New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  Seven hundred, give or take, of my comrades were arrested. The authorities intended, I suppose, to lock us all up pending a prolonged legal procedure - or if they did not aim so high as arresting all of us, then they sought to incarcerate enough to impair our ability to function as a military unit.

  We were disinclined to play by these rules.

  We reformed in al fresco units, and coalesced wherever our people were imprisoned. Mostly this meant towns where there were prisons. Sometimes it meant police stations or other facilities. Then we got such weaponry as we needed and we destroyed the capacity of these institutions to detain people. The British police, being unarmed, put up no fight. We got our people out, and released a good number of civilian criminals as well; although personally - I took part in the breaking open of Wandsworth prison - what surprised me was how many of these old lags sat in the corners of their cracked-open cells and said they preferred to sit out the rest of their sentences.

  As we drove away from Wandsworth with a van full of newly liberated comrades, the conversation was taken up, for the first ten minutes or so, with a great deal of whooping and cheering and whistling. Fodior, our best driver, span the steering wheel to take and overtake and hurtle through lights, and we rattled westward and on to the M3. We got to talking. Several of our liberated comrades had fallen asleep. Those that remained awake were saying: ‘The interrogations were constant. They kept hauling us off to ask us these questions.’

  ‘Did they apply stress techniques?’

  ‘Not so much. But they wouldn’t stop with the questions. Back to the cells, and I’d lie me down to sleep, and just as my eyelids dropped - bang, and wide flew the door, and back once again to the interrogation room.’

  ‘What were they after?’ asked Raphael, wiping camouflage makeup from his cheeks with a wet-wipe.

  ‘They tagged all our DNA, of course,’ said Fodior.

  ‘But what,’ I chimed in, ‘were the questions about?’

  ‘Always the same questions! They wanted ringleaders! Give us the names of your ringleaders! Isn’t that a crazy term, though, ringleaders?’

  ‘Ringleaders,’ agreed another freed comrade, waking from his sleep at this prompt. ‘They kept banging on about ringleaders. Told them we didn’t have any ringleaders.’

  ‘Isn’t that the point of a ring?’ said somebody else, from the back. ‘That it is a circle? That it’s not led?’

  ‘Arthur’s round table,’ said Fodior, in a loud and approving voice.

  This seemed to me an ill-thought-through comparison - for didn’t King Arthur’s round table have a ringleader, after all? But I said. ‘Did they ask anything else?’

  ‘Told them we didn’t have any ringleaders, they kept asking me about ringleaders. And they kept on asking us, over and over. They flat refused to believe that’s not the way we’re structured.’

  ‘It’s religious,’ bellowed Fodior, over his shoulder. ‘It’s religious!’

  ‘How do you reckon-o, my Fodio?’ I called back.

  ‘Folk see an army and they think it’s been intelligently designed. They think: it must have been made by a single figure. Generals are Popes, you see, you see. But the world is full of complexity and functionality that has not been designed. People just don’t like to see it in those terms.’

  ‘The word makes me think, you know, Sauron’s ring,’ said somebody else.

  The British authorities declared these actions to be in violation of the ceasefire; they occupied Edinburgh with military force and shut down the two-week-old Scottish Independent Parliament. They brought in a whole raft of new legislation, argued over and debated in their Parliament - supposedly a democracy, but in fact an archaic chamber of exclusion and privilege in which individuals are ranked according to an arcane logic from the bottom up: backbenchers, regular MPs, committee members, shadow ministers, Leader of the Opposition, junior ministers, senior ministers, Defence Secretary, Chancellor, Prime Minister. All these chickenlike pecking-orders carefully policed the debate and infractions of protocol were politely punished. That this place calls itself democratic is one of the pleasant ironies of which England has, historically, shown itself fond.

  At any rate they passed their pronouncements into law. It became illegal for any shopkeeper to sell provisions to any illegal combatant. But, really: how were the shopkeepers to know? It is not as if we went into supermarkets in combat gear and shouted our affiliation to the tellers. It was made a requirement to display an ID card at all retail outlets; and at the larger stores they even checked these cartes d’identités against computerized databases. But there were plenty of smaller stores without the wherewithal to do this, and it was always possible to stock up from them; and besides ID cards were easy enough to get hold of. Easier than guns.

  The Parliament also insisted on what they called a border smackdown - a wrestling term, I believe, and a peculiar one, in that context. We need, said the Prime Minister, to stem the flow of illegal arms into our country. Most unrealistic, really, especially given that much of the south-east of the country was in a state of war, a condition in which it is much harder than usual to caulk porous borders. We flew private planes down to the Med to collect some weapons; others we captured from the British - although by it is fair to say that, after the first few weeks (when such seizures were easily effected) the enemy became more efficient at preventing these reappropriations. There was a certain difficulty associated with this for our enemy, in that ordnance, ammunition and supplies had to be constantly moved from place to place, which tied up a fair number of men, but it was better for the enemy than losing everything.

  You want to know about Simic? They didn’t arrest him. They didn’t get old Simic. Perhaps they didn’t know about him. He was being tended in a smart and expensive clinic, the best care money could buy. And then, when he was well enough, he came out and took his place again in the body militic.

  We pooled a little under two thousand men in the countryside south of Reading. Back to our old stamping ground, the land still carrying the scars of our last visit. Another limb of our NMA hauled itself into being, gigantic muscles and sinews, outside Staines.

  10

  You want to know what was going on in my personal life? That’s not the way it works.

  I’ll tell you about my father. He was not native born in a town called Erm in Friesia. He had a little spiel about how the Friesians were the original English, and that this made him more authentically English than most of the resident UK population. But the truth is that Friesian, in modern usage, only makes people think of cows - which is spot-on, for my pater: he was a bovine, stubborn-skulled man. He came over to England to teach in a university, and he changed his name from Bloch to Block because, I believe, he thought it made him sound more English. In fact, of course, it made him sound less English (how uncommon is the surname Block!). But his subconscious prompted him to it anyway, because Block is what his head was. He a broad-browed, wideset-eyed man with skin the colour of pink milkshake and he had white-blond hair and white-blond eyebrows and had he grown a moustache - which he would never do - it would come out milk-white too. He was not fat, although he did have a certain physical unavoidableness about him - because, I suppose, he was tall, and long limbed, and there was a lumbrous, awkward physicality to him. His neck was as wide as his head: as if someone had pushed a cannonball up through a pink membrane and drawn a face on the bulge. And he was rigid. When my mother moved to Turkey with a very nice man called Zafer his personality calcified even further. I was thirteen when Mum moved away, and Dad’s first action was to send me to a boarding school - as if I were some infant from the nineteenth century. We argued over it. Argue, though, does not do the work needful, there, to convey what occurred between us. My position (a reasonable one I feel) was that I did not want to leave my current school; that all my friends were there; that I liked my school. My father’s position was that he was a single parent now, and was too busy with his work to nursemaid a child. He said that boarding
schools were one of the historical splendours of England, and that the experience would make me a man. It was not a reasonable position. I did not need nursemaiding: I was thirteen, and unusually independent for my age. I did not want to go away. He insisted. Understand: I do not offer you this as an exemplary example of his stubbornness, or of mine. His stubbornness was, rather, an absolutely consistent, continuous thing. He was like this all the time. I was my father’s son. So we raged at one another: my rage taking the usual volatile adolescent forms, his rage manifesting its characteristic immovability, intense and placid-aggressive.

  I suppose, now, after the passage of years, I could ask myself: why was he so angry? But I don’t know the answer. I once had a boyfriend who, having met my father, diagnosed self-loathing. Maybe that’s right. It’s hard for me to imagine why he considered his self so loathsome. My mother was English and whilst my soul is like my father, I resemble her, physically, more than I do him; so perhaps there is a more straightforward psychological dynamic at work here - that he was angry at her for leaving him for another man, and he was punishing her vicariously by punishing me. At any rate I went to the boarding school. I had no choice. It was probably a perfectly fine establishment, but I was not in a state of mind receptive even to that possibility. I was hostile from the get-go to everybody: teachers, fellow pupils, janitors, the school secretaries. There was some desultory attempt to bully me, ostensibly on the grounds that I was a poof, although actually because I put such effort into my fuck-you-ishness. But I was fairly strong, and physically brave, and I have the gift of vindictiveness. On one occasion I was ambushed by a dozen other kids, and debagged - which is to say, de-trousered - and dumped naked from the waist down in the middle of the school field. During this procedure I struggled like a person possessed by legion angry devils, but there were too many of them, and the trousers came away as a snake sloughs its skin, and I was left trembling violently with embarrassment and anger as they gambolled away over the turf waving my trousers and underpants in the air. I was forced, pulling my short shirttails down as inadequate loincloth, to creep to the school office. But here’s the thing: I knew who had done it. Over the following fortnight I paid every one of them back. I used a book on several. It was something I’d seen in a film. I would seek out one of my tormentors, when he was alone: leap upon him, push him against the wall, press the book against his face and then hammer the hardback as heavily as I could. I did it first to a boy called Tremain, and made a very satisfying amount of blood come out of his nose. Two days later I chanced upon a lad called Sinha who has also been part of that crowd, and punched him with my fists. Later that same day I gave another boy, whose name I can’t remember now, the book treatment.

  The following week I caught another of them, Dennis Corman, and actually broke his nose. He had to go to hospital, and I was disciplined by the school authorities. The Headmaster sat me in his office and gave me a talk about the Christian responsibility to turn the other cheek. I remember that conversation vividly, actually: because it was late afternoon and the sunset light coming through the windows made the Head seem pinker than he usually did. That window was a tessellation of transparent panes except for two little inset stained-glass sections, Saint George, top left, and the Dragon, top right. George looked pretty cool, in his silvery armour and with a lance tipped by a blade shaped like a pack-of-cards spade and coloured like platinum. But the dragon looked much cooler, especially in the reddish light: its skin enamelled with ruby and purple, and gold coloured flames emerging from his open mouth. The Head was trying to explain a point of theological interpretation (a rather too subtle point, I’d say, for the context) about how turning the other cheek was the road to victory. If your opponent strikes you, he told me, you win by not striking back. To return the blow is to lower yourself to his level and so to lose. My thirteen-year-old brain refused to compute this. I asked, addressing the Head as ‘sir’ in that insolent way schoolboys have mastered for clarification. Was he saying that defeat was victory? Wasn’t that like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, sir, where they say Ignorance is Strength and so on? Isn’t that doubletalk, or ideology, or communism? Not at all, Block, said the Head. He sat behind his desk with both palms flat on the wooden surface before him. Christ is the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of War. But that’s not to say he is the Prince of Defeat - on the contrary. He has shown us a better way to overcome our enemies. War is not the way to defeat our enemies: forgiveness is. By forgiving the boys who bullied you, the Bible says you will be heaping hot coals . . .

  But sir doesn’t it make more sense to say that Victory is Victory? But sir, doesn’t God in the Bible say I am that I am - isn’t that more God’s logic? But sir, isn’t God Truth, and isn’t truth just another word for A = A?

  He was patient with me, but eventually my stubbornness wore him down. ‘Understand this, Block,’ he said, eventually: ‘what those boys did to you was wrong, and their parents have been informed. But you must let it go - do you understand? You broke young Corman’s nose. I shall report it, officially, as horseplay; but it must stop with that. You are confined to house for a month as punishment, and after that we’ll say no more about it. Do you understand?’ I replied, in a surly voice, that I understood sir that I was to let it go because you say I must, sir. ‘If that’s how you choose to take it,’ the Headmaster said, haughtily.

  But of course I did not let it go. I beat a boy called Hilken whilst he slept, creeping like a Ninja into his dorm to do it: I stuffed a teatowel into his mouth and pummelled him, and ran away before the lights went on and all the hue-and-cry began. Then, the following morning, I tripped up Wray and kicked him pretty sharply in the ribs. I was confined to dorm, and told that my father had been informed. I was told that the governors were considering expulsion. But this was hardly a disincentive to me. I crept out of the dorm and followed Adrian Todd into the toilets. When he saw me he started weeping most piteously, telling me over and over that he was sorry, and begging me not to hurt him - offering me his trousers as a trophy if I liked and so on. But my father’s stubbornness was in me, I suppose, and his show of weakness only infuriated me: so I bundled him into a cubicle and put his head down the toilet bowl, banging the seat down on the back of his neck as he writhed and shouting at him - I have no idea where this came from - Todd means death! Todd means death!

  I was expelled. My father was very angry, in his implacably placid manner, at having to leave work and drive for an hour to collect me in the middle of a weekday. We drove back in silence, and as I sat in the passenger seat all I could think was that I had only paid back six of the twelve original malefactors.

  I spent a month at home, sent to Coventry by my oxlike pater. For a time he was involved in negotiations to get me returned to that school - negotiations with the Head over my contrition, undertakings not to reoffend, classes on anger management. In fact I was content to go back, not because I valued the school experience but because it would give me the opportunity to get to the remaining half dozen boys. But in the end it did not come about, and instead father found another boarding school, much further away, that was prepared to take me. I came there like Jane Eyre, with a reputation for violence, and was immediately subjected to a strict disciplinary regime. On the other hand, my reputation preserved me from bullying, although it also inoculated me against friendship. And I was miserable at this school. My only consolations were poetry and music - the music I liked tended to be old-fashioned, with an antique emphasis on elaborate lyrics poetically embroidering themes of alienation and unhappiness. I wrote a good deal in my Bible-coloured Moleskine. I did my lessons, and played sport with an aggression that intimidated the other boys.

  I spent two weeks of the summer in Ankara with my mother and her boyfriend, and it was such a profound release - the sunlight, and the easy-going vibe of the house, and the sense of possibility - that coming back to the UK felt like dying. I decided that autumn to run away from the school. I knew enough to understand that I could not simply make
my way to Turkey and present myself to Mum and Zafer with ‘I’ve come to live with you!’ They’d have to send me back, I knew. So I figured Spain, or the South of France, or Italy would be just as good. I was a tall fourteen-year old by this stage, and was confident I could pass for adult. I ran away once in November, and hitch-hiked a ride from near the school gates, trying to get to London. Unfortunately for me the man who picked me up was married to one of the teachers, and had met me at some school event, so he simply took me back to the school. I tried again after Christmas and spent three days living rough before a police car happened upon me sleeping on a bench, and returned me once again to school. The next opportunity for escape did not present itself until much later in the year, and this time I managed to get to London, although then, maddeningly, I had an accident - I tripped on some wet red leaves on the pavement and broke my wrist. I carried this, in considerable pain, for another day and night, but I gave myself up at Casualty the following morning.

  Thereafter they kept a close eye on me, and I did not run away again. Instead I joined the Officer Training Corps that the school ran, and dissipated some of my fury in drill and exercises. From there to a British Army sponsored university education at Cambridge, no less, since I am bright. And then into the British Army itself - and so here we are.