by Lawton, John
“That’s ’cos they’re a bunch of fucking twats.”
There was a momentary pause, the merest flinch on the colonel’s part.
“A bunch of fucking twats, sir.”
“Of course. Sorry. A bunch of fucking twats, sir.”
“Let’s get one thing clear. I’m not a fucking twat, and if you talk to me like a fucking twat I’ve enough authority to bung you back in the glasshouse and throw away the key.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good—now we understand one another, let’s backtrack and get to the introductions. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Burne-Jones. And I can save your bacon if you let me.”
Burne-Jones. A hyphenated Englishman. That went with the rank and the regiment and the pencil-line moustache. If he stood he’d be six two and ramrod straight . . . but then so would Wilderness.
“I’m listening.”
Burne-Jones held up the top three pages of the papers in his right hand.
“You remember this?”
Wilderness didn’t.
“It’s the test you sat in London last August. It’s known as an IQ test. Now, do you know what that stands for?”
Wilderness remembered it now. Word games and pattern recognition. Matching up identical triangles. Juggling rhomboids and trapezoids. The square peg and the round hole. Only an idiot could fail it. He’d thought nothing of it at the time. Just call-up bollocks. It went with the ill-fitting uniform and the beetle-crusher shoes.
“Intelligence Quota?” he ventured.
“Close. Intelligence Quotient. It’s a way of measuring intelligence. Assigning a score to it. Would you be interested to know yours?”
“If I say no I go back to chokey?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m all ears.”
“One hundred and sixty-nine.”
“Big is it?”
“Well, it’s bigger than mine. In fact it’s bigger than most.”
“Bigger than yours? Then maybe I should be the officer?”
“That’s right, Holderness, push your luck. I do hope you like bread and water.”
“Excuse me, sir. Cheek is a way of life where I come from. Almost a language in itself. It has its own rules and syntax. My point is it must mean something, it must change something or you wouldn’t be telling me.”
The shift from cockney lout to articulate individual gave Burne-Jones another little pause. An effect Wilderness relished. It was like swapping masks at the ball.
“Quite. It does. It means I’m not going to let you go on square bashing. It would be a waste of everybody’s time. You’re moving to my operation.”
“What? The Guards?”
“Regiments are meaningless. You’ll be a trainee for a while, in fact for six months at least. If you pass you’ll be in an Intelligence unit, and for the time being that’s all you need to know about it. You’ll still be in the RAF for purposes of pay and uniform, but effectively not. You need never go on parade again, no one will put you through a crack of dawn kit inspection. You’ll answer to me. And I’ll tell you now, you make trouble, you fuck up . . . I’ll just send you back here for the bunch of twats to pick over your bones.”
No was not an option. Technically, in shoving Bodell aside Wilderness had struck an NCO. He’d spent the last four days in the glasshouse. He knew he was looking at six months in a military prison.
“Fine, sir. Where do you want me?”
“Cambridge. Queen’s College. You’ll be learning Russian and German.”
§30
Much to his surprise this transfer—which Wilderness saw as something between being booted out and being rescued—was regarded by the RAF as just another posting. He was paid up to date—an unprincely two pounds and six shillings—and he was allowed forty-eight hours embarkation leave.
He avoided Turpin and Bodell, since it seemed obvious that they would resent his dodging the glasshouse, would therefore have it in for him and be looking for one last way to take a poke—and whilst it was tempting to make up his bed by numbers, lay out his kit to a grid and then unzip and piss all over the lot, it was a temptation readily resisted.
He spent a quiet, sad weekend back in Sidney Street—Merle poised wistfully in front of a cold cup of tea lamenting the downturn in trade since peace broke out—walked the streets of the old manor in search of faces he knew, concluded that everyone he’d ever known, every kid and every scallywag, was now in uniform and elsewhere, and boarded a Cambridge train at Liverpool Street Station two days later, not glad to be there, or anywhere, but feeling that he was nowhere, and hoping this sensation would not last.
Much more to his surprise Burne-Jones met him off the London train at Cambridge Station.
“You thought I wouldn’t show up?” Wilderness asked.
“Nothing of the kind. And don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Or in this case a gift MG in the radiator.”
Wilderness had never thought much about cars. They had always been beyond his reach. He knew no one who owned a car. He’d never even been in a London taxi. He’d not yet learnt to drive. But if he did, when he did, this, a neat little open-topped 1938 MG two-seater, was what he’d like to own.
“Sling your kit bag in the back.”
Driving up Hills Road towards Parker’s Piece, Burne-Jones said, “You’re in digs a couple of streets from here. There’ll be no room in college, what with dozens of chaps returning to pick up the degrees they put on hold during the war. But you’ll be fine. Besides, you get a taste of living in hall and it could spoil you for life.”
“Maybe I’m ready to be spoiled. Very few opportunities to get spoiled have come my way.”
“My point exactly. You’re vulnerable. Seducible by easy living. And if you get seduced . . . you’re no bloody good to me.”
Wilderness handed over his kit bag to his new landlady—an aproned, tiny, floury, cockney woman called Mrs. Wissit, who looked not unlike his great-aunts and who did not look likely to seduce him—and dashed back to the car.
“We’ll go into college. I’ll introduce you to a few people I know.”
“You went to Cambridge yourself?”
“Yes. Magdalene. 1920 to 1923, and again in 1926 for my master’s. Hasn’t changed much. I’ll show you around. There’ll be about a dozen other chaps doing the crash course with you. And if you could try to remember ranks for the rest of the afternoon, mine included, I’m sure we’ll all get along pretty well. Just say sir from time to time, on the basis that everyone you meet today, whether in civvies or in uniform, will probably outrank you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Just try, Holderness. Just fucking try!”
§31
Wilderness became aware of the phenomenon of town and gown, and equally aware that he was neither. He mixed with undergraduates without being one of them, and while though he wasn’t exactly town, he never wore a gown, he wore his RAF uniform. He was one of twelve students of Russian and German assigned to a short-term course by His Majesty’s Forces. Two RAF, four Royal Navy, two of whom were the same age as Wilderness but not the same class, and were newly-commissioned sub-lieutenants—that is green whilst being blue—and six soldiers, two of whom were NCOs in their midtwenties, far from green, who had seen combat in the war and elected to stay on with Burne-Jones’s unit. They also elected to have nothing but contempt for the “kids,” officers or other ranks, who had not taken part in the war, and that was everyone else on the course. In between the active and the inactive, but receiving no less contempt was a fat artillery bombardier with a broad Birmingham accent, and a demeanour of contained misery, who had been called up in 1942 and had spent the entire war in England as a driver.
“Even rationing doesn’t make me thin. I reckon they did me a favour. Too fat to be fit. Basic training was a total bloody nightmare. Jump this, jump that. I look like Porky Pig and they wanted me to be Road Runner. So I got trained as a driver. Jeeps, staff cars . . . driving officers and nobs. I drove Anthony Eden across
London once during a V-1 raid.”
Wilderness wondered if this was Bombardier Clark’s way of saying he had done his bit. He didn’t care if he had or not.
“Could you teach me to drive?”
“O’ course. But we haven’t got a car.”
“You leave that to me.”
However superior the NCOs felt, it was Clark and Wilderness who shone at languages. In weekly tests of what they had learnt, Wilderness came top and Clark invariably second, followed by the two navy sub lieutenants and everyone else an also-ran. It narked the NCOs, but not half as much as Wilderness’s inability to respect them, their rank or their experience.
On one of his occasional, unannounced spot checks—roaring up in his MG, a dozen belt-fed machine-gun questions rattled off—Burne-Jones found Wilderness bruised, scabby, and with an Elastoplast over one eyebrow.
“What happened?”
Wilderness would not tell him that the two infantry corporals had given him a kicking for his cheek, but Burne-Jones was no fool and readily deduced it.
“You want to report this?”
“Of course not. You think I can’t handle a pair of fucking twats?”
“Holderness, is everyone in a uniform a fucking twat to you?”
“No. Just the NCOs, and to prove it you can have a sir at the end of this sentence, sir.”
“I hope I don’t come to regret you Holderness, I really do.”
“I’m good at this, you won’t have any reason to regret it.”
“Quite.”
One of those non-committal toff words that Wilderness was adjusting to—it was less than meaning, more than punctuation.
“I’m not only good. I’m the best you got right now.”
“That I can’t deny. Top of the form. But is there a point to you telling me this?”
“Yeah. The quid quo . . . quid . . .”
“Quid pro quo. Nice try, Holderness.”
“I want something in return.”
“We don’t make deals.”
“It isn’t much. In fact it’ll cost you nothing.”
Burne-Jones could have walked away at any moment. He didn’t. His look said “try me.”
“Birch,” said Wilderness.
“What?”
“Aircraftman Alexander Birch. The kid who pissed himself on parade.”
“Ah, yes I do indeed recall.”
“I want him out.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s still back in Essex doing his basic training, while I’m here leading the life of Riley. I want him out.”
“I’ve no use for him, Holderness. You were the only one who met the IQ requirements.”
“I’m not talking about that. What I mean is I want him out of the RAF. Away from those tosspots who’ll drive him to suicide before his ten weeks are up. Get him discharged. Medically unfit.”
“But he was passed fit or he wouldn’t be in the bloody RAF.”
“Then un-pass him.”
“He’s got two years to serve, just like everyone else.”
“You can do it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Never said it was. But if it were impossible you’d have said impossible.”
“Two years, Holderness.”
“Fine. If the king can’t spare ’em, I’ll serve his two bleedin’ years, You can sign me up till 1949.”
“You’re not joking?”
“Just get him out and back in civvies before those fuckers kill him.”
“Was he charged after the piss incident?”
“No. They blamed me for everything.”
“Jankers?”
“All they could pile on I’d imagine, but no formal charges.”
“Alright, you have a deal. And you tell no one. Mr. Birch will be back in Civvy Street by the end of the week.”
“Thank you sir. You are a gentleman . . . and I am a scholar.”
The grin was too much for Burne-Jones.
“Don’t push it, Holderness. And don’t let altruism ruin you. Or you’ll be no bloody use to me.”
Burne-Jones got back in his MG. Wilderness went in search of a dictionary and looked up “altruism.” It was not something he thought would trouble him much.
§32
It was tempting to be a schoolboy and slip laxative into the cocoa of the two infantry corporals or to let down the tyres of their ubiquitous Cambridge bikes, but it went against the grain of everything he had learnt from his grandfather, chiefly that vengeance could and should be tempered with profit.
It was easy enough to find out where they boarded, and almost as easy to slip in when no one was home and rob them of everything worth stealing. Two burglaries in a single wet afternoon while both corporals were stuck in remedial German grammar would point the finger squarely at him, so he chose the digs of the bigger, nastier of the two and netted seven pounds seven and sixpence in cash, a pair of gold cuff links, a silver cigarette case and several back issues of Men Only. It felt odd, like practising an instrument after months of neglect—a strange tingling in the fingertips as though they itched not for the easy pickings of petty theft, but for a safe.
On his next trip to London he sold the gold and silver to Abner’s fence and on his return took Clark out for an off-the-ration meal at one of the city’s better restaurants. Much to the bafflement of the waiters they conducted their entire conversation in two languages. Clark would speak in German, and Wilderness was obliged to respond to whatever he said in Russian. And vice versa.
“Мне кажется, что если мы не были в форме, они уже позвонили бы Полиции.” Wilderness said.
“Verdammt richtig.” Clark replied.
Wilderness switched to English over the coffee, not yet feeling he could string out every vital thought at its proper speed in any foreign language.
“I’ve never eaten in a restaurant before.”
“I can tell,” said Clark.
“Not counting chippies of course.”
“I have. When I was a War Office driver, the back pay used to pile up by dribs and drabs and about once a month a few of us would go up West and have a bit of a blowout. It’s what got me interested in languages, reading menus in French.”
“Like what?”
“Filet mignon.”
“What does that mean?”
“Steak, posh steak.”
“Et pommes dauphinoises.”
“You got me there, Eddie.”
“Spuds in milk.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It’s not.”
“Y’know. One day, I’m going to go into one of those posh restaurants and eat my way through the menu.”
“Literally?”
“Nah . . . but have anything, absolutely anything I want.”
Clark paused, drew breath.
“You’ve never really lived have you, Joe?”
“I’m eighteen and a half, Eddie. How much living do you want me to have done?”
“I’m only twenty-three meself. What I mean is England isn’t one world, it’s several. Let’s not kid ourselves that because we’re on first-name terms with a couple of navy sub-lieutenants and the colonel’s not above using our first names when it suits him, that us and them live in the same world. We don’t. Going up West was a wartime treat. It would have been unpatriotic for any restaurant to have been snotty with us, but the war’s over. English snottiness will be back in spades. And we’ll be down the chippie.”
“I say, waiter, cod and chips twice with an extra helping of mushy peas and a saveloy. Pip pip!”
Clark giggled.
“How do you do that? You sound just like Burne-Jones.”
“Ain’t difficult Eddie, and if all it takes to pass for a toff is sounding like one and looking like one . . . well . . . their world is ours for the taking isn’t it? A bit of ventriloquism and a decent tailor and it’s ours.”
“I’m not sure I want it.”
“I do. I want the bleedin’ lot. I wants what’s mine, and if some other tosser’s got it I want what’s his too.”
“For a chit of a kid, you certainly scare me sometimes, Joe.”
§33
Wilderness had no idea why or how a serving officer might come to pawn his uniform, but at the back of a dusty, cobwebbed window in a pawn shop in the Mile End Road there hung the jacket and trousers of what his fag cards (buttons grouped in fives, ludicrously embossed with leeks) told him was a second lieutenant in the Welsh Guards.
Wilderness asked.
“Yeah, I remember him. Three sheets to the fuckin’ wind ’e was. One day in, I reckon it was January 1943. Said he’d come on leave without evening dress and could he swap his uniform for a full DJ and dickie until Monday morning. Well, I got five bob off him up front, ’cos if he never come back I was stuck with the bleedin’ thing wasn’t I? And he never did. Not seen him again from that day to this. Either he was so pissed he forgot where the shop was, and if he weren’t pissed and lost, what was he doin’ in the bleedin’ Mile End Road in the first place? . . . or he copped it. Either way I got stuck with his uniform.”
“Two quid,” said Wilderness.
“Three,” said the pawnbroker. “This ain’t tat. This is the proper clobber. Gieves and Hawkes. Savile Row tailors they are.”
“Two pound ten.”
“Done, but yer robbin’ me blind, son.”
Looking in Merle’s full-length mirror on the front of her wardrobe he thought, “Not bad. Bit shorter than me, a bit fuller.”
Merle said, “Nobody looks at your feet. The length don’t matter. Tighten your belt and the tum’ll be OK. What people look at is your face. If you’re going to pull off the stunt I think you’re going to then what you need is a proper haircut—and I don’t mean the ninepenny barber down the road. I mean a proper job. Half a dollar up West.”
In an alley off Jermyn Street, he strangled his vowels, got a haircut for half a crown—a ludicrous sum of money, but the trick, he knew, was to suppress all sense of the ludicrous—and took himself for tea at the Café Royal.
Café Royal was nothing more to him than a name. He’d never been there. He had no idea if royalty might be there. One of his childhood heroes was forever eating there, but A. J. Raffles was fictional. He’d no idea what would be on the menu, but assumed that at four o’clock they would probably be serving tea and cake. All he had to do was catch his dropped aitches before they hit the carpet.