by John Harris
We dressed and stood staring at each other, shamefaced and like a lot of convicts in the ill-fitting clothing.
‘It’s no different from me working suit,’ Eph Lott complained. ‘The one I wear with me red tie and me yellow boots. Only it don’t fit so well. They gave me a better suit than this when they sent me down for assaulting the police.’
His fat red face was indignant, his flabby cheeks quivering with indignation. Eph wasn’t a very big man and you could hardly see him for uniform. ‘I didn’t join to get shot up the backside in a bloody spud sack like this,’ he mourned.
Locky was staring at his reflection in one of the windows, a look of wry humour on his face.
‘It’s impossible,’ he said in a tone of awestruck wonder.
‘What’s impossible?’ Bold demanded.
‘No man can look like Ethelred the Unready and Abdul the Damned at one and the same time.’
Bold’s bony face cracked as he gave a bark of laughter, then he stifled it hurriedly and began to shout at Twining. ‘Come on, Quartermaster,’ he snapped. ‘We haven’t all day! Give ’em their trousseaux and let’s get on with it!’
One after the other, we had our arms filled with shirts, underwear and socks.
‘These boots are too big,’ young Murray complained.
‘Git ’im a new pair,’ Bold snapped.
‘Sergeant-Major,’ Tom Creak said. ‘This ’at. It’s too small.’
‘Git yourself a new ’ead,’ Bold said unfeelingly. ‘What do you think this is? Savile Row? One of them fancy French mobs? This is the Army, man!’
‘Now,’ he roared when we were outside again, awkward in the new uniforms, the cardboard-stiff kitbags filled with civilian clothing. ‘Git your stuff ’ome and let’s ’ave you back ’ere tomorrer morning with your uniforms fitting. Fitting! ’Ear that? Git your mums on the job. Git your wives. Git your sisters. Git your girl friends.’
‘Sergeant-Major,’ someone piped up, ‘I’ve got no girlfriend.’
‘Well, git yourself one,’ Bold told him, unmoved. ‘You ain’t no soldier if you ain’t got a girl friend. You ain’t got much time. Next week we’re going to start soldiering proper. We’re leaving here.’
‘Leaving?’ Even the ridiculous uniforms they’d given us were forgotten as this latest item of news sank in through the noise.
‘Leaving?’ Henny Cuthbert said. ‘Where are we going, Sergeant-Major?’
‘Where are we going?’ Bold said. ‘Blackpool front. Southend-on-Sea. We’re going to Blackmires. That’s where we’re going.’
‘Blackmires!’
There was a loud groan. Blackmires was a thousand feet up, just outside the city on the edge of the Pennines. It was the place where Colonel Cody had flown his string-and-canvas aeroplanes from several years before, and it was well known he chose it because there was nothing but open moors to get in his way for miles around, and the strongest wind in the country to help him off the ground.
‘They’ve been building a camp there,’ Bold informed us. ‘Well, now it’s finished and we’re going to take it over.’
‘Blackmires,’ Murray moaned. ‘With winter coming on.’
Locky sighed. ‘The first drop of red-hot iron has entered my soul,’ he said.
4
Until we moved to Blackmires it had all been a bit of a picnic. We’d been reaping the glory of the men in France with a minimum of discomfort. We’d lived at home, admired and treated like fighting-cocks, regarded as heroes and Hotspurs and defenders of the faith, without lifting a finger to defend anything and with more girls and free drinks than a lot of us could easily manage.
At Blackmires, it was different immediately. There wasn’t much glory in that bleak little plain, and, cut off from the city streets as we were by those few empty miles of rain-soaked moors, there was a great deal of discomfort. There was no one within reach to regard us as heroes, and only one pub, the Four Merry Lads, where the farm-worker customers couldn’t afford to buy anything for anyone but themselves. It was a wild windswept area devoid of trees and bushes and already with a hint of snow in the wind.
‘Is this it?’ Henny Cuthbert gave a neigh of horror as he stared from the top of the last hill through the growing dusk at the bleak huddle of huts in the shallow distant valley; a mere grouping of corrugated-iron and asbestos-and-wood shacks like a lot of squat black beetles round an unpainted water tower on stilts, their roofs gleaming in the needling rain that beat into our raw faces and soaked us all to the skin. The few trees about us were stunted and leaning well to the east, and the moss-patched dry-stone walls glimmered and shone in the fitful light that came through the racing clouds.
‘This is it,’ I said. I was carrying Henny’s kitbag in addition to my own belongings and the best part of a parcel that Murray had brought, which had burst open halfway up the hill as we marched so that he’d had to distribute its contents among his pockets and his friends.
The camp was nothing but a shambles. The fields were sodden and the roads were quagmires. Nothing was finished. Nothing was ready. I saw Sergeant-Major Bold, his uniform soaked, his white face furious, splashing through the puddles on the cinder path that led to headquarters, shoving between groups of limping, bewildered men and cursing under his breath the people who’d sent us there. Suddenly soldiering seemed to lose all its glamour, and in the plaintive wails around me I caught a hint of the thin sad scent of disillusionment.
Because they hadn’t had a chance to practise it, the regimental cooks didn’t know their job and our first army meal was a wretched affair of half-boiled mutton, hard potatoes and undrinkable tea.
No one had knives or forks because we hadn’t needed them up to then, and we had to tear the meat apart with our fingers, all sitting on the floor because there were no tables, all surrounded by the little items of equipment we’d had to tie about us with a string because we had no slings and pouches, all smelling of wet wool and complaining of feet crippled by boots that hadn’t been properly broken in.
The draughty, damp-smelling cookhouse, that echoed the complaints like a vault, seemed to be full of steam and the smells of cabbage and half-cooked meat.
As darkness came we tottered towards our huts, through parked transport with the City Council’s name on it in square white letters, through the piles of canvas bags and tent poles and floorboards that lay in the mud, through the rolls of rusting barbed wire that were to form a fence and the rows of untarred wooden buildings and the piles of unused planks and bricks. There was no electricity, no coal and no roofing felt on the huts, and rainwater dripped monotonously inside to form pools on the bare floorboards. Half the windows were missing, and here and there an ill-fitting door banged in the wind.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do so we decided to go to bed. There weren’t enough palliasses, of course, so we put them together in twos, and sharing the blankets, which were nothing more than suit-lengths from city tailors cut to the right size, lay down across them in batches of five for warmth, like litters of piglets in front of a sow.
We undressed in silence, listening to the whine of the wind and the creak and groan of the hut-frames in the gale, too exhausted and dispirited to say anything. Inevitably, Locky was already asleep. He had the gift of adapting himself to whatever came along. He wasn’t a good soldier in the way that Mason was a good soldier. He was clumsy on parade ground and indifferent to authority, but he had the gift of fitting in without complaint, always hard-working, always good-tempered, always unobtrusive.
Murray had stripped himself to the skin and put on his pyjamas and then adorned himself with an assortment of socks, pullovers, scarves and balaclavas to keep himself warm. He was sitting moodily now on the edge of his portion of palliasse, his round young face edged by the faint light from the two candles which were all the hut could boast.
‘Wouldn’t like to borrow a couple more pullovers, would you?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘I’ve got some in my bag, if you’d like ’em?’
Murray turned his head wearily. ‘I’m all right,’ he said despondently.
‘You ought to be warm, anyway.’
‘My mother said I always ought to make sure of that.’
Someone laughed and Murray turned. It was Henry Oakley. He had money and he’d always been popular with the crowds at Hendrick Lane as a cricketer, but on closer acquaintance he’d proven to be quick-tempered and hard to get on with. He’d originally been in A Company, but had eventually turned up in D, and Locky insisted that Bold, with one eye on the company’s cricket team, had swopped him for a spare clerk and a hundred cigarettes, and the disgrace had soured his nature.
‘You think it’s funny or something?’ Murray was demanding.
Oakley looked up. ‘You’re in the Army now, sonny,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to leave your mummy behind.’
‘You leave my mother out of this.’
Murray’s mother was a standing joke in the company. He’d managed for weeks to hide from her where he went every day, but he’d been seen at last by a neighbour, charging madly across Suffolk Park with a broomstick, in company with two or three hundred other madmen, and before we’d left the Drill Hall for Blackmires there’d been quite a scene when she’d insisted on getting the colonel’s promise that he shouldn’t go overseas till he was eighteen.
His face went pink now and his fists started to clench.
‘You trying to pick a fight or something?’ he demanded, and Oakley grinned confidently.
‘You want to do something about it if I am?’ he asked.
Murray sighed and got to his feet and we all turned round to watch the fun, none of us really interested, but all welcoming violence as a diversion from the draughts and too tired to try to stop it.
Only Catchpole took no notice. He was on his knees by the window and we all thought he was saying his prayers, though it wasn’t much like him. Although he was the Vicar of Cotterside’s son, he’d never showed much enthusiasm for the family business. He was a burly rakehell of a man who’d been to sea and spent some time gold-mining in South Africa before returning home just before the war. He was always borrowing money from Eph, and scrounging cigarettes, and claimed to have a wife in Cape Town his family knew nothing about.
He’d placed a lace handkerchief that had obviously belonged to one of his numerous girlfriends on top of a wooden box he’d pinched for use as a locker, and on the handkerchief he’d stood a brass ashtray he’d brought with him and a bottle containing one of the two candles we’d found. For a long time he’d been silent, then just as Murray lifted his fists and Oakley got slowly to his feet, Catchpole, in sepulchral oratorical tones he’d obviously learned from his father, started to deliver a catechism of his own.
‘Dearly beloved brethren,’ he said loudly, and Murray and Oakley stopped dead and turned towards him, ‘we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation to join together these two men in mortal combat.’
Murray stared, startled, and Oakley’s scowl faded. Arnold Holroyd grinned and Eph Lott twisted round on his palliasse to see what it was all about.
Catchpole stood up. He was wearing his shirt outside his trousers and, in the half-light looked vaguely like a parson in his surplice. He lifted his hands and began to proclaim in sombre tones that made everyone turn their heads.
‘The Army moveth us in sundry places,’ he said hollowly. ‘To acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness…’
Someone laughed, a short sharp bark, and Murray dropped his fists and began to smile. Catchpole gestured with his hands over the flickering candle.
‘We should not dissemble, nor cloak our sins before the face of Almighty God, the colonel,’ he went on and we all sat up and began to listen gleefully, feeling better at once, all eyes turned to the candle-lit figure by the end of the hut, his fair hair ruffled by the breeze that came in through the broken window.
‘We should not dissemble them before the face of the adjutant, the officers, or Sergeant-Major Bold. Let us confess them with a humble, lowly penitent heart, to the end that by the infinite goodness and mercy of the War Office we might eventually be granted blankets, knives, forks, spoons, and perhaps even somewhere to lay our weary heads.’
‘Amen,’ Mason said solemnly.
Catchpole turned and held out his hands towards us in blessing, his face as straight and expressionless as a curate’s.
‘O Lord,’ he said loudly, ‘we have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep and in consequence have had idiots set in judgment upon us…’
‘Amen!’ The chorus was taken up by all of us this time, cheerfully and with great zest, and the fight was forgotten as Catchpole began to warm up.
‘…They have not done those things which they ought to have done and very soon there will be no health left in us…’
‘Amen! And amen again!’
‘Grant, O Lord, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life – paying particular attention to one Ephsibiah Lott, who has long been a straying lamb…’
Eph started to chuckle, then it dissolved into a breathless laugh that shook his fat little body, and in the end he rolled off the end of the palliasse and lay flat on his back on the floor.
‘Straying lamb,’ he wheezed. ‘Me! My Gawd!’
‘O Lord, open Thou our lips – O God, make speed to save us.’
‘O Lord, make haste to help us.’
Catchpole made a few more passes over the candle and swung round again to us, the wind that howled through the broken window ruffling his shirt. ‘Blessed are the fornicators,’ he said, ‘for they shall populate the earth. Blessed are the lowly and the poor in spirit, for they are all privates in Kitchener’s Army.’
‘Amen, mate,’ Eph shouted enthusiastically, still on his back.
A ghost of a smile crossed Catchpole’s face and he dropped on his knees before the candle, raising his hands to heaven.
‘Now let us pray for all those set over us,’ he said, his voice wavering up and down as though he were chanting a psalm. ‘For Lord Kitchener, the War Office, King’s Regulations, Army Council Instructions, Daily Routine Orders, the generals, the colonels, the majors, the captains, the lieutenants, the second lieutenants, the sergeant-majors, the sergeants, the corporals, the lance-corporals, the cooks, the military police, the orderly-room staff, the chief cook, the bottle-washers, the colonel’s terrier, the major’s cat and the man who fought the monkey in the dustbin.’
Catchpole’s voice grew stronger and he seemed to gather us together in a sweeping gesture before him, his sepulchral voice coming through the noise of the wind and the mutter of a loose door and the low sniggers of laughter, as he leafed through a novel belonging to Murray as though he were looking for his place in a Book of Common Prayer.
‘We will now conclude,’ he said, ‘by singing hymn four thousand six hundred and seventy-three: “O Lord, I have never wronged an onion, So why should it make me cry?”’
As he droned to a stop, there was a burst of noisy laughter that was followed at once by a shout from the bed nearest the door.
‘Quiet! Bold!’
The candles went out immediately and there was a hurried scuffling for palliasses. The door shook under a heavy fist and Sergeant-Major Bold’s voice broke through the rattling of the wind and the beat of the rain.
‘What are you lot doin’ in there?’
‘Saying our prayers, Sergeant-Major,’ Henny Cuthbert said meekly, in a high-pitched girlish voice.
There was a long silence from outside. Bold was clearly trying to make up his mind how much truth there might be in the statement. For all his vast experience, he’d never had recruits such as he’d got now, and he was never quite certain what to expect next. He was clearly coming to the reluctant conclusion that, in fact, we might be saying our prayers.
In the end we heard him splash away and settled back in peace.
Suddenly Blackmires didn’t seem so bad after all.
; From the first trembling notes of reveille next day, when we learned just how cold cold water could be in a howling gale, life suddenly became a round of fatigues which I hadn’t known existed when I’d lived at Mrs Julius’. Suddenly there was a cookhouse to clean, potatoes to peel, latrines to clear, huts to scrub, and always – always – some part of the camp to erect.
‘God strike me blind,’ Eph Lott complained. ‘There’s even a list of bloody duties to be done before breakfast.’
We got up at six-thirty – six if you had any sense and wanted to avoid the shoving, jostling crowd of men round too-few washbasins, shaving out of a mug filled over someone else’s shoulder, scraping at cold-toughened beards in the half-light. We formed up with a great clattering of hobnailed boots outside the hut to march to the steamy warmth of the cookhouse, the darkness noisy with the clash of mess tins and spoons, the cooks grey-faced and unshaven in soiled white aprons and reaching for a mug of stale tea whenever there was a spare moment between the dollops of burnt porridge.
A whole day of work followed, boring and repetitious because they still hadn’t realised we had any intelligence and insisted on doing everything the simple way, but relieved by moments of sly joy when we took pleasure in deliberately marching where we shouldn’t – across the CO’s lawn, over the fence into the next field, through the cookhouse – when Corker’s attention was attracted elsewhere and he forgot to give us right or left wheel. In the evening, if there wasn’t an inspection the next morning with boned boots and scrubbed table-tops and whitewashed stove surrounds, and rolled greatcoats and laid-out kits, we had a free hour or two to pick up the threads of civilian life with a daily paper or a pack of cards, or a trip to the Four Merry Lads where it was always beer and choruses round a piano with the back taken off.
Inevitably Eph became our crown-and-anchor king, and whenever there was a moment to spare he was down on one of the palliasses with his little strip of canvas or his lotto board on a blanket. We never got the chance to sample much else but Eph’s gambling. We weren’t allowed to wander far, and for days all we did was eat whatever was given us like ravening wolves and fall asleep wherever we happened to be lying. The company became more than ever our boundary, and of the wider world beyond it we never learned a great deal. If the battalion was our world, the company was our city, and the platoon our particular street.