Life Without Armour

by Sillitoe, Alan;

  On bulkhead duty I stood by steel doors in the very guts of the ship, which were to be shut flush if the sea broke in – whether from stray mines or icebergs I couldn’t decide – keeping my nightmare of a sudden wall of water well under control. Staying awake all night and sane was nothing to a wireless operator, but if any water did rush in it would be impossible to get off the ship from so deep down.

  In the Red Sea the showers were warm and oily to the skin, and lime juice tepid. Falling asleep on deck in the sun, sweat from my body streaked out over the wood like piss from a dead-drunk. I should have known better, but managed to conceal the burned skin as we again crossed the Passage of the Israelites, and went through the Canal by night. A few days later Pantellaria was circled on my map, the glow of its lighthouse more attractive because Italian was spoken on the island.

  Orders were tacked up on passing Gibraltar for changing into heavier Home Service uniform, back to sharp creases, and a cap badge hard to glisten in the salt air. Hammocks were slung in the claustrophobic warmth below, away from roughening weather, and one had to bend double on coming down late so as not to bump the undersides of those already ensconced. The duty NCO walked around flashing his light to see that all was well, or maybe to check that no one had gone missing over the side.

  A stormy sea did not spoil my appetite, and perhaps from boredom I went balancing on goat’s feet up and down the companionways to fetch breakfast from the galley and deal it out: a large tea urn, basket of fresh bread, a plate of butter, a stone jar of bitter and excellent marmalade, and a steel pan of eggs, sausages and tomatoes.

  In the Bay of Biscay, feeling in my haversack for the last Malayan cheroot, and finding shelter out of the soulful wind to light it, I climbed to the highest deck for a better view of the turbulent water, windows glowing in the white cliff-face of the bridge, the whole boat shuddering, lifting and churning its way forwards. I felt at the summit of my power (and indeed happiness) as if I had already lived for ever and saw a kind of future that only those who live from day to day can envisage – empty but without end. The absolute fearlessness of standing on the edge of a cliff in no danger of going over gave confidence to face whatever might be in store. The beautiful morning had ended, but with everything coming my way.

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Heredity is the cause: circumstances only exacerbate, though some years passed before the statement could be formulated. On being told at the demobilization camp at RAF Warton in Lancashire, after an all-night train journey from Southampton, that an X-ray showed sufficient signs of tuberculosis to make it necessary for me to stay on for an unspecified length of time for treatment, it was as if a bolt of electricity had passed through my biological system, to which my brain was indubitably attached.

  Such a stunning fact put me into a depression as deep as the euphoria on the ship had been high. Even if thought had been forthcoming, no amount of it, under the circumstances, could turn the clock back. It seemed inconceivable that someone like me should be tainted with the disgusting disease of consumption, yet science, as I had always believed (and was unable to deny it now), did not lie. Up to then I had imagined that you did not go to a doctor unless your limbs were broken, or you were bleeding copiously from numerous wounds, at which you could justifiably be rushed into a hospital. Nor did you visit a dentist unless in agony from a face like a football. It was a matter of: I stand, therefore I’m healthy; and now, still solid enough on my feet, I was said to be fit only for a hospital bed. Simplicity had gone for ever.

  My self-esteem was sliced to the quick, a mood metronoming in those first few months between rage and self-pity. The intensity of the shock began a dislodging of tectonic plates that needed half a decade to settle into place. From being, as had been foolishly believed, the master of my fate, I had to acknowledge that Fate was a malicious knock-me-down that would take much living with.

  After my friends, with commiserating handshakes, had gone jauntily through the gate with their neat brown cardboard box of demob gear, I was told to go on ten days’ leave, and then return to the camp for more tests. Crossing the middle of Manchester with my kit, outwardly the spick-and-span airman back from overseas hoping for a good time, I could not feel less fit than anyone around me. Even so, homecoming after two years necessarily lost some of its glamour and, as if to muffle my despair – though the habit of discipline absorbed from the age of fourteen was useful to me now – I began to doubt the medical officer’s assumption that I had started to rot inside. The pride-saving possibility occurred to me that X-ray plates had got mixed up, and that all would later be put right.

  I told my parents I wasn’t quite fit after my time in Malaya, and that it might be necessary for me to go into hospital for a while to convalesce. This explanation was found reasonable, and no questions were asked. My old girlfriends were married, or gone from home, or otherwise occupied, and I have no memory as to how my leave passed. A habit of noting novels read for that year in a wireless log book listed none for those ten days.

  I was not unhappy to get back to Warton, anxious to know whether or not tuberculosis had really struck, and if so to what extent. For three weeks I was isolated in a small ward at the station sick quarters because of possible contagion, much like a leper on Pulau Jerejak. The experience of being cut off from the world was new: a piece of obsolescent equipment for which no one could have any use.

  A silent male orderly brought in my meals, and left me to make my bed, and I saw a doctor once on going for more X-rays. Apart from the settled despair, I was glad above all to be on my own, not wanting anyone else to be sequestered in the ward in case I was obliged to talk about my reason for being there. I remember reading Many Cargoes by W. W. Jacobs, The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells, and a novel by J. B. Priestley, as well as some chapters of my Bible.

  In my kit were notebooks and maps from Kedah and, at the onset of evening, the worst part of the day, I drew the bedtable forward and began to write a coherent account of the expedition. For some days I was blessedly unaware of the anguish that had settled on me, reliving the trip into the jungle proving that mental pain ceased to be felt if something could be done that was entirely absorbing. Turned into two people, I chose to be the one which knew no hurt, never in any doubt as to which was more compatible. This first indication that writing could expunge the pain of living was not lost on me.

  Further interior photographs at the X-ray machine revealed cavities in my left lung, and the right also as marked with the disease, a map of the moon never imagined in all the wanderings of my fevered topographical dreams. I was more than mystified as to how the affliction had been acquired, because you certainly did not catch it in the jungle, though the effluvia could have been breathed on a bus in George Town. Speculation turned into a circular worrying nag that got nowhere, unless as an anodyne to ease the baffled spirit. At times I thought my head would burst from sheer misery, though an invisible person looking on would have seen no outward evidence of distress, something made sure of by carefully observing myself, but hoping I wasn’t going mad in the attempt.

  Told to pack my gear, I was given a train warrant for RAF Wroughton in Wiltshire. The journey, with changes at Crewe (of not too distant memory) and Bristol, was a hiatus of blessed normality. Getting out of the station at Swindon, a coffin containing the body of an airman, who had died of tuberculosis in the hospital I was bound for, was put on the train just stepped from.

  At Wroughton, sixteen miles north-east of the radio school, it was found beyond all doubt that I was ‘TB Positive’, which put me into a ward with thirty other men in a similar condition. What had to be accepted, and took much doing, was not being recognized any longer as in first-class health. People who had TB, if they hadn’t died of it, were regarded as finished off, or at best as unemployable pariahs. From wanting to be first-class everything I was suddenly defeated in an area where no trouble had been expected at all. The fact that 25,000 people a year died from what I had
got did not worry me, as much as having reached a solid gate on the road forward which had always seemed ready to open on to the infinitely promising beyond.

  Now that the evidence of X-rays and sputum tests was indisputable, another kind of normality had to begin, that of two rows of bedridden men facing each other for an unknown length of time, with lovely Queen Alexandra’s nursing sisters and delectable WAAF orderlies gliding along the polished floor to look after us. None of us would have seemed ill had we been walking in the outside world, or so I even now liked to think. Most of the men were younger than myself, their tuberculous condition having been diagnosed during training or before despatch overseas.

  The treatment consisted mostly of simple bed-rest, and we were superbly cared for, the excellent diet including a bottle of rich stout set on every locker each morning. Smoking was not forbidden and, lacking my favourite Malayan cheroots, I sent out for 100 small cigars, the little wooden box reaching me in time for Christmas.

  On first entering the ward I noticed a man reading History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, while two others were discussing Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, to be broadcast on the wireless that evening, which seemed to set the intellectual tone peculiar to the RAF. A set of earphones by each bed was attached to a radio system, and my switch stayed on the Third Programme, so that I was soon becoming familiar with the music of the great composers.

  The Times and Daily Telegraph came in every morning, carrying advertisements for surveyors and wireless operators needed by the Colonial Service, each reading like a poetic epitaph on the tombstone of my previous ambition. After mulling on them wryly I turned for compensation to the crossword puzzle, my skill much improved on borrowing a thesaurus from a man several beds along. As for world news, the Russians were no longer brave and with us as during the war, and the Americans and the RAF were trying to break their blockade of West Berlin.

  A correspondence course in surveying gave me what was needed to keep my brain sharp. Opening the textbook, and spreading a sheet of graph paper on my bed-table, I drew plans of imaginary streets and country estates, familiar from those given me by Burton as a child. My sister Peggy, thinking me about to embark on a new career, sent an engineers’ diary for 1949, containing interesting mathematical data.

  I posted my account of climbing Kedah Peak to Hales, of my old ATC squadron in Nottingham, and it came back typed, with a letter advising me to try and get it published. Some poems and short prose sketches were already written in my wireless log book, so his suggestion did not seem too outlandish, and in January I despatched ‘Kedah Peak’ to the Geographical Magazine and, when it was rejected, to Wide World Magazine, which also turned it down. At the same time I tried getting a poem into a periodical called Everybody’s.

  During 1948 the list in my notebook showed thirty-eight novels read, mostly of the escapist sort plucked off the trolley pushed around the ward every few days by women of the WVS. Books of travel and adventure were as much enjoyed as by any bedjacketed explorer, but there was also From Bapaume to Paschendaele by Philip Gibbs (which started my interest in all to do with the Great War), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, The Guide to Music by P. A. Scholes, and a biography of Chopin.

  Though confined to ‘strict bed’ I was soon managing an affair with one of the orderlies, and many of my so-called poems were banal love lyrics written for her, who seemed impressed by them. We met every night after lights out in a store-room at the end of the ward and, luckily enough – but mostly for her – our clandestine love-nest was never discovered.

  Frankie Howerd came to shake hands and say encouraging words to every patient in the hospital. Having been out of the country I didn’t realize either his fame or talent, and could think of nothing to say in return. It was unnecessary to do so, of course, but neither was I willing to seem friendly with someone I didn’t know, though it was a generous visit for such a celebrated comedian to make.

  My lungs were not responding to treatment, perhaps because the spirit wasn’t yet ready to provide assistance, sulking at the body’s ignominious capitulation to the lowest kind of germ. Squadron-Leader O’Connor, the top medical officer, decided that an artificial pneumothorax might help. This meant a minor operation to cut the lesions that attached the lung to the pleural wall. Once this was done, air pumped by needle into the chest every ten days from then on would be able to flatten the free-floating lung and prevent it doing the usual work. The lung would only be permitted to resume its normal function when, it was hoped, the infection was cured, and in the meantime, which may be for years, I would be able to exist perfectly well with the use of only one lung, provided I didn’t do anything silly like mountain climbing, rowing, cycling or carrying heavy suitcases.

  The ingeniously scientific process had improved many people, and the operation itself was little inconvenience. On being put back into bed from the trolley I guzzled a bottle of delicious life-giving stout and puffed at a fragrant shit-smelling cigar, much to the amusement of Sister Monica Jones, to celebrate the first deep cut of my life, before falling asleep.

  I borrowed a typewriter so as to see how my poems would look in print, and their appearance, if not their quality, seemed so much improved that I acquired a reconditioned Remington Portable for twenty-six pounds from a salesman travelling the hospital. Touch-typing had been taught at Radio School, and though I hadn’t done any since, the machine was soon rattling away at top speed. My girlfriend brought in ribbons and paper from Swindon, and when my old Nottingham friend John Moult sent a pound note for my twenty-first birthday I asked her to get Auden’s Tennyson Selection, the first English poet I scanned with pleasure and attention.

  Half a dozen volumes of modern poetry, none of particular memory, showed the current idiom and themes. I studied the long and detailed appendix on prosody in a Wordsworth selection, then read FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke with Edward Marsh’s memoir, and some of Coleridge – whatever I could get hold of. For prose I read Wilde’s De Profundis, The Living Torch by A. E., and made an attempt on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which my girlfriend’s mother had sent me, with works by Edward Lear.

  Quality began to predominate, and in the next few months it became more and more possible to make choices, such as A Room of One’s Own, two plays by George Bernard Shaw, In Hazard by Richard Hughes, Voltaire’s Candide, and Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant. E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey sent me on a trail, during the next couple of years, through the whole of the Latin and Greek classics. They came from an age that was dead, but I relished the spare language of the histories, the elegant poetry that spoke to and was spoken by the gods, the philosophies which sharpened my mind wonderfully, and plays that re-created legend with such heartbreaking effect.

  My Bible – the Jewish Scriptures – appealed to a deeper part, its language entering the bones’ marrow and giving solace during my transition from one life to another. The beauty of the King James’ version, and the sombre rectitude of the Ancient Hebrews, found an enduring response in me.

  Mail was important, and I corresponded with Schlachter, Gladstone and others. Coleman wrote from Malaya telling me that the Butterworth Jungle Rescue Team had climbed a mountain from whose summit they had looked down on Kedah Peak, which sent momentary pangs of regret and envy through me.

  I woke from my usual afternoon sleep to see my mother and John Moult sitting by my bed. John had won something on a football game, he said, and so paid both their fares. He was still serving with the Royal Corps of Signals as a wireless operator.

  The artificial pneumothorax quickly improved my condition and, as the intensity of X-ray shadows decreased, and my blood sediment rate went down, I locked like clockwork on to the progressive stages of time permitted out of bed. Two hours extra were added every few weeks, until one stayed up the whole day except for the afternoon rest. Nothing was more important than this measured return to activity and freedom.

  Though not supposed to, I put on
my uniform and went out by the store-room window. Patients allowed in the hospital grounds were distinguished by a white instead of a blue shirt and, accordingly dressed, I made my way between the buildings as if by permission, then jinked behind one and went along the fence till finding a place to climb over. Crossing fields, after first using hedges for cover, the smell of herbage was intoxicating, and ‘Greensleeves’ sang at my stolen liberty. Some days I would wander on the nearby Downs, or otherwise during a long summer evening meet my young woman, with her cherubic face and auburn hair, in the village pub.

  For want of time the surveying course lapsed, though I was glad of its help and knowledge. Enlightenment gained from reading was rapidly filling the empty spaces, and the ability to write, though still in an uncertain state, provided that sense of purpose without which I had never been able to live.

  One book read more than once was The Forest Giant by Adrien le Corbeau, translated by J. H. Ross who was, the publisher’s note explained, T. E. Lawrence. The writer described in 150 pages of stylish and aphoristic prose the birth and death of an enormous sequoia pine – Le Gigantesque. A copy was recently put into my hand by a young woman after a lecture at Nottingham University, and I was caught up again by the beginning:

  For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest. Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly. One day it would be gilded by the sunlight – but not softened; another day grizzled streaks of rain soaked it – without refreshment. It was buried, to all appearance forever, by drifts of snow – but was not hurt. It had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow; it had been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the shrieking gusts of cyclones; and it had met all these things – the sweetness of the day, the shade of night, the winter, the springs, the summers – with the same submissive, invulnerable apathy. It had waited its hour, ready, if need be, to wait yet much longer.