by Michael Gill
At that moment there were three heavy explosions: firecrackers going off. Yells and shouts and then a number of sharp blasts on a whistle. The noise maddened Gidney further.
‘It’s all over and we’ve missed it,’ he screeched. ‘We’ve missed all the fun. We’ve been lying here, perishing to the bone, all because of you, you blind bugger.’
I tried to explain, pointing out the deceptive similarity of contour and volume between mole-hill and posterior.
‘You wouldn’t know your own arse from your elbow. You wait till the Corp gets hold of you. He’ll have your guts for garters.’
Actually, Corporal Barker was looking uncommonly pleased with himself when we finally met up at the rendezvous point. His eyes, surrounded now with streaks of gun-powder among the mud, fairly twinkled over the top of a mug of Navy tea.
‘Well, well, I did say keep your distance,’ he murmured. ‘You just shouldn’t have taken me so literally.’
With Robbins and two others he had found a way through the wire. Unnoticed by the defendants, they had reached their objective and put on their chalk marks. As a final triumphant flourish, Corporal Barker had scaled one of the huts and, leaping from roof to roof, had dropped a lighted firecracker down each chimney, to the consternation of the occupants. Stirred out of his usual catatonic indifference by the explosions, Robbins had jumped at an emerging senior naval officer and fired his rifle in his face. Though it was only a blank, the unfortunate man suffered shock and a broken nose from the blast. Robbins had to be refrained from clubbing him to death with his rifle butt.
‘Perhaps it’s as well that you weren’t with us, Gilly,’ said Corporal Barker. ‘We do still need the Navy, I suppose.’
He had been personally congratulated by the RAF Commanding Officer for the excess of zeal and ardour he had instilled in his squad.
My nemesis came three days later. The climax of our field training was a newfangled assault course. Under lowering clouds and flurries of rain we struggled through barrels, climbed ropes, scrambled along poles and swung across a specially constructed pit of mud. I managed all this fairly well, only putting one foot knee-deep in the mud, and not falling backwards into it as some did on letting go of the rope. Then we were told to double back to our billets and parade again in full kit – tin hat on head, full back-pack, side-pack and water bottle, respirator slung at the ready on chest, rifle and fixed bayonet in hand. We were paired off with someone approximately our own weight and ordered to carry him over a two-hundred-yard course in three minutes. I was unlucky enough to draw Da Silva, the amiable East End tailor. He was at least a stone heavier.
Picking him up was difficult enough. It was like two hornets embracing, cluttered as we were with bulging equipment front and back, and with the additional hazard of the sharp pointed bayonets always threatening to go up our noses. Eventually I got him on my back in some sort of fireman’s lift and set off. I discovered it was better to pitch yourself forwards and run as fast as you could, utilising the pull of gravity from the weight on your shoulders to increase your impetus. The trouble was, however hard your legs went, gravity kept gaining on you, and your body sagged lower and lower. Eventually one of the rifles got between my legs and brought us down. Our helmets banged together with an ear-ringing crash. There was no time to get him on my back again. I embraced him, and lifting him bodily, trotted through a red haze. His heels were dragging on the ground. My knees were melting. The pain in my chest made me believe one of the bayonets was sticking in it. The course seemed interminable. We fell several times. I had no idea how long it took to reach the finishing line. No one commented.
I realised yet again how very unfit I was. Four years on my back in a spinal chair, the total prohibition on playing any sports that followed, had left me with no reserves of energy and muscles that had never been used. I was still trembling with fatigue when we were assembled for the last test of the day. Still in full kit, we had to charge at one of the sea-front shelters, scale the ten-foot-high brick side wall, run along the flat concrete top and, jumping down the other side, run past a table where the dreaded Flight Sergeant Jones was sitting with a stopwatch. The time allowed was fifty seconds.
We gathered in a watching group and ran forward in turn as our names were called out. The first few made it look quite easy: a running jump, fingers clutching the top, a scrabble of boots against the brick, and they were up and away. Then Gidney, missing the hand-hold, fell on his back with a sickening crash. When it came to be my turn, my grasping hands failed to reach the roof. My jump had not lifted me high enough. And I was over six feet tall. Smaller men were going over with apparent ease. After some humiliating fluttering against the wall I was ordered back to the starting line. The jumping went on. Some fifteen or twenty out of the two hundred failed. We were told to try again. This time all but four made it. My fingers reached the flat concrete, but my arms were incapable of levering my body, weighted with all its equipment, upwards. I fell back with a jarring thud.
The voice of the Flight Sergeant rang out cold and clear from where he sat at the distant table.
‘Those four men will go again.’
Two more got over, leaving only Robbins, the clumsiest and stupidest man in the Flight, and me. Surely I would not be bested by such an idiot. Yet there was a crablike power in that misshapen body. On his fifth attempt he got one elbow over the top and hung sideways, grunting and jerking like an impaled pig. A frantic cart-wheeling of legs and other arm and he was on the roof. Wheezing and gasping, he pulled himself to his feet, clattered away without a backward glance, and dropped heavily down the other side.
I ought to have been pleased for him, but I felt only consternation at being left on my own. This time I must make it. I succeeded only in grazing my chin. None of my friends looked at me as I limped back to the ranks.
‘Stand forth that man.’ The Flight Sergeant’s diction was so precise that he hardly needed to raise his voice, though he was seated fifty yards away. I marched out alone, still gasping for breath. In the space midway between the watching Flight and the table, I was halted.
‘Aircraftman Gill, you have so far failed to carry out a trial at which all your comrades have succeeded. Some are nearly twice your age; others are at least as unfit and ill-prepared as you are. Never mind. You will stay here until you have completed this test successfully. For the rest of the Flight, the day’s duties are over. You may go to tea. Flight – dismiss.’
I stood rigidly to attention, my cheeks burning. Behind me the lucky ones turned on their heels and bustled off. Through the receding foot-falls a single low farewell reached me.
‘Good luck, Mike.’ That was Wyndham.
It seemed so unfair. Some of them might be a lot older, but I doubted if any had passed a quarter of their life in bed, and had had to be taught to walk all over again at the age of eleven. And how was I going to be able to make it, when each attempt further sapped my feeble strength?
I flung myself against that dreadful wall with increasing despair. Each run required a nerving of energies, a steeling of bruised and aching flesh for the impact. I recognised the greater the force with which I threw myself upwards on that last step, the more chance I had of getting my reaching fingers onto the top. There was no alternative: no cracks or misplaced plastering allowed a toe hold on that rough, but unseamed surface. Each failure jarred every bone, produced a new bruise or graze or added to an earlier one.
It was like being punched by a brick fist, ten feet high and eight feet across. I could not imagine how I would ever master it. My breath was coming in fiery gulps; I was close to tears. Fatigue lifted me out of the body, to which I remained attached by sharp threads of pain. Remotely I heard the clatter of iron-tipped boots on the concrete increase their momentum, till the collision shocked me back into the knotted contusion that I was becoming. What was I doing? The situation seemed more and more unreal as I ran, jumped and fell into the gathering dusk of the early October evening. The solution could only be a ho
rrid calamity.
After one frenzied effort I crashed heavily and lay gasping for breath. Light footsteps approached.
‘Get up Airman. Being sorry for yourself will not help.’
Shakily I pulled myself to my feet. How could the Flight Sergeant be so unfeeling? Against my will I found myself appealing for sympathy.
‘I was ill when I was young.’
‘Possibly. Your medical record shows you as A4B now. That is a higher rating than many of those who got through this test this afternoon. You also are going to do it, however long it may take. I am prepared to stay here till breakfast if need be. Rest for ten minutes before we proceed.’
His merciless, judging voice drove me to anguish. What had I done to deserve it? The other NCOs had all vanished. This morning had begun like any other, with the expectation of a million similar days to follow. Now it had changed, like one of those trick picture postcards: looked at from one side, it showed a sunny seaside; looked at from the other, the lines of the picture blurred over into a storm at sea and a shipwreck. I was in the eye of the storm and, absurd though it was, this trial was reality; my skinned hands, grazed legs and bruised body, the pain in my chest, the ache in my limbs, all confirmed it. Yet it was also a nightmare, the wall growing higher and higher as I shrank with hurt and tiredness. And lowering at the side, flogging me on with his acid, contemptuous tongue, the monstrous Flight Sergeant, pale, inflexible, vindictive.
‘Right, Airman, you’ve had your rest. Let’s see if it’s given you any more guts. Proceed with your next attempt. It will be your sixteenth.’
I hated him. It was not a feeling with which I was familiar. My life had had its pain and fear, but I had been carried through the trials of illness by the devotion of my parents. Their loving care had made grim times happy. Only in the two years at school as an adolescent had I experienced malice. Spite came my way because I was singled out, not able to play games, allowed home at the weekends, treated solicitously by the headmaster. I remembered the flaying inquisitions that probed every weakness, the mean surreptitious bullying, the uncomprehending nastiness of my classmates. I had hated them as I now hated this evil Flight Sergeant.
Usually I suffered the endless silly witticisms in silence, but there had been the time, when I was about fourteen, when I was driven over the breaking point by a boy smaller than myself. He was one of my chief persecutors. Over and over he repeated a fatuous torturing rhyme, putting his face close to mine while I was reading and trying to take no notice. At each repetition the sniggering crowd of followers grew behind him. Suddenly, without warning, I lashed out. I was completely inexperienced at boys’ tussles, but I hit him so violently that the blood spurted from his nose. He said nothing, put his handkerchief to his face, and went away. He never teased me again.
Thinking of this, and of all those other yapping monsters at school, my hatred grew and wrapped around the silent tormentor who was watching me now as I ran forwards in the twilight. He had humiliated me in front of the whole Flight. He was going to keep me here all night was he? I would show him. I found myself further up the bricks than before, my hand over the top. It slipped on the damp concrete and I fell full length on the asphalt.
Jarred and breathless, I was up and trotting back to the starting mark before I had fully pulled my wits together. If it was only him I was throwing myself at, I would kick him until his teeth rattled, just as I was kicking at the bricks now. I would get my arm around his stiff neck and break it, as I had it over the wall. My elbow would be pumping between his ribs, in the way it was levering me over the edge. Flinging my tired body on top of the concrete shelter, so would I flatten him and squeeze the breath from his hateful frame.
He had not finished with me yet. As I dropped shakily down the far side and lumbered to the table where he sat, his face gleamed pallidly upwards.
‘You have nothing to congratulate yourself on, Gill. You have taken seventeen attempts and two hours and twenty minutes to carry out a simple trial that on average took the members of your Flight forty seconds. Not good enough, Gill. This fiasco will go in your records. More will be expected of you in the future. You may dismiss.’
What a bastard. Going on right to the end. I had done it, after all. Stumbling painfully back to Trafalgar Avenue, I never thought that without the spur of the hatred he induced I would not have made it.
No one in the billet asked how I had got on, or made any reference to my earlier failures. Bruises made sleep difficult, and the next morning I felt very odd: hot as a furnace and aching intolerably. It did not take much persuading from Wyndham for me to report sick. This time it was as well that I had brought my satchel with overnight kit. I had a temperature of 104 and was sent straight by ambulance to the nearest military sick-bay at Boston.
VI
I remember little of the next twenty-four hours. My condition was diagnosed as influenza with a high fever. My body was taking a revenge that for years was customary: following a period of intense effort with a relapse into the ill-health that had accompanied so much of my childhood.
I was in the sick-bay only three days, being discharged as soon as my temperature returned to normal. During this time I missed our final passing-out parade and the celebratory football and hockey matches that followed. I could not have cared less. Once my fever began to abate, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Illness was a familiar condition. I knew how to get the best out of it. There was the additional comfort of a real mattress instead of the hard biscuits of the billet, and sheets, coarse but clean. Even the sharp, alcoholic tang of drugs and antiseptics were old friends.
I sipped my Bovril and Ovaltine contentedly and luxuriated in the frequent bed baths, meant to bring my temperature down. The male nursing orderlies were an easygoing crowd, and the other patients a cross-section from all the services. Talking to them had an odd effect on me, considering the incompetence I had recently displayed. I wrote to my mother: ‘There were chaps in our ward who had escaped from Greece, one from Dunkirk, one who had come from New Zealand to fly a Wellington bomber, a stoker in a submarine and another who was in an armed trawler, not to mention several men of over fifty who had served throughout the last war and volunteered again for this one. I wouldn’t like to think that my war effort was confined to living in absolute safety and moderate comfort.’
How best to serve? It was a recurring problem, triggered not so much by patriotism as by social conventions. Most of my peers in Canterbury had been, like myself, in the Air Training Corps, and were now training as pilots or navigators, as I would have done had I not failed the last medical. Others were in the commandos or Merchant Navy. Not to be at risk, when so many others were, seemed morally unacceptable.
I discussed the problem with Wyndham the evening I got back.
‘It’s silly to think we would be much good in a scrap,’ he said calmly.
‘That’s not the point. We ought to be in danger.’
‘Seems to me we’re all in danger. Like you in Canterbury. It’s more dangerous to be a civilian living in the docks in Plymouth or Liverpool than to be in an army unit stationed in Iceland.’
‘I know all that. It’s true of course. Total war and so on, it comes to everyone. But that’s passive suffering.’ Wyndham looked up quizzically.
‘You think we ought to volunteer for something nasty?’
‘I don’t know. If you’d seen these people in hospital . . . Then there’s that friend of Auerbach’s, the one who’s in the other Flight. Remember? He’d been a gunner in Wellingtons, crashed, and got so badly smashed up he was totally discharged, yet here he is, signing on as an airman – he had been an officer before – anything to get back into action.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Wyndham, diving into our bookshelf. ‘While you were away I was reading your Stephen Spender. Do you remember this poem?’
He read it slowly, in his surprisingly deep, thoughtful voice.
I think continually of those who were truly great
. .
. . .
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
The grave splendour of the words brought tears to my eyes. For a moment I saw myself plunging ashore on some rocky moonlit coast, a knife between my teeth, an image that changed instantly to me dragging an injured pilot from the burning wreckage of his plane. It was pure sentimentality of course; I would have cut my mouth on the knife and burnt my toes. I was a liability, best kept out of trouble.
Reading my thoughts, Wyndham said gently: ‘I don’t think action is the most important thing. I think we need to keep clear in our minds what we want to preserve. So much is falling . . . We need to hang on to what we believe to be good, so it doesn’t go down with everything else.’
Part of my mind agreed with him, but I found the idea of this giant melodrama moving inexorably past on the stage, while I was still in the wings, intolerable. I must be in it somehow, but how? The thought of actual fighting, of killing Germans, was impossible and disgusting. It was most unlikely I would ever be trusted with a rifle again, now this course was virtually over. The chances were I would end up in some quiet backwater. That was what my parents would prefer and my general weediness made appropriate.
The paradox was still teasing me the following night. At the very beginning of our six weeks, everyone in the squad had contributed sixpence to a sweepstake that was to be drawn at the end. This had been done while I was in the sick-bay. I won and, richer by twelve shillings and sixpence, took Wyndham, John the Irish film extra, and Maconachie the cockney out for supper in the little café across Drummond Road. It was both a celebration and a farewell. Any day our posting would come through and we would be scattered.