Covenant with Death

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by John Harris


  ‘It’ll be fine if they let that lot in,’ Henny said resentfully, his long face mournful. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a select mob.’

  I didn’t listen to him very carefully because I’d just seen Frank Mason and was busy pushing people out of the way to make room for him.

  I liked Mason. He was a handsome man, six foot odd in his socks, with crisp black hair and a strong face and mouth. In the pepper-and-salt suit he’d bought at Aby Moss’s on the Common the year before, he was enough to fetch the ducks off the water, and I noticed more than one of the girls in the cars with their eyes on him.

  Before joining the Post on the same day that I had, he’d moved about the country for Liddell, Moore and Hart’s, selling machine tools, and was the only man I ever knew who managed to have a girl in every county in the kingdom. To me, who’d lived in digs ever since I was sixteen, Mason was the absolute limit in human splendour.

  He’d obviously dressed for the occasion and was wearing a bowler hat, cloth-topped boots and a stiff collar tall enough to cut his head off. Frank considered himself a bit of a lady-killer and liked to dress the part. He went dancing a lot and was always practising things like the Bunny-Hug and the Turkey-Trot and the Something-or-other Glide round the office, and when there was nothing to do you could always find him in the photo library downstairs with Molly Miles, who worked there, showing her how to do the Tango or something, or doing a bit of quiet mashing with one of the other girls in a corner behind the files.

  ‘Hello, Fen, old fruit,’ he said. ‘Only people with real eyes and no more than ten toes are wanted this morning. I decided to offer my services. Obviously, it’s going to hold up the war if I don’t. They tell me Asquith’s already telegraphed the Commander-in-Chief: “Mason’s on his way.”’

  ‘The war’s as good as won,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Strong, clean and cheerful,’ he went on. ‘A fine figure of a man. Put me down for a general and I’ll not complain. Butter up the sergeant and tell him that Mason’s to be well looked after.’

  ‘Hardacre’s here,’ I pointed out, and Mason grinned.

  ‘We shall have music wherever we go,’ he said gaily.

  It was already very warm, in spite of the early hour, and several of the men around me had their jackets over their arms. Then I saw one or two of them had dusty clothes and looked as though they hadn’t shaved.

  One of them, a square-built man with a back like the Rock of Gibraltar and a pale scarred miner’s face, grinned at me in a sudden onrush of friendliness that lit up his sombre features as though the sun had come out behind his eyes.

  ‘Been making a night of it?’ I asked, and he nodded.

  ‘We’ve been ’ere since yest’y, if that’s what you mean,’ he said, with a curious dignity that went oddly with his cheap blue suit and cap. ‘Slept on t’pavement. T’police let us.’ I was impressed by a patriotism that was greater than mine.

  ‘We come over from ’Amley,’ he went on. ‘“Tom Creak,” I said, “you’ll need to be early. If you don’t stay overnight, all them forms’ll be snatched up before t’first bus gets in.” So we slept ’ere. There was about twenty of us. Tom Creak saw to it. I’m Tom Creak. I’m a deputy at t’pit.’

  The first of the traffic was beginning to appear now, buses drumming past on their solid rubber tyres, blue and white and with the city coat of arms; drays drawn by great clattering Clydesdales, piled high with barrels of the strong north-country beer the city was famous for; carts of straw and hay and coal and great white rolls of paper for the printing presses; drays of steel bars, blue-grey from the rolling-mills, and bales of freshly cooled wire – the iron rims of their wheels polished bright on the stone setts; horse-drawn cabs; a few motor cars; and the first of the office workers – pausing at the end of Suffolk Street to stare at the growing crowd outside the Town Hall.

  Several of the men around me were skylarking about on the pavement and dancing to the hurdy-gurdy, and two or three had begun to climb on each other’s shoulders to look into the windows of the Town Hall.

  ‘There’s an old josser in there,’ one of them said eagerly, his nose against the glass. ‘I think he might even be alive. He’s breathing. Hi, you in there!’ he bawled. ‘Come and open these damn’ doors!’

  A policeman appeared and told them to get down, and they promptly joined hands and began to dance round him. The policeman grinned.

  ‘Now look ’ere, you young fellers,’ he said, ‘nobody minds you acting the old goat, but don’t stop t’traffic, that’s all. Keep on t’pavement and make way when folk want to pass.’

  He was saluted and cheered on his way, and Frank Mason and several others started pretending to form fours for him. The crowd at the end of Suffolk Street began to laugh. Then in the distance I heard the faint wheezy sound of a brass band and saw that the crowds were turning away and staring down the High Street. The policeman took a hasty look and began to push the pedestrians back on to the pavement, then, standing in the middle of the road, he held up his hand to stop the traffic.

  Round the corner swept the brass band in blue-and-lavender uniforms, thumping and wheezing away at ‘The British Grenadiers’. There must have been a dozen of them, ranging from the oldest who was a man easily seventy with a white beard, sawing away at a trombone, to the youngest, a thin-faced boy with pimples, whose blue bus-conductor’s hat wobbled over his nose as he marched to the music.

  Behind them, swinging round the corner, came a banner, held on two poles and supported by four crimson cords. National Union of Mineworkers, it said, Caldby and Hannerside Lodge, and behind the banner, trying to march in step, were another two or three dozen young men, all of them, like Tom Creak the deputy, with the pale faces and blue-scarred noses of underground workers.

  ‘We’re ’ere boys,’ one of them yelled excitedly. ‘They can start t’war now.’

  A cheer went up from the crowd outside the Town Hall as the band turned into Suffolk Street and came to a shuffling halt. There was another cheer from the passers-by, which was returned by the men behind the banner. Then it dawned on me that these two or three dozen miners had probably been marching behind their brass band ever since daylight, all the way from Caldby, a matter of fifteen miles, simply for the privilege of enlisting.

  ‘Has it started yet?’ one of them shouted.

  ‘It’s been going on since August, old sport!’

  ‘Not t’war, fat’ead! T’recruiting.’

  ‘There’s ten minutes to go,’ someone announced. ‘They daren’t open t’doors in case they’re killed in t’rush.’

  By midday there were three bands and three banners outside the Town Hall. They’d arrived in a blast of noisy patriotism that had died as quickly as it had risen when they realised others had arrived before them. Most of the bandsmen didn’t bother to go home but stayed to sign on themselves, taking their places at the end of the queue, which stretched away into the evening and eventually into the next day, so that they had to be found beds in city hostels and Y.M.C.A. rooms.

  I was one of the first in.

  Earl FitzJames, who’d offered to act as commanding officer, was sitting beside the clerk who was filling in the forms, his top hat on the table in front of him, so that I could see the red silk lining and the name of the makers. He owned collieries all over South Yorkshire and had raised and commanded his own battery in the South African War.

  He stared at me silently for a moment, stroking his gravy-dipper moustache, his watery old eyes looking me up and down. His frock coat hung loosely on his shrunken frame and his long bowed cavalryman’s legs stretched out in front of him.

  ‘Strong young feller, by the look of you,’ he observed. ‘Play any games?’

  I told him I did, and he nodded approvingly.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ he said. ‘Sporting spirit. Don’t hit a man when he’s down. Yer in for the greatest game of yer life, young feller.’

  He fished out his cigarette case and offered me a smoke from th
e rolled gold with the FitzJimmy crest on it, and I sat there like a lord myself as they took down my particulars.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Fenner.’

  ‘Christian names?’

  ‘Mark Martin.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Religion?’

  ‘Church of England.’

  ‘Trade or profession?’

  ‘Journalist.’

  I was out within half an hour, but there were others who stood in the broiling sun and the dust outside the Town Hall for most of the day, fidgeting restlessly, fearful they were going to be overlooked, telephoning friends who might pull enough strings to get them in by a short cut, and waylaying passing recruiting officers or plucking the sleeves of harassed sergeants to argue about their places in the queue. ‘They were marshalled back into line by weary policemen, and old FitzJimmy sent for meat pies, cheese sandwiches and beer from the nearest pub to keep them going.

  We were attested and sent in cheering, police-escorted groups to the Corn Exchange, where a group of civilian doctors in sacking-covered booths slapped our chests, examined our private parts, our height and weight, our feet, our teeth, our hearts, our eyes, our hearing, our lungs, and, as far as they could, our internal workings.

  ‘Touch your toes,’ I was told by an old man with a red face and mutton-chop whiskers, who wore knickerbockers and looked and smelled like a vet.

  I tried.

  ‘Without bending your knees,’ he pointed out grimly.

  I hadn’t done it for years and it was harder than I thought, and I decided that if I got through this lot I’d cut out drinking and smoking and concentrate on keeping fit. Something in my spine gave an ugly creak, but with a bit of an effort I managed it in the end.

  ‘Quite a job,’ the doctor said dryly. ‘Still, that’s quite a bread-basket you’ve got on you, isn’t it? Sure you’re not in pup?’

  I tucked in my stomach as fast as I could, blushing furiously. We’d all thought the medical would be easy. We’d been saying all morning that if they looked in one ear and didn’t see daylight from the other, you were in.

  Most of the time we waited in nearby rooms, half-clothed and in acute embarrassment, obeying orders to walk up and down, open our mouths, read from cards and fill small test-tubes, dreading constantly that the next step might be the last.

  ‘Why’d you join, old boy?’ the man next to me was saying.

  ‘We-ell’ – his neighbour scratched his head – ‘I don’t know, really. Because everybody else seemed to be joining, I suppose. It seemed the thing to do. Besides, you can’t let the old Hun get away with it, can you?’

  ‘He said my teeth were bad,’ Henny Cuthbert complained, his voice like the mournful neigh of a horse. ‘Anybody’d think I wanted to eat Germans, not shoot ’em. They say they’re going to interview every one of us individually to make sure they get the right type. Every one of us. It’s worse than applying for a new job.’

  He edged uneasily away from Eph Lott, who was sitting next to him. Eph’s body was white up to the point where his collar fitted. There it became bright purple in a sharp-etched line, almost as though his head belonged to someone else and had got itself attached to Eph by mistake. As Henny moved away, Eph seemed to think he was making room for more customers and he hitched himself up too, so that Henny had to move again.

  ‘Bloke in there told me I was too fat,’ he said bitterly. ‘Me! Too fat! Anybody’d think they didn’t want me. They’ve only to say, and I’ll do a bunk quick as poss. They don’t realise what I’m giving up, to go and fight their bloody ’Uns for ’em.’ He turned to me. ‘How you doin’, mate?’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t stand no nonsense. They want you, y’know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  By this time, in fact, I’d reached the stage when I’d have considered it a shameful humiliation to have been rejected, and I suffered agonies as the doctor examining my feet and legs seemed to hesitate.

  ‘Varicose veins?’ he asked.

  ‘No, never,’ I said.

  ‘Feet give you any trouble?’

  ‘No.’ I was beginning to wonder if he’d spotted something dreadful I wasn’t aware of.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘What about that one?’ He pointed at my right big toe which I’d once broken playing football.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Funny shape, that’s all. Don’t like the look of it.’

  He stared down at my foot, bending over to peer closer, and my eyes followed his anxiously.

  ‘I’ve never had any trouble, Doctor,’ I pointed out quickly. ‘And I do a lot of walking.’

  He looked up at me and smiled. ‘Do a lot of walking, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, you’re going to do a lot more walking before you’re much older, young man. Very well, go through there.’

  ‘Am I all right?’

  ‘I wish I’d got a heart like yours.’

  In a small room off the main hall, someone had chalked on a blackboard To Berlin Via the Corn Exchange and we thought it rather good. As we appeared, still a little sheepish and uncertain, a sergeant, with a ferocious moustache and South African ribbons on his chest, lined us up, shoving at us with gnarled hands. I noticed he looked rather elderly and not very bright, and that his nose had a deeper hue than perhaps it ought to have had. He looked like a Reservist who’d been called back to the Colours and just then, to me, he seemed the very symbol of authority and military skill.

  ‘All right,’ he said harshly. ‘Stop all this spitting and committing a nuisance. This here’s government property for the moment. Less ’issing, whistling and false laughter, and take them grins off yer faces.’

  It was an old joke he’d probably trotted out dozens of times before, but we managed to laugh. He handed me a Bible and told me to hold it up so that two or three other men could put their hands on it at the same time. Eph Lott was with me, and Henny Cuthbert and Jack Barraclough.

  ‘We’re going to swear you lot in,’ the sergeant said. There was no emotion on his face, none of the deference we half expected as the saviours of mankind. To him we were just bodies about to be absorbed into the vast impersonal machine of the Army – and pretty uninteresting bodies at that. ‘Nothing to it,’ he went on, ‘jest keep yer ’ands on them there Bibles. Back in a tick.’

  He opened a door, while we were left standing with our arms high in the air, all feeling a little foolish and over-dramatic.

  ‘Just think,’ Henny Cuthbert said, his long face alight. ‘In half an hour we’ll be in.’

  But after what seemed ages the sergeant was still speaking to someone in the office beyond. They seemed to be discussing the weather.

  ‘They’ve forgot us,’ Eph Lott complained. ‘What’s that old fart up to? Leaving us standing ’ere like wet weekends? They want to remember we’re busy men.’

  Eventually an officer appeared. Like the sergeant, he too was elderly and seemed bored by the whole business. He wore an old-fashioned uniform with a stand-up collar and a starched stock.

  ‘Take the Book in your right hands,’ he said. ‘Oh, you have done! Well done, Sergeant. That’s the stuff. Right, now say after me: I swear——’

  ‘I swear——’

  ‘—to serve His Majesty the King——’

  ‘—to serve His Majesty the King——’

  ‘—his heirs and successors … and the generals and officers set over me by His Majesty the King, his heirs and successors, so help me God!’

  ‘—So help me God!’

  ‘Now kiss the Book.’

  We did as we were told and the officer disappeared without another word, and the sergeant collected the Bibles unemotionally and gave us each a bright new shilling and a strip of paper with a set of figures on it.

  ‘That’s your number,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose it and don’t bleedin’ well forget it.’

  ‘Are
we in?’ Barraclough asked.

  The sergeant nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can go now.’

  ‘Go?’ Henny’s face fell. ‘Where to?’

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘’Ome,’ he said. ‘’Alifax. ’Ell. I’m not fussy.’

  ‘Don’t they want us?’

  The sergeant pulled a face. ‘Not now they don’t,’ he said. ‘But they will, don’t fret. Now they’ve got you, they won’t let you go in a hurry. They’ll be in touch with you.’

  It must have been late afternoon by the time I got back to the office. Sergeant Corker, the commissionaire, had gone, I noticed, from his little cubicle at the bottom of the stairs in the Editorial entrance, and I wondered suddenly if, complete with shiny red nose, large moustache and South African War ribbons, he too was engaged at that moment in swearing in groups of other eager young men elsewhere in the country.

  In the Reporters’ Room, Frank Mason greeted me with a gleeful thumbs-up sign to indicate that he was through, but Hardacre, who was sitting at his desk, puffing furiously at a cigarette, merely gave me a heavy reproachful look.

  ‘Get through, Hardy?’ I asked him gaily, secure in the knowledge that I had got through.

  For a while he said nothing and I could hear the machines’ monotonous scratchy ticking from below, and a telephone bell in one of the offices along the corridor, ringing with a harsh jangling sound as though it were shrill and angry at the lack of attention. Then Hardacre looked up and shook his head and I saw there were tears of disappointment in his eyes.

  ‘Some trouble with my feet,’ he said.

  I suppose until a week before Hardacre had never dreamed of becoming a soldier. He was a humourless man whose spindly legs led us to call him ‘Four o’clock Feet’. He was married, with three children, and every year he sang like a lark in Handel’s Messiah at the City Hall, then pounded back to the office to write a criticism of himself. He’d got a chest like a barrel and walked miles in spite of his legs, to improve his lungs. He’d never struck me as a possible soldier, but in the prevailing excitement, here he was on the point of tears because he wasn’t one.

 

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