‘It was home that kept me going really. Scotland. I dreamed about it, and when I woke up I thought about it. I tried to remember everything I could down to the finest detail. Mountains I’d climbed, rivers I’d fished, towns I’d visited. I thought of walks I’d done and I did them again.’
He paused, and Don wondered how Jack had had the time and the money before the war to do all that. That was one difference between them, money. Not that Jack was rich but he came from people who went away on holidays, trips to the Highlands, that kind of thing. It gave you a different perspective. Don had been in Egypt and Italy but he’d never been as far as Dumfries or Aberdeen.
‘I imagined a map of the country,’ Jack said, ‘and I filled it with all the counties, just like on the real map, in the right colours. Yellow for Perthshire, green for Inverness-shire, pink for Argyll. I’d list every major town, every football club, every football ground. Dates of kings and queens, battles. I could do all that while I was working. Clearing the undergrowth, digging, levelling the ground. It was like being in a kind of dream. You could almost dream yourself out of the pain and the heat and the hunger. Almost. We were like machines by that stage, we hardly knew we were real.’
Jack spoke very distinctly, but quietly too. The other customers couldn’t hear him. They wouldn’t want to. It was Saturday night, the war was five years over, they were trying to move on from it or already had. But Don, standing next to him, could hear every word. Jack might almost have been speaking to himself but he wasn’t, he needed a listener. Not just anyone, but Don. For some reason he could say these things in his presence, things otherwise too rotten to be exhumed.
Don had read that other survivors from Japanese camps were bonded together because of the experience; there was a sympathy, an understanding between them that nobody else could share. But Jack was alone. He had a sister over the way at Slaemill, but Don didn’t get the impression they were close. Jack wasn’t close to anyone, maybe not even his wife – but anyway you couldn’t talk to a woman about the war, not the really deep, bad stuff, you couldn’t inflict it on her. So if Jack was going to open up to anybody, it would be to Don, over a couple of pints in the Blackthorn Inn on a Saturday night.
They caught the same bus every morning into Drumkirk. From exchanges they’d had at the bus stop, over weeks, months, years, Don had gradually come to know Jack, or some of him, grabbing morsels of information that he built into a kind of shape. Jack didn’t really volunteer intelligence about himself, it slid out of him bit by bit, reluctantly, painfully, as if he were boaking up wee sharp slivers of metal. And most of it was about the years between 1941 and 1945, when he’d been in the world but also absent from it. He didn’t say much about his life before or since the war: everything turned on what had happened to him in those years. And yet that very period was sometimes out of bounds, a space you trod gingerly round the edges of.
Ach well, everybody had places that were off-limits to others. Don had. Jack didn’t venture there, didn’t know about them. What he knew was that Don had also been a soldier, and that connected them. Don had had a very different war but he understood what it was like to come close to death, to survive.
They didn’t talk on the bus, they sat in separate seats and Don dozed while Jack didn’t. If Don opened his eyes Jack would be staring intently out of the window, as if he were trying to spot a rare bird. Don’s stop came first. He’d to be at his work for eight o’clock sharp. Jack had further to go but he didn’t start till half past the hour. When Don got on in the evening to come home there Jack would be again, with his steady, watchful gaze, as if he’d been travelling all day scanning the countryside instead of writing out dispatch sheets. They’d say a few words then, maybe. Don had the impression that Jack was assessing him. When the bus reached their village of Wharryburn they’d walk in the same direction for a hundred yards before Don turned off into his street and Jack carried on up the brae. ‘Goodnight,’ Jack would say. ‘See ye the morn’s morn,’ Don would say. That was their routine. It was enough for two men to say that they knew each other.
Then one Saturday morning, as Don was going past Jack’s seat to get off, Jack said, ‘Fancy a pint in the Blackthorn tonight?’ and Don, not really having time to think about it, said, ‘Aye, all right,’ and Jack said, ‘Eight o’clock, then,’ as if there were no other time he could envisage being there, and that was how their weekly sessions had started.
Don felt he’d earned a drink or two after five and a half days at his work and an afternoon tending the garden. He’d have a thick slice of bread and jam and a cup of tea when he got home on a Saturday, then he’d be out there, digging or planting or weeding, wet or dry, hot or cold, it didn’t matter. At first Liz had been put out that he didn’t want his dinner when he came in, surely it was what a man needed, but he said if he ate a full meal he’d just want to sleep all afternoon. She fed wee Billy at the back of five while Don cleaned himself up, then he’d sit down at six for his tea. Liz cooked them a lamb chop each, with potatoes and a vegetable, followed by bread and margarine and plenty of tea. The chops were the highlight of the weekly menu. Afterwards Don would wash the dishes, read the paper while Liz put Billy to bed, then leave her listening to the Light Programme with a detective novel in her lap, and stroll down to the Blackthorn. A pint or two. He reckoned he deserved them.
‘There were three of us,’ Jack was saying, ‘all Jocks – well, four of us before they killed MacLaren – we stuck together like brothers, kept each other going, there was a kind of rivalry about it. Who could think up the most details about Scotland.’
‘Who could be the maist Scottish,’ Don said helpfully. ‘Daft what ye’ll do, eh?’ He was fascinated by the neatness of Jack’s clothes, everything about him. Even the veins in his neck looked like ironed creases. He had hard, smooth skin and very little hair up top and not much growth on his chin either. His head was like a large wooden egg. Don tried to picture him coming out of the jungle barefoot, skeletal, naked except for a loincloth, after twelve hours on the railway.
Jack said, ‘It wasn’t daft, it made perfect sense. And the closer it got to the end, the more sense it made. There was a radio in the camp, I never knew who had it, you didn’t ask, it was too dangerous, but somebody had built this receiver and the news from All India Radio was that the Japs were in retreat and you chaps were winning in Europe, and we were worried about what the Japs would do when the crunch came. More torture, more killing – they were capable of it. Maybe they’d shoot us all. So we were all keeping our heads down, fighting off the disease and the hunger, just trying to stay alive – and imagining Scotland and what it would be like to be back here was one of the ways to do it.’ He was speaking very rapidly now, short vowels and clipped consonants as if he had only a few seconds before somebody came, a guard maybe, that was how it seemed to Don. ‘There was Sim Mackintosh and myself and a chap called Geordie Spiers, Geordie was from Ayrshire, grew up on a farm but he wanted an adventure so he ran away to Stirling and joined the Argylls and that’s how he ended up in Singapore in ’41. “Out of the byre and into hell,” he used to say.’
Jack paused and drank deeply from his pint. Don thought about what ‘hell’ meant. He’d been in North Africa and Italy himself, there’d been a few times he could describe as ‘hell’, one in particular, but not even that matched up to Jack’s version because it hadn’t lasted three and a half years.
‘There were no fences,’ Jack said, ‘no locked gates, because we were surrounded by thousands of square miles of jungle, so where were we going to run to? MacLaren used to make a joke of it. “Fancy a stroll to India?” he’d say. We all knew it was hopeless, including him, but was it less hopeless than staying where we were? That was the kind of thinking that could drive you mad. And then one night he slipped off by himself.’
‘MacLaren?’ Don said. He thought, why does Jack only ever refer to him by his surname? There was Geordie and Sim and there was MacLaren. Like he was in a different category. Well, he
was.
‘MacLaren, aye. A week later they brought him back. He’d been picked up in a village twenty miles away, starving, sick. The whole camp was assembled. They lined us up as three sides of a square and trained machine guns on us from the fourth side. Then they dragged MacLaren into the middle of the square, hands tied behind his back, and made him kneel, and one of their officers took out his sword and beheaded him. One stroke. And we all stood there watching the blood pouring on to the ground and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, we could do.’
Don did not speak. What could he say? Jack wasn’t looking for sympathy or anger or grief. He was just telling a story. And in the next breath he’d moved on, as if it were necessary now to consider only the other men he’d been with out there, the ones who were still, at that point, alive.
‘I don’t suppose Geordie spoke any different from the way Robert Burns himself spoke,’ Jack said. ‘In fact if Burns had come back from the dead for a day he’d have been able to speak to Geordie as if he was one of his cronies from the Tarbolton Club. And Geordie taught Robert Burns to the rest of us. We all had wee bits and pieces, a few of the songs and a few verses you learn at school, “To a Mouse” and things like that, but Geordie knew them all. I mean, the lot. I don’t know where or when he’d learned it but there wasn’t a bit of Burns he couldn’t give you. We had no books or paper, they were forbidden, but Geordie had the entire collected works of Robert Burns in his head and he taught us from that. He’d recite or sing and we’d listen, and pick it up from him. I mind the first time I had “Tam o’ Shanter” off right through, I felt I’d won this tremendous victory. It wasn’t that I’d defeated the poem; somehow by learning it I’d beaten the Japs.
‘When the news finally came in that they’d surrendered, well, we were all down to our last reserves, and a few of the lads just took their eye off the ball, they stopped concentrating. I just kept at it, thinking of Scotland, reciting Burns and all that, I wasn’t going to come that close and not see it again, but Sim and Geordie, they both relaxed too soon, and they went down with yet another bout of dysentery and they were too weak this time and it killed them both. A dirty trick. I mean, the war was actually over. Sim just slipped away one day but Geordie knew he was dying. The last thing he said to me was, “Weel, Jack, looks like I got mair o an adventure than I bargained for.” ’ He paused, and Don could see he was hearing it again, Geordie’s last sentence chiselled into his memory like words on a tombstone. ‘I thought that was a dreadful waste, all that poetry in his head, getting buried out there.’
‘It was a dreadful waste,’ Don said. ‘The haill war was a waste o human life.’
‘Except the atom bombs,’ Jack said. ‘I know you disagree with me but you’ll never get me to say dropping the bombs was a waste. I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t dropped them, and neither would a lot of other folk. I don’t care how many Japanese they killed.’
‘I’d say the same in your shoes,’ Don said. ‘I dae say the same. I ken the Japs had orders tae kill all the POWs as soon as the Allies set foot in Japan.’
‘Aye, they did,’ Jack said.
‘It’s just … what the hell have we produced? What terrible power have we created?’
‘Be thankful it was the Americans that created it first,’ Jack said. ‘Or we’d be dust.’ His gaze swept briefly, dismissively, round the room. ‘All of us.’
‘I just worry aboot what happens when somebody else has these weapons,’ Don said.
‘The Russians already have,’ Jack said. ‘Their technology’s crude, they’ve a long way to go, but they’ll catch up. They can’t afford not to.’
Sometimes Don felt, because of what Jack had been through, that he had special insight into the workings of the world – although, God knows, they’d all been through enough, so what did Jack know that he didn’t? But he didn’t want to believe the worst about the Russians. He wasn’t soft on Communism, but he felt a burden of debt to the Russian people, after what they’d been through. Was it really their leaders’ ambition to destroy the planet? Was it not just that they wanted to defend themselves?
The present signs weren’t good, though. North Korean Communists were rampaging through South Korea and it looked like they’d have the whole country wrapped up before the clocks went back. Certainly before the newly established United Nations could agree how to respond. Russians were in there advising the North Koreans. The Chinese were sitting on the frontier, waiting to move in. The Americans were there already, trying to stem the tide, while the British, Canadians, Australians and others prepared to join them. The papers were beginning to use a new term, ‘cold war’. Jack said it was only a matter of time before things got very hot indeed.
‘The Russians can’t reach America yet so Britain’ll be the target. And that means we’ll have to have the Bomb too. If we haven’t already got it. Everybody wants it. The Chinese, the French. It’s too big not to want.’
‘Then we’re living in a world where there’s a clock ticking,’ Don said.
‘That’s right,’ Jack said. ‘We are.’
§
Don rubbed Liz’s back as she lay turned away from him. She was nearly eight months pregnant and wanting it to be over. ‘It’s going tae be another boy,’ she said. ‘I ken it. A footballer or a soldier, the way he’s kicking and shoving.’
‘No a soldier,’ Don said. ‘We’ve had enough o that.’
He put his arm over her and cupped her in his big hand, feeling the life moving inside her. His mind flitted from one thing to another. He was aware of the beer slopping in his own belly. He’d have to watch himself or he’d turn soft and fat, struggle to get himself out from under the lorries. Still, it was the only drink either of them took, apart from New Year when Liz would have a sherry and he’d get in a half-bottle of whisky. The one time of year when there was alcohol in the house. He didn’t much like whisky himself, but you felt you had to have it in at New Year for visitors, and you had to join them in drinking it. What kind of a man were you if you didn’t take a dram at Hogmanay?
He heard Billy make a small sigh as he turned in his cot next door. He wouldn’t wake. Billy would have slept through the Clydebank Blitz.
‘If only Jack Gordon would just let it all go,’ he said. ‘It comes oot in wee dribs and drabs, but I ken he’s no telling me the half o what happened to him ower there.’
‘I dinna ken how ye can stand it,’ Liz said, drifting into sleep. ‘I ken ye feel sorry for him, but it’s hardly a good night out for you.’
‘It’s no aboot feeling sorry for him,’ he said. ‘I like my pint on a Saturday.’ And, he thought, he liked Jack too. Nobody else did, but he felt an affinity with the man. He respected him, what he’d survived, his present purposefulness. Maybe that was all it was, respect. He couldn’t explain it to Liz.
‘Ye’ll no get oot sae much when this one arrives,’ Liz said. ‘We’ll hae oor hands full. And no sae much money in them.’
‘I ken that,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get promotion. Works manager by next year.’
She elbowed him gently. ‘Aye, that’ll be right. You’ll be the one that closes the place.’
He was in the union, cajoling, arguing with other men to get them to join. If a majority of the workforce signed up they’d have real bargaining power. The management didn’t like it but they couldn’t stop him, couldn’t get rid of him either, he was too good at his job, there wasn’t a mechanical problem Don Lennie couldn’t solve. There’d been two Byres brothers originally, in the 1920s, but one had died without issue and the other had kept the name, Byres Brothers, in case he had more than one son. He hadn’t, but the name stayed. Byres Brothers had escaped nationalisation in 1948, they were too small and most of their work was short haul, forty miles or less, but that still enabled them to reach most of central Scotland. Auld Tam, the father, had managed to keep the business intact and out of the hands of the British Transport Commission, and since the railways had been nationalised more and more firms were t
urning to lorries to shift their goods, and Byres Brothers were experiencing a steady growth in trade. It was a shame, Don thought, they hadn’t been bigger: then he might have been working for British Road Services, the new national organisation. The pay and conditions were better. On the other hand, he was beginning to hear stories from men in BRS about petty officials, union and management, enforcing petty rules and making it impossible to get on with your job. Maybe he was safer where he was.
‘Better the bastards ye ken than the faceless bastards ye never meet, eh Don?’ Wullie Byres, Tam’s son, had said, with the big, sleekit grin on his face it was hard not to grin back at. He wasn’t as hard as his father, not yet anyway, but he’d inherited the same creed: that work was the chief end of man. Home was all very well – a place where you rested between shifts, tholing the ministrations and demands of your womenfolk – but work, the dirt and noise and machinery of work, was everything. And when it came to the workplace every man was judged equally, measured by the quality and extent of his graft and nothing else – unless he was divorced or a Catholic, but if you were in either of those categories you didn’t work for Byres Brothers anyway. ‘A man that canna mend his ain marriage has nae business meddling wi an internal combustion engine,’ Auld Tam used to say. As for why he didn’t take on Catholics, well, if you had to ask the question you wouldn’t like the answer.
‘Dinna you fash about Byres Brothers,’ Don said to Liz. ‘Plenty work there. Plenty money in their coffers, tae. We just need tae squeeze a bit mair oot for the workers.’
For a moment he thought she must have drifted off. Then she said, ‘Canna be easy for his wife. Dae ye ken what she’s like?’
‘Jack Gordon’s wife? Naw, he hardly mentions her. There’s a bairn tae, a lassie.’
‘I never see them,’ Liz said. ‘I see everybody, but I’m no even sure I’d recognise them. What’s the wife’s name?’
He thought for a moment. Jack must have mentioned it, surely? But then, Don didn’t speak much about Liz to Jack either. ‘I canna mind,’ he said.
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