The only other time I lived this kind of corporate, community existence was · · in the RAF, for a short time, since I was in only a short time: and that only in Reserve Flight at Padgate, with the other rejects who were waiting for their discharge, all sorts, the odd serious disease, and three or four like me with perforated eardrums: they did not like people with perforated eardrums in the RAF, I never did find out exactly why not, some said it was because if the other ear went they had to give you a pension for the rest of your life, which would in many cases be a very long time, others said it was because you might have to fly high and unpressurised and you could not do that if your ear was perforated; others said—and the idea has never left me—that it was because meningitis bugs could go straight through to your brain: anyway, they never told me why, just made me step out for being hard of hearing in that right ear at a medical inspection, and then a doctor tested it, banging a huge tuning fork in a deep score mark on a table and pressing it over various parts of my head, the while saying, Can you hear that? and me saying No, or Yes, as the case was, and when the doctor went out one of the erk orderlies said Looks like you’ve worked your ticket, mate: and I thought, Christ, now I shall have to think of getting a job, of deciding on this career I am expected to devote myself to. And they did discharge me, with a certificate excusing me from National Service on the grounds that I was unlikely to attain full medical fitness on account of a suppurative otitis media: which I must say has never given me much trouble, only discharged a custard-like, ha, fluid which stank when I was a kid up to about fifteen, and only did that when I had a cold. I am very slightly deaf in that ear, and I suspect also that this perforation is the reason why I can never tell any difference between mono and stereo. They found this imperfection on my second day at Padgate, the reception camp then, which must be known to thousands of my generation as a damp and foul dump near Warrington in Lancashire: but they kept me three weeks before my discharge came through, in this Reserve Flight, which had nothing to do with flying but was a scruffy nissen hut in which all we rejects lived and slept. And though we had had no training we were still expected to march up to meals at the canteen as though we were trained airmen, and as we could not march properly were brought back in the evenings in what would otherwise have been our free time to learn to march, for hours it seemed, the bastard of a corporal, this was, in charge of us, and we drilled, drilled, drilled, drilled. I quite came to enjoy it, but for the compulsion, saw a possibility of the pleasure of doing something simultaneously with others that I only ever felt before whilst singing in a choir. · · And we had only parts of uniforms: I had a couple of shirts, socks, and boots, no blues, best or working, which I was rather sorry about. And they made us bloody bull the hut, too, polish the floor till it shone immaculately, without any polish, too, officially, and lay our stuff out on our beds in a way we had not been officially shown, and generally be like real airmen when we were only passing through, were not to be airmen yet were treated as though we were. Yet in some ways we were luckier than other huts because we able-bodied Reserve Flight men were sent to work in the hospital each day, cleaning floors like chars, and we could steal polish to keep our floor bulled for the officer’s inspection. The hospital was an interesting place, though the work was boring and there was not even enough of it. I would try to work it so that I had the floor of a matron’s or nurse’s room to clean, work like hell, and then relax and read her medical handbooks, particularly those on sex, sex being my first choice in medical reading, at this time. I never saw the matrons or nurses, pity, they were always out, working I presume. The only women we did see were Naafi bags, as they were known, in the evenings, when we bought Naafi food, which was only marginally better than the issue, which was terrible, eggs in cellophane jackets, tinned beans, tea thick with tannin and bromide. And we used to cook toast and stuff we bought in Warrington by the cylindrical donkey fire in the middle of the hut, which was CRAANGK! · · We’re hauling—that’s early—the weather must be so bad that we’re giving up fishing till it blows itself out. Where was I? · · The hut, we were proud, if that is the right word, since we had to do it, of our polished floor, so much so we kept squares of blankets inside the doors for anyone coming in to step on and traverse about on. This had the pleasingly dual effect of protecting and polishing the shitbrown lino: anyone who did not use the squares had in the middle of the night his bed turned upside down on him. There was no privacy, · · as there is virtually none here · · which I missed, which I lack. · · I heard some new jokes, to me, at least, and the sex stories of other youths which may or may not have been true but which were certainly interesting. I learnt to sew buttons on for myself, and to patch a tear: but not to darn. I contracted the worst cold I have ever had, which lasted for weeks after I had finally been presented with my ticket. I saw the sex films meant to put erks off dirty women who could give them VD, and was accordingly disinclined that way for several days. I did no firing, held no weapon even, and the only aircraft I saw there were the decorative Spitfire and Hurricane preserved like modern fossils on patches of grass at the camp main gate. I made no friends, hardly an acquaintance, talked little even to the men in beds either side of mine. I read a lot, brooded a lot on a girl called Dorothy who was in effect affianced to me at the time, we were that close, ha-ha, designed a model aeroplane based on an amalgam of all the features of all the designs in a book I had on aeromodelling. My brooding over Dorothy—her lowermiddleclassness, the way in which she was directing our to-be-married life, the direction in which she was forcing my life—was very much involved with brooding on my future now that, very unexpectedly as I had since fourteen been conditioned to accept that my nineteenth and twentieth years were only to a very limited extent going to be under my control, I had seriously to think of a job that would as soon as possible enable me to marry and soon as possible afterwards provide me with enough money comfortably to support a wife and in due course, or sooner, children. This brooding depressed me, for marriage seemed both desirable and dull, inevitable and avoidable: certainly not an end in itself, as which it was presenting itself and presented to me. What I earned money from was made to seem by this irrelevant, arbitrary, and I felt it should not be. One thing I did decide, was sure about, was that I was not going back to being a bank clerk as I had been in the six months between leaving school and being called up: I could not stand any of the work, the people, the atmosphere. But what I would do I just did not know, and could not think: and I could not even think of anything I would like to be, except the impossible things, like a writer, or a film director, or just rich. I had gone at fourteen for two years to a secondary school which specialised in turning boys into clerks and accountants, and girls into typists and secretaries: and I could therefore keep accounts, type, even do shorthand, though very slowly, and was fitted, even trained and qualified, after a style, to be a clerk in some sort of office: which fitting was dismaying to me after my experience at the bank. The whole point was that such work involved repetition, often quite complex repetition, but nevertheless basically the same sort of thing day after day after day: and that while I was sometimes interested in doing a thing, and I have always been interested in doing a thing for the first time, even for the second time, until I had learnt, not to say mastered, it, my interest would go immediately I had done so, and I would then be bored almost to shouting with it. I have always liked the new, though not in all things, not in marriage, for instance, a condition of which seems to me exclusion, oneness, with one person only. · · · · · My parents in all this seeking of appropriate employment were no help and no hindrance: that is to say, while they made no attempt either to press me to take a certain type of job or to dissuade from another certain type of job, they yet did not indicate to me what jobs there were to be had for our sort of class, for the sort of person I was, from the sort of background I came. The examples even of the rest of the family—a driver, greengrocers in the New Kent Road,
the odd labourer—were not of much use, and certainly neither my father nor I wanted me to follow in his footsteps as a stock-keeper. So I brooded on this, there is no other word for it, unfortunately, I even came to resent the disability—left as some sort of medical legacy after having scarlet fever as a child of three—which had resulted in my so having to brood and think of my future two years earlier than I had expected, almost had hoped: realised too that, though there were obviously unpleasant sides to National Service, that indeed these might form the major part of the life, there was also a better side, the companionship, the fitness, a sense of some purpose even if I disagreed with it, a chance to travel, and a freedom from having to make serious decisions. And I had felt when I went in that in some way National Service would improve me, harden me, and save the love I had for Dorothy, which wore away daily through her bourgeois aspirations and my regression into workingclass habits in self-defence, in defence of my self. Perhaps though it was fortunate that I was rejected by the RAF, for it might have coarsened and dulled me as well as toughened and honed me, and I might even now be stuck with an unsatisfactory wife, or divorced, or some such mess. As it is . . . it was very painful at the time, since in classic middleclass style she found someone else whilst still at least nominally attached to me, not engaged, that is to say, but attached, betrayed me, which hurt far more than her loss: I am glad I did lose her, now, and was not . . . · · no matter. She is not relevant to this present enquiry, this present state. · · Even our lovemaking was bourgeois and petty, incomplete and unsatisfying. And I hardly remember anything of her now, only things, comic things, like how her nose was in the way when I first kissed her, which was in the pictures, in Richmond or somewhere like that. · · No relevance, no interest, go on to something else. · · · · · · · · When I take my mind off, I feel the bucking, I must force myself not to be sick again, but thirsty, yes, drink, I have a can of beer somewhere, yes, in the corner between my mattress and the bulkhead, open, difficult, and it will splash, fizz rather, IPA, spray, all over, can’t help that, no, lever in the point, hold face away, spray, ah, spray! Can’t even be bothered to wipe away. Who’s to condemn me, here. · · Brace myself between the side of the bunk and the side of the ship, carefully judge the can in hand in relation to my mouth, drink, a delicate manoeuvre, a tricky judging. · · Ah. This beer is strong, straight from the punctured can. But not cold, since I keep it here, and this cabin is kept very warm, comfortable for us, but not good for keeping beer, but better than nothing, now, or going up to the Skipper’s day cabin, to the case of beer he let me buy from him, where it is not so warm, where it keeps that little cooler. I asked the cook if I could keep it in his cold store, but he said it would be frozen solid there, suggested I leave it out on deck somewhere, certainly it would get cold enough there, but who’s to know if a sea might not wash it overboard, or someone take a thirst to it? As it is I keep it in the Skipper’s day cabin, yes, and the bottle of whisky he let me buy, too, which he does not allow everyone on board, for drunkenness at sea is diabolical, to a seaman, apparently, a matter of endangering life, and so on. But he trusted me with a case of cans, twenty-four, and a bottle of whisky. Perhaps this export whisky is purposely different, for it has a strong, burnt taste I have not noticed in this brand at home: or perhaps it is that my taste is so affected by the seasickness that nothing tastes as it once did. The beer, too, is not what I would have chosen, myself, being a strongly tasting IPA, but the deckies seem to like it, it was chosen by their popular vote: they have two cans a day each, given out at midday, a ration they call it, I have heard no complaints that it is too little, and they pay for it themselves, cheap enough, on board, no excise, nor on cigarettes, nor chocolates, for some reason the Skipper keeps chocolates as well in the bond just outside Molloy’s room, I had a box, at the start, but my stomach let me eat just two. But the beer I drink cheerfully enough, though it is not exactly to my taste, the taste is not particularly mine, for I am thirsty a lot on this ship, I drink it to break my thirst, one swallow from the can, straight, until I feel the click in the back of my throat, which breaks the thirst, I drink it to break my thirst, not to get drunk. The whisky I am sorry I bought, though it was only a few shillings, for I do not enjoy it: perhaps I can take it ashore, home, or give it away on board, have a farewell drink with the deckies—That’s the first time I have thought of the end of the voyage! So there is an end! There will be an end! Yes, already we must be over half way through. And it seemed—not endless, that’s a stupid word, but indefinite, though I knew three weeks as a length, as a unit, it was less than a month, which I knew about, well enough, but those first few days out, across the North Sea, it seemed indefinite, the length of the voyage, and very quickly the deprivation of the sight of land for that length of time was grievous, unexpectedly, · · And when, the weather in the open sea being bad enough to justify the cost of a pilot in terms of time gained in steaming speed, the Skipper decided to go through the fjords, I was relieved, delighted at the prospect of another sight of land: even though it had been only three days, or so, this was the fourth day. And carefully I watched from the bridge, on the first day I really felt that I might be able to withstand the voyage and not jump overboard, or die, possibly, for the first lump on the horizon which they told me would be the southernmost stump of the Lofoten Islands: and for about fifteen or twenty minutes they said they could see it, and I sectored that horizon again and again but could see nothing: until at last I did, a burr on the port side far forward, and realised how much keener than mine their eyesight was, how much better adapted to seeing at sea. And as the Lofotens came up one by one, mere great rocks at first, I was pleased for the first time that I was at sea, I, who had not expected to see land for three weeks grasped at the visual relief of these variations on the flat horizon of my outlook, and was glad. And it was then too that the Skipper told me we might land on the way back, at a place called Honigsvag, where we would pick up the pilot for the return through the fjords, if we needed fresh water: but that we would not that day put into the southern port for a pilot as they came out by boat to us waiting in the channel. As they did, two pilots, friendly but austere, to leave us at this Honigsvag, which I saw not to be much compared with most towns, but which I certainly hope we stop at on the way back, fervently, almost, I hope we put in at Honigsvag for water, even if it is only for a very short while. · · Surprisingly, as we came out of the fjords after twenty-four hours of smooth water and she began to roll and pitch again, immediately I was seasick yet again, just as I was the first few hours out. It was as though I had gained no immunity, as it were, from the earlier sickness, but as soon as she started rocking after a smooth spell, there I was, back where I had started. · · Now try to sleep, the beer helps, ah. · · Ah.
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