by Michael Foss
Penned up in the convent, or slouching about the Oxford streets, I had formed no conception of nature, apart from the artful formalities of Worcester College gardens. I began to clear my eyes and cleanse my ears for the benefit of the natural world around me – the trill and the squeak and the caw of the birds, soft animal grunts in the undergrowth, scurrying of small beasts, kamikaze buzzing, iridescent flashes of tiny wings, the changing green palette of the woodland – all this was a surprise.
We were, as our schoolmasters gravely told us, in a state of ‘total war’. If we found a pen or a cigarette lighter or some little packet on the beach, we were drilled never to pick it up. It might be a booby trap. I could not reconcile these versions of the world. How was it possible to connect the dreamlike but enduring reality of Sundays with the brutal temporal fears of weekdays?
We had no lessons to teach us the meaning of angst, or existential doubt. Instead, we had cold showers and a brisk trot around the playing field.
*
In the holiday, a small girl about my own age was staying, like us, at the hotel in Uplyme. She was wiry and lively, with two fair plaits hanging to her shoulders. She giggled a lot, staring into my face quizzically before skittering off at a sharp angle.
‘I expect,’ she said one day over by the far flowerbeds, ‘you would like to see me wee. Wouldn’t you?’
I replied that I rather thought I would.
She reached out a hand and caught hold of me and we ran towards some bushy cover at the side of the hotel, away from the front windows. Then she raised her skirt with one hand and held it bunched against her stomach, and with the other hand she pushed down her panties. Crouching awkwardly, she released a brief golden stream while I took careful note of it. When she had finished she sprang up, still with her skirt raised and her panties down, and twirled around gaily.
‘Well,’ she said with something like regret, ‘that’s that.’ And she began to put her clothing in order. She left the hotel a day or two later, and I did not speak to her again.
I had not seen that part of the female anatomy before and I was taken aback. I had not expected it to be like that. I wondered at the clean lines and the smooth, sculpted look of it. It seemed more elegant – more logical too – than my own little lumpy appendage. But then I thought of the palaver with the clothes, and the awkward uncomfortable squatting, and compared that with the quick action and usefulness of my own small hose, and I decided that in these particular anatomical stakes I had the best of the bargain.
*
Early in a new winter term the headmaster came looking for my brother and me. He found us upstairs, getting ready for bed. I was already in pyjamas and dressing-gown. In a friendly manner, with a hand on the shoulder, the headmaster led us into the corridor, away from the bustle of the dormitory, and while the Atlantic below the cliff grumbled and shifted, and a sharp wind jabbed at the loose panes making the black-out material over the windows catch and flutter like the luff of a sail, he told us that we were being withdrawn from the school. News had come suddenly from the War Office. The Atlantic sea-routes were now deemed safe enough for families to return to India. A passage was being arranged and we would soon be on our way.
Shivering slightly, I pulled my dressing-gown tight. What sort of news was this? Four years before, in 1940, things on the North Atlantic had not gone well for us. But my brother seemed untroubled. He was grinning and nudged me in the ribs with an elbow, as if at the start of some large piece of adventurous fun.
So we decided to take a gamble on it, to take this news more as an invitation to hope than as a cause for alarm.
*
Slowly the train worked its way north towards Glasgow. It was time for another trial by sea. The progress seemed tentative, even painful, with long sighs of escaping steam, waiting at empty country stations for clearance up the line. In the silence the boiler ticked and hissed. Windows thumped down as dim faces hung out at twilight, looking back and forth with impatience, though there was no one on the platform to question. The train was full of soldiers and we were pegged in the corridor by the crush of military bodies. Seated on a kitbag I pressed my nose against the glass of a compartment, watching warriors on their uneasy travels, smoking or trying to read in the dying light. Young faces grown up suddenly in wartime were puckered with concentration or flat with boredom. They were in the hands of the army and to struggle for any sense of dignity or individuality was pointless at the moment. Others, both in the compartments and in the corridor, were slumped in exhausted sleep. As the train got going again, heads lolled and rolled with the sway of the carriages. Arms and legs were thrown out across the passageway, or contracted into a crippled stillness. I watched these soldiers with a certain detachment. Though we were all jumbled together now, my path was not their path. We had our relief-papers in the form of a ticket to India.
In Glasgow, an ancient bus wheezed out of town to a nearby transit camp where we would stay until our ship left. All around, the Scottish winter was just beginning to grip. A dismal snowfall, not thick enough to bring to mind the pleasures of the Christmas just gone, blotched the ground and the roofs of the huts. Thin brown lines of frozen earth formed by the tramp of many feet connected the dining-hall with the outlying huts. The camp had all the sadness of decay and hasty planning. The rumour was that it had been thrown together for German prisoners in the Great War and then abandoned in peacetime. Miserably resurrected, it had all the discomfort, except the barbed wire, of a stalag.
In the hut our mother stoked the rusty iron stove with the few pieces of coke provided and we crouched close to the heat. She hung underwear and pyjamas on the fireguard and we saw the damp rise off the clothes. The uninsulated hut was raw and dank. The embrace of the sheets was slightly clammy. Curled up with coats and spare clothing piled on the blanket, I shoved my face deep into the pillow, shutting out the present and determined to dream forward to that place I already dimly knew, the place that had come into my possession through the accident of birth.
After a week or so in the camp we were taken to the docks to join our ship. This was the Batory, a Polish liner of dubious history that later gained some notoriety as a sort of freelance rascal of the oceans, unrestrained by either Polish communism or Western capitalism. Even as we joined it, the Batory appeared to be a jolly, piratical vessel, with a Polish crew taking what advantage they could from the drift of the war. Later, I thought of these sailors as the spiritual brothers of the impossibly gallant and quixotic Polish cavalrymen who (or so a well-known piece of mythology related) at the beginning of the war had charged the German panzer divisions on horseback.
The Batory was a passenger liner of some 8,000 tons, a well-built example of marine engineering from Gdansk, fitted out with all the mahogany, teak, rosewood and polished brass expected in the pre-war Atlantic trade. We were given a roomy cabin on the starboard side of the boat-deck, a cabin of surprising luxury. There was a large hanging cupboard smelling of pine and mothballs that one could walk into, and there were brass-handled drawers under the bunks that glided in and out with the hushed delicacy of a superior servant. The portholes, with their big brass clamps, were covered by chintz curtains that slid along a slim brass pole with knobs on the ends. Best of all, our cabin had a private bathroom, with as much hot water as we wished. It was a delicious indulgence to squander time soaking in the deep bath, watching condensation bead and drip along the bright metal and the heavy dark wood of the fittings. I took this luxury as some recompense for unnameable wartime wrongs.
*
In memory, I have the impression that the simple step from dock to deck was the crossing of a fateful line. Snow-flecked Scotland lay along the banks of the Clyde, dirty and worn-out by war, but the low winter sun picked out our ship rising hopefully above this depressing toil. Any sea-voyage to a remote land is an entry to strange possibilities. That was something we were ready for. We wanted to emerge from shadows, to bring an end to deprivation and tears.
Almost a
t once I became wildly exuberant. The Batory had a devil-may-care air about it, and that seemed a good lead to follow. My conduct, already bad enough owing to frequent fits of temper, changed for the worse. I think it was not so much naughtiness – at least, not extra naughtiness – but more a lightness after a lifting of weight, a release of pressure when the valve blows.
But this was an unpleasant surprise for my mother, dragged down by four years of a lonely penury with little human friendliness. Her own liberation was put back while she faced a new spirit of rebellion, in me and in my brother also. When she tried to cut short our incessant prowling about the ship after adventure, on the grounds that it was time for bath and bed, it was more from devilish exhilaration than from rage that I pushed her fully-clothed into the hot bath water. Naturally, I howled with fright and repentance. But later I discovered that I was not so very sorry. With a new, voracious appetite, I was testing new freedom.
‘Oh you boys,’ my mother cried with wounded resignation, ‘I don’t know what to do with you. Just wait till your father gets here.’
My father’s arrival was expected. For the whole war he had been stationed in the Middle East, and now it was planned that he should join our ship en route back to India. This news did not mean much to me. I had only the dimmest picture of my father, and the abstract notion of fatherhood, and what that meant to children, had no hold on my mind. Nor was the image of father as bogeyman very attractive.
For my mother, pale and slight and always on the verge of ill-health, the anxieties of war, which for the most part had resolved into a meagre life full of hopeless compromise, gave way to the vague but abundant worries of peace, which may not have formed a torrent but flowed into a wider maze of channels under different currents. As a result, her wartime frown was displaced by the no less marked frown of peace. She took personally all the whims of chance, good and bad.
‘Oh, that sun,’ she would say with a baleful glance at the hot sky that promised us so much liberty, ‘it always brings out my rash.’
She sat on the shady side of the boat in a long deckchair, waiting for the steward to bring the mid-morning bouillon. A scarf or a straw sunhat was arranged carefully against the glare. As the sun crossed the sky she shifted her position, sighing apologetically, ‘Of course, this weather always brings me out in freckles.’ As if that were a good reason for parcelling up the sun and posting it away. Whatever the sun might do for the rest of us, it had it in for her.
Her anxiety tracked us around the ship, which was a rich playground for a couple of energetic young lads. Polish sailors, whose English did not go much beyond a dockside lingo of sex and swearing, tolerated our games. From engine-room to bridge, we wandered more or less at will, occasionally balked by a scowl or a cuff on the ear. Sometimes, penetrating into forbidden territory, we were headed off by an irate seaman, at a loss for English words, but stamping on the iron gratings to drive us away like troublesome geese. Always hungry, we pestered the kitchen hands between meals, mooching around the service door that led into the cooks’ sweaty cave. As we entered warmer seas, in all but the worst weather that door was thrown open for air. When the kitchen hands came out for a cigarette, looking sticky in stained singlets and long soiled aprons, we badgered them for titbits, enduring lively Polish oaths for the sake of a biscuit.
On fine days, after the crew had practised their drill on the gun-placements, my brother and I were sometimes allowed to take turns on the springy metal seat behind the ack-ack guns. Lifted there by callused nautical hands I gazed at the ocean skies through the spoked wheel of the gun-sight. In imagination I sent whole armadas of Dorniers and Messerschmitts spiralling into the sea. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat,’ I yelled in childish glee. The Poles applauded noisily. ‘Blody gud show. Too many fockin German in sky.’
Our shipboard life, if we were not in the greasy realms of winches and hawsers and machinery, was spent on deck. We wanted the freedom of open air. At first, it was not so easy to get out. The Atlantic weather was wet and brisk with the wind blowing keen off the white-topped waves. The ship had a queasy motion. At these times I felt a swell of gorge in my throat and often had to make a rush for the lavatory. Choppy seas drove us down the west coast of Ireland, then we set a course away from the northern winter. We were in a loose convoy, more for administrative convenience than for safety, great grey shapes in wartime drab, merchantmen as well as sleek liners, rolling like a school of migrating whales. As the weather became milder we crossed the Bay of Biscay without sea-sickness. At the straits of Gibraltar, the passenger liners peeled off for the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, while the merchantmen set route for the long haul round the Cape of Good Hope.
Lands went by, looking from the deck no more than lumps and shadows – the point of Tunisia, Sicily, Malta. Then we kept south, past the low dun-coloured coasts of Libya and Egypt. Throwing pieces of stale bread to the escort of gulls I saw my first dolphins, a sign, according to the Polish sailors, of the very best kind of luck. But the Mediterranean, lacking the wilder chances of the ocean, seemed a dull enough place. What was history to a child on a boat?
At Port Said, where we anchored to await the canal pilot, we were assailed by a flotilla of bum-boats. From the profuse jumble of men and goods on the wharves, the long shallow boats knifed out into the harbour with their crews of bearded hustlers already yelling a fervent sales pitch. Paddling into the lee of the ship they bawled upwards to the faces lining the high decks, offering indiscriminately things both useful and futile, with a few objects of real beauty amid the junk – rings and jewellery, etched bowls and long-necked copper jugs, pottery patterned in raw colours, glassware, small prayer rugs, carved wooden animals stylized in the manner of ancient Egypt, models of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, printed cottons and wool jellabas, framed pictures of old beast-headed gods copied from tomb-paintings. As the time passed the haggling grew more frantic. Our deckhands were laying out ropes and lounging by the winches, getting ready to ease the ship away. The opportunities were fleeting, and as the normal stock drew no more takers more intimate stuff was unveiled in a babble of many languages. With bold and hopeful gestures the vendors displayed condoms and dildos, and devices for private pleasures, and most explicit pictures of very peculiar couplings.
Then lines were dropped, the hooter blasted, and the propellers began to churn harbour muck. Yet the vendors still did not give up, but pursued with energetic strokes. As their boats fell behind, they were still waving rugs, or scarves, or shawls, or tasselled cotton robes, or pornographic wall-hangings.
Pushing my way between the legs of the adults and popping my head between the bars of the rails I could see that all this commotion was highly diverting. The passengers, whether eager to buy or not, hung over the rails with their mouths open. Nothing like this, I realized later, had erupted, so garish and blatant, into the grey disquiet of wartime England. They were shocked and glad to be so. This, after all, was the gate to the Orient about which they had certain secret expectations. So long as Western fundamentals were not completely outraged, cheeky indiscretion and mischief were permitted, under the heading of exotica. It was expected, even appreciated, that a journey to the East led to a loosening of the braces all round.
One after another in line astern the big ships entered the Suez Canal, as if shuffling slowly through a sea of sand. By our side, surprisingly close but far below, strings of camels often kept pace, swinging along with their tortuous gait. It looked like a new way of doing something even as old as walking. Then the ships threaded the Great Bitter Lake, members of a monstrous modern caravan, huge arks making so little stir that their wakes hardly ruffled the water.
*
When we reached Suez we stopped once more. The sunshine was bright and penetrating and the days began to get sticky before noon. In the morning the ship’s makeshift cinema was showing a Laurel and Hardy film. My brother and I were keen spectators, for in wartime England we had seen very few films.
In the midst of the performance there wa
s a sudden commotion. A dim adult figure appeared behind us, whispering, ‘You two, come quickly. There’s someone to see you.’
Neither of us wished to leave. My brother slumped down in his seat and grumbled over his shoulder.
‘Can’t it wait? Look, we’re just getting to a good bit.’
Kids about us were biting their thumbs with excitement and having hiccups from laughter. But we were pulled out in a sulk. Then I saw the light flooding in through the broad open port where new passengers were making their way into the ship. I saw my mother standing just out of the eddy of the crowd, and next to her but not touching her was a tall thin man. He looked handsome to me, even though he wore the comical khaki shorts and the long woollen socks that soldiers wore in the desert. The bare knees of his long legs looked hairless and vulnerable. I noted the trim military haircut, carefully brushed with the parting almost dead centre, and on the upper lip the little clipped hedge of the moustache. He was holding a cigarette in his left hand and something else in his right.
We gazed at this man, not sure what was expected of us.
‘It’s your father,’ said our mother in a quiet voice, sounding a bit resentful, as if we should have known him instantly.
The tall man cleared his throat. ‘Hallo, boys,’ he said in a voice that was embarrassed and too loud. ‘How are you?’
We said nothing but stood looking hopeless. The silence seemed to knot him up with shyness. He cleared his throat again and then thrust out his right hand.
‘Look,’ he said more softly, having got control of his voice. ‘I’ve brought you bananas. Take them. Please.’