by Farley Mowat
Dawn brought us into an immense industrial sprawl somewhere in the Midlands, through which our troop train crawled in fits and starts. Early as it was, the chimneys of Blake’s dark satanic mills were already smearing the pallid sky with dust and smoke. The train jolted at a walking pace past endless rows of tenements backing so closely on the right-of-way that we could stare directly into the wan faces of men, women, and children crowding at their open windows to see us pass. They did more than stare. They leaned out toward us over blackened walls and waved and grinned and shouted raucously: ”Good show, Canada!” ”Up the Can-eye-dee-ans!” ”Give the Heinies hell!”
Munching bully beef sandwiches and taking the occasional swig from a bottle of gin someone had thoughtfully brought along from Letitia, we waved and shouted back. We were moved by this reception, yet perplexed. Nothing like it had ever happened to us in Canada, where for the most part the civilian populace tended to treat the armed forces as some sort of necessary but essentially unpalatable aberration.
The train inched across a mighty bridge and as we reached the far side we saw why we had been delayed. Work crews were swarming over one of the spans, some of whose massive iron girders were strangely twisted and distorted. Below us lay a waste of tenements and factories reduced to unroofed and still-smouldering ruins by a Luftwaffe bombing raid the previous night.
Passing beyond the city, the train gathered speed and trundled into another world – the Ancient Island, at peace in the shimmer of a summer’s morn. We caught glimpses of hoary villages and stately homes shrouded from vulgar view by moss-grown walls. Massive copses of oak and elm stood upon a land that curved and rose and fell away again in sensuous somnolence. Everything was unbelievably green, even, it seemed to me, the translucent sky itself. Our toy train, its little whistle keening at the many crossings, was an invisible time machine. Neither men nor animals in the fields and byways so much as raised their eyes as we went past. It was as if the train and we ourselves were from some future time.
War did not belong here, yet every now and again we glimpsed a distant aerodrome with tiny fighters lazing high above, or dingy rows of what looked like huge metal culverts cut in half lengthwise. We would become all too familiar with these unlovely objects – corrugated iron Nissen huts, the standard shelter provided for the armed forces throughout Britain.
On the last day of July we halted at a little station whose identifying sign had been removed ”for the duration” so as not to afford aid to German columns if they should invade. This was Witley, well south of London on the edge of the Salisbury Plain. A herd of double-decker London buses repainted a bilious khaki waited to trundle us the final few miles to 1-CDRU– First Canadian Division Reinforcement Unit – a gloomy collection of Nissen huts and ancient brick barrack buildings where each unit in the division maintained its own reinforcement company. Ours was commanded by Major Stanley Ketcheson, a raffish, slightly balding young man with a refreshingly unmilitary manner.
”Glad to see you horny young bastards … though you might better have stayed home. The regiment don’t need you. It’s up to its ass in officers right now and the only casualties we get are from syph or the clap. You’ll stay here until you’re wanted. We’ll teach you something about real soldiering.”
His sharp-eyed glances flicked from face to face and stopped on mine. ”You there, Mowat! How in hell did you lie your way into the army? Can’t be a day over sixteen and still a virgin by the look of you. We’ll fix that, by God!”
Ketcheson was as good as his word. He gave us into the charge of Captain Williams, a suave and cynical ”older” man of thirty. Williams began our education by taking us in a battered fifteen-hundredweight lorry to Windsor where we spent the day learning about right-hand drive, charabancs, pillar boxes, tea shoppes, queues, bobbies, Hore-Belisha stripes, and sundry other local mysteries.
Williams explained that this expedition was intended ”to acquaint you with some of the more superficial aspects of life in this loony bin. Tonight I’ll show you the real thing!”
The real thing consisted of a pub crawl through Guildford, the nearest large town to Witley. Here in short order we learned the vital distinctions between saloon, public, and private bars; ’arf-and-’arf and gin-and-it; and members of the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service), WAFS (Women’s Air Force Service), ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, also female), and Land Army girls. The differences between these groups consisted mainly of variations in the uniforms, all of singularly hideous design, clothing a breed of young woman the likes of whom most of us had never encountered before.
In the last of the several pubs we visited that night, Williams conferred earnestly with a Land Army girl named Philipa, whereupon this rather lumpy lady wearing a sweater and manure-stained green jodhpurs invited me to take a walk along the adjacent riverbank. Woozily I wondered if Philipa might be interested in birds – owls perhaps – for the night was very dark.
Her interest was biological, but not ornithological. In what must have been one of the most undignified and most uncomfortable seductions of modern times, she got me under some dripping bushes and deflowered me upon the soggy sod.
”There you are, luv,” she said brightly as I fumbled to get my fly buttoned up again. ”Captain Willy told me the Major said you needed doing and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a Canuck.”
Having accomplished our introduction to the basic facts of civilian life in England, Ketcheson sent us off on an assault training course. The sadist in charge of it chillingly explained: ”We’re going to teach you to kill or be killed. If you live through it, you’ll think taking on the Jerry army single-handed is a piece of cake!”
We did our stuff on a waste of blasted heath – a dusty semi-desert filled with thorny gorse. Our day began at 0500 and never really seemed to end. Everywhere we went, and everything we did (with the sole exception of defecating if and when one had time for this), was done at the double, running full-out while wearing full battle kit, including rifle, bandoliers of .303 ammunition, small pack, and sundry other impediments that weighed about sixty pounds at the beginning of the day and something like two tons by the end of it.
The training syllabus for Battle Drill (as it was called) demanded that we march (read: run) a minimum of ten miles a day (twenty on Sundays); that we crawl, squirm, and wriggle for endless terrifying hours over gorse-covered heath while homicidal maniacs masquerading as training staff fired live ammunition over, under, and all around us; threw percussion grenades between our out-flung legs or heaved gas canisters (which made us puke) under our noses as we tried to dig slit trenches in the flinty soil. For variety, we played unarmed combat games with bronzed killers who hit us in the windpipe, kicked us in the testicles, cartwheeled us over their shoulders into gorse bushes, and belted us with rifle butts.
Although the bayonet was as outmoded in modern warfare as the horse, training in its use was still encouraged in order to instil in us a proper degree of ”bloody-mindedness.” So we lined up in squads in front of rows of straw-filled dummy Germans swinging from rough wooden gibbets. On command we lowered our rifles and thrust our bayonets into the dummies to an accompanying litany screamed by a hoarse-voiced instructor.
”IN … OUT … SHOVE IT IN HIS FUCKING GUT … IN … OUT … SLIT HIS BLOODY THROAT … IN … OUT … STICK HIM IN THE BALLS … IN … OUT …”
The instructor of one squad (thank God it wasn’t ours) collected a load of offal from a local abattoir and stuffed some of the dummies with rotten tripe and with balloons filled with pig’s blood.
The actual assault course, mostly constructed of barbed wire, was half a mile long and had to be surmounted or crawled through or under in a maximum of four minutes. If you were one second over, you repeated the torture and kept on doing so until you either beat the stopwatch or fainted dead away.
On the fourth day of this torment, our demon of an instructor added a particularly diabolical wrinkle. As we staggered over the last barbed wire obstacle, he scr
eamed at us to ”double to the right, over the hill, down the slope, and swim the pond at the bottom!”
We managed the hill and fell rather than ran down the far slope to the pond, which was what in England is discreetly referred to as a sewage farm. In this case, it was a gigantic open septic tank containing the sewage from most of the military camps in the Witley area.
The leaders of our panting mob drew up in horror on the verge of this stinking pit, but the demon was right behind us tossing percussion grenades under our tails, so in we plunged. There is no need to dwell upon the details.
Two weeks passed and the assault course was nearing its end. We had lost eight or nine of our number, three of them wounded (one fatally) during live firing exercises. The others had simply collapsed and been returned to their units as ”unsatisfactory combat material.” I was barely a hair’s breadth from this fate myself. Nevertheless, I hung on until one morning I woke to find myself with what looked like the symptoms of a dose of gonorrhoea.
I was revolted, horrified, and frightened. I was a product of a time and society where the stigma attached to venereal diseases was the equivalent of what might attach itself to the hatchet murderer of a crippled old lady.
Overwhelmed with guilt, shame, and dread, I actually contemplated getting myself accidentally shot on the assault range, but somehow screwed up my courage and reported sick.
The camp M.O. was a young and recent graduate, humourless or perhaps just uncertain. He made a quick examination, muttered something unkind about people getting what they deserved, and ordered me to collect my kit and report to the transport lines en route to hospital. I sneaked into the officers’ quarters for my gear and sneaked out again like the invisible man.
Three ghastly hours later I was admitted to No. 5 Canadian General Hospital to be examined by a doctor who told me the diagnosis would have to wait until the following morning. The nursing sister who saw me to my bed was an attractive woman whom I was too shamed to look in the face. I put in one hell of a night. But next morning the sister flung into my room, threw wide the curtains, and brought joy back to a blighted life.
”Well, Lieutenant, lab report is in. Nothing to fret about. Only a little non-specific urethritis. Bit like a sinus infection … except not in your nose. Clean it up in a day or three. Meantime, kippers for breakfast, or would you like some nice scrambled egg powder?”
God, how I loved that woman! I hope she reads this and remembers the frightened little subaltern to whom she restored the desire to go on living.
Later that day the M.O. came by and asked some questions about what I had been doing with myself. When I told him about the sewage farm, he grimaced and guessed that this was where I had picked up the infection. Freed of my incubus of dread, I began to take notice of my surroundings. They were quite extraordinary. No. 5 CGH was a brand-new, handsomely designed, and luxuriously fitted hospital built on the Cliveden estate of Lord and Lady Astor on the banks of the Thames in dreamily peaceful countryside near Maidenhead.
The luck of the gods had sent me here but it was entirely thanks to the sadists of the assault course that I remained, not just for the three or four days it took to cure my drip, but for three glorious summer weeks.
During my final days on the course, I had become agonizingly aware of swellings in both knees resulting from the interminable pounding across the heath loaded like a mule. Severe bruising of the knee cartilages was the diagnosis, and when it was also discovered that my weight was down to 116 pounds the doctors ruled I should remain in hospital until my bones had more upholstery.
I wrote home to my parents:
”I have a room to myself complete with radio and big bay windows looking out on a park of giant oaks. A luxurious bed, easy chair, semi-private bathroom, and three edible meals a day in a panelled dining room. I’ll have walking-out privileges when I can walk again. This is the army? I don’t believe it!”
An extraordinary bonus for me was that Cliveden then harboured one of Britain’s leading ornithologists who, with his father and grandfather before him, had amassed an enormous collection of rare bird skins and eggs from all over the world. These included three great auks, together with the last known egg laid by that ill-omened species before mankind exterminated it; an egg (the size of an ostrich egg) of the legendary dodo of Mauritius; and two mounted passenger pigeons, relics of North America’s most infamous extirpation.
Learning during a visit to the hospital of my interest in birds, the current guardian of these glories, a retired brigadier of First World War vintage, kindly invited me to view the collection and later gave me sherry in a magnificent library that boasted a port folio of Audubon’s paintings of American birds.
The brigadier led the good life as custodian of several thousand dead birds and many more of their eggs. His one complaint was that the current war had put a halt to the acquisition of additional specimens.
”Frightful loss to science, you know. But I trust young chaps like yourself will soon be able to take up the good work again. We’ll drink to that, shall we?”
Cliveden also possessed an ornate boathouse containing several sculling punts and, wonder of wonders, a Canadian-made cedar-strip canoe. These were available for the use of patients so, being unable to walk any distance, I appropriated the canoe and used it to explore the back reaches of the Thames, stopping often to sample the wares of the many pubs along its banks. My favourite was the Compleat Angler, a pub frequented by an international collection of civilian pilots belonging to Ferry Command, in the dicey business of ferrying warplanes from Canada and the United States to and around the British Isles. They included bush pilots, stunt pilots, test pilots, and commercial pilots too old (one or two were in their fifties), too ruggedly individualistic, or of the wrong sex (there were several women among them) to fly in the air forces of their respective countries.
A hell-for-leather, hard-drinking but kindly lot, they responded to my admiration by tolerating me in their circle as a sort of mascot. They called me their Pongo Penguin – Pongo being a derisive name for an infantryman, and Penguin because I was flightless.
It was through them that I met Penelope. She was sitting at a table on the Angler’s river terrace one evening when I arrived in my canoe. Petite, blond, and amber-eyed, she was suffused in that diaphanous glow which is the hallmark of an English beauty.
I was instantly enthralled, but the ferry pilots surrounding her presented such formidable opposition I was afraid to intrude. When it grew dark and everyone moved inside to drink and dance, a pilot jokingly introduced me as Ferry Command’s pet penguin. To my delight she allowed me to buy her a drink and I was emboldened to, in the language of the times, pitch her a line.
Penelope listened with gratifying interest until a handsome Yank (who claimed to have flown in the Antarctic with Admiral Peary) sauntered over and shot me down in flames.
”Enough of your crap, Penguin,” he said sternly. ”You wanna fly with pretty birds like this you gotta have wings! C’mon, Penny baby, let’s cut a rug.”
She smiled kindly at me as she took the Yank’s extended hand. Somehow I managed to smile back, the sardonic grin of One Who Does Not Care, before slipping miserably off to my canoe.
It was an awfully dark night and just below the Angler I found myself paddling into a side channel that turned out to be blocked by an ancient weir over which even the sluggish Thames poured with unexpected vigour.
The canoe tipped forward, burying her bow and spilling me out. I floundered ashore on a muddy little islet, where I was immediately attacked by two spectral beings clad in white who beat me savagely about the kidneys with what felt like flails. By the time I had leapt back into the river and splashed my way to the mainland, most of the Angler’s customers, including Penelope, had assembled on the bank to see what all the fuss was about.
Although it was not one of life’s great moments (I had come ashore in a sorry state), my misadventure awakened Penelope’s protective instincts. She demanded towels an
d hot whisky for me and as she drove me back to the hospital in her little red MG sports car proceeded to make amends.
”Someone really ought to have told you about the swans. They’re royal birds, you know, and they do get frightfully huffy when someone trespasses on their breeding grounds. But not to worry, dahling, I’ll make it up to you.”
We were barrelling along in almost total darkness (the little car’s normally ineffectual lights had been further dimmed with blackout tape) when she jammed on the brakes and brought us to a squealing stop beside a roadside callbox erected by the Royal Automobile Club for the benefit of members who might experience a breakdown.
Penelope slid smoothly out of her bucket seat and with her member’s key unlocked the door of the callbox. Then she beckoned me to join her in the glass-enclosed little cubicle. Puzzled but willing, I did as bid. When we were jammed inside, she scrunched the door shut and began making passionate and acrobatic love to me.
Nothing had prepared me for the likes of Penelope.
A day or two later she drove me to her home – a mansion surrounded by impressive lawns and guarded by a grim-visaged Scots nanny who met us at the door holding a year-old infant in her arms. Penelope fondly took the child and in reply to my mute inquiry explained that ”Baby Dumpling” was hers.
”Daddykins,” she would later tell me, was a senior staff officer ”doing something frightfully important in Cairo for dear Alex – General Alexander, you know” – but who expected her to ”live a normal life” in his absence. This she was doing to the best of her ability.