ‘Well, what could he do? I mean, I was bloody daft in the first place, I admit that. You know me – anything for a laugh. And you should have seen his face! He came stomping along the edge – for a moment I thought he was going to dive in after me, boots and all!’

  We were all laughing like drains now.

  ‘So he yells to me, “Is that you, Signaller Stubbs? What the fucking hell are you doing in there?” – as if he’d never seen a man take a swim before. I felt like saying to him, “I’m watching Arsenal play the Spurs”, but I just said, “I’m cooling my balls off, sarge” – and he had me out of there so fast my feet didn’t touch! Straight up to the orderly room!’

  They were all laughing and repeating ‘Cooling my balls off!’, and more blokes were coming over to find what was so funny.

  I told the story again, throwing in a comic imitation of Gore-Blakeley. ‘I suppose you think typhoid is a make of tea, Signaller Stubbs? Eh, what?’

  Everyone was in cordial agreement: Meadows and Gor-Blimey had no sense of humour; I, on the other hand, was a bit of a card who had been victimized. Most of us saw ourselves as cards and victims. More beer was ordered, and other victim-card stories told, amid general laughter. Soon someone was reminiscing gaily about the first time he was on jankers.

  Mention of jankers reminded me of picket duty. It was almost time to be getting my kit together. Back to realities, I drained my glass and bid them all farewell. As I was going out of the tent, a pasty face in the corner caught my eye. It was Rusk, sitting with a mate and eating a chicken butti which was so firmly clasped in his great mitt that for a moment I thought he was tearing his fist apart with his teeth.

  Rusk fixed his greasy eyes on me and made a sign, beckoning me with his whole arm. I gave him the Up Yours signal with two fingers and ducked out of the tent, but he called out and immediately began following me. Outside the circle of light thrown by the tent entrance, I turned and waited for him.

  He came towards me truculently, the strands of chicken in the corners of his mouth waving for the last time. His sleeves were still rolled up to his elbows. ‘You’re asking for trouble, Stubbs, sticking your fucking fingers up at me, you know that?’

  ‘Get your sleeves rolled down, Rusk! How long have you been in? Get some fucking service behind you!’

  ‘Don’t you tell me to get some fucking service in, mate! You’re going to get a bunch of fives if you don’t belt up, know that? You’re on a charge already, aren’t you?’

  I moved in closer and said, ‘You’ll be on a charge if you don’t get your sleeves down ek dum, you fat shit!’

  ‘Don’t you order me about: I’ve been in too long. Don’t you go calling me names! I know a thing or two about you, don’t I?’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Come on, you know what I know!’

  ‘What do you fucking know?’

  ‘You know!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About that bibi!’

  ‘What about that bibi?’

  ‘Well, you spewed your fucking ring, didn’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I could see him grinning sickly in the dark.

  ‘You know what I mean, mate! How’d you like your mates to know that the great right-winger Stubbs chickened out of screwing a bibi at the last minute? I watched you! I saw you piss off in the other direction when you thought nobody was looking!’

  With my right fist, I hit him hard in the left ribs; with my left fist, I hit him hard in the right. There was less blubber and more solid meat than I had imagined. He grunted hard, swiped at me and missed. When I stepped back, he did not come on.

  ‘Want any more, you fat bastard?’ I asked.

  ‘You want to get some fucking service in,’ he muttered. With that devastating shot, he turned and disappeared in the direction of the cookhouse.

  I stood where I was, knowing that I must move to get on picket in time, trying to collect my emotions. All round me was the living night, ever present. Our characters were no more than outlines scrawled on the ruined wall of India. It didn’t matter what you did – as long as you weren’t found out. Even then, of what significance could our temporary actions be?

  Picket was straightforward enough. The moon shone and the night world was beautiful. Of course the ache for women was worse than ever. Wanking did very little to ease it, although it was pleasurable in its own right. The mystery of India – of which I was acutely aware – positively demanded a mysterious woman with whom one could enact the necessary ritual. That night, I did it to myself standing up against a palm tree, rapidly in case I was discovered. Even as the spunk scattered in the dust, my intense vision of warm brown entangling limbs, red lips, and the darker scents of desire vanished; I was left holding a deflating and disappointed prick.

  Disillusion was setting in; we called it ‘feeling chokka’. Our amphibious training was strenuous – and the more strenuous it became, the more pointless it felt, although we had then to learn how pointless it really was. At the end of the first week of February, we thankfully left the camp at Vadikhasundi and returned to Kanchapur. Although we greeted our old haunts with delight, the delight was short-lived.

  Out in the wilds, we had accumulated some back pay. This was soon frittered away in the bazaars on night-dresses for girl-friends, leather wallets that immediately disintegrated, and flashy silk scarves that incurred military discipline if worn. Geordie Wilkinson bought a wrist watch which stopped twenty-three hours later, and we never found the twister that flogged it to him. As we became broke, we became disenchanted. The demon sex was left to fight the military worm, and the worm generally conquered. Although the dark eyes and tender hot tits of my mystery girl still beckoned, I dared not defy the MPs again. To be caught would mean real trouble this time and, in a peacetime cantonment like Kanchapur, the police had everything organized.

  So we endured the routine of parades, drills, games, and booze-ups, and went slowly round the bend. No doubt the lists were circulating. It would be a relief when ours came through, whatever it contained – and it could contain nothing good. Meanwhile, we were powerless.

  Only on a crippled personal level was some freedom of action possible. Any fears I h
ad that Ron Rusk might spread a lie about my supposed chicken-heartedness at Vadikhasundi vanished. Those swift blows to his ribs had done him a power of good. Whenever I appeared in line with my mess-tins, Rusk would now grin at me and ask, ‘Hello, Stubby, how are you doing?’ – or, even more familiarly, ‘How’s your belly off for spots?’

  All the same, it was necessary to protect a bod’s reputation. If you’ve given yourself a role in life, you’ve got to act it out. Men without women really go about spare, and I felt spare up to my earholes – especially at this time when I was all health, eagerness, and hard-ons – to find I was debarred from the world’s great fucking match. So I embroidered a bit on what had happened by the Vadikhasundi lake and invented adventures in the Kanchapur bazaar to match the stories of other people’s adventures. Yet funnily enough, I could never bring myself to say a word about the little hot girl I had had. I still felt soft about her.

  It suited everybody’s purpose, in this sterile waiting period, to lie and to believe other people’s lies. Even the war situation encouraged fantasy. Japanese forces in Burma were still growing, and very little was being done about it. ‘Vinegar’ Joe Stilwell in the north of the country was making a bit of a show with his Chinese troops, yet the Fourteenth Army just seemed to be sitting on its arse, apart from a few skirmishes in the Arakan. We had done our amphibious training, and there was not a man in the unit who had not had his stomach filled with brackish water more than once; so why were we back in Kanchapur, killing time, doing nothing, not going to meet the Japs? What were we meant to be doing?

  Naturally we invented lecherous fantasies and ‘gripped’ at each other. Apart from pontoon, this was how we passed the long evenings in barracks.

  One of the leaders of the pontoon school was Corporal Warren, a stringy old fellow who always expressed disgust for our stories. After a particularly filthy one from Ginger Gascadden, Warren waved a finger at him and said, ‘You’re nothink but a bloody fool, Gas, mucking about with native women. Many’s the time I’ve seen young lads like you go mad because of women!’

  ‘Young lad! Belt up, Corp, I’m twenty-fucking-five, got a couple of kids at home!’

  ‘All the more reason for you to watch it. I’ve seen blokes in hot countries go clean round the oojar because of the perverted practices of native women. When I was stationed in Malta—’

  ‘Don’t give us that grip, Warry!’ someone called.

  ‘When I was stationed in Malta, in Senglea Barracks in Valetta, there was a bloke there called Hunter as shot himself between the eyes with his rifle because of what a native woman done to him.’

  ‘Christ, what did she do?’

  ‘He had only come out from Blighty a couple of months. This was some Arab bint, I believe. See, these native bits of stuff are brought up different to what we are – you ask Aylmer! Ain’t that right, Jack?’

  ‘Arr,’ said Aylmer, nodding his head so slightly that we could only think that deep experience had almost conferred immobility on him.

  ‘They’re brought up different from what we are,’ Warren repeated. ‘Japanese girls, for instance, they sleep with the white of an egg up their holes every night till they’re married, and they have to lay very still so it don’t run out over the blankets.’

  ‘What do they do that for, for fuck’s sake?’ Wally asked.

  ‘It helps keep the hole fresh, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What about this bloke in Malta or wherever it was?’

  ‘I tell you, he shot himself – right between the eyes. This Arab bint got some sort of a hold on him. If they really get a man, they aren’t satisfied till they’ve sucked all the good out of him.’

  We were all laughing and saying things like ‘Don’t care if I do go blind!’

  ‘They will, they’ll suck all the good out of you! So my advice to you, Gas, if you ever want to see your kiddies again, is don’t get involved. If you want it so bad, you better go to one of these here gobble-wallahs. You know what they are, don’t you? There’s a chicko of about seven or eight as hangs about round the Golden Lion restaurant most nights – he’s a lot safer than any women and you don’t get involved. It’s getting involved that causes the trouble.’

  ‘I’m not putting my fucking dick in anybody’s mouth,’ Geordie said. ‘I’ve sort of got too much respect for my dick!’

  ‘If you haven’t, no one else has, Geordie!’ Dusty Miller said. When we all laughed, Geordie went red.

  So we dreamed our sordid dreams, or made them up. Guilt had so invaded the situation that everything was distorted. When we got it, we pretended we hadn’t; when we didn’t get it, we pretended we had.

  Many of the Mendips were having it regular. In our squad, Dave Feather, a greying fatherly man, had a proper arrangement. His father kept a cycle shop in Bristol. Feather had a regular appointment in a shack behind Kanchapur’s one garage; a woman turned up there with her pimp to meet him every Saturday afternoon. There were rumours that she was somebody important – rumours fed by Feather’s way of being very discreet about this arrangement. He neither confirmed nor denied what went on by the garage once a week, and he was not the sort of bloke you pressed.

  His oblique attitude, hinting at great things without actually claiming anything, was easy to imitate, doing good service for many who hoped humbly to pass as sexual athletes: for the life-distorting barrack-room ethos, to which all were supposed to conform, demanded that spunk should be shed somehow, anyhow, as often as beer was drunk. Our sergeants had one well used tag-line when they let us knock off fatigues for a ten-minute rest: ‘Right, break off for a smoke! Them as can’t smoke go through the motions!’ With sex, the same conformity was expected.

  This fantasy-barrier was acknowledged in one or two pet clichés. That old saw, ‘Them as talks most does least’ was frequently bandied about, valued as much for its symmetry as its wisdom. It overlooked the fact that many of the brigade’s most arrant lechers, who had been known to fuck anything on four, three, two, one, or – since mangoes have no legs – no legs, said almost nothing that was not a disordered flow of verbal lust There was no rule that helped understanding of anyone’s sexual life beyond this: that all men lied and distorted what they did. The process was often unthinking, a helpless response to the distortions of the system in which they grew up and grew old.

  Self-aggrandizement was the commonest form of self-defence.

  You always made yourself out better than you were. This was so commonly acknowledged that any attempt at reminiscence was immediately attacked. When Corporal Warren started to say, ‘When I was stationed in Malta’, several voices cried ‘Grip on!’, as if they feared that the self-inflations which must inevitably follow would somehow deflate them.

  The assumption was that anyone speaking on any occasion when no checks on the accuracy of his statement were available would be bound to lie.

  This I say with hindsight; at the time, I was just a BOR, eager not to think or feel. But I enjoyed listening to the stories Warren, Aylmer, and the other old soldiers told. Lies I could take – my old love, Virginia, had acclimatized me to them; it was the truth that came hard.

  During this waiting time in Kanchapur, Geordie Wilkinson became pally with old Jack Aylmer, who did orderly duties and suffered from bad feet. I had taken an interest in Aylmer long before. Aylmer had one line of a song he sang, always the same line of the same song, which he left suspended in the air in a melancholy way:

  ‘Could I but see thee stand before me …’

  This line haunted me. It was a snatch from the Flower Song from Carmen, and powerful enough to invest Aylmer with a whole history. I saw him as incredibly old – and indeed he must have been in his late thirties – with an ageing wife whom he loved very much; they lived together in a little cottage in Cornwall, the windows of which caught the spray from the Atlantic in rough water. He had been in some profession, a solicitor perhaps, had failed at it, and now eked out a living, ably supported by his dear wife, as a market-gardener. The war had pa
rted them and she had gone to live with a draper, but he never forgot her and sang his line of song to her over and over again.

  Tickled by this vision of comic pathos, I took to drinking with Aylmer and Geordie in the WVS canteen. Of course, Aylmer’s background as it emerged was not at all as I had pictured it. He came of a large family who lived above a hairdresser’s shop in the Fulham Road, had worked in a glass factory, and moreover bore a picture of a biplane tattooed on his left buttock.

  The attraction about Aylmer was that he was a gripper. He was generally disliked for this quality, and had few friends. No sooner did he begin a sentence ‘Back in 1936—’, or ‘When the Mendips were in the Near East—’ than cries of ‘He’s gripping again!’ would arise to silence him. Geordie and I, however, could tolerate his grips. He blossomed and told us marvellous tales of service life in odd parts of the globe. His self-aggrandizement was subtle, lying less in the stories – which were generally impersonal – than in the unspoken claim to omniscience behind them.

  At the time, I had no means of knowing whether the things Aylmer told us were true or not: that on Malta, where the Mendips had been stationed, there was a four-thousand year-old prehistoric palace where human sacrifices were still carried out; that Chinese girls made the best mistresses; that several thousand BORs had deserted from the Army in India rather than go to Burma and lived hidden lives in the big cities; that in certain African tribes, the women were circumcized and had their clitorises removed; that Churchill got a payment of fifty pounds for every tank that bore his name; that in the wastelands behind Aden there was a temple now covered with sand which was full of gold dating from the time of the Crusades; that a Burmese tribe near Lashio ate a certain food which was deadly poison and then followed it down with another equally deadly which neutralized the first; that the respected Chiang Kai-shek, our Chinese ally, was a secret Fascist; that some day the Mendips were going to have to liberate Singapore from the sea approach; that Hindu mothers wanked off their boy-children to keep them happy and quiet; that a friend of Aylmer’s, a truck-driver, had been stabbed in his sleep the day after he had knocked down and killed a sacred cow wandering across the road; that another friend had died in his sleep when a deadly little krait, a small snake, slithered into his bed and bit him; that yet another friend, serving on detachment on the North-West Frontier, had had his blanket stolen from under him by the Pathans as he slept; that the Indians had invited Japan to invade and free them from the British and that Gandhi was in touch with Hirohito; that there were caves near Bombay filled with incredible erotic sculptures – voluptuous women with breasts like melons being fucked all ways by men and animals – which could so easily drive you mad that only officers above the rank of captain were allowed in; that as you sailed into Colombo harbour on a calm day, you could see an old East Indiaman sunk in clear water at the entrance to the harbour; that Gandhi liked young girls; that there were gay parrots flying among the trees in southern India which had been taught to speak Tamil by the locals; that the Americans wanted to take over the British Empire; that a Japanese soldier was issued with half a capful of rice a day and nothing more; that the Gurkhas were the best soldiers in the world and must be treated like whites; that prostitution was regarded as holy in many parts of the world, including Greece and Persia; that the third largest church dome in the world was on Malta; that there was a battalion of Poles serving in India who had walked to Delhi over the Himalayas from Poland when it was over-run by the Nazis, a distance of several thousand miles across the worst country in the world; that Hitler had got syphilis; that most of the past kings of England had also had syphilis, which accounted for the king’s stutter; that the Pope had caught syphilis from one of his cardinal’s wives; that the Yankee Air Force could not find its targets at night like the RAF, and so was confined to daylight raids; that the Italian army took droves of whores with them wherever they went; that there was a castle in the Highlands of Ethiopia built entirely from the skulls of some army massacred there in battle; that when the Ark Royal sank, a powerful British secret weapon went down with it; that the Americans were preparing a secret weapon that would blow Berlin off the map; that an octopus will die immediately if you bite it between the eyes; that near Mandalay stood a town as big as Brighton built entirely of pagodas of various sizes; that Malta is all that is left of a land-bridge between Europe and Africa; that Churchill had delayed the Second Front in the hope that Hitler would defeat Russia; that by inserting a sixpence into a woman’s twot you could tell if she had VD, because the coin would then turn green; that either Kipling or Noel Coward had written ‘Eskimo Nell’; and many other subjects upon which I was either totally uninformed or needed enlightenment.