Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  The crowd in our platoon were a mixed lot. There were two English ex-schoolboys and a number of Scots, at least two of them from Glasgow. There was also a boxer, who spoke with a regional, agricultural accent. One of the public schoolboys had a record player which he had brought with him. He was a jazz devotee and I can still remember him plugging it into the light and playing, on an autumn evening, a tune called ‘Love, O, Love, O, Careless Love’. The second line, I think, was, ‘You fly to my head like wine’. The public schoolboys were very composed people (certain officers), and the chubby-cheeked one was always reading poetry.

  Lecky stood out from the first day. First of all, he couldn’t keep in step. We used to march along swinging our arms practically up to our foreheads and then this voice from miles away would shout across the square, ‘Squad, Halt!’ Then the little corporal would march briskly across the square, and he’d come to a halt in front of Lecky and he’d say (the square was scorching with the heat in the middle of a blazing July), his face thrust up to close to him, ‘What are you, Lecky?’ And Lecky would say, ‘I don’t know, Corporal.’ And the corporal would say, ‘You’re a bastard, aren’t you, Lecky?’ And Lecky would say, ‘I’m a bastard, Corporal.’ Then the marching would start all over again, and Lecky would still be out of step.

  It is strange about these corporals, how they want everything to be so tidy, as if they couldn’t stand sloppiness, as if untidiness is a personal insult to them. I suppose really that the whole business becomes so mindlessly boring after a few years of it that the only release for them is the manic anger they generate.

  Of course, Lecky got jankers. What this involved was that after training was over for the day (usually at about four o’clock) he would put on his best boots, best battledress, best tie, best everything and report to the guardroom at the double. Then, after he had been inspected (if he didn’t get more jankers for sloppiness) he would double up to the barrack room again, change into denims, and go off to his assigned fatigue which might involve weeding or peeling potatoes or helping to get rid of swill at the cookhouse.

  Continual jankers are a dreadful strain. You have to have all your clothes pressed for inspection at the guardroom; as well as that, boots and badges must be polished and belts must be blancoed. You live in a continual daze of spit and polish and ironing, and the only time you can find to do all this is after you have come back from your assigned task which is often designed to make you as dirty as possible. There is rapid change of clothes from battledress to denims and back again. For after your fatigues are over you have to change back into battledress to be inspected at the guardroom for a second time. I must say that I used to feel sorry for him.

  His bed was beside mine. I never actually spoke to him much. For one thing his only form of reading was comics, and we had very little in common. For another thing—though this is difficult to explain—I didn’t want to be infected by his bad luck. And after all what could I have done for him even if I had been able to communicate with him?

  The funny thing was that as far as the rest of us were concerned the corporal became more relaxed as the training progressed and treated us as human beings. He would bellow at us out on the square, but at nights he would often talk to us. He’d even listen to the jazz records though he preferred pop. All this time while the others were gathered round the record player, the corporal in the middle, Lecky would be rushing about blancoing or polishing or making his bed tidy. Sometimes the corporal would shout at him, ‘Get a move on, Lecky, are you a f … snail or something?’ And Lecky would give him a startled glance, before he would continue with whatever he was doing.

  I never saw him write a letter. I have a feeling he couldn’t write very well. In fact, when he was reading the comics, you could see his lips move and his finger travel along the page. Once I even saw the corporal pick up one of the comics and sit on the bed quite immersed in it for a while.

  At the beginning, Lecky seemed quite bright. He even managed to make a joke out of that classic day when he was first taught to fire the bren. Instead of setting it to single rounds, he released the whole batch of bullets in one burst and nearly ripped the target to shreds. I saw the corporal bending down very gently beside him and saying to him equally slowly, ‘What a stupid uneducated b … you are, Lecky.’ He got jankers for that too.

  But, as the weeks passed, a fixed look of despair pervaded his face. He acted as if his every movement was bound to be a mistake, as if he had no right to exist, and that carefree open-faced appearance of his faded to leave a miserable white mask. Sometimes you wonder if it was right.

  The more I see of these two people in the court, the more I’m sure that they really are guilty of hitting that old man, though they themselves swear blind they didn’t do it. They keep insisting that they are being victimised by the police and that they were beaten up at the station. They even picked on one of the policemen as the one who did it. He very gravely refuted the charges. One of them says he never drank vp in his life, that he thinks it’s a drink only tramps use, and that he himself has only drunk whisky or beer. He is quite indignant about it: one could almost believe him. They also accuse the girl of framing them because one of them had a fight with her brother once on a bus. But their attitude is very defiant and it isn’t doing them any good. My wife was away yesterday seeing her mother so I had to go to Armstrong’s for lunch. Armstrong’s is opposite the court which is in turn just beside the police station. As I was entering the restaurant I was passed by the superintendent who greeted me very coldly, I thought. He is a tall broad individual, very proud of his rank, and you can see him standing at street corners looking very official and stern, with his white gloves in his hands, staring across the traffic, one of his minions, usually a sergeant, standing beside him. I wondered why he was so distant, especially as we often play bowls together and have been known to play a game of golf.

  It struck me afterwards that perhaps he thought I had put them up to their accusations against the police. After all, we mustn’t undermine the authority of the police as they have a lot to put up with, and, even if they do use truncheons now and again, we must remember the kind of people they are dealing with. I believe in the use of psychology to a certain extent, but the victim must be protected too.

  There was the time, too, when Lecky nearly killed off the platoon with a grenade. After a while it got so that hardly anyone in the hut spoke to him much. At the beginning they used to play tricks on him, like messing up his blankets, but that was before the corporal got to work on him (no, that’s not strictly true, the Glasgow boys were doing it even after that). Most of the time we didn’t see him at all, as he was so often on jankers. I don’t know why we didn’t speak to him. I think it was something about him that made us uneasy: I can only express it by saying that we felt him to be a born victim. It was as if he attracted trouble and we didn’t want to be in the neighbourhood when it struck. We didn’t want to have to do that spell of ten weeks’ training all over again as Lecky was sure to do.

  One morning we had an inspection. We had inspections every Saturday: the c.o. (distant, precise, immaculately uniformed) would come along, busily accompanied by the sergeant major, the sergeant, and corporal of the platoon. Oh, and the lieutenant as well (our lieutenant had been to Cambridge). We would all be standing by our beds, of course, rifles ready so that the c.o. could peer down the barrel, followed in pecking order by all the members of his entourage. If there was a single spot of grease we were for it. Our beds had all our possessions laid out on them, blanco, fork, knife and spoon, vest, pants, and much that I can’t now remember. All, naturally, had to be spotlessly clean.

  So there we were, standing stiff and frightened as the c.o. stalked up the room followed by the rest of his minions, the corporal with a small notebook in his hand. Unwavering and taut, we stared straight ahead of us, through the narrow window that gave out on the outside world which appeared to be composed of stone, as the only thing we could see was the parade ground.

/>   Our hearts would be in our boots as we took the bolt out of the rifle and the c.o. would squint down the barrel to see if there was any grease. Mine was all right, but a moment later I heard a terrifying scream from the c.o. as if he had been mortally wounded. I couldn’t even turn my head.

  ‘Take this man’s name. His rifle’s dirty.’ And the sergeant major passed it down to the corporal who put the name in the notebook. The c.o. proceeded on his tour round the room poking distastefully here and there with his stick, and staring at people’s faces to see if they had shaved properly. I remember thinking it was rather like the way farmers prod cattle to see if they are fat and healthy enough. On one occasion he even got the sergeant major to tell someone to raise his feet to see if all the nails in the soles of his boots were still present and correct. Then he went on to the next hut, his retinue behind him.

  And the corporal came up to Lecky, his face contorted with rage, and, punching him in the chest with his finger, said, ‘You perverted motherless b …, you piece of camel’s dung, do you know what you’ve done? You’ve gone and stopped the weekend leave for this platoon. That’s what you’ve done. And don’t any of you public school wallahs write to your m.p.s about it either. As for you, Lecky, you’re up before the c.o. in the morning, and I hope he throws the book at you. I sincerely hope he gives you guard duty for eighteen years.’

  Now this was the first weekend we were going to have since we had entered the camp five weeks before. We hadn’t been beyond the barracks and the square all that time. Blancoing, polishing, marching, eating, sleeping, waking at half past six in the morning, often shaving in cold water—that had been the pattern of our days. We hadn’t even seen the town: we hadn’t been to a café or a cinema. All that time we hadn’t seen a civilian except for the ones working in the Naafi. So, of course, you can guess how we felt. I wasn’t myself desperate. I wasn’t particularly interested in girls (though later on when I was in hospital I got in tow with a nurse). I didn’t drink. All I wanted was to get that ten weeks over. But I also wanted to put on my clean uniform just for once, and walk by myself, without being shouted at, down the anonymous streets of some town and see people even if I didn’t talk to them. I would have been happy just to look in the shop windows, to stroll in the cool evening air, to board a bus, anything at all to get out of that hut.

  There were two Glasgow boys there, and they went up to Lecky when the corporal had left and said to him, ‘You stupid c …, what do you think you’ve done?’ or words to that effect. They were practically insane with rage. For the past weeks all they had talked about was this weekend and the bints they would get off with, the dance they would go to, and so on. In fact, I think that if either of them had had a knife they would have run him through with it. And all this time Lecky sat on his bed petrified as if he had been shell-shocked. He was so shell-shocked that he didn’t even answer. He didn’t even cry. I had heard him crying once in the middle of the night. But there was nothing I could do. What could anyone do? I must say that I felt these Glasgow boys were going too far and I turned away, feeling uncomfortable.

  Lecky was trying to pull a piece of rag through his rifle in order to clean it. One of the Glasgow boys took the rag from him (Lecky surrendered it quite meekly as if he didn’t know what was happening, and indeed, I don’t think he did know), rubbed it on the floor and then pulled it through the rifle again. The other tumbled Lecky’s bed on to the floor, upsetting everything in it. (All this time the chubby-cheeked boy was reading Firbank.)

  ‘You’d best keep in tonight,’ the Glasgow boy said. ‘If I get you outside …’ and he made a motion of cutting Lecky’s throat. Lecky sat on the floor looking up at him, deadly pale, his adam’s apple going up and down in his throat.

  ‘And no help for this bastard from any of you, anymore,’ said the Glasgow boy, turning on us threateningly. The boxer, I remember, grinned amiably like a big dog. I think even he was afraid of the Glasgow boys, but I don’t know. He was pretty hefty too, and the corporal spoke more softly to him than to any of the rest of us.

  So Lecky went up next morning and got another three weeks of jankers, and on top of that he had trouble from the Glasgow boys as well. I would have said something to them, but what would I have gained? They would just have started on me. The sergeant was a placid family man and he left everything to the corporal. The sergeant was pretty nice really: a nice stout man who was very good at handing out the parcels any of us got and making sure that he got a signature. It was funny how Lecky never wrote any letters.

  So the time came for our passing-out parade, to be inspected by a brigadier, one of those officers with a monocle, and a red cap, and a shooting stick. Of course, our own c.o. would be there as well.

  I remember that morning well. It was a beautiful autumn morning, almost melancholy and very still. We were up very early, at about half past five, and I can still recall going out to the door of the hut and standing there regarding the dim deserted square. I am not a fanciful person but, as I stood there, I felt almost as if it were waiting for us, for the drama that we could provide, and that without us it was without meaning. It had taken much from us—perhaps our youth—but it had given us much too. I felt both happy and sad at the same time, sad because I had come to the end of something, and happy because I would be leaving that place shortly.

  I don’t know if the others felt the sadness, but they certainly felt the happiness. They were skylarking about, throwing water at each other from the wash-basins and singing at the tops of their voices. The ablutions appeared on that day to be a well-known and almost beloved place though I could remember shaving there in the coldest of water, in front of the cracked mirror. Today, however, it was different. In a few hours we would be standing on the square, then we would be marching to the sound of the bagpipes.

  And after that we would all leave—all, that is, except Lecky. We were even sorry to be leaving the corporal, who had become more and more genial as the weeks passed, who condescended to be human and would almost speak to us on equal terms. He had even been known to pass round his cigarettes and to offer a drink in the local pub. Perhaps after all he had to be tough; one must always remember the kind of people with whom he often had to deal. For instance, there was one recruit who was in his fourth year of National Service; every chance he got he went over the wall and the m.p.s had to chase him all over the north of England. That’s just stupidity, of course. You can’t beat the Army, you should resign yourself. Rebellion won’t get you anywhere. I believe he had a rough time in the guardroom every time they got him back, but he was indomitable. You almost had to admire him in a way.

  Anyway, I found myself standing beside Lecky at the wash basin. I could see his thin face reflected in the mirror beside my own. There was no happiness in it, and one could not call what one saw sadness: it was more like apathy, utter absence of feeling of any kind. I saw him put his hand in his shaving bag, look again, then become panicky. He turned everything out on to the ledge but he couldn’t find what he was looking for. I looked straight into the mirror where my face appeared cracked and webbed. He turned to me.

  ‘Have you a razor blade?’ he said. To the other side of him I saw the two Glasgow boys grinning at me. One of them drew an imaginary razor across his throat, a gesture which in spite of his smile I interpreted as a threat.

  I knew what would happen to Lecky if he turned up on parade unshaven. I looked down at my razor and remembered that I had some more in my bag. I looked at the grinning boys and knew that they had taken Lecky’s blade.

  I said to him, ‘Sorry I’ve only got the one blade, the one in the razor.’ After all, one must be clean. It would be a disgusting thing to lend anyone else one’s razor blade: why, he might catch a disease. It is quite easy to do that. There’s one thing about the Army: it teaches you to be clean. I was never so fit and clean in my life as during that period I spent in the Army.

  I turned away from the grinning Glasgow boys and looked steadily into the mirror, leani
ng forward to see beyond the cracks as if that were possible. I shaved very carefully, because this was an important day, cutting the stubble away with ease under the rich white lather, the white towel wrapped round my neck.

  I should like to describe that parade in detail, but I can’t now exactly capture my feelings. I began very clumsily, not quite in tune with the music of the pipes, but, as the day warmed, and as the colours became clearer, and as the sun shone on our boots and our badges, and as I saw the brigadier standing on the saluting platform, and as my body grew to know itself apart from me, I had the extraordinary experience of becoming part of a consciousness that was greater than myself, of entering a mysterious harmony. Never before or since did I feel like that, did I experience that kinship which exists between those who have become expert at the one thing and are able to execute a precise function as one person. It was like a mystical experience: I cannot hope to describe it now. Perhaps one had to be young and fit and proud to experience it. One had perhaps to feel that life was ahead of one, with its many possibilities. Today I think of Sheila and a childless marriage and a solicitor’s little office. Perhaps, for once in my life, I sensed the possible harmony of the universe. Perhaps it is only once we sense it. Not even in sex have I felt that unity. It was as if I had fallen in love with harmony and as if I was grateful to the Army for giving me that experience. And after all, at the age I was at then, it is easy to believe in music: I could have sworn that all those men were good because they marched so expertly to the bagpipes, and that anyone who was out of step was bad, and that it would be intolerable for the harmony to be spoilt. I began to understand the corporal, and to be sorry for those who had never experienced the feeling that I was then experiencing.